Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a historic loss on Tuesday, the effects of which will reverberate for generations to come. This defeat came after she and the Democratic Party committed to a right-wing lurch that, in the end, served only to empower her opponent and usher in a new era of fascism under Donald Trump.
As of Wednesday, Harris had lost every swing state that had been called by The Associated Press — with Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin going to Trump — and was behind in the last swing state of Arizona. Trump’s win, called by the AP early Wednesday morning, is a walloping for the ages, with data showing that the vast majority of counties swung toward Trump compared to in 2020.
In the end, Trump is likely going to win with over 300 electoral votes. As of writing, Harris was also badly losing the popular vote by a margin of roughly 5 million.
Despite the warnings of the left, Democrats dug down on a tried-and-failed strategy of courting Republicans this election. For a short period after President Joe Biden dropped out, Harris had a huge amount of momentum, even picking a progressive favorite, Tim Walz, as her running mate.
That momentum was quickly quashed as the Democrats ran to the right. The campaign uplifted Republicans at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and touted endorsements like that of Republican Dick Cheney, who is infamous for engineering the U.S’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq.
Some small gains in polling made by the promise of a new face of the Democratic Party slowly diminished. In the month leading up to the election, Harris campaigned more with Republican former House member Liz Cheney than anyone else — including more left-leaning supporters like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) or United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain.
At the same time, the campaign outright ignored the left, refusing to grant progressives even a symbolic victory, like allowing a Palestinian to make a short speech onstage at the DNC. Progressive policies were consistently shown as winners in polls; multiple surveys showed that Harris could gain ground in swing states if she tossed Biden’s approach to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and backed an arms embargo.
Instead, in a moment that will likely go down as a key reason for her defeat, Harris promised in an October appearance on “The View” that she wouldn’t do anything differently from Biden — and then doubled back later to say that the only thing she would do differently is have a Republican cabinet member.
Despite this relentless courting, exit polls showed that Republicans still overwhelmingly voted for Trump, and that this imagined base of conservatives who want to vote against Trump doesn’t exist. According to NBC News’s exit poll, 94 percent of Republicans voted for Trump, while 5 percent voted for Harris — roughly the same as the 4 percent of Democrats who went for Trump. Other polls, like that of Edison Research, found the same proportions.
It’s not just who they uplifted on the campaign trail. Democrats also shifted their platform to the right. Many parts of Harris’s immigration proposals were virtually indistinguishable from Trump’s 2016 and 2020 policies, with Harris committing to rebuilding Trump’s southern border wall; parroting right-wing myths about drug smuggling; and generally adopting a racist anti-immigration approach.
At the same time, Harris pledged more policing, failed to meaningfully address issues like preserving health care access and Social Security, and, as the country was hit with a historically disastrous hurricane, rejected crucial climate policies like a fracking ban.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.