Why I wasn’t surprised by the Trump victory
I’ve been a Democrat my whole life. I’ve never voted for a Republican.
I wanted Kamala Harris to win the election. But I’m not remotely surprised she lost.
I frankly would have been surprised if she won.
The Democratic Party has morphed into the party of educated elites—what the Republican Party was known as when I was growing up, and this was a heavy mantle to carry in the current anti-establishment environment.
Working class voters were once a crucial part of the Democratic coalition. Now Democratic leaders talk openly about ignoring them in favor of educated Republicans in the suburbs. From the Washington Post:
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) dismissed the possibility that Donald Trump’s popularity with rural and working-class voters spelled trouble for the Democratic ticket. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” he proclaimed, reflecting the prevailing attitude within the party establishment. “And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
As anyone paying attention knows, this was the same strategy for the Democrats this cycle.
Elites, by nature, are out of touch with reality. They have to make a real effort to see things clearly because their privilege and money insulate them from what the average person is experiencing. George H.W. Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton largely because he couldn’t acknowledge the economic pain people were feeling and wanted them to trust the “experts.”
Sound familiar?
Over the last few weeks, I watched Democrats I respect tweeting about how pathetic Trump voters were for putting concern about grocery prices (literally feeding their family) over concerns about democracy.
A more constructive approach would have been to acknowledge that grocery prices are out of control. Kamala Harris actually had a plan to address this issue, and Trump does not—something I don’t think many voters know largely because the media was too busy lecturing Americans about how stupid they are for not knowing how great the economy is. I remember reading an article in The Atlantic by a respected economics writer claiming that there was no price gouging going on with the monopolies that run the US food industry.
This is insane.
I think myriad reasons contributed to Harris’ loss—certainly, racism and misogyny played a role. The fact that she had such a limited time to establish herself with voters was also a factor.
However, we can’t ignore the exit polls that indicate what a big role economic concerns played for voters pulling the lever for Trump.
I don’t think Trump will do anything to alleviate the economic pressure on Americans because that would involve massive systemic reform that corporations would not like. However, elections are referendums on the incumbent. In this case, that was the Democratic Party’s very timid response to the hair-on-fire crisis in the US regarding the economic pressures on Americans that are unsustainable.
Yes, globalization is taking its toll everywhere, but what is happening in the US is unique—nobody is drowning in debt for receiving medical care in our peer countries, for example. A third of Americans have this experience. I have a friend with $150,000 in credit card debt for health care for her developmentally disabled children.
I’ll quote Jeet Heer from The Nation:
Democrats will need to reform themselves radically if they ever want to defeat the radical right. They have to realize that non-college-educated voters, who make up two-thirds of the electorate, need to be won over. They need to realize that, for anti-system Americans, a promised return to bipartisan comity is just ancien régime restoration. They need to become the party that aspires to be more than caretakers of a broken system but rather is willing to embrace radical policies to change that status quo. This is the only path for the party to rebuild itself and for Trumpism—which, without such effective opposition, is likely to long outlive its standard-bearer—to actually be defeated.
For people who are struggling to put food on the table, find stable employment, or pay for health care, nonstop lectures about the end of democracy sound hysterical and not relevant to their lives.
I personally think the US is facing an existential threat as a country, and democracy is very much in peril. The state of abortion rights in the US is terrifying. I fear what will happen to undocumented immigrants and other vulnerable populations under a Trump administration.
I had many more reasons for enthusiastically supporting Kamala Harris, but if I’m being honest, fixing systemic economic issues is not one of them.
I had little hope that even if Democrats won that anything would fundamentally change regarding the rampage of late-stage capitalism in the US. Even if Harris had won, I would have continued with my move to Italy1 because I find living in the US to be so economically precarious and exhausting—and I’m college educated and have had a pretty successful career.
The only silver lining I can find in all of this is perhaps Democrats will do some soul searching and come back stronger from this defeat.
I know that Democrats can do better than this.
