by Marc Stier, Executive Director, Pennsylvania Policy Center
Pennsylvania Policy Center doesn’t endorse candidates. But we can react to the results.
And we, like you who follow us, are hurting today. We are frustrated and scared.
While we need to take some time to deal with the emotional upheaval created by an election result that will no doubt undermine progress to our goals, it’s important that we understand where we are and what we can do to save our country and move it in a better direction.
You may not yet be ready to think about that. But here are some initial thoughts for when you are.
1. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of you who worked so hard over the last weeks and months to stop this from happening. It was truly impressive and inspiring. Please don’t think your work was in vain. As we will point out later, there is a way forward and we are going to need the same level of commitment and fervor to save our country and put it back on the right track.
2. It’s possible to both over-interpret and under-interpret the election results. Given what I have seen, both reactions are a mistake.
a. Do not over-interpret the results and conclude that this election shows a fundamental change in the country or a huge movement toward the Right and fascism. And don’t think that Democrats made fundamental errors in how they ran this race. Both Left and Center Democrats are going to make this claim. The Left is going to say that Harris should have embraced a much-further-left program. The Center is going to say that Democrats should have fled from our principles on cultural issues: opposing patriarchy and white supremacy, defending immigrants and transgender folks, etc. I am pretty certain both claims are wrong. While at the end of this essay, I do suggest that more progressive messaging is going to be necessary in the future, I have doubts that it would have made much of a difference this year.
Why? Well as I have been pointing out since we started talking about replacing Biden, every incumbent government in the developed world—left, center, and right—has been defeated in an election in the last 18 months. The reason is obvious: people really and truly hate inflation. And that’s reasonable. Higher prices have made life much harder for all of us. If we lived in a country where more people had a true understanding of politics and economics, things might be different today. Voters would understand that we’ve been facing world-wide inflation caused by the shift from a pandemic to a post-pandemic economy—not something caused by Biden’s policies. But that’s sadly just beyond most people.
And the second problem is immigration. Polls show that a majority of people don’t oppose immigration. But the idea of an out-of-control border is particularly scary to the half of us who are xenophobic. And the lies that the US spends huge sums of money supporting undocumented immigrants or that immigrants are taking native-born Americans’ jobs are too plausible to those people, especially when they are a looking for an explanation for their economic distress.
The border issue was a clearly a policy error on Biden’s watch. After some initial changes in policy, which led to little increase in the number of people crossing the border, undocumented immigration spiked. It’s not something I focus on, and I admit I really didn’t notice it at first. And when I did, I wasn’t that concerned because I know that immigration ultimately helps our country. But it did put a burden on some communities. And the huge number of border crossings gave Trump an opportunity to exploit the issue and falsely blame our economic problems on immigration. That we could, and did, rightly blame Trump for killing a bipartisan border control bill did not help much because that was too complicated an explanation for a public that pays little attention to legislative action.
And, of course, the third problem in this election is that Harris is a Black woman. That barrier, by itself, may account for the small difference in the popular vote.
I thought we could overcome these problems because our elections had increasingly come to look like late-nineteenth-century elections, with very few people switching sides. In elections during that period the parties mostly fought to mobilize their own voters. Those elections were very different from mid-twentieth-century elections in which the parties’ visions were more closely aligned and there was a large floating vote that swung with economic conditions. The problem this time is that because our country is so closely divided, a change in even the small floating vote could still lead to a major shift in who won. Democrats did not lose very much of the vote to Republicans. But even when the potential swing vote is no more than 5% to 6%, inflation and immigration issues convinced swing voters that we are living in bad times.
This small swing in the national vote cost Democrats all of the battleground states and possibly enough seats in both the House and Senate to give Trump a trifecta.
I’m not going to spend time here explaining in detail why a big move by Harris to the left or center would not have helped, but it should mostly be obvious from what I have written. Given that many swing voters were already lost to the Democrats because of inflation and immigration, and many Republicans were in fact scared by Trump’s fascism, it made sense for Harris to try to appeal to the latter group. It appears that folks on the Left supported Harris. Jill Stein’s support, especially in Pennsylvania, was half what it was in 2016. And Harris picked up some support from college-educated Republican women who were scared by Trump. But unfortunately, it was not enough to make up for the couple of points swing to Trump among those without a college education.
The important point I want to make here is that neither the election nor polling on economic issues shows a huge change in the mind of the public. There is actually majority support for the center–left economic policies Biden supported. And even on cultural issues, we remain ahead. A majority of people support abortion and reproductive healthcare rights, immigration through legal channels, and specific efforts to overcome white supremacy and patriarchy if framed properly. We are even making progress on transgender issues, the latest and somewhat effective Republican cultural dog whistle.
b. We should also not under-interpret the election results. Trump has taken advantage of inflation and immigration issues to win an election as the head of what is clearly a fascist movement. I believe that the last two weeks, in which he embraced fascism more clearly than ever, probably hurt him. But he still won. And even if his majority was a product of a “times are bad” shift in swing voters, a large part of our population embraced a fascist, racist, and sexist candidate for president. They did it with their eyes open, without any doubts about what Trump and his movement stands for and seeks to create.
And the base of that movement is just horrid. In the last few weeks, I’ve had to block more than four hundred people who have commented on our posts on the Penn Policy Center Facebook page with snarling, insulting, vicious, and horrifying comments about immigrants, women, and liberals. And those posts were accompanied by the most absurd ideas about public policy—ones utterly disconnected from reality. But Trump supporters believe them simply because Trump says so.
It is immensely difficult to have serious conversations with people who are part of a cult-like mass movement, let alone reduce the impact they have on the country and the rest of us. And, it is deeply frightening that so many of those people have utterly lost faith in our ideals of democracy and freedom.
While Trump’s slim victory is mainly driven by the immediate issues of inflation and immigration discussed above, the large Trump movement was created by deeper problems that we must learn how to better address. Most immediately, it is driven by patriarchy, white supremacy, and xenophobia as well as the backlash against the small steps toward progress we’ve made for women and Black and brown people. Racism, sexism, and distrust of immigrants have a very long history in the United States. But they have become even far more prominent among those on the Right in recent years. That’s not just because Trump’s vulgar embrace of them encourages people to express awful view. It’s also because his embrace of them gives people an explanation, however false, of troubles that are actually the result of a long-term economic crisis of our country, in which the rewards of our economy flow increasingly to wealth, not work.
3. Thus, the next four years are going to be scary and difficult. Trump, with the support of a Republican House and Senate, is likely to pursue horrible policies that threaten our democracy, our freedom, and our economy. Among them will be
– a movement to deport ten million undocumented immigrants, including those who have a right to be here as refugees, those who have been living in and contributing to our country for decades, and those who have children who are American citizens.
– tariffs that raise costs for Americans and a tax cut mainly for the ultra-rich and corporations.
– legislation to ban abortion nationwide.
– rollbacks of Biden’s bold climate change policies.
– a repeal in whole or part of the Affordable Care Act.
– cuts to Social Security and Medicare as the deficit increases due to Republican policies.
Our central political task in the next two years is to resist these initiatives. I do not want to sugar coat it: this will be a difficult task. My guess is that Republicans are not going to let the filibuster stand in their way to achieve their goals, and the economic ones can be attained through the reconciliation process, which means only a majority of senators will be needed to enact them. It will take vigorous organizing at both state and federal levels—from contacting legislators to taking to the streets at both the state and federal levels to win some victories. Fighting back effectively against deportations of immigrants may require emboldened state government action where Democrats are still in power, backed by direct citizen action, protest, and even blockades of the US Army. I very much fear that violence will result.
We will lose some battles. But if we can muster half the effort we put into this election, we will win many others. And most importantly, we will help Americans understand what is at stake. Our and our partners’ efforts made the 2017 tax cut deeply unpopular. We can do that again. And we can certainly do it against any legislation to eliminate the ACA, in whole or part, or to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare. We can do that for an abortion ban and the rollback of climate change policies as well. And we can do that against the effort to deport immigrants which, I believe, will also be deeply unpopular once people see it in action.
4. I believe that Trump and the right-wing radicals in Congress are likely to overreach and lead our country into economic disaster. And, given the usual midterm problems for the party in power, I believe that it is likely we can take back both houses of Congress in 2026.
The deficits caused by tax cuts, the tariffs, and the deportation of agricultural and construction workers is going to create serious inflation. Whether it happens by 2026 is in question, but it is likely. And that will mean that the swing vote in the next election will turn against the Republicans.
And the other radical right policies on abortion and climate change, adopted by Trump and the Republican Congress, will anger many people.
5. But to win those elections we are going to have to fight against efforts to diminish our democracy further. And we can’t count on the federal courts to help us. We will see movements in many states, including Pennsylvania, to make it harder to vote or to undermine the integrity of our elections. We will see movements in many states, including Pennsylvania, to make governments less responsible to the people. And perhaps even worse, we can expect Trump to use the federal government to reward his friends with economic benefits and harm his perceived enemies by denying them the benefits to which they are entitled or threatening them with investigation and jail. Already, we can see Democratic-leaning business people and editorial boards cowering in fear of retribution by Trump.
And unfortunately, with the Republican corruption of the US Supreme Court as well as courts in many states—but thankfully not yet Pennsylvania—it is going to be difficult to stop some of these things from happening.
But while our constitutional system is damaged, much of it still stands—most importantly federalism. Those of us who resist Trump can use our control of many state governments to limit the damage. Here in Pennsylvania, we still control the governor’s office and the Supreme Court, which, as it has done in the past, gives us leverage to stop some of the awful things the Republican General Assembly will try to do.
6. And finally, to win the future by winning elections and undermining fascism, we need your efforts to rebuild a genuine progressive movement and message while we are fighting back against Trump’s radical agenda.
That means, first, we need you to stay involved and committed, not just to resisting and rebuffing Trump’s fascism but to helping us refine and spread a progressive message.
I never thought that changing candidates was enough. I feared that we could not overcome the difficult economic conditions without a stronger progressive economic message that addresses forty years of declining economic well-being for most of us, while the ultra-rich and wealthy corporations benefited.
As I wrote earlier this year, the Biden legislative record in addressing these problems was quite good. But the Biden messaging was insufficient. People had no idea that Biden recognized and understood the problems they face, let alone put forward ideas to address them. Frankly, I don’t think we on the left/center did enough to explain that. And, sadly, those on the far left were so busy rehearsing their attacks on Democrats that they barely noticed when Democrats came through for working people.
While Harris went some way towards addressing the issue, her campaign was perhaps too afraid of sounding overly “leftist” to address the problem thematically either. She didn’t have to break with Biden to say,
“We understand that inflation hurt. We understand that you have not seen your economic well-being increase for a long time. But our economic problems are not recent. They didn’t start in 2021. For forty years, our economic system has rewarded work too little and wealth too much. But we can reverse these developments, starting in January, if you give us your support.
“President Biden and I have already has presented some answers. Our administration got Congress to enact some of them, such as our huge infrastructure bill, which is creating tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. We got the inflation reduction bill through Congress, which is responsible for the major progress we’ve made in addressing climate change, reducing the cost of prescription drugs, and increasing subsidies that have made health insurance less expensive. Some we could do with administrative action—like supporting unions, which has led to higher wages. Others, like our plans to reduce taxes for working people, and especially those with children, were in place for a brief time, cutting child poverty in half. But, their extension, as well as other policies, such as an increase in the minimum wage, has been blocked by the Republicans.
“There is much more we can do to make our economy work for you, not the corporations and wealthy. We can reduce housing costs. We can further reduce the costs of health care and child care. We can better empower unions to raise wages. And we can pay for our plans by requiring billionaires to pay their fair share of taxes. But we need your support to do this. Most importantly we need you to reject the efforts of billionaires to divided us, so that Donald Trump can reward them with tax cuts for them and cuts in vital programs for you.”
Harris said some of these things a bit more boldly than Biden did. But she could have presented these ideas in a more thematic way. Again, her campaign team was most likely concerned that she might sound too left-wing in doing so, which would undermine her attempt to appeal to Republicans who were disgusted with Trump.
Harris was walking a tightrope. On the one hand she had to convince working-class voters that the Democratic party would look out for them, even though they were angry about inflation and too often embraced the cultural right on immigration, race, and gender issues. On the other hand, she needed to reach upper-middle-class women, some of whom are former Republicans (but also cultural liberals) and may be dubious about progressive economic ideas.
She might have been better off tilting a little in one direction or the other. But she made what seems to us the sensible choice to try to build as broad a coalition as possible. Had she not been running against the headwinds of inflation and immigration issues it would have worked. But it fell just a little short.
Two things would have helped.
One is if she’d had more time to build a campaign.
The other would have been using the progressive narrative put forward over the last few years by organizations like ours and by Democratic politicians. We need to refine the narrative, but some of its basic elements seem clear to me:
– recognition of forty years of increasing hardship for all but the ultra-rich with wages going up slowly while prices for vital goods like health care, child care, housing, and education increase
– criticism of a tax system that puts the burden of common goods on working people while allowing the wealthy to pay less and less
– explicit attention to the efforts of the Right, and the ultra-rich and corporate fat cats who pay for their campaigns, to divide us based on, gender, race, sexual orientation, and where we were born to win votes for politicians who undermine our economic well-being
– identification of an enemy, the billionaire members of the corporate elite who have twisted our economy and politics to serve themselves not the rest of us for the last forty years.
This kind of bold and progressive thematic campaign is going to be central to winning the next election and the one after that. The elections will continue to be close because the fascist narrative appeals to dark human emotions that, sadly, are sometimes more powerful than the appeals to the common humanity, interests, and goals that animated Harris’s campaign.
But if we combine a powerful narrative with the kind of organizing we saw during this election—and if Trump’s policies are as disastrous as we expect—we will win close elections in the near future. And if those electoral victories are followed by new policies that help working people, we will gradually reduce the appeal of fascism and save our country from ruin.
