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kamala harris
Revenge of the Deplorables?
Think about it this way, maybe it's the Democratic Party which has become deplorable to the working class.
Nov 20, 2024
Did the working class, especially its white members, elect Donald Trump again because they are basically racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic? Are they craving a strongman who can protect white supremacy from a flood of immigrants and put the woke liberals in their place? Didn’t Harris lose primarily because she’s a woman of color?
More than a few progressives, as well as the New York Times, believe these are plausible explanations for Harris’s defeat. I’m not so sure.
The working class started abandoning the Democrats long before Trump became a political figure, let alone a candidate. In 1976, Jimmy Carter received 52.3 percent of the working-class vote; In 1996, Clinton 50 percent; In 2012, Obama 40.6 percent; and in 2020, Biden received only 36.2 percent.
This decline has little to do with illiberalism on social issues. Since Carter’s victory, these workers have become more liberal on race, gender, immigration and gay rights, as I detail in my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers.
These voters of color don’t fit comfortably into that basket of deplorables Hillary Clinton described, but they are a part of the working class that’s been laid off time and again because of corporate greed.
Furthermore, my research shows that mass layoffs, not illiberalism, best explains the decline of worker support for the Democrats. In the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example, as the county mass layoff rate went up the Democratic vote went down. The statistical causation, of course, may be off, but the linkage here between economic dissatisfaction and flight from the Democratic Party is straightforward.
Did the Working Class Give Trump 1.9 Million More Votes?
Trump improved his vote total from 74.2 million in 2020 to 76.1 in 2024, an increase of 1.9 million. Did the white working class support him more strongly this year?
No. According to the Edison exit polls, Trump’s share of the non-college white vote dropped from 67 percent in 2020 to 66 percent in 2024. (For 2020 exit polls see here. For 2024 see here.)
In fact, the largest increase for Trump this year came from non-white voters without a college degree. Trump’s percentage of these voters jumped from 26 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024. These voters of color don’t fit comfortably into that basket of deplorables Hillary Clinton described, but they are a part of the working class that’s been laid off time and again because of corporate greed.
The Defection of the Border Democrats
Perhaps the most astonishing collapse of the Democratic vote is found in the Texas counties along the Rio Grande. Take Starr County, population 65,000, most of whom are Hispanic. Hillary Clinton won that county by 60 percent in 2016. Trump won it this year by 16 percentage points, a massive shift of 76 percentage points, almost unheard of in electoral politics. Trump won 12 of the 14 border counties in 2024, up from only five in 2016. Interviews suggest that these voters are very concerned by uncontrolled border crossings, inflation, and uncertainly in finding and maintaining jobs in the oil industry.
(I hear whispers among progressives that Hispanic men just don’t like women in leadership positions. Yet just across the Mexican border, Hispanic men seemed quite comfortable recently electing a female president.)
The Big Story Is the Overall Decline of the Harris Vote
Harris received 73.1 million votes in 2024, a drop of 8.3 million compared with Biden’s 81.3 million votes in 2020. That’s an extraordinary decline. Who are these voters who decided to sit it out?
So far, while the final votes are tallied and exit polls are compiled, it looks like they are a very diverse group—from young people upset about the administration’s failure to restrain Israel to liberals who didn’t like watching Harris go after suburban Republicans by palling around with arch-conservatives Liz and Dick Cheney.
Personally, I think many working-class voters of all shades sat on their hands because Harris really had so little to offer them. Harris was viewed as both a member of the establishment and a defender of it, and the establishment hasn’t been too considerate of working-class issues in recent decades.
Many working-class voters of all shades sat on their hands because Harris really had so little to offer them.
Harris’ highly publicized fundraising visit to Wall Street certainly made that clear. And in case we missed that signal, her staff told the New York Times that Wall Street was helping to shape her agenda. It’s very hard to excite working people by arguing, in effect, that what’s good for Wall Street is also good for working people.
The John Deere Fiasco
For me, the symbolic turning point was the Harris campaign’s pathetic response to the John Deere company’s announcement about shipping 1,000 jobs from the Midwest to Mexico. Trump jumped on it right away, saying that if Deere made that move, he would slap a 200-percent tariff on all its imports from Mexico. If I were a soon-to-be-replaced Deere worker, that would have gotten my attention.
The Harris campaign responded as well, but not in a way that would convince workers that she really cared about their jobs. The campaign sent billionaire Mark Cuban to the press to claim such a tariff would be “insanity.” He and the campaign said not one word about the jobs that would soon be lost. Trump promised to intervene. Harris promised nothing.
The sad part is that the Biden-Harris campaign could have at least tried. They had the power of the entire federal government. They could have cajoled and bullied, waved carrots and sticks. In short, they could have easily made a visible public effort to prevent the export of those good-paying jobs by a highly profitable corporation that was spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks to enrich Wall Street and it’s CEO. Here was a chance to defend jobs against overt greed. Instead, they essentially told working people that Harris wasn’t willing to fight for those jobs.
But Didn’t the Working-Class Abandon Sherrod Brown?
I haven’t yet found any comprehensive demographic data about Brown and his working-class support. We do know, however, that he ran well ahead of Harris. Brown lost his Senate race by 3.6 percent in Ohio compared to a Harris loss by 11.5 percent.
Rather than blaming working-class voters for not rejecting Trump out of hand, the Democrats should reflect on the failure of their brand and their failure of nerve.
Brown knew that he was carrying a heavy load as a Democrat, especially because of the passage of NAFTA, which was finalized during Bill Clinton’s presidency. As Brown put it: “The Democratic brand has suffered again, starting with NAFTA…. But, what really mattered is: I still heard it in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.”
Brown, as a loyal Democrat, was stuck with that dubious brand, and with Harris, as she was clobbered in Ohio. Tom Osborne, the former local labor leader and a refreshing political newcomer, shed the Democratic Party burden by running as an independent in Nebraska. He lost his Senate race by 6.8 percent compared to 10.9 percent for Harris. Brown did better than Osborne but it’s highly likely that both did much better than Harris with working-class voters.
Maybe the Democratic Party Has Become Deplorable to the Working Class
Rather than blaming working-class voters for not rejecting Trump out of hand, the Democrats should reflect on the failure of their brand and their failure of nerve.
- Biden’s ego kept him in the race at least a year past his sell-by date and the Democratic leadership did not have the nerve to act until he completely lost it in the June debate with Trump. (A few of us urged Biden to step aside in November 2023).
- Harris was anointed without going through a rigorous primary process. She failed miserably at that in 2020, and she probably was not the strongest potential Democratic candidate this time around either.
- Refusing to run on a strong progressive populist platform pushed much of the working-class to Trump. The Center for Working Class Politics survey of Pennsylvania showed that a strong populist message was the most popular among working class voters, and that the Harris focus on democracy was the weakest issue for that group. But the Harris campaign doubled down on the democracy issues late in the campaign and paid the price.
- The failure to say anything at all about mass layoffs and stock buybacks was nothing short of political malpractice.
- And placating Wall Street was flat out deplorable.
Will the Democrats learn from this debacle and change their ways? I’m not optimistic. They are the defenders of the liberal elite establishment and have grown very comfortable (and prosperous) in that role.
We may not have all the data we desire or need as yet, but we know this much: something has to change. And that change is not going to come from the old guard of this deplorable Democratic Party establishment.
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We Need an Anti-Billionaire Party
The way back for the Democratic Party begins with rejecting billionaires and their money.
Nov 16, 2024
Everything feels different this time. In November 2016, there were protests; today, mostly silence. In November 2016, there was a lot of talk about resistance; today, people are talking about stepping away from politics. In November 2016, people clamored for news; today, folks are logging off. In November 2016, there was shock. It has been replaced by numbness. But best to take the words of Joni Mitchell to heart, that “something’s lost but something’s gained, by living every day.”
The warning signs were hiding in plain sight, even at the Democrats’ ecstatic four-day August convention in Chicago that felt more like a warehouse rave than a political confab—a vibe-shift that sent delegates back home convinced that their nominee Kamala Harris was about to vanquish Donald Trump from American political life for good.
But in an election year in which there was fury from the middle class over how much it costs to get by in today’s America, some observers—especially in the party’s left flank—were appalled at the barely hidden embrace of big money. Across the Windy City, in rented venues like the House of Blues, lobbyists for industries like crypto or PACs funded by firms like Cigna or AT&T threw posh late-night private parties for Democratic insiders after the TV lights were turned off.
The current Democratic brand is toxic—especially with working-class voters who have no idea what the party stands for. It’s past time to cast out the money-changers and stop pandering to millionaires and billionaires who may be pro-abortion rights or support the LBGTQ community, but who mainly just want to keep America’s unequal economic status quo.
But one pivotal moment inside the United Center even horrified the seen-it-all investigative journalist and former Sen. Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota, who noted that a line from Illinois governor and Hilton hotel heir J.B. Pritzker—“Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing, stupidity”—caused “raucous applause from an audience overjoyed to have found its newest billionaire idol.”
Sirota and others who heard it knew instinctively that this was not a winning message for the party that once dominated American politics in the mid-20th century by turning out the working class, and Tuesday’s results proved them right. In the flaming wreckage of an election in which Trump won a return ticket to the White House by winning the popular vote for the first time in three tries, while his fellow Republicans were capturing control of Congress, both pundits and Democratic insiders have spent the last week fighting over who to blame.
For these wounded elites, prime suspects include everything from President Joe Biden’s insistence on running and staying in the race until July, to Harris’ failure to reach young men by not going on testosterone-laden shows like Joe Rogan’s podcast, to the party’s collective inability to feel consumers’ pain over the post-COVID spike in prices. But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist or even a political scientist to argue that the biggest blunder was not attacking the billionaire class because Harris was too busy begging for their campaign checks.
If there is one thing that gets working-class Americans across the familiar fault lines of political ideology or race or ethnicity to agree, it’s that the super rich have too much wealth and power and don’t pay their fair share. In March, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of voters in the seven key swing states found some 69% of voters—including 58% of Republicans and 66% of independents—supported higher taxes on billionaires. That populist fervor is hardly surprising in a nation where the top 10% controls 60% of all wealth, while the bottom half struggles with just 6%.
But while the Harris campaign did pay lip service to raising taxes on the super wealthy, it didn’t give voters the red meat of a soak-the-rich campaign that might have landed emotionally in a nation that most voters believe is on the wrong track. That’s probably because Team Harris, with its ambitious yet eventually reached goal of raising $1 billion in order to outspend Trump on TV ads and getting out the vote, felt it needed to woo Big Business, not offend it with a truly populist campaign.
A New York Times post-mortem on what went wrong with the vice president’s messaging and proposals noted in its headline that she had a “Wall Street-Approved Economic Pitch” that “Fell Flat” with voters, writing that Harris “adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.”
It was arguably worse than that. One of the Democrat’s few firm economic proposals was a 28% capital-gains tax plan that was actually lower and thus more friendly to the wealthy than what Biden had been proposing. Much of her economic agenda, according to the Times, was bounced off a key adviser: her brother-in-law Tony West, a corporate lobbyist for Uber—and it showed. Although the Biden administration had been cracking down on abuses in cryptocurrency, Harris signaled support for the scam-plagued, polluting industry, and won over some new donors.
Harris even campaigned with a billionaire—the colorful Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban—who went before a Wisconsin rally to say the Democrat “has an amazing plan for small business,” even after he’d initially lobbied for Harris to dump controversial tough-on-business Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan. Watching Harris’ carefully calibrated campaign, it’s also hard not to wonder whether her tepid talk about reining in fossil fuels and even her weak-tea echo of Biden’s Gaza policies—unpopular with many young voters—were meant more for donors than for voters.
It can’t be a coincidence that Democrats’ decades-long embrace of the donor class in an era of big-money politics has disabled its potential populist message to working folks who elected FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton. The Democrats need radical change in a hurry if the party wants to retake the House in the 2026 midterms and start the search for a new leader who can replace Trump in the 2028 election—assuming that we’re still having those by then.
That won’t happen under the current Democratic leadership or its consultants, who owe their status to the party’s wealthiest supporters. Any serious political movement to reinvent the anti-MAGA left will have to start from the bottom-up—with meetings and phone calls and rallies by community activists and environmentalists and ministers and everyday folks. The goal must be finding a new breed of candidates who will reject all billionaire and corporate contributions. That can help remake Congress and eventually boost a presidential candidate truly committed to taxing the rich, waging a new war on poverty, cutting the wasteful Pentagon budget and expanding the Supreme Court to protect these gains.
Sound crazy? Such a movement happened in this century, when the Tea Party emerged in 2009-10 to challenge established Republicans with new grassroots organizations that met regularly, staged boisterous protests and primaried GOP incumbents, pushing their party furtherto the right. That short-lived counter-revolution set the stage for Trump, and for last week’s big victory.
The current Democratic brand is toxic—especially with working-class voters who have no idea what the party stands for. It’s past time to cast out the money-changers and stop pandering to millionaires and billionaires who may be pro-abortion rights or support the LBGTQ community, but who mainly just want to keep America’s unequal economic status quo. Build a new Democratic Party that bans big money, because elections are won with votes, not dollars. The next Democrat who brags about how obscenely rich he is should be booed out of the arena.
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Democrats Discover Backing Genocide Is Not a Winning Issue
However, because we know better than to expect anything better from Trump and the GOP, this is the perfect opportunity to translate votes into sustained action for an end to Israel's carnage in Gaza.
Nov 15, 2024
Arab and Muslim American voters did not remove Democrats from office, nor did they cost Kamala Harris the Oval Office. They merely sent a strong message that Palestine matters, not only to Arabs and Muslims but to many Americans as well.
The ones who cost the Democrats the elections are the Democrats themselves. Their humiliating defeat on November 5 was due largely to their undeniable role in the Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.
Peter Beinart put it best in his November 7 op-ed in the New York Times, entitled "Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party."
“Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media,” according to Beinart, has “triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation”. The writer correctly indicates that the core of this activism was “Black Americans and the young”.
Undeniably, for the first time in US election history, Palestine has become a domestic American political issue—a nightmare realization for those who labored to maintain US foreign policy in the Middle East as an exclusive Israeli domain.
Aside from Arab voters, black voters and voters from other minority groups who prioritized Palestine, many white Americans felt the same way. This claim is particularly important as it suggests that American voters are challenging the identity politics paradigm, and are now thinking around common struggles, values and morality.
“Democrats may no longer be able to rely on young voters to boost numbers, as Harris appears on track to have the lowest support among voters aged 18-29 in this century,” a report in the British Independent newspaper noted. Knowing the relatively strong support for Palestine among young Americans, US politicians have much to worry about in coming elections.
We already know that support for Palestine is overwhelmingly strong among young Democrats. A poll conducted by Gallup in March 2023 indicated that, for the first time, Democrats’ “sympathies .. now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%.”
Even more astonishing, the overall US Democratic constituency is more pro-Palestine than Israel. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last April, the overall young American population “are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinian people than the Israeli people.” While a third of adults under 30 sympathized “entirely or mostly” with Palestinians, only 14% sympathized with the Israelis.
These numbers did not seem to matter to the Democrats who continued to take for granted the votes of youth and other minority groups. They made a grave mistake.
The Biden Administration has played a central role in funding and sustaining the Israeli war machine, thus facilitating the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Millions of Americans took notice and acted upon their sense of collective rage to punish the Democrats for what they had done to the Palestinian people.
According to a report prepared for Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Biden Administration has granted Israel a record of at least $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel in the first year of the war. Additionally, according to a report published on October 4 by the non-profit investigative newspaper ProPublica, “the US has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry” to Israel since October 7, 2023.
Merely hours after the US presidential election results were announced, the Israeli Ministry of Defense signed a deal “to acquire 25 F-15IA combat jets from U.S. manufacturer Boeing for $5.2 billion, with an option to get 25 more,” according to Defense News. In other words, Biden remains unrepentant.
This is the perfect opportunity to translate votes into sustained action and pressure so that all aspects of the US government may hear and heed the deafening chants of 'ceasefire now', and 'free, free Palestine.'
Biden, Harris and others may twist the logic to justify their support for Israel in any way they wish. However, there can be no denying that their administration has played a leading role in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. For this, they were duly and deservedly penalized by American voters.
The understandable euphoria among many of Palestine's supporters in the US notwithstanding, we must not harbor any illusions. Neither President-elect Donald Trump nor his entourage of right-wing politicians will be the saviors of Palestine.
We must recall that it was Trump's first term in office that paved the road to the complete marginalization of the Palestinians. He did so by granting Israel sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem, recognizing the illegal settlements as legitimate, waging financial warfare against Palestinians, and attempting to destroy the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, among other actions.
If Trump returns to his old destructive policies in Palestine, another war will certainly start.
This means that the pro-Palestine camp, which has managed to convert solidarity into decisive political action, must not wait for the new US administration to adopt a more sensible political line on Palestine. Judging by the history of Republican support for Israel, no such sensibility should be expected.
Thus, it is time to build on the existing solidarity among all American groups that voted against genocide in the latest elections. This is the perfect opportunity to translate votes into sustained action and pressure so that all aspects of the US government may hear and heed the deafening chants of 'ceasefire now', and 'free, free Palestine.'
This time around, however, these chants are backed by solid evidence that American voters are capable of destabilizing the entire political paradigm, as they did on November 5, 2024.
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