The results of the 2024 elections are in, and despite Democrats performing well in New York State, successfully flipping three House seats from red to blue and passing a ballot referendum to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution, Democrats nationwide didn’t fare so well.

Democrats have officially lost their one-seat majority in the Senate and Republicans are set up to continue as the majority party in the House as they currently hold 214 seats to Democrats 205, and a total of 218 is required to hold a majority. The Democrat at the top of the ballot, Vice President Kamala Harris, lost the presidential race to former President Donald Trump.

Now, a former President who attempted to overturn the results of an election he lost in 2020 is set up to return to office on January 20, 2025 — but this time with even fewer guardrails as Republicans are likely to control the House, Senate and Presidency.

Along with the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which ruled earlier this year in support of presidential immunity and trash-canning the regulatory state in their Chevron decision, Republicans seem to be set up to enact their will on the American public.

The polls leading up to election day indicated that the race was a toss-up, giving Trump and Harris roughly equal chances of winning the Presidency. However, the election saw a stronger performance than expected from Trump, as he defeated Harris in nearly every swing state that Biden won in 2020.

Trump won in all three “blue wall” states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He also won in Georgia and is projected to win in Arizona and Nevada. As a result, he earned 312 electoral votes, well above the 270 required to win. In comparison, Harris earned just 226 electoral votes and even lost the popular vote, which has been rare for Democratic presidential candidates in recent years.

This election was the first time a Republican Presidential candidate won the popular vote and the electoral college since George W. Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry in 2004. In total, Trump received 74,708,357 votes (50.5%), and Harris received 70,979,779 votes (48%).

While Trump received roughly 484,988 more votes than in 2020 (74,223,369), Harris received 10 million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020 (81,282,916) and failed to outperform him in a single state.

This drastic underperformance has sparked debate among Democrats, who seek to understand why Harris could not drive the turnout among the Democratic Party's base that Biden received. The party's corporate wing has been quick to say that Harris was too far left and that she didn’t appeal to moderate voters enough. However, quite a few examples point to the opposite being true.

Some point to the prevalence of sexism in our society and say that the public at large remains too racist and misogynistic to elect a Black female President. While this certainly played a part in Harris’ defeat, it ignores other ways the Democratic Party has failed to operate as a meaningful opposition to Republicans. Also, former Democratic President Barack Obama won several states won by Trump in 2016 and 2024, so Harris’ loss can’t be entirely explained by racism.

Others say that the Democratic party's decision not to hold a primary election, which would have allowed voters to choose their nominee rather than have one undemocratically elected by party leaders, hurt the party's credibility as the protectors of democracy, which they attempted to posture as in the face of Trump’s authoritarianism.

It’s difficult to pinpoint one specific issue that led to Trump’s comeback victory, but when taken all together, it becomes clear that a right-wing shift in the Democratic Party has resulted in poor electoral outcomes at the national level.   

Over the last several years, the Democratic Party has made a strategic decision to abandon its longtime base of multiracial working-class voters, choosing instead to reach out to wealthy moderate and center-right voters in the suburbs. This strategy was explained by U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer leading up to the 2016 election when he told CSPAN, “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, Illinois, and Wisconsin.”

That strategy lost the Democrats the Presidency to Trump in 2016, and it has done the same again in 2024. 

Instead of pushing a compelling message about how progressive populist policies desired by the base of the party, such as enforcing antitrust law to break up monopolies that are price gouging on necessities like housing, gas, and groceries, would address issues like inflation — which ranked as the top issue concerning voters in the 2024 election — the Harris campaign chose to prioritize reaching out to moderate Republicans and corporate interests.

While supporters of the Democratic party in the media talked about how the Biden/Harris economy was doing great because unemployment and inflation were low, stocks were doing well, and the GDP is growing, a majority of Americans continue to live paycheck to paycheck and view the economy as struggling because they aren’t invested in the stock market and are still struggling to afford basic necessities, leading to 67% of voters rating the economy as “not so good/poor” based on Washington Post exit polls.

Without an adequate counter message to Trump’s economic policy of tariffs, tax cuts, and demonizing immigration, Democrats effectively ceded the narrative about why so many working-class Americans are struggling to keep pace with rising costs of living to right-wing faux-populist misinformation about government spending, over-regulation and undocumented immigrant criminals on welfare driving inflation.

As a result, 73% of Trump voters said inflation caused their family “severe hardship” in the last year, while 78% of Harris voters said they experienced “no hardship,” according to a CNN poll. 

Washington Post economics reporter Jeff Stein has also documented the Democrats' failure to retain support among their working-class base. Stein found that in 2020, the majority of voters who earned over $100,000 voted for Trump, while in 2024, the majority of these voters went to Harris. For voters earning under $50,000, a majority went to Biden in 2020, but in 2024, the majority went to Trump. 

Biden was successful at attracting support among the party's working-class Base in 2020, partly due to Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and partly because Democrats were momentarily correcting some of their 2016 failures. Biden was elected in 2020 and passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which kept in place many of the pandemic-era social programs implemented under Trump’s CARE Act — such as expanded unemployment and Medicaid benefits and federal moratoriums on evictions and student loans.

Then, throughout 2021, the Biden administration attempted to pass the Build Back Better (BBB) Act, which supported progressive policies like universal family and medical leave, expanding Medicare to cover dental and vision benefits, expanding the Child Tax Credit, and investing $100 billion in energy infrastructure to transition the country to 100% carbon-free electricity production by 2035. 

Even though 63% of the public supported BBB and Democrats held majorities in both chambers of Congress, it was never passed by the Senate due to opposition from Republicans and conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, who said that the bill was too expensive and that it would drive up inflation. 

In response to the pushback, the Biden administration abandoned the progressive policy of the BBB agenda at the start of 2022, choosing instead to cater to Republicans and the party's corporate wing that wanted to prioritize decreasing federal spending because they were incorrectly blaming it for inflation. In reality, the leading causes of inflation have been corporate price gouging and supply chain issues caused by the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, some argue that supply chain issues had a more significant impact. 

Then, in 2023, Democrats continued their rightward move by passing an omnibus bill that cut millions of people off SNAP benefits by ending the Emergency Allotment (EA) enacted at the start of the pandemic in 2020. Weeks later, the Biden administration announced the end of the COVID-19 National Emergency, which threw an estimated 20 million people off expanded Medicaid coverage. Ending the national emergency also ended the federal moratorium on evictions and student loan payments.

As the Biden-Harris administration caved to corporate interests and dismantled the pandemic-era social safety net enacted under Trump one program at a time, the number of people in the United States experiencing food insecurity increased from 33.8 million in 2021 to 47.4 million in 2023. Over the same timeframe, the number of people living below the poverty line increased from 25.6 million to 42.8 million, and household food costs increased by 35%.

The Biden-Harris administration effectively handed Trump a victory by overseeing the dismantling of the pandemic social safety net and failing to provide voters with a coherent economic package.

In addition to failing to provide an adequate counter message to Trump’s economic agenda, Democrats have adopted more right-wing policies in several areas, such as immigration, the environment, and war powers.

While Harris supported policies like creating a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers (undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children and have lived in the country for most of their lives) during her Presidential run in 2019, she didn’t support it in 2024. She even talked about continuing to build Trump’s border wall, which Democrats once fiercely opposed.

Harris has also shifted to the right on environmental policy since 2019. She used to support a federal fracking ban but has since changed her position to support an all-of-the-above approach to energy policy, leaving the fracking door wide open despite opposition from the party's base.

Not only that, but the Harris campaign also bragged about being endorsed by Republicans, like the notoriously unpopular former Vice President Dick Cheney, who left office with a dismal 13% approval rating after overseeing unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Harris also campaigned in swing states with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney more than anyone else during the final month of the election. 

At the same time as the Biden-Harris administration has supported Israel in what has been called a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, this cozying up to the former Republican establishment, which has supported wars that destabilized the Middle East, eroded any remaining trust for the Democratic party among arab-American voters, who were a crucial population to win in swing states like Michigan which has a significant arab-American population. This allowed Trump to position himself as a pro-peace candidate, which gave him an advantage in states like Michigan.

According to Washington Post investigative reporter Evan Hill, this attempt to reach out to moderate Republicans achieved nothing for the Harris campaign, as she received even less support from moderates than Biden. “Harris's center pivot toward independents and Cheney Republicans seems like it got her less than nothing: -1% from Biden's share of Republican identifiers, -5% from Biden's share of independents,” Hill said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

Regarding the congressional war powers, which Democrats supported in their 2020 platform, no mention of it was included in the 2024 platform. A sign that the party has resigned itself to allowing the President to unilaterally wage war without approval from Congress.

This could be seen most clearly over the last year as the United States has expanded its military presence in the Middle East to defend Israel as they wage war in Gaza and Lebanon. Since the start of the current outbreak in violence, US-backed Israeli attacks — many of which violated international law — have killed more than 40,000 in Gaza and more than 3,000 in Lebanon. Estimates from The Lancet say the death count could already be as high as 186,000 — roughly 8% of the population of Gaza. These attacks came in response to the Hamas attack on October 7 that killed roughly 1,200 Israelis. The U.S. has spent at least $22.7 billion on these operations.

While the bipartisan political establishment hasn’t bothered to care about war powers, five progressive House lawmakers have signed a letter to President Biden arguing that the deployment of American troops and missile systems to Israel violates the Constitution. Several Democrats in Congress have also criticized the Biden-Harris administration's decision to conduct airstrikes in Yemen, saying that the strikes were unconstitutional because Congress did not authorize them.

As the Biden-Harris administration has continued to send military aid to Israel despite pushback from elected members of their party, a large amount of the public has also grown to support stopping weapons sales to Israel. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), 52% of Americans supported halting weapons shipments to Israel. The number was even higher for voters who chose Biden in 2020 at 62%.

Despite this opposition, policy regarding Israel has remained unchanged, which presented an electoral issue at the ballot box for the Harris campaign. Voters in several swing states who voted for Biden in 2020 said that they would be more likely to support the Democratic nominee if they pledged to withhold military support for Israel. In Pennsylvania, that number was 57% of voters; in Arizona, it was 44%; and in Georgia, it was 34%.

Harris lost all three of these states to Trump, partly due to the campaign's reluctance to listen to the base of the party and distance themselves from Biden’s policy regarding Israel.

Then you have the war in Ukraine, which has gobbled up a total of $175 billion in funding from Congress since Russia invaded the country in March 2022. While polling suggests that Democrats are more supportive than Republicans when it comes to sending funding to Ukraine, the public is nearly evenly split, with 48% in support and 49% opposed.

As the Biden-Harris administration allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to be sent to foreign countries to fight proxy wars at the same time as they cut domestic spending by dismantling the pandemic-era social safety net and failed to provide a coherent campaign message about how progressive populist policies would work to end endless wars and improve affordability, they lost the trust of working-class voters in key swing states that propelled them to victory in 2020.

The Democratic establishment's failures to defeat Trump in 2016 and 2024 should expose the fact that the party is perceived by the American public as elitist and out of touch with the economic realities faced by the working class. The lack of a straightforward progressive-populist narrative to help the American public identify corporate greed as the root cause of economic issues allowed Trump to blame them on things like government spending and immigration, which don’t pose a threat to the corporate-backed bipartisan establishment that runs this country.