Marty Levine

November 15, 2024

A week ago, I spent Election Day serving as a precinct-level Judge of Elections. A very long day gave me a chance to see the wonderful reality of what our electoral system can and should be. Neighbors of every ethnicity, every age group and every political persuasion came through our voting station in good spirits and glad to be voting as part of their community.  

But when I returned home that joy was wiped away by the results of that day.  By 10:30 it was clear to me, if not to the reporters asked to “call” the election that Donald Trump would be in the White House again. I woke very early on Wednesday morning to find, unfortunately, that was true despite all the factors that have told me since 2015 that he was unfit to be our President.

As I write this a week later the results have gotten even darker. Donald Trump not only won the Electoral College vote, as he did in 2016, but also and surprisingly won the popular vote getting 75,522,869  votes to Harris’ 72,378,170. The Senate will be controlled by the Republican Party, and it appears that when all the votes are counted the House may as well. A clean sweep at the federal level. His early list of Cabinet and White House Staff appointments tells us that he is going to do what he said he was going to do, be xenophobic and revengeful.

The next four years are going to be difficult for any of us who care about repairing our world and protecting those at risk from the harms that this new administration threatens to unleash as it reshapes our government along the lines spelled out in its Project 2025 manifesto.

These results come just four years after we thought we had rejected Trump and his MAGA forces and banished them to the history books as an anomaly. Joe Biden was elected by an energized coalition that feared what the Trump years had meant domestically and internationally. The coalition was wide and energized, it turned out more than 81 million votes and margins that delivered 6 of the seven “swing” states (Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina)” that were needed to tip the Electoral College Vote to the Democratic Candidate.

On November 6^th we knew that four years later, the Harris-Walz ticket had not repeated that feat, the MAGA message had not been banished, and we are faced with again going on the defensive to minimize the harm until the next elections give us another chance to change the nation’s course.

The question of the moment has become “What went so wrong?” Media pundits, the op-ed writers, pollsters, political sages and people gathering over a cup of coffee who were hoping for a different outcome are all trying to figure out how to answer that question and make whatever changes need to be made.

What is it in this country that is causing people to look beyond Trump’s obvious flaws, beyond the apparent signs of aging that were so clear to me as the election wore on (the same signs that spoke so loudly to them about Joe Biden), beyond the serious failures of his first term in the White House, and beyond the indictments and the coarseness?

These are the questions that are making me think deeply because we are going to need to learn from them before the 2026 mid-term elections and certainly before the next presidential race if we are to have any hope of returning our country to a stable and humane footing.

There has been a lot of analysis that identifies how the Trump vote included significant swings within various groups of voters (Hispanic, Black men, younger voters, college-educated white men, etc.)  The Democratic ticket lost ground when measured by the share of the vote of these various communities and that deserves understanding. But less attention is being paid to the fact that there seem to be a large number of people who were 2020 voters who just did not vote last week. That deserves more attention.

Before we focus on these swings in voter preferences, I think we need to grapple with the actual number of voters who showed up this year.  In 2020 Joe Biden got more than 81 million votes. As I am writing these words Kamala Harris can is about 9 million under this number and Donald Trump is currently about 1 million votes more than he received in 2020.  While I recognize that there are still votes needing to be tallied before the final count, it points to what will remain as a key question: where did these 2020 Democratic voters go?  Some may have switched to the Trump column but there remain a significant number of voters that have just dropped out.  And they did not go to the third-party candidates that were on the ballot. Most recent numbers say that about 500,000 fewer people voted third party as compared to 2020.

In the week before the election I wrote about my concern that the Democratic party was misreading their base made up of the voters and the advocates who had powered the 2020 victory. I was concerned that they had seen the Biden presidency as focused on marginal, safe and slow changes that left millions of Americans feeling their government did not care about them. Here’s how I described my fear of how the Democratic Party had gotten out of touch with its base:

On issue after issue where there might be controversy, Democratic leadership has chosen to go for incremental change rather than bold, systemic solutions. It has listened to those who think change is only possible in small steps. They have chosen to listen to special interests more than they have listened to the voices of those with the most at stake. They assert that it is necessary to take any small change that they can achieve and work for further improvements in the coming years. Slow incremental change is their motto.

Unfortunately, this seems to have been more on target than I had hoped.

From my perspective, the Trump and Republican victory comes not from the Democratic Party being too “woke” and espousing policies that are too far to the left. While that is the message that Donald Trump’s campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put forward it is a message that only had relevance because the Democrats did not deliver while they had power to do so. Nor did they put forward a powerful message about how they would be a force for the powerless, for the working class, and for those who struggle.

People judged based on concrete results in their lives, not on repeated but unfulfilled promises.  And they said they wanted a change.  Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez won reelection in a district that saw Harris underperform Biden and AOC by a significant margin asked those in her district who had shifted their votes to tell her why.  Jere are how voters who split their ballots between AOC and Trump answere her question of “why?”

• It’s real simple… Trump and you care for the working class.
• I wanted change so I went ‘with Trump and blue for the rest of the ballot to put some brakes.
• Voted Trump but I like you and Bernie [Sanders]. I don’t trust either party establishment politicians.

That’s the practical politics part of my analysis.

The more difficult part of understanding this election is to grapple with the inescapable conclusion that for many their vote was to reject a woman of color. These were votes about racism and misogyny. These are not the missing voters who no longer believed the democratic party, but the bulk of the Trump coalition which does not want to accept that our nation is no longer ruled by white, Christian, male leadership.

 Here’s how Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude categorized these election results during a conversation with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle

• Most Americans voted for Trump because they felt that “whiteness” was under threat.
• “So, there’s this sense, right, that whiteness is under threat – the demographic shifts. The country is – all of these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios commercials are confusing the hell out of me.”

It is well worth viewing the entire clip of his comments to fully get the power of this conclusion:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1855303086882898360

The Harris campaign ignored this dissatisfaction and did not recognize the need to own their administration’s failure to deliver for these people. The campaign needed to grapple with their fear that moving to make the nation more equitable requires them to challenge the middle and more conservative voters.   Trump’s allure may be that even if what he is going to do is harmful to millions, his message of change overpowers those who feel left out and ignored.

Beyond trying to grapple with the inability or the unwillingness to address the nagging problems for which government solutions will require significant structural changes, voters need to recognize that our nation remains one with a sizeable portion of its electorate that do not want to accept that we are no longer a white, male-led nation. We need to recognize that these are people we will not convince but rather continue to beat at the ballot box election after election. We will be, if we are not already, a divided nation, like it or not. We need to look not to these voters, but to those whose lives can be improved to find the support that can keep us from slipping backward in time to a place where we may not be able to peacefully return.