Why Donald Trump won the US election: Kamala Harris failed to provide an economic alternative

Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election in a landslide. Unlike in 2016, where Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, this time he got millions more votes than his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.

Why was Harris defeated so thoroughly? In short, because the billionaire-funded neoliberal Democrats failed to provide an economic alternative to the billionaire-funded Republicans’ pseudo “populism”.

Polls consistently showed that the economy was the number one issue in the 2024 race. Concern about the state of the economy was at the highest level since the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007-09.

In other words, “It was the economy, stupid”.

Trump won three-quarters of voters who said the economy was their most important concern. Two-thirds of all voters said they considered the state of the economy to be “not so good/poor”.

Biden’s supporters in the corporate media expressed surprised at this, arguing that working people are ignorant and misinformed about the economy, “amid a hot labor market, booming stocks, much lower inflation, growing GDP”. But the reality is that the growth in the stock market and GDP has not trickled down to average people.

93% of stocks are owned by the richest 10% of people of the US, whereas the bottom 50% of the population holds just 1%. Most people do not benefit when the S&P 500 climbs higher – even as it has broken records in recent years.

Poverty and food insecurity have risen substantially under the Biden-Harris administration. Homelessness reached a record high in 2023.

A poll in September found that 52% of Americans said they were worse off economically than they had been four years before. Just 39% said they were better.

High levels of inflation ate away at the purchasing power of many workers. Although inflation was a global phenomenon, largely caused by supply chain disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic, many people blamed the Biden-Harris administration for not doing enough to help working families.

Even the Financial Times, the newspaper of the transnational capitalist class, which fears the growing wave of “populism”, published an op-ed warning that the “US economic boom is a mirage”. Author Ruchir Sharma wrote (emphasis added):

US growth is a mirage for most Americans, driven by rising wealth and discretionary spending among the richest consumers, and distorted by growing profits for the biggest corporations. Times look good but this growth is lopsided, brittle and heavily dependent on spending and borrowing by the government, which is typically the lender of last resort.

Although the world marvels at “unsinkable” US consumers, a growing number are priced out of homes and falling behind on credit-card debt. The bottom 40 per cent by income now account for 20 per cent of all spending while the richest 20 per cent account for 40 per cent. That is the widest gap on record and it is likely to widen further, says Oxford Economics, a consultancy. Most Americans now spend so much on essentials such as food that they have little left for extras like travel or eating out.

Discretionary spending is becoming a luxury for the wealthy, and so is optimism. Confidence collapsed during the pandemic and has since recovered much more strongly for the richest third of consumers than for the middle or bottom thirds. The impact of rising wealth on spending is also concentrated among rich consumers, who own most of the assets. This decade, booming financial markets added $51tn to US wealth and while millennials did especially well, virtually all their gains went to rich millennials. To a widening wealth gap between the young and old, add this new source of division and anger within the younger generation.

The Biden-Harris administration utterly failed to address these problems, even with control of the House and Senate.

The Democrats could have easily learned from the remarkable success of Bernie Sanders, who was the single most popular politician in the United States in 2017, after he had run for president a year before on a robust left-wing program, proposing concrete economic policies and redistributive measures to help working people.

The Democratic Party leadership, which is beholden to the oligarchs and large corporations in the donor class, despised Sanders’ leftist populism, and undemocratically sabotaged his 2016 campaign. Even Senator Elizabeth Warren admitted on CNN that the DNC “rigged” the race on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

Instead, the Democratic Party leadership insisted on moving to the right — thereby alienating its base. Clinton was the second-least popular politician in the country, surpassed only by Trump. But Clinton’s conservative, hawkish program was very attractive to the Democratic donor class.

Wall Street’s loyal Senator Chuck Schumer had summarized the party’s strategy before the 2016 election: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin”.

That approach ended up failing miserably. A staggering 94% of registered Republicans voted for Trump in the 2020 and 2024 elections. Just 5% of registered Republicans voted for Harris.

The fact is that the mythical “Never Trump Republican” barely exists outside of the media and internet. But the Democratic Party bet its entire strategy on this political unicorn.

Harris campaigned even further to the right of Joe Biden in the 2024 race. She ran as a war hawk, vowed to appoint a Republican to her cabinet (something the GOP would never do for the Democrats), and took a hard line against immigration, trying to out-trump Trump.

Harris held events with neoconservative former Republican Congresswomen Liz Cheney, and thanked her father, hardened war criminal Dick Cheney, for his endorsement, praising his “service to the country”.

Two decades before, many Democrats had seen George W. Bush and Cheney as their mortal enemies, rightfully excoriating the conservative Republicans for their criminal war of aggression in Iraq, which took the lives of more than 1 million Iraqis.

But the Democratic Party has moved so far to the right that it now proudly considers the Cheney clan to be some of its most important allies.

While Harris was holding campaign events with Cheney, pledging to put “country over party”, she was also eagerly seeking to woo billionaires.

CNN happily reported that Harris had won the support of some powerful billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, the Democrats were spitting in the face of their own constituency.

77% of Democrats said they wanted the US government to stop sending weapons to Israel. Just 23% of Democrats supported the shipments.

A majority of Democrats said they considered Israel’s brutal bombing of civilian areas in Gaza, medieval blockade, mass starvation of Palestinians, and ethnic cleansing to be acts of genocide – a position shared by top UN experts and many countries that have joined a lawsuit against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

The Biden-Harris administration ignored all of this, criticized its own base, and sent $18 billion in military aid to Israel in the year following October 2023.

During her campaign, Harris made it clear that an arms embargo on Israel was totally off the table, despite the fact that it was demanded by UN human rights experts and dozens of countries. She insisted the weapons would keep flowing.

The Democrats’ extreme hawkishness lost them support in crucial swing states. Zeteo reported on a poll in August found that:

In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely.

The unsurprising result of Harris running a right-wing campaign with neoconservative Republicans, in which she constantly attacked and alienated her own base of support, was that Democratic turnout was very low in 2024.

In 2024, Trump won roughly the same number of votes he had received in 2020. The difference was that the Democrats lost millions of votes. They failed to motivate people to come out to support them.

Many longtime Democratic voters in swing states like Michigan, which Trump won, said they refused to back Harris because of her unflinching support for Israel’s genocidal war. This was especially true for Arab-American voters, who denounced the Democrats for being complicit in killing their family members.

Reuters reported that Democrats had the lowest turnout, at just 32% of voters. For the first time, in fact, independents were the biggest group of voters, tied at 34% with Republicans.

Even liberal strongholds in states like Massachusetts reported low turnout for the Democrats.

In short, the Democrats’ aggressive disdain for their own base meant that many voters simply stayed home, whereas Trump had excited his supporters, and they went out to elect him.

In her presidential campaign, Harris made few concrete promises. She vaguely claimed she would try to bring down grocery prices, at one point floating a proposal to stop price gouging, before immediately backtracking, giving in to criticism from neoliberal economists, and subsequently refusing to articulate what her policies would be. (This put her well to the right of Richard Nixon, who imposed price controls in the 1970s to stave off inflation.)

Instead, Harris essentially campaigned on one message: Vote for me because I’m not the other guy.

Trump, on the other hand, ran a campaign focused on the economy. But, in typical demagogic fashion, he scapegoated immigrants and foreign nations like China and Mexico, refusing to recognize the roots of the very real problems in the economy:  neoliberal financialization and deindustrialization; underemployment, precarity, and “gigification” of jobs; growing inequality; asset-price bubbles that make housing unaffordable for most working people.

In addition to simplistically scapegoating immigrants and foreign nations, Trump had a very clear message: I will bring back good manufacturing jobs; I will take them from other countries.

At a campaign rally in September, Trump pledged (emphasis added):

With the vision I’m outlining today, not only will we stop our businesses from leaving for foreign lands, but under my leadership, we are going to take other countries’ jobs. Did you ever hear that expression before? Have you ever heard that, that we’re going to take other countries jobs? It’s never been stated before.

We’re going to take their factories. And we had it really rocking four years ago. We’re going to bring thousands and thousands of businesses, and trillions of dollars in wealth back to the good old USA. That’s what we’re doing. We’re going to be doing it, and doing it fast.

And under my plan American workers will no longer be worried about losing your jobs to foreign nations. Instead, foreign nations will be worried about losing their jobs to America. We’re going to bring them back.

Of course Trump has no realistic proposal for actually carrying this out. His favorite panacea is tariffs. Trump has vowed to impose blanket tariffs of at least 60% on all Chinese goods. This would simply increase the price of imports.

The US could use protectionism to rebuild some manufacturing potential in more advanced, high value-added industries, like cars and machinery, but unless Trump plans on US companies competing with exporters in the Global South that exploit low-paid workers to create basic, low value-added consumer goods, like clothes and household appliances, the blanket tariffs he has proposed will fuel even more inflation.

Trump’s extreme pledge to deploy the National Guard to do a militarized deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants is not a solution either. Many of these people work in jobs that are not well compensated but are very important, in sectors like agriculture and food processing. After Trump deports the so-called “illegal aliens”, what is his plan for finding people to work, say, on farms and in slaughterhouses? There is very little interest.

That said, Trump’s war on immigrants could also benefit some sectors of the capitalist class who have backed him and funded his campaign. If undocumented immigrants live in constant fear of violent deportation, they will be much less willing to fight to defend their rights as workers. So if the employers who had previously paid them below the table decide to steal their wages, or cut their pay, or force them to work in dangerous conditions, who will protect them? They will be unable to ask government authorities for help. This gives companies that exploit migrant labor even more power, and would boost profits.

What is clear is that Trump’s so-called economic “populism” is skin deep and fraudulent. Trump is himself a billionaire, and fellow oligarchs will benefit most from his policies.

Trump’s 2024 campaign was enthusiastically boosted by the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, whose companies have already received billions of dollars of US government subsidies, and are now likely to rake in even more.

Trump was also funded by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and the highest paid executive on Wall Street, Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire CEO of the world’s largest alternative asset manager Blackstone, the biggest landlord on Earth, which owns more than 300,000 rental housing units in the US.

In his first term as president, Trump showed his true face. Instead of helping workers, he slashed taxes on the rich and corporations, which meant that billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the bottom 50% of the population.

Trump’s proposals for his second term will reduce taxes on the richest 5% of Americans by at least 1.2%, while in fact increasing taxes on the bottom 95% of the country. The poorer a worker is, the more likely their taxes will increase under Trump, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

This is the polar opposite of true economic populism; it’s class war.

Nevertheless, even though Trump’s proposals are cynical, they do superficially represent some kind of break with the status quo.

Trump told voters that he would fight for them, that he would try to bring back jobs and rebuild a manufacturing sector that has been devastated throughout decades of neoliberal globalization.

Even if Trump’s promises are hollow, they are promises. The Democrats made no real promises, and offered no economic alternative. Their message was that the status quo is fine — or, as Hillary Clinton put it in 2016, “America is already great”.

For tens of millions of working people, however, the situation is far from great.

When one candidate fails to provide an alternative to an unpopular status quo, the candidate who is offering some kind of alternative often wins the vote. This is exactly what happened with Brexit in the UK in 2016, or with the election of far-right extremist Javier Milei in Argentina in 2023.

Harris’ boilerplate pledge to “protect democracy” fell on deaf ears. It may have excited some rich white-collar liberals, but working people don’t care much about rhetoric about so-called “democracy” when they have trouble feeding their families.

As the Associated Press put it, “Trump made inroads among lower-income voters, middle-income voters and voters without college degrees… All those groups appeared to put as high a priority — if not somewhat more so — on their family budgets than the worries about the future of democracy that motivated much of Vice President Kamala Harris’ coalition”.

Defenders of the Democrats argued that Biden and Harris had little hope, because incumbent parties that led governments during the global inflation crisis following the supply-chain shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic were defeated in many countries. There were notable exceptions, however.

The leftist Morena party had incredible success in Mexico, and shows what can happen when a government actually delivers for the working-class majority.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum won the 2024 election in a landslide, despite the fact that her predecessor and political ally Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) had governed during the pandemic, and also dealt with high rates of inflation.

Sheinbaum is the first female president of Mexico. Harris supporters who facilely attribute her electoral loss to misogyny fail to explain how a woman was able to win a presidential election by an enormous margin just a few months before in Mexico. Is the United States more sexist than Mexico?

The fact is that Sheinbaum and AMLO had robust left-wing economic programs focused on helping the working-class majority, raising the minimum wage, reducing inequality, expanding social programs, and investing in education and healthcare.

The Democrats, on the other hand, studiously avoided any left-wing economic proposals. Harris made no concrete promises, other than floating complicated loan schemes that were means-tested to death, while mindlessly regurgitating clichés about “protecting democracy” and putting “country over party”.

Harris’ apologists also argued that she had no option but to move to the right, because, they claimed, US voters had becomingly overwhelmingly conservative. This is contradicted, however, by the fact that many left-wing members of the Democratic Party won their own races in a landslide.

Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), won re-election with 70% of the vote in Michigan – a swing state that Trump also won.

Tlaib had refused to endorse Harris, given the vice president’s role in sponsoring Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Voters rewarded Tlaib for her principled stance, while they rejected Harris.

Another left-wing Democrat, Ilhan Omar, won re-election in Minnesota with 75% of the vote, trouncing her conservative pro-Israel Republican opponent.

At the end of the day, the fact is that Harris failed to mobilize the Democratic Party’s base. It didn’t help that she had always been unpopular.

It is worth emphasizing that Harris never had a democratic mandate. There was never a Democratic Party primary in 2024. It was initially taken for granted that Biden would be the candidate, despite his own extremely low approval ratings.

Biden’s ghastly performance in the June presidential debate with Trump made it impossible to keep ignoring his severe mental decline, so Harris was anointed by the DNC, and the donor class gave her its endorsement on a silver platter. She never had to win a single vote in a primary.

This was a transparent example of the Democratic Party’s flagrant disdain for democracy. It insisted on running an uninspiring candidate who was not liked.

When she ran for president in 2019, Harris had just 1% support among the Democrats’ own base. She was so unpopular that she withdrew before the primary even began in 2020.

The Democratic Party leadership loved Harris, however, because she was a textbook opportunist with no coherent ideology.

One day, Harris could boast of her record as “California’s top cop”, a conservative Democrat who was tough on crime, happily willing to jail poor parents if their children skipped school; the next day, she could suddenly claim to be a “progressive” who supported Medicare-for-all — which she didn’t actually support, or did she? Does anyone really know? Does she?

During the 2024 race, Harris refused to answer most questions on policy issues. She was notoriously evasive, responding with long strings of PR speak that may have sounded like words, but had no meaning behind them.

Harris’ resounding defeat shows that the Democratic Party leadership is facing an irreconcilable contradiction: If it wants to win elections, it will have to mobilize voters with a true left-wing populist agenda, like Bernie Sanders had done; but in order to do so, it must necessarily challenge the class interests of the billionaire oligarchs and large corporations that fund the party.

Many DNC operatives apparently prefer losing over taking on the donor class.

This may explain why, in 2024, the Democratic Party essentially adopted the same strategy it had used in 2016, when it ran Hillary Clinton, the second-least popular US politician, as its candidate — after sabotaging the campaign of the most popular politician, Bernie Sanders.

Adding insult to injury was the fact that Clinton was even brought back to advise Harris during her campaign.

In other words, the only person who had ever lost to Trump in an election was graciously offering her wisdom on how to defeat Trump.

Knowing this, it’s no surprise they lost again.