It also appears that Donald Trump has won the popular vote—something he failed to do in his first two runs for the presidency.
With Trump winning his second term, it is worth noting that there was no absolutely accountability by the Democratic Party when he won in 2016.
Trump won as the candidate of anti-system anger in 2016.
On October 14, I published a column arguing that Kamala Harris was replicating the mistakes of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
One big reason Clinton lost in 2016 was that she neglected the working-class base of the party at the expense of trying to win converts from Never Trump Republicans.
Even though the election for president wasn’t scheduled until early Wednesday morning, by midnight, it was clear that the Democrats were on the verge of a 2016-style disaster. Republicans were on the verge of winning the Senate, Donald Trump was already in the lead in every battleground state, and the House of Representatives was still incredibly close. Once the final votes are counted, there is a genuine risk of a Republican trifecta. Furthermore, it seems that Donald Trump has won the popular vote, something he was unable to accomplish in his first two presidential campaigns.
Now that he is in office for a second term, Trump has the opportunity to cause significant harm. The resignation of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito from the Supreme Court is likely to be followed by the appointment of younger right-wing ideologues who share their views. This would guarantee another generation of the American Supreme Court’s right-wing hegemony. Trump can also extend his 2017 tax cut, which will guarantee that billionaires keep their trillions of dollars in wealth instead of paying taxes for the nation’s benefit. Trump will also be able to carry out Project 2025’s radical agenda, which calls for a plutocratic overhaul of the US government.
Notably, when Trump won his second term in 2016, the Democratic Party did not fully hold him accountable. A political party should seriously examine its own policy and political strategy shortcomings after losing an election to someone as dangerous and corrupt as Donald Trump. Instead, every Democrat who was accountable for the 2016 failure, beginning with Hillary Clinton, managed to place the blame elsewhere. This was particularly evident in the growth of the Russiagate myth, which had a sliver of reality but was transformed into a complex liberal mythology to cover up their own policy shortcomings.
Other alleged culprits for Trump’s victory, in addition to Vladimir Putin, included the media for overplaying the Clinton email story and giving Trump too much airtime, the general bigotry of the American public, James Comey for publishing two letters about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton, and the Bernie brothers for allegedly boycotting the election. Even though some of these elements contributed to Trump’s win, their primary purpose was to divert attention from the uncomfortable reality that Clinton and the Democrats were far more to blame. Clinton’s campaign lacked originality and concentrated too much on Trump’s personal shortcomings, and her party refused to accept accountability for the neoliberal policies that had devastated the American working class. Clinton’s message also heavily emphasized winning over Republican suburban college-educated voters, who actually stayed with Trump in large numbers. Because of this, she failed to take into account the significantly higher percentage of working-class and less educated voters.
Understanding the Trump era requires realizing that America’s true political divide is between pro-system and anti-system, not left and right. The bipartisan agreement of both Republicans and establishment Democrats is known as pro-system politics. It encompasses the politics of trade agreements, NATO and other military alliances, and respect for economists (e.g., when they claim that price gouging isn’t the cause of inflation). Trump opposes this consensus and does not advocate for any particular ideology.
The primary reality of American politics in the post-Obama era is that a growing number of people are dissatisfied with the current state of affairs and amenable to anti-system politics. In 2016, Trump prevailed as the anti-system candidate. In 2020, he was held accountable for maintaining the status quo while COVID was wreaking havoc on the globe. Supported by the positive recollections that many Americans have of the economy during his presidency—and of the brief but generous expansion of the welfare state under COVID emergency measures—he was able to return by 2024 as the voice of change.
My column, which was published on October 14, made the case that Kamala Harris was repeating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 errors. I wrote:.
To an unsettling extent, Harris has been focusing the last few weeks of her campaign on trying to appeal to Never Trump Republicans rather than emphasizing her own economic populism and support for abortion rights.
This strategy invariably reminds one of Hillary Clinton’s singular emphasis on Trump’s unfitness for office, which her campaign emphasized as a means of appealing to Republicans with college degrees from the suburbs. Senator Chuck Schumer famously stated in 2016 that “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the Philadelphia suburbs for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, and you can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin.”. Schumer’s calculation was wildly incorrect for the obvious reason that voters without college degrees outnumber those with college degrees by almost two to one (64 percent to 36 percent). Clinton losing in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin shouldn’t have been shocking. Black and Latino voters who do not have college degrees are the only thing that keep the Democrats afloat, but polling over the past few years indicates that their support has also been declining.
Clinton’s attempts to win over Never Trump Republicans at the expense of the party’s working-class base were a major factor in her defeat in 2016.
I continued by stating that Harris still had the opportunity to change her mind and return to economic populism. Indeed, there was some effort made in this direction, particularly in the advertisements her campaign ran in swing states’ local media. Ultimately, though, this was insufficient. Harris committed herself to the policies of the unpopular incumbent Joe Biden to the point of self-destruction. This made it simple for Trump to once more express his discontent and call for change.
If Democrats hope to ever defeat the radical right, they will have to undergo radical self-reformation. They must acknowledge that they must win over the two-thirds of voters who are not college graduates. They must understand that the promised return to bipartisan comity is mere ancien régime restoration to anti-system Americans. They must transform into the party that wants to be more than stewards of a dysfunctional system and is prepared to adopt drastic measures to alter the current situation. This is the only way for the party to recover and for Trumpism—which is likely to outlive its standard-bearer in the absence of such strong opposition—to be truly defeated.
