As progressives continue to debate the reasons for Harris's loss—it was the economy! it was the bigotry!—Isabella Weber and Elie Mystal duke out their opposing positions.
Democratic presidential nominee, and Vice President Kamala Harris concedes the election at Howard University on November 6, 2024.(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
As the dust settles on the 2024 elections, stunned Democrats are struggling to understand why the country voted the way it did. In the run-up to November 5, survey after survey showed that Americans were concerned about the cost of living, but many economists and pundits shook their heads in disbelief. They blamed a “vibecession.”
Imagine you are struggling to pay your grocery bills, and then an economist in the country’s top income bracket comes along and says your hardship is just vibes. It is this lack of compassion, this unwillingness to descend from the world of elegant models and aggregate numbers to try to understand conditions on the ground, that ended up making many economists complicit in Donald Trump’s victory.
James Baldwin once said that anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor. People’s experience of inflation differs based on factors like race, income, gender, where you live, whether you have a car to drive to cheaper stores, whether you can buy in bulk to take advantage of discounts, whether you rent or own your home, whether you have a mortgage from before interest rates went up, whether you depend on credit-card debt, how many assets you hold, and so on. This diversity of lived experiences is not captured in the headline numbers. For many people, the favorable economic data and booming stock market belied the reality of exorbitant grocery prices, sky-high rents, prohibitive healthcare costs, and spiking interest rates.
Exit polls consistently showed that the economy was among the biggest concerns for voters. In one exit poll, for example, 46 percent of respondents said they were worse off than they were in 2020; only 20 percent said the same four years ago about 2020 versus 2016. In another poll, nine out of 10 voters said they were concerned about grocery costs, and eight out of 10 said they worried about healthcare, housing, and gas costs. And in a third poll, voters from families that earned more than $100,000 leaned toward Kamala Harris, while those from families earning less than $100,000 preferred Trump. Many working Americans felt that Democrats had abandoned them with respect to their pocketbook struggles and ended up casting a ballot for Trump.
It didn’t have to be this way. The Harris campaign was off to a promising start when the vice president proposed introducing price-gouging laws for food at the federal level, which surveys show are immensely popular, including with swing voters in swing states. But she stopped putting the plan center stage after Wall Street started throwing mud at it and a few economists incorrectly criticized the measures as “price controls.” In reality, Harris’s proposals would not have fixed prices but would have given consumers the power to hold companies responsible when they excessively hike prices in emergencies.
Faced with that backlash, Harris went quiet on her most potent message for low- and middle-income voters. Her campaign still ran some ads on price gouging, but she did not mention it in the presidential debate; nor did she emphasize the idea that she would protect voters against cost shocks in her interviews and speeches.
Because Harris didn’t defend the plan, Trump could lambaste it unchallenged. He branded her price-gouging proposal as “communist,” even though he himself had issued an executive order against price gouging during his first term. Far from being communist, price-gouging legislation has long existed in deep-red states like Texas and Florida.
Harris’s silence won over the billionaire donors and pacified the economists, but she lost the American people.
Meanwhile, Trump vowed to put a cap on credit-card interest rates—a control on the price of short-term credit. He promised to bring down the price of energy and other essentials. He did not say how he would do this, but he portrayed himself as a leader who would protect people against rising costs. Of course, if implemented, the tariffs that he’s proposed would create a massive cost shock, but on the campaign trail, he framed them as measures to protect ordinary Americans.
Capitalist societies rest on a basic social contract: People go to work and are paid enough for their labor to afford the necessities of life. When people keep showing up at their jobs but the price of essentials skyrockets—even if only temporarily—workers feel cheated. Matters are only made worse if the stock market reaches record highs and corporate profits explode.
The election outcome should stand as a warning. We need to discard free-market fundamentalism and dare to imagine an economics that caters to the needs of ordinary people—not as a nice side effect but as a key goal. We cannot save democracy by talking about saving democracy; we can save democracy only by committing to policies that ensure the economic security of the many.
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Isabella M. Weber It was the Bigotry, Stupid
Let’s start here: We can all agree that at least some people who voted for Donald Trump are racist, yes? We can all agree that at least some people voted against Kamala Harris because she is a woman, right? The people who are proud to be racist voted for Trump.
The people who think it’s cool and edgy to hate women voted for Trump. There are an unknown number of “I hate n*****s and females” voters out there, and Trump won functionally all of them. He was the candidate for racism and misogyny, not just according to me but according to all the racists and misogynists who giddily supported him. If you can’t understand that, then I suggest you stop reading this column and return, forthwith, to the fantasyland you came from.
Our question, then, is why did so many people who do not consider themselves to be racist or sexist vote for the openly white-supremacist adjudicated rapist? And the answer coming to me from both the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the hardcore economic progressives in my social networks is: “Well, inflation, you see, and the party abandoned the working class.” Many people on my side of the aisle would have me believe that millions of Americans joined forces with the very worst people this country has to offer because of the price of eggs.
The economic argument is unpersuasive to me, because I’m Black. And while I hesitate to say anything on behalf of all Black voters, I feel fairly confident in my observation that Black people also like cheap eggs. I know plenty of Black folks, and none of us roll up to the pump and testify, “I sho’ nuff love paying more for gas, ‘cause it’s the price of freedom!”
I have come to understand that many working-class white men feel like their economic struggles are unjust and unfair (while they think everybody else’s economic struggles are because they’re lazy and undeserving), but the reality is that the Black community is more sensitive to inflationary pressures than anybody else in this country. As the saying goes: Whenever white folks catch a cold, Black people catch the flu. We have less wealth than whites, make less on the dollar, are more likely to be renters, and are more likely to be supporting multigenerational households (with our elders on no or fixed incomes). All of that means that when prices rise and wages don’t keep up, Black people, writ large, are hit first and hardest.
That is what happened during the Covid-induced inflationary economy of the early 2020s, and yet Black people overwhelmingly rejected Trump and his “working-class” appeal. Black women—a group of voters incredibly sensitive to the price of eggs, and the socioeconomic group that would destroy all the other contestants in the “race war” version of The Price Is Right—rejected him most forcefully of all, for the third time in a row.
Why? Are Black folks just dumb? Are we so provincial that we are the ones who voted against our own economic interests? Arguing that a majority of white voters were motivated more by economics than by hate sneakily argues that a majority of Black voters are too stupid to know what’s good for them.
Unlike some of my progressive friends, I tend to give Black voters more credit than that. I think Black voters faced the same economic pressures white voters faced, only worse, and despite that, Black voters resoundingly rejected Trump. A majority of white voters did not. That’s because the real appeal of Trump’s campaign was not economic but social. Trump was proposing an economy run by billionaires and kleptocrats like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; such an economy is not in the interests of anybody worried about the price of groceries. But that’s not what Trump was selling. What he was selling was white male cultural domination, and that is what appealed to a majority of white voters and a large minority of nonwhite male voters.
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I like to use what I call the “Black Turing test”: If a reasonable observer cannot distinguish the actions of an actual racist or misogynist (however defined) from a person who merely suborns racism and misogyny for their own economic reasons, then there is no difference.
All of Trump’s voters are either racist, sexist, or comfortable enough with racism and sexism that it makes no difference. I acknowledge that these people do not like being told what they are. I stipulate that saying these people just want money and prizes is a more palatable short-term political strategy than saying they need remedial social education.
But I’m not going to be lied to. It was not the economy, stupid. Trump ran on pure, unadulterated white identity politics and hate, and white-hot hate won.
Elie Mystal
Isabella M. WeberTwitterIsabella M. Weber is an economist and the author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy.
Elie MystalTwitterElie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and the host of its legal podcast, Contempt of Court. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. His first book is the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, published by The New Press. Elie can be followed @ElieNYC.