In times of great loss, it’s important to reflect. What went wrong? Who didn’t receive our message? How can we recuperate, regroup, and reinvent ourselves to meet the challenges of today?
Following election day on November 5th, 2024, the Republican party won control of the Presidency, the Senate and the House. Yet, this was less a sweeping victory for the Republicans, and more a monumental failure for the Democratic Party. Donald Trump won the Presidency with nearly 2 million fewer votes than he obtained when he lost in 2020. In contrast, Kamala Harris received 6 million less votes than Biden’s total in 2024.
Democrats lost support in nearly every demographic, but their backing with the working class in particular plummeted disastrously. Democrats’ share of non-college-educated voters fell from 47% in 2020 to 43% in 2024. Similarly, support from people making less than $50,000 decreased by 6 points.
Democrats were quick to start pointing fingers after the election, arguing that Biden should have dropped out of the race earlier, that there should have been an open primary, or that they went too far to the left on transgender rights. But if the Democratic Party wants to regain executive and legislative power they need to work to win-over that vital support.
“People do not believe that the Democratic Party is fighting for them or for their families or gives a damn about their lives,” said Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota-Democratic-Labor-Farmer Party. “We lost ground with almost every group except wealthy households and college-educated voters.”
Bernie Sanders, the senior U.S. Senator from Vermont, has been among the most vocal supporters of sweeping structural reform for the Democratic Party. Right after the election, Sanders said, “In my view, the Democrats lost this election because they ignored the justified anger of working class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system.”
Although America is one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, thousands of families are struggling to pay rent, put food on the table, or pay exorbitant medical bills. According to Sanders, Trump won the election because he was able to tap into this anger in an unjust system, while Kamala Harris presented herself as its defender.
While the Democratic Party sided with the status-quo, Donald Trump offered an explanation for the working class’s struggles. It was a racist, deceptive, and false narrative — that illegal immigrants are taking American jobs, causing wage depletion, and increasing crime — but it was still an explanation. Trump’s violent rhetoric and racist lies are easy to latch onto when the alternative is a denial of your daily struggles.
Those opposing Sanders’ stance cite the accomplishments of the Biden Administration’s economic policies. For example, Biden has empowered unions, providing funds for the National Labor Relations Board and Teamsters Union pension plan. Through the Inflation Reduction Act, he has successfully increased the amount of jobs in the economy, the average wage, and invested in clean energy, putting America on track to decrease carbon emissions.
Yet, Democrats cannot simply sit idly by and console themselves with these gains while ignoring the empirical dissatisfaction of the population. Notably, on the night of the election, 60 percent of Americans described the economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.”
Even Kamala Harris’s supposedly pro-worker campaign sought approval from wall-street millionaires. Harris’s economic policies hovered between the interests of corporate America and the middle class, ending with a message that appealed to no one. Most significantly, she refused to call out the ultrarich and was equivocal in her policies to increase taxes on the top one percent.
Overall, there has been a lack of specific debate regarding important working-class issues such as health-care and wages. In an interview with Democracy Now, Bishop William Barber, the national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said, “I didn’t see one debate where there was a focus on poverty and low wage, even though 800 people are dying a day from poverty, even though you have a million — over 32 million people making less than a living wage.”
According to Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O, the working class’ disenchantment with the Democratic Party is nothing new. “One of the things that has been frustrating about the narrative ‘The Democrats are losing the working class’ is that people are noticing it half a century after it happened,” said Podhorzer in a New York Times interview.
In addition to suburban and urban workers, farmers in rural areas are experiencing economic difficulties caused by industrial farming and corporate monopolies. Before the 2020 election, 85 percent of farmers supported Donald Trump and have continued along the same trend.
Industrial farming is not sustainable. Excessive pesticides, fertilizers, antibiotics, and tilling deplete nutrients from the soil and cause epidemics of viruses and diseases in produce. A way to combat this would be creating free-ranged organic farms that do not require buying feed, fertilizer, and antibiotics due to natural nutrient recycling and healthier conditions.
Policies that regulate large dairy industries and corn-milling companies would allow people to switch to organic farming and provide them with more options. However, Trump’s past agricultural policies have exempted large factories from reporting harmful emissions and reversed bans on harmful pesticides.
In general, the Republican party supports deregulation of large companies, especially regarding environmental policies. In 2016, Trump initiated deregulation policies of businesses regarding climate change, allowing them free reign in destroying the country’s air, land, and water. The Trump administration rejected more than 100 environmental rules including every influential Obama-era climate regulation. The Interior Department under Trump opened up more land to oil and gas leasing, reversing wildlife protection.
In just his first week in office, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement and issued executive orders aimed at deregulating energy producing companies and increasing oil production on federal lands. By handicapping the Environmental Protection Agency and other oversight program’s ability to regulate the environmental degradation of large companies, the climate disaster will only worsen. Inevitably, this will result in more chemicals in the water people drink and more toxic particles in the air people breathe, destroying American land and poisoning American people.
In addition to the climate disaster, the United States is stacked against the working class in a plethora of different ways. This includes a corrupt and expensive health system, an unlivable minimum wage, union busting, steep pricing for prescription drugs, and unaffordable housing and education.
The root of a lot of these problems is unsympathetic neoliberalism and individualism. Large corporations and monopolies control much of the U.S. economy, causing problems for workers, farmers, the environment, and democracy in general.
America is rapidly becoming an oligarchy, with many arguing that we have already toed the line into an illiberal democracy. A study in 2014 found that, “a proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time.”
This is likely to exacerbate as Elon Musk takes his place alongside Trump’s government as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency. Already Musk and other billionaires like Jeff Bezos have influenced the election. Musk publicly invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, even giving away millions directly to Trump voters. Bezos controversially refused to let the Washington Post endorse Kamala Harris.
In an Slate interview, Northwestern University political science professor Jeffrey Winters said, “The Harris side also had major oligarchic support, including big injections of money from Michael Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman and Michelle Yee, Bill Gates, and others.” Harris also boasted about receiving a billion dollars in campaign donations from rich elites.
Democrats would do well to abandon their oligarchical billionaire supporters and turn their attention to class issues. Working class anger is a unifying force across the political spectrum. The assassination of United Health Care’s CEO led to a united upsurge in anger against parasitic insurance companies. People came together to criticize the corrupt immorality of U.S. health insurance and share stories of times when they were denied coverage.
Americans know the medical system of the United States works against their interests and are demanding cheaper healthcare that is easy to access. The Democratic party can tap into that anger by addressing healthcare as a human right in their legislation. Obama managed to pass some Medicaid reform, but in his attempt to make it by-partisan, ended up watering down its benefit.
Implementing economic policies typical of democratic socialism, such as more government spending for social services, could win back the working class. Although lacking a majority in any branch of government, the Democratic Party still has the ability to propose legislation to increase minimum wage, social security, health care, and other social surveys. When the Republican Party inevitably votes down these bills, the working class will finally see who has their best interests at heart. Yet, this is impossible with the Democrats continued support of corporate America’s billionaires over the American people.
Introducing “socialist” policies to ingratiate themselves with the working class may at first seem counterintuitive. Many Republicans, including Reagan, Bush, and Trump have won on the platform of reducing welfare and cutting taxes. Even the word “socialism” has a negative connotation in the American political sphere, specifically to conservative blue-collar workers.
However, these government policies are designed to protect workers from the inhumanity of laissez-faire liberalism. Increasing the federal minimum-wage will help ensure that blue-collar workers earn a livable salary. Free college education increases social mobility, allowing people to escape cycles that unfairly haunt families for generations. Free universal healthcare will prevent families from having to choose between a loved-one’s life and bankruptcy.
These policies are already popular with the majority of the American population. “Why didn’t the Democrats bring up living wage in the Senate before the election and force a vote on it, to expose where the Republican Party actually stood on this critical issue?” said Barber. “Because everywhere that raising the minimum wage and paid family leaves and things that matter was on the ballot, they won.”
However, these changes will only work if the Democrats finally sever their ties with the oligarchs of America and adequately tax the top 1%. That way, the burden of these reforms does not solely fall on lower and middle class taxpayers, which would nullify the greatest criticisms of government social services.
This biggest question is however, will the Democratic Party undergo this necessary introspection? Or, will they continue playing a self-destructive blame-game, all while refusing to commit to any substantial change?
“In my view, the Democrats lost this election because they ignored the justified anger of working class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system,” said Bernie Sanders, the senior U.S. Senator from Vermont.