The Democratic Party Debacle in the 2024 Election
The only demographic among all ages and races where the Democratic Party increased their vote support was among the affluent and among the super-rich.
This post is the third in a short series from the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Website explaining the causes and consequences of the Trump victory and elaborating a political strategy for the working class to fight back against the incoming administration. Each post has been transcribed from a recent online meeting organized by the SEP and aims to provide a critical analysis of the election’s outcome and to outline a socialist strategy to mobilize workers in the immense struggles that lie ahead.
David North, national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party and chairman of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board:
I just want to make a point here that we place a tremendous amount of central emphasis on the political education of the working class, of the youth, of all those who are serious in their commitment to the defense of democracy, to opposition to war, and the fight for socialism. A socialist movement is not built by dumbing down, by use of facile slogans. It builds on the basis of analysis, of an understanding of the lawful development of society, an understanding of the historical experiences of the last century and their importance for the developments which are taking place today. We’ve said this many times. We are living in a world whose problems would be very much recognized by the great revolutionary figures of the past. ‘The history of man is the history of class struggle,’ wrote Marx and Engels. Never was that historical analysis so clearly vindicated as in the conditions of our own time. We are engaged in a daily process of political analysis. The World Socialist Website, our principle organ of political analysis, is produced each day. Each day there is a perspective which explains the major events of the day and provides a path forward. It is subject to continuous censorship. We appeal to all of you to read the website every day and to make sure to distribute among your co-workers and fellow students those articles which you find particularly important. They need to be shared and distributed so that they get the widest possible circulation. The next speaker will be Eric London, a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party and writer for the World Socialist Website. He is going to analyze the election vote and what it revealed about the underlying forces and factors at work in the election of Trump.
Eric London, leading member of the Socialist Equality Party and writer for the World Socialist Web Site:
I’m going to try to jump right into it by breaking down through a combination of reviewing the election data and the exit poll data what this election tells us about the political situation here in the United States.
So, these are the final results, or at least the electoral college votes have all been tallied. Results are still coming in from the West Coast, but Trump has beaten Harris by 312 to 226 electoral votes. It is essentially the reverse of the 2020 outcome, just in terms of the electoral college. Trump has won over 50 percent of the popular vote, some 74 million votes, and Harris has won just under 48 percent of the vote, which will end up being closer to 71 million. And the map here shows that every single battle ground state that was up for grabs in this election was won by Trump, including all three of the industrial Midwestern ‘blue wall’ states, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
It’s worth just looking at these numbers. We now have three elections in which Trump has been the Republican candidate. Starting at the top here, looking at the popular vote, perhaps the single most important statistic from this election is that the Democratic Party lost about 10 million votes from the last election to this election. It was running the incumbent vice president, who had ran on the last ticket that received 81 million votes, and then, although Trump did not himself increase his vote total by a significant amount, he held steady, essentially increasing slightly from 74 million and change to 75 million. And the Democrats declined from over 80 million to just about 71 million, a massive, historic collapse in support. If you look at the bottom chart, this was the first time in these three elections that Trump has won a majority or a plurality of the votes. Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016 and to Biden by a substantial margin in 2020. This time, it appears he will have won by a substantial several-million vote margin. He has won more votes than any Republican candidate in the history of the country.
The Democratic Party ran a campaign based on a combination of right-wing economic policies and imperialism and identity politics. And these statistics are critical because they expose the fact that identity politics is not winning substantial, or really any, support beyond the most affluent 10 percent of the population to which the Democratic Party’s entire electoral strategy is pitched. In 2008, Black men voted for Obama by a 90 to 10 margin, an 80 percent margin of victory overall. The next few slides will be based on margin of victory. That has declined substantially now to only 56 percent. In a very brief period of time, that is a significant, significant decline in support for the Democratic Party candidate, and you can see that since 2008, it has been a more or less linear decline. And this period as well, and Obama’s presidency, was the culmination of the really vile right-wing politics based on personal, racial gender identity.
You see a similar process on a somewhat different, perhaps even greater, scale for Latino men. The Democratic Party has consistently beaten Republicans by a 30 percent margin for the last several cycles that, in this most recent election, turned into a defeat. Trump defeated the Democrats by a margin of 12 percent among Latino men.
And these numbers are perhaps even more significant. The percentage of young people who supported the Democratic Party—this has always been for the Democrats a question more of turnout, knowing that they will win votes from this demographic—and yet, in this election, in large part because so many young people who are opposed to the genocide in Gaza refused to vote for Harris due to her complicity and role in prolonging and escalating that genocide, the margin declined from 40 percent in 2008 to just 11 percent in this election.
These are two exit polls which show how the income breakdown has changed from 2020 to 2024. I want to remind people this is just four years. This is not a very long period of time. And substantial changes therefore should be really understood to be quite significant. If you look at the top chart, the Democratic Party has traditionally, at least since the New Deal, built its electoral strategy on winning the votes of working-class voters. The old saying was that on Election Day, the country was Republican until 5PM when the working class gets off work and starts voting. The Democrats defeated Trump in 2020 by substantial margins among those making less than 100 thousand dollars, and they lost among those making more than 100 thousand dollars. In other words, Trump, generally, was winning more votes from rich people, and Biden was winning more votes from the working class. That is reversed in 2024. If you look to the bottom half of this slide, Harris won among the poorest section of the population only very narrowly 50 to 46. Trump defeated Harris by 53 to 45 percent among those making 30 to 50 thousand dollars and 51 to 46 percent among those making 50 to 100 thousand dollars. But here is where it is most significant: The only demographic among all ages and races where the Democratic Party increased their vote support was among the affluent and among the super-rich. I think for the first time in any federal election for which exit poll data is available, Harris won 51 to 47 among those making 100 to 200 thousand dollars and also defeated Trump among those making 200 thousand dollars or more.
As we said, the Democratic Party saw a massive collapse in support from the working class in this election. It was less that Trump was able to increase his support, because we know that his vote totals stayed relatively the same from 2020, but it is here that one really sees where the Democratic Party lost. Of course, 90 percent of the population more or less fits into one of those three categories on the left, and you can’t win an election in a country of 350 million people if you suffer this type of electoral debacle among masses of working people.
Now, there are multiple elements to these two exit polls. Don’t look yet at the red and blue numbers. Look at the number of people who said in 2020 that the coronavirus has caused them severe hardship: 16 percent. 39 percent said moderate financial hardship. 44 percent said no financial hardship at all. So, over half the population said that there was some financial hardship caused by the pandemic. Fast forward to 2024 and look at those same numbers on the bottom half. 75 percent of the population is experiencing hardship, a massive increase in just four years. 22 percent, up from 16 percent, say that hardship is severe, and 53 percent up from 39 percent say the hardship is moderate. Only a quarter of the population said they are suffering from no hardship, and Harris did very well among these voters, among voters who have nothing really to worry about financially, who do not worry about making ends meet, who aren’t worried about where their next paycheck is going to come from or how they can afford groceries or gas. Harris of course did very well [with those voters]. They were running a campaign on keeping America great and maintaining joyfulness, and of course this had the result of angering the vast majority of the population, who is suffering financially.
This is a similar slide which shows, again, just looking at the percentage of the population which thinks the country is on the right and wrong track, it was 62 percent to 33 percent wrong track versus right track in 2016, and now, only 6 percent of the country is enthusiastic about conditions in the United States. 19 percent are I guess satisfied, which is a somewhat ambiguous term, but 75 percent of the country is either angry or dissatisfied. And, again, Harris performs very well among that tiny sliver of the population that is enthusiastic, whose stock portfolios have been increasing over the past four years, who aren’t concerned with the genocide, who aren’t concerned or aware of—or maybe even making money off of—the escalation of the war against Russia.
And now I want to turn to some regional points because this was basically a universal shift toward Trump from the last election. And these are historic changes. This is the point we’re stressing. It really can’t be said anymore that the Democratic Party is the party of the working class. The Republican Party, of course, is not either. And Trump and his allies attempted to present otherwise, but all those like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez who run around the country trying to convince people to smaller and smaller audiences that the Democratic Party can be pushed to the left, pushed to adopt progressive policies—that is falling on deaf ears among masses of working people. Fall River, Massachusetts, one of the oldest industrial areas in the country, an old textile hub, has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 1924. Obama won it by 50 percent. Hillary Clinton won it by 22 percent. Trump won it for the first time in 2024. Go down to Hidalgo County, Texas, which is in the Rio Grande Valley and voted for the Democratic candidate for generations. It even voted for Clinton by a massive margin. Biden’s margin was about half that in 2020. But Trump flipped it and won by 16 percent in 2024. There has been much comment on Dearborn, Michigan, which has voted for the Democratic Party for generations and voted for Biden by an 88 percent margin. And Trump won Dearborn by 6 percent in the most recent election as a result of massive opposition among Arab American and young voters over the Biden-Harris Administration’s role in the genocide. A couple more quick examples just to show that this is not just in the North East or in the South or in any one or another area. San Joaquin County, California, a Central Valley working-class town, working-class county and home to Stockton, California, voted for Obama by 10 percent, Clinton by 13 percent, and Biden by 14 percent. Trump won it by 2 percent. Mahoning County in East Ohio, which is where Youngstown, the old steel center, is, voted for Democrats in every election since 1972. Trump did win it in 2020 by a hair. But he increased his margin by 11 percent and won it again in 2024.
Again, Trump won 75 million votes, but he did not increase his votes by a massive amount. It was largely Democratic Party voters who stayed home or voted for Trump, who had voted for the Democrats in 2020. Take a look at some of these. These numbers may change slightly with some votes outstanding in some of these cities. But 400 thousand people in Chicago who voted for the Democratic Party in 2020 did not do so in 2024. That’s a 40 percent decline, almost one out of every two Cook County voters who voted for Biden did not vote for Harris. In Detroit, there was a decline of 65 thousand. Philadelphia, 50 thousand. Boston 22 percent decline, 60 thousand. And again, this is taking place in all different regions. In Houston, there was a 115 thousand vote decline. Similar in smaller Jackson, Mississippi, a largely black city, 75 thousand people voted for Biden in 2020 and 55 thousand in 2024. And even in New York City, in every borough, the Democratic Party suffered a debacle. They lost 100 thousand votes or more in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens, declines of between 20 percent and 30 percent. In other words, one in five people to one in three people who voted for the Democrats in 2020 did not do so in 2024.
Again, this is just another example. In California, the Democrats’ margin has shrunk in every election. You see here on the right a list of counties where the vote shifted to the right, and it includes a lot of these working-class Central Valley counties, Fresno, San Joaquin, and others as well.
None of this means that this is a very right-wing electorate, and that is critical to point out. In fact, when asked what they think about policies, the overwhelming majority of Americans say that they support expanding Medicare, they support cutting the cost of prescription drugs, they want to make corporations and the wealthy pay higher taxes, and you’re talking about 85 percent margins on some of these. Expanding social security, rent increase cap…
Building mass numbers of affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, eliminating all medical debt. 65 percent of the country supports that. Could you imagine that? That is something that would never even be discussed in bourgeoisie politics. The point here is this is an oligarchic system in which 90 percent of the population have absolutely no say in having any of the policies which they largely support be enforced by either party.
I think one point which the World Socialist Website has made very forcefully is that the election outcome and the coming to power of Donald Trump represents a sort of coming into being or an expression of the real forms of social relations in America, which is that this is a society that is dominated by the new oligarchy, by a tiny sliver of the population which controls almost all of the wealth. According to a study which was recently published by Americans for Tax Fairness, just 150 billionaire families alone spent 2 billion dollars on the 2024 election, almost double the amount those same families spent on the 2020 campaigns, a massive increase in influence.
These are some of the top donors. It’s a lot of money for Republicans, but the Democrats are well represented as well. Timothy Mellon donated 200 million dollars. Go down the list here, and you can see. These are the people who make the decisions about policy in the United States.
This is another chart that shows some of these families. The Adelson family, Musk in the 130 millions. The Singers, the Bloombergs gave 45 million dollars to the Democratic Party. This is an oligarchic system of government.
There is an important book that was published in 2021 by an Oxford University professor, Joe Foweraker. He makes a couple of points about the way that American oligarchy today is different than the system of blatant corruption which existed in the Gilded Age of the 1890s, for example. He makes a couple of very important points. He says: ‘These modern robber barons are successful in converting their market power into the political power to pursue policies that either distort markets or prevent government from reforming markets. The new barons do not therefore need public subsidies or favorable loans; they simply require a compliant federal government that allows them to impose their lucrative tolls on society.’ He continues: ‘The rise and rise of the financial oligarchy saw the balance of power shift decisively away from the elected constitutional government towards the unelected and largely unaccountable oligarchy. This was not the result of bribes or kickbacks or blood ties to important politicians—the usual sources of power in emerging markets plagued by ‘crony capitalism’, nor to special access to government funding or contracts, but to a highly favorable tax regime and to a permissive regulatory regime engineered to suit oligarchic interests.’ And the last quote I’ll read from this important book makes the point that the American government cannot be considered a democracy. It’s what he calls a ‘patrimonial state,’ a state which is inherited from one generation of oligarchs to the next. He says: ‘The role of the patrimonial state in guaranteeing the conditions of oligarchic rule is routinely projected and reproduced through a political class of this kind that comfortably adapts to different institutional templates within democracy, frequently finds expression in political families, clans or tribes, and typically survives generational change. It is alleged that just such a self-perpetuating and self-aggrandizing political class exists in America, with its apex in Congress and the higher echelons of the federal administration. Thus, virtually all senators and most of the representatives in the House are members of the top one percent and are sustained and rewarded by the top one percent, as are the key executive branch policymakers on trade and economic policy.’
This chart shows on the left the increase, though it ends in 2015, in the total net worth of the two houses of Congress combined, which has doubled in the last ten years. The chart to the right shows the wealth of some of the richest members of Congress. You can see some in the many hundreds of millions.
This will come as a surprise to nobody, but donations have continued to increase over the years and increased massively in the last election as well.
One can speak of the Supreme Court, the fact that five of its members were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, the fact that many of them have been embroiled in the most naked and putrid corruption scandals that the Supreme Court has ever seen. But this is a chart which shows that although the Democrats and Republicans in the outgoing Senate control 50 seats each, the Democrats won 20 million votes more to get those 50 seats than Trump did if one looks at the 2018, 2020, and 2022 Senatorial cycles. That’s about half-a-millions voters more per seat the Democrats have to win than Republicans. And in the 2016 cycle, this is perhaps most glaring—and calling for the abolition of the Senate under these conditions is reasonable—because in that cycle, the Democrats won 51 million votes and won only 12 seats. The Republicans won 10 million votes less, but they won 10 more seats. This is American democracy. Just 43 of the 435 seats in the House this year were competitive. By comparison, more than 100 seats were competitive in 2010. And then if one looks at these absurd geographical discrepancies, why does Wyoming have two Senate seats? Why does each of the Dakotas have two Senate seats? Under these conditions, the weight of reaction drags the entire system to the right. In Wyoming, your vote for Senate counts 68 times more than it does if you live in California. So, I’d like to make a couple points in conclusion. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently went on social media and gave a speech. As a result of the impact of this election, this is the main point she wanted to make: ‘We have to be able to construct a culture that is productive, that is focused on growing, that is not sectarianism, that does not tear one another apart,’ over what she calls ‘the narcissism of small differences.’ Well, Congresswoman, the genocide in Gaza is not a small difference. The illegalizing of strikes is not a small difference. The escalation of the war against Russia, a war that you voted for to give tens of millions of dollars taken away from working families who need them, on a war that risks nuclear catastrophe—that is not a small difference. The Biden Administration’s asylum ban is not a small difference. And as for the attack on sectarianism, all they mean by that is that we oppose the Democratic Party, that the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Website are fighting to break people from the Democrats and the trade union bureaucracies and to build a mass movement in the working class that is capable of fighting for the expropriation of the wealth of the rich, for placing the banks and corporations under public social ownership to direct social production to meet human need and not private profit. Those are the policies which we are fighting for in the working class, and that is not sectarianism, but it goes to show that the DSA, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez are primarily concerned about a real revolution on the left. And that is what we are fighting to build. And we ask all of you to join us.
David North, national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party and chairman of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board:
Thank you, Eric. I think your report exemplifies the well-known adage that ‘facts are hard things.’ We challenge the Democratic Party and its apologists to provide their analysis of what these votes mean, how they have managed to forfeit the votes of millions and millions of working Americans who are suffering under the present system, how they could claim continuously that this is the best of all possible worlds when facts and statistics show precisely the opposite. There are conclusions to be drawn from this. I just want to make one more point. Bernie Sanders just a week before the election said that Biden is the most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Anyone who even knows anything about bourgeoisie politics would recognize the absurdity of such a statement. Roosevelt was the representative of the New Deal, which brought in, if nothing else, Social Security. Kennedy and Johnson’s administrations were associated with the preparation and implementation of what was then known as the Great Society, which witnessed the last period of social reform in the United States more than a half-century ago. What did Biden accomplish? Nothing of the sort. In fact, the statistics presented by Eric document the escalation of a massive ongoing transfer of wealth to the rich. It would be worthwhile to present graphs which show the relationship between the massive bailouts which began in 2008, and which, in the space of the last sixteen years, have quadrupled the national debt from somewhere in the area of 8 trillion to 35 trillion, and the exponential growth in the wealth of the ruling class. These facts and these statistics provide a rational explanation to what the Democratic Party tries to suggest is an irrational outcome, that somehow the people just made a mistake, that they didn’t appreciate all the wonders of their rule. And, of course, people like Ocasio-Cortez exemplify that. They call our criticism ‘bad-faith’ criticism. Well, our criticism corresponds to facts.