by Steve Howell

After a US presidential election, it is usually easy enough to offer some sensible thoughts on what happened and why. It also tends to be fairly clear what the outcome means for the world because of the longstanding neo-con consensus on foreign policy between Democrats and Republicans. Even the personnel can move seamlessly between administrations once their political patrons have completed the electoral show. As Julius Nyerere famously said the United States is a one-party state “but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” (1)

In the case of Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, however, the dust settling has not entirely cleared the fog, if you’ll forgive the mixing of metaphors. The reason for this is because his nominees for key ‘national security’ posts are people who have been at loggerheads with each other on geo-political issues and particularly on which confrontations and wars the US should prioritise.

But let’s come back to that harder question after dealing with the easier ones.

TRUMP'S VICTORY  

Firstly, what happened? Trump’s victory was undeniably an extraordinary comeback after being trounced by Joe Biden in 2020. Not only did he win the electoral college by 312 to 226, he also won the popular vote - by a margin of 2.5m - to become the first Republican to do so since George H W Bush in 1988. The latter was not so much because of the increase in his vote, which went up from 74m to nearly 77m – but because the Democrat vote plummeted from Biden’s 81m to Harris’s 74m.

However, given the US’s first-past-the-post electoral college system, the decisive factor was that Trump took six of the states Biden had won in 2020 - Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona - despite Harris actually increasing the Democrat vote in the first three of them. The biggest falls in the Democrat popular vote tended to be in states where they had no chance of losing: in New York and California, for example, Harris won but with a combined total of 2.79m fewer votes than had been cast for Biden. With Trump’s vote falling in California and rising only marginally in New York, most of these missing voters must have sat on their hands.

DEMOCRATS ABANDON THEIR VOTERS

The drop in the Democrats’ popular vote was not for want of money. In the presidential election, the Democrats spent $929m compared to the £519m spent by the Republicans. (2) So, how did Trump manage this? A big factor was undoubtedly the self-inflicted wound of the Democrats consciously turning their back on working class voters.

In 2016, in outlining the party’s strategy for beating Trump the first time around, the New York senator, Chuck Schumer, said, "For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western PA, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. You can repeat that in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin. Voters who are most out there figuring out what to do are not the blue-collar Democrats, they are the college-educated Republicans, who lean Republican or independent and in the suburbs.” (3)

In fact, the reverse of what Schumer predicted happened. The polls suggest that any advances the Democrats made among moderate college-educated voters were more than cancelled out by a drop in blue-collar support. Whereas Obama narrowly won in 2012 among people with no college degree, the Democrats casual disregard for that group had by 2024 led to them to lose millions of those voters to Trump. Of people who had never attended college, he won a 62% to 37% majority; of those who had attended college but received no degree, he won by 50% to 49%. The same trend can be seen when voters are analysed by income.

On the day after the election, this loss of working class support for the Democrats prompted a scathing statement from Bernie Sanders, who had campaigned for Harris, in which he said, “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.” (4)

As well as losing working class voters generally, the Democrats were hit by a drop in support among Arab-American and young voters. The latter has been presented by most of the media as Trump doing well with young people, but the polls suggest his support remained the same and the Democrat lead among 18-29-year-olds narrowed from 24 to 13 percentage points mainly because turnout fell. Meanwhile, loss of Arab-American support was a big factor in Michigan where the community makes up a large proportion of the voters in three cities - Hamtramck, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights – in which Democrat support fell by “at least 22,000” votes, representing nearly 27% of the 81,000-vote difference between Harris and Trump across the state as a whole. In addition, a US-wide exit poll by the Council on American Islamic Relations found that 53% of Muslim Americans voted for Green candidate Jill Stein, 21% for Trump and 20.3% for Harris. (5)

According to the exit poll conducted by NBC and other news organisations, only 4% of voters said foreign policy was what mattered in deciding who they had backed. However, that is more than six million people, and Trump won a 57% to 37% majority of them. And this is before you add those who the Democrats lost because they did not vote at all, voted for a third party or were among the 32% who told the pollsters that the economy was their top issue but who resent the tens of billions of dollars the US spends on foreign wars.

While Harris did not even recognise war weariness as an issue, Trump was adept at exploiting it. In every speech, he would say – as he did on election night – that in his first term “we had no wars” and that he was “going to stop wars”. This was taken mainly to refer to Ukraine – since no one doubts he backs Israel to the hilt – but it belies the reality that Trump endorsed giving Ukraine another $60 billion for the war in April after designating $10 billion of it as repayable loans. Senator Lindsey Graham said afterwards that the funding “would not have passed (the House of Representatives) without President Trump” who had “created a loan component to this package that gives us leverage down the road."

TRUMP AND THE WORLD

This takes us to the question of what the election means for the world. Trump’s immediate circle is populated by people – like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elon Musk - who think that the Ukraine war should never have happened because it pushed Russia closer to China, which they perceive as the main enemy. This camp is still vocal, as indicated by their reaction to President Biden allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with US-made long-range weapons.

Taylor Greene accused Biden of “trying to start WWIII” on his way out of office. She said, “The American people gave a mandate on Nov 5th against these exact America-last decisions and do NOT want to fund or fight foreign wars. We want to fix our own problems. Enough of this, it must stop.” (6)

Trump’s nominees for the key foreign policy posts are, however, not of this faction. The Financial Times said, “His picks are not universally disastrous. Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Mike Waltz as national security adviser are traditional foreign policy figures who believe in a strong America and spending on its armed forces.” (7)

Where the overlap lies is in recognising the reality of the situation on the ground in Ukraine. The Russians are steadily advancing in the grim war of attrition and firing missiles into their territory is not going to change that.

Even Graham, who has been among the most belligerent of US politicians on Russia, is now talking about the end game, though not in terms of defending any high principles. In an interview for Fox News on November 20, he said, “This war’s about money. People don’t talk much about it. But the richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine, two to seven trillion dollars’ worth...We can make money and have an economic relationship with Ukraine that will be very beneficial to us with peace. So, Donald Trump's going to do a deal to get our money back, to enrich ourselves with rare minerals. A good deal for Ukraine and us, and he’s going to bring peace.” (8)

The corollary to this plan to fill the pockets of US corporations – while Ukraine and Russia mourn their dead – is that it frees US military resources to escalate its confrontation with China.

Since the US shifted to seeing China as a major threat during the first Trump administration, it has developed new anti-China military alliances, such as the Quad and AUKUS, and new military bases in the region, alongside the strengthening of existing ones. The risk now is that Trump – faced with the failure of sanctions to stop China’s economic advance - could provoke a Ukraine-style proxy war by recognising Taiwan.

The widely respected French commentator on China, Arnaud Bertrand, says he expects the new Trump administration to be “extremely provocative” and acknowledges “the US’s long history of using proxy wars to weaken its rivals”. But he adds, “I also think that, unlike most proxy wars, almost everyone sees that one coming and, if triggered by the US recognizing an independent Taiwan, would blame the US more than China since it would so clearly be a provocation. And, in war, narrative management is absolutely crucial... I also doubt the Taiwanese could be so stupid.” (9)

Bertrand is probably right about the narrative, at least as far as most of the world is concerned. What actually happens depends, to a large degree, on how the more immediate issue of the Israel’s US-backed war in the Middle East develops and on US capacity to mount two wars at the same time. Of one thing there is no doubt, Trump will be as shameless in his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and attacks on the Lebanon, Syria and Iran as Biden. 

1 Julius Nyerere (1922-1999), president of Tanzania (1964-1985)

2 Open Secrets, www.opensecrets.org, Elections Overview 2024

3 From an interview clip posted on X by David Sirota (former Bernie Sanders speech-writer), @davidsirota 7/11/24

4 Statement by Senator Bernie Sanders, 6/11/2024

5 ‘They blew it: Democrats lost 22,000 votes in Michigan’s heavily Arab American cities’, The Guardian, 9/11/2024

6 Tweet by Marjorie Taylor Greene, @RepMTG, 17/11/24

7 The FT View, Financial Times, 16-17/11/2024

8 Senator Lindsey Graham, interview with Fox News, 20/11/2024

9 Tweet by Arnaud Bertrand, @RnaudBertrand, 20/11/2024

 

Trump is back photo by Gage Skidmore

On the day after the election, this loss of working class support for the Democrats prompted a scathing statement from Bernie Sanders, who had campaigned for Harris, in which he said, “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.