In August of this year, Current Affairs editor-at-large Yasmin Nair wrote a blog post with a confident title: “Kamala Harris Will Lose.” Nair warned that Harris was already repeating Hillary Clinton’s mistakes from 2016, such as running more on personal narrative and empty rhetoric than on a clear vision for how to transform the lives of struggling Americans. She warned that Democratic leaders were taking their base for granted by contemptuously refusing to accommodate any of the demands of the “Uncommitted” movement over the war in Gaza. Nair’s analysis looks remarkably prescient now that Harris has, in fact, lost. 

Other writers made similar arguments here in the magazine. I argued, for instance, that Kamala Harris was worryingly focused on vibes and the parasocial aspect of politics, rather than on giving people a clear understanding of what exactly a Harris presidency would do for them. Harris made some very obvious blunders that revealed her to be a poor politician, such as her failure to come up with an answer when she was asked a (very obvious) question, namely how she would have governed differently than the unpopular incumbent, Joe Biden. Harris missed obvious opportunities to court voters, such as missing an opportunity to appear on the most popular podcast in the world, The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan ultimately endorsed Trump, but his politics are malleable, and I very much suspected that a strong performance by Harris on the podcast could have won him over or at least kept him from publicly siding with Trump. 

My colleague Alex Skopic and I warned in August that Harris was making a mistake by abandoning progressive policies like a jobs guarantee and Medicare For All. This is not just because we think these are good policies that will help people’s economic situations at a time when they see living costs as a hugely important issue. And it’s not just because the policies are popular. It’s also because ditching the policies made Harris look opportunistic and dishonest. It was clear she abandoned them because she holds the (deeply mistaken, in my view) position that progressive policies are destined to alienate centrist voters and hurt you electorally. 

But Republicans don’t give Democrats any credit when they become more conservative. For instance, Trump relentlessly hammered Harris over her previous support for a ban on fracking. He didn’t credit her for changing her position, he just argued that she was dishonest and still supported a ban. I think it’s better politics to simply defend your positions rather than opportunistically reverse them. Explain the serious damage done by fracking. Harris thought that it was politically toxic to criticize fracking because she needed to win Pennsylvania, but a Wall Street Journal report showed that fracking isn’t actually as popular or economically important as it’s often portrayed. Instead of trying to figure out what you think the median voter believes, and then insisting you believe that, too, figure out how to effectively convey what you believe. Don’t try to compete with Trump to brag about who can produce the most oil and gas. Instead, explain the peril we’re in from climate catastrophe and expose how Trump is going to make the problem much, much worse. 

 Running away from Medicare For All, for instance, implies both that you agree with Republicans that Medicare For All is bad, and makes you look like you only ever supported it because you thought it was a vote-getter in 2020. Not good. Far better to just explain the case for Medicare For All, which is strong! Instead, Harris’s healthcare plans were mushy and wonky, and it didn’t seem like they would actually make much of a difference to people’s healthcare costs. For instance, her plan to make healthcare “affordable” by strengthening the Affordable Care Act was laughable. The ACA has utterly failed to make healthcare affordable, and any existing Biden tax credits on premiums that she might have continued would simply constitute another subsidy to the private health insurance industry.

Likewise, Trump ran on horrendous anti-immigrant bigotry, demonizing Haitians as cat-eaters and promising a mass deportation program. Harris should have responded with a vigorous moral defense of immigrants, pointing out their contributions to American life and shaming Trump over his cruelty. She should have promised to solve problems with our immigration system with humane measures that provide a pathway to citizenship rather than relying on expelling people by force. Instead, she declined to commit to supporting even the Dreamers, and I was rather surprised when, during her debate with Donald Trump, instead of forcefully defending immigrants after his “they’re eating the pets” line, she pivoted to a boast about how many former U.S. military leaders had endorsed her! 

Many of Harris’s mistakes were similar to those Hillary Clinton made in 2016. Like Clinton, Harris cozied up to billionaire donors. Mark Cuban, for instance, said he was delighted that Harris was abandoning Democrats’ commitments to progressive principles and letting the business community propose the policies it wanted. Like Clinton, Harris and Tim Walz made hubristic campaign stops in solidly red states like Texas and Kentucky rather than spending the final days laser-focused on crucial battlegrounds. Like Clinton, Harris emphasized celebrity endorsements while failing to successfully court unions. (Most notably, the Teamsters declined to endorse her after she refused to pledge that she wouldn’t break a national railway strike.) Like Clinton, Harris focused too much on the danger of Donald Trump (which is very real) and not enough on the reasons why she would be good at being president herself.  

 Most importantly, like Clinton, Harris ultimately decided upon a strategy of trying to woo moderate Republican voters away from Trump, reasoning that it didn’t matter if doing so alienated progressive voters and the Democratic base. Chuck Schumer, speaking of Hillary’s 2016 strategy, infamously promised: "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin." In fact, they just lost the blue-collar Democrats and didn’t pick up the Republicans! In 2024, Harris, too, aggressively touted endorsements from Republicans, promised to put a Republican in her cabinet (she even cited that as the answer to what she would have done differently from Biden!), and went so far as to praise and embrace Dick and Liz Cheney! The strategy was an abject failure. Because she wanted to appease both Republicans and progressive voters, Harris had to further indulge her weakness for speaking in meaningless word salads, since taking stances that were meaningful could have alienated one of these constituencies. Trump, who is canny about portraying himself as more anti-war than Democrats, correctly pointed out that an endorsement from the hawkish Cheneys should be a badge of shame, not honor. (Specifically he said Cheney is “"the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris. I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III!")

After all that, Harris did not succeed in winning over any more Republicans than Joe Biden had! 

(Image: Stats for Lefties, from CNN data)

In fact, on the surface, the election looks like a massive swing to the right among the American electorate. I am concerned that Democratic leaders will look at this result and think that their problem was that they were simply not right-wing enough, that Trump won by demagoguing about immigrants and trans people, and so Democrats should make sure they are the party of Border Security in the future. I think this would be a grave mistake, because the correct interpretation of the map showing the right-wing shift is not that America is a conservative country, but that the kind of vacuous, unprincipled centrism Harris practices is not popular. There’s all kinds of evidence that voters favor progressive policies. Missouri, for instance, voted for Trump in this election but also overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure that raises the minimum wage and introduces paid family leave. Deep-red Kentucky rejected a measure to pay for private school “vouchers” using tax money by a resounding 65 percent. Ilhan Omar not only won reelection but gained a point over her 2022 result.  

 In fact, while I’m sure there are critics would say “Of course, Nathan, you as a leftist think that the solution is for Democrats to become more left-wing,” many of the criticisms I and others made of Harris have little to do with whether she should have “run to the left” or “run to the right.” You don’t have to share the position of the pro-Palestine movement to believe that sending Bill Clinton to contemptuously hector Arab American voters was a political misstep. You don’t have to believe in Medicare For All to believe that it’s a bad idea to support it one year and oppose it the next. I am opposed to courting Dick Cheney because I think he is morally on the level of Osama bin Laden, but I also think it is tactically foolish to tout endorsements from widely-disliked war criminals. 

What’s exasperating is how loudly we on the left have been warning about this. We were saying early in the campaign cycle—February 2023, in fact—that Joe Biden was weak and unpopular, and that he needed to step aside so that there could be a real primary to find a strong candidate. In fact, I wrote all the way back in November 2020 that precisely the situation we’re now in was likely to happen. I argued that the Biden presidency would probably be a failure, because it would not transform people’s lives in a meaningful way (“nothing would fundamentally change” as Biden famously promised), and Trump could well come back in 2024 with a vengeance. I also cautioned that Kamala Harris would probably be the favorite alternative among the Democratic establishment but was probably going to be a weak candidate. 

Well, here we are, and it’s maddening, because we already saw this happen once in 2016. (The expression “first as tragedy, then as farce” comes to mind, except we’re now three or four farces deep.) The lesson to Democratic leaders in 2016 should have been that Bernie Sanders had been right, that the party had betrayed working-class voters and would be doomed if it could not effectively counter Trump’s pseudo-populist appeal with a visionary alternative. (See the excellent analysis in Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal.) Unfortunately, the lessons weren’t learned then, and it doesn’t seem like they’re going to be learned now, either! MSNBC anchor Joy Reid is already insisting that Kamala Harris’s campaign was “flawless” (because she got “every prominent celebrity voice”), and pundits like Jill Filipovic are saying things like, “this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.” (Good luck ever winning with the slogan “You’re the problem, America!”) USAToday’s Michael Stern says that instead of talking about “where the Harris campaign went wrong” we should talk about “where the American people went wrong.” The Harris campaign itself is blaming unspecified “obstacles that were largely out of our control.” 

Unfortunately, a Trump presidency is going to be an absolute disaster. Republicans have control of the Senate and probably the House. Trump has already stuffed the courts full of right-wing appointees, and he will be able to put many more of his favored jurists on the bench over the next four years. He has promised an unprecedented new deportation program, which may mean giant concentration camps and armed ICE agents breaking down doors and tearing families from their homes in unfathomable numbers. Because Trump’s compassion for workers is a total sham, we will see labor protections eviscerated (remember, the Right doesn't believe you should have water breaks in the heat). Workplace safety rules will be loosened, and unions will be smashed as unfathomably rich men like Elon Musk use the Trump presidency to pillage the country and cement a kind of feudal economy where a small coterie of plutocrats reign over a large mass of precarious workers. 

The crisis in Gaza is likely to get much worse, with even the limited restraints on Israel’s actions disappearing. Israeli leaders will probably be given the green light from the Trump administration to fully ethnically cleanse and “resettle” Gaza. We may see real authoritarianism take hold. J.D. Vance is open to the fascist methods used by Pinochet and Franco, and we will likely see protests ruthlessly cracked down on and may even see the prosecution of journalists and members of the political opposition. Trump is surrounded by foaming-at-the-mouth authoritarians who believe they are in a war for the soul of civilization and want to annihilate the left. Public health might very well be overseen by, of all people, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., so I wouldn’t be surprised if vaccination rates for many diseases drop precipitously as the White House officially promulgates complete pseudoscience. We might get a new pandemic, which will be even more badly managed than the coronavirus pandemic we’re still living with. The worst consequences will likely be on climate, since Trump will rip up whatever climate measures are in place and try to maximize the use of fossil fuels, driving us toward the precipice of complete climate breakdown as fast as possible. 

Is there an upside? A silver lining? Only this: Trump’s second term is likely to be deeply unpopular. Americans do not want the Project 2025 agenda. They do not want authoritarian governance. They do not want a spiraling climate catastrophe that destroys their homes. And as it becomes clear that Trump’s actions are wildly unpopular and he cannot govern the country well, there will be backlash. Trump’s first term sparked what might have been the largest protest movement in American history. It grew the Democratic Socialists of America. It forced Democrats in 2020 to run on much more compelling social democratic policies. Trump’s gang are crooks and sadists, and people don’t like being ruled by crooks and sadists! 

Unfortunately, Trump is one of the most skilled bullshitters of our age. He has an amazing capacity to convince voters that things that objectively harm them (such as letting climate change spin out of control, or not raising their wages) are actually measures to stick it to The Elites. Those who oppose his vision need to understand how he’s been so successful. The photo ops and stunts are corny and dumb, but they delight his fans. The meandering speeches often don’t make sense, but Trump can be charismatic and funny. He told his supporters that when they got a restaurant receipt, they should write his “No Tax on Tips” policy on it, so that servers know Trump is for them. I thought this was brilliant, and indeed Trump succeeded in winning over working-class voters. 

We have a fight on our hands. The next four years are going to be brutal for anyone who cares about climate change, immigrant rights, the labor movement, Palestine, abortion rights, inequality, or any of the other issues on which Trump will make life demonstrably worse for people. We cannot afford to resign ourselves to despair. We need to study the catastrophe that Democratic party elites have helped to lead us into and to build an alternative to their failed political strategy. As Jeet Heer writes in The Nation:

[Democratic leaders] have to realize that non-college-educated voters, who make up two-thirds of the electorate, need to be won over. They need to realize that, for anti-system Americans, a promised return to bipartisan comity is just ancien régime restoration. They need to become the party that aspires to be more than caretakers of a broken system but rather is willing to embrace radical policies to change that status quo. This is the only path for the party to rebuild itself and for Trumpism—which without such effective opposition is likely to long outlive its standard-bearer—to actually be defeated.

I agree with Heer, although I doubt Democratic leaders have the capacity to realize anything of the kind, since they didn’t after 2016. The only solution here is to get new leaders and build new organizations. 

Building independent media in particular is a huge part of any plan for successfully fighting back. One of the reasons the right succeeds is that they have a massively successful propaganda apparatus, from X (Twitter) to PragerU. We have to build up alternative information channels that can tell Americans the truth even when that truth is harsh and can train them to see through propaganda, whether it is anti-immigrant propaganda on the right or Democratic delusions about the “flawless” campaigns they are running. I am proud of this magazine’s track record in that respect. In 2016, we were one of the few publications pointing out that Clinton was actually crashing and burning and Trump was likely to win. If you listen to leftist analysts like those you’ll find here, you will have a more reliable sense of how the world works and the historical forces that are shaping political outcomes.

So I’d like to end with a few pleas. First, do not become resigned. Do take care of yourself and others in your community over the coming weeks as the reality of Trump 2.0 sinks in. But remember that the next four years require resilience, determination, and a plan to fight back and keep the worst potential horrors of Trumpism from materializing. Second, act. Join organizations that are doing good work. Organize, organize, organize. Republican control is very frightening, but their power to enact their horrendous agenda can be curtailed if enough people stand up and fight back. And as pundits remind us that the country has lurched to the right—possibly implying that our fellow Americans are inherently terrible human beings and we are all doomed because we collectively voted this man into power—remember that human beings can be persuaded to believe lots of different things. We can believe in a nasty, right-wing view of humans as inherently selfish, competitive people or we can believe in a society made up of people who are willing to fight for people they don’t know. It’s this society, one of human solidarity, that we need to believe in and work to create. It’s the only true antidote we have to right-wing authoritarianism and fascism.   

And please consider supporting independent media projects like this one that are devoted to keeping the truth alive. We are so much tinier than publications like The Atlantic, but we give you consistently higher quality information and analysis that will help you understand what is actually going on in the world you live in. We could do a great deal more if we can find some benefactors who can help us hire some new staff to take the fight to Trump in the next four years, so please consider donating yourself, and if you have any leads for foundation or donor support, please get in touch. I am deeply worried about the next four years, but I promise you that we will be doing everything in our power to fight right-wing propaganda and build an effective alternative that can actually defeat the forces of bigotry and plutocracy. Stay strong. We have the curse of living in “interesting times.” We are at the beginning of the fight of our lives. But we will prevail, and the dark Trumpian vision will not take over this country. No matter what the New York Times says, this is not Trump’s country. It is ours.