In one month, Donald Trump will become president once again. The effects of his election are already being felt around the world, and have been hailed by the international far-right. His electoral victory came as a shock for many, even if it was increasingly suspected in the final run-up to election day. Despite some smaller anti-Trump demonstrations soon after the election, and a call for protests around the inauguration, we have not seen anything like the organizing that came early in Trump’s first term. Many on the broader left are still feeling numb.
Any effective response to Trump will have to come to terms with what happened in the election, the role of the Democratic Party in Trump’s victory, the split in working class votes, and Trump’s ambiguous relation to both the conventional Republican backers in the ruling class and the less conventional far-right. In previous articles, I have discussed both Harris and Trump and the politics of the campaign.[i] This article will examine what happened in the election and why. A future article will look more closely at Trump’s cabinet and what to expect in his second term.
What happened?
Trump won not only all seven “swing states,” but the national vote, although not the majority suggested in early returns, receiving 49.9% of the vote to Harris’s 48.4%. This is the first time a Republican won a majority of the national vote since George Bush in 2004. Republicans also won a majority in both houses of Congress.
Compared with 2020, Trump gained ground in 48 of the country’s 50 states. The Democrats had been relying on support for abortion to bring out the women’s vote. Women voted for Harris by 53% to 45%, a smaller advantage than Biden had four years earlier. The percentages shifted towards Trump in both the Republican rural districts and Democratic urban ones, and Trump won the contested suburbs.
That does not mean a majority of America voted for him. While Trump received roughly 31% of the eligible vote to Harris’ 30%, the non-voting party won with 36%. While Trump gained about 3 million votes from 2020, the shift came mainly because the Democrats lost over 6 million votes.[ii] This was a disastrous outcome for the Democrats. But it would be an exaggeration to call it a massive move of the American people from the left to the right.
In fact, some of the most conservative red states enacted progressive legislation in referendums. Abortion rights passed in 7 of 10 states where they were on the ballot. In Florida an abortion rights amendment fell just short of a 60% threshold, but received 1.4 million more votes than Harris did. Voters in Republican states also approved raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and mandated sick leave; and they voted down school vouchers backed by the religious right, anti-union captive audience meetings, and Republican limits to voting rights.
Polls have consistently shown American voters to the left of who they vote for on issues like government action on climate change and government help with healthcare for all Americans. Majorities mistrust the power of corporations, and support for unions is at the highest in decades. These beliefs mean little until there is an opportunity to do something about it. That the Democrats could not connect with these feelings, that they lost to Trump despite his low approval ratings, is due to their basic politics, not a tactical mistake in campaign messaging.
That someone as outside the normal bounds of politics as Trump could benefit, could move from pariah status to reelection, demonstrates a crisis the old bipartisan neoliberal consensus had no answers for. It is worrying and dangerous that Trump was able to get away with the racist language, the open contempt for democracy, the violent insults and promises. While most of his voters are not true believers, the results show the working class not able to vote as a class, and a good section at best is tolerant of Trump’s reactionary messaging. Trump is coming in with a vicious agenda, and his cabinet picks seem designed to help him achieve it. Although he bragged during his victory speech that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he does not have a “mandate” for his policies.
How Did Trump Win?
“The economy” was the primary concern for voters, principally inflation, and these voters leaned heavily towards Trump. Before the election, a majority of Americans said they were worse off than they were four years ago. The results are consistent with an American “kick the bastards out” reaction to low economic confidence, and part of an international rejection of incumbents of whatever stripe during the post-pandemic wave of inflation. But it is more than just that.
Trump’s speeches often acknowledged the economic problems of Americans, and blamed the Biden/Harris administration for inflation. “We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history,” he claimed in the televised debate. Despite the exaggeration, it felt true to many. The Democrats’ response was explaining that the economy was fine (“the strongest in the world,” bragged Biden); inflation rates had fallen and unemployment was low. Things were fine for some at the top, but the majority were not benefiting from the rising stock market. Cumulatively over Biden’s presidency, prices had risen by 19.4%. Groceries were more expensive, and rent, housing, mortgages, and insurance were through the roof. This was crucial for the 60% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck.
All of this is in the context of decades of neoliberalism, growing inequality, and declines in unionization. The feeling of crisis was more than cyclical economics. People felt the American dream of each generation being better off than the last had disappeared. This all was reflected in growing rates of suicide and drug addiction.
This seemed a world away from Harris’ corporate-friendly campaign, where she brought out celebrities and took advice from billionaires about her “opportunity economy” for the “middle class” rather than focus on combating inequality. An AP poll showed a majority wanted “substantial change” in how the country is run, and 30% said they wanted “total upheaval”. Harris was not the candidate for change.
Trump recognized a problem and bragged that he alone could fix it. He gave false answers, fed people’s anger, and scapegoated the vulnerable, while pointing a finger at policies of Democratic Party elites. The billionaire ex-President was still running as an outsider. The Democratic campaign allowed him to get away with it.
Scapegoating Immigrants
The main theme of Trump’s campaign was virulent scaremongering about immigrants, calling them “criminals,” “illegals” and “animals” swamping cities and hogging benefits. He adopted Nazi language in saying immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country,” and alluded to the fascist great replacement theory in saying Democrats were purposefully letting them in through their “open borders.”
Central to his pledges was to “institute the largest deportation program in American History.” He tied it all to the economy, “I will protect your jobs” he told his audiences, “I will protect your borders.”
In 2016 Trump ran on building a wall, though it was left unfinished. He cruelly deported one and a half million immigrants in four years, still a fraction of his promise and ironically less than the Democratic presidents Obama before him and Biden.
This time it is different because of the scale of the rhetoric. While finding and deporting 11 million people may be logistically impossible, it will be just as hard for him to give up on his “bloody story” of deportation. His pick of Steven Miller, the far-right architect of many of his immigration policies, as deputy chief of staff, and the aggressive pro-deportation former acting ICE chief Tom Homan as “border czar” suggests how serious he is.
The Democrats made no defense of immigration, whether on moral, political, or economic grounds. Questioned on it in the televised debate, Harris championed a repressive bipartisan border security bill scuttled by Trump for political reasons, and never contradicted Trump over his racist lies about waves of “migrant crime” and immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
The same dynamic was seen in other issues. Republicans spent over $200 million on ads calling trans people a threat to the nation and ending “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Democrats again retreated to relative silence. Unlike 2020 and 2016, there was no trans speaker at the Democratic convention, and barely a mention of transgender people in the Democratic platform.
In an interview Harris evaded a question about gender-affirming care, saying “I think we should follow the law.” But the law bans this care for young people in half the states, with 128 other anti-trans bills introduced.
Despite this, some Democrats are still arguing the party was too “woke” and should have talked more about the economy and less about trans rights. The answer is not pitting “identity politics” against “workers’ issues”, but addressing consciousness of a multi-racial and multi-gendered class, and using it to cut through the oppressive divisive rhetoric.
Others have concluded that “America is not ready for a Black Woman President,” even as several pro-Palestinian women of color were handily re-elected. Certainly, racism and sexism have played a long and horrific role in American politics, and were highlighted in Trump’s campaign. But hardcore racists were already in Trump’s camp against Biden. A believable candidate raising class and anti-racist arguments could have won support cutting through ordinary prejudice. While the majority of white voters again voted Republican, the ratio was about the same as in 2000 under Biden. On the other hand, women, Black, and especially Latinx voters voted Democrat by a smaller percentage than in 2000.
Campaigning During Genocide
The electoral campaign took place during Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, bankrolled by the US. Widespread demonstrations have transformed Americans opinion on the Middle East, but not the policy of Biden or Harris. An “Uncommitted Movement” was successful in gaining protest votes during the primary, but could not get a meeting with Harris, or even a Palestinian speaker at the convention, although several anti-Trump Republicans spoke.
While they could not officially endorse Harris, Uncommitted Movement leadership linked to the Democratic Party used undemocratic maneuvers to put out a statement telling people to vote against Trump, but not for third parties. Large parts of the movement objected, endorsing a vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party, and stating genocide is not a lesser evil.
In Dearborn, Michigan, where there was organizing among the Muslim majority, Stein received 18%, moving the plurality from Harris to Trump. However, throughout Michigan Stein got less than 1%, and made no difference to the electoral college count in any state.
Activists were sickened by Harris campaigning on “joy” during a genocide, relying on an ineffective support of abortion as her only progressive plank while campaigning with anti-choice Republican Liz Cheeney, supporting Israel, and telling the convention, “We want the most lethal military in the world.” It is no wonder many could not stomach voting for her.
Harris’s campaign started by dismissing Trump and Vance as “weird.” Later, with the polls narrowing, Harris began calling Trump a “threat to democracy.” She even quoted ex-Trump staff who used the word “fascist” about him. By “fascist” she did not mean a product of a system in crisis, but an individual out of the norm of bourgeois politics. For Harris, defense of “democracy” was defense of the present discredited political system, not opposition to a ruling class attack on living standards, minorities, and rights. This again placed the right as the only alternative to the status quo.
After the election many commentators were essentially giving advice to the Democratic Party, saying they should have mentioned working class issues more (or responded to Gaza protesters, etc.) Much of this amounted to saying “you should have lied to us, or lied more convincingly. The Democratic Party is incapable of genuine class politics, invoking anger at the obscenely wealthy, or opposing US imperialism, because that is who they serve. The role of the Democrats is to dampen down expectations. Changing their messaging next time will not help change reality.
Class Realignment or Dealignment?
The Democrats and Republicans are two parties of capital, though retaining the backing of different sections of society. Certain sections of capital tend to back different parties. Since the 1930s and the New Deal under FDR, unionized workers have tended to vote Democrat. Traditionally, Republicans are the first choice of large industrial capital, although the ruling class can switch to temporarily using Democrats as their B team in order to absorb and neutralize dissent. Untypically, Democrats received the bulk of Wall Street and large corporate donations in both 2016 (Trump vs Clinton), and 2000 (Trump vs Biden). Harris still brought in more corporate money than Trump this year, but many CEOs seem to have made their peace with a Trump administration, or at least thought the reductions in taxes and regulations were worth some instability. On the other side, the Democrats are losing the adherence of many working class votes. Voters without a college degree have traditionally voted Democratic, but switched to Republicans under the last three Trump races, while the Democratic Party has taken the lead among the college-educated. Because exit polls don’t have a specific question about class, many commentators have mistakenly used the “no college degree” category as a stand-in for the working class. This is nonsense: there are many college-educated workers, who have been behind much of the more recent union militancy, and half of business owners in the US don’t have a college degree, especially the small business owners — the classic petty bourgeois basis of fascism – and of Trump’s MAGA base. Still, the significant reversal was fundamental to Harris’s loss, and there are many manual workers in the non-college category. More dramatically, in this election for the first time, Democrats won with those making more than $100,000 a year, as well as the much smaller category of those making over $200,000 a year. Trump won a majority of those making under $50,000 a year. A Financial Times analysis found that for the first time the Democrats received more support from voters in the top third of the income bracket than from either the middle or lower third.
It may be that this is just a phenomenon based around Trump’s personality, but even that could easily continue with Vance or others running in an increasingly Trumpist Republican Party. The collapse of the vote at the lower end of the income scale may also be a temporary product of the “kick the bums out” protest against recent inflation. But it is also true that a party continually talking about the “middle class,” while spending more effort appeasing corporations than workers, would eventually lose their position as an historical destination of the working-class vote. This does not mean we are seeing a “class realignment,” where the Republicans become the home party of the working class (or “white working class”). But it is certain that, for now, the working class and ruling class are both split between the two parties of capital.
These questions have been written about from a reformist, social democratic (and sometimes explicitly anti-“woke”) point of view in several articles in Jacobin (see especially by Jared Abbott), as well as a series of articles in The New Left Review (most recently by Merton Ash and Tim Barker), and has been discussed recently by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
On the eve of the election the Tempest Collective wrote that “The Democrats have effectively morphed into the pre-Trump Republican Party, seeking to prove their bona fides as the A Team of American capitalism.” If so, they may find that this is not as stable a position as they thought.
As the focus of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) after this election demonstrates, the Democrats still have the capacity to divert opposition, even from those livid at their leadership. And the low third party vote this year, even after the strength of the “uncommitted” movement, shows there is no sign of a viable electoral alternative on the horizon. But even this “dealignment” (rather than “realignment”) could help open up space for a future party that can attract votes from workers, the oppressed, and the left in a more class-conscious manner. For now, the working class is not voting as a class. In the absence of an alternative, it seems a larger portion of the working class seems to be pulled by the nationalist anti-immigrant politics of Trump’s middle-class base.
What to Expect from Trump?
The politics of Donald Trump has been well covered elsewhere.[iii] Marx21 is in process of publishing a new article that looks at the ideologies behind his cabinet picks and threats and contradictions in his domestic and foreign policy agendas for his second term. Trump’s reactionary cabinet shows how his style of MAGA politics has gained a following in Washington. He has shed the traditional conservatives that held back his impulses eight years ago, but his policies and appointments are still filled with contradictions. They will want headline-generating moves in the first 100 days, and to consolidate changes in the two years before the midterms. How far he will get is now an open question, but it certainly indicates increased misery for the majority.
This will not be a conventional Republican administration, but neither are we living under fascism. The working class and oppressed groups will be facing threats, and the Trump campaign has sown divisions among them. What is certain is that there will be struggles, and we still have room to operate. The country is not in a fundamentally different state that it was before the election.
Certainly, one threatening part of Trump’s ascent may be his instinct to gain support by whipping up hate and suggesting fantasies of violence at supposed “enemies of the people.” This rhetoric often evoked cheers at his rallies. But many of his followers are used to his bluster, and don’t believe he will carry through with his worst threats. His appointments for Attorney General and related posts do suggest he is serious in using the Justice Department as his political enforcer, to the extent he can.
Legally elected and safe in a White House protected by the Supreme Court, Trump will prefer to pursue his goals through a commanding executive and compliant Congress, abandoning the mobs and far-right outside. But he will try to hold them in reserve.
Many of the working people who voted for him will be unpleasantly surprised that the promised economic improvements do not reach them. How long economic disappointment can be displaced into a radicalizing resentment of imagined enemies, and whether it instead leads to a conscious opposition to Trump and his class will be a crucial question in the coming period.
What Next?
The day after the election young Black people across the country received an intimidating text message telling them they had been selected to pick cotton “at the nearest plantation.” There were small and scattered manifestations of neo-Nazi rallies and aggressive Trumpist caravans in the days following the election. Now is the time to revive and build united fronts against the far-right. The extra-parliamentary insurgent right retreated after January 6 and have been partially eclipsed by the looser MAGA movement around Trump, but they still exist and use his milieu to grow.
Trump may well use state power to intimidate and limit left-wing activism. In this he will be building on the new McCarthyite repression of Palestinian solidarity under the Democrats. This is best defeated by continued mobilization, and masses on the street. On the days immediately after the election there were anti-Trump marches, the largest only a few thousand. Protests in DC on January 18th, and others around the inauguration should be supported, but have not caught on widely and will be nowhere near the scale of those after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. The November 29th day in solidarity with the Palestinian people saw demonstrations in a few cities larger than the more general anti-Trump protests. Although the campus encampments have been dampened down for now, these protests are still key. The election of Trump already sparked into action the openly genocidal dreams of the furthest right-wing elements of Israeli Zionism.
The disaster of the Harris campaign, combined with the horror at genocide in Gaza, opens room for the left to argue for a break with the Democrats. Both Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America wrote angry condemnations of corporate Democrats after the results. Sanders (who campaigned for Harris) doubted they would learn the lessons and called for “conversations.” The DSA mentioned a goal of “a new party for the working class,” but doubled down on prioritizing electoral campaigns for left candidates inside the party. Any viable electoral alternative will come as an expression of mass activity beyond what is happening now.
We do not know what defensive struggles will erupt under Trump, but defense of immigrants looks to be a flash point. We can learn from the emergency mobilizations that defeated Trump’s “Muslim Ban” in 2017, and the May Day 2006 “Day Without Immigrants:” a ground-up general strike of immigrant labor that shut down workplaces and defeated threatening anti-immigrant legislation.
Recent strikes of dock and maritime workers in the ILA , and the IAM machinists at Boeing won raises significantly over inflation, but were convinced to go back without other demands being met. The ILA may walk out in January over protecting jobs from automation. Just as strikes can show other movements where greater power lies, so can growing movements in the streets give confidence to workers to hold on for more, and provide inspiring victories. We are not there yet.
In Boeing, on the docks, and in future strikes, a good minority of the workers will be Trump voters. Class conflict in the Trump administration will be the best way of discovering who their real allies are, and which side Trump and Vance stand. But we cannot rely on workplace politics alone. Nor can divisions in the working class be dealt with without explicitly standing against all manner of manufactured bigotry, from racism to trans-phobia.
Politics and Organization
The US is in a time of politicalization without corresponding organization. This started to be seen after the recession of 2008, with the quick flashes of Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right, but it has intensified since.
This phenomenon can be seen in the massive verbal support for Luigi Mangione after his assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
On the right, this can lead to lone-wolf shooters raised on fascist conspiracies online. Far-right Christian politics is gaining influence even as church attendance is in decline. Though fortunately, there is no major fascist organization in the US at the moment, their ideology is influencing Trumpism. The left needs to fight this process, but also fight all the smaller fascist groups that want to grow.
On the left, we are experiencing massive politicalization. Prison abolitionism became a popular idea among the millions on the streets with Black Lives Matter. Similarly, the recent protests against the Israeli genocide drew anti-imperialist conclusions, and chanted “One Solution: Intifada Revolution!” Even within the environmental movement there are many who recognize capitalism as the problem, without being clear on how to organize against it. The left has not built visible, ongoing, and independent organization out of these struggles. Without that, the Democratic Party–firmly pro-capital and standing against all these radical demands–remains the place to incorporate and neutralize resistance.
At present, the left in the US is not large or embedded enough for the task at hand. We need to build up opposition to Trump’s agenda at scale, and simultaneously to establish independent political organization.
[i] Fretz, Eric, (2024), “The US election: Kamalamania, Trump and lesser-evilism”, International Socialism 184 (Fall), https://isj.org.uk/kamalamania. The present article is a version of one to be published in the next issue: “The US election: An Update” International Socialism 185 (Winter) https://isj.org.uk/us-election-update.
[ii] Figures as of 17/11December 1st. For latest vote figures, see AP Elections, https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024.
[iii] Merton, 2024, balances Trump’s options in his second term. In Fretz, 2024, I included relevant references. For one extensive but older analysis of the Trump phenomena, see Tanuro, 2024. Lyons, 2024, updates Trump’s relation to fascism on the ground.
Marx21 US 