Newsletter November 2024
The U.S. elections - what did happen? And what didn’t
This month has been brutal. I spent Election Day, November 5, working in a polling station in Manhattan, beginning at 5h00 in the morning. It was quiet all day, too quiet. When David and I went to vote early on October 26, at the very same voting location, we had to wait more than an hour in line. On Election Day, voters came in all through the day, but there was never a line. Had everyone voted early, like we did?
When I got out at 22h30, news was already trickling in that the Harris-Walz campaign didn’t have the momentum we had hoped for and needed. A feeling of intense dread, the all-too-familiar pit in the stomach we felt when Hilary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, began to take hold of me. No, how on earth?!…
And I also felt anger, because this time, we already KNEW who Donald Trump was and what he is capable of in the White House. This time we weren’t being fooled. Americans were re-electing a man convicted of 34 criminal counts of election interference and tax fraud, an adjudicated rapist, an election denier and an insurrection leader. During this campaign, we had heard months of his insulting, incoherent, incendiary diatribes against everyone from former speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Congressman Adam Schiff, from Taylor Swift to Special Counsel Jack Smith, from President Joe Biden to former First Lady Michelle Obama—with of course, his most unhinged and defamatory comments reserved for his adversary Kamala Harris.
We had heard him promise he would mass deport 11 million people, threaten to deploy the U.S. military against U.S. citizens, had a comedian open one of his biggest rallies by calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” lie about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets, call for revoking the broadcast licenses of TV networks that criticize him, and brag about his regular telephone calls with Putin. We know he had taken top secret documents with him to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, and refused to return them. We knew he admired Hitler’s generals and that his own senior staff considered him a “fascist to the core.” We had seen him pretend to fellate his defective microphone at a rally and heard him allude to the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis. This was a man utterly unfit to be ever sit in the White House again. Yet the unthinkable was happening again.
Sitting at my breakfast table the next morning, I couldn’t even drink my coffee. I was numb and grieving. I also felt reluctant to say anything before I understood better. Many of the usual pundits were obviously not feeling any such restraint, and were already jumping in to blame the Democratic Party, the Harris campaign, and Joe Biden for the loss: the Harris campaign had been too woke, it had skewed too far right, it shouldn’t have campaigned with Liz Cheney, it didn’t do enough (or the right) media interviews, it was disconnected from the working class, it had been too focused on trans issues, it hadn’t spoken about its economic plans, it hadn’t appealed to Black men, Harris wasn’t chosen in a proper primary, Tim Walz was a terrible choice for Vice-President… All of that couldn’t be true at the same time, and a lot of it felt like those pundits’ pre-existing pet peeves.
For my part, I had hoped white women, angered at the loss of abortion rights and the resulting health catastrophe unfolding in states like Texas and Georgia, where several women’s deaths have already been reported, would propel Harris to victory. The 2022 midterms, when Democrats stopped the “red [Republican] wave” and voters approved ballot initiatives to maintain or reinstate abortion rights, even in states as conservative as Kentucky and Montana, made this a reasonable expectation. I had hoped younger voters, whose makeup is more diverse than that of previous generations, would also make a significant difference. I hoped that, having voted in Barack Obama twice and given Hillary Clinton the popular vote in 2016, U.S. voters were in fact ready to elect a Black woman.
So, what had happened, exactly? As the week went on and most of the votes were counted, the situation became clearer. Total turnout will be a bit above 155.3 million votes (versus 158.4 million in 2020, when Joe Biden won). That Election Day feeling of lower enthusiasm, or at least, lower turnout for Harris, wasn’t entirely wrong. About six million Biden voters stayed home, split their votes or switched parties altogether, while Trump gained about three million new voters.
Yet this was not a landslide for Trump. Kamala Harris actually did very well, given the short time she had to introduce herself as a Presidential candidate to voters (107 days), and especially when compared to the years Trump has had in the national limelight. As of writing this (and numbers will go up as California, Oregon and Washington finish their count, but percentages are likely to hold), Harris obtained 48.3% of the vote, for a total of 75.0+ million votes. Trump got 49.8% for a total of 77+ million votes. Others (third-party or write-in candidates) got 1.9% or 2.9 million votes.
As election watcher and Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg noted:
“2024 was a close election. Trump will win by approximately 1.5 pts in total, that is 0.9 in Wisconsin, 1.4 in Michigan, 2.0 in Pennsylvania and 2.2 in Georgia. A shift of 2 points in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and Harris would have won. 2024 was not a landslide, not a blowout. It was a close election. The Senate today is at 52-47 (Pennsylvania is still counting) and the House will be decided by a few seats, either way. While [Democrats] lost some House seats, they also flipped a few, including 4 in New York State this cycle. While Harris lost in the 7 battleground states, Democrats had important down ballot wins, including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin Senate and North Carolina Governor.”
It’s heartbreaking when one looks at the seven battleground states, where control of the Electoral College is won or lost. Trump’s victory margin in Pennsylvania will be about 145,000 votes, and in Michigan, 81,000 votes.
Still, there is no denying that there was a shift towards Trump, and that he won the national popular vote this time (although not 50% of the vote), something he didn’t come close to in 2016 and 2020. Since the Republican Party will control the Senate and clinch control of the House of Representatives (even though that control will be razor thin), there will be few obstacles in Trump’s path at the federal level. This is a disastrous result for U.S. democracy, freedom, justice, the rule of law and the integrity of the judiciary, climate policy, Ukraine, the future of the Palestinian people, the U.S.’s international alliances and of course, for sexual and reproductive health and rights and racial and gender equity.
So how did women vote? Black women voters, as always, “understood the assignment,” and 91% of them voted for Harris. They understandably feel betrayed by the result: “This country is just behind, just backwards. We would rather elect a criminal than a Black woman,” said Georgia schoolteacher Cindi Jackson in an interview in the Washington Post. The Trump campaign kept up a drumbeat of overt and implicit racist attacks on Harris, which appeared to produce the desired result of turning people off her candidacy: “The unfounded attacks on Harris’s intelligence and the racist suggestion from Trump and some of his supporters that she would be a ‘DEI president’ show just how far the nation still has to go, some Black women said. ‘People keep saying we need to soul-search to figure out what happened,’ said D’Ivorie Johnson, 50, who lives outside Dallas. ‘Listen, the racism and sexism is what it is.’”
In a searing article in The Cut magazine entitled The Plight of Black Women in America, Black writer and activist Brittany Packnett pushed back on the blame immediately laid at the feet of the Harris campaign: “America’s pundit class has been insisting that misogynoirdidn’t play a role in Harris’s loss, when the evidence to the contrary is staring them right in the face. The media and some leftists insist that Harris ignored the working class despite centering her campaign on an “Opportunity Economy” that both Wharton and the Working Families Party agreed would significantly benefit it, showing plainly the double standard to which the Black woman was held compared to the white guy offering mere “concepts of a plan.” And when vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance vowed to “take out the trash in Washington, D.C. And the trash’s name is Kamala Harris,” merely two days before the election, there was no outcry, no rush to defend a vice-president whose name, after four years, is still mispronounced (and often on purpose).”
I must confess I am particularly annoyed by Senator Bernie Sanders’ claim that Harris didn’t address the concerns of the “working class,” when Black and brown voters make up large swaths of that very working class. The working class surely cares about support for trade unions, minimum wage increases, tax relief for dependent children, subsidies to buy a first home or state support for home care for elders—Harris policy proposals that had no Trump counterpart and that Republicans in Congress oppose. Oh, and also the many working class jobs created by the Biden/Harris Infrastructure Act! And Black working class folks somehow figured out that Trump's vacuous posturing on the economy and inflation was just that, but white working class folks couldn't?!
The Black women quoted above are right: this election’s result is an indictment of the fundamental values of white American voters, no excuses.
Interestingly, the much discussed drop-off in Black men’s support for Harris didn’t happen. 77% of Black men voters chose Harris (vs. 80% for Clinton in 2016, and 79% for Biden in 2020). Compare that to white men, only 37% of whom voted for Harris in 2024 (and 38% for Biden in 2020). One can wish that Black men voted for Harris at the same rate as Black women do, but Black men voters aren’t the reason Harris lost this election.
Meanwhile, I’m horrified that white women continued to vote for Trump at the same rate they had in 2016 and 2020. 53% of white women voted for Trump this time vs. 52% in 2016 when Hilary Clinton was on the ticket. Trump’s track record on abortion rights did not persuade white women to abandon him. These women not only didn’t care about the plight of women as a class, they also knowingly gambled with their own daughters’ and granddaughters’ rights. And not all of these women are well-to-do and thus able to secure abortion access by travelling out of state. Whew. This is a blow to all who hoped that sisterhood would propel us forward. I am bereft.
Also disturbing is the increasing support for Trump from Latina women, who went from 30% for Trump in 2020, to 38% this time. This growing support for patriarchal authoritarianism in non-Black communities of color is a concern and needs more careful analysis. Are these white or “white-adjacent” Latinas (Cubans, Venezuelans…)? Immigrants of previous decades or longstanding U.S. citizens who want to distance themselves from more recent arrivals? But again, we have to remember that white people make up 71% of voters vs. Black people at 11% and Latinos at 12%. And let’s not absolve the 60% of white men who voted for Trump! White voters are the problem, there is no two ways about it.
This also comes through when one looks at how the ballot initiatives (or referenda) to reinstate abortion rights in restrictive states played out. Ten states had these ballot measures on the ticket on November 5, and progressive activists (like me!) hoped that these measures would turn out progressive voters and lead some Republican voters to switch to Democrats. It didn’t work out that way. Seven of these measures passed, some of them reinforcing and improving on existing legal protections (as in New York, Maryland, Montana, Nevada or Colorado), and some of them reinstating Roe era abortion access in restrictive states (in Missouri and Arizona). The measures failed in Florida (where a favorable 57% vote failed to clear the higher threshold of 60% required in that state), South Dakota and Nebraska. Yet at the same time, sizeable percentages of those who voted to protect abortion rights ALSO voted for Trump. In fact, Trump won in four of the states where voters also chose to expand or protect abortion access.
In several of these states, it therefore seems white women (and men) supported the reinstatement or protection of their own abortion rights at state level, while throwing under the bus folks living in restrictive states AND voting for the man who could very well sign a national abortion ban into law. Perhaps these abortion ballot measures even gave these voters an out, letting them avoid the cognitive dissonance of voting for the man who brags nonstop about overturning Roe v. Wade. It’s illogical, but racism and internalized patriarchy do that. My head is spinning.
Meanwhile, only 42% of young people aged 18-29 turned out to vote, as opposed to 50% in 2020. Of these young voters (of all genders and races), 54% came out for Harris, so the lower youth turnout could have hurt Harris. The youth vote was characterized by a significant gender gap, much larger than that for the electorate as a whole: 56% of young men overall (18-29) voted for Trump (vs. 42% of men of all ages and races), while 58% of young women chose Harris (vs. 53% of women of all ages and races).
Young white men made up the bulk of the Trump youth vote this time (63% of young white men voted for Trump). This is a further rightward shift for young white men, 51% of whom had voted for Trump in 2020. The ever-growing volume of masculinist, sexist and racist vitriol targeted at young men on social media certainly contributed to this shift. And indeed, as the results of the election were coming out, sexist online content spiked—such as the “Your Body, My Choice!” video by white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Yet, I am also worried that Trump appears to have also improved his results with young women as compared to 2020: in 2020, only 33% of young women chose Trump him, while this year, that number went up to 41%. That overall result was driven by young white women shifting their votes from 2020—49% of them chose Trump in 2024, vs. 42% in 2020.
It’s worth noting that the Biden/Harris Administration’s disastrous handling of the Gaza crisis probably played a role in depressing youth turnout overall. This seemed to play out most acutely in Michigan, where there is a sizeable Arab-American electorate, and where only 49% of young people voted for Harris. Making it harder for young people to vote was an overall Republican priority. Data has yet to come in on the impact of this effort, but progressive groups had been sounding the alarm about measures that would likely suppress the youth vote (e.g. increasing ID requirements for registering and voting, rolling back vote-by-mail, and removing campus polling stations). Republican donors also paid for hundreds of misleading ads micro-targeting Democratic voters to depress the vote in the last days of the campaign. They seemed to have worked.
My other takeaway at this time is the catastrophic state of the U.S. media ecosystem. I was infuriated on a daily basis by the “sanewashing” of the Trump campaign by the New York Times or the Washington Post, but unfortunately, I think the problem goes much deeper than just “both sides” reporting. During the campaign, many of you no doubt saw interviews with Trump voters who had zero understanding of who foots the bill for tariffs on imported goods (the U.S. consumer does), believed inflation is the highest it’s ever been (it’s at 2% right now. Obviously, these folks don’t remember 1974 and 1979, when it spiked to 12-13%), thought crime is way up in the U.S. (it’s at historically low levels) or is largely committed by immigrants (immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans). During the campaign, I had shocking (and contentious!) exchanges with white Republican women who told me with aplomb that Harris was a stumbling drunk, couldn’t string two sentences together, had slept her way to the top, and/or “was very stupid.” What?! Had they not even watched the Trump/Harris debate?
Now, there will always be uneducated, low-information or disengaged voters. T’was ever thus. And the point above about persistent racism and sexism stands. But the number of people in the U.S. today who only consume right-wing media, where there they are subjected to a torrent of conspiracy theories and false narratives, has grown significantly over the last decade. I recommend this sobering New Republic article by its editor Michael Tomasky, Why does no one understand the real reason Trump won? to understand what we are up against:
“The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school [changed into] your daughter.”
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin notes in Democrats need to reclaim reality from the right-wing disinformation machine that: “A now much-discussed Reuters-Ipsos poll found that “Americans who primarily get their news from Fox News and Conservative Media and social media/other are more likely to answer questions about inflation and crime incorrectly than Americans writ large.” When tens of millions of Americans believe things that simply are not true, Democrats’ accomplishments matter very little. Their message does not reach the intended audience. And frighteningly, “You can get people to vote away their democracy … as long as you create a false world for them to believe in,” as historian Heather Cox Richardson said.”
The relentless attacks against trans people by the Trump campaign and allied political action committees (PACs) were a prime example of trying to create such a “false world.” More than $200 million was spent on advertising that attacked Harris for supporting trans people in the military (the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—these are generals—are completely supportive of trans persons serving in the military, and that includes providing them with the medical care they require, as is the case with any military personnel). The ads also accused Harris of allowing “boys” to play in girls’ school sports teams (comedian John Oliver explains it here: there are exceedingly few trans girls who play on school teams in the U.S. and there is no evidence they have any particular advantage!).
At his rallies, Trump also repeatedly claimed that children were coming back from school with sex change operations (when school nurses cannot even give a Tylenol to a child without checking with their parents!). While this barrage of attack ads seems to have had very little impact on the outcome of the election (most voters, and even Trump voters, don’t rank this issue as a top concern), it paradoxically seems to have persuaded Democratic pundits and lawmakers that this was a prime reason Harris lost. Yet Harris did not campaign at all on trans rights, and overall, even steered clear of leaning into race and gender. A false world indeed.
Tomasky argues that people of means who believe in democracy and human rights must urgently invest in a countervailing news strategy to combat disinformation. Rubin specifically calls for funders to “support fact-based local media, help recruit new media influencers, sponsor nonprofit investigative journalism and construct well-moderated social media platforms.” All of that would help. (Tellingly, Rubin doesn’t think that legacy media can be relied upon to lead the charge —a direct rebuke to her employer, Jeff Bezos).
Incidentally, studies show that countries with strong public media (sizeable market share and predictable revenue), such as the BBC, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) or the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), tend to fare better at combating disinformation than those who don’t, such as the U.S. It’s not surprising that right-wing figures constantly call for de-funding public media in those countries, and it shows why we must fight to protect that trusted resource.
For their part, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Australia have all taken or announced measures to try to limit the harms of social media rather than just hope good content will prevail. The EU’s Digital Services Act, in force as of February 2024, requires large social media companies such as X and Meta to take proactive measures to reduce disinformation, rather than react after the fact. This past week, Australia announced bills that would ban social media use by children under the age of 16, and require social media companies to take proactive measures to prevent harm (such as hate speech, bullying or child pornography) and ensure a “Digital Duty of Care.” We will see how effective these measures can be, but these countries have at least named the dangers and are trying to mitigate them.
I’ll have more in the next newsletter about what hopeful news and points of light came out of the election (yes, there were quite a few!), and what we can do next, because I’m not ready to leave the field, as devastated as I feel at this moment. As activist Mariame Kaba famously wrote, hope is a discipline.
In feminist anger, grief and solidarity,
FG