Ari S. analyzes the results of the recent US presidential election and stakes out a vision for the future of US socialist electoral strategy in the wake of the Democratic Party’s historic defeat.
The result of the presidential election was only really surprising in how drastic it was. The Democratic party failed to stake out a vision for the future or to reckon with the failures of the Biden administration. They relied on vacuous branding and a universally unappealing alliance with conservative elites instead of advancing policies that appealed to their voter base, like Medicare for All, debt forgiveness, and rent relief.
On the other hand, the success of DSA candidates and ballot proposals measured against the collapse of the Democrat vote proves that socialism hasn’t gone down in defeat with Democratic Party liberalism. To the contrary, it proves we need to draw an even stronger line of demarcation between ourselves and the Democratic Party. Amicable collaboration with increasingly unpopular bourgeois liberalism can no longer help socialists achieve our goals. We stand to gain only from a confrontational stance and independent messaging.
Collapse of the Democrats
The modern form of the Democratic Party took shape between the New Deal era and the Civil Rights Movement. Beginning in the 1930s, labor unions, community organizations, and anti-war activists entered a coalition with Democratic elites, aimed at the passage of civil rights and progressive economic legislation. It was always an “unholy alliance” that brought together the workers and oppressed with the more far-sighted elements of big capital who saw the need for reform to prevent social unrest amongst the working class. This Democratic Party coalition was an unstable marriage of convenience, born out of on the one hand the ruling class’ fear of mass movements escaping their control, and on the other the opportunistic shortcuts taken by radicals to win legislative reforms.
Since the financial crisis of the 1970s, however, economic changes brought on by capitalism’s organic crisis have undermined the space for reforms that radicals carved out within the Democratic Party. Shifting the site of struggle away from the streets and mass mobilization, and into the courts and the party apparatus, also surrendered the very basis of power which could have been utilized to fight neoliberalism.
The Democrats’ ineffectiveness has objective roots. The party’s base in big capital, its largest donors and lobbyists coming from Wall Street and major corporations, prevents it from taking the radical measures needed to confront the problems facing everyday people in the US. Yet it survives by hanging the threat of the right over our heads without taking real action, while the right’s agenda advances unencumbered.
The Democratic Party’s betrayal of the Black Lives Matter movement, which ended in brutal repression, intensified surveillance, increased police budgets, and subsequent moral panic over crime, exposed the fissures in the coalition. Labor has received only modest results for its loyalty, mostly amounting to a slowing down of defeats.
The reversal of Roe V. Wade destroyed decades of promises. Since the ruling passed, defending abortion rights was the central argument to progressives for loyalty to the Democratic Party and “lesser-evil” voting. Despite ample opportunities and massive popular support, the Democrats never attempted to codify the ruling into law. It is painfully obvious that they preferred to keep it as precarious and dependent on election results as possible. Predictably the house of cards collapsed, but working class women will be the ones to pay the price.
Since last October, the Democrats’ lack of confidence and decisiveness in defending the rights of the people were suddenly on stark display in their strident support for Israel’s genocide on Gaza. To social movements reeling from 2020’s defeat and the abandonment of Covid-era benefits expansions, it became clear that the Democratic Party had nothing left to offer. Most activists and progressives dutifully cast their vote with a heavy conscience, but decisively less did so than in the last election.
To the “average voter” in the conditions of the movement’s ebb, the Democrats’ two-faced display of symbolic concessions without material transformation only supported the Trumpist worldview: that the Democratic Party represents a conspiracy of globalist elites with certain minorities and radicals to undermine the nation under the guise of “social justice.” Token displays of “sensitivity” while conditions of life deteriorated might have fueled a mood of revanchism and resentment in some parts of society. If workers weren’t convinced by Trump’s vision, however, they equally weren’t convinced to go to the polls to stop it.
The Right Didn’t Win, Liberalism Lost
The Democrats are making every kind of excuse to avoid blame for their loss. The dominant narrative from that corner in the days immediately following their defeat was that the rejection of Harris was the result of racism and sexism,1 that it represented poorly educated and misinformed voters being swayed against their own interests. Yet ironically, Trump’s gains among Latino and Arab voters have even led to an overtly racist backlash from some Democrats,2 with pro-Harris posters flippantly fantasizing about the Latinos and Arabs who voted for Trump being deported and their families abroad being killed. It’s baffling to see them blame these attitudes for their opponent’s victory, while also demonstrating them themselves; not only in the hateful vitriol, but in their rigid assumptions about racial voting patterns and their feeling of unconditional entitlement.
Insofar as these Democrats are saying that the people can’t be trusted to make decisions about their own future, these kinds of arguments are arguments against democracy itself.
Clearly, racism and sexism are real and baked into the fabric of the capitalist system. However, these can’t be neatly separated from economic concerns. Chauvinism is most convincing as a political program in a time of economic and social crisis, when problems require someone to blame. The theme of immigration in the campaign is an example. Trump claimed that every issue—jobs, wages, inflation, crime—all stemmed from “illegal immigrants” crossing the border. The Democrats, who spent four years continuing Trump’s border policy, didn’t challenge his xenophobic framing, and instead tried to position themselves as the most responsible border guards. It’s impossible to beat Trump on the grounds of xenophobia. Between a pale, half-hearted copy and the real thing, people will choose the real thing, or else not feel the need to choose at all.
The connection between chauvinism and the impact of the capitalist crisis is also demonstrated by the rightward shift in the votes of men under thirty.3 Increases in the cost of living are making it harder for young people to live independently from their parents, access higher education or the increasingly few remaining high paying jobs, and have money for leisure activities. In addition to stifling the achievement of culturally-expected milestones of adulthood for all workers, it is increasingly difficult to achieve the dominant standard of masculinity. Without the Left fighting for higher wages, free education, and healthcare, and without a popular social narrative that demonstrates the oppressive nature of gender roles in capitalist society, right populism fills the vacuum. It asserts that women’s advancement, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and the breakdown of the nuclear family are to blame.
The other argument being promoted by Democratic Party loyalists is that the Harris campaign ran too far to the left, alienating moderate voters.4 This claim is even more ridiculous, given Harris walked back support for nearly every progressive policy that “progressive” Democrats claimed to advocate in the last few years, notably Medicare for All.
In reality, the Republicans did not make impressive numeric gains compared to the Democrats’ losses. All over the country, progressive ballot measures succeeded or demonstrated mass support, even in places that Republicans also carried, such as protecting abortion rights in Arizona or raising the minimum wage in Missouri. DSA candidates running on the Democratic line managed to retain their seats, and even gain new ones. This includes women of color like Rashida Tlaib, who won in Michigan, a state otherwise won by Trump. This belies the idea that the prejudice of the masses was the main factor behind Trump’s victory.
Voter turnout fell nationally compared with 2020, but especially in areas which had the strongest support for the Democratic Party in previous elections. The drop of support for Democrats in their former strongholds was larger than Trump’s largest gains.5 What the numbers show is that the most important factor behind Trump’s return was the lack of an alternative vision to improve society. This is exactly what the Democratic Party could not provide. Like the Republicans, they are also a party of big capital, but they can’t rely on an openly chauvinist vision for populist mobilization without losing important parts of their base, such as Black, Latino, and immigrant communities. Only the socialist movement can combine the anger of the masses against the establishment with a coherent and rational vision for a better society.
Socialist Electoral Strategy
The Democratic Party is becoming a liability to winning the working class. Though we will continue to use their ballot line in conditions where independent campaigns are unfeasible, our candidates must be clearly recognizable as a different type of politician. That means, without exception, running as open socialists and having DSA, our platform, and our ideas featuring prominently in communications. It means viewing speeches and social media appearances as an opportunity to agitate for socialism and for DSA. No one should cast a vote for a DSA candidate without knowing it’s a vote for a socialist.
At every chance, our candidates need to identify the Democratic Party as an undemocratic and capitalist party. We need to explain to the masses that we are running to expose a system from the inside that we can’t yet beat, and which we will not be able to beat until we build up a mass socialist party. We also need to explain that the US is not a democracy—that unelected judges, officials, and police are the real pillars of power, and that the election system and a constitution established to defend chattel and wage slavery is designed to stifle the voice of the people.
Far from sabotaging the campaign, a message of strident opposition to politics-as-usual would likely be popular in this climate of doubt and mistrust in the political system. If there was ever a time to worry about intransigence damaging our relationship to “progressive” Democrats, that is now over. Following the example of labor’s victories of the 1930s, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, we know that our movement gets its power from the people, not the goodwill of the capitalists and their political servants. DSA provides the kind of organization and ideological clarity that will allow the working class to wield power.
Agitation and popular education is an important priority at this time. Reactionary propaganda has been given free reign by the inaction of the liberals. Socialists everywhere—from the campaign trail, to the workplace, to the neighborhood—need to point out at every opportunity that there is no border crisis at all, and that migrants aren’t criminals but fellow workers who are trapped in a racist and inhuman immigration system. We need to explain that the collective struggle against the bosses and against imperialism is in the interests of citizen and noncitizen workers alike. We need to proclaim that attacks on women’s bodily autonomy and the rights of transgender and gay people are attacks on the rights of everyone; that violence and oppression abroad always come home like chickens to roost, infecting every part of society. That womens’ advances aren’t the cause of young men’s problems, that the real culprit is a parasitic and predatory economic system in decline.
We will also need to take real measures to defend democracy, to fight racism and war, and to counterpose that with the empty rhetoric of liberals. We will need to take these measures in workplaces and in the streets, backed up by socialist electeds on the campaign trail and at the bully pulpit. Real, practical answers and decisive action will take the wind out of right populism’s sails.
It is also worth taking seriously every opportunity we can get to break the stranglehold of the two-party system over US politics. Whether it be because of local election laws benefiting third-party campaigns, the breakdown of the Democratic Party’s base, or both, an independent candidate might have the ability to win. Running openly as a DSA candidate will help build up the profile of the organization, improving the understanding of our project as distinct from Democrats, and strengthening the efforts of our comrades still forced by necessity to use their ballot line. The time when a fully independent party will be possible and necessary isn’t far at hand, but only if we begin preparing now.
If there’s any lesson to take from the 2024 elections, it’s that the current political order will not last forever. The imperialist oligarchic constitutional regime of the United States—and world capitalism along with it—is a rotting corpse that continues to pollute the planet and civilization only because no one has pulled it out of the way yet. The socialist movement needs to take the lead, and with every tool at our disposal, spread the “good news” of socialism: the need to organize the working class majority to sweep the world of exploitation and oppression, war and ecological destruction. There is no shortcut, and no one else can save us.
- Juliann Ventura, “Axelrod: Racism, Sexism Partly to Blame for Harris Defeat,” The Hill, November 6, 2024, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4976151-david-axelrod-donald-trump-kamala-harris-2024-election/; Elena Schneider, “Democratic Women See a Country That Is ‘Not Ready for a Woman President’,” Politico, November 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/07/democratic-women-sexism-harris-trump-00188076.
- Didi Martinez, “Trump Has Made Gains with Latino Men. Why They’re Voting Republican and How Harris Is Addressing It,” NBC News, October 25, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-latino-men-republican-vote-2024-election-harris-rcna177240.
- E. Moore, “Biden won big with young voters. This year, they swung toward Trump in a big way,” November 8 2024, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2024/11/07/g-s1-33331/unpacking-the-2024-youth-vote-heres-what-we-know-so-far.
- Adam Wren, Holly Otterbein, and Lisa Kashinsky, “Centrist Dems Seize Opening at the DNC: ‘I Don’t Want to Be the Freak Show Party’,” Politico, November 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/15/centrist-democrats-chair-dnc-00189933.
- Michael C. Bender, “Why Was There a Broad Drop-off in Democratic Turnout in 2024?,” The New York Times, November 11 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/us/politics/democrats-trump-harris-turnout.html.