A busy year for general elections abroad has culminated in the return of Donald J. Trump as president-elect of the United States of America. Just four years after being ousted by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in a resounding loss, Trump, despite facing a litany of criminal charges, rebounded to defeat vice president Kamala Harris by an even larger margin of votes in the Electoral College. It was the first time that a Republican candidate has won the popular vote in 20 years, swinging from a 7 million vote lead to the Democrats in 2020, to an over 2 million vote lead to the Republicans in 2024. Republicans also swept the House and Senate, now possessing unchecked power with which to push their agenda.
The loss comes as a shock to the Democrats, and as the autopsy continues, blame is being thrown in all directions. Indeed, there are many errors to choose from, and they will have all played varied roles.
On the left, we point to Kamala Harris’ refusal to distinguish herself from Joe Biden in any way, plainly stating that she wouldn’t have done anything differently to her deeply unpopular predecessor. Most egregiously, this included her unwavering support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza – an unpopular position with her own base. Instead, the Democrats sent former president Bill Clinton and congressman Richie Torries to rallies in swing-state Michigan, which has a large Arab population, to essentially boast about the genocide and imply that it is deserved.
The Democrats followed this up by parading the support of Republican genocidaire Dick Cheney and his family, opening space for Trump to once again position himself as an anti-war candidate, despite now filling his cabinet with neoconservative war-hawks of the same flavour, as he did in 2016. For all the Democrats’ best efforts, the fabled Republican swing voters did not move left, and the actual swing voters – uninspired Democrats – stayed home.
It has also been revealed that the Harris campaign spent more than US$20m on event production alone, and even more on celebrity endorsements, including $1m solely for the endorsement of billionaire TV personality Oprah Winfrey. This vapid and substanceless strategy, along with the reaction of surprise at the result, feels eerily similar to 2016.
The Democrats have shown again that they are a right-wing party who are more content in losing to Trump than to commit to any transformative progressive change that could energise a working-class base and improve turnout. Rest assured, whatever the most insightful takeaways from the loss turn out to be, the Democratic Party establishment will find a way to draw the exact opposite conclusions. None of their strategists will lose their jobs for this humiliating defeat, on the contrary, they will raise record donations opposing Trump’s radical second term.
For us, there is a more broad and perhaps important observation to be made: incumbents are getting smashed. This marks three straight losses for incumbents in the United States. In the United Kingdom, the Conservatives were ousted in a landslide of discontent, yet it took only 70 days for the incredibly milquetoast UK Labour Party to once again become unpopular in the polls. The trend is reflected in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Canadian provincial elections.
Across the world and particularly in the West, capitalism is deep in crisis. People feel that their lives are only ever getting worse, and no bourgeois politician has demonstrated capability or real desire to make them better. The public mood boils down to resentment of the status quo, and politics is driven by a thirst to punish the current ‘thing’. In elections, this means to vote out the incumbent, who is presumably the cause of your problems.
Where Biden in 2020 was able to sell himself to the ruling class as the more stable and effective manager of the interests of capital, a more unhinged and incoherent Trump returning so quickly and decisively feels like yet another death-blow to the reformist project. The reformists simply cannot keep the electoral fascists at bay – they have no tools to do so. Through fealty to neoliberalism, they only empower them further.
The cycle will continue until a complete re-constitution of society breaks it. Socialism or barbarism. We know what we’re choosing.
