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.
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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