President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the November 7 United States presidential election was in many ways a shock—the Republican nominee took the popular vote for the first time since George W. Bush in 2004, and won every single swing state against Democratic opponent (and sitting Vice President) Kamala Harris.
What led to this massive failure of the Democratic Party apparatus to maintain its hold on power? Peoples Dispatch has published, in three parts, a discussion between socialist journalists and left leaders Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear on the key reasons behind Trump’s victory—demystifying the liberal argument that the country has supposedly moved to the right. This discussion originally took place on The Socialist Program, on BreakThrough News.
According to Becker and Puryear, the cost of living crisis is a far more critical issue than the Democratic Party operatives let on. “The Democrats failed to deliver,” Puryear argues. “Harris was speaking to the issue, but not actually providing a solution that meets the scale of the problem” faced by working people in the US.
Read the full interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity, below:
Brian Becker: Donald Trump has won the presidency for a second time. Donald Trump won the popular vote. He won the Electoral College. Four years ago, Joe Biden won by a greater margin than that in terms of popular vote. The Democrats controlled the House and the Senate. What happened [in this election] from your point of view?
Eugene Puryear: Obviously, turnout overall was lower. Of course, with some of these numbers, we take them with a grain of salt because as you mentioned, they will change as more states come in. You can take them as rough proxies.
The Democrats lost something like 14 million votes, Trump lost nearly 2 million votes. A lot of people who voted in the last election cycle just stayed home. Now, the question is, why did they stay home?
There are a lot of different reasons why that may be, and why we may be seeing some of these pieces. But I want to hone in on one particular piece, and that is if you compare 2020 to 2024, the percentage of [voters] making under 100,000 dollars went down 14%.
When you look at what’s going on with the economy, which people were saying was their major issue, it’s kind of always the economy, right? Because we live under capitalism. Your paycheck is your ration card. People are always going to be primarily concerned with how to have shelter, food, clothing, so on and so forth.
We are coming out of one of the largest inflationary spirals that many people have seen in their entire lifetime. We can actually measure where the cost of living crisis in the United States for almost all people has skyrocketed. You have the Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey saying that there’s 155 million people, roughly, who are having trouble making ends meet week to week. 21 million people roughly, that at least sometime in the past week, actually went hungry. So the level of hardship is so significant.
97% of Black respondents under 30 just tell The New York Times that the economy was poor or fair. We’ve seen the New York Times poll that also showed that something close to 70% of people in the United States think the economy needs to be massively transformed or completely torn down. Year over year wages have gone up about 4%, but the cost of housing has gone up about 4.9%. The cost of eating food away from home has gone up about 4%. The cost of electricity is going to be about 4%. Your wages aren’t keeping up with your rent. They’re barely keeping up or basically on par with the cost of powering your home, your Internet, your air conditioning, your electricity.
The cost of going out with your friends to try to have a good time, and to forget some of these bad times, has also basically been essentially the same increase in costs as your wages. People’s ability to survive is not keeping up with their incomes.
Then you put that together with the fact that you have a 14% reduction in terms of percentage of the electorate of people making 100,000 dollars and below. You can start to see that a big part of what took place in the 2024 election here was that a large number of working class people just did not believe that either of the two party candidates had any solution for this massive crisis that was affecting them. Many of them chose not to vote.
That heavily affected all of the other issues that were playing into the election. Of course, there was the anger with the Democratic Party amongst many of its core supporters over their complicity and participation in the genocide in Gaza.
There was the manipulation of the immigration issue here in the United States, where a lot of the economic hardship was placed on the backs of immigrants, where both major parties essentially pandered to that.
We’re in a rapidly changing cultural environment in America. There is a huge amount of demagogy around the issue, for instance, of trans rights and trying to exploit the various different views people may have about the trans community that are incorrect, or wrong, or bigoted.
I don’t want to just say it’s all one factor, but I think it’s very notable that we are in a massive situation of economic crisis.
In almost every single country, the leader who was in power during this inflationary crisis has been turfed out, regardless of their politics. We’re seeing a similar trend here in the United States of America, that after the massive COVID-19 crisis, people have seen that there is this huge corporate smash and grab raid that drove up prices, only for the needs of corporate profiteering.
We had seen over COVID how easy it is to do things that help working class people. People just could not fathom that the political system was offering them so little in terms of actual solutions to their core economic issues.
Kamala Harris lost this race. The Biden administration, the Democratic Party lost this race, because they could not offer an alternative to the Republican far right agenda that also is offering no solutions, but was able to speak more substantially to a larger subset of the population.
BB: You see all of these liberal commentators who are pro Kamala Harris say that people in the United States are so backward, so reactionary, they voted for this racist, this reactionary xenophobe, Donald Trump, this misogynist.
Well, Eugene, the Democrats had control of the House and the Senate and the White House, they could have done anything they wanted in the last four years. And they apparently did whatever they wanted, and it didn’t satisfy the needs of working class people.
Let’s go back to inflation. Harris said price gouging is bad. Well, all of the inflation is price gouging. I mean, inflation isn’t something from God. It’s not divinely mandated. Capitalist companies raise prices. And so the government has the ability, the executive authority, to be able to do something about it. And Kamala Harris and Biden maybe whined about it once in a while when they were trying to get votes. But they did nothing to stop this looting of the working class, which is called inflation, but it’s really looting for corporate profit.
EP: The Economic Policy Institute has done a lot of studies on this issue and the height of the inflationary spiral, and was saying that 50 odd cents of every dollar of inflation was going towards corporate profits. If you average it out from 2021 now to 2024, it’s a little bit less than that. But you can still see a substantial amount of every dollar of inflation is going directly to corporate profits. So there is no doubt whatsoever that this was the case.
There are a number of other aspects that spoke to this, especially the issue of concentration in certain industries, especially the meatpacking industry, where you have collusion between different companies to keep the prices at the level that they want to keep them at.
Everywhere you look, it’s very clear that there is a corporate price gouging reality. The point that’s deeper here is that there is no real answer coming from the Biden-Harris administration.
The irony is that the White House actually put out a number of very good reports and studies actually laying out the role of corporate profiteering, monopolization and other things that were causing inflation. But they took no real substantial action. They didn’t try to put in any sort of price controls or price caps of any significance. The Kamala Harris plan for inflation was never really explained. She said that she was going to keep your grocery prices down and she said it over and over again. But she never really explained how she was going to do it.
The one thing that she shied away from was the overall issue of price caps. Her plan essentially was to make it easier for the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, to sue companies over price gouging, which means that two years down the line, after you get through some long court case, the company might have to pay a fine and be held responsible.
We know that the fear of regulation doesn’t really prevent big corporations in America from doing anything whatsoever. There are dozens of states, including Republican led states, that have very similar provisions and power, and none of them were really used to bring down prices in any substantial way over the course of the inflationary price spiral.
So she was speaking to the issue, but not actually providing a solution that meets the scale of the problem.
The Democrats failed to deliver. Kamala Harris is saying we should increase the national minimum wage to $15 an hour. That obviously would have to pass Congress. And if they can’t pass the signature agenda of Joe Biden across a range of programs, when they controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency, how could you expect them, in a potential era of divided government, to just pass one policy like raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour?
When you look at people saying in polls that they trust Trump to handle the economy more than they trusted Harris, I think a lot of that is the credibility gap, the inability to actually address the price spiral as it was happening, the inability to actually deliver on things like a child tax credit and other social protections that people enjoyed during the brief pandemic Goldilocks zone for social policy.
It’s the inability to present a plan going forward that was actually credible, in terms of people being able to understand how the policies were going to translate into lower prices in the midst of a massive cost of living crisis.
Brian Becker is a founding member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the host of the Socialist Program.
Eugene Puryear is a journalist at the US movement-centered Breakthrough News and a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
