Lindsey German considers the latest from Washington  

1. Why did the polls and liberal media get it so wrong? We will no doubt get inquests into the highly inaccurate poll predictions, but polling operations are not separate from the political system in which they operate, and they reflect the assumptions and prejudices of that system. They are also not well designed for any situation which overturns long held assumptions of a two-party system. The mainstream media describe as ‘populism’ challenges from right or left, without any attempt to understand or explain why so many people are rejecting establishment politics. This is because the political correspondents too are part of the wider political establishment. Their partisanship for Harris was clear, and they shared the same incredulity that workers didn’t believe they were better off, despite the Democrats telling them so. The BBC coverage was frankly embarrassing, its accuracy and insightfulness in inverse proportion to the hundreds of journalists sent to cover the event.
   
2. This was less an overwhelming mandate for Trump – whose vote improved only marginally compared with 2020 – but a resounding defeat for Biden and his hapless vice president Kamala Harris. The Democrats lost millions of votes overall, not just in the so-called swing states but in their heartlands like New York and New Jersey. Harris lost support among every group apart from college educated women and over 65s. She won among those with incomes over $100,000 while Trump was ahead among those on lower incomes between $30,000-$100,000. Trump picked up votes across the working class.
   
3. The key issue was the worsening conditions being felt by the working class in the US. Trump’s cry of do you feel better off after four years of Biden was met with a resounding no. It’s no wonder. US workers have been badly hit by inflation coming on top of a long-term decline in real wages over the past half century. US workers already suffer from having to pay heavily for healthcare, having far fewer holidays, and a decline in well paid and secure jobs. The Democrats’ assurances that the economy was getting better and that we should all be hopeful didn’t wash. Working class people don’t like being quoted statistics about a booming economy when they are doing two jobs or struggling to get to the next pay check. It only reinforces the (correct) view that someone else is benefiting from the boom. This is a direct warning to UK Labour: even if its growth plans hit the US figure of a 2.8 percent rise in GDP (they won’t) it will not matter to voters unless inequality is addressed.
   
4. Harris either didn’t understand this or deliberately ignored it to steer towards picking up disaffected Republicans who didn’t like Trump, particularly among women. Early in her campaign Harris took aim at big capitalists ‘price gouging’ and seemed to realise the degree to which inflation and high prices were an issue for people. By the end she was sucking up to the billionaires and the supposed ‘wealth makers’, gaining major donations from the wealthiest and supported by the likes of Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg. She had a tour with disaffected Republican Liz Cheney, both a hawk on foreign policy and anti-abortion. Trump is of course himself a billionaire and supported by fellow billionaires like Musk. But they have managed to present themselves as in some way anti-establishment (ludicrously) and in the model of US super wealthy philanthropists such as Rockefeller and Carnegie.
   
5. Key planks in Harris’s campaign were about the state of democracy, Trump’s involvement in the attack on the Capitol in 2021, and his recent convictions.  While these issues were clearly motivating for some Democrat politicians and activists, they were obviously less so for the millions of working class facing a severe cost of living crisis which they blamed at least in part on Biden. The constant harping of the liberal media about Trump’s crimes and references to him as a ‘convicted felon’ did not damage his vote, especially given the widespread view that all politicians are crooked and corrupt.
   
6. Palestine was on the ballot paper, as was the Ukraine war. And in both cases it cost the Democrats votes. Biden’s continued arming of Israel and refusal to take any serious action against Netanyahu’s onslaught on Gaza earned him the title ‘genocide Joe’. Harris did nothing to challenge that and indeed backed Israel to the hilt. The Democratic Party convention in August refused to hear a Palestinian speaker, while platforming a relative of the Israeli hostages. She lost support among Arab Americans and the Muslim community. Biden’s continued commitment to billions of dollars arms and military aid to Ukraine was also unpopular, as a growing number ask what the war is for. Trump positioned himself as the man who would bring peace.
   
7. Misogyny and racism played a major part in Trump’s campaign, and Harris, as a black woman, was attacked by him and his supporters on these grounds. One of his central themes was immigration, and he also had reactionary ‘culture wars’ policies against abortion and trans rights. Yet when we look at Trump’s support, it was considerable among Latino men and to a lesser extent black men, and while Harris was quite right to campaign to defend abortion rights, and this undoubtedly struck a chord with many women, it is also clear that many women voted for Trump. Trump’s inroads into sections of the Democrats’ traditional base among ethnic minorities strikes at the whole model of the latter’s organising since the 1960s. It also marks a severe defeat for top-down identity politics and how they are used by the neoliberals. These politics are purely performative, proclaiming a commitment to equality but pursuing policies which have increased inequality, not least among women and ethnic minorities.
   
8. While Trump was supported by traditional Republicans across the middle classes, the Democrats lost many working-class votes not just from the ‘white working-class’ but across ethnic minorities. This highlights the weakening of the US trade unions who have traditionally supported the Democrats – this time the powerful Teamsters’ union declined to endorse Harris, a recognition that many of its members were supporting Trump. He promised to protect jobs by raising tariffs on imports and keeping out immigrants. However bogus those claims are, they appealed to people whose jobs have been destroyed and who feel totally ignored and despises by the ruling elite. One repeated message when working class people were interviewed was that the Democrats looked down on them, and were simply part of a wealthy clique that didn’t understand the problems of ordinary Americans.
   
9. This is not just a crisis of one election for the Democrats. Trump and the Republicans have political power in Washington. The Democrats will not find it easy to reassemble its ‘rainbow coalition’ of voters across ethnic minorities and oppressed groups alongside organised labour. Indeed at present that looks over. Serious rebuilding would require understanding the issues that led to their defeat and trying to provide answers to the many discontents of US workers. All the signs are that they will go in the opposite direction. Left Democrat Bernie Sanders put forward a critique of Harris’s campaign which urged a turn towards attacking the rich and increasing working class living standards. It was immediately shot down as ‘bullshit’ by the chair of the party, Jaime Harrison. Like Labour here, answers to any problems are to move to the right, to occupy the ‘centre ground’, thus presenting no challenge to inequality and only helping feed the real right.
   
10. Trump will not deliver for US workers: what he stands for is a section of capital which will continue the exploitation of truck drivers, auto workers and the rest, while demonising migrants and those considered ‘woke’. They will need to fight him and the employers, just as workers at Boeing have done recently. In this they can find common cause with those fighting for abortion rights or against punitive immigration policies. We need to fight Trump here: his victory will embolden the far right internationally, and Labour will be too cowardly to do anything but flatter and fawn around him. We know that Reform will try to build on his success, and on the failings of Labour to deliver for workers here. As ever this is twin track: opposing Trump and his policies which hurt us all, while fighting for better housing, NHS, higher wages and better conditions, all of which help to undercut the right’s agenda. 

This week: I am very much looking forward to the Stop the War Anti-War Convention next Sunday. Before that I’m going to an online meeting on Wednesday to build for the Palestine day of action on 28th November. And on Saturday I will be speaking with Jeremy Corbyn at a book launch for Monstrous Anger of the Guns in Oxford.