Trump is saying the election gave him a “very big mandate.”
Rubbish. It wasn’t a mandate at all. It wasn’t even a “red shift” to Trump and the Republicans.
It was a blue abandonment.
We now know that nine million fewer votes were cast nationwide in 2024 than in 2020.
Trump got about a million more votes than he did in 2020 (700,000 of them in the seven battleground states). That’s no big deal.
The bigger news is that Harris got 10 million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020 (400,000 fewer in the battleground states).
Harris campaigned hard in the battlegrounds, so her erosion from Biden’s vote there wasn’t nearly as much, proportionately, as it was everywhere else across the country.
The biggest takeaway is that Biden’s 9 million votes disappeared.
Why?
It couldn’t have been because of virulent racism because we elected a Black man, twice. It couldn’t have been misogyny, since Hillary Clinton got 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, and Clinton’s actions and statements probably triggered more misogyny in 2016 than did Harris’s in 2024.
There’s no evidence of illegal vote tampering or of voter suppression nearly on this scale. In fact, it was easierto cast a ballot this year than in 2020.
So what happened to the 9 million?
We can’t know for sure but it seems most likely that those 9 million potential voters — mostly working class — said to themselves, “I won’t vote for Trump because he’s an asshole. But I won’t vote for the Democrats either, because they don’t give a damn about me.”
The task for the Democrats is what it should have been all along: remaking the party into the party of the bottom 90 percent — the party of people who don’t live off stocks and bonds, of people who are not CEOs or billionaires like Mark Cuban, the party that rejects Elon Musk and the entire American oligarchy.
Instead, the Democratic Party must be the party of average working people whose wages have gone nowhere and whose jobs are less secure.
Blue-collar private-sector workers earned more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are earning now in 2024. This means today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents earned 52 years ago.
Yet the American economy is far larger than it was 52 years ago. Where did the additional money go? To the top. So what’s the Democrats’ task? To restructure the economy toward more widely shared prosperity.
This isn’t a blue-state versus red-state phenomenon. It’s a class phenomenon.
In Missouri, one of the reddest of the red, voters passed an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by a wide margin, even as they overwhelmingly rejected Harris. It looks like they did the same in Alaska.
In ruby-red Nebraska, roughly 75 percent of voters backed a measure to institute paid sick leave, although they rejected Harris. (Nebraskans also came close to unseating their incumbent senator in favor of Dan Osborn, a union activist who ran as an independent and railed against corporate overlords.)
Americans across the board want a fairer economy. Trump Republicans won’t deliver one. Instead, Trump and his allies are readying more tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy and regulatory rollbacks. They’re preparing to hand the country over to billionaires.
Democrats! This is your opportunity! Take it!
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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