The centrist political strategy of sidelining working-class interests and the left has blown up in the US, as elsewhere, and only a left politics can respond, argues Kevin Ovenden

There is shock in most European governments not only that Donald Trump is returning to the White House but at the scale of his victory. There is also anger, upset and confusion among many people who detest Trump and his reactionary views. They rightly fear what will happen next given the experience of his first term in 2016-2020. 

How on earth can America vote him back in? Do that many men hate women that much; or whites, black people? Those feelings are most pronounced among many women and those such as Muslims and immigrants whom Trump has targeted.

Shocking it may be, but this result ought not to be surprising. That it is, is in part down to the disconnect between the official politics of the centre, represented in the US by the Democrats, and reality. Between the impression given by the bulk of the media and what is happening at the base of society. That is not confined to the US.

The defeat of the Democrats is enormous. But it is not a so-called ‘red wave’ that mainstream commentators are talking about. That is presented as if there has been some great flood towards the Republicans (party colour: red) and Trump and with it a major rightwards shift among ordinary people. All as if it were a natural event like a tsunami. The reality is different and more complex.

When counting is over, Trump will probably end up with the total vote he got in 2020 – 74 million. The Democrat vote has slumped. Biden got 81 million. Harris is on 68 million at present and will likely go over 71 million.

It will be the first time the Republicans have won the popular vote for twenty years with George W Bush. They have usually relied on the undemocratic electoral college system by winning less populous states that are over-represented in choosing the president. 

The loss of probably ten million votes is what did for the Democrats. Trump widened his support geographically and in almost all demographics – but his absolute vote is about the same. The Democrats lost support across the board and among working-class voters above all.

What has happened is a profound rejection of the Democrats under the disastrous Joe Biden administration. There are a number of immediate factors. One is the intense unpopularity of Biden himself. He hung on until July when clearly losing cognitive capacity and compounded a feeling of popular rejection and of national decline, which Kamala Harris as the continuity candidate inherited when she took over.

There is also what we can call the long-term decomposition of the Democratic party and its historic coalition of electoral support. That is significant beyond the US.

Contempt, class and corporate capitalism

In the immediacy, Biden squandered a big win four years ago and alienated those who had come over to the Democrats in recoil at the Trump presidency. They wanted Trump out. They also wanted serious change to improve their lives, on pay, jobs, housing, healthcare, and restoring a sense of security that their parents or grandparents were thought to have had. Real pay in the US is still where it was fifty years ago.

Biden had responded to the challenge for the candidacy by left Democrat Bernie Sanders in 2016 by appearing to adopt some of his platform and rhetoric about rebuilding working-class America and challenging the billionaires.

Within months that had been winnowed down, even though the Democrats had a majority in the Congress. Big business was happy with a significant increase in infrastructure investment (good for construction magnates) and corporate welfare, but it opposed plans for recovery from the Covid disaster to include serious gains for workers. It hated any tax rises and managed to limit them. The result was a strongly pro-corporate bounce back from the end of lockdowns. That led to the conditions for corporate price-gouging and thus rising inflation even before the Ukraine war created further price hikes in 2022.

There is recognition among serious analysts that the inflation shock and cost-of-living crisis seriously destabilised many governments around the world over the last three years. In ten elections this year, there has been a revolt against incumbent candidates. 

But this is not some iron law of economics. It has depended on how governments have dealt with inflation and who has been made to pay. Ironically, the one glimmer of independence from Harris when she got the nomination was to suggest an act of Congress to stop food companies and supermarkets from price-gouging. She was slapped down by her own side and limped back into saying she would act no differently from Biden on the big issues. A plutocrat she had recently criticised, Mark Cuban, was elevated to speak for her campaign.

She ended up disappointing those in economic distress who liked the idea of controlling food prices, still leaving Trump with a chance to scream that she was in favour of ‘communist planning’, and all-round looking insincere. Worse, as the level of social crisis grew under Biden and started to make itself felt in politics, the Democrat response was patronising and contemptuous.

So over the last year, when people expressed how hard their lives are, the standard answer has been to point to macroeconomic figures such as GDP per head, a soaring stock market, more jobs created, rising average wages and falling inflation. Four in ten people said the economy was the most important issue for them in this election. But by ‘economy’ they did not mean abstract things that economists measure, like Starmer-Labour’s fixation on growth in Britain. They meant what was happening to their lives. When they told Democrat politicians this, time and time again, they were told their sense of their own lives was wrong. 

So phrases like ‘they don’t know what my life is like’ or ‘they don’t listen and instead patronise me’ became widespread because the truth behind the ‘recovery’ touted by Harris is widening inequality. Now the bottom 40% of Americans account for 20% of spending (not wealth – where the difference is starker). The top 20%, for 40% of spending. It is the biggest gap ever.

Most of the gains of the recovery from COVID have gone to the top. New jobs are not only few in number. They are precarious. Meanwhile, rents have gone up 20% over the last four years. Homelessness has soared over the last twelve months. Pushing up interest rates in response to inflation has hit mortgage holders. Personal debt in the US rose to a staggering $17.8 trillion in the first three months of this year.

The actually experienced inflation facing the working class is higher than official statistics which include things like TVs and fridges that people do not buy every month. A better glimpse of the immense poverty than the economic measurements came with the hurricane devastation in generationally poor areas like Appalachia last month.

When people spoke of their suffering, they were ignored and told to focus instead on the ‘joy’ of life in America and the chance for a black woman president, as Harris kept repeating, and that Trump would bring this good feeling to an end. Meanwhile, Trump opened every rally with the question Ronald Reagan had asked over forty years ago: ‘Are you better off now than four years ago?’ The crowd roared back: ‘No!’

Among the swathe of initial statistics from exit polls (we await stronger data) the most remarkable figure is that Trump improved his standing among working-class people. Biden won among those under $100,000-a-year four years ago. Trump won heavily this time. As Sanders said: ‘It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.’

He went on to criticise the Democrats’ disastrous campaign. However, that raises a question for Sanders: ‘All true, Bernie, but why did you collapse behind the Democrats and act to prevent a left alternative to them from emerging?’ And that included his stance for months over the question of Palestine and still does over fuelling war in Ukraine.

The genocide: writing on the wall

Joe Biden arrogantly refused a proper primary process and expected to sail to the unopposed nomination. But an initiative to register opposition to the US role in the genocidal war against the Palestinians made some remarkable headway.

Starting in Michigan, it called for registered Democrat voters to vote ‘uncommitted’ in the primary ballots. The demand was that Biden come out for a ceasefire and stop arming Israel. The aim was that the level of uncommitted, usually Democratic voters would show the risk for Biden at the election. It was very successful, in some states getting a larger vote than the Biden margin of victory in 2020.

The Democrat machine made some soothing noises about listening and then carried on as before. We have yet to see what the direct impact in numbers was of Biden sundering connections with large numbers of Arab, Muslim and progressive voters by slavishly backing Israel against the wishes of most Americans, let alone Democrat voters.

We do know that in the city of Dearborn in Michigan unofficial results were Trump: 47%, Harris: 28%, and Jill Stein (the Green anti-war candidate): 22%. It is a heavily Arab, Lebanese and Palestinian town near the giant Ford plant. People said the extension of the war to Lebanon was the final straw for even older, traditional Democrat voters. Harris lost Michigan.

There was the most vicious campaign by left faces of the Democratic party to demonise Jill Stein and blackmail people into voting Harris because Trump will be worse on Palestine. He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, don’t you know! Yes, replied many people. And in four years, you didn’t move it back. It was typical underestimation of people’s politicisation. Many more people abandoned the Democrats in part over Palestine than voted for Stein nationally. 

The response to being told that they were losing swathes of progressive voters was for the Democrats to double down on taking them for granted and go after the mythical moderate Republicans who would apparently switch to the Democrats on an anti-Trump basis. On the evidence of the initial exit polling, it was a resoundingly defeated strategy. Republicans voted Republican overwhelmingly. But a lot of Democrats did not vote Democrat. 

Voices on the left had pointed out four years ago that if the Democrats with an unexpectedly big win under their belts, then pursued a course of creating a bloc with mainstream Republicans, then they would squander the fresh support they had been gifted. However, such ‘both sides of the aisle’ dealmaking has been for forty years the stock-in-trade of Joe ‘fixer’ Biden in the Senate and then as vice-president. Strategically, the Democrats wanted to restore bipartisan stability to the US political system after the disruption of the Trump years. This has been the direction of the centre left everywhere in response to the ‘populist eruption’ of the mid-2010s.

So after the 6 January 2021 riots summoned by Trump to invade the Capitol and disrupt the handover of power, the Democrats went all out to try to win ‘mainstream Republicans’ into a pact against Trump. What followed was Democrats constantly seeking to build that bloc and dealing with Trump not by a counter popular insurgency from the left, but by one court case and barely understood process after the other.

A reason for the huge shock that is spreading among the Western publics now is that the institutions of the centre, its media and prominent personalities have spent four years endorsing a sub-political, liberal-establishment and ‘culture-war’ response to Trumpism. They created a false sense in which Trump was now just a cartoon figure, ever on the verge of being sent to jail. It was illusory.

It was part of the extreme incoherence of the Harris campaign. Trump was at one at the same time an extreme threat to democracy, a fascist according to Harris, and a weird figure of fun who no one takes seriously.

Another contradiction in the campaign was in scolding progressives on the one side to be adult and set aside issues like Palestine at the same time as rubbing left voters’ noses in it by making endorsements by neo-conservatives of the Bush era, who oppose Trump for their own reasons, a major part of the platform.

So Harris simultaneously said that women’s abortion rights were at stake and could go altogether if Trump were elected, and majored on getting the endorsement of Republican Liz Cheney, who is for abortion bans. And you wonder why you lose votes and there is great cynicism about what you stand for?

The fracturing of the Democrat coalition

The immediate breakdown of historic Democrat support brings into sharp relief the long-term decay of the party. For forty years, it has compensated for the Republicans’ incursion into the previously Democrat south of the country, ‘the southern strategy’, by building a coalition of interest groups including those who had made some gains from the movements of the 1960s – black people and women – with various community-interest groups to compensate for Republican gains.

This election showed that breaking down. Harris put great store on winning large numbers of women voters, who tend to turn out more than men anyway. She did win a majority of women, but it was down on the margin by which Biden won. Trump improved. The only improvement for Harris was among college-educated women and those over 65.

That is despite abortion being further under threat and according to Pew, 63% of people in the US agreeing abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Among Republicans, the figure is still 43%. It is a mistake to think either that it is the only issue that concerns women or that it automatically fits with a strict party divide or overrides voting on class and other political lines. In some states, there were also votes on Tuesday over the local state protecting the right to abortion in law. In most of those, the vote for a right to choose was higher than for Harris.

This analysis piece in the Financial Times looked at some detail from the initial exit polling of the vote breakdown according to various demographic categories. There is a lot more to say about all of this and there will be more reliable data. But there has clearly been a widening of support for Trump, though his vote is not up overall, and a chipping away at what were once considered solid blocks for the Democrats.

Some of the claims about this are exaggerated. But they do fit with recent US elections at state level and it is a real process. So: ‘exit polls suggest those efforts [by Obama and others to get a big turnout of Black voters for Harris] fell short — even if the initial evidence is less decisive than it is for Latinos. Data from the Associated Press found that Black voters were slightly less likely to vote for Harris than they did for Biden in 2020. An NBC exit poll reported that while 92 per cent of Black women backed Harris, this was true for only 78 per cent of Black men. In some areas with large Black populations, there were signs of small upticks in support for the Republicans, particularly in Georgia and North Carolina.’

Trump won Georgia. Biden won it in 2020 and there was great interest in the grassroots work of Stacey Abrams. She is a lawyer, politician and activist who ran very effective voter-registration and engagement campaigns under Trump, enabling Biden to take the state. 

She combined the vote with a social-movement orientation over concrete issues. Some on the left looked to this as a model for how to fuse work through the Democrats with ‘movement building’ and winning left policy positions. The Democrats took all that effort, thanked Abrams for the vote and then completely sidelined her as Biden slid into operating as he has for half a century as a creature of the Washington consensus.

A full analysis of the shifts in the electoral demographics is beyond the scope of this article. It is important to locate them though in a deeper context. While Trump consolidated his base, he also won support from above. He gained the support of tech-capital billionaires who eight years ago were seen as strongly pro-Democrat and hostile to him. Not only the hard-right, anti-liberal adventurer Musk, but others, such as Jeff Bezos, reconciled with him.

His use of racism is highly targeted. The wall and scapegoating ‘illegal’ migrant labour enabled him to feed a division between settled ‘proper’ immigrants and ‘the illegals’. So he won the border area between Texas and Mexico with its Latino majority for the first time for the Republicans. Similarly, his use of protectionism as a way to relate to working people and portray the ‘Trump can fix it’ line by imposing tariffs on China and on Europe. In a shifting world economy, these are not policies that are automatically antithetical to US big business. Not just domestic manufacturers, but big tech is strongly for economic warfare with China. 

He ran a smart campaign. He used the assassination attempt not immediately to lash out at the Democrats but to present himself as a potentially unifying figure against violent division! The Democrats were forced to step back from their personalised attacks and Biden’s push that he was a danger to democracy. Having won that space, Trump later went on the strongman, rude offensive. Some commentators said piously ‘he just can’t help himself’. They missed that there was a skilful political strategy at work.

The long-term crisis of the centre-left

What has happened is that the long decline of the Democrats, which was partially interrupted in 2020 with the political effects of Covid hitting Trump, has returned with a vengeance. 

Trump has built his coalition over the last four years. The Republicans had already repositioned incrementally from thirty years ago in alliance with a section of the billionaire class committed not only to pro-rich economic policies but to destroying the post-war, post-1989 liberal hegemony.

The Democrats stuck with an old post-1960s strategy electorally that had tried to revamp the coalition of support they had had in the post-war boom. It limped on and appeared to stabilise under Obama. And now it’s over. It is not just the presidency. It is Republican advances in all the swing states and the Democrat ones. Even down to county level. Trump narrowed the gap in Democrat bastion New York. And in New Jersey. 

The Republicans have won the popular vote, have taken control of the Senate and are very likely to retain the House. The centrist political strategy is finished. It will not stop it being touted as the only game in town for the left. And the influence of the advertising approach to ‘different demographics’ informed by liberal identity politics will continue to obscure militant struggle and politics – perhaps most especially over racism and women’s rights. 

But militant struggles are what we shall have to persuade many others to turn to. All that vitriol by some left Democrats against Jill Stein has achieved nothing except to encourage the delegitimisation of the left in the US through right-wing smears. You do not win the voters of a third-party candidate by calling her a ‘predator’ or an ally of Trump. As with Keir Starmer’s attacks on the left in Britain, it just encourages the radical right.

The electoral systems are very different and the outcomes of the elections in Britain and the US this year may appear to have nothing in common at all. A win for Trump and the hard right versus for Starmer and Labour.

Beyond the surface similarity of a big anti-incumbent result, there is also the reality that the scale of victory belies the fact that it does not indicate some great tide towards the winner. Trump’s overall support was static. Labour’s was actually down. In both the US and the UK, it was the collapse of the other side that led to such dramatic results. 

There is also the visible impact of Palestine and the global movement on politics. It is pronounced in Britain where there is sufficient a left to give some varied political expression to that. It is still under appreciated that there is a historic representation, in different blocs, of forces to the left of Labour in parliament.

It is far weaker in the US. And now there will be dilemmas over how to respond to all the attacks Trump will launch. Not only on immigrants and minorities, but upon the very working people he won support from but whose interests are at odds with the billionaires he stands for, who saw their personal wealth grow by $64 billion from the stock-market surge the day after the election.

Opposition to Trump will not be the same as last time. It will have to navigate, for example, Palestine and the Democrat-Republican consensus. The election on Tuesday is good evidence that Palestine cannot just be parked and that collapsing struggles and politics down to Anyone But Trump will weaken social and political struggles in the US.

Those struggles can win over and involve loyal Democrat supporters, but they cannot – there or in other countries – be pared down to what the leaders of a centre-left in crisis will accept for their own repeat electoral strategies, with ever-diminishing returns. 

There is much for the left to discuss. And much to do, crucially over the practical struggles that were vital before Trump’s win and would have been had he lost.

The crisis of the Democratic party, and the recriminations are already raging, can open space for a genuine left to make its arguments and try to recoup from a period in which the lifeblood of quite a large left in 2016 has been sucked into the vampiric Democratic party. We must do what we can to help those on the left attempting that and building upon the struggles they have sustained under Biden.

A part of that is discussing all this at a serious level and with an eye to what it means for the left. The Starmer victory this year bears some similarities with Biden’s in 2020. The pro-systemic and wooden politics are also similar.

We can anticipate some similar developments. That places a premium upon how the left responds and seeks to grab the political space so that Britain’s Trumpists such as Nigel Farage, puffed up from meeting Trump on election night, are not the only game in town when Labour fails badly.