The Democrats and the Electorate

Turns out, voters like abortion more than they like Democrats — even when the Democrats are running on abortion. While reeling from Donald Trump’s win, we’ve been paying close attention to the ballot measures on abortion all over the country. Most of them passed. Florida’s ballot measure failed — devastating news for Southerners, who’ve long traveled to Florida for care — but it still garnered 57 percent support (it needed 60 percent to pass). People voted for these measures while voting for Trump. Much of the country shares feminist views on abortion and voted for an outright fascist. 

What seems like a contradiction may not be. Democrats and their coalition partners have neglected (and sucked money from) grassroots abortion organizing for decades. Access to abortion has eroded, court case by court case, ballot measure by ballot measure, through state and national Democratic administrations. Joe Biden wasn’t even pro-choice until arguably 2007, supported the Hyde amendment until his 2020 campaign and, as We Testify has documented, barely uttered the word thereafter. Why would anyone associate Democrats with successfully protecting their right to an abortion? Americans abhor hypocrites and failures — on this issue Dems are both. 

And herein lies one simple way to interpret the Democratic loss. The Dems claim to be the party of equality and by all normal measures they’re not. At the national level, the Democrats are a billionaire-funded, abortion-wary, activist–scolding, labor-betraying bunch of police enthusiasts. When they take a $5 donation from a worker and a $5 million donation from her boss, who do you think they listen to? No one thinks the party is going to look after her needs. No one likes being lied to and disappointed year after year. They con their base and then ask them for money.

While Trump is responsible for the fall of Roe, most people didn’t seem to think he’d pursue a national ban — and he’s worked hard to cultivate this impression. He seems less hypocritical because he never pretended to be noble. Meanwhile, many voters associate Trump with a pre-inflation economy and stimulus checks that bore his name. Is it so odd that people might support reproductive rights and redistribution at the same time (even if they’re wildly wrong about where it came from)? After all, that’s what Democrats used to stand for. 

Today, Democrats seem like Republicans but weaker. In fact, they’ve never seemed more like “the second most enthusiastic party of capital.” Harris cozied up to big business, leaned right on immigration, celebrated her law enforcement background and her Glock. She raised over a billion dollars in a country where the abortions she supports are too expensive for the people who need them, and spent it on ads in seven states. Democratic mayors from NYC to Chicago to Atlanta — including some Black progressives who inspired a lot of hope upon election — have fear-mongered around immigration and crime. Elected Dems have chastised students for opposing the genocide of Palestinians, Black organizers for confronting police brutality, and climate justice organizers for blocking pipelines. Party-aligned reproductive rights organizations failed to protect abortion rights because instead of cultivating a grassroots movement they gave all their money to Democrats who did fuck all but get themselves elected. Democrats have done more than their part to suppress the battle for equality. 

When these movements have gained momentum, Democrats seem to accept them, and then repackage them without the content. The movement for Black lives — which called for police funding to be redirected to housing and mental health — gets transformed into workplace DEI sessions (another lecture from your boss, or, even better, a consultant your boss is paying way more than you) and Nancy Pelosi in kente cloth. It’s no mystery why Democrats fear disruption; they are a party with an entrenched hierarchy just as beholden to big donors as the Republicans. They’re managerial, boss-like, and in no way represent what people are feeling right now. People often say they’ve failed to take credit for victories like the Inflation Reduction Act; I think people don’t give them credit because instead of rallying constituents against right-wing opponents of a green economy, Democrats settled the legislation in smokey backrooms with Joe Manchin. “Stop yelling, we’re the adults in the room,” they seem to say. “We’ve got a plan and one billion dollars.” Can’t you feel the joy? 

It’s important to remember that a lot of people were willing to try the left before this historic affirmation of the far-right. After the financial crisis of 2008, left-wing movements rose up in the U.S., Spain, Greece, Italy, the U.K., and elsewhere to capture peoples’ dissatisfaction with inequality. The Occupy movement was international and the mayhem churned up parties like SYRIZA, Podemos, Die Linke, and the Corbyn wing of the Labour party. These political movements helped people understand their fear and precarity as outcomes of an unfair economic system. Over the 2010s, centrists and their funders crushed most of these political movements’ chances at political power. 

With the collapse of the left, a new standard bearer of anti-establishment feeling had room to rise: the far-right. The far-right has always had the benefit of more capital and secret friends in high places — what would the Tea Party be without the Koch Brothers? The right helped people blame their precarity on immigration, feminism, anti-racist organizing, and trans rights. It’s a reminder that misogyny, white supremacy, and nativism are always politically available as ways to feel strong or important or better. A right-wing vision makes those hatreds politically central instead of marginal — a socialism of fools. Today, the right-wing’s vision centering nativism has beaten the left’s vision of centering redistribution.

I’ve heard people suggest that outrage over Gaza or the fight for trans rights somehow lost us the election. That we should focus strictly on so-called bread-and-butter issues. I don’t think so.  

As my Lux colleague Cheryl Rivera told me yesterday, effective politics is when you put forward a real vision and build a bloc to support that vision. The Democrats have long been enthralled with the offensive idea that demographics are destiny, but Trump, vicious though he is, did manage to build surprising support for a vision of violent borders, violent patriarchy, and tax cuts. 

We can counter that. Abortion used to be dismissed as an election loser; today it’s wildly popular. I highly recommend this conversation, filmed just before the Dobbs decision, among abortion organizers’ who explain the work you can do beyond elections. I love this essay by Andrea Long Chu in which she eschews any defensiveness and makes the moral, proactive case for letting trans kids, adults, and everyone else change their bodies. Our vision includes economic justice; open borders that allow people to flow as freely as capital does today; free abortion on demand; housing for all; abolition. We can organize people toward this vision today; we reject defeatism. 

When we designed the current issue, we knew we’d produce it before the election and publish it after. We thought Trump might win. So we created a package about confronting fascist right-wing movements around the world: Kenya, the Philippines, the U.K., India, Afghanistan, and here, with lessons from the long fight against immigrant detention. We hope it is useful to you. To support these feminist journalists, please subscribe today and, if you can, give a subscription to someone else.

There’s a lot more to think about in this election. Gen Z men broke hard for Trump. We’ve written about the crisis of masculinity before, and if you’re in New York you can attend this discussion about left-wing organizing by self-described redneck men in Alabama. We’ll be digging into Gen Z politics in issues to come, and breaking down the role of gender in this election as more information comes out — will the divide grow, or will white women strengthen the fascist camp? If this interests you, please join us for a discussion interpreting the election with Lux‘s political writers in New York on Monday. We’re also waiting for more information about how the genocide in Gaza affected the race (though we know some) — many in our community made their decisions based on the Democratic Party’s ongoing commitment to supplying the killing, and yet Gaza was barely discussed in exit polls or election coverage.

I know it’s a scary time — everyone in the Lux community is freshly vulnerable under a new Trump presidency. But we’ve also been preparing. 

See you out there,

Sarah Leonard
Editor-in-Chief