Viewpoint: Where will Democrats go from here?
William Riley
I am not the only one who is looking at the election results thinking “WTF just happened?” It makes no sense. We as a country, know what a sequel to 2016 will look like (just like most sequels, we can count on it to retread many of the same paths and likely be worse in every case).
One of the things my neurospicy brain does is to look at the data and see if I can make sense of it at all. Bear with me, this will be a bit long and have large numbers in it. But hopefully this info might help us understand what we need to do if (and yeah, I do mean IF) we get a chance to correct this.
First thing I looked at— did Trump court more votes than he did in 2020? No. While he certain seems to have flipped certain demographics (and the ones flipped will most like be hurt by him), the totals show him with 74.2M votes in 2020 (up from 62.9M in 2016), but is currently (as of the time I am writing this) at 72.7M votes. Our brains have a hard time putting this in context with big numbers, 1.5M so as a comparison the population of Hawai’i is 1.4M.
Ok, so he has less votes than he got in 2020 and more than 2016. We knew going into this election there was a growing number of people who felt they could not vote for Harris due to perceptions towards things in Israel and Gaza. If that didn’t equate to increased votes for Trump, surely we saw an increase in 3rd party candidates? Doesn’t really look like it.
Based on info from 270towin.com, in 2020 the only 3rd party to get any meaningful number of votes was Libertarians and they received 1.8M votes. At present, the Libertarian candidate (Oliver) has 577,159 votes, Green Party (Stein) has 642,551, and independent (RFK, Jr) has 616,997 for a total of about 1.2M votes, down .6M votes.
If they didn’t vote 3rd party and didn’t vote for Trump, what happened? Honestly, it looks like voters failed to turn up. 2020 was an odd combination of factors, from the then current tumult, pandemic frustrations, and increased number of mail-in ballots as folks were still concerned with in-person interactions during the pandemic. As such, Biden received 81.2M votes, compared to 65.8M voters for Clinton in 2016 and increase of 15.4M votes (equivalent of the population of Illinois and Mississippi). Harris, on the other hand, has at present 68.0M votes which is honestly quite a feat for the shortness of her campaign and less face time with prospective voters, but still a loss of 13.2M votes compared to Biden.
From reports, there is a pretty noticeable gender gap in Trump vs. Harris voters, with women more likely to vote for Harris than Trump (understandably). Unfortunately, reproductive health was not a big enough factor to bring voters most likely to side with Harris out to the polls. There certainly may be a certain level of disenfranchisement felt by Democrats as Harris was not chosen by primary and became the only option after Biden took far too long to step out of the race. This delay may well have cost the Democrats an untold number of votes.
Of course we cannot ignore the elephant in the room, namely patriarchal views that women are not as capable as a man in a seat of power. For as progressive as Democrats like to think ourselves, we certainly don’t show up for women when they have run for President, with Harris over Clinton by only 2.2M votes (a little more than the population of New Mexico). If we want to consider ourselves progressive, we need to confront our own deep seated misogyny and show up every time for women as they run for various offices.
Despite the reality that Trump represents the far-right and the Conservative American ideals that have been cultivating since the Reagan era, people see him as an outsider instead of a life-long politician. And his brand as a savvy businessman seems to resonate with working class in key swing states like Pennsylvania (which to me seems quite bizarre as he is a member of the economic elite bourgeois which stands apart from and in contrast with the working class in these states. But, they feel they were better off financially the first time around not fully grasping how the post-pandemic price gouging of goods and services benefit people in Trump’s class and any attempt to meaningfully address cost of living would mean cutting into profits of business that are buddied up to and with Trump.
What did this mean for Harris? Well, it meant she needed to have a clear message of how she would differentiate herself from the current administration and that means taking ownership for Biden’s and hers failings with a clear plan for how she would work to turn around the economy. She didn’t just need to say “don’t vote for the other guy,” but to make in-roads with union workers with plans to deliver decreased medical costs, improve spending value, accessibility to home ownership, and other hallmarks of a strong economy.
One of the things I think put people in favor of Biden was his plan to eliminate higher education loan debt. I can attest that the savings provided to me for not having to pay on my loans has helped my household navigate the increased cost of living over the last few years, even as my husband has taken on more overtime to help offset time missed by me due to chronic health issues. But we are both getting on in years and have not been able to save a meaningful amount of money for retirement (let alone to make any real attempt to leave a state that has been rather purples and has made the shift to deep red). That’s not to say we didn’t vote for Harris. I can attest that all four of us voted for her as we know first hand what a second Trump administration means for us.
It what about the other 13.2M voters who failed to turn up this time? They didn’t shift their vote elsewhere they simply failed to show up at all. In my opinion, I think the overwhelming messaging of the dangers of Trump made too many people feel like he didn’t stand a chance and so felt their added vote didn’t matter. There are others who feel the electoral system itself is broken and that it doesn’t matter who wins the popular vote, as has been demonstrated by the number of candidates who failed to capture the popular vote, but managed high enough win margin in states with high number of electoral votes. I have a few friends in this category, who feel like their votes doesn’t mean anything and I can understand it. I do my agree, as I think every time the elected candidate fails to capture the popular vote adds to the fight needed to eliminate the electoral college.
Beyond this, the general election is never just about the presidential election as we have other key seats of power as well as important ballot measures that need our attention as well.
So, what do I think is the path forward? We need to get back to grassroots actions like we did during the last Trump administration. We need to recalibrate our messaging and start listening to those who are getting left behind by far-right policies and develop meaningful action-forward plans to address them. We need to let go of what has worked in the past for Democrats, because it is not working now. We need 21st century plans and actions and we need them like two presidential elections ago. We need to find new language to discuss certain topics without it sounding like a personal attack against people, for example “toxic masculinity.”
Unfortunately, that discourse has made men feel like they are under attack instead of understanding the environment itself is toxic and that sense of attack pushes a certain type of voting-aged man away from where we need him and into the welcoming embrace of the far-right and its anti-woke rhetoric. We need to find a way to slip off the cloak of intellectual superiority and find a way to make things more common sense and inviting.
Most importantly we need a plan. We need true leadership and we need to organize and galvanize around it. We need to create spheres of action and not play whack-a-mole with issues, shifting from one issue to another. We need to enlist down-to-earth and charismatic people to focus these spheres and manifest the changes we need in our party and in this country. We need to find what it means to be 21st century Democrats under Trumpian authoritarianism.