Donald Trump has decisively won the 2024 US Presidential election. Needing to win only 270 votes in the Electoral College, he has won 312, to 226 for Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris.
His victory was overwhelming. He won the national aggregate popular vote by 74.6 million (50.5%) to 70.9 million (48%) for Harris.
Trump’s Republican Party has won control of both houses of Congress – the Senate and the House of Representatives, giving Trump the ability to push through his political agenda and appointments.
How did this happen? In 2020, Democratic candidate Biden won over 81 million votes, the largest ever for a presidential candidate. The Democrats lost 10.3 million votes in 2024.
Working class people were worse off than four years ago. It’s all very well pointing to economic indicators about growth and inflation coming down, but that still means that prices are going up.
In the absence of any strong left-wing alternative, gas and groceries made many workers either stay at home or turn to Trump.
Biden’s and Harris’s backing of Israel’s mass murder in Gaza and Harris’s appeal to ‘moderate’ Republican’s instead of to working class voters contributed to Trump’s victory.
But where was the socialist alternative? At least 80,000 socialists are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). There are a number of smaller socialist groups outside the Democratic Party.
Well-known left-winger Bernie Sanders, who stood for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016, losing to Hillary Clinton, has issued a statement criticising the Democratic Party electoral campaign.
In it he states,
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change.”
He continues,
“Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.”
He is right.
So why have Bernie Sanders and the DSA remained in the Democratic Party? By doing so, they have led working class voters up the dead-end of voting for a party that represents the class that exploits them for profit.
Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020 and 2024, and Kamala Harris when she became the Democratic candidate late in the 2024 campaign. He encouraged his supporters to campaign for them and encouraged workers to vote for them.
The Democratic Party is a party of big business. It is one of the two parties of big business in the USA. The other is Trump’s Republican Party. While there are clearly differences between the two, they both represent the interests of the big capitalists, the billionaire oligarchs that own and control the US economy and the US state’s imperialist global diplomatic and military goals.
The Democratic Party does not represent or act in the interests of the American working class.
Trump can’t be beaten by an appeal to workers to back a different party with the same fundamental capitalist objectives. It is clear that many workers were looking for an alternative. Workers want to see a way out from the low-wage, inflation-racked lives they lead. They mistakenly believed that they have found it in Trump. But what else was on offer?
A call to vote for the ‘lesser evil’ will inspire no-one.
What is needed is a break with the Democratic Party and the establishment of a clearly-defined socialist party, with a clear programme that aims at the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a new society based on the democratic common ownership of America’s wealth, run and planned democratically by all, for all: for need, not for profit.
Socialists must aim to abolish capitalism, not to manage it.
Too many socialists in the US, for too long, have tied themselves to the billionaire Democratic Party.
A break is needed. A new mass socialist party of the working class is needed. Socialists should not look to Bernie Sanders or to any of the other prominent DSA members such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Just like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, these social-democratic reformists cannot bring themselves to break with a party that defends capitalism.
Socialists in the DSA must look to themselves to make that break.