Democrats’ disastrous presidential campaign shows how not to defeat the far right

“We just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America,” said incoming Vice-President JD Vance, standing alongside a triumphant incoming President Donald Trump, in front of a row of American flags, to announce a blowout election victory. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” said the president-elect.

It certainly was a comeback. The Trump-Vance ticket won every swing state, and even the popular vote—the first time a Republican presidential candidate has done so since the 1980s, other than George W. Bush’s post-9/11 victory. Presidential candidate Trump increased his vote share in 48 of 50 states.

Not only did the Trump ticket win a stomping victory in the electoral college and the popular vote, they significantly increased their vote share among all demographics compared to 2020. Despite promises of mass deportations and militarized attacks on migrants, Trump increased his vote share among latinos by a whopping 14 percentage points.

Dearborn, Michigan—the United States’ largest Arab-American majority city—backed Joe Biden with nearly 70 per cent of the vote in the 2020 presidential election. In 2024, the Democrats lost the city, taking only 30 per cent of the vote in the presidential election.

“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders said post-election. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Despite Republican support for abortion bans—an extremely unpopular policy, especially among women, which the Democrats tried to turn into a key election wedge—all demographics of women turned out in greater numbers for Trump than they had in 2020. The Trump-Vance ticket won a majority of white women of all age groups, at 53 per cent.

Young voters—who typically vote overwhelmingly for the more progressive option—only squeaked through for the Harris-Walz ticket, which won 18-29 year olds of all ethnicities and genders with only 52 per cent of the vote.

The rest of the story is who chose not to vote. While the final counts are still being tallied at the time of this writing, it looks like Donald Trump received around three million fewer votes in 2024 than he did in 2020. The Democratic candidate, though, was down 15 million. Democrat strongholds saw the most dramatic drop in turnout.

These numbers tell a story that is, frankly, disastrous for the Democratic party—and paint a grim picture for what happens when liberals and centrists ignore popular anger over the status quo.

Centrism is dying—drive a stake through its heart

Trump’s return to power—with all of its deeply frightening implications—was not set in stone. Earlier in the campaign, Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris had been out ahead in the polls, running as a breath of fresh air compared to an increasingly unpopular Joe Biden. She was proposing somewhat ambitious anti-inflationary programs, including price controls, to bring the cost of living under control. Her campaign emphasized its bread-and-butter policy proposals for working people struggling to get by.

Then something changed. Party operatives, likely convinced that they already had urban progressives and racialized communities in the bag, pivoted to a more centrist approach that focused on winning suburban moderates who may like some of Trump’s policies, but find him uncouth as a person. They trotted out Dick Cheney and former Ronald Reagan staffers to endorse Harris and court the mythical “moderate Republican.”

If this approach sounds familiar, it’s because it is the same basic rubric that centrist political parties—in the U.S., in Canada, in France, in the UK, everywhere—have been drawing from for decades. There’s an established wisdom among suit-wearing political strategists, marketing firms, and party brain trusts that the way to win elections is by appealing to moderates, toning down the rhetoric, and speaking in platitudes.

The Democrats’ presidential campaign may as well have been pulling directly from the playbook of Justin Trudeau’s victorious 2015 campaign—a campaign that was light on policy and concrete proposals and heavy on positive vibes, in contrast with the mean and menacing other guy.

U.S. exit polls showed nearly half of voters saying they feel worse off than four years ago. That mood is also poignantly present in Canada right now, and is translating to sky-high polling for Conservative prime ministerial candidate Pierre Poilievre. We are seeing it in provincial elections as well, like October’s B.C. election, in which an upstart provincial Conservative party filled with anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists came within a hair’s breadth of power against a relatively flaccid and centrist incumbent provincial NDP.

Trump, like Poilievre, spoke directly to working people and spoke to the bread-and-butter needs and frustrations of the working class. He is, of course, a convicted criminal who works in the interest of the ruling class and whose policies will be disastrous for workers, but he is an extremely astute political campaigner when it comes to speaking to the anxieties of workers. Beyond his attention-grabbing racist and unhinged screeds about migrants eating pets, he spoke constantly about “bringing back” American jobs, getting the cost of living under control, and creating a “new golden age” for the American worker.

The Democratic party brain trust, on the other hand, thought it was wise spend the latter half of the campaign directly antagonizing significant sections of their own base—doing things like sending Bill Clinton to Dearborn to chastise prospective Muslim voters on why Israel’s genocide in Gaza was justified—while working to court moderate Republicans. How did that work? Ninety per cent of voters who identified as conservative, including those who find Donald Trump personally distasteful, still voted for the Trump-Vance ticket.

The Democrats’ main pitch was that they were not Trump. They were going to protect sacrosanct institutions and maintain respect for American democracy. They spent little energy campaigning on the issues that working class voters cared about, they antagonized key elements of their own base, and they went after voters that will never vote for them. The approach failed disastrously, and now we’re all going to pay the price for it.

Lessons from France

There was another path. When the liberal French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called an election in early June 2024, his speech was reminiscent of the way the Democrats have been talking about Trump, or how the Liberals have been talking about Poilievre. “The rise of the nationalists and demagogues is a threat not only to our nation but also to our Europe and to France’s place in Europe and in the world,” he said.

All the polling showed that the far-right Rassemblement National party was going to run away with the election. The far right was unified, and Macron’s liberal coalition was presenting itself as the only alternative. France’s left-wing parties were disunified and in disarray.

Within three days, the left-wing parties announced that they had unified and formed a coalition—the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP)—and began running a campaign with an ambitious and transformative program of expanding workers’ rights, climate justice, migrant justice, and ending wars. French media attacked them mercilessly, and the smart, professional political observers wrote off their chances. You don’t win elections that way, they said—you win elections by being moderate and respectable.

Then, they won. The left-wing coalition defeated both the far right and the liberals in the French legislative elections and won the most seats in the National Assembly—though not an absolute majority, which has since become a problem.

The French left parties that make up the NFP understand something that the American Democrats and Canadian progressives haven’t caught onto yet—that in order to win against fascism, you need to be bold. You need to have a real vision for improving the lives of working people. You need political parties to be the legislative arm of broader popular movements—not disconnected organizations composed of strategists who think they can move voters around like pieces on a chess board, and that the main task of a political party is to focus-group slogans and messaging. You need a real political project that speaks to the wants and needs of the working majority.

The basic lesson of the historic American election may be that people will make drastic choices, including choosing fascism, if they think it will make their life easier. The young, in particular, are susceptible to this due to widening wealth and opportunity gaps and the abandonment of class politics by left and centre-left parties. Unlike in France, where the left saw the threat and united to defeat it at the polls, the Democrats adopted a bankrupt strategy of seeking bridges with the right, including hated figures like Cheney.

The next years will be dark, there’s no way around it. We are staring into a deep abyss of increasing climate disaster, attacks on workers, escalating violence against vulnerable people, and an emboldened far right. Progressive gains will be quickly rolled back. Progressives will be in fight-back mode for some time to come. And when progressives are on the defensive, bold thinking can become a casualty. We can’t let that happen.

If we want to turn this ship around, we need to take a long, hard look in the mirror about why the far right is galloping ahead in support while the left stagnates. Then we’re going to need to wage a struggle to take back our political organizations and embrace a bold, transformative political project that speaks directly to the working class.

Because if we don’t do it, someone else certainly will.