Peter Solenberger
The voting in the painfully long and expensive 2024 US elections ended on November 5. The vote-counting continues as I write on November 10, but the overall results are clear.
Donald Trump has won a second term as president. The Republicans have a majority in the Senate and seem on their way to a slim majority in the House of Representatives. The balance in state governorships is unchanged. Seven of ten state referenda on abortion were won by the pro-choice side. In Florida, an abortion-rights initiative won 57 percent of the vote but didn’t overcome the 60 percent threshold for passage.
In this article, a follow-up to my earlier article, Capitalism, democracy and the 2024 US elections, I’ll take up four questions: 1) What happened in the 2024 US elections? 2) Why did it happen? 3) What comes next? 4) What is to be done?
What happened in the 2024 US elections?
An estimated 154.8 million people voted in the 2024 US elections, out of 244.7 million
eligible to vote, a participation rate of 63.3 percent. This is down from the 2020 participation rate of 66.4 percent, but still quite high by US standards.
Trump currently has 74.7 million votes, 50.5 percent of the count. Kamala Harris has 71.0 million votes, 48.0 percent of the count. These numbers will change as more votes are counted. Most likely, Harris will narrow the gap between her total and Trump’s, since most of the remaining uncounted votes are in Democratic areas, but the gap is too big for her to catch up. Trump currently has a 312 to 226 lead in the Electoral College, which is unlikely to change.
The Republicans have gained three Senate seats and are likely to gain one more, giving them a 53 to 47 majority. The Republicans have won 213 House seats, the Democrats have won 205 seats, and 17 races are too close to call. When these are decided, the Republicans are likely to have maintained their narrow majority.
At the state level, as mentioned above, no governorships changed hands, and abortion rights won in seven referenda, gained a majority in eight, and lost only in two.
Trump’s current count of 74.7 million votes is slightly up from his 2020 count of 74.2 million. Harris’s current count of 71.0 million is sharply down from Biden’s 2020 count of 81.3 million. The gap may narrow, as more votes are counted, but the main story seems clear: millions who voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris.
The three leftwing presidential candidates got nearly 900,000 votes: 699,151 for Jill Stein of the Green Party, 124,635 for Claudia De la Cruz of the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and 67,867 for Cornel West, an independent Black radical.
Why did it happen?
Harris’s loss is partly an expression of the racism and sexism endemic in US politics and stirred up by Trump’s demagoguery. Barack Obama’s candidacy broke through the racial barrier in 2008. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was unable to break through the gender barrier in 2016. Harris’s candidacy was unable to break through the double barrier in 2024.
Harris’s loss is also an expression of the workings of the US political system, described in Capitalism, democracy and the 2024 US elections. The separation of powers, the system of checks and balances, the Electoral College, the Senate, the filibuster, lifetime appointment of Supreme Court justices, states’ rights, the corrupting influence of money in politics, the revolving door between government and business, the corporate media, and all the other undemocratic aspects of the US political system mean that the government can do only what the ruling class wants it to do.
The result at the federal level is a governmental alternation between the two capitalist parties, generally every eight years. One party makes promises, energizes its base, gets elected, fails to carry out its promises, discourages its base, and gets voted out, giving the other party its turn. The alternation between Democrats and Republicans traps workers into endlessly chasing the lesser evil.
In 2008, Barack Obama promised “change we can believe in,” failed to deliver, and disappointed the Democratic base. In 2016, Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State, ran as a continuation of the Obama administration. Enough voters had fallen away so that she lost, giving Trump the presidency.
In 2020, Joe Biden was elected due to popular revulsion against Trump, but this disrupted, rather than cancelled the pattern. The Biden administration produced little change in government policy, even on immigration, where the rhetoric of Biden and Trump was very different. In July 2024, the Biden administration reverted to the Trump policy of rejecting all asylum seekers at the southern border and sending them back to Mexico.
In 2024, Trump won a majority of white working-class voters with two main issues: the economy and immigration. The Biden administration prided itself on how well the economy was doing — a “soft landing” from the Covid crisis. But for most workers, the “soft landing” was a return to where they had been under Trump before Covid, except that interest rates and the costs of food, energy, and housing were far higher. On immigration, the administration seemed to have adopted Trump’s policy.
The Democrats had no adequate response on either the economy or immigration. They couldn’t champion measures to redistribute income from the capitalists to the workers, because they’re in the pockets of the capitalists. They aren’t brave enough to say that the US needs more immigrants to compensate for an aging population and immigrants need equal rights.
Harris and the Democrats campaigned mainly around democracy and abortion rights. Democracy was a strong argument with relatively well-off liberals, but it had little resonance with most voters. The Democrats were too involved in the deportation of immigrants, the breaking up of homeless encampments, militarization of police, and repression of Palestine solidarity actions to be credible. Their attempts to prosecute Trump seemed too much like using their offices to punish their enemies.
Abortion rights was the Democrats’ strongest issue. Trump claimed that he opposed a nationwide ban on abortion and would veto one, if it got to his desk. But he could be expected to back measures to stop women in states that ban abortion from getting medicinal or out-of-state abortions. The argument was strong, but it wasn’t enough.
What comes next?
If the Republicans win the House of Representatives, they will have a trifecta — the presidency and both houses of Congress — as well as a six-to-three majority on the Supreme Court. The second Trump administration will certainly move to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy enacted by the first Trump administration and set to expire next year.
The Trump administration will try to roll back government regulations to limit emissions, to curtail drilling and fracking for oil and gas, and to promote electric vehicles. The rollbacks will be harmful, but the government was doing nowhere near enough to begin with. And the administration has its own internal conflicts. Trump’s biggest booster is Elon Musk, who makes billions selling electric vehicles.
The Trump administration will make border-enforcement crueler, but the Biden administration had already reverted to the Trump policy of keeping asylum-seekers out. Trump talks of rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants, but the US economy needs them, particularly in agriculture, construction, meatpacking, restaurants and hotels. Trump himself makes millions from undocumented workers in his hotels, casinos, and golf courses. This will limit what he can do, other than rant.
The Supreme Court has ruled that states may determine the status of abortion rights. A majority of states now protect them, including the seven that voted to do so this year. It would be very difficult for anti-choice state governments to prevent women from traveling to other states to get abortions or obtaining mifepristone and misoprostol for medicinal abortions.
The Trump Justice Department will likely revert to its 2017 position that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, does not apply to gender identity. In more progressive states, trans people will still be protected by state law, but their rights will be under constant attack.
Overall, Trump aspires to do more harm than he can. His administration will be cruel and nasty, but it will also be inept. It will likely preside over the next recession, which may well doom the next Republican nominee.
What is to be done?
Trump’s election is a blow, but it’s not the end of US democracy or the class struggle. Democracy is still the best possible shell for capitalism, and the two-party system still serves the capitalists quite well. The struggle must continue on the picket lines and in the streets.
The tasks of revolutionaries fundamentally remain what they were: To build unions and other mass organizations, to promote democracy and militance there, to lead struggles, to expose capitalism, imperialism, and the two-party system, to resist militarism and war, to build solidarity with Palestine and all other struggles against oppression, to build workers’ parties, revolutionary parties, and a revolutionary International.