Democrats are to blame for Trump’s election. Now it’s time for radical action 

I was 11 years old in 2016 when Donald Trump was first elected president. Although I didn’t fully understand the intricacies of what happened that day, I remember waking up in the morning and my mom telling me the news over breakfast before school. Now, eight years later, and I am 19 years old and on my way to school again in the morning after watching Trump secure his ascendancy to the most powerful position in the world. I will be 23 when his term is over, and I have no guarantee that it will be the end of things. I have not, in my entire conscious life, known a political sphere not dominated by Trump, and I will not for many more years it seems. In this election, I expected Vice President Kamala Harris to win, I even said so in this column, and I was prepared to continue doing the work of agitating and writing in service of pushing Democrats in power to listen to the voices of their constituents. This result was still heartbreaking to see, although there is no love lost between me and the Harris campaign. Yet, in the aftermath, lessons must be learned if we, the people, are to continue to make change despite those that will be in office. The most important takeaway from the 2024 Presidential election is that nobody is going to save us but us.  

One of the biggest reactions to the election I’ve seen both personally and nationwide is the shock at the amount of minority voters who did not show out for Harris in comparison with previous elections. Especially with Latinos, the difference in support for Harris now as there was for Biden in 2020 was crucial. In all but one swing state, Harris’ share of Latino voters decreased, in some cases as much as 24 percent compared to 2020. In my own Latino communities, I heard lots of talk over the disappointment and betrayal felt at this, with so many angry and failing to understand how those with the same background could possibly make the choice to instead support a man like Trump, who seemingly doesn’t even view Latinos (or any minority group for that matter) as being human. There are also those who decided to vote third party, especially in protest over the current administration’s enabling of a genocide in Palestine right now. In crucial swing states, the presence of Jill Stein’s Green Party was very clear, like how she captured 18% of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan and other communities boasting large Arab-American populations. Although this was not enough to materially affect the outcome in any swing state as it was in 2016, it still merited lots of anger from establishment Democrats who believe that “a vote for Stein is really a vote for Trump.” 

Fundamentally, this is the wrong focus to have. I am all for holding our own communities accountable, as in the case of “Latinos for Trump,” and addressing the Machismo culture and desire for faux whiteness that pushes marginalized peoples towards supporting a fascist like Trump is crucial. But for the sake of an effective response, these voters should not be the primary target of our anger. The same goes for other minority voters who either did not participate in the two-party binary or simply did not vote at all. There were valid reasons not to support Harris this year and the responsibility for that is on her and the rest of the Democratic leadership; nobody else.  

The numbers tell an important story of this election, which truly shows why the blame lays solely with the Democrats. Trump has always been good at keeping his base strong and active. They are loyal voters, and they came out to support him as such, showing out in similar numbers compared to 2020 (74.22 million then to 71.85 million now). Meanwhile, Harris was completely unable to garner the same enthusiasm and had almost 15 million votes less than Joe Biden did in 2020. In a way, it presents a misleading effect on the shares of voters because it’s not as though there must have been a great realignment of values in between that time with certain demographics; more so, it’s that those that already did support Trump continued to show out, while so many typically Democratic voters simply stayed home.  

The reasons why are clear, and it’s a lack of energizing, impactful progressive policy from the Harris campaign. For example, in Pennsylvania, according to The Intercept, a significant amount of the legwork in connecting with minority communities that proved crucial in winning 2020 for Democrats was done by local progressive advocacy coalitions who got people out to vote. In the time between then, Democrats burned these bridges, failed to deliver on promises and fundamentally provided no reasons to be excited for another four years as they kept up their race to cater to Republicans, Never-Trumpers and other affluent voters, thus losing connection to these communities and failing to get them interested in voting. 

It is clear that left-leaning policies are popular, but Harris simply was not. Across the country, initiatives on abortion outperformed Harris (and overwhelmingly passed) in every state where they were on the ballot. On the economic side of things, ballot initiatives in Alaska, Missouri and Arizona overwhelmingly showed support for higher minimum wages and more paid sick time. In October, Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding (IMEU) polls showed 34% of Democrat and independent voters said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if they vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to the 7 percent who said it would make them less likely. In terms of specifically voters who supported Biden in 2020 but were undecided this year, these numbers became 57 percent in Pennsylvania, 44 percent in Arizona and 34 percent in Georgia. If these voters were given anything to hope for in this election, as opposed to two equally horrible options, this could have fundamentally changed the entire race. The fact of the matter is that Democrats showed they would rather maintain control of their party and continue to reel in big money interests than win a national election through real policy. This is not a sign of a functioning party system or, more broadly, a functioning institution of democracy in and of itself. All the voters who felt alienated and didn’t come out to vote as a result shouldn’t be blamed for that because, no matter how bad the other guy is, support for elected officials is earned, not guaranteed.  

Now, as the next four years are upon us the question is what is to be learned from this? The answer has to be in breaking away from electoral politics as the sole solution to our problems. Trump is going to do what he will, and Democrats seem poorly positioned to do anything to stop him. Simply voting in midterms and the next presidential election is insufficient. Community support, solidarity and mutual aid must happen now more than ever. The most powerful social movements of the last decades existed despite Democrats adherence to the violent status quo. To every person that feels burned by this loss and is afraid of what is to come and that has people they care about under the threat of authoritarianism, the time has come to take direct, collective action. It is no one’s responsibility but our own to protect each other and there has never been a more important time to understand that.