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IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN  
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Matt Karp
November 6, 2024
Jacobin
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_ And until Democrats can find a way to win back some large chunk of
working-class voters, Donald Trump’s successors will be favored in
the next presidential election too. _

, Nigel Parry/Esquire

 

It is happening again.” This morning, with Donald Trump in command
of another crushing presidential victory, the dreadful words from
David Lynch’s _Twin Peaks_ sit like lead inside many stomachs. As
the climax of a frenzied campaign and the triumph of so much that is
vicious and corrosive in American society, Trump’s second election
comes as a shock. And yet, as an event in contemporary history, it can
hardly be seen as a surprise.

First and most prosaic, there is inflation. Did America really elect a
dictator because Frosted Flakes hit $7.99 at the grocery store? Read
that sentence again and it doesn’t sound so absurd.

At a deeper level, 2024 has taught us a hard lesson: in a global
society defined by consumption rather than production, voters loathe
price increases and are ready to punish rulers who preside over them.
Across the biggest election year in modern history, with billions
voting worldwide, incumbents have taken a beating, left, right, and
center: the Tories in Britain, Emmanuel Macron in France, the
African National Congress in South Africa, Narendra Modi’s BJP in
India, Kirchnerism in Argentina last fall. Today post-pandemic
inflation, aggravated by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has
claimed the scalp of yet another incumbent government.

In America, the Democrats’ position was doubly dire. Across the last
decade, the defining pattern of national politics has been class
dealignment: a vast migration of working-class voters away from the
Democratic Party, matched by a flood of professional-class voters away
from the Republicans. This was the decisive factor in 2016
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when Hillary Clinton was toppled by the same Rust Belt proletarians
who had elected Barack Obama. And it continued, more quietly but with
unchecked motion, in the years when Democrats made up for their losses
by winning more suburban professionals, in 2018
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and 2022
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Kamala Harris’s campaign was an embodiment of this shift. She
herself ran a cautious but mostly competent race, moving to the right
on the border, as voters seemed to demand, pummeling Trump on
abortion, and — at least in her paid messages
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wooing working-class voters with a bread-and-butter focus
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But in the end, these narrow tactical decisions were overwhelmed by
the altered nature of the Democratic Party as a whole. 

Even as Harris herself tried to avoid the toxic identity politics of
Hillary 2016, she was overtaken by the “shadow party” — a
constellation of NGOs, media organizations, and foundation-funded
activists who now constitute the Democrats’ institutional rank and
file. Thus “White Dudes For Harris” and its kindred, the effort to
promote Never Trump Republicans in media, and the embarrassing
attempts to win over black men with promises of legal marijuana and
protections for crypto investments. These shadow party interventions
in the race helped raise historic sums of money — over $1 billion
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just a few months —  but also marked Harris as the property of an
educated professional class, focused entirely on “democracy,”
abortion rights, and personal identity but largely uninterested in
material questions.

In the last weeks of the campaign, Harris clearly pivoted in the same
direction. At rallies and in interviews, she zeroed in on Trump
himself as a deadly threat to America’s existing institutions. She
barnstormed the swing states with Liz Cheney, labeling Trump’s
verbal attack on Cheney as a “disqualifying” incident. In her
final tour of the Midwest, she paused her own speeches to put Trump
clips on the Jumbotron, seeming to believe that the former president
would somehow defeat himself with his own words.

It worked, in the sense that Harris won voters with college degrees
by 15 points
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a larger margin than in 2020. Voters making over $100,000 a year swung
toward the Democrats in record numbers. The moderate Republicans in
the suburbs, famously invoked by Chuck Schumer eight years ago, keep
trickling into the Democratic coalition. It seems to serve them well
enough in the midterms but not so much in the big-ticket contests.
This year, the Liz Cheney Democrats were dwarfed by a vast
working-class swing toward Trump, in many flavors: rural voters,
low-income voters, Latino voters, and black male voters, from Texas to
New Hampshire. Even as progressive pundits hailed the
post-_Dobbs_ gender gap, boasting that Republicans had ruined
themselves with female voters for a generation, non-college-educated
women swung
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Trump by 6 points.

Above all, Harris and the Democrats failed to reach voters who have a
negative view of the economy — not just Republican partisans
but two-thirds
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yesterday’s electorate. With her modest bundle of targeted economic
initiatives, joined occasionally to a half-hearted populist rhetoric
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is it a surprise that she failed to convince these frustrated voters?
Almost 80 percent of the voters who listed the economy as their top
issue cast a ballot for Trump. How much can a few months of targeted
advertising do, compared to a broader Democratic shadow party that has
been trumpeting the health of the economy — low unemployment, wage
growth, and a booming stock market — for over a year now? If voters
did not believe that Harris had a real plan to make their lives
better, materially, it is hard to fault them.

Finally, it is only fair to add that Harris faced a uniquely difficult
task in this election. For over a year, an already unpopular
Democratic president has lacked the physical capacity to communicate
with the public. Nevertheless, the shadow party stuck with Joe Biden,
propped him up, angrily shouted down any dissenters who questioned
whether his political skills — not to mention his judgment, on
Israel/Palestine and elsewhere — had entered a terminal decline.

After Biden finally malfunctioned at the debate, it still took
Democrats a month to swap him off the ticket. (For all the memes
celebrating Nancy Pelosi for her “ruthless” role in this
last-minute effort, few bothered to note the fecklessness of the
Democratic leadership that had allowed Biden to last that long to
begin with.) Harris thus entered the race with a makeshift campaign,
already trailing heavily in the polls. Plucked to join the Biden 2020
ticket as a first-term California senator, she herself lacked any
experience defeating Republicans in a competitive statewide election.

Between the global hex of inflation, the slow creep of dealignment,
and the Biden fiasco, the prospects for a Republican victory in 2024
were always large. Trump himself seemed to recognize this better than
the pundit class, running a cavalier campaign that junked much of his
rhetorical “populism” for an embrace of billionaire budget cutters
like Elon Musk. His arrogance has been rewarded with another term.
Like most second terms, it is likely to end in disappointment for his
supporters, frittered away in unpopular policy lurches, a rush of
scandal, and lots of time on the golf course. But until Democrats can
find a way to win back some large chunk of working-class voters,
Trump’s successors will be favored in the next presidential
election, anyway.

_Matt Karp is an associate professor of history at Princeton
University and a Jacobin contributing editor._

* working class voters
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* Trump voters
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* Democratic Party Platform
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