Dr Demetris Tillyris shares his thoughts on how Donald Trump defied the odds to win another term as US President.

The US Presidential Election carried with it a sense of déjà vu. Like 2016, by the day after the election, Donald Trump had secured North Carolina, and Georgia, and the three Rustbelt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – states integral to the Democrat pathway to electoral success. The 45^th US President, had been elected as the country’s 47^th President, by winning not just the Electoral College but also the popular vote – the first Republican candidate to achieve this in 20 years. One of the most impressive comebacks in political history was complete.

The parallels with 2016 do not just stop at the way in which election night unfolded; they also extend to the run up to the election. Despite most polls suggesting that the election was too close to call, most commentators, and members of the Democratic Party were ‘cautiously optimistic’. It appeared that Kamala Harris had fought a good campaign; and, the message that Trump was a fascist who will drag America back to its darker past via the implementation of racist and misogynistic policies, seemed to register with voters. How could an adjudicated rapist, a convicted felon who ignited an insurrection against democratic institutions return to power? Surely, it was thought, if women and ethnic minorities voted in large numbers, especially in urban areas, the Democrats would remain in power. And so, on the eve of the election, like 2016, while Trump campaigned in Pennsylvania’s rural areas, the Democrats made one final push in Philadelphia, surrounded by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Lady Gaga,

Such campaign events held by the Democrats were not just a bad omen; they suggested that the lessons from 2016 were not properly digested. As Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former Communications Director, and supporter of Harris, noted on the eve of the election, ‘star-studded concerts don’t play well with non-elites’; they bespeak of a kind of liberal, metropolitan moralism, and exude an aura of pretentious snobbery and hubris, which reinforces the perception that the Democratic Party constitutes a gathering of the affluent – individuals completely detached from reality, compelled to lecture ordinary folk on what to think, what to say, and how to vote.

The reasons for the Democratic party’s failure, are numerous. For instance, the timing of the decision to replace Joe Biden; the question of whether Kamala Harris was the right candidate; Trump’s communication style, his effective political weaponisation of X, and his successful utilisation of podcasts. And, there is also little doubt that a considerable portion of Trump’s base espouses, at the very least, regressive or prejudiced views. But, suggesting outright that the election was lost because Trump supporters as such are sexist and racist, would constitute an embodiment of the very moralism that was, at least in part, responsible for the loss in the first place.

Unlike 2016, this election was not just, what Van Jones termed, a ‘whitelash’. Despite his divisiveness, Trump put together ‘the most diverse Republican presidential coalition in history.’ According to exit polls, Trump’s numbers among Latino voters improved from 28% in 2016 to 46% in 2024; his share of Black voters also increased, while Harris’s share of Black voters was down by roughly 10% from the last election; and, whereas Harris’s support from women also fell by 5% , Trump picked up a larger proportion of voters under 30 than any Republican presidential candidate since 2008.  

 An acute manifestation of the Democratic party’s liberal metropolitan moralism was its failure to appreciate the plight of ‘paycheck-to-paycheck voters’  – a voting bloc transcending age, race, and gender. Such a detachment from economic reality was evident in the Party’s reluctance to offer a coherent narrative about the economy, even though the economy was identified as a key issue in the election.

Rather, than addressing the cost-of-living crisis experienced during Biden’s presidency, the Democratic Party found solace in more abstract indicators of economic performance (e.g., GDP), which pointed towards an improved economic picture – a luxury afforded by the affluent, not by those who are or have been struggling to make ends meet.

And, rather than engaging directly with the ‘working class’, the Democratic party framed its campaign message around the notion of ‘middle class opportunity’. Perhaps, the expectation was that the electorate would appreciate that their financial struggles were the product of exogenous factors. But, as I argued elsewhere, democratic cultures are not inhabited by the enlightened, rational deliberators envisioned by conventional liberal theory; they comprise of a zealous, fragmented, biased multitude, incapable of any constant opinion or of converging to a shared understanding on matters of shared concern. To suggest otherwise would be to efface the recognition that something as random as shark attacks in New Jersey could have considerable impact on US Presidential Elections.

In a scathing post-election critique of the Democratic party’s campaign, Bernie Sanders noted that ‘It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well’. Sanders’s point is important, not just because it suggests that the Democrats sought for the maintenance of the status quo, when most voters craved for radical change. Rather, it also plants a question mark over the Democratic Party’s emphasis on what we might term ‘intersectional politics’. Intersectionality, a term owed to Kimberlé Crenshaw, grapples with the way individuals are oppressed because of their identity; it highlights the need to go beyond single identity categories (e.g., gender or race), and considers how such identity categories intersect, and can be the source of multiple oppressions. No doubt, the endeavour to grapple with and address injustice is necessary an enterprise. However, despite its emphasis on identifying multiple, overlapping sources of oppression, intersectionality, even in theory, appears to establish a hierarchy of identity categories, and fails to account for class and economic inequality, and might even perpetuate problematic stereotypes of Black men.

Relatedly, intersectionality appears to have morphed from what was intended to be a bottom-up approach which takes the experiences of the oppressed seriously, to a top-down moralistic creed which presupposes that group identity is reliable a predictor of an individual’s aspirations, interests, and voting behaviour, and which condescendingly dismisses those who fail to conform to one’s antecedent expectations. As Jill Lepore notes:

‘“In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose,” Julia Roberts said in a pro-Harris ad, “you can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know.” I don’t think women, no matter who they were likely to vote for, needed anyone to tell them that. They didn’t need the Post-it notes on the doors of bathroom stalls in public restrooms. And they didn’t need the Democratic campaign ads that treated them as if they required rescue from their own marriages.’

Identity, I have suggested, is not destiny; nor, is it a monolith. Rather than being blocks of marble, identities are swarms of bees, characterised by conflicting, often contradictory desires. In short, it is not implausible to suggest (or even expect) that members of different groups, though oppressed in some of the ways an intersectional approach ably identifies, might espouse different, less radical, views on other matters. For instance, members of an ethnic minority might reject racism, but they might also hold more conservative views on gender, or abortion. It is not surprising then, that a considerable number of Latin and Hispanic voters – fed up with the gender-neutral label ‘LatinX’ used by Democrats – have voted for Trump.

The defeat of the Democratic Party will no doubt prompt considerable finger pointing. But it should also prompt a lot of soul searching. It appears that the Democrats cannot change the voters. If they have any serious political aspirations, they will have to change themselves. 

A shorter version of this blog was first posted on CCCU Expert Comment on 14 November 2024