It’s The Economy, Stupid
There have been many insightful pieces written about the outcome of the 2024 election. In Compact Magazine, Christopher Caldwell and Slavoj Zizek scolded the left for its missteps while Darel Paul and Ashley Frawley provided insight into the Democrats’ unsuccessful gender politics. Meanwhile, at the New Yorker, veteran writers David Remnick, Jelani Cobb, and Jia Tolentino sounded the alarm on Trump’s authoritarianism, bigotry, and misogny (respectively) and what it means for the country moving forward. Although these publications succeed in platforming a diverse array of voices and opinions, they fail to acknowledge the simple reason why Kamala Harris lost this election. To quote James Carville: it’s the economy, stupid.
As CNN’s David Goldman dutifully noted, a rising GDP means little when American home prices have reached a record high for 15 straight months. Similarly, what good does a low unemployment rate do when Americans can still not afford the bare necessities; indeed, despite inflation returning to normal, prices are still 20% higher than when Biden took office. Harris’s ill-conceived praise of Bidenomics reflects just how out-of-touch the coastal professional-managerial class is with the working-class constituency that was once the base of the Democratic party. Harris’s loss underscores another issue which the Democrats lost to Republicans: immigration.
In her article from November 4th, Batya Ungar-Sargon provided great insight into how immigration and, by proxy, the economy shaped the 2024 election. Ungar-Sargon astutely notes that xenophobia is not the only factor contributing to the electorate’s stance against illegal immigration. Additionally, she notes that working-class wages have trended downward since the 1970s while the share of the US-born foreign population has trended upward. Now, correlation does not equal causation and there are many factors that have contributed to declining working-class wages, among them the advent of Reaganomics. That being said, Trump’s 2024 success with a diverse working-class coalition suggests that there is a fear of illegal immigration grounded in material concerns in addition to xenophobia.
All this being said, will Trump’s Project 2025 agenda help working-class Americans? Of course not! But, if the Democratic party is to regroup and respond in 2028, they must acknowledge the material concerns of the working class instead of merely ascribing Trump’s win to xenophobia, misogyny, and bigotry. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but if the Democrats hadn’t pushed out Bernie Sanders in 2016, we might be looking at a very different picture heading into the new year. And, without a doubt, if Biden had stepped aside sooner, we would have had a more productive Democratic primary and a better shot at retaining the White House.
