To many, the Election results on the fifth came as a shock. Donald Trump will be the 47th President of the United States of America. Not only did he sweep aside the democrats in every single swing state, he also won the popular vote by – at the time of writing – about three million.
This is undoubtedly a massive upset. Joe Biden, the incumbent President, won his election handily. He received 74 more electoral votes and won the popular vote. Furthermore, a Republican hasn’t won the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.
These numbers, however, leave out what I think are key parts of the story. Donald Trump did not expand his popular vote count very far beyond what he won in 2020. It seems like instead of voters breaking for Trump, many Democrats were undermotivated and stayed home. The Harris-Walz campaign ran one of the most right wing Democratic campaigns in recent memory.
She removed support for single payer healthcare from her platform, she supported fracking, on trans issues she was unclear on her stances protecting gender affirming medical care, she stated that America should have the “most lethal fighting force in the world,” she supported a restrictionist border bill and offered a full throated defense of Israel while ignoring pleas by Palestinian and Arab-Americans. She isolated and pushed away almost every marginalized group the Democrats usually campaign on protecting, and as such they did not vote for her.
Bernie Sanders, who won his race that night by 35 points, said it best in his own scalding postmortem.
“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. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Donald Trump’s base did not get larger, Kamala Harris’ got smaller.
This is in contrast to many other stories that played out quietly that same election night across the country. On local city councils and state senates, progressive Democrats and self avowed democratic socialists—some running with the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—won races, ousted incumbents and generally outperformed expectations.
Here in Portland, elections for the 12 city council seats saw 98 candidates running on a variety of platforms. Of those who won, five ran on far-left political platforms. Three of those – Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal and Koyama Lane – are currently members of the Portland DSA. According to the Portland DSA’s voter guide, Mitch Green is a mainstay of DSA organizing in the city. He has a long history of support for workers rights issues in the city. I first met him while he was showing support for a PSU-AAUP rally recently.
Furthermore, six candidates who won were endorsed by the Northwest Labor Council, a body headed by the AFL-CIO (the largest trade union federation in the United States.)
Candidates endorsed by the Portland Police Association (PPA), on the other hand, didn’t make the cut. For example, the PPA endorsed two candidates for District 1 – Terrence Hayes and Loretta Smith. Terrence’s priorities on his website denote a very pro-business, tough on crime candidate with a focus on fear mongering specifically about violent crime rates and vandalism. He wore his endorsement from the PPA on his sleeve, putting it on the front page on his website.
He lost his campaign.
Loretta Smith did win, but she also ran a much more moderate campaign with a more robust list of policy suggestions. Instead of her policy page being made up almost entirely of pro-police talking points, she mentions an interest to “Strengthen public safety” in between her sections on affordable housing and lowering grocery costs. She ran on bread and butter issues and also had the good sense to tuck her police endorsement away on her website.
Furthermore, progressive pushes against certain candidates in the city played a critical role in who won and who didn’t. Mayoral candidate Rene Gonzalez caught the ire of progressive forces in the city who banded together in the Don’t Rank Rene campaign. Rene came into the election while under investigation by the state, after using tax dollars to hire a PR firm to clean up his image (famously editing his Wikipedia article). His political action committee, ED300, had garnered controversy for pouring money into anti-LGBT and anti-abortion parent groups.
He was polling at around 23% in October, highest of the pack, but after the push by Don’t Rank Rene and other groups, he lost the election to a much less evil Keith Wilson.
This progressive wave flowed into other local elections across the country as well. Ignoring traditionally blue states where DSA endorsed candidates made headway, such as in the Los Angeles elections, DSA members and DSA endorsed candidates wrestled control of local government seats across the nation in traditionally red areas.
Gabriel Sanchez of Georgia, both a member of and endorsed by the DSA, won a seat in the State House. He beat his Republican opponent by 26 points, and he won the race on a platform of Universal Healthcare, a 20 dollar an hour minimum wage, lifting the state’s ban on gender affirming healthcare and affordable housing.
JP Lyninger of Louisville, Kentucky, who wrote on his campaign website that “the time for a democratic socialist Louisville is here” won his election to city council. He slid into home unopposed after winning the Democratic primary for the district. I guess no Republican felt that they could beat his winning combination of unabashed socialism and a truly beautiful mustache.
There is also Rashida Tlaib, of Michigan’s 12th congressional district. In the House of Representatives, she was the first Palestinian-American elected to the House in 2019 and has won her successive campaigns for re-election consistently since then. She is a member of the DSA, she has their endorsement, and uses her position in the house to push for a social justice oriented platform.
And let’s not limit ourselves to only those under the DSA umbrella. Democrats in states lost by Kamala Harris on the presidential level won on the state and national level. Many of these Democrats ran on what was the standard, liberal or progressive platform. They didn’t make the same, overt pivot to the right that Kamala Harris made, even if some did stand by it and support it.
Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, a state Trump won by around 2 points, is a lesbian woman who won re-election to her seat on the Senate. She defeated her Republican challenger Eric Hovde who’s hawkish foreign policy platform and fentanyl fearmongering contrasted with Tammy who chose to focus on bread and butter issues in the Rust Belt like bolstering domestic manufacturing and lowering the cost of prescription drugs.
Just a skip across the Great Lakes, in Michigan, Elissa Slotkin from Michigan beat her Republican challenger. She focused on similar issues to Tammy, but also focused some attention on expanding access to healthcare; an issue that Kamala retreated from.
This story repeats itself in North Carolina who elected a Democratic Governor, In Nevada who elected another Democrat woman to the Senate and in Delaware who elected the first trans woman to the Senate: Sarah McBride.
Let’s be clear on what the lesson is here: retreating from popular progressive policies on the border, on trans issues, on protecting labor and on healthcare makes for a losing platform. By running the most conservative Democratic campaign in recent memory, Kamala Harris deflated her supporters and many of them simply decided to stay home. She reinforced the popular refrain that there is no fundamental difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.
On top of that, the left gained ground in places the Democrats didn’t look or court. Establishment Dems who didn’t follow the push to the right held their ground. Kamala Harris tore down a winning coalition of oppressed people looking to, at the very least, maintain their rights and replaced it with a coalition of B-to-C list Republicans and border town sheriffs. She lost, and those people who want their rights to be maintained looked elsewhere and found candidates they respected and who filled those gaps.
Those candidates won.
