Well, here we are folks. Another Trump presidency.
What has surprised me, and I think many, isn’t necessarily that Trump won, but that it wasn’t even close.
The numbers still aren’t final, but it looks like Kamala Harris got about 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020, whereas Donald Trump has slightly surpassed his previous outing.
What we see on the state level parallels what happened on the national level. In states like New Jersey, New York, California, and Illinois, Trump’s base held steady. It didn’t grow; or if it did, we can measure it in inches and feet rather than leaps and bounds. Most shocking is that in deep-blue New Jersey, Trump came within punching distance of a major upset. Why? Not because voters were flocking to Trump, but because they didn’t show up for Harris.
Things weren’t so simple in our seven swing states—doubtless, in part, precisely because of the enormous amount of attention both campaigns lavished them with. In addition to the constant campaign stops, Democrats and Republicans collectively spent more than $1 billion on ads. Just in these seven states.
While Democrats play the blame game, I think it’s safe to say that their reasons for losing the election were complex and came down to a variety of factors.
Democrats win when people have a reason to vote for them. Barack Obama carried the day in 2008 and 2012 because he convinced war-weary Americans from all walks of life that another type of politics was possible—a politics of hope. Yes we can. Change we can believe in.
Democrats won in 2018 because a large swathe of the American people believed that Trump was unstable and needed to be held to account. They won in 2020 because a consensus of Americans believed Trump incapable of handling the COVID-19 pandemic. And in 2022, the Supreme Court gifted Dobbs v. Jackson to Democrats. And while they didn’t exactly win, they came within striking distance and defied early expectations.
And in 2024?
Democrats tried to convince Americans that Trump represented a unique and existential threat to American democracy. That strategy failed.
For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think that Kamala Harris was an intrinsically flawed candidate who was doomed to fail. The circumstances in which she ran were extremely challenging: Being tied to an unpopular and aging president didn’t help, and neither did getting only three months to make her case to the American people. Nancy Pelosi is likely correct in surmising that Biden’s refusal to step aside sooner was a uniquely inhibiting factor.
While the Harris campaign’s launch went about as well it could have, they discovered a problem after the convention: the initial relief that Biden had dropped out wasn’t going to be enough to magically buoy Democrats to victory. This was going to be a tight election.
Confronted with this reality, Democrats fell into the same trap from 2016: talking down to voters, dismissing legitimate concerns, and alienating important segments of their own base.
Gaza is a great example.
In February, Democratic voters mobilized in an organic campaign to vote uncommitted in protest of Biden’s blind commitment to Israel. The intent was never to derail the Biden campaign or Democrats generally, but simply to get their attention on an issue that is important to millions of Americans. Despite lacking serious funding or organization, more than 500,000 people joined in to vote “uncommitted.”
Initially, it looked like Harris was going to move things in a positive direction. She skipped Netanyahu’s address to Congress and stated her refusal to be silent on the suffering in Gaza. Frankly, that’s not much—but Biden had left her an incredibly low bar.
Unfortunately, that was about all Harris did. Nothing highlights Democrats’ attitude on Gaza as well as the DNC, where seven Republicans had speaking slots. Palestinian Americans, zero.
Democrats’ refusal to act on the suffering of the Palestinian people isn’t the only issue that decided the 2024 election, but it’s certainly toward the top of the list. For context, 100,000 voters in Michigan checked the box for “uncommitted” in the primaries. Harris lost the Great Lakes State to Trump by about 80,000 votes.
And it’s not like it was some small subset of voters who wanted the Biden administration to take another course on Gaza. By March, just after Michigan held its primary, some 75% of Democrats and 60% of independents said they disapproved of Israel’s military actions.
Harris largely avoided Gaza, one imagines, out of a desire to not alienate this imagined moderate Republican voter who could be swayed to Harris by the likes of Dick and Liz Cheney. When Harris did address Gaza, it was largely because protestors interrupted her speeches with demands for a ceasefire.
And when Democrats couldn’t get away with silence, their messaging was ineffective, condescending, and deeply dehumanizing: You think this is bad? Just wait until Trump gets into office. It’ll only get worse.
Worse? Have you seen the videos of teenagers burning to death in hospitals and babies’ bodies being pulled from the rubble? Or aid trucks being ransacked by Israelis who want Palestinians to starve? Or soldiers posing in dead women’s clothing? Or the PowerPoint presentations being given on how Gaza can be rebuilt as a Zionist, Israelis-only beach resort? Or read the stories of emergency workers who have taken the bodies of their own mothers to the morgue? The Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, Abdullah Hammoud, recently shared that one person in his community lost 70 family members.
Imagine what it feels like to be an Arab or Muslim voter who has lost family members from a brutal and unrelenting military campaign that the U.N. has said could reasonably be described as a genocide, living through that grief and trauma while America sends billions of dollars in weapons and military support to the people who are killing your relatives, voting in the primaries to try to get Democrats’ attention, getting ignored at the DNC, and then being told: I’m sorry, but right now, it’s my turn to speak.
Whatever you think of Donald Trump and the Republican party, there’s one thing that they don’t do to their base: they don’t ignore them. They might not always have an answer, but they don’t talk down to them.
For all the rage and despair Democrats feel right now, it’s about time they started listening to the rage and despair of the people they’re meant to represent.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting me on Patreon for as little as $2/month!