THE OVERVIEW: Election Reflections — Thoughts from an American Living in London
U.S. journalist, Danielle Maisano, who has been living in London for 11 years, shares her views on the build-up that led to the fallout of Trump winning his second term.
The last time I voted in a U.S. presidential election on U.S. soil was in 2008. It was also the last time I felt truly inspired by a Democratic nominee. I came politically of age during the George W. Bush period. After years of watching war criminals, Bush and his VP, Dick Cheney, violate international law with the invasion of Iraq and state-sanctioned torture while domestically rolling back environmental protections and civil liberties with the Patriot Act.
Like so many on the left, I thought Obama’s election was the first step in finally restoring some of the country’s sanity. But by his second term, Obama had made it clear that little would be done to reign in the financial system that devastated the lives of many and the revolving door he promised to close remained swinging open to insurance lobbyists and bankers. By 2016, like many of my millennial generation, saddled by student debt and the prospect of being the first generation to fare worse than the previous, it was obvious that mainstream liberalism wasn’t providing the answers to combat the devastating impact neoliberal policies were having, overseeing the largest redistribution of wealth in generations.
“I watched with hopeful anticipation as the Bernie Sander’s campaign looked to combat Trump’s rise with progressive policy proposals. But Sander’s uphill battle against the Democratic establishment to secure the nomination left many progressives increasingly disenchanted with mainstream politics.”
What seemed obvious to those on the left at home and abroad, was that Trump was allowed a path to victory in 2016 because, while he defied establishment norms and leaned into populist rhetoric, he posed no real challenge to the same corporate interests Sanders targeted in his own run for the presidential nomination.
Sanders’s second defeat in the 2020 primary, again some might say a result of a concerted effort by Democrats to shore up the nomination for Biden, left many in the mainstream media eager to declare populism dead on both sides of the spectrum. Biden’s election in 2020 gave the appearance, for a brief moment, that the Trump era had come to an end. Perhaps, America had once again regained its sanity?
However, one thing made me sceptical and nervous about being too sure my country had turned the page on this destructive period. Watching from afar, the public response to the pandemic in the U.S. left me and many Brits increasingly bewildered. As the U.K. ostensibly put politics aside and banded together to face an unprecedented crisis, with record vaccine uptake and nightly tributes to the National Health Service, the increasingly politicised discourse in the U.S. felt more and more removed from reality.
What should have been a moment of national unity, as it was in so many other countries in Europe, the public health crisis in the U.S. was dividing families. Conspiracy theories abounded. But what felt like a cultural rift was grounded in material realities. The same college-educated workers in higher income brackets that zoomed into meetings lived in a different world from those in service-sector jobs and workers on zero-hour contracts. The economic divide laid bare by the COVID pandemic and ignored by the Democrats in the 2024 election left fertile ground for Trump’s return. Democrats believed the existential threat of what another Trump presidency would do to the future of American democracy would win out over campaigning harder on “bread and butter” issues. A disconnect that played directly into Trump’s narrative of liberal elitists out of touch with the average voters’ needs.
More popular than ever
Unlike in 2020, when it took almost a week to declare the winner, by the morning after voters went to the polls, the results were in. Trump had secured a surprisingly fast and decisive victory. Not only had he taken every swing state he lost to Biden in the previous election, this time, he secured the popular vote as well, something he was unable to do in his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton.
One could argue that Kamala Harris was never a strong candidate. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, she dropped out of the race before voting had even begun, due to a lack of funds. According to the LA Times, in April of 2024, just months before Biden dropped out of the race, Harris only had a 39 per cent approval rating with registered voters while 55 per cent of voters had an unfavourable opinion of her.
Many argued that Biden’s refusal to step down before his disastrous debate performance in June made it too late for the Democrats to run any sort of primary. Without any sort of leadership contest, the Democrats were unable to test their candidate’s popularity and any potential policies with the general electorate. By failing to hold a Democratic primary like that of 2016 and 2020, which saw the popularity of the Bernie Sander’s campaign able to push progressive policies to the forefront, Democrats abandoned policies popular with their base, like Medicare for All and a federal fifteen-dollar minimum wage.
These policies that are still popular with voters as evidenced in places like Missouri, where Trump won, but voters also voted to increase the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour.
“Voters responded by making one thing clear from this election, if there were any doubts before, that Democrats are no longer viewed as the party of the working-class.“
While some liberals look to blame the xenophobic undercurrents of Trump’s campaign by appealing to a racist and misogynist base, Trump made gains in almost every demographic since 2016, from Latinos to the youth vote. When asked why they voted for him what it came down to, for many voters was that when Trump asked repeatedly on the campaign trail, did Americans feel better off than they did while Trump was in office? The answer was a resounding “no!”.
Despite passing the Inflation Reduction Act and an impressive investment in US infrastructure, the remnants of price gouging brought on by the pandemic are still an issue as companies continue to make record profits while refusing to lower consumer prices to pre-2020 levels. At the end of the day, the basic cost of living is still too high for the average American. But do Americans really think Trump will enact policies that would change this? One thing the Democrats seem to ignore in favour of focusing on the more outlandish and hateful rhetoric is that Trump has always leaned into more populist messaging popular with working-class issues. Like his criticism of NAFTA, which many Americans blamed for the gutting of the few remaining manufacturing jobs.
It’s the (Neoliberal) economy stupid
In 2016, as in 2020, most of my friends and former colleagues in the States were supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders. He seemed to tap into the same economic discontentment as Trump, but instead of blaming immigrants, he attacked the neoliberal policies of the past thirty years and talked about strategies that would impact the average American voter: Medicare for All, a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, and Green New deal all became part of mainstream political discourse. Even Kamala Harris campaigned in support of Medicare for All in the 2020 primaries. An issue that she then abandoned in 2024.
When Joe Biden received his party’s nomination in 2020, it was after another hard-fought primary that saw the repeat popularity of leftist candidate Senator Bernie Sanders force the administration to adopt some of its more progressive policies on the campaign trail. A fifteen-dollar minimum wage, student debt cancellation and a Green New Deal were incorporated into Biden’s platform. When Biden was elected, he formed a Joint Unity Task Force made up of former Sanders and fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren advisors that has been the driving force behind his economic policies.
Kamala Harris instead abandoned the left in favour of winning some mythological centre. As the New York Times noted just before the election, Harris had more appearances with billionaire Mark Cuban than the popular president of the United Auto Workers, Shawn Fein, in the run-up to election day.
Since the Obama era, Democrats have been trying to recreate the magic that captured the nation in a way many generations had never felt before. But Democrats appear to have learned the wrong lessons. In the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Iraq war, whether voters were conscious of it or not, the election of Barack Obama was a rejection of the neoliberal policies that had overcome the country.
Change was his mantra and Americans weren’t voting for celebrity and good vibes, they were voting for a genuine political shift. But Obama’s betrayal of that mandate, bailing out the banks, along with a foreign policy that saw his unprecedented use of drones and targeted assassinations, left an electorate jaded and sceptical of the empty rhetoric of liberal promises of a better America that did not focus on policies directly impacting the economic pain felt by every day, working-class Americans.
American exceptionalism at home and abroad
At first, it might appear difficult to see how so many Americans could be hoodwinked into thinking Trump is the man for the job when so many of his policies go against their best interests, weighing some faint promise of future prosperity against the risks of electing a man who has made no secret of the potential damage that could be done to American democracy in his second term. Perhaps Americans’ ability to overlook potentially harmful policies impacting those most vulnerable is best exemplified in how many Democrats and progressives themselves were able to vote for Harris despite her policy of supporting the genocide in Gaza. The majority of Americans support a ceasefire and arms embargo, but the US under the Biden-Harris administration, has continued to arm Israel and increased its financial support since the conflict began.
On the campaign trail, Harris was unwilling to commit to any break from the current administration’s policy. And, apart from Arab-American voters vocally abandoning the party in places like Michigan, most liberals still wanted Harris in office because that part of her platform would seemingly have no impact on their day-to-day lives. Which in turn is similar to the way Americans have always felt removed from their nation’s foreign policy, from CIA-sponsored coups in Latin America to the Iraq war. If they don’t see it as impacting them directly, they can turn a blind eye and vote for the candidate they believe serves their own personal best interest.
So young and healthy Americans can forgo vaccines because chances are they will be fine. Abortion bans are supported by white women in rural countries and harmful immigration policies are ignored by Latino voters. The myth of American exceptionality runs deep. It might have devastating consequences elsewhere. To some unknown other. But it could never happen to me.
In 2016, I watched the election of Donald Trump unfold from an apartment in Valparaiso, Chile. Media pundits spent weeks asking how voters could have gone from Obama to Trump in such a seemingly drastic turn. Much attention was paid to counties like my home county Macomb, where voters overwhelmingly went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and turned to Trump in 2016. But living in a country still haunted by the shadows of U.S.-sponsored fascism, it felt naïve to believe the U.S. was forever protected from the same ills at home it had imposed elsewhere. No one believes it will happen to them. Until it does.
“We are living in the ashes of the neoliberal era and what the future holds is impossible to know. The new era of prosperity brought on by liberal democracy and the end of history failed to materialise.”
Instead, we have been left with an ever-increasing disparity of wealth.
Republicans under Trump have fuelled people’s despair by blaming elites, immigrants and everyone but the global capitalist system that has forced a race to the bottom for so many American workers, hit by neoliberal policies that weakened unions and deindustrialized large swaths of the country. If the Democrats remain unwilling to address those concerns, they have no one to blame but themselves for whatever comes next.
