Only a quarter of the U.S. population thinks the country is on the right track, and a big part of the reason is the steady erosion of the middle class. The bottom forty percent of income earners now account for twenty percent of all spending while the richest twenty percent account for forty percent. This is the widest gap on record and is likely to widen further according to Oxford Economics, a consultancy firm. Sixty percent of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, spending so much on essentials that they can't spend on travel or meals out. Joyless survival appears to be the new "American Dream."
Source: "It's Trump," Novara Live, You Tube, November 6, 2024
According to exit polls 35% of voters felt democracy is threatened in the United States. Those voters favored Trump 53%-46%.
Source: Jeffrey St. Clair, "Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold" Counterpunch, November 6, 2024
Concern about the high cost of food, housing, gasoline, and medical care, and an effective anti-immigrant message, carried Trump to victory.
He won increased support in almost every segment of the population. He won forty-five percent of the Latino vote, the highest portion in fifty years for a Republican. Among Latino men, he won fifty-three percent, a ten point gain compared to 2020. Twenty percent of black men voted for Trump, double the corresponding figure from 2020.
Source: "Trump Fascist Threat Materializes" La Jornada (Spanish), November 7, 2024
Turnout was 64.5%, so more than a third of the country, the poorest part of the electorate, still sees no advantage in going to the polls. And they are correct. Poverty can't even be discussed in American politics, much less eliminated by intelligent social policy.
Source: "Congress and the Supreme Court Under Republican Control," La Jornada (Spanish), November 6, 2024
When all of Biden's pandemic relief efforts were still in place, the president's approval rating hit 57%, the highest of his presidency. After he abruptly terminated such efforts and post-pandemic inflation kicked in, his approval rating dropped twenty points. Biden tried to cure inflation with austerity, which didn't work. Child poverty doubled. These are the programs that Biden took away: eviction and foreclosure bans, expanded and prolonged unemployment benefits, expanded child tax credit, expanded Earned Income Tax Credit for low income earners, free school meals, extra SNAP benefits, Medicaid expansion, a pause in student loan collections, child care provider grants, and WIC increase (nutrition support for women and young children). Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget reached nearly a trillion dollars ($953 billion).
Food insecurity has increased 40% since 2021, with over 42 million Americans now food insecure.
As American purchasing power ebbed away, Democrats lost whatever chance they had had to win the elections.
Sources: David Doel, "Charts Clearly Explain Why Trump Won," The Rational National, November 11, 2024. Left Reckoning, "Two Charts That Explain Kamala Harris' Loss To Trump," You Tube, November 9, 2024
Donald Trump gained electoral ground in forty-eight out of the fifty states, all except for Utah and Washington. Almost every demographic group supported him, including white suburban women, with notable gains coming from Generation X men and racial minorities, plus overwhelming support from rural areas. As inventive as they are in excuse-making, it will be difficult for Democratic elites to blame James Comey or Vladimir Putin this time around.
Trump out-performed every other Republican candidate and is effectively the King of American politics. The neo-liberal era is dead, killed by Trump, not Bernie Sanders, whose attempt to revive the New Deal roots of the Democratic Party was crushed by the party's own leaders. Sanders's constituency - the working poor - has fled the Democrats. But when both Trump's and Sanders' "populism" were in play, that demographic favored Sanders more than Trump.
Hillary Clinton painted Sanders as racist and sexist, a one-issue candidate, that issue being economics, which just happens to be the heart of politics. Breaking up the big banks won't end racism and sexism, HRC lectured us. This is the kind of idiocy we regularly get from "the most qualified candidate" in history.
While Kamala Harris told the world she couldn't think of a single change she would make to Joe Biden's policies, Trump provided an explanation of all that needs to be done to "make America great again": deport illegal immigrants, raise tariffs, and bring back industry to the United States. Something beats nothing every time, and there's no point in blaming voters.
Source: "Krystal and Saagar REACT: Trump LANDSLIDE Victory," Breaking Points, November 6, 2024
Harris out-fundraised Trump by nearly 5-to-1 in the final months of the campaign, collecting nearly a billion dollars in record time.
Source: Alison Durkee, "Trump vs. Harris Fundraising," Forbes, November 4, 2024
Update on U.S. voter turnout. 107 million Americans didn't vote who had the right to vote. Trump got 79 million votes, Harris 76 million. So 262 million Americans had the right to vote, which means that forty-one percent chose not to, more than two out of every five adults. That is "democracy" under capitalism: the poorest part of the population has no one to represent them, so it doesn't vote.
Source: La Jornada, November 13, 2024
254,000 votes in a handful of "Blue Wall" states turned the election for Trump, in other words 0.16% of the total votes determined the outcome of this year's "landslide."
Saagar Enjeti, Breaking Points, November 18, 2024
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