Trumpism Is Poised for Massive Overreach

In a text she sent me about a week ago, in the aftermath of our disastrous yet regrettably predictable election result, a dear friend of mine lamented that “the whole state of the world doesn’t allow for us to be happy.” And on the face of it, she’s not wrong. For most of the Biden administration, Trump’s reelection seemed like a disturbingly tangible prospect; dread lingered in the air. January 20, 2021, ushered in a blessed respite from the Trump era’s madness. But especially after the events of January 6, it always felt like borrowed time, a temporary reprieve from some impending judgment. And as Bidenism largely failed to cement COVID-era expansions of the social welfare state, meeting with stubborn Republican obstructionism and defections by the treacherous Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, even as inflation soared and popular discontent gathered force, it became increasingly apparent that gaslighting the American public—embracing the status quo while telling voters that the economy was hunky-dory, voters’ lived experience be damned—was a losing strategy.

For leftists, the reason that Bidenism couldn’t stick was the same thing we’ve been shouting from the rooftops for years, if not decades, now. People are suffering immensely, living in the long shadow of the 2008 financial crisis and COVID. “Good vibes” are no substitute for policies that help the tens of millions of people struggling with medical debt, credit card debt, student loan debt, soaring rent, and inflation. Absent a fundamental reckoning with oligarchy, without a Bernie Sanders-style political revolution which transforms the Democratic Party into a unified movement able to truly represent workers, attack billionaires and corporate interests, and champion social democracy, Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris professional-class neoliberalism will limp from defeat to defeat, eking out occasional victories here and there, but largely hemorrhaging the base of working-class people which is necessary to win elections in the United States.

There will be plenty of time in the months ahead for postmortems and analyses which point the way forward. Spates of op-eds—some excellent, many dreadful—have already popped up to dissect the Harris campaign’s ignominious defeat. We must derive the correct lessons from the 2024 election. But it’s equally important that we maintain hope in the face of an unquestionably bleak political landscape. The fact that the Republicans now control all three branches of federal government is exceedingly grim. Republican domination of the Supreme Court will take decades to dissipate. And Trump’s recapture of the Oval Office—coupled with a laughably pliant Congress—means that the disturbingly ample powers of the executive branch are now at his full disposal. Despite Trump’s winking disavowal during the final days of his presidential campaign, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 now seems set for implementation, including the firing of tens of thousands of professional civil servants and their summary replacement by Trump supporters in Trump’s long-awaited purge of the “deep state.”

Trump intends to unleash the U.S. military domestically to conduct his long-fantasized campaign of mass deportations, which the rabid nativist Stephen Miller promises to harshly oversee. And despite Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal, the flurry of nominations of patently unqualified Trump loyalists like RFK Jr., Pete Hegseth, and Pam Bondi continues unabated. Under the aegis of the recently announced “Project Esther,” Trumpist politicians plan to use antisemitism as a pretext for destroying freedom of speech and academic independence at our leading universities, private and public alike. Contemplating this horror show, it’s all too easy to spiral into despair and hand-wringing apocalypticism. Is there anything to be hopeful for, amid the electoral wreckage and the harbingers of impending disaster?

Contrary to the articles interpreting Trump’s victory as a massive repudiation of the Democrats, the Republicans are in a position which in some ways resembles that of the Democrats after the 2020 election. They have a tenuous majority in the House: Republicans won 220 seats, only two seats above the 218 necessary to win control of the chamber. And they have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, which is just two seats above a bare majority. Trump won the popular vote, securing about 76.8 million votes. That constituted an undeniable improvement on his previous vote shares of 74,223,975 in 2020 and 62,984,828 in 2016. 76.8 million votes sounds like an impressive total—until you compare it to the 81,283,501 votes Biden received in 2020, and until you realize that Trump failed to garner even 50% of the popular vote. Trump received lower vote totals in about a third of the top 50 counties which flipped from Democratic to Republican, and his overall margin was slim. Approximately 1% of votes nationwide still await tallying. But as of November 23, Trump had beaten Harris by about 1.6%—a stinging defeat for Democrats, who have become accustomed to winning the popular vote regardless of their Electoral College showing, but hardly a blowout. The Electoral College result—Trump 312, Harris 226—obscures how close the election actually was.

The United States political system offers voters a binary choice between a two-party duopoly. Harris ran as a candidate for continuity. She refused to break with the Biden administration: when asked on The View in October what she would’ve done differently than Biden, she declared that “there is not a thing that comes to mind,” and her policies were carefully calibrated to not offend any of the Democratic Party’s donors or Big Business in general. But the American electorate is furious and wants change: in the lead-up to the election, in late October, about 72% of Americans felt that the country was on the wrong track. Only 25% of Americans rated the economy as “excellent” or “good,” with 46% rating it as “poor.”

It was never going to be a good idea to run a candidate like Harris or Biden in such a context. The Democratic Party’s choice to crown Harris, and Harris’ choice to double down on the status quo and economic timidity, were fatal decisions. They left the mantle of populism uncontested, surrendering the fertile terrain of anti-establishment rage to Trump. If a voter wanted to register their discontent with the status quo and didn’t merely want to sit out the election, their only real option was to vote for Trump. And in many ways, the most notable feature of the 2024 election was precisely those potential voters who chose the couch: about 89 million eligible voters—around 36% of the electorate—stayed home. As of November 21, national voter turnout hovered at around 63.9%, which is about 2% lower than in 2020. In a close election, that makes all the difference. Inevitably, one wonders what would have happened if a left-wing, forthrightly anti-establishment populist like Bernie Sanders—or a candidate like him but with the advantage of relative youth—would have run against Trump instead.

The Intercept’s Natalie Shure recently made a very cogent and thorough case that Bernie would have won. And though we’ll never definitively know whether she is right, we do have some clues. In national polling between July 2015 and June 2016, Sanders varied between a virtual tie and holding a whopping 17% lead, averaging a jaw-dropping 10.4% lead. In nationwide surveys spanning September 2019 and April 2020, Sanders held a lead which wasn’t quite as ‘uge, ranging between 2.5% and 8% nationwide—yet even a 5% lead in the national popular vote would have translated into a landslide majority for the Democrats. Bernie was also notable for getting low-propensity voters to the polls; like Trump, he had a knack for mobilizing people who normally sat out elections.

Many non-leftist Bernie skeptics dismiss the idea that one should fight fake right-wing populism with genuine leftist populism, but the phenomenon of Bernie-Trump voters from 2016 is hard to ignore: 12% of Sanders supporters in the Democratic primary switched to supporting Trump in the general election. This suggests that a significant chunk of the electorate views elections through the prism of anti-establishment sentiment and will vote for the candidate who seems least tied to a deeply unpopular status quo. We also have evidence from the present: in a series of polls, the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) and Jacobin found that messaging that attacks corporate elites and the billionaire class and leans into populist economics is extremely popular among blue-collar workers and the general public alike. In the 2024 election, candidates like Dan Osborn, a working-class mechanic from Nebraska who ran a strongly populist campaign, and Sherrod Brown, a consistently populist Ohio Democrat, vastly outperformed Harris. Osborn received over 74,000 more votes than Harris, while Brown received nearly 109,000 more votes.

Why did Trump win? Unhappiness with inflation and the economy seems to be the main reason. A September Pew Research survey found that 93% of Trump supporters viewed the economy as key to their vote. In the NBC News exit poll, among the 32% of voters surveyed who answered that the economy was the major deciding factor for their vote, 80% chose Trump and only 19% picked Harris. The ABC News exit poll tells a similar story: Harris routed Trump 91%-8% among the 31% of voters who felt the economy was excellent or good, but Trump dominated Harris 70%-28% among the much larger 68% of voters who felt the economy is not so good or poor. Among the 46% of voters who felt that their personal economic situation had deteriorated over the last four years, Trump won handily, 81%-17%. Trump won by a commanding margin (74%-24%) among the 22% of voters who suffered severe economic hardship because of inflation. When it came to the 53% of voters who’d suffered moderate hardship, he won 51%-45%. Harris cleaned up 77%-20% among people who experienced no hardship—the problem is that only 24% of people were lucky enough to not suffer inflation-related troubles. The major decline in support for Harris among Latine voters seems to be due primarily to the economy and inflation, which were consistently ranked as top issues by Latines.

The progressive polling outlet Navigator Research’s exit poll analyses indicate that “Trump held a 12-point advantage among the 2024 electorate on the state of the national economy [Trump 52%-Harris 40%] and a 13-point advantage on the level of inflation (52 percent) than more of a reason to support Harris (39 percent). Among ‘swing voters’—those who did not rule out voting for Trump or Harris from the start of the campaign, and whom Trump won by 8 points—Trump held a 39-point advantage on the level of inflation being more of a reason to support him [Trump 62%-23%] and a 37-point advantage on the state of the national economy being more of a reason to support him [Trump 61%-24%].”

If there’s any comfort to be found in all this, cold though it is, it’s in the fact that many Trump ballots appear to be expressions of economic discontent, not proclamations of undying fealty to an adored leader. Some Trump voters are lukewarm towards Trump himself. In NBC News’ exit poll, only 46% of voters held a favorable opinion of Trump. 9% of the 53% of voters who regarded Trump unfavorably voted for him nevertheless. That 4.77% of the electorate who were Trump-disliking Trump voters exceeds Trump’s national popular vote margin. A Pew Research survey conducted in November after the election found that Trump receives low marks among the American public for being even-tempered (37%) or a good role model (34%), and that minorities of Americans describe Trump as caring about the needs of ordinary Americans (45%) or honest (42%). Nor was a Trump vote necessarily a full-throated endorsement of every item on Trump & company’s turbocharged capitalist agenda. 77% of Trump supporters oppose cutting Social Security. Among Trump voters under 30, about 45% identify as moderate or liberal, and 46% support the government doing more to solve problems and getting more involved in healthcare and debt relief. All this suggests that if Trump can’t improve people’s lives economically—which seems highly likely, given his penchant for tax cuts for billionaires and Big Business, tariffs which will trigger an international trade war and drastically exacerbate inflation, and ending Obamacare—many of his voters will punish incumbent Republicans heavily in 2026 and be ripe for the picking in the 2028 presidential election.

Democrats cannot sit on their laurels, though. They have serious problems with the working class. They lost voters who made between $30,000-49,999 a year 53%-45% and lost voters who made $50,000-$99,999 a year by 51%-46%. They managed to win voters who make under $30,000 a year, one of their traditional constituencies, but only by a razor-thin margin: 50%-46%. Similarly, they maintained a very slim majority in union households, winning by a margin of 53%-45%. Those margins are a far cry from the heyday of LBJ’s Great Society or FDR’s New Deal. The great labor leaders Walter Reuther and Cesar Chavez must be rolling in their graves. Things could be far worse: Harris ran a woefully uninspired campaign, offering the working class very little by way of credible policy and scoring low marks on authenticity, yet she managed to preserve a substantial degree of working-class support nonetheless. But warning lights are flashing and can no longer be ignored.

With Trump’s inauguration, we’re entering a period of great uncertainty. It’s impossible to predict what the future will hold, now more so than ever. Free and fair elections may no longer be something we can take for granted; Trumpism will inflict massive suffering over the next four years, none of which I’m trying to sugarcoat or deny. But as long as free and fair elections survive in this country, this is not yet—and it need not be—an epoch-defining realignment of American politics, whereby the Republicans capture the hearts and minds of the working class. Pride cometh before a fall. Republicans, drunk on power and wrongly convinced that they’ve won an enormous mandate because of their 1.6% popular vote edge, are poised to overreach spectacularly. They will implement deeply dangerous and unpopular policies, inviting anger and backlash from the many affected groups, from government ex-employees to immigrants to women to LGBTQ+ people to professors to everyone angry at hyperinflation. If the Left organizes, fielding genuine progressives in primaries and rallying around vocal, forthrightly populist, working-class figures like Shawn Fain and Sara Nelson, we may yet wrest the Democratic Party from the clutches of its neoliberal establishment—and victory from the jaws of the defeat which we’re still grieving.

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