Six Ways the Democrats Elected Trump... Again

As the MAGA troops dine, dance and saunter into the White House, we have to ask how one of the most unpopular presidents in U.S. history triumphed yet again. Yes, Trump is a gifted entertainer with an incredibly loyal base. But he could not have won without Democratic Party malfeasance. Let us count the ways:

1. Biden’s Ego

You don’t get to be president without an enormous ego, so large that it’s very hard to imagine not getting exactly what you think is your due. Even though Biden told his advisors in 2019 that he would serve only one term, he changed his mind, or rather his ego demanded four more years. Biden liked the job he had spent his life pining for, and damn anyone who thought he wasn’t up to it.

The combination of ego and power meant that those around Biden were loathe to suggest that maybe, just maybe, he shouldn’t start a second term at age 82. The closer his advisors were to power, the less likely they were to risk losing their access by pointing out that Biden looked his age and then some, and that an overwhelming majority of voters thought he was too old to serve again. That Biden was having difficulty putting forth coherent sentences in public was studiously ignored. Biden was told exactly what he wanted to hear. Run, Joe, Run!

2. Liberal-Left Complicity

Everyone who was awake, except Biden and those dependent upon him, knew that he was too old to run again. On November 20, 2023, Biden’s 81st birthday, I wrote , “Happy Birthday Joe: Please Don’t Run!” I took a good deal of criticism, even from close colleagues. Didn’t I know that there was no way he would agree to step down? Didn’t I realize that if someone challenged him the Democrats would lose, just as in 1968 when Lyndon Johnson was forced out? Didn’t I realize that Biden was the best president for workers since FDR, maybe even better, and had therefore earned a second term?

I was stunned especially by the FDR claim. That one only works if you live in the Washinton bubble and are blind as a bat (without a bat’s stunning radar.)

• FDR, through his fireside chats, was an enormously gifted communicator. Biden during his presidency has been one of the worst.
• FDR’s massive public works programs engaged millions of people in highly visible ways each day. Biden’s infrastructure programs were nearly invisible, and severely hampered by his inability to promote them.
• FDR’s changes in labor law legalized unions and led to an explosion of successful organizing, full of posters with FDR saying, “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I’d do is join a union.” While Biden did go on a picket line and put pro-labor appointees into key regulatory offices, union density barely budged on his watch.

The voters of Mingo County, West Virginia could tell the difference. FDR in 1936 got 66.1 percent of their vote. Biden received only 13.9 percent in 2020. (See Wall Street’s War on Workers for a closer look at Mingo County and the collapse of the Democrats.)

By 2024, the rise of inflation and Biden’s feeble demeanor, during the rare times he was let out in public, augured for a sizable Trump triumph. Democrats who feared a second Trump term should have demanded that Biden step down long before he fell flat on his face during the June 2024 debate.

Where were AOC and Sanders? In Biden’s pocket. As late as the middle of June 2024, AOC said:

Joe Biden is our nominee. He is not leaving this race. He is in this race, and I support him.

Even after the worst debate performance in presidential history, Bernie Sanders chastised Biden’s critics:

Enough! Mr. Biden may not be the ideal candidate, but he will be the candidate and should be the candidate.

No doubt AOC and Sanders saw what I saw a year earlier--- that Biden really was too old to serve a second term. But they kept silent. They were not about to give up their influence over Biden’s agenda, an agenda they can kiss good-by during the coming four years of Trump.

3. The legal cases

If you’re going to put a former president on trial, one who desperately wants to run again, you had better do it long before the next election. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland fumbled around for two years before appointing a special counsel to investigate Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his hiding classified documents in his bathroom. The delay allowed Trump to run out the clock and avoid any punishment, despite 34 felony convictions in the New York State business records case involving the adult film star Stormy Daniels and campaign finance laws.

Clearly, Trump’s legal woes didn’t wound his election chances and may even have helped to solidify his base. While progressives were titillated (me included) by each new legal revelation about Trump’s malfeasance, the public at large cared much more about leadership, change, inflation, and the economy.

4. Anointing Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris was a very poor candidate in 2020. She withdrew after polls showed her at 3 percent. Yet, by waiting until after the 2024 debate debacle, Biden ensured that the Democrats had no choice but to rally around Harris. She was the incumbent vice-president and not doing so would have been viewed as a slap in the face to women and people of color.

But they had a choice if they had acted sooner. Had party leaders forced Biden out in early 2024, later than they should have, there was time to hold at least two primaries that would have put Harris to the test—primaries that would have let voters register their preferences, perhaps finding the best candidate and giving more legitimacy to whomever was selected.

Taking away that vital phase of the democratic process, the Democrats neutered their own claim that Trump was an enemy of democracy. Whether or not those acts are parallel in anti-democratic gravity is irrelevant. More than a few voters thought that Democrats did not have the high moral ground on democracy issues.

And blaming the Harris loss on racism and sexism is a poor excuse for a party desperate to prevent Trump from stomping all over democracy. If the Democrats really believed that racism and sexism would defeat Harris, why nominate her?

In the end she could not compete with Trump on two key issues—leadership and change. On the exit poll question of the candidate's "ability to lead,” Trump received 66 percent to Harris’s 33 percent. On “Can bring needed change,” it was 74 percent for Trump to 24 percent for Harris.

5. Anti-working-class campaign

Nevertheless, Harris was a much stronger campaigner in 2024 than in 2020. She exuded energy and certainly was far more coherent than Biden. The spark needed to attract support was there. But by that point the problem was substance, not style. Harris is a corporate Democrat, and she wanted to gain the support of Wall Street as much if not more than she wanted to be the party of the working class.

While independent polls, like those from the Center for Working Class Politics, showed that the Democrats needed to campaign on a strong anti-corporate populist message, especially in Pennsylvania, Harris chose to emphasize her opponent’s threat to democracy. Further, she went out of her way to raise money from Wall Street, to campaign with Republicans, and to make her campaign palatable to them both.

For me, the defining moment came in the response to the John Deere and Company’s announcement moving 1,000 jobs from the Midwest to Mexico. In June 2024, right here on the pages of Common Dreams, I repeatedly begged the Biden administration to stop the carnage. Deere was the poster child of a greedy corporation that was using job cuts to move money to Wall Street through stock buybacks, an artificial means of boosting the share price to enrich a company’s richest investors. In 2023, Deere logged $10 billion in profits, paid its CEO $26.7 million, and conducted $12.2 billion in stock buybacks. As I pleaded then: “Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers and show the working class that you’re tougher than Trump when it comes to saving American jobs.”

The greatest president for labor since FDR did nothing. When more layoffs were announced in the fall, Trump jumped on it, calling for a 200 percent tariff on John Deere imports from Mexico.

Here was the chance for Harris to strut her pro-working-class stuff. Instead, her campaign committed political malpractice. They recruited Mark Cuban, the TV star billionaire, former principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, to attack Trump’s plan. He called the proposed Deere tariffs, “insanity.” He criticized Trump’s worker-friendly proposal rather than Deere’s attempt to kill workers’ jobs. Cuban is on record saying stock buybacks are bad for employees, but he said not a word about Deere’s abuse of them. And most importantly, neither he, nor Harris, nor anyone else in the campaign said a word about the 1,000 jobs that would be lost.

That’s because they are corporate Democrats who refuse to interfere with corporate decision making. Job loss is inevitable and necessary, they believe, and only can be confronted by the vague promise that new jobs will be created elsewhere within the prosperous “opportunity society.” Instead of stopping needless mass layoffs, the Democrats prefer to shower corporations with public money to “encourage” them to create jobs, which are nearly always for someone other than those who are losing theirs. It’s not hard to see why workers like those at Deere might think Trump would fight harder for them.

6. Inflation

The rise in prices negatively affected the vast majority of voters and it happened on Biden’s watch. To say it was not as bad as in the rest of the world was a feeble response, as was blaming Covid supply chain transformations. Whatever truth there was to these claims, what voters wanted to see were actions to stop prices from rising and attempts made to lower as many as possible.

This would prove to be a heavy lift for Harris. She needed to attack the major corporate cartels that jacked up prices, which would mean breaking with the Biden administration (something she pointedly refused to do). She would have to call for investigations about price gouging, and even demanding price controls to prevent the food and drug producers form profiteering. It would also mean proposing new laws to prevent Wall Street and private equity firms from buying up millions of homes, a practice that was putting upward pressure on home prices and hurting even workers with decent-paying jobs. In short, it would mean breaking from Wall Streeters and turning public ire against them. She early on made some noise about price controls, but as the campaign proceeded, a populist message didn’t happen and realistically could not have happened given the Democrats’ immense entanglement with their Wall Street financiers.

Of the voters who said inflation has caused their family “severe hardship,” 76 percent voted for Trump according to exit polls. Of those who said inflation caused “no hardship,” 78 percent voted for Harris. So why would you do anything serious about inflation if your real base of support, upper income voters, don’t feel any pain?

Chuck Schmer enthusiastically summarized the new class politics in 2016:

For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.

Now, didn’t that turn out to be the perfect strategy for four more years of Trump?