It’s already two weeks since Trump’s decisive election win, but the battle of interpretation is still raging. Why did more than 76 million people vote for Trump, who won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, despite all the terrible things he has said and done, and threatened to do throughout the election?
Many mainstream liberal explanations claim that Harris ran a flawless campaign and that racist and misogynist voters are to blame. This analysis is not only wrong, it lays the ground for repeated defeats in the years ahead.
In Canada, with Pierre Poilievre 20 points ahead in the polls, we’re facing a similar outcome in next year’s federal election. In Ontario, we might see a third Ford majority in 2025. If we want to avoid these results, we need to learn and apply the lessons from Trump’s win, but we don’t have a lot of time.
Here are six big lessons that, if we put them into practice now, might help us stop Poilievre (and Ford) in the coming months.
1) Working-class anger is real, and so is the pain
Harris and the Democrats massively underestimated the widespread anger among working-class voters right across the US, and the pain and suffering that inspire it.
After 40 years of neoliberalism, workers and their families are reeling: large-scale job loss and plant closures, especially in manufacturing; stagnant or declining wages; increasing precarity in the workplace; repeated austerity budgets that slash social programs and public services; and fewer and fewer measures to protect workers from the brutality of the markets.
On top of this, workers got slammed during the pandemic and then had to face an out-of-control cost-of-living crisis, along with a housing crisis, an opioid and addictions crisis, a health care crisis, and a climate crisis–in the midst of record profits for corporations and the banks and record payouts for CEOs.
Workers have been hurting for a long time, and they’re at a breaking point.
But the only candidate who gave voice to that anger was Trump, who stoked it to scapegoat immigrants and refugees, Trans people, women, and many others. Even if workers didn’t agree with everything Trump says or does, he reflected the anger that they feel in their daily lives.
By contrast, Harris came across as the defender of the status quo, which is simply untenable for most workers. When asked if she’d do anything differently from Biden, Harris quipped “not a thing comes to mind.”
And at a time when trust in government institutions is at an all-time low, Harris’ decision to campaign as a great defender of the political system, which many workers believe is rigged against them, and to portray Trump as a threat to it, only widened the gap between Democrats and working-class voters.
Some Democratic pundits lamented that it was all a question of communication–that they needed to do a better job explaining to workers that they’re better off than they think they are. Again, this demonstrates just how out of touch the establishment in the Democratic Party is with ordinary working-class people, a majority of whom no longer see them as a party of working people.
In Canada, Poilievre has managed to capture that same working-class anger more than any other federal leader and, like Trump, is stoking it to fuel support for even more right-wing ideas.
The NDP and the leadership of the trade union movement have a lot of catching up to do. So far, what they have on offer has not connected with, or inspired, working-class voters, but the potential remains to turn things around.
We need less finger-wagging about the merits of the NDP’s confidence-and-supply agreement with the Liberals, which may have extracted some modest wins for workers, but comes nowhere near anything on the scale they need. Instead, we need a big, bold, and ambitious vision for workers that inspires them to fight well ahead of an election and, in the process, exposes Poilievre’s empty sloganeering.
That brings us to the second lesson.
2) Blame the Democratic leaders, not voters
The Democrats’ failure to understand the depth of working-class anger is related to the kind of campaign they ran: all vibes, no vision. The delivery of Harris’ message may have been slick, especially on social media, but it totally lacked any compelling working-class content.
Instead of campaigning on raising wages, creating jobs, expanding workers’ rights, ensuring medicare for all, or cancelling student debt (some of which Biden campaigned on in 2020), Harris led with uninspiring talk about “an opportunity economy”–a vague commitment that workers might have a better chance to get ahead, but with no real measures to make that happen.
The economy was the number one issue throughout the election, and Trump exploited it by campaigning on this simple message: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Although inflation has eased in recently, prices remain sky-high and workers are still struggling to keep their heads above water.
In response, Trump promised to bring back jobs from overseas, re-open shuttered factories, and restore the American Dream. It didn’t really matter that he had no intention of doing any of this. What mattered was the stark contrast between his vision and what the Democrats had on offer.
Even where some Democrats did recognize the pain and anger felt by working-class voters, the party’s primary allegiance to Wall Street and their corporate donors ensured that those interests would always override a robust pro-worker agenda during the campaign. Indeed, this has also been the record of the Democrats in power: striking a “centrist” balance between the demands of US capital and the needs of working people, always at the latter’s expense.
It’s therefore not a surprise that workers were more responsive to Trump, who spoke to their aspirations for dramatic change, than they were to Harris, who spent much of her time defending Biden’s record–which felt like telling workers they’re better off than they realize.
Where workers had the chance to vote for it, they supported a number of bold working-class ballot initiatives. In Missouri, voters backed “Proposition A,” which raises the state’s minimum wage to $15.00 (from $13.75) and ensures that private employers must provide workers with some form of “paid sick and safe leave” (PSSL), similar measures which also passed earlier this fall in Alaska and Nebraska, also “red states” that backed Trump.
Where these options are available to workers, they vote for them. When the Democrats fail to make similar demands themselves, workers will look for them elsewhere.
In Canada, the NDP and labour–and all our movements–need to organize accordingly. Workers are looking for something that will inspire them to fight, to give expression to the pain and anger they feel. Small, modest reforms that tinker at the edges of the system just won’t suffice.
Workers need something that they know will help improve their lives right away: wages that go further than just paying the bills, good jobs, housing they can afford, health care whenever they need it, safe and healthy communities. And they don’t want to wait years to get it.
A big, bold, and ambitious vision that meaningfully speaks to those working-class desires could do more than win voters away from the right, it could inspire millions of workers who never voted at all or who sat out this election, including the roughly seven million voters who backed Biden in 2020, but who didn’t vote in 2024.
3) Don’t make people choose between equity and paying the bills
Abortion was another big issue during the election, the first presidential ballot since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Without a doubt, some people voted for Trump because they’re anti-choice, but this was far from the case for many other Trump voters, despite what mainstream pundits claimed about them.
In states that held stand-alone ballots on access to abortion, where voters could vote regardless of their choice for president, many pro-choice initiatives succeeded or came very close. In Florida, for example, a “red state” that voted for Trump, “Florida Amendment 4” won over 57 percent of the vote, which would have entrenched abortion rights in the state constitution.
The ballot only failed because state law requires a “supermajority” of 60 per cent in order to pass. Despite failing, the amendment ran 14 per cent higher than the vote for Harris.
The Democrats were mostly clear in their support for abortion rights, but their approach had two major flaws.
The first is that, in the absence of a compelling working-class agenda that addresses workers’ immediate concerns about paying the bills and keeping a roof over their heads, the Democrats ended up counterposing an equity issue to an economic one. And when workers are forced to choose one over the other, as many of them did when they voted for President, the economic one will almost always win.
This does a real disservice to the broader agenda for equity, in that it frames the issue in an abstract way, completely detached from its potent class content. Abortion is an equity issue, but it also an economic one and of urgent concern to working-class women. Their access to it is not just about whether abortion is legal, it is also about whether they can afford it.
This is the second major flaw in the Democrats’ approach to abortion. By disconnecting the demand for legal abortion in the US from the demand for health care for all–which would ensure women’s access to reproductive health regardless of their ability to pay–the Democrats failed to win support from working-class voters for whom legal access means little without the means to pay for it.
When our movements raise demands for equity, we must embed them in a broader working-class agenda that makes access real, immediate, and meaningful, and avoid isolating them as separate stand-alone measures that fail to address the barriers most workers encounter as they struggle for it.
4) Build movements instead of attacking them
Perhaps the biggest issue to haunt the Harris campaign was the Biden administration’s unyielding support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Anti-war and Palestine solidarity campaigners appeared at almost every Harris rally, chanting “ceasefire now, ceasefire now,” but Harris’ claim that “everyone wants a ceasefire” rang hollow in light of Biden’s refusal to do anything to slow or stop the war.
The Biden administration’s muscular foreign policy–which supports and facilitates the genocide in Gaza, funds the war in Ukraine, and spends nearly a trillion dollars on the pentagon–is out of step with most people in the US, who desired peace and stability on the world stage and supports for services at home.
That Harris spent so much time campaigning with Liz Cheney, who is widely associated with the war-mongering record of her father Dick Cheney, made it easier for Trump to depict himself in the final week of the campaign as the “anti-war” candidate. Indeed, Trump reached out to sections of the Arab and Muslim communities in Michigan, who have been devastated by US backing for the war in Gaza, and who have been sidelined and marginalized by the Democrats throughout the campaign: during the Democratic National Convention in August, the party leadership refused to give any time to an Arab or Palestinian speaker, despite the widespread opposition to the war among party members.
But the Democrats’ record is worse than its backing for Israel’s war. For most of the last year, Democratic leaders, pundits, and spokespersons have systematically attacked, smeared, and demobilized the student-led encampment movement on campuses across the country, which emerged in solidarity with the Palestinian people and as part of a new front in the US anti-war movement.
Over many months, tens of thousands of students on campuses in every US state joined encampments or demonstrations in support of them, calling for a ceasefire and for a free Palestine. But instead of supporting this movement or providing a platform for it, the Democratic leadership almost uniformly depicted it as antisemitic and violent, despite the widespread participation of Jewish students and faculty and its overwhelmingly peaceful character.
This and other movements could have been a source of strength for Harris and the Democrats, in the same way that widespread anti-war sentiment during the US-led war on Iraq later fuelled Barack Obama’s election as President, but instead the movement had to defend itself against the Democratic leadership, which responded to it as a threat.
The Democrats’ support for the war, and its hostility to anti-war activists, had an impact well beyond Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voters who, overall, still backed Harris over Trump: it depressed turnout among voters in other communities (especially among students) and fuelled support for third-party candidates such as the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who has real roots in the anti-war movement and consistently opposed the war in Gaza.
In Canada, the anti-war and Palestine solidarity movement has a better relationship with the NDP and labour leadership than its counterpart in the US has with Democrats. One high point in the last year was the successful Opposition Day motion that the NDP introduced in the House of Commons which, with the help of anti-war campaigners outside of Parliament, ended up passing, while isolating Poilievre’s Conservatives.
Genuine, good-faith collaboration such as this initiative shows the powerful relationship that could exist between movements in the streets and workplaces and their allies in elected office–not a parasitic relationship where the latter attempts to co-opt and demobilize the former, while movements drop or abandon their demands to focus exclusively on elections.
This leads to the final, and likely most important, lesson.
5) The fight starts now, not at the next election
As we learn more about the extreme far-right agenda that Trump is already preparing to implement in the wake of his election, the urgency to build strong movements at work and in our communities should be even more obvious. We can’t wait for another election to resist Trump’s agenda–whether here or in the US. We need to build the opposition now.
Indeed, in the wake of Trump’s first election victory in 2016, it was movements–not the Democrats–that stayed his hand. It was the massive women’s marches in early 2017 that galvanized the opposition to his agenda, and inspired a new generation of activists to fight for reproductive rights and women’s health care.
It was the fight for decent work that kept up the demand for a $15 minimum wage at the state and local levels, and won some impressive wins–some of which, shamefully, were vetoed by Democratic mayors.
It was anti-racist and human rights campaigners that, alongside Muslim communities across the US, took on Trump’s Muslim ban that blocked refugees from a number of Muslim majority countries.
The same movements pivot to defend migrants from Latin America who were swept up in raids and saw their families separated in detention camps across the US. At key moments, workers–including non-union workers–led walkouts to protest these barbaric measures, in disgust at their employers’ complicity in the camps.
These are just a few examples of moments where working-class people in the US, many of whom had looked to Trump to defend their interests, moved into activity to fight for a better life for themselves and others. They are moments where workers chose the politics of solidarity over the politics of division.
We have similar experiences in Canada. Canada’s abortion laws were struck down under a Conservative government in 1988–not because there was an election to do so, but because a movement led by women, trade unionists, and their allies made it impossible for the Court and the government to make any other choice.
Similarly, Canada stayed out of the Iraq War (notwithstanding sending troops on a combat mission to Afghanistan), not because we voted for it, but because a mass movement in the streets imposed its will on Parliament.
Elections are the lowest form of political activity–workers vote in isolation from each other and in a way that dramatically limits their choices (they get to vote for what’s on the ballot, not necessarily for what they really want). Movements, by contrast, whether in the workplace or in the streets, widen their options and give workers a sense of their own collective power, and show that they don’t have to wait for elections to win what they need.
And if movements are successful, they end up shaping the outcome of elections far more so than any platform could during a four-week campaign. In the US, the Civil Rights Act–the landmark legislation that ensured the civil rights of Black Americans–was the result of a mass movement over decades, not the singular achievement of a Democratic president.
If we want to defeat Poilievre (and Ford) in the coming months, we need to see the centrality of building movements, struggles, and strikes, and other fights well ahead of the formal election period. What we do now will determine whether workers feel confident to vote by the time Election Day comes, and will build the confidence of the best leaders to raise the demands of the movements–and go well beyond the low expectations and low horizons of Parliament and electoralism.
6) If you want workers’ anger to go left, you have to organize it
There was nothing guaranteed about Trump’s election on November 5, either this year or in 2016. It happened because the right did a better job of capturing workers’ anger and pulling it in their direction.
But when this anger was first coming to the surface, it didn’t immediately go towards the right, it went to the left.
In the mid-2010s, it was Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, a “democratic socialist,” who first connected with workers and directed their anger at Wall Street and Big Business. The Democrats–in both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries–did everything they could to discredit and sideline Sanders, in an attempt to keep him off the ticket and prevent his demands from becoming party policy.
In 2020, as Sanders won more and more states in that election cycle’s primaries, including the big prize of California, Barack Obama personally convinced all other candidates to drop out of the race and rally behind the party establishment’s preference: Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Sanders for the nomination.
This move all but guaranteed that working-class anger would find a home outside of the Democratic Party and be safely directed away from the US ruling class, a big section of which funds the Democrats.
But the Democrats’ sabotage doesn’t mean that this anger can’t or won’t find a left-wing expression. We know that workers’ expectations for Trump to deliver are extremely high, and that their anger isn’t simply going to dissipate.
As Trump shows his true colours and lines up to serve his billionaire buddies like Elon Musk, workers will be pulled in one of two directions: further towards the right, fuelling more scapegoating of immigrants and refugees, Trans people, women, and others; or, they could be pulled back towards the left, into the kind of self-activity that makes it easy to see the need for solidarity and collective struggle.
In addition to building those movements now, we need to ensure that it’s easy for people to join them–especially people who might have voted for Trump or who want to vote for Ford and Poilievre. Instead of mocking or sneering at them because of how they voted (or think they might vote), we need to find ways to connect with them, engage them, build their trust and confidence, and show them what we could all win by being part of a united, multi-racial, working-class movement.
Those conversations aren’t easy, and can’t be conducted in a single phone-banking session or in a 30-second pitch during a door-to-door canvass. They need to happen in the midst of ongoing self-activity–in the workplace, in our communities, on the campuses, in the streets–as we organize together in accessible campaigns to support bold demands that resonate with all workers.
We really only have weeks and months to learn these (and many other) lessons from Trump’s election win on November 5, and even less time to start implementing them in our movements. But where we can meaningfully connect with workers, and show through practice a compelling alternative to the hate and vitriol of Trump (and to the right-wing politics of Poilievre and Ford), we can begin to make inroads among workers we haven’t talked to in many years, and turn the tide towards the politics of working-class solidarity.
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