No, Trump Did Not Win in a Landslide—nor Did He Secure a Mandate

As blue western states and cities finish counting votes, it looks like the “vote collapse” predicted by Donald Trump last week has turned out to be little. When all the votes are counted, he will have a roughly two-point lead over Vice President Kamala Harris. Presidents Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1972 won more than 60 percent of the vote; Ronald Reagan in 1984 received 58 percent. These were landslides.

Don’t get me wrong: it was a bad result for democrats. Trump won all seven states with 312 Electoral College votes (vs. 306 for Biden in 2020). Democrats lost control of the Senate; The GOP now has 52 seats and will likely win 53 when the race between incumbent Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey and Connecticut corporate titan David McCormick is finally decided (early ballots are still being counted). He is likely to hold the House of Representatives by a narrow margin.

So yeah, none of this is good news. But it’s not a repudiation of Democrats from the top down, as it first appeared, and the way to respond is not to start a civil war within the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, it has already started. Centrists blame the “woke” doctrine, with particular anger at trans-Americans (we see you, Rep. Tom Swasey of New York); say the left The Democrats have abandoned the working class (we hear you again, Sen. Bernie Sanders). Both positions are wrong. Others point the finger at Harris’s company. Meanwhile, much of the media is hyping Trump’s victory as a landslide, seemingly validating his racist, anti-labor agenda.

I would argue that the Harris campaign’s biggest challenge was that it inherited a dysfunctional Biden campaign with only 107 days left. And even with that in mind, her company did a lot of things right: Her ground game really mattered; Trump won by an average of three points in seven battleground states and by seven points in states where there really wasn’t an active campaign. The same dynamic has narrowed Harris’ field in Democratic Party strongholds. (Good job, New York, California, and New Jersey Democratic parties.) It wasn’t enough of a difference, but it was a difference. I don’t know why she apparently lost to Biden in Detroit and Philadelphia, but it wasn’t for lack of trying: she visited both cities numerous times, spending the Sunday before the election at a black Philadelphia church, a black hair salon, and a Puerto Rican restaurant. Unlike Hillary Clinton, she didn’t ignore Wisconsin; she and Waltz campaigned there regularly, so she may have come closest to winning in Wisconsin than in other swing states.

Harris also turned out to be a strong campaigner, in contrast to her failed 2020 presidential campaign. And the excitement caused by Biden’s transition to the position of his vice president was real. But Biden’s squeaky-clean campaign in Wilmington couldn’t channel it — and, for good and bad reasons, Harris didn’t want to shake it. Despite the fact that the major media scrutinized the internal problems of the election campaign, I thought this artwork is by Jasmine Wright of course was most revealing. The company she inherited was not equipped to take advantage of the volunteers or money that Harris-Waltz brought in at the start of their campaign.

Of course, Harris made her own mistakes: she brought in former Barack Obama staffers and placed them in an existing dysfunctional leadership structure. According to Wright, some of her VP staff have been suspended. Perhaps because of this, she has toned down her populist rhetoric, relying on brother-in-law Tony West of Uber to check policy and billionaire businessman Mark Cuban as a top surrogate. She didn’t promise to keep antitrust crusader Lina Hahn, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, and we all know that supporters of Cuban and other corporations were gunning for her. She made headlines when she said she would cut Biden’s promised increase in the capital gains tax from 35 percent to 28 percent. But how many “working class” people even noticed these moves?

Also, Sanders’ insistence that the Harris campaign was “disastrous” and that “a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people will find that the working class has abandoned them” ignores how much she focused on workers in her campaign. (not to mention how much Biden has done for them during his administration!). She campaigned regularly in union halls and with union leaders, and there’s no denying that her proposed $6,000 baby tax credit, $25,000 for first-time home buyers and her plan to expand Medicare to cover home care, would do for working people. But am I only aware of these offers because I covered her campaign? it is possible Maybe her company didn’t target those messages enough. Maybe instead of giving a closing argument on the Ellipse about Jan. 6 and Trump’s existential threat to democracy, she should have packed the SEIU union hall and killed her opportunity agenda.

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that some of the complaints that Harris has “left” the working class focus, as always, on the issues and voices of working-class white males (though exit polls shouldn’t be relied upon entirely, the conclusion that in This year, NBC polled 10 statesit should be noted that Trump won Latinos 55–43). Advocates for working-class women, especially women of color, saw what President Harris would do for these workers.

Domestic workers stand up for I-Jen Poo, Harris’ strong surrogate, wrote in Time magazine a week before the election: “Harris’ agenda invests in caregivers, paid and unpaid, in an effort to limit the cost of childcare to 7 percent of incomeestablish paid family and medical leave, expand access to home care and raise the wages of health workers. These are the kinds of investments that will help families participate and stay in the workforce and realize America’s promising opportunities.”

Finally, this class critique ignores Harris’ pledges to continue Biden’s pro-labor policies—many of which were influenced by or borrowed from Sanders himself. As writer Michael Cohen points out, under the Biden-Harris administration, “the working class has grown more they are paid more than any other group of Americansso much so that it has reversed one-third of the rise in wage inequality since 1980.” Why did the labor voters not respond to this? This is a deeper problem that we need to address.

Either way, it’s time to stop pointing fingers, myself included. Let’s wait for more data before trying to understand demographic shifts; even the best exit polls are notoriously wrong. Stop capitulating to the media narrative that Trump won (he didn’t) which means he has a “mandate” for his policies – he doesn’t. Begin strategizing to block his agenda, especially his promise of mass deportations. With his swift selection of the horrible Tom Homan, the architect of family separation during Trump’s first term, as “border czar”, the white nationalist Stephen Miller as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and the incompetent dog killer Christy Noem as Homeland Security Director, the first personnel moves Trump shows that it was not just rhetoric. The blame game does not protect the vulnerable. Let’s move on to what will happen.