By JOHN PRIETO
Now that the dust has begun to settle, a clearer picture of how exactly the Kamala Harris campaign lost this election is beginning to develop. For all the lashing out of frustrated liberals, they have yet to find the mark. It certainly wasn’t the fault of Latino voters. And it wasn’t the fault of Muslim or Arab American voters. Nor was it primarily due to male chauvinism or racism. The Harris campaign encountered pitfalls that it could not, or would not, overcome, and it made some policy decisions that alienated sectors of the electorate. But at its core, this election came down to:
Am I better off now than I was four years ago?
This quintessential election-year question, for most working people, could definitively be answered in the negative. According to NBC News exit polls, 68% of voters felt that the economy was “not so good/poor.” A full three-quarters of voters said that inflation had caused their family moderate or severe hardship. A similar number said they were dissatisfied or angry with the way things are going in the country.
Harris, unsurprisingly, lost among all of these groups. In a year when family incomes are being ground to dust under the weight of inflation and the continuing post-COVID employer offensive, Harris chose to jettison any attempt at providing an alternative. When given the opportunity to distance herself from Biden, she refused to identify a single thing she would have changed about the last four years.
While it became somewhat of a trope to identify Trump’s first election victory as the result of economic anxiety and papering over the very real racial animus that certainly motivated and continues to motivate a core part of his supporters, it is clear that to a certain extent, the 2024 election was lost mainly on the basis of economic issues. Instead of running a campaign focused on the very real hardships caused by inflation and distancing herself from a historically unpopular incumbent, she pulled Biden—and consequently the current economic situation—even closer. When people are searching for an alternative and you fail to provide one, they will go elsewhere.
There is no alternative … in the Democratic Party
Did Kamala attempt to provide a solid alternative to Trump? No. Here, she again failed to provide any real motivation for voters to come out for her.
Are you worried about climate change? Too bad! Harris wants more fracking. Are you concerned about Trump’s violent rhetoric around immigration and deportation? Tough! Harris promised to pass the failed Bipartisan Border Bill to put more cops on the border, create a mechanism for closing the border to immigration and asylum claims, and to facilitate the process of deportation. Instead of pushing back against Trump’s racist narrative, she reinforced it, positioning herself as the responsible and experienced border-state prosecutor who could actually get it done.
On trans rights too, Harris again caved to the narratives of the right. Instead of pushing back and forthrightly defending our trans siblings, the best Harris could offer (on Fox News) was a meek “I will follow the law” and an attempted gotcha of accusing Trump of also providing gender-affirming care to prisoners during his first term. This is the best the so-called “most pro-LGBTQ+ administration” can offer? This isn’t an alternative; this is abject surrender to the eliminationist rhetoric around trans people.
In the face of such a transphobic and anti-immigrant Republican Party, what did Harris promise to those concerned about these issues? She promised to work closely with Republicans, hitching her banner to the likes of neocon hatchet-man Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, the former U.S. Congress member.
And so, the Harris campaign was seen to stand for a strong border, more fracking, not a peep on trans rights, rejecting free universal medical care, putting Republicans in the cabinet, maintaining the “most lethal” military on earth, and continued weapons and funding for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
That last position in particular might have doomed her in Michigan. The Harris campaign squandered every opportunity they might have had for a PR win with Arab or Muslim voters concerned about the genocide. They sent Ritchie Torres—perhaps one of the most extreme Zionist members of Congress—to Michigan, along with Bill Clinton, to scold and lecture supporters of Palestine.
In the meantime, on the campaign trail, Harris mimicked Biden by occasionally wagging her finger at the Israelis and mouthing toothless calls for a “cease-fire,” while continuing to advocate arming Israel to the hilt. The Democrats—just like Trump and the Republicans—are not about to withhold support from U.S. imperialism’s key junior partner in the Middle East.
Why was this campaign seemingly committed to alienating their “base” and losing this election? The answer is simple. All of us—immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and the working-class—are not their base. We never have been. The base of the Democratic Party, its real base, is the same as that of the Republican Party. They sit on corporate boards together, send their children to cloistered elite schools together, and profit from war and immiseration together.
The liberals were right that there was “no alternative” in the election. None was provided, and their class interests mean that the Democrats could never realistically provide one. But what this indicates is that we need to look beyond the limits of the capitalist system and fight for a real political alternative that is run both by and for working people.
Building the future together
Leon Trotsky identified the growth of fascism in the early 20th century as the result of the failure of the working-class movement to meet the moment of capitalist crisis. Bourgeois democracy was in a shambles, the revolutionary wave had ended, the Stalinized Communist Parties failed to provide effective political leadership, and so the middle-class especially but also some in the working-class turned to the easy answers of fascism.
Today, in the United States, it is very possible that the Trump victory might extend the reach of far-right forces. But the rise of reactionary political groups is due in no small part to the failure of the Democratic Party—and the labor bureaucracy that tail ends the Democrats—to provide any kind of alternative to the crisis of capitalism.
To meet the Trump moment, to fight the growth of reactionary politics, the working class and oppressed must build our own alternative. We saw a hint of how to respond to Trump in the mass militant protests that pushed back against the “Muslim ban” in 2016. But the anti-Trump political momentum was absorbed into liberal NGOs, which ultimately funneled it into the Democratic Party. We must build our own organizations, independent of the Democrats, who—despite partisan wrangling at election time—are linked arm-in-arm with Trump and the Republicans in the joint management of U.S. capitalism and imperialism.
We must fight Trump and the reactionary policies that are most assuredly coming, but we must not let that fight be subsumed under the very institutions and political leaders who create the basis for Trump’s rise. An independent working-class party is what we need. Let us use this moment to cohere the forces that can build it and lead it to victory.
