First as Farce, Then as Tragedy
Explaining Trump’s Reelection
This article is from Dollars & Sense: Real World Economics, available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org
This article is from the
January/February 2025 issue.
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It’s impossible to know exactly why President-elect Donald Trump won the 2024 election. With tiny margins in critical swing states such as Pennsylvania (+1.7%), Michigan (+1.4%), and Wisconsin (+0.9%), where Trump&squo;s margin of victory in 2024 was close to or even narrower than Joe Biden&squo;s in 2020, almost anything could have meant the difference between winning and losing the Electoral College.
But just because we can&squo;t say what the crucial proximate causes of Trump&squo;s success were doesn&squo;t mean we can&squo;t identify the most critical campaign choices and political, social, and economic conditions that helped to deliver the White House and both chambers of Congress to the GOP in 2024. By taking a closer look at these factors, we gain insight into the general terrain upon which the two major parties are likely to battle in 2026 and 2028. In turn, we can begin the long and difficult discussion of what the most effective political orientation should be going forward for those interested in advancing a robust program of economic justice for the U.S. working class. In short, if progressives hope to gain ground among the working class, economic populism in both word and deed is the only path forward.
Throw the Bums Out
The 2024 presidential election was bound to be particularly challenging for the Democrats regardless of anything they did or didn&squo;t do during the campaign. The international backdrop of Trump&squo;s victory was a global trend of anti-incumbent sentiment, which has led to loss or electoral setbacks for over 80% of governing parties around the world over the past year. Since 2022, parties in power spanning the political spectrum—from Sri Lanka and Senegal to Argentina and Armenia—have faced growing resistance from voters over their failure to provide effective governance and address citizens&squo; intensifying economic anxieties since the pandemic. While Kamala Harris was not the incumbent president, her position as vice president obviously tied her closely to the very unpopular President Joe Biden—who was seen by many as responsible for Americans&squo; economic and political woes.
There is little doubt that Harris&squo;s likelihood of winning in 2024 was substantially diminished by the same anti-incumbent sentiment that led voters to “throw the bums out” in diverse settings across the globe. As in so many other places, Americans expected their government to right the post-Covid ship—which President Biden promised to do from Day One when he pledged to bring back normalcy after four chaotic years of the Trump administration. Unfortunately, however, despite the ambitious economic reforms Biden was able to pass—such as the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act—and despite the Fed&squo;s largely successful efforts to bring down inflation without prompting a recession or a spike in unemployment, most Americans felt worse off in 2024 than they did before Biden entered the White House. Macroeconomic indicators were improving, yes, but many Americans just didn&squo;t feel an accompanying improvement in their daily lives. Even if, as economists like Paul Krugman never tired of pointing out, real wages were rising faster than inflation under Biden, they weren&squo;t rising fast enough to erase voters&squo; memory of the infamous price of eggs compared to four years earlier. The result: widespread frustration, and as a result, increasing nostalgia for the Trump years. In short, while Harris&squo;s effort was far from the “flawless” campaign imagined by commentators like MSNBC commentator Joy Reid, there is only so much that anyone in her position could have done in the face of these powerful headwinds.
Exit Populism, Stage Left
Though broader economic and political conditions placed real limits on the Harris campaign&squo;s ability to influence the election&squo;s outcome, the fact that 2024 shifts toward the Republicans—which occurred virtually across the board—were considerably smaller in states where the campaign sank a lot of resources, and the fact that many down-ballot Democrats substantially outperformed Harris in their districts, suggests there was at least some electoral real estate for the vice president to work with.
Yet rather than take full advantage of whatever capacity they had to move the needle, Harris&squo;s team made critical strategic and tactical errors on the messaging front. A range of pre-election polling indicated the candidate&squo;s best bet was leaning into messaging centered around working-class economic anxieties and resentment toward economic elites. One October survey of Pennsylvania voters by the Center for Working-Class Politics, for instance, found that full-throated economic populist messaging—language that pitted greedy corporations against struggling American workers who&squo;ve been screwed over and taken for granted for far too long—made voters across the board feel most positively toward Harris, especially working-class voters. On the other hand, the same survey indicated that Harris&squo;s weakest pitch by far was messaging around Trump as a threat to democracy: Voters in general, and particularly working-class voters, were not enthusiastic about abstract appeals to the defense of the same democratic institutions they held responsible for our current economic malaise.
Despite positive early signals that she might back progressive economic policies, from subsidies for new homebuyers and an expanded child tax credit to higher corporate tax rates and even price controls, as the campaign wore on, it became clear that Harris was moving in the opposite direction. Milan Lewer and I developed an analysis which was published in Jacobin in late November showing that in the last month of the campaign, Harris&squo;s references to Trump&squo;s attacks on democracy rose steadily at the same time as her allusions to progressive economics and critiques of economic elites were on the decline. In short, Harris&squo;s messaging went in the opposite direction from the economic-populist approach that might have given her a fighting chance to maximize support among working-class constituencies in key swing states. This is not to say the campaign&squo;s efforts had no effect, as their more muted losses in states that were inundated with campaign resources attest. Yet, especially when we consider that congressional candidates who campaigned on economic populism outperformed Harris by significant margins, it appears likely that the campaign left critical—and potentially decisive—swing-state votes on the table.
Condescending Coastal Elites
A related factor in explaining Trump 2.0 is many Democrats&squo; tone-deaf attitude toward working-class voters, an increasing share of whom feel that the party is out of touch with their concerns and doesn&squo;t understand people like them. Perhaps in part because so many Democratic Party leaders are quintessential coastal elites themselves (the median net wealth of U.S. Senators in 2018, for instance, was nearly $2 million, and only around 2% of Congress members come from a working-class background), Democrats often have a hard time relating viscerally to working-class Americans&squo; feeling of being left behind as an ascendent upper-middle class of highly-educated knowledge workers thrives.
Sometimes Democrats&squo; aversion to working-class voters takes the form of an outright dismissal of the group as a valuable constituency in the party—as in Senator Chuck Schumer&squo;s infamous 2016 quip that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia”—while in other cases it manifests as smug condescension at working-class voters&squo; apparent inability to understand their own experience. As an example of the latter, consider Democratic commentators&squo; perpetual befuddlement over working-class voters&squo; failure to recognize that the country was doing better economically under Biden than their own daily experience suggested (looking at you, Krugman!).
Perhaps equally problematic from the standpoint of building trust with working-class voters was many Democrats&squo;—particularly progressive Democrats&squo;—assumption that championing policies meant to help working-class voters is an effective substitute for showing that you understand, and validate, decades of pent-up, working-class anger at political and economic elites around the Democratic Party. It&squo;s not enough to say you&squo;re in favor of unions and support a higher minimum wage if you don&squo;t also show voters that you&squo;re as enraged as they are by the elites who have created the mess we&squo;re in and are tired of working peoples&squo; voices being ignored or brushed aside by politicians from both major parties.
As Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins found in their book Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, Democrats&squo; condescending attitude toward working-class Americans is reinforced in mainstream media, academia, and the arts, where the preferences and priorities of the liberal elite are seen as the norm, and from which many working-class people feel alienated. As a result, for many working-class voters, anger at economic elites is intertwined with resentment toward cultural elites, as Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol report in Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party. This means that economic appeals from Democrats are likely to ring hollow if they fail to acknowledge not only that billionaires are screwing over working people, but also that many of the elites in the Democratic Party who snub their nose at working-class values and ways of life are benefiting handsomely from the rigged economy Democrats unleashed during the Clinton years, as Lily Geismer found in her book Left Behind: The Democrats&squo; Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. For Democrats to effectively challenge Trump&squo;s reactionary populist appeals to working-class voters, they needed to do more to recognize and address this cultural divide. It&squo;s not enough to criticize super-rich conservatives; Democrats in 2024 failed to reckon with the fact that many of their own wealthy, coastal elites are just as disconnected from working-class values and embody the very condescension that working-class voters resent.
Demographics Are Not Destiny
With all this in mind, it should hardly come as a shock that Harris&squo;s share of working-class voters fell substantially relative to Biden&squo;s. Depending on the measure, Democrats&squo; support among working-class voters sank from 47% in 2020 to 43% in 2020 (using education as a proxy for class) or from 54% to 48% (using income as a proxy for class). What was striking in 2024, however, is that the largest decline was not among working-class white voters, whose shift toward Trump was well-documented in the 2016 and 2020 elections, but rather from voters of color, particularly Latino men. While Harris did experience a decline in working-class white support—from 37% in 2020 to 34%—her losses among non-white working-class voters were much more pronounced. In 2020, Biden received a commanding 73% of the non-white working-class vote, but Harris&squo;s support among this group dropped to 65% in 2024.While still a clear majority, this figure makes it hard to deny that Trump has real appeal among working-class voters of color.
The most notable decline in Harris&squo;s support occurred in counties with high Latino populations. In counties where Latinos make up 75% or more of the population, Harris saw an average drop of more than eight percentage points compared to Biden&squo;s 2020 performance. This decline was significantly larger than the shifts in predominantly white working-class counties or Black-majority areas, indicating that the erosion of support for Harris was largely driven by working-class Latino voters.
What explains this shift in Latino voting patterns? While it&squo;s too early to draw any definitive conclusions, there were likely at least two major factors. First and foremost, as a December 2024 report by UnidosUS found, working-class Latinos were feeling the pinch of rising inflation and high costs. The Democratic Party&squo;s inability to address these issues effectively led many Latino voters—like working-class voters more generally—to question whether the party truly represented their interests. This likely helps to explain both why some Latino voters switched from Biden to Trump, but also why many simply stayed home in 2024. Second, as in 2020, Trump&squo;s rhetoric on immigration appears to have resonated with certain segments of the Latino population, particularly, as reported in election polling, those who prioritized border security and felt that the Democratic Party had failed to deliver meaningful immigration reform. At the same time, it is important to remember that the overwhelming majority of Latinos—including Latino men—favor humane immigration policies and oppose Trump&squo;s agenda on this score. So, it is also possible that some Latinos sat out the 2024 election due to their disappointment over Biden not moving in a more progressive direction on immigration—though it&squo;s unclear whether those votes would have offset trends in the opposite direction.
The decline in support from non-white working-class voters—who either switched their vote from Biden to Trump or didn&squo;t feel that the Democrats had given them strong enough reason to turn out in 2024—was likely a critical factor in Trump&squo;s success.
There Must Be Some Way Out
While the extent of Republicans&squo; success may have been unexpected, Trump&squo;s Electoral College victory in 2024 was hardly difficult to predict. The signs were there, including global anti-incumbent sentiment, poor economic messaging by the Harris campaign, Democrats&squo; tone-deafness and condescension toward the working class, and months of warning signs prior to the election that male voters of color were defecting to the Republicans.
Of course, Democrats will need a new approach going forward if they hope to prevail in 2026 and beyond. They need a fundamental reorientation toward the working class. But, given the extreme power of ultra-wealthy donors within the party, as well as the increasingly affluent and highly educated nature of the Democratic base, such a course correction will be difficult, to say the least. Perhaps the most likely scenario is a kind of Clintonism 2.0 built on moderate economic appeals dressed up in populist rhetoric that does nothing to challenge the technocratic cultural elitism that has helped to push so many working-class voters away from the party.
Yet the problems Democrats face run much deeper than messaging or policy proposals. The party is struggling to dig out of a decades-long neoliberal hole—dug largely by its own leaders—that has steadily eroded their support among working-class voters. The hole has gotten so deep that in 2024, for the first time since polling began, Democrats received less support than Republicans among lower-income Americans (households with annual incomes less than $50k). The only way Democrats can bring back the working-class voters they need to forge a durable pro-worker, social-democratic coalition over the long term is to finally deliver transformative material gains to working people. Biden&squo;s industrial policies represented something like a shift in this direction but did not approach the scale of what is needed for working Americans and communities left behind by deindustrialization to catch up. Only time will tell if Bidenomics was the inadequate but important first step toward a New Deal for the 21st century or a tragic, once-in-a generation missed opportunity to turn the tide on the working-class&squo;s steady abandonment of the Democratic Party.
It is not at all clear that the Democratic Party—especially in its current, corporate-dominated form—is or ever will be up to the task of representing the U.S. working class in a meaningful way. Historically, the only time it came even close to doing so—however imperfectly—was in the post-World War II period when the strength of organized labor was dramatically greater than it is today. In the absence of a revived labor movement, it is difficult to imagine where the leverage to push Democrats in the pro-worker direction they need to go will come from. So that, as always, is task number one, but it is a long-term project. In the short term, we need to build a much larger bench of charismatic, labor-backed, economic-populist candidates to wage battle both within, and, as independent Senate candidate and Nebraska union leader Dan Osborn showed possible in 2024, outside the Democratic Party.
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