Most people didn’t vote for Trump, or Harris
Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality. Now that the dust has begun to settle on the presidential election results, he looks at some of the conclusions that should and should not be drawn.
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Flush with election night news that he had won the presidential election fair-and-square, Donald Trump took to the stage at his victory rally to assert: “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”. The next day, Republican congressional Representative Elise Stefanik, a Trump lickspittle, declared: “We the people made our voices heard by re-electing President Trump in a historic landslide”. Trump rewarded Stefanik’s fealty with an appointment as US ambassador to the United Nations.
On the Democratic Party side of the political spectrum, despair mixed with lashing out at millions of “stupid” and “selfish” Americans who supported Trump. As always, social media brought out the worst, of which this was just one small example:
“I hope every woman who voted for Trump and lives in a no abortion state gets what they wanted. To bleed out in a parking lot due to a miscarriage and no doctor will help you because THAT’S what you voted for. Y’all deserve it.”
Even Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist turned Democratic Party consultant, condemned Uncommitted movement adviser Waleed Shahid with the indefensible statement: “I probably won’t be able to stop the Schadenfreude when Shahid gets deported”.
Did Americans vote for authoritarianism, misogyny and racism? Is that who Americans “are”? Millions certainly are avid supporters of Trump and, at the very least, don’t consider his racism and misogyny disqualifying. But it’s harder to extend those observations to all Americans—or even to the 64 percent of eligible voters who cast a ballot.
As more votes are sorted, it becomes much clearer that Trump’s victory, far from being a landslide, was quite narrow. When the count is finalised nationwide, more voters will have chosen someone other than the bigoted billionaire. At the time of writing, the president-elect had corralled 49.8 percent of all ballots, meaning that more than 50 percent of voters chose either Harris or a third-party candidate. In fact, Trump’s victory is the seventh narrowest (about 1.6 percentage points in vote share higher than Harris) in 51 presidential elections going back to the 1820s.
When compared to the 2020 election, we see a mirror image. In each election, the incumbent president was turfed out, and the winning candidate’s party lost ground but prevailed as the majority in the House of Representatives and narrowly won the Senate. Trump and the Republicans certainly won, but the margin of their victories doesn’t suggest a fundamental reordering of US mainstream politics.
That doesn’t mean that the Trump administration won’t try to act on its most reactionary, authoritarian and venal impulses. But those actions won’t embody “the will of the people”—even of those who voted. To take a couple of examples: exit polls showed that support for abortion rights exceeds support for either major party candidate. And clearly, millions of people who support abortion rights also voted for Trump. If the Trump administration pushes through a national abortion ban, it won’t be because it was acting on an anti-abortion “mandate”.
Second, exit polls showed that while most voters support “mass deportation” of the undocumented, more significant majorities support providing the undocumented with a path to US citizenship. When people are asked if undocumented residents who have lived and worked in the US for decades should be deported, support for “mass deportation” evaporates.
Despite what the pundit “hot takes” and “instant analyses” say, the simplest explanation for the election result is that millions of people were dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s economic management, and enough of them decided either to vote for Trump or to not to vote for Harris (more on this later).
And that’s the judgment of the estimated 155 million people who voted—out of a voting-eligible population of just under 245 million. When the counting is completed, Trump is expected to net about 77.8 million votes and Harris about 75 million. Trump’s total will be about 4 million fewer than Biden received in 2020. Meanwhile, about 90 million people who could have voted didn’t. In other words, the “party of non-voters” is the winner again—as it has been in every election since the post-Civil War era.
Research over the years has shown that these non-voters tend to be younger, not college educated, lower income and people of colour. They don’t pay much attention to politics, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have political opinions. One of the reasons they tune out of mainstream politics, according to a large 2020 study, is because they have little trust in politicians or the system to do anything that will change their lives for the better. They are more likely to consider the system “rigged” than those who cast ballots.
An October Associated Press story showed these sentiments were alive in 2024. It recounted an encounter between a voter registration organiser and Earl Jones, a 73-year-old Detroit resident who said he survives on Social Security and “hustling” and hasn’t voted since the 1970s. “I ain’t voting for nobody unless we see somebody go do something for us, and not just for me, for everybody—you, him and him”, Jones said, pointing to people around him. “If they do something for us, it’ll be alright. If they don’t, the hell with it.”
This sentiment reduced the turnout for Kamala Harris. While the media maps of the vote showed a “red shift” to Republicans in most of the country, Harris lost the most ground in urban Democratic Party strongholds. A Politico analysis of precinct data in “swing-state” urban areas showed major declines in Democratic turnout from 2020. In swing-state precincts with African American populations of 85 percent or more, Harris lost more than 17,000 votes compared to Biden’s total in 2020, while Trump gained about 3,500 votes in the same precincts. Politico showed a similar pattern in swing-state precincts that were more than 85 percent Latino.
And those data are from the seven swing states, where both campaigns focused the entirety of their campaigns. In those states, the popular vote split between the Democrats and Republicans shifted 2.5 to 3 percentage points to the Republicans, compared to 2020 results. In fact, Harris won more votes than Biden did in four of them (Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina). Nationally, the shift was about 5.5 to 6 percentage points compared to 2020. The decline of the Democratic presidential vote in non-swing states such as California, New York and Illinois, and the increase in Republican votes in Texas and Florida, accounts for the bulk of the national popular vote shift.
These figures illustrate the absurdity of the electoral college system of electing a president. A multi-billion-dollar presidential campaign that essentially ignores 43 of 50 states doesn’t have to address itself to the mass of working people clustered in the largest and most diverse cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Tampa. It’s why so much post-election commentary magnifies as significant changes what are small shifts among voters in a handful of states.
Widening the lens on the election result provides more perspective. Do most Americans really want an authoritarian theocracy that architects of the conservative Project 2025 promise? Did they get to vote for what they really want?
The 2020 study quoted above noted that about one in five non-voters say they would vote for a third party if they did vote. And, for about two decades, opinion polls have shown majorities of Americans believe a third party is needed because the two major parties don’t “do an adequate job” of representing the people. In 2024, however, third-party support was low by historical standards, and the Democrats couldn’t blame the Green Party or the independent campaign of Cornel West for costing them the election.
The money-soaked US electoral system managed to do what it always seems to do in presidential years: present an increasingly dissatisfied electorate with two capitalist parties—one an increasingly authoritarian, theocratic party (the Republicans) and the other a centre-right party of the status quo (the Democrats). That’s the way the plutocrats and oligarchs behind both parties like it. The Elon Musks and Richard Uihleins on the Republican side and the Michael Bloombergs and Reid Hoffmans on the Democratic side aren’t about to finance a real political challenge to their dominance of the US political economy. Social commentator Freddie deBoer, who voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in Connecticut, drew this conclusion:
“A country with a two-party system that include[s] a far-right party and a center-right party is a country that will inevitably move in a far-right direction. And not [pundits] Jon Favreau nor Gail Collins nor Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor the New York Times editorial board nor Hillary Clinton herself nor any other of the tongue-cluckers have a response to that fact. Because they’ve assumed away any possibility of positive change; they know they’re stuck. That’s the other thing almost nobody did [on election day]: articulate any path for the country to get better. You can’t, because better can’t emerge from this rotten system.”
There’s no use in sugar-coating the election result. But it’s also important to remember that most positive social change in US history didn’t come from elections. It came from the struggles of ordinary people. This may not seem to be on the cards right now, but history hasn’t “ended”. The great peoples’ historian Howard Zinn put it well:
“The Constitution gave no rights to working people; no right to work less than 12 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance….Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel and violate the law in order to uphold justice.”
