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Democratic Defeat in the Urban Vote

From the series Elections in the USA

A careful analysis of the 2022 mid-term elections revealed the symptoms of a Democratic Party malaise which subsequently fully manifested itself in the latest presidential election, with the heavy loss of support in its traditional strongholds of the metropolitan areas of New York City and Chicago, and the State of California.

A defeat foretold

Republican votes rose from 51 million in the previous 2018 midterms to 54 million in 2022, a gain of 3 million. The Democrat vote fell from 61 to 51 million, a loss of 10 million. The Republicans gained only three votes for every ten lost by the Democrats, while the other seven became abstentions. In 2022, we analysed the elections in New York City by borough, the governmental districts whose names are well known through movies and TV series. In The Bronx, where the average yearly household income is $35,000, the Democrats lost 52,000 votes, while the Republicans gained 10,000. In Brooklyn, with an average income of $63,000, the Democrats lost 87,000 votes, while the Republicans gained 25,000. In Manhattan, where the average income is $112,000, the Democrats lost 31,000 votes, while the Republicans gained 10,000. We extended our analysis of those elections to other important American metropolises, from Cleveland in Ohio to Detroit in Michigan, Chicago in Illinois, and Houston in Texas. With local candidates competing, we could already see a sharp drop in Democratic votes, with only 30% of the lost votes shifting to the Republicans and the remainder becoming abstentions. This was already an ongoing phenomenon, independent of the candidature of Donald Trump, who rode the wave of an existing process rather than generating it.

In the latest presidential elections, we saw a repeat of the phenomenon seen in the 2022 midterm elections. This year, for the first time in decades, the Republicans overtook the Democrats in the popular vote. In California, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris lost 1.9 million votes and Republican Trump gained only 55,000; in Illinois, Harris lost more than 400,000 votes and Trump also lost some; in New York State, Harris lost almost a million votes and Trump gained only 200,000.

Trump gained a majority of the Electoral College votes, a victory secured with less than 2% margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin: these States account for 44 electoral votes, thanks to which, with a slight swing, Harris could have got 270 votes and won the election. In the end, Trump won thanks to 230,000 votes from these States, 0.15% of the 154.8 million total votes. This may seem a small thing, but there is something deeper than this 0.15% swing behind Trump’s victory, and it has two elements: Republican penetration into the Democratic strongholds of the big cities, primarily the high-income, and certainly not the working-class, districts, and marked abstentions by medium- and low-income wage earners.

An analysis by The New York Times [December 6th] studies the vote shift in favour of Trump by type of county, albeit with the defect that it did not consider abstentions. In core urban counties (representing 27% of voters), 8% of the votes shifted to Trump; in other urban areas (15% of voters) 5.8%; in suburbs (41% of voters) 4.6%; and in rural counties (17% of voters) 3.7%. However, as concerning the Democrats’ strategy, in the counties with a non-white majority, representing 18% of voters, the shift in favour of Trump was 9.9%.

The New York Times writes: “Voters in the largest urban counties moved more as a group toward Donald J. Trump since the 2020 election than the nation did as a whole, with eye-popping shifts in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Boston [...] but if we look just at counties that are majority-white, that’s no longer true”. Hence, according to the newspaper, what is surprising is that, in spite of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, the shift of non-white minorities towards him was greater than the shift of whites. In the light of our past twenty years of analysis, this does not come as a surprise.

In 2002, Democratic analysts John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, in this book, they argued that, because of natural demographic trends, and in particular the growth in the number of Hispanics, a long-term stable majority for the Democratic Party would be created. This thesis was already refuted by George W. Bush’s victory in the 2004 election [Lotta Comunista, November 2012]. In May 2017, in an analysis about income brackets as the prevalent factor rather than ethnic background, we criticised these theses as “The Illusion of the Democratic Party” since “the second and third generation Hispanics, the ‘natives’, also show some anti-immigration tendencies” [Internationalist Bulletin, June 2017].

In the elections of the previous twenty years, the Democratic Party based its victories on the urban vote, where it combined the votes of the high-income professional classes with a low-income mass base. This mechanism did not work any more. This could have consequences in the next electoral cycles.

The end of the Obama coalition?

Michael Lind, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas (Austin), and an advocate of a return to Roosevelt’s New Deal, with echoes of European social-democratic policies, espouses a Democratic economic nationalism similar to that of Walter Russell Mead on the Republican front. On November 1”, before the election, he published an article called “The Obama Machine” in the online magazine Tablet. Here he argued that, during his 2008 and 2012 presidencies, Barack Obama transferred the political model of Chicago’s Democratic Party onto a national scale. Lind argued that Obama and his collaborators modernised Chicago’s old urban Democratic machine, characterised by patronage jobs, favouritism, nepotism, precinct workers, and party loyalty, all based on a territorial structure. They managed to transform it into an organisation funded by national and global corporate and banking interests, and by billionaire oligarchs, who make large use of consulting firms and mass media advertising. According to Lind, Obama exported the Chicago model to the other major cities.

In the November 13th issue of The New York Times, editor Ezra Klein discusses these theses with Lind himself in the article “The End of the Obama Coalition”. According to Klein, the 2024 election marked the end of the Democratic electoral coalition: the Democratic Party had worked hard in the last few years to bring about a coalition between the white professional elite and the ethnic minorities, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Now it has seen these voters turn towards Trump and abstentionism. Although Lind and Klein’s narrative is radically different from our interpretation based on the Marxist definition of classes, and from our theses about abstentionism, it is interesting to see it appearing in a newspaper which is the point of reference for Democrats, and their supporters outside the US. According to Klein, it is not just a matter of electoral tactics or strategies, but it is the structure of the Democratic Party itself which is called into question.

The beginning of a reckoning for the Democrats?

In the opinion of an important Democratic strategist, the apparatus and strategies of his party are obsolete. According to him, Democratic messaging across the board “needs to be thrown out the window”; they should “stop holding rallies with Beyoncé and caring about a Taylor Swift endorsement”, because this only exacerbates the narrative that Democrats have become the party of Hollywood [The Hill, November 8th.

An internal struggle among Democratic currents has begun and the use of funding has become a point of contention. Harris received $1.6 billion for her election campaign, more than Trump’s $1 billion. A list of the top 100 billionaire donors, 50 pro-Trump and 50 pro-Harris, can be found in the October 30th issue of Forbes and also in the September 10th issue of business magazine Bloomberg.

The latest election offers an interesting lesson on the link between money and politics: it is not enough to have money, one also needs to know how to spend it. Now Democrats are beginning to ask how Harris’ staff spent all the money donated by rich billionaires.

80-year-old James Carville, one of the most experienced Democratic political consultants, adviser to Bill Clinton in 1992 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, lit the fuse of the future battle inside the Democratic Party with an article published on November 30th in The Hill. He claims that Harris raked in not $1.5 billion, but $2.5 billion and then wonders, probably giving voice to the disappointment of her donors: “Does anybody have any idea where that money went?".

Carville and other party members have questioned the costs associated with events, which involved the participation of Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, and other celebrities. They argue that the huge amount of money set in motion could have caused a short circuit, with the election campaign becoming a business in itself, relatively disconnected from the voters it is supposed to attract: a way to enrich pollsters, consultants, and celebrities, a parasitic machine which is closed in on itself, and no longer just a tool used by financial oligarchies to win elective posts.

Lotta Comunista, December 2024

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