ATTN: The Democratic Party

This piece is part of a series of articles produced in a special topics class taught by Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought Lawrence Douglas on the 2024 election. Articles may have been reviewed by Douglas as well as other members of the class prior to submission to The Student.

As we are now a month away from the election, I am compelled to take stock of a few necessary comments regarding the outcome. It was no surprise to me, and shouldn’t be to anyone, that Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. It was never a race at all. For months, the world listened to plenty of different perspectives regarding polling, research, state-by-state analysis, pundits making claims one way or the other, and scholars theorizing outcomes. It had been my independent analysis for some time, shared by friends and others, that Trump would succeed in his political comeback. Claims that he would win the popular vote were scrutinized, and some called me crazy when I suggested it. And I now want to explain why I felt he would win.

Since attending Amherst College, my political consciousness has grown to see the two-party system and the two parties themselves as the wings of the same bird—the bird being the capitalist oligarchy behind the veil of our democracy. The sheer amount of money that dominates our elections, the parties, and the people within the parties is chilling.

Consider how corporate money floods our campaigns, from tech giants like Meta, whose lobbying expenses skyrocketed post-2020, to major pharmaceutical companies that spent millions lobbying against drug price caps in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Grassroots initiatives and small-dollar fundraising do play a role in politics. Still, corporations and high-net-worth donors, who rarely feel the pinch of policy failures, continue to steer the ship, pushing political leaders away from taking stock of how an electorate feels policy pressures because they know voters have been diminished to choosing between two parties. Voters vote how they feel. The “kitchen table” conversation issues that our political leaders peddle as campaign rhetoric every four years may be obscure to them, but they are not to us. A friend of mine recently said something like this more eloquently than I ever could, so I am paraphrasing — when working-class voters, who assume the position of the “masses” in an election, continue to feel inflation, taxes, grocery prices, and, yes, gas prices, as brutally as they are feeling them now, those voters tend to reject the incumbent government that they feel those pressures under. They believe in the alternative, even if that alternative is running an illusive campaign funded by a few uber-wealthy who benefit from the sentiment of the masses in a case like this.

Let’s look at recent rent spikes in major U.S. cities to bring this closer to reality. Take Austin, Texas, where the average rent increased by nearly 40% over the last three years, or Phoenix, Arizona, which saw similar surges. Housing costs aren’t falling for the middle class, compounded by inflation on everyday goods. So, yes, the “economy” may be doing better, job employment may be up, and prices may be steadily going down, but that does not account for the middle class (and lower) being on fire and slowly but surely fading away as class and income inequality expands. The Democratic Party claims to be the party of the “working” person. But with Trump as the other choice, this election delivered the harshest rebuke of leadership and capability the Democrats have seen in a very long time.

In Ohio, for instance, we saw the closure of the Lordstown GM plant under Trump, which was a significant hit to local communities. Yet, many blue-collar Ohioans still gravitate toward Trump, not because he kept factories open, but because they feel his rhetoric speaks to their experiences of being left behind by the political establishment. We need to start having the actual conversations. We need to start talking about political realignment. While there is a lot I could say about the Republican Party turning into something akin to a cult, I feel more compelled to emphasize that this cycle, the Democratic Party was heinously out of touch, deluded, and had no clue what kinds of “issues” to focus and deliver on. Yes, the conversations need to be and continue to be about safeguarding social rights — very hard-fought rights — while simultaneously having conversations about living costs and daily expenses. There wasn’t just lousy messaging on these critical issues, but looking the other way from them almost altogether and parading around with a Cheney, trying to woo a non-existent ‘undecided’ electorate instead.

Take the case of California, where Democratic leadership has held power for years, yet homelessness has only worsened in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Despite massive (albeit necessary) spending, Democratic policies have failed to alleviate the root causes of homelessness. Meanwhile, they need to stop using “billionaire taxes” as a talking point while crippling the middle class even more by not doing it. They need to grow a backbone and start putting their money where their mouth is. They need to stop making false promises to women, young people, and Black, Brown, and other non-white voters simply to gain support in elections and then do nothing to stand by those promises to uplift communities when they come into power. The Biden administration's recent failure to deliver on student loan forgiveness after promising relief to younger voters is a clear example. Likewise, issues like police reform saw little to no movement despite being a core part of the Democratic platform in 2020 — they introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. They failed to get it through the Senate. They make promises and wait for them to fade with time. We cannot allow them to forget. They need to stop encouraging young people that they have our back, yet leave us with the horrible messes facing our future. They need to wake up, and more than that, we need to continue to hold them accountable.

People ask me how I predicted Donald Trump returning to power, and the answer is quite simple: Every variable we have used to judge elections in the past was out of place. The variables this time were that there were none to begin with. Donald Trump’s success is not a win for him but a rebuke of the Democrats. While we owe him an immense debt for service, it was no secret to perhaps overly observant political minds that Biden would not run again. The conversations about what would happen at the Democratic National Convention if he dropped out after the primaries were happening as early as January of this year — not just weeks before. He had been strategically removed from more and more media and press appearances in the months leading up to the debate, with that being the breaking point, and was already the oldest president in history (take a look at what eight years did to Obama, and he was in his forties when he won). One could have taken a few guesses about Biden.

While I am proud of Vice President Kamala Harris for taking on this momentous moment and exercising grace, dignity, and respect at every turn, the Democratic Party’s first mistake, or instead, whoever else was in charge, was intentionally waiting for the primaries to be over, and assuming Harris would be the candidate the party could use as a vessel and the candidate that people would want. Their other mistake was not making space for a younger generation of leaders to step forward and priming and readying them for the task. Take figures like Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, younger Democratic leaders who may have had greater public support if the Party had backed them more aggressively in a primary model. Many might be asking now if a governor, independent of the federal branch of Democratic leadership, would have fared better against Trump — who skillfully capitalized on heavily felt sentiments of political resentment and economic hardship that the country is feeling. He is the last person to save us, but he convinced enough people he can.

I do not blame Vice President Harris for losing this election. I do not see it as a loss for her. I do not entirely see this as Joe Biden’s fault. I see it as a significant rebuke of the Democratic echelon, which needs to reflect on and pivot from the advisors and voices they are listening to and bring in the younger minds they have neglected — younger minds that won’t just fill their campaign team quotas, but who will steer them in the right directions moving forward. They must pull in people with drastically different backgrounds because the world differs from twenty years ago. This election was simple to analyze but complicated everywhere else. They are irritatingly out of touch with voters. Stop the blame game, tie your laces, and lock in.

Sometimes, friends, we have to turn away from the pollsters and the data telling us one outcome is imminent and just go with our gut. We have to do away with leaning one way because the media is. We must reject the illusive narratives peddled about momentum when it wasn’t there initially. Intuition is sometimes the only indicator at the end of the day. The Democratic Party, at least publicly, vastly overestimated the momentum social media and other media outlets made us all think they had. While Trump is the wrong person to see as the country’s savior, the hardship voters are facing is genuine and felt by so many people. My announcement to the Democratic Party is that you cannot expect your supporters to support you if, repeatedly, it is broken promises, or at least not trying to fight for them. Democracy is not worth protecting on our end if it isn’t on yours. There is much to say about Harris being a Black woman in this election. Trump, in his candidacy itself, has proven to us yet again that racism and sexism are just as much a fracture in social cohesion as they always have been. That is where we are as a country, but it doesn’t have to remain who we are as a people.

These conversations are one of many we must have as a country and as a party to realign ourselves going forward. Class inequality, climate apathy, and economic hardship are just going to get worse and worse. While it saddens me that it will take the election of Donald Trump to get us there, we are at a point in human history where the Renaissance is imminent, and the question will become, are you ready to rise from the ashes?