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kamala harris
Six Ways the Democrats Elected Trump... Again
It didn't have to be this way. And yet the Democratic Party's failures were easy to see every step of the way. Let us count the ways.
Jan 16, 2025
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?
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'Damning' New Poll Shows Price Kamala Harris Paid for Backing Israeli Genocide in Gaza
"Israel is a liability," said one Palestinian-American rights advocate.
Jan 15, 2025
As a cease-fire and hostage release deal was reportedly reached between Hamas and Israel on Wednesday, new polling made it clearer than ever that Vice President Kamala Harris' refusal to break with the Biden administration's position on Israel's relentless assault on Gaza had an impact on her support from voters, and contributed to millions of potential Democratic voters deciding to stay home on Election Day.
A YouGov poll backed by the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project and released on Wednesday showed that among the 19 million people who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 but did not vote in 2024, nearly a third named Israel's U.S.-backed war on Gaza as a top reason for staying home.
"The top reason those non-voters cited, above the economy at 24% and immigration at 11%, was Gaza: a full 29% cited the ongoing onslaught as the top reason they didn't cast a vote in 2024," wrote Ryan Grim at Drop Site News, the first outlet to report the news.
In states that swung from Biden in 2020 to President-elect Donald Trump in 2024, 20% of non-voters said Gaza was the reason they didn't cast a ballot in November.
After replacing Biden as the nominee in July, Harris faced pressure—as the president had—to take decisive action to end U.S. support for Israel's assault on Gaza, which has now killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been civilian men, women, and children.
Advocates called on Harris to support an arms embargo on Israel—one that would have placed the U.S. in compliance with its own laws, such as Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which bar the government from providing military aid to any country that is blocking U.S. humanitarian aid.
The U.S. has made more than 100 military transfers to Israel since it began bombarding Gaza in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack. Israel's near-total blockade on humanitarian aid has left parts of the enclave facing famine, according to the World Food Program and international experts.
"We want to support you, Vice President Harris, and our voters need to see you turn a new page on Gaza policy that includes embracing an arms embargo to save lives," one leader of the Uncommitted National Movement told Harris at an event in August. At the same event, the vice president accused protesters who chanted, "We won't vote for genocide!" of wanting "Donald Trump to win."
At Drop Site News, Grim wrote that Harris later emphasized, "I am not Joe Biden" and insisted that her presidency "not be a continuation of Joe Biden's presidency" because of her "life experiences, [her] professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas"—but she continued to back the White House's position on the bombardment of Gaza.
"Of course, diverging from Biden on Gaza risked losing voters who supported his policy," wrote Grim. "But a close look at the survey suggests that risk was low compared to the potential reward."
YouGov asked voters who turned out for Harris and had also backed Biden in 2020 whether a shift away from the White House policy on Israel and Gaza would have made them more or less likely to vote for Harris.
"By a 35 to 5 margin, they said doing so would have made them more enthusiastic to vote for her, with the remainder saying it would have made no difference," reported Grim.
Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement, said the "damning new poll" shows that "Israel is a liability."
Grim noted some caveats, pointing out that "even if October 7 and the resulting genocide had never happened, it's fair to assume some number of those non-voters still would not have voted, and would have cited a different top reason for not voting."
"Still, even the most biased poll can only manufacture so much of a response," wrote Grim. "Even if the true numbers aren't as stark as this survey found, it points in a clear direction: Biden's ruthless support for Israel's genocide, and the refusal of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to break with him, hurt her among voters who stayed home."
The IMEU Policy Project called on the Democratic Party to "come to terms with the real reasons it lost the presidency in November, including because after over a year of unprecedented protests and calls for Biden to stop sending weapons to Israel, party leadership failed to listen to its own voters."
"As the Democratic Party looks for its future leaders in 2028 and beyond," said the organization, "they need to understand that voters they lost in 2024 overwhelmingly say they would prefer to support officials who have opposed sending more weapons to Israel."
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Progressive Foreign Policy Expert Says Americans Are Tired of Democrats Being 'Party of War'
"It's time for Democrats to offer Americans a new and affirmative vision of U.S. foreign policy, one that boldly and unashamedly embraces global peacemaking as an essential component of our own security and prosperity."
Jan 09, 2025
"Democrats have become the party of war" and "Americans are tired of it."
That's the message that Matt Duss, a former top aide to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who is now the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, imparted in an opinion piece published Thursday in The Guardian.
"In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans," Duss wrote. "As they enter the political wilderness, it's time to reckon with what they got so wrong."
Among other things, what they got wrong during Vice President Kamala Harris' failed 2024 Democratic presidential bid, according to Duss, was embracing figures like former CIA director Leon Panetta and "torture advocate" Liz Cheney in a bid to woo right-wing and moderate voters.
As President-elect Donald Trump's campaign painted the Republican nominee—who fulfilled his 2016 campaign promise to "bomb the shit out of" Islamic State militants and "take out their families" with devastating results—as the "
candidate of peace," Democrats "left the anti-war lane wide open for him by leaning into a tired, curdled militarism as a substitute for an actual foreign policy vision," Duss said.
"It's time for Democrats to offer Americans a new and affirmative vision of U.S. foreign policy, one that boldly and unashamedly embraces global peacemaking as an essential component of our own security and prosperity," he wrote. "One that insists that keeping Americans safe does not require spending more on defense than the next 10 countries combined."
Duss continued:
Our leaders should be clear about the genuine security threats that our country faces, but decide, at long last, to stop being drawn into dumb bidding wars about being "tougher on Russia/terrorism/China/whatever"—a framing designed to sustain the hawkish status quo. They should broaden the national security conversation to include the challenge of domestic and global inequality and the grievances it powers. They should articulate not just a domestic but a global pro-worker agenda—in addition to a global corporate minimum tax, a global minimum wage, for example. Make clear that a foreign policy fit for this era doesn't pit the security and prosperity of Americans against workers in other countries but recognizes that our security and prosperity are bound together.
"All of this will of course require confronting the various defense, business, and foreign lobbies that distort and constrain our policy discussions, which is why a strong anti-corruption plank is essential for any such platform," Duss said.
That's a tall order. Reflecting on President Joe Biden's term, Duss asserted: "I never imagined I would write this, but by the end of his presidency he will have done more damage to the so-called 'rules-based order' than Trump did. Fifteen months and counting of support for Israel's horrific assault on Gaza has violated virtually every international norm on the protections of civilians in war and left America's moral credibility in tatters. Biden showed that international law is little more than a cudgel to be used against our enemies while being treated as optional for our friends."
"In his 2020 election victory speech, Biden proclaimed: 'I believe at our best America is a beacon for the globe. And we lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example,'" Duss recalled. "It's a nice line, but Biden showed that he sees it as little more than that. The question now for Democrats is whether they can actually mean it, or if they even want to."
Addressing the recent phenomenon of Republicans being perceived as the anti-war party of the working class—even if such perception is divorced from reality on both fronts—Duss lamented that "this year's Democratic ticket failed to provide a sufficient response."
"Instead of responding to the right's tech oligarch-funded faux-populism by offering a genuine alternative and attacking the real sources of our country's insecurity, they leaned into a defense of a militarist status quo that most Americans rightly recognize as broken," he added. "They must not make that mistake again."
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