Pothole in the Middle of the Road: The Democrats’ Path to Defeat

Kim Moody

CRUISING DOWN THE middle of the road, the Democratic Party handed Donald Trump and the political right the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Looked at in percentage terms, the Republicans picked up support in just about every geographic and many demographic categories: urban; suburban; medium metros; small towns and rural areas; men; white non-college graduates; 18-29 year-olds; Black and Latino men; and those earning $50,000 or less a year.

The Democrats clung to their majorities among women (54%), college graduates (54%); those making $100,000-199,000 (51%) and won 51% of those with incomes of $200,000 or more — upping the average income of Democratic voters once more. Nevertheless, they lost their majority in the suburbs, the central focus of their electoral strategy, where their vote went from 54% in 2020 to 48% this year.(1)

Yet this was no voter landslide for Trump and the Republican Party, so much as a defeat for the Democrats. Trump gained just over three million votes more than in 2020, a gain of less than two percent compared to a drop of eight percent for Harris. He won by 2.8 million out of more than 155 million also less than two percent. The secret to his success lay in the Democrats’ loss of over six million votes compared to 2020, despite the growth of the eligible electorate by four million voters. That is, Kamala Harris won 75.1 million in 2024 compared to Joe Biden’s 81.3 million four years ago. Had the Democrats turned out just over half of those lost voters, Harris would have at least won the popular vote and quite likely enough of the swing states to take the White House.

The extent of the lost Democratic vote was breathtaking. The Harris/Walz team lost in all seven swing states that put Trump in the White House, and saw Democratic vote numbers drop in 37 out of 47 states where the vote count at this writing was complete compared to 2020.

Twenty-four of those states saw the Democratic vote fall by more than the Republicans gained. In Pennsylvania the Democrats lost 145,036 votes, while Trump gained 133,602. In Michigan, it was the drop of 61,000 votes in usually solid Democratic Wayne County, home to majority Black Detroit and heavily Arab Dearborn, that accounted for the bulk of the 80,000 lost Michigan Democrats and cost Harris that state. In the case of Dearborn, it was the Biden Administration’s unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza that cost Harris thousands of Arab-American votes.

The sweep of the collapse of Democratic support is underlined by the fact that the Democratic vote fell in 81% of all U.S. counties. Even in once deep blue New York State, the Democrats lost 831,252 voters compared to 2020, while Trump gained just 219,000. The Democrats’ share fell from 60.9% to 55.9% in 2024. It also fell in New York City where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was shocked to discover that the percentage of votes for Trump in her congressional district had risen from 22% in 2020 to 33% this year — many of whom also voted for her.(2)

Nationally, the Black Democratic vote continued to fall as a percentage this year from 87% to 86%, but down from 95% in 2012. Perhaps the biggest shock was the dramatic falloff of Latino Democratic voters from 65% to 53% this year — from 69% in 2012.

Both the turnout of Black and Latino people also fell as a proportion of all voters. Despite the centrality of abortion rights in the Harris/Walz campaign, the percentage of women who voted Democratic fell from 57% in 2020 to 54% this year.

The Democrats even broke one of the prime laws of American elections: that nine-out-of-ten candidates who spend the most win. In the 20203-2024 election cycle, Harris broke fundraising records as her campaign spent $1,167,194,124 to Trump’s $622,633,035, while Republican “outside” money beat that of the Democrats by just $975,826,757 to 843,053,718, according to OpenSecrets.org. And yes, this election was even more expensive than the record-breaking 2020 election at $15,901,068,285 — and that isn’t the final count.

Apparently, even with today’s polarized electorate and a threatening future, it takes more than dollars to get people to the polls when the alternative doesn’t speak to what they actually feel.

Party of the Status Quo

That racism and sexism worked against Harris is clear, just from the nature of Trump’s campaign. And no doubt there were Democrats who were not willing to see a Black woman in the White House. But given the size of past votes for Obama and Hillary Clinton among all traditional Democratic groups, both of whom won a majority of the popular vote, it seems unlikely that race and gender by themselves can explain the depth of the fall in Democratic turnout.

The Democratic campaign’s economic message, insofar as they had one, remained squarely in the political center in defense of the status quo, mainly in support of Biden’s record. Exit polls tell us that the vast majority of Democratic voters approved of Biden’s economic performance, but those respondents were disproportionately among the better-off who did vote (see below). And even among all voters, 67% rated the “condition of the nation’s economy” “Not so good/Poor.”

Following a longstanding trend, the Democrats did better among the highest earners, though not enough to win the suburbs as a whole. It was primarily working class and middle-income people of all races who deserted the erstwhile “party of the people,” either by voting Republican or more often this year by just failing to mail their ballot or staying home on election day.

Whereas Biden beat Trump 57-42% in 2020 among $50,000-99,999 earners, who would encompass most of the employed blue-collar working class, in 2024 Harris lost them by 47-49% — a drop of ten percentage points compared to Trump’s gain of five points. Furthermore, this middle-income group fell from 39% of all voters in 2020 to 32% in 2024.

This goes far to account for the drop in the number of Democratic voters, especially blue collar and middle-income workers of all races in 2024. Given that the small business owners many of whom also fall in this income bracket vote disproportionately Republican, the bulk of missing voters were working-class Democrats.

This is further suggested by the drop in the Democratic union household vote from 56% to 54% this year and its decease as a proportion of voters from 20% to 19 percent. Overall, the voting electorate and the Democratic voter base were significantly whiter and more prosperous in 2024 as those with an income of more than $100,000, where Democrats won a majority, rose from 26% of all voters in 2020 to an astounding 40% in 2024, according to CNN exit polls. Clearly it was the nation’s economically embattled workers who disproportionately sat this one out in protest or disgust, rather than a stampede to the right.

The Harris campaign’s centrist message and its effort to sell Bidenomics to the working class failed utterly. They ran as the party of the status quo when many potential voters were angry and wanted “change,” above all relief from the cost-of-living crisis. That trouble was already on the way could be seen in a September 2023 Pew Research survey which found that approval of the Democratic Party had dropped from 60% in the early 2000s to 37% in 2023, while disapproval had risen to 60%.(3)

Indeed, only 33% of registered voters identified as Democrats in 2023 compare to between 37 and 40% a decade earlier.(4) The messages of good vibes and Biden’s big spending programs fell on deaf ears because they didn’t match working-class experience (more below). Trump’s “dark” message of a nation in trouble did resonate and for good reason. The rate at which inflation grew might have slowed down, but it didn’t relieve the accumulated cost of living of the previous four years — particularly on some of those items that lower- and middle-income people depend on such as food, fuel, rents, etc. In fact, real weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers have been essentially stagnant since 2022.(5)

The Legacy of Democratic Party Neoliberalism

Deeper than this, however, and even more ignored by Democratic politicians was the tectonic shift in the lives of those workers who make and move the nation’s material production. It was a shift that followed the course of the Democrats’ move from the party of at least modest reform, during the upheaval of the civil rights era, to that of neoliberal austerity from Carter to Clinton to Obama. It was during these years that the Democrats consciously distanced themselves from unions, pushed labor law reform down the agenda, terminated almost all aid to the cities, while promoting free trade, deregulation, welfare reform, mass incarceration, etc.

The prelude to neoliberalism in the United States began with the embrace of “supply-side economics” and deregulation of transportation under Jimmy Carter, even before the “Reagan Revolution.” Neoliberal policies that undermined working- class life were further developed, designed and implemented by Democratic Party think tanks, leaders and politicians who reigned for 20 of the 32 years after the period of Reaganite Republican rule.

This was the long period sparked by the Stagflation crisis of the 1970s characterized in the United States by the simultaneous and interrelated rise of globalization (outgoing foreign direct investment and free trade), deregulation, deindustrialization and union decline, on the one hand, and the political organization of big business in the Business Roundtable, the rise of corporate PACs and wealthy money in elections, and the remaking of the Democratic Party on the other.

This latter was a shift not only from the old New Deal voter coalition of northern liberals, labor unions, urban machines and Southern segregationists, but from some level of grassroots organization in machines, local party clubs, unions and the now mostly hollow county committees, to a top-heavy tower of power of increasingly well-financed and staffed institutions (DNC, DCCC, DSCC, party caucus, professionalized state parties, donor networks, consultants).

This hierarchy of organized money and power that is today’s Democratic Party floats far above a disorganized electorate, while the party’s top-down organization is increasingly and disproportionately dependent on business and wealthy donors. Call it realignment, dealignment or misalignment, the party’s voting base on the other hand is a changing patchwork of incompatible and increasingly prosperous class fractions lacking organizational coherence in which various elements of capital provide selective financial glue in each election cycle.

For the majority of working-class people, the neoliberal period was a catastrophe. The fact of deindustrialization of the nation’s rust belt running from Pennsylvania through the Midwest has been well documented ever since Bluestone and Harrison wrote The Deindustrialization of America in 1982.6 The current wave of Democratic leadership however, didn’t seem to notice (except for Chuck Schumer who  argued that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.” Not quite, Chuck.)

The focus of attention on the impact of deindustrialization has often been on the plight of white workers in rust belt mine, mill and factory towns who became the famous Reagan Democrats. The fact, however, is that this well-known industrial shift hit Black workers as hard or harder in gutted industrial cores of urban centers such as Detroit, Flint, Gary, Chicago, Pittsburgh and St. Louis as well as many smaller towns.

For these workers of color, however, becoming Reagan Democrats was unthinkable. It took Trump’s message of radical change and protectionism to move a significant number of them from the Democratic column to the Republicans, while many more joined the 40% or more of the electorate that doesn’t vote.

Wherever the trio of neoliberal “Third Way” policies, global forces and deindustrialization hit, they disrupted and undermined decades-old working-class communities, cultures and union-based ideas of solidarity that had kept these communities voting Democratic. A recent study of steel towns in Pennsylvania by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol shows how the decline of working-class organizations, above all unions, led white workers to turn to the right as communities eroded, the unions left town, and that old culture was undermined.(7)

The generation that followed the loss of blue-collar work was stuck with service sector jobs that were non-union, sometimes based on casual or “contracted” labor, and always with lower wages. Only recently have we seen the beginnings of organization in these jobs, and it will take time to build new cultures of solidarity.

It wasn’t simply that the good jobs were gone and wages stagnated. As a study done for the New York Times shows, a huge section of the employed U.S. workforce since 1980 saw their incomes fall below the average for all employees as millions bypassed them. The relative earnings of production workers fell fastest in the Southeast but dropped below the national average in the Midwest, both key locations of Trump supporters and this year’s missing voters, in the wake of the 2008-2010 Great Recession.(8)

While the victims of this downward shift may not know the statistics, they have seen and felt the results and interpret it, not altogether incorrectly, as rejection by Democratic Party elites. This often overlooked shift of well-being and economic status, largely under Democratic administrations, is certainly one reason why so many white workers turned Republican or dropped out over the years, and why now more Black and Latino workers didn’t vote for Harris on November 5. It was not the workers who abandoned the Democratic Party, but the party that had rejected the workers over the decades.

Neoliberalism Decays, Democrats Seek Old Solutions

The Biden Administration and the 117th and 118th Congresses were the first caught fully in the crisis of the neoliberal order, tasked with regenerating the economy in the transition to a largely unknown new phase of global capitalism — one compounded by a global pandemic and intensified climate change.

Democrats naturally turned for help to the state because it is their territory and there was nowhere else to turn. But rather than raise the minimum wage, build low-cost housing, dramatically expand free healthcare, pass the PRO-ACT and sufficiently fund the NLRB, tax bloated wealth and incomes, continue the direct COVID payments to individuals that Trump initiated, or anything else people had demanded or desired, they obeyed the commands of their benefactors and their own deeply held belief in the system to save U.S. capitalism by rewarding capital and protecting private assets — which no social movement or section of public opinion had demanded.

Facing a period of low investment and profit rate volatility, Democratic policy wonks and politicos reached back to the thinktank debates of the 1980s and 1990s and dug out “industrial policy.” Industrial policy meant the government picking “winers and losers” to further the growth of strategic or competitive sectors by making them profitable at state expense. Reagan actually set up a commission to study industrial policy but ignored its findings.(9) Bill Clinton briefly flirted with industrial policy before leading the neoliberal charge.(10)

To some on the left, industrial policy is a progressive approach — perhaps social democratic. But it has always been little more than a top-down means of encouraging capital to invest where those in charge thought it was most needed by financing businesses from the public trough. While there are often some requirements for getting the money, it does so without threatening or cramping management’s rights, investors’ dividends or the sanctity of private property.

The two trillion or so in tax breaks, grants, loans and other incentives and subsidies at the center of Biden’s three major pieces of legislation (CHIPS, Infrastructure, Inflation Reduction), stretched out over 10 years, will eventually create jobs if the private employers take the bait, but they seldom demand specific conditions for those who do get the work.

Furthermore, as an analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act from American Prospect noted, “Yet, challenges remain to make sure the funding isn’t being skimmed by middlemen…”(11) Given the multi-tiered contract nature of much production and construction these days, this is almost inevitable. Ironically, despite the “Inflation Reduction” name of the major Act, the flow of government money without price controls for non-fossil fuel energy has actually inflated the prices of renewables.(12)

Furthermore, this version of industrial policy was designed and sold on the basis of national security and international competition, not the elevation of a working class in crisis. Industrial policy stimulus, thus, is little more than targeted welfare for capital in a crisis-ridden world with a presumed trickle-down effect on employment, stretched out over time and largely invisible to the public.

Trump on the other hand described a country with problems and promised highly visible, promptly implemented solutions: protective tariffs; border walls and immigrant removal — concrete actions that promised to bring back jobs and seemed to many to address the problems they and their communities faced in an immediate way.

No doubt underlying racism has furthered this view, but it has increasingly been adopted by Black and Latino workers whose communities suffered even more from Democratic neoliberalism. That turn to reactionary and racist solutions is the consequence and culpability of the Democrats’ leadership and institutions’ inability to offer tangible progressive solutions.

Just as public opinion and movement demands fell on deaf Democrat ears, so did pleas from the left to run a “populist” campaign á la Bernie Sanders: attack corporate elites; propose really taxing the rich; pass the PRO ACT, raise the minimum wage, promise healthcare-for-all; control rents, etc.

Some down-ballot candidates regularly deploy “populist” anti-corporate language during campaigns, including this year to be sure. But the actual existing party’s leadership, establishment, institutions, and the vast majority of officeholders and candidates could no more threaten to bite the hands of their wealthy and business benefactors with heavy taxes and higher real wages than actually run a socialist, even a reformist one like Bernie, for president.

Nor could they threaten to seriously tax the very employers to whom their “industrial policy” infrastructure and climate programs were sending billions of dollars through tax breaks, incentives, grants and subsidies. They ran a centrist campaign because no matter how liberal they may seem on some social questions, they and their benefactors are centrists or worse by conviction and financial necessity: the need to keep in place their tower of power party structures, fund their campaigns, and promote the system on which they and the whole money-driven electoral system rests.

What Now for the Left?

Like the party itself, the effort to build a genuinely progressive left in its midst by unseating incumbent centrists and push it in a progressive direction has lost momentum and ground to a halt in 2024. The strategy of changing the party by “primarying” sitting moderate Democrats that began with Bernie Sanders’ 2016 challenge for the presidential nomination, accelerating down-ballot in 2018 with the election of the original “squad” to the House and the emergence of the Justice Democrats and Our Revolution that encouraged left primary challenges, has derailed.

In 2022 Sanders, Our Revolution and Justice Democrats endorsed 23 candidates for the House of Representatives, eight of whom challenged sitting moderates. Of the 15 who fought open seat contests, nine won, but only one of the eight challenging a sitting moderate won and she (Jamie McLeod Skinner) lost in the general election. Overall, in 2022 left progressives made net gains of just four — none through a direct challenge.

In 2024 things got worse. Sanders, AOC and others collapsed from the start into the Biden, then Harris campaign and there was no left challenger in the presidential primaries. Sanders, Our Revolution and Justice Democrats together endorsed only 16 candidates for the House, 12 of whom were already incumbents mostly in safe blue districts, while four ran in open seat contests. None, however, challenged a sitting Democrat.

To make matters worse, incumbent Squad recruits Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their seats as the Zionist lobby AIPAC threw millions of dollars at their campaigns and the party leadership stood by in silence despite pleas from party activists. Where there had been seven members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Congress, today there are three — either because the others were defeated or left the organization. AOC, once the outstanding public voice of intra-party rebellion, has migrated to the mainstream, even to the degree of recently voting for a House resolution that endorses the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, and the strategy is almost certainly further buried in the wreckage of this year’s party vote.(13)

To be sure, there are still voices of dissent in Congress on Palestine from Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and others, and some who will push for “realistic” reforms, but the dreams of a Green New Deal, Medicare-For-All, aid for desperate communities, massive housing construction, or any comprehensive reforms that could benefit the working class have died with the left’s permeationist electoral strategy. The idea of building mass electoral organization or a “surrogate party” while using the Democratic ballot line, once projected as the socialist left’s path to power, didn’t get off the paper it was written on.

Almost certainly, pressure from the party leaders to move right will increase as Trump occupies the White House with his band of policy extremists and billionaires. The Democrats will fight among themselves — watch the Democratic National Committee leadership contest already underway — attempt to raise yet more money to maintain their shaken tower of power, and recruit more moderates to run for Congress in the 2026 midterms in hopes of thwarting Trump’s more extreme actions. The resistance to Trump will have to come from elsewhere.

We don’t know at this point exactly how the Trump Administration will implement its white nationalist policies, but the political scene will switch from Washington to U.S. streets as his storm troopers or the military seek to round up immigrants, smash protests, promote fear, and turn the nation’s streets into battlegrounds in the name of order.

At the same time, his tariffs would create more inflation and reignite the cost-of-living crisis, while his plans to purge thousands of civil servants can only undermine the functions of government, and his violent efforts to deport masses of immigrants disrupt communities of color and civil society in many ways.

The hope that capital will thwart all of this has vanished with the rush of business leaders and billionaires to suck-up to the new administration and its vindictive leader even before they take office. Not to be outdone by his fellow plutocrats, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos kissed the ring with a million dollar donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.

This means that the tasks of the left lie not in another round of hoping to make the Democrats something they aren’t by getting lost in their midst, but in mobilizing to counter Trump’s attempts to implement policies where they happen. This has to be more than one-shot conventional protest demonstrations.

From my vantage point in England, I was impressed at how tens of thousands of British activists and citizens flooded the streets and town centers to successfully beat the nationwide far-right racist “riots” of last summer and drove them off the streets, something the police couldn’t do.

I was also inspired during the Obama administration when young undocumented immigrant “dreamers” sat in front of federal buses to stop deportations. These kinds of actions should be at the center of left work on a mass and continuous scale to defend immigrants, abortion clinics, unions on strike, and each other despite differences.

There is certain to be resistance to attempts to limit or ban abortions at the state and possibly national levels. There is also still momentum in strikes in many industries and on organizing Amazon and other centers of economic power. Unions, of course, will necessarily be key to “the resistance” as it arises this time. I believe there is enough anger and disgust to make such mobilizations and actions possible and effective. As the impact of Trump’s policies hit blue-collar workers as well, perhaps it will even be time to take UAW president Shawn Fain at his word about general strikes.

To most Americans, politics means elections and government. We cannot afford to cede the electoral terrain to either the right or the center for long. In the multiple crises of the system, the disarray of the Democratic Party and the dire consequences of Trump’s policies will offer openings and possibilities to intervene in this arena at various levels.

The initial object of running independent or third-party candidates in down-ballot general elections is not necessarily to win the first time out, but to show that there are alternatives for working-class people from candidates who listen to and come from them. This can’t be done in the usual money-dependent-media-consultant-celebrity endorsement way, but by building grassroots support and organization in communities, local unions, and social movements. People, not dollars must drive these campaigns.(14)

There are hundreds of “one-party” centrist or right-wing-occupied House and state legislative seats, in both Democratic and Republican urban and rural districts, with no “spoiler” effect or even second-party competition, where it is possible to build a foothold. A look at the somewhat unique labor-based, anti-corporate and pro-choice independent campaign for U.S. Senate by union and strike leader Dan Osborn in deep red Nebraska might help.Osborn got 46.6% of the state-wide vote (435,582 votes), and though his campaign was conventional in many ways, his appeal might offer some ideas.(15)

The central fact of the next four years, however, is that Trump and MAGA cannot be fought by depending on the Democratic Party or its officeholders. Whether by direct or electoral action, it will be grassroots mass mobilization and, above all, ongoing organization that can limit Trump/MAGA effectiveness in the streets and halls of government and point to a long-term alternative to the endless replay of center-vs.-right lesser evilism.

Notes

1. All election stats and results including comparisons with 2020 are from CNN, AP VoteCast, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, Bloomberg, The Hill, and/or University of Florida Election Lab unless otherwise cited. I use the latest election figures, but they may not reflect the official final count exactly.
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2. Michele Norris, “Split ticket voters offer some bracing lessons for the Democratic Party,” MSNBC, November 12, 2024, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/aoc-trump-democrats-listen-voters-rcna179762.
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3. Pew Research Center, Americans’ Dismal View of the Nation’s Politics, September 19, 2023.
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4. Pew Research Center, The partisanship and ideology of American Voters, April 9, 2024.
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5. BLS, TED: The Economic Daily, February 17, 2023; Real Earnings News Release, November 13, 2024.
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6. In any case, check OpenSecrets.org ofr thelatesrt figures. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry, Basic Books, 1982.
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7. Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol, Rust Belt Blues: Why Working Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party, New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.

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https://www.pewresearch.org/poltics/2024/04/09/the-partisanship-and-ideologiy-of-american-voters/

8. Emily Badger, Robert Gebeloff, and Atish Bhatia, ”They Used to Be Ahead in the American Economy. Now They’ve Fallen Behind, New York Times, October 26, 2024, https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/26/upshot/census-relative income.html.
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9. Bennet Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America, Basic Books, 1988: 182-184.
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10. Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023: 30-66.
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11. David Dayen, “the Inflation Reduction Act at Two,” American Prospect, August 16, 2024, https://prospect.org/environment/2024/08/16-inflation-reduction-act-at-two/
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12. Paul Debbar, “How the Inflation Reduction Act made renewables inflation worse, “ The Hill, July 12, 2024, https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/4763935-inflation-reduction-act-renewables/
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13. For detail on this see Kim Moody, “The Crisis of Left Electoralism,” New Politics 76, Vol. XIX No. 4, Winter 2024: 57-65; Kim Moody, “AOC’s Journey to the Center,” Against The Current 228, January-February 2024: 22-27; Kim Moody, “Stuck in the Mud, Sinking to the Right: 2022 Midterm Elections, Against The Current 223, March-April 2023: 23-28.
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14. There is a certain irony in the fact that DSA “electeds” in Congress have raised millions for conventional campaigns, while DSA is itself is perpetually broke.
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15. Osborn’s campaign was union-backed, but it raised a lot of money from various sources, most of it from out-of-state, and less than half from small donations of $200 or less — over $6 million total according to OpenSecrets.org.
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January-February 2025, ATC 234