Donald Trump’s second victory cannot be attributed to any unhappy accident of eighteenth-century constitutionalism. This time, he won not only the Electoral College, that antique curiosity, but the popular vote as well. In the end, Trump’s national margin over Kamala Harris was just 1.5 percent—narrow in the manner of all mandates within our entrenched politics. Yet even this slender triumph was disorienting to his Democratic opponents, who had again staked everything on the notion that Trump was fundamentally unacceptable to the American people. Somehow, this year, they were more wrong than they had ever been before.
After such a campaign and such a result, one natural response was a revival of the classic Brechtian proposal to dissolve the people and elect another. For the columnist Jill Filipovic, “this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.” “Our mistake,” wrote Rebecca Solnit, “was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” Such proclamations reflect a deep unease with the basic concept of representative democracy—a foundational if sometimes dormant element of liberalism itself that was reactivated in 2016 and is likely to assume larger proportions during the second Trump Administration.
At least dramatic proclamations of this kind have the virtues of candor and comprehensiveness. Elsewhere, Trump’s manifold opponents struggled to produce even a partial theory that might explain the results and also let themselves off the hook. This was a difficult business because the 2024 election—which amounted to something like a working-class revolt against the Democratic Party—drove a bulldozer through every paradigm.
As Trump claimed victory, many left-of-center pundits returned to their favorite talking point from 2016: the indelible racism and misogyny of the American public. Yet, as the deadpan blogger Matt Bruenig delights in observing, the raw majority of Trump voters have always been women and people of color. In this year’s election, virtually every demographic in the country shifted toward Trump—younger women, unmarried women, non-white women, indeed all women; Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Arab Americans. As an explanation for why Joe Biden won but Harris lost—with Trump athwart what may be the most racially diverse Republican coalition since Ulysses S. Grant—mass bigotry leaves something to be desired.
The very weakest explanations, perhaps, blamed the media. Here the usual bogeymen—Fox News, Christian radio, etc.—now shared space with Elon Musk’s X and an array of “bro” content on social media, whose otherworldly powers, in between ads for MeUndies and nootropic chewing gum, had magicked tens of millions of Americans into believing that the economy was bad when actually it was good. There were calls to build a “liberal Joe Rogan”—as if Rogan himself were some kind of hard-right intellectual, rather than an agreeable goof who endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020; as if no one remembered the George W. Bush era, when the rise of conservative talk radio produced six shining years of Air America; as if liberals really lost this election because they didn’t have enough podcasts.
Less preposterous but not much more edifying was the inevitable ideological crossfire. Harris was “too progressive,” said centrists: she did not do enough to shed the label of an out-of-touch San Francisco liberal; she should have picked pragmatic Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro for her VP nominee instead of the mushy Tim Walz; she was torpedoed by an activist infrastructure that had tied her to unpopular positions in the 2020 primary and did not let her repudiate them in 2024. Yet these complaints ring hollow in the mouths of a commentariat that spent the election season boasting that Kamala Harris’s centrism was working. This was a campaign, after all, that did all it could to massage the fluffy plumage of the Never Trump Republican columnist class. “Watching Harris’s speech,” rhapsodized Bill Kristol in the days before the election, after Harris delivered her “closing argument,” “I wasn’t merely comfortable with my vote for her. I’ve got to say that I was proud to be a Harris voter.” Right then and there, we should have known she was doomed.
Progressives, of course, had their own share of postmortem talking points. In pursuit of the vanishing moderate Republican, Harris had embraced the Cheney family and other pillars of a bankrupt Establishment; she waffled pathetically on Israel’s mass killing in Gaza, alienating young people and Arab voters in Michigan; she harped on threats to the Constitution but offered no positive reform agenda.
As we might expect, the left’s critique cut sharper than the center’s: critique is what we are good at, and this election wasn’t our baby, anyway. But that is part of the problem. In November 2016, fresh from the thrill of an unexpected primary struggle, it was not only satisfying but genuinely plausible to affirm that Bernie Would Have Won. This year is different. After a much less exhilarating defeat in 2020, and the mass base of the Sanders left reduced to little more than a fractional protest movement, few have sought to reawaken the old battle cry. Does anyone believe that a presidential campaign run by today’s Democratic Socialists of America could have come close to beating Trump?
The economic press, meanwhile, alighted on a more cold-blooded explanation for Trump’s return. As in Britain, Japan, and elsewhere, voters had simply turned away from an incumbent party with the misfortune of being in power during the post-COVID inflation surge of 2021–22. For the first time in over a century, reported the Financial Times, “every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share.”
This is important context, of critical use in deflating the many hyperboles about Trump’s uniquely sinister appeal. Yet the broadest version of the argument (“it’s the inflation, stupid”) risks whitewashing the character of the American turn against Biden and Harris, which was far from evenly spread or socially uniform. According to exit polls, Harris either held or increased Democratic support with a number of notable constituencies: white men with college degrees; voters with postgraduate educations; voters in households earning more than $100,000 a year; and voters in households earning more than $200,000 a year. In other words, Harris managed to retain the new core of the Democratic base: the highly educated professional class. Given the strong political headwinds—the national swing against her was greater than six points—this was no small accomplishment.
Almost everyone else, however, moved in the other direction—especially within the working classes. The Trumpward shift of voters without college degrees was nine points, larger than the national shift. For non-white voters without degrees, it was sixteen points; voters in households making less than $50,000, eleven points; and voters in union households, twelve points.
On the map, the class character of the shift was equally unmistakable. In Massachusetts, for example, Democrats’ enormous margins in wealthy Boston suburbs like Newton and Wellesley receded by five points or less. But in the historic industrial center of Lowell, home to some of the first factories in the United States, the decline was eleven points; in New Bedford, the hard-luck whaling port where Herman Melville went to sea, it was sixteen. In the old mill town of Lawrence, largely Hispanic and working class, the swing toward Trump was a whopping thirty-one points.
After 2016, metropolitan reporters packed their carry-on bags and went on safari in the Rust Belt, filing anthropological dispatches from dive bars and roadside diners in exotic locations like Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Saginaw, Michigan. This year the job was easier: they hopped on the R train down to Sunset Park in Brooklyn, or took the 4 up to Yankee Stadium, where scores of ordinary New Yorkers—immigrants and children of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East—explained why they had decided to vote for Trump.
Fundamentally, the election witnessed a rebellion of working Americans squeezed by rising prices. The Biden Administration boasted that strong employment and wage gains negated the impact of inflation, but their measuring sticks—as the progressives’ bête noire Larry Summers has noted—excluded the price of credit, a major omission in an economy built on housing loans and other financing costs. The combined inflation rate of food and fuel, meanwhile, reached in 2022 levels unseen since 1980. Housing, groceries, and gasoline, of course, are the costs that working Americans experience most keenly in their day-to-day lives. The fact that inflation rates declined in 2023—another factor much touted by liberal economists—was little consolation, given that actual food prices, for instance, remained 25 percent higher than they had been before the advent of COVID-19. On election day, 68 percent of voters said the economy was not good, and 70 percent of those who said so voted for Trump.
After half a century of class dealignment, it was not exactly a surprise to see another wave of workers abandon the Democratic Party. Given the state of the economy, many liberals knew this might happen. Even as Democratic pundits blamed popular discontent on ignorance, misinformation, and bad partisan vibes, the party’s own data analysts recognized the reality of widespread frustration.
In response, Harris and her super PACs poured their lavish resources into digital and television ads aimed at a disenchanted working class. “I’m not rich as hell,” an assortment of ordinary voters told the camera, after a clip showed Trump boasting about giving tax cuts to his donors. Yet they paired this big spend on pseudopopulist politics with a quieter effort to reassure Wall Street and Silicon Valley that a Harris Administration would be open for business. Here the word of Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West—the chief legal officer at Uber and certifiably “rich as hell”—was worth a thousand TV commercials.
After a brief honeymoon period over the summer, when Harris mocked Trump instead of denouncing him, the campaign gave way to a more familiar Democratic posture of ethical rectitude enlivened by flutters of hysteria. Harris painted Trump as a criminal, a moral abomination, a would-be dictator whose dangerous rhetoric should disqualify him from office. Meanwhile, she showcased her celebrity endorsements and lambasted Trump on abortion, confident that the Dobbs decision had changed the American electorate for good by galvanizing pro-choice voters.
In the end, the $1.6 billion operation was a bust—the most expensive failure in American political history. Yet the impulse to proclaim Kamala Harris “a bad candidate” should be avoided. Who would have been better: Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro and his embarrassing Obama impersonation? Gretchen Whitmer, the victor of two low-turnout midterm elections, whose political wizardry this cycle involved a bizarre TikTok video that mocked Holy Communion with Doritos? These are interchangeable parts in a broken machine.
The fault is not in the Democrats’ campaigns; it is in themselves. This is a party that represents the nerve center of American capitalism, ideological production, and imperial power. Elon Musk’s contributions notwithstanding, in just three months Harris raised far more money than Trump, from a much broader and deeper bench of wealthy elites. This is a party that embodies a contented American status quo—its faultless Constitution, its dynamic “opportunity economy,” its “indispensable” role as military policeman of the global order. And this is a party for which everything is either righteously moral or bloodlessly technical, but for which nothing is political—that is, alert to real questions of power and subject to actual popular contestation.
It is no coincidence that the past three Democratic nominees for president did not emerge from any kind of political process, but were preselected by fellow elites—“anointed” is, in fact, the correct word for the actions of a party of such aristocratic manner and apostolic self-regard. Barack Obama anointed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then, in a crunch, Joe Biden in 2020; Biden, in turn, anointed Harris when he stepped down. Squashing the Sanders insurgency was one thing, since the rebels were all outside the castle, but this is a party that simply does not welcome internal ideological debate.
Even the decision to run those populist TV ads was driven not by conviction or popular demand, but by data scientists at the helm of focus groups. Given the billion-dollar muscle behind Harris’s campaign and the barrenness of her actual economic agenda—which promised a “working people” tax cut and vague efforts to stop price gouging—it is no surprise that the ads failed to convince many working-class voters.
No doubt they struck many as hypocritical. The Democrats today recall the Whigs lacerated by Marx in nineteenth-century Britain, another liberal party tied to an arrogant economic elite. They too are
money-mongers with feudal prejudices, aristocrats without point of honor, Bourgeois without industrial activity, finality-men with progressive phrases, progressists with fanatical Conservatism, traffickers in homeopathical fractions of reforms.
It was a strange assemblage: Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney; Mark Cuban and Shawn Fain; Bill Kristol and Beyoncé; left-liberal think tanks touting “the greatest economy ever” even as labor’s share of national income remains lower than it was before the pandemic; Harris pledging to “take on big corporations” while raking in unprecedented billions in dark money from the corporate investor class. “The mass of the English people,” wrote Marx, “have a sound aesthetical common sense. They have an instinctive hatred against everything motley and ambiguous”: so, too, the American people.
In this election, Democrats asserted their moral authority while making an elaborate effort to whisper away their vast economic power. Trump, in contrast, boasted of his wealth and pretended to no virtue beyond his own advancement. His chief promises to the people—a closed border, high tariffs, and low taxes—depended not on his character but on his capacities: “Trump will fix it.”
Even after Trump’s victory, it is far from clear that this program was the first choice of the electorate. Across the country, populist Democrats—who decried rather than celebrated the inflationary economy; who blamed a class enemy, the corporate elite, rather than a partisan one; who set aside the NGO-approved culture war in favor of a material focus—ran well ahead of Harris. In Nebraska, Dan Osborn, an independent union steamfitter running for a Senate seat, outran the national Democratic ticket by almost fourteen points, a margin large enough to have won any of the seven swing states, Ohio, or Florida.
These populists were not progressives, at least not in the juvenile two-dimensional conception of American politics. Beginning with a political argument rather than a moral code, they avoided unpopular positions on energy, immigration, and gender policy. Yet unlike Harris, they did not campaign alongside the same plutocrats they denounced in their TV ads; they did not lament an unfair status quo while also auditioning to maintain it. When Osborn attacked the “millionaires and the billionaires” in the Senate, you had the distinct sense that he actually meant it. Until Democrats can find a way to mean it, too, they can expect more bulldozings.