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chapotraphouse chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
HorseRabbit @lemmy.sdf.org

So why did they win?

The majority of Americans who voted, at least in the swing states, have voted for the republicans. Why? Do the republican policies reflect popular opinion? Or is it that their vibes are more aligned with the public? Or maybe people are worse off now than they were 4 years ago and are hoping to turn back time? As a non-american I don't quite get it. People must think their lives will materially improve under the republicans, but why?

121 comments

  • Look at the vote totals, (as of right now) Harris 66 mi vs Trump's 71, compare this to 2020, 81 Biden vs 74 Trump.There is also this Pew article which shows the breakdown of non-voters

    The simple conclusion is that the singularly most important thing a politician can do is excite and move their base. For how awful/low energy his campaign was this year, trump still excites and moves a base, while kamala was confused about what base to cater to- first calling Republicans weird then copying their platform and getting the dick Cheney approval.

    This all could have been avoided if the Dems actually had a primary this year, but I think the DNC is actually afraid of progressives taking the party back over

    • Wow.... So Harris just... lost 15 million voters? Trump didn't gain much but Harris managed to be so repulsive 15 million people just stayed home?

      • Yes, but no. More years for context (count in millions)

        2016: 66 Hillary v 63 Trump

        2012: 66 Obama v 61 Romney

        2008: 69 Obama v 60 McCain

        2020 was a rarity in terms of turnout, 4 years of trump motivated a lot of angry Dems, but 4 years of Nothing will fundamentally change doesn't really excite the base. Add on top of that the Dems last second changed their nominee to a person who dropped out of the 2020 primary because she did not have a base.. If I remember right, it was so bad even mayo Pete had a higher percentage of the black vote.

      • maybe those 15 million along with the rest of the nonvoters didnt see any benefit from biden kamala being in office for 4 years and so didnt care

    • I knew the turnout this time was going to be dogshit. Turnout is strongly correlated with a dem victory, but they only get turnout when they run someone who projects a break from the norm.

      Non-voters are converted into voters when there is uncertainty, but I think that also cuts both ways, if the electorate feels that nothing will change based on the options, voters get converted into non-voters.

      • The Dems pissing off the most volatile part of their electorate (the youth vote) probably didn't help either

  • Democrats had nothing to offer beyond not being Donald Trump. They copied his policies, celebrated endorsements from hardcore republicans, and bragged about wanting to put republicans in positions of power in Harris' cabinet. Every vote for Harris was a vote for Trump. Trump has been the center of the democratic party since he won the 2016 primary. The two cornerstones of democrats strategy have been that they are not the person Donald Trump and that any criticism of the democratic party is Russian propaganda. It works better than it should because most Americans have the memory and political literacy (and sometimes even the literal literacy) of a goldfish, but it doesn't work well enough to win elections unless their opponents do an even worse job campaigning.

    • this, and plus: the far right worldwide is offering the "radical" solution of tearing it all down. people want this, people are sick and tired of whatever we have now and republicans offered an alternative.

      the electoral "left" is pretty much just offering the status quo. nobody fucking wants the fucking status quo.

      • Let’s be real, the electoral left in the west is gone. Many reasons: the idiocy that de-Stalinisation was, completely derailing leftism for the next 70 years, the complete corruption of socdems into lackeys for capitalism, the decoupling of politics and economy in the west (bravo Jean money monet), and the slow, methodical, destruction of state programs and education. All of this led to a world where people cannot understand cause and effect, that politics and economy cannot be separated (no matter what the Central European Bank would like you to believe), and that the world isn’t a chaotic mess with evil forces pulling strings, but a rational one where material conditions dictate action and reaction.

        Naturally when all of these conditions are achieved, people will flock to a simplistic worldview and solution which is what fascism offers, no matter your skin colour or location, look at Japan or Rwanda for salient examples. You might say the same of Marxism, if you were deeply ignorant of how much work is required to study it and understand it, yet even cursory knowledge allows you to make more sense of the world. When I was a run of the mill EU neolib, I was confused at the world, and didn’t understand why so many people were furious at western governements, and thought slop like “Hypernormalisation” was groundbreaking, now I see it’s completely aimless and idealistic, and I understand the status quo is literally the devils work.

        Actually one funny outcome of becoming a hardcore communist and unapologetic Stalin fan is that my faith in Christianity which was practically gone has strengthened the more I learned. I remember meeting a communist priest who taught me about liberation theology, the guy thought that achieving communism was basically the second coming, that really inspired me.

        Now, coming back to your initial comment, it is true that after 70+ years of status quo bullshit, a lot of people have had enough and coincidentally, leftism is very, very slowly rebuilding itself in the west, sometimes in clumsy ways, but rebuilding nonetheless. We’ve seen attempts successful or not in France, the UK, Spain, even Canada or the US. Sometimes (most times) results are disappointing, or even crushing (looking at the NFP in my country), but results nonetheless. Hell, maybe the masks slipping off this past year regarding the genocide waged on Palestinians may be the proverbial punch in the face many need to finally wake up and organise, because blowback will come back home at some point.

    • Also, note how they lost Georgia. They only won it in 2020 thanks to people in the BLM and Sunrise Movement, who were quickly marginalized by Dems claiming it was thanks to Abrams. They then spent the entirety of Biden's admin shitting on them.

  • This is just what happens in a declining country with an enforced two party system: people blame the decline on the incumbent party and vote for the other party in a desperate attempt to right the ship. But the decline continues and people blame the decline on the new incumbent party and vote for the old incumbent party back in a desperate attempt to right the ship.

    At the end of the day, Harris couldn't distance herself from the Biden administration by virtue of being part of it. Her not invoking the 25th amendment meant that she either cosigns to everything the Biden administration has done, including genocide in Palestine, or lacks the leadership qualities to make decisive decisions. Factor in her being a terrible candidate in general and the (truthful) perception that she didn't earn her spot as the presidential candidate (ie she lost the only primary she participated in and was only handpicked at the last minute) and it shouldn't be that surprising that she got BTFO.

    I honestly think any Democratic candidate that isn't working directly for the Biden administration like Gruesome Newsome would beat Trump because Trump is also a known quality and a shadow of his former 2016 self, but it goes back to what I said in the first paragraph. The US is going to be worse off in 2028 than in 2024, people will blame it on the GOP, and whoever is the Democratic candidate would BTFO their Republican rival. The smarter political operatives like Gruesome Newsome understand this and are setting themselves up to run in 2028. He's probably going to push some ghoulish "liquidate the homeless" initiative in California to show how he's "tough on crime." I guess this also shows Harris's poor political instincts. In a way, the DNC pretty much set her up for failure whether they realized it or not.

  • In reality I think there's probably not just one reason you can point to. Inflation, refusal to do a primary, abysmal campaigning, et al. All of it is probably a factor to one extent or another.

    End of the day the one thing I do hope all of us on this site can agree to is that whatever the actual material reasons for it: the Democrats absolutely unquestionably deserved this loss.

    • Agreed. If you want to win you take every advantage you can get. Harris fucked up in many, many different ways, and the Dems as a whole have been fucking up for decades.

  • Sounds like historically low turnouts. It's entirely possible that the Democrats' behavior the last four years was so demoralizing and dispiriting that a couple million of their voters didn't bother.

  • The real story here is that Trump won the popular vote. That signals an enormous shift in sentiment and culture, and should be the subject of any serious analysis here. This is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of the liberal project and liberal vision--a total implosion of the do-nothing "centrist" political consensus. Democrats have shown over and over and over again that they have nothing to offer the majority of Americans. The Harris campaign was just the apotheosis of the trend: courting capital and neo-conservative ghouls while jettisoning any talk of policies that might help people. This is not a winning election strategy. That should be screamingly obvious now. People are angry, hurting, and looking for anyone that even suggests they understand that pain and might do something about it, even when the suggested solutions make no sense. The only sane response to this result is a SWEEPING reexamination of the neo-liberal consensus. Liberalism in its current form has failed most people, and the Democrats have failed to articulate any message or position that appreciates that. Until someone in the United States starts articulating a positive vision with policies to engender some hope for the future--healthcare for everyone, housing as a human right, SERIOUS action on climate change--the far right will keep winning. They're the only ones with ideas.

    • On the other side of that coin is that the voting base literally just collapsed from under the Democrats. They really went full on, "no more half measures" when it came to the left and abandoned any attempt to even lie about progressive leftist political values.

      Liberals will blame this loss on the left and they are correct to do so. It is the left's fault because that is how electoral politics work. You didn't court their vote and they didn't vote for you. Cause and effect.

      • I don't really see this as being the other side of the coin at all. Their voter base collapsed precisely because they failed to articulate any kind of positive vision or embrace any policies that might help the vast majority of Americans. People will not turn out to vote for you when you explicitly tell them you're not going to help them and that they should stop whining.

    • The real story here is that Trump won the popular vote.

      Second time the Democrats lost the popular vote since 1992. Most likely, the Democrats will shift even more right. They shifted right after getting stomped in 1988.

      • Yeah it would not surprise me at all if they took exactly the wrong lesson from this, but I think doing so would make it crystal clear that they're not operating in anything like good faith. The percentage of Republicans who voted for Harris was totally unchanged from the percentage who voted for Biden, and the traditional Democratic base just didn't vote for them. The rightward shift overwhelmingly hurt their electoral performance. If they move even further to the right, that's just an indication that they actually believe in those policies; they won't be able to hide behind the fig leaf of "strategic triangulation" anymore. Most of us here on Hexbear are aware of the fact that they actually want to feed immigrants and poor people into a meat grinder, but I'm at least hopeful that this might be the beginning of more ordinary people waking up to that fact.

      • Democrats (well both major political parties in the US) are capitalist and, as such, are standing on the conveyor belt of capital interest, which constantly moves to the right. They would have to seriously fight against the forces of capital in order to just appear to stay roughly in one place, which they do not. The last time there was any meaningful resistance to capital interest were the Keynesian reforms to get out of the Great Depression, but that was really only to keep capitalism on life support long enough to roll them back.

  • The tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

    I mean, yeah, it looks like Kamala didn’t get the dem base out to vote for her because no one wants “more of the same” when following an incredibly unpopular president. Kamala was very openly telling the base to fuck off, and made her race singularly about attracting white, upper middle class suburban women at the cost of everyone else.

    But that’s the micro view. In the macro view, Michael Roberts’ analysis of rates of profit shows it’s been falling for a while now. Capitalism was in crisis during the Great Depression, only to be “saved” by WW2. The reconstruction of the industrial world led to good times for a couple decades until there was a profitability crisis in the 1970s. Capital’s response starting the 80s was offshoring, privatization, and financialization - neoliberalism in other words. But the gains from that was only able to keep things going until 2009 or so. Since then profitability has been shit. Capital has no answers beyond just tightening the screws (austerity at home and imperialism abroad). Just increasing misery in order to slow the decline of the rate of profit.

    The US needs that surplus value extracted primarily from the global south to keep running. That surplus value is how capital is able to buy off the domestic working class. But that slice of the pie keeps shrinking, i.e. material conditions keep worsening. Things are getting worse as every year goes by and everyone knows it, even if they don’t understand it. That’s why we keep bouncing between parties every four years instead of the steady 2 term presidents we had in the era of neoliberalism. Most people are not doing in depth political analysis. They are just seeing their situation get worse and blaming whoever is in charge.

    Of course the economy won’t recover under Trump. It will almost certainly get worse, and I happen to think the odds of a major economic crisis are pretty high. I would bet everything we get a dem president in 2028. Things just get worse and people are fumbling around for a solution.

    And that’s where we come in. WE HAVE THE ANSWERS. It’s our job to bring the light of Marxism to the world. I’m not even gonna pretend we can make much of a dent in 4 years but this is a multi-generational project.

    • Thank you for that. Makes too much sense and feels like the big picture to put these things in context.

      Would you be and to share some resources which helped you to this conclusion? No pressure if not!

      Would be cool to see this on a graph somewhere (although I can imagine we can see the correlated variables react in kind). That's the problem of trying to sell the future and having the "promise" of future value. Seems with Trump in power, corporations will eat but since that value has to come from somewhere. Like you alluded, from the global South or from tightening the working conditions of the workers. And it probably still not be enough to "fix the economy". There is serious cost to inaction on our part that the future will pay.

      • Sure thing. Regarding the rate of profit, it’s something Roberts talks about a lot, so if you go to his website and search for “rate of profit”, you’ll find many articles (and graphs).

        Regarding the extraction of surplus value, that one’s a little trickier. It’s a key part of what’s in volume 2 of Capital, specifically in chapter 6 (but the chapters before are important to comprehend as they build up to ch. 6). Long story short, it is only in the sphere of production (i.e. making things) where surplus value is created. So any costs that are not directly a part of production are “unproductive” and thus must be covered by surplus value. At the individual firm level this is often called “overhead” or “indirect costs”.

        But at the economy level… what about the US? We don’t make anything anymore, so where is our surplus value coming from? Production in the global south! The value is created there but it is “imported” into the US. This is plainly obvious when you consider how much it costs to make a t-shirt in Bangladesh and what it ultimately sell for in the US. (I am admittedly mixing surplus value and profit a bit here but I think it’s appropriate).

        How that surplus value makes it to workers indirectly is a bit abstract. But it can be done politically or through action. Meaning, you can pass a law that grants universal health care to pacify workers. Or the workers themselves can go on strike and earn more. Or even just through market forces this can happen. It’s a hard thing to empirically “prove” but it’s something you can see historically: when capital faces pressure, they have mechanisms to redistribute surplus value. In England, there was an increasingly militant labor movement that was eventually bought off by England ramping up imperialist plunder in the second half of the 19th century. In the US, up until the early 20th century you could always just steal more indigenous land and give it to workers (stealing capital and distributing it to workers isn’t the same and sharing surplus value per se but the effect is the same).

    1. Really hard to run an attack campaign when you're the incumbent party. If your messaging is just "im a bit better than the other guy" people are just gonna point to the shit job you're doing right now. Historical levels of unpopularity is real hard to come back from, bush needed 9/11.
    2. The whole Biden debacle was disastrous, probably ended any chance of scooping up the moderate vote they were desperately pining for.
    3. Gaza, immigration, and generally running to the right put a bullet in any chance of bringing this campaign back. They tried really desperately with the weed stuff at the last minute, but the damage was done.
    4. Democratic party reeks of putrescene

  • Honestly this is why.

    "Things were cheaper under trump" which is sort of true.

    Sure there are the extremities of the republican party who are deadset on abortions or trans people or whatever but I promise the majority that vote republican do so because things were cheaper under trump.

    Political discussion in America is not very nuanced

  • Honestly, it's difficult for me to mind meld into a republican. Their messaging always sounds to me like "shit sucks and it's supposed to suck. I want you to go fuck yourself and live a life full of toil as I tighten the screws because I want to profit off of it! I do not want to know what other cultures are like." And then they all start cheering wildly. Their boogeymen make my skin crawl. I don't see a lot of trans people and blue haired feminists causing civil unrest. I think generally messaging and education enable people to say that feminists want a choice and a fair shot. Not that you should even endeavor to be seen as acceptable through their lens; in my experience that's an intractable fool's game that becomes a barrier to living a life full of that which you find important. In addition I am simply stupified that the Dems can take the torch for the border wall and take the project higher and still the Republicans call Dems the party of illegal immigrants. That should be your crown jewel as a country of ashes and cruelty. Then of course you have your firm base of racism and sexism - they'd codify men and women can't be friends + you were assigned one at birth" on day 1 if they could.

    But what I do know is how to fucking hate liberals. You can build a house on that shit. I can even conceive of the right wing attack as well. You get all the WEF "eat ze bugs" rhetoric where they're trying to put you in cages and allow you to scream in the Amazon mindfulness cubes. They think you're the party of HR and big tech (spiderman pointing at spiderman). They think you're the warhawk who wants to babysit the middle east (sometimes, other times they also want to). You'd hate how INCREDIBLY corrupt they are; their messaging is like a sponsorship from a big company that you hate (spiderman pointing at spiderman). They siphon everything nice for themselves and they (spidey senses) cheat at the stock market. I bet all sorts of foul shit happened in Ukraine. I bet all sorts of shit happened with Diddy and Epstein. I bet foul shit of both types is still happening.

    So I could comprehend doing a harm reduction by being a republican if I never knew about socialism and still hated the libs. I could never imagine in a million years being excited because my boss is going to save so much money by dumping shit into rivers.

  • When you run on the status quo, and the status quo sucks, people are gonna turn to whoever manages to present themselves as an alternative.

    When you run to the right on stuff like immigration and the military, and the people who like right-wing policies already have a party waiting on them hand-and-foot, they're not gonna switch over to you, and you're just going to alienate the parts of your base/coalition that are affected by those policies.

    People are gonna blame the left or say it's because she's a woman of color. But Tammy Baldwin, a queer woman, looks set to win Wisconsin, and Elissa Slotkin is ahead by a hair in Michigan, so that narrative is dead in the water.

  • Because left-of-center people -- not even "leftists" mind you, just people who broadly want to Improve Society Somewhat -- were told loud and clear by the Harris campaign that their support wasn't needed, so they stayed home. It's still too early to show this definitively, but I believe the final results will bear this out.

  • As a non-american I don't quite get it. People must think their lives will materially improve under the republicans, but why?

    the american people are unintellectual. we laugh at trump's conception of tariffs but his silly economic rhetoric and proposed policies sound good and correct to a lot of fools.

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