Contesting the narrative of the US elections as a ringing endorsement of Trump | Pritam Singh

The narrative presented by the mainstream media almost all over the world of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential elections, the Senate and the House of Representatives as an emphatic endorsement of his politics by US voters deserves a sharp rebuttal. We refer to three aspects of the 2024 US presidential election results to present our rebuttal. The emerging election data, the Democratic victories in Senate races in some swing states where Harris had lost, and the economic scenario in the US economy, after Trump takes over in January 2024, underscore the need for a more nuanced and balanced account of the US political and economic scene. This nuanced and balanced account will provide a more informed and aware perspective for all, challenging the prevailing narrative and ensuring that the public is well-informed about the complexities of the US political and economic landscape, thereby empowering them with knowledge and understanding.

The available data shows that Republican Trump’s vote in 2024 was 75,306,909, and in 2020 it was 74,223,975. That is an increase of just about one million (1,082,937). It is worth comparing that with the Democratic vote in 2024 and 2020. In 2024, Kamala Harris’s vote was 72,112,497; in 2020, Joe Biden’s vote was 81,283,501. That shows a loss of over nine million (9,171,004) votes from 2020 to 2024. There might be only a very minor revision later to this vote tally, but that would not change the broad picture that in terms of the popular vote, there is no truth in the widespread media narrative that there was a significant swing towards Trump in the 2024 election.

Despite this absence of a significant swing towards him in 2024, when he has won, compared with 2020, when he lost the presidential election, if Trump has won in 2024, it is due to the collapse of the Democratic vote in 2024 compared to 2020. Over nine million Democratic voters did not vote for their party’s candidate in 2024.

Therefore, the most significant takeaway from the 2024 US presidential election is not a resounding endorsement of Trump but rather the disillusionment of over nine million Democratic voters with their party and its leadership under Biden and Harris. However, these voters are not lost. They represent a significant opportunity for the Democratic party to regain their trust. If the party can chart a new political course, it could secure victory over the Republicans not only in 2028 but also in the midterm elections in two years on November 3, 2026. This presents a hopeful prospect for the future.
Who are those democratic voters who abstained, or some minority of them who might have even voted for Trump? These abstained voters can be divided into three segments: one, student and youth voters who were overwhelmingly against the Biden administration’s pro-Israel policy. One hundred campuses had demonstrations and encampments against the Gaza genocide. The police administration dealt harshly with protesting students.
Three leading university heads were forced to resign under pressure from pro-Israel billionaires because they refused to ban student protests. Kamala Harris did not distance herself from Biden on his pro-Israel stance. She, in fact, warmly welcomed the support of anti-Trump Republicans such as Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, who is widely viewed among Democratic supporters as a war criminal for his role in the Iraq War. Such cosying up to a hated Republican alienated many potential Democratic voters who chose to abstain as a political choice.

The second segment of potential Democratic voters who either abstained or even voted for Trump out of protest against Biden Harris regime’s policy on Gaza were Arab Americans. In the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, which voted heavily for Joe Biden in 2020, Harris’s vote fell, and she lagged Donald Trump by about six percentage points.

The third segment, which voted for Biden in 2020 due to the active support of the veteran socialist Bernie Sanders, was the working-class white and non-white population, but they were disillusioned by the Biden administration’s failure to abandon pro-corporate policies. Kamala Harris raised an enormous amount of election funding. One detailed study showed:

Overall, this cycle, Democrats raised roughly twice as much money as their opponents. In the months after Joe Biden dropped out, Democrats raised more than $1 billion – more than three times [1] as much as Republicans brought in over the same period – largely thanks to enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris within Wall Street [2], Silicon Valley [3] and Big Law [4]. (A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives - by Musa al-Gharbi [5])

In her election campaign, Kamala Harris did not announce any significant pro-working-class initiatives if she were to win.

The most progressive part of the Biden administration was the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) initiative. Though the name is misleading, it was the most transformative programme in any developed capitalist economy for the green transition, focussing on renewable energy replacement for fossil fuels. Still, the Harris campaign hardly touched upon this, including the potential of creating millions of green jobs, which would have attracted working-class voters. This highly admirable programme would, unfortunately, be the biggest casualty of Trump’s presidency because he is a climate change denier and unashamed supporter of fossil fuels.

The recent Senate election results in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin further amplify our analysis that this election is not a straightforward Trump victory. In both states, the Democrats have won the Senate seats despite Harris losing to Trump in the presidential elections. Arizona’s victory was especially glorious because of the defeat of a hard-core right-wing Kari Lake. She is such an ardent supporter of Trump that she has been consistently maintaining that Trump did not lose in 2020. Democratic voters voted for Democratic Senators in the four swing states, making them win because they were not tainted with the unpopular policy stances of the Biden regime. In contrast, Kamala Harris was tainted, and they did not vote for her. This is called the vote-splitting phenomenon. Dr Guneeta Bhalla, a California-based physicist turned oral historian friend of mine, describes this as voting down where a voter does not vote for the top presidential election but votes for Senate and the House of Representative seats. The discrepancy between Senate and presidential election results in these swing states indicates a more complex political matrix than simple Trump /Republican victories.

Finally, Trump’s weakest spot is his economic programme. He represents the isolationist tendency in American economic, foreign and security policy compared to the internationally interventionist tendency represented in a more recent period by Bill Clinton. Trump’s planned imposition of 10 per cent tariffs on all imports, especially 60 per cent on Chinese imports, will raise domestic inflation and come to haunt the Republicans sooner rather than later. The drastic reduction of immigration and planned expulsion of some immigrants will reduce the labour supply, especially of unskilled labour that is much needed in agriculture and the construction, health, and care industries. Reducing taxes on the rich will accentuate the state’s fiscal deficit, thus jeopardising the provision of public services, especially when the state of US infrastructure is dire.

The hardcore right-wingers celebrating Trump’s victory will find this analysis discomforting. Still, others misguided by the flawed mainstream narrative should feel better informed and empowered by a realistic reflection.

(Author: Pritam Singh, Professor Emeritus Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford, UK)

[Another version of this article has appeared earlier in The Wire]