Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Donald Trump at his election night party
It will take some time to sort out all that went wrong, but let’s begin with the current president, who was responsible for a host of necessary and long-overdue changes in national policy, but who was also incapable of making the case for them to the American people. His vice president was inherently not the person who could make up the ground that Joe Biden had lost, though Kamala Harris made a pretty fair effort to do that in the brief time she was allotted. Some Democratic governors could have made the race without the Biden albatross so plainly around their neck, but Biden’s decision to withdraw came so late that Harris was the only plausible substitute.
We will surely hear plenty in the weeks and months to come that the Democrats need to moderate their politics; indeed, last weekend, both The New York Times and The Washington Post ran nearly identical pieces making that argument. Both those pieces dwelled on social and cultural policies that Republicans have gone after, as their tsunami of anti-transgender ads made all too clear. Neither, however, really dealt with Democrats’ progressive economic policies, such as raising taxes on the rich and reducing the cost of prescription drugs, for the rather basic reason that those policies remain overwhelmingly popular. I’m not certain it would have made that much of a difference, but Harris might have run better had she stressed such policies more, as pollster Stan Greenberg warned us in several Prospect pieces.
But looking at last night’s votes, a general rightward movement on some social issues can’t be dismissed. The rejection of reform district attorneys in left-leaning cities, as well as liberals’ embrace of some more traditional law-and-order ballot measures, points to a broad concern over the rise of visible social disorder. In many liberal cities, the persistence of homelessness is viewed as a confirmation of that social disorder, even when people also understand its correlation to an unaffordable housing market.
That explains some uncharacteristically conservative voting in California, where voters not only overwhelmingly repealed a law they’d previously enacted that reduced the penalties for minor crimes, but also declined to pass a measure that would have incrementally raised the state’s minimum wage. (A measure to raise the wage of tipped workers also failed in equally liberal Massachusetts.) In the current zeitgeist, the specter of the undeserving poor has come to stalk even historically liberal jurisdictions.
That movement, however, doesn’t mean that core Republican positions on key social issues have become popular. I bow to no one in my skepticism about the accuracy of exit polls, but when they show lopsided policy preferences, they’re usually correct. And in this election, they showed that when asked if they wished to legalize most undocumented immigrants or deport them, 56 percent preferred legalization while just 39 percent favored deportation. Likewise, those wanting to keep or make abortions legal outnumbered those who favored banning them by a 66 percent to 31 percent margin, an outcome reflected when majorities in seven states voted on Tuesday to strike down abortion bans or enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions.
The dividing lines that reshaped this year’s electorate were those of class and gender.
A look at how the electorate voted for the presidential and senatorial candidates makes clear that the dividing lines that reshaped this year’s electorate were those of class and gender. Looking at gender first, white men voted for Trump at a rate seven percentage points higher than white women (59 percent to 52 percent). Black men voted for Trump at a rate 13 percentage points higher than Black women (20 percent to 7 percent), and Latino men had a level of support for Trump that was 16 percentage points higher than Latino women (53 percent to 37 percent). It’s clear that Harris’s initial emphasis on building a more “caring economy,” through such measures as an increased Child Tax Credit and more affordable child care and senior care, appealed more to women than men, though she later augmented those proposals with pledges to increase investment in such male-dominated fields as construction.
But it’s also the case that working-class men in particular believe that technology may threaten their jobs and that the material compensation for such work has diminished to the point that many lack the income and stability to form relationships and families. Those fears are grounded in the reality of our nation’s economy. Republicans, like right-wing parties in many nations, have used those fears to stoke anger against immigrants they claim are taking workers’ jobs and against Democrats whom they depict as feminized for addressing women’s issues and neglecting, or even disdaining, the challenges facing working-class men. That Republican success in these attacks was made painfully clear last night when the Senate’s staunchest defender of working-class men and women, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, was swept away in the Trumpian tide.
What last night also made clear was that the Democrats cannot win if they can’t do better with the working class. Though their exact numbers are subject to question, exit polls showed that Trump won a narrow majority of Americans with family incomes under $100,000, while the Democrats won a narrow majority of those with incomes exceeding that. This is in no small part the long-term consequence of the working class’s deunionization, of the near-disappearance of a working-class culture rooted in ordinary workers banding together to successfully advance their interests in both bargaining and politics. When the rate of private-sector unionization is down to its current level of 6 percent, those levers of power that once yielded victories are almost nowhere to be found, and demagogues who tell workers that banishing immigrants will solve their problems may sound plausible in the absence of alternative solutions.
This sense of abandonment appeared to be most acute in the Rust Belt last night. Not only did Trump sweep the once-industrial Midwest, but Democrats appear to have lost Senate seats in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. As I write (it’s 5 a.m.), Democrats appear not merely to have lost their Senate majority, but to have their Senate delegation reduced to a mere 45.
With a Republican Senate, Trump is assured that his appointments to the federal courts and government agencies will all sail through, as appointments no longer have to clear the 60-vote cloture bar. At 5 a.m., however, it looks like the Democrats still have a chance to retake the House, though if they do, it will likely be by a margin of just one or two votes. (Nobody had better die, or even go to the bathroom when a vote is pending.) If they do, they would constitute civilization’s last line of defense, compelling Trump to bargain with them over tax policy when his first-term corporate giveaway cuts expire next year.
It’s important for Democrats to remember that when Trump’s performance in office was still fresh in the public’s mind four years ago, he was soundly defeated. There’s no reason to think his second term will be any more successful than his first, and not just because he has become even more unhinged as he’s aged. His tariffs could restart inflation; his deportations and the abuses they’ll unleash will prove hugely divisive; the policies of a MAGA-tized Senate and federal agencies, determined to destroy the laws and regulations that protect public health, diminish corporate abuse, and ensure democratic elections will not win majority support among the public. Democrats will surely oppose them all, but they must also do the serious work of regaining their credibility with the nation’s working class if they’re to ensure the survival of a democratic America.
