In the wee hours of the morning after Election Day, when it had become apparent that Donald Trump would prevail in the race for the White House, political writer Jim Newell attempted to grapple with the monumental implications of the result. “We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that,” he lamented in a predawn post at Slate. “We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened.” Bewildered as he was by the outcome, though, there was one thing he believed was abundantly clear: “The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.”
He was half-right. For the Democratic establishment’s hand-picked candidate to lose to Trump was indeed an epic embarrassment. But Newell’s confidence that such a defeat would lead to a major turnover in the party’s leadership or a comprehensive rethinking of its modus operandi turned out to be misplaced. And in case you think it’s too soon to draw that kind of conclusion, I should point out that his piece was written not in November 2024 but in November 2016, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s first electoral victory.
When it comes to the Democratic Party’s ability to keep the Right out of power, little has changed in these past eight years. If anything, the situation has gotten worse: a Republican has now won the popular vote for president for the first time since I was in middle school, and has racked up more electoral votes than any GOP candidate in my lifetime. Objectively speaking, Trump has managed to pull off one of the most astounding comebacks in U.S. history, becoming only the second former president ever to win a nonconsecutive second term—after becoming the first ever to be convicted of a crime.
Four years ago this month, at a time when many seemed to believe that Trump had been vanquished for good, I warned in the pages of Commonweal that reports of his political death were greatly exaggerated. “Democrats should take the threat of a third Trump campaign extremely seriously,” I wrote back then, arguing that “[i]f the Biden administration settles for mere political redecoration instead of championing bold economic policies, it will be leaving the White House door open to the return of Trumpism, if not of Trump himself.”
I bring this up not to congratulate myself for unique prescience—I certainly wasn’t the only one in late 2020 predicting that we hadn’t seen the last of Trump—but simply to prove that I’m not relying on hindsight when I say that, sadly, his return comes as no surprise. Rightly or wrongly, it was always going to be difficult for an incumbent vice president to convincingly present herself as an agent of change at a moment when change is exactly what people were demanding. For quite some time now, public-opinion surveys have shown broad unhappiness with economic conditions in America, and various metrics designed to track such sentiments have yet to recover to where they were half a decade ago.
Some pundits have been perplexed by this state of affairs, given that a range of traditional indicators suggest that “the economy” is actually in pretty good shape right now: unemployment is relatively low, for instance, and inflation has come down sharply from forty-year highs. But there are important factors that this type of surface-level analysis ignores. For one, prices remain elevated relative to incomes, particularly for essentials like housing, even if they are growing more slowly than before. In addition, the usual measures of inflation do not account for the burden imposed on debtors by high interest rates, which the Federal Reserve began to raise a couple of years ago and did not start lowering until very recently.
Completely overlooked in many of the election postmortems I’ve seen is another crucial fact: under Trump’s successor, the dramatic expansion of social supports undertaken by the U.S. government during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic has been almost completely rolled back. Although he had campaigned in 2020 on a promise to “shut down the virus,” Joe Biden instead opted to normalize it, rescinding the emergency declarations that had undergirded the federal response to the crisis (even as a national emergency declared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks is still in effect more than two decades later). Today, Covid continues to kill thousands of Americans every month and leave many others with serious chronic illnesses for which medicine does not yet have satisfactory answers.
As part of this “return to normal,” tens of millions of Americans have been kicked off of Medicaid, a significant fraction of whom have been unable to obtain new coverage. Enhanced unemployment benefits were cut off (over a Labor Day weekend of all times), a moratorium on evictions was allowed to lapse, and a pause on student-loan repayments was ended—with protections against the worst consequences of delinquency eliminated mere weeks before the 2024 election.
It should not come as a shock that those who relied on such assistance might have felt upset when it suddenly evaporated, or that they might have soured on the man who occupied the Oval Office when it happened. For some, the contrast between Trump and Biden was probably only heightened by the memory of receiving stimulus checks in 2020 that ostentatiously bore the former’s signature.
Not all of this unraveling can be laid directly at Biden’s feet, of course, and it is true that he was at times thwarted by Congress or other forces beyond his control. His “Build Back Better” agenda, which included calls for an expansion of Medicare benefits as well as paid family and medical leave, was tanked in large part by saboteurs like Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. And his administration did make genuine progress in some areas of economic policy, including through appointments of bold regulators to agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board and Federal Trade Commission.
But even though he couldn’t single-handedly extend popular measures like enhancements to the child and earned-income tax credits, President Biden—and Vice President Harris after him—could have emphasized their intention to fight for legislation that would make these things permanent. Regrettably, Biden gave up on even talking about the unfulfilled vision of Build Back Better, and Harris followed his lead. In many respects, her campaign recapitulated Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 bid, with its lack of policy ambition, embrace of billionaires and war criminals, focus on her opponent’s odious personal qualities, and pursuit of a mythical “anti-Trump Republican” vote.
Admittedly, economics is not everything. As many others have pointed out, the Biden administration’s unconditional backing of Israel and complicity in its violations of international law in Palestine and Lebanon—which have undermined any moral authority it had to speak out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—undoubtedly did cost Harris votes where it really mattered.
Some have claimed that the loss of the second woman—and first woman of color—nominated to a major party ticket simply demonstrates that the sexism and racism entrenched in American society are just too much for even the most accomplished women, and especially women of color, to overcome. Without question, Trump’s male chauvinism and bigotry are, for many of his supporters, a key part of his appeal. But this diagnosis is also too fatalistic, not least because the American electorate did see fit to put Harris the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency four years ago. It also gives the Democratic Party an easy out, and an excuse to avoid any kind of substantive introspection.
The fact is that economic precarity remains paramount in accounting for Trump’s political resurrection. This does not mean that policies like single-payer healthcare or mandatory corporate profit sharing will necessarily win over MAGA diehards—but they don’t have to. Lost in much of the post-election commentary is a recognition that the increase in Trump’s vote share compared to 2020 is only partly explained by voters flipping into his column. In many places, the bigger story was the number who just didn’t vote.
The notion that the real “swing voters” are not those deciding between Republicans and Democrats, but rather those deciding between voting and not voting, and that many of those who don’t vote could be receptive to an authentically populist but broadly inclusive political program, was a central part of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Now that the strategy of trying to offset waning blue-collar support with votes from disaffected conservatives has failed once again, perhaps there is an opening to pick up where Sanders left off.
Or perhaps not. Jim Newell thought the Democratic establishment was done for eight years ago, yet two presidential elections later it doesn’t seem to have been dislodged at all. Is there any hope of reorienting the Democratic Party toward greater focus on the well-being of workers, children, students, retirees, those who don’t work because of disability, and everyone else in need of an effective advocate? What will it take to undercut right-wing populism when the Democrats are themselves all too beholden to powerful interests?
Growing the labor movement is a critical part of the solution, since unions are a principal source of what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith referred to as “countervailing power” that can push back against the domination of concentrated capital. But electoral organizing is also important, even when it takes place outside of the two-party system. Although plenty of scorn is heaped upon “third” parties and their supposed role as spoilers in our elections, the threat of serious competition from independent parties and candidates representing workers’ interests may be necessary to compel the Democratic Party to pay less heed to the wishes of wealthy donors. Historically, minor parties have played a vital role in bringing about progressive change, most notably when it came to the abolition of slavery.
We desperately need a party that is capable of drowning out the siren song of right-wing populism, not only for the sake of delivering material security for all, but also to ensure we can meaningfully confront other intensifying crises like climate change. In principle, Democrats are not wrong to sound the alarm about rising authoritarianism. But a critique of the Republican assault on democracy has to be paired with a critique of the GOP’s war on even the most basic elements of a welfare state. After all, why should people be expected to rise up to preserve a political system that they believe, not without reason, serves only the interests of the rich and powerful? As Franklin Roosevelt once said, “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
Dustin Guastella, a researcher with an organization called the Center for Working-Class Politics, wrote an article for the Guardian shortly before the election in which he shared the results of campaign message-testing that the Center and the polling firm YouGov had conducted with voters in Pennsylvania. Not only did the team find that messages focused on abortion or immigration “fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested,” they also discovered that one centered on the “democratic threat” posed by Trump “polled dead last” and was “the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.” By contrast, the one that tested best “combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of ‘billionaires,’ ‘big corporations’ and the ‘politicians in Washington who serve them.’” Ironically, Guastella concludes, “if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it.”
This doesn’t mean that the defense of democracy is unimportant. In fact, I would argue that there is at least one eventuality that is not being taken seriously enough when it comes to the creeping danger of autocracy: that Trump may try to run again. Yes, it might seem even more absurd for me to suggest in 2024 that he could seek a third term than it was for me to suggest in 2020 that he could seek a second. There is ostensibly no ambiguity about the fact that, since 1951, American presidents cannot be elected more than twice.
But consider what has happened elsewhere: earlier this year, El Salvador’s “crypto bro” president Nayib Bukele, who first entered office in 2019, was reelected despite a clear prohibition on consecutive presidential terms enshrined in that country’s constitution. What made his run possible was a widely condemned ruling from El Salvador’s Supreme Court—stacked with Bukele loyalists—reinterpreting the law in his favor. Our own Supreme Court has already ruled that Trump has sweeping criminal immunity for any “official act” he takes as president. With its right-wing majority potentially enlarged at some point in the next four years—and Trump as determined as ever to keep himself out of jail—what’s to stop it from also waiving term limits for him?
The week after Election Day, Trump told a meeting of House Republicans, “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you do something…. Unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’” Members of Congress who were there later assured reporters that he was only joking.
