Donald J. Trump will be the 47th president of the United States of America. 

How did we let this happen? 

While the simplest explanation is that America is not ready to elect a woman for president, let alone a Black woman, which is absolutely true considering racism and sexism is so deeply ingrained in American culture. However, this is not the only explanation. 

Not only did Trump win, more importantly, Vice President Kamala Harris and the dysfunctional and out-of-touch Democratic Party lost. The Democrats ran a campaign based on an imaginary 0.1% of the Pennsylvanian population they decided would determine the election, and catered only to this predominantly white, upper-middle class portion of the electorate and by doing so, sacrificed the votes of nearly every average working class American. 

While the issues of abortion, the war between Israel and Gaza and student debt relief are incredibly important, not everyone in the country is privileged enough to vote on these issues alone. As James Carville said in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The vast majority of the country voted on the economic promises of the Trump campaign, ensuring he will lower prices and slow the rate of inflation that he pitted on the failures of the Biden administration, a sentiment that evidently got through to voters as there was not one state that Trump lost votes in from 2020 to 2024. This is the main failure of the Democratic Party and the Harris-Walz campaign; they neglected to appeal to working class families who have been struggling to make ends meet, leaving the door wide open for Trump to swoop in and earn their votes. 

Now this isn’t where the issues began, to understand this, we must go back to the 2020 primary. 

Where it all went wrong

While attempting to narrow down who will represent the Democratic Party in the 2020 election, the Democratic Party came to the conclusion that they must run a more moderate candidate in order to win over the votes of anti-Trump Republicans, landing on Biden as their nominee. 

How they came to the conclusion that running a truly progressive campaign is too radical for the United States is utterly beyond me. If this was not the thought process in the party, we would have ended up with Bernie Sanders running, as he had the most financial support going into the 2020 primary. 

It is very simple, if Democrats ran Bernie Sanders in 2020 instead of steering the party further right, we never would have seen a second Trump administration. That being said, one thing must be made abundantly clear: The Democratic Party in the United States is not left of the political spectrum, at best it is a center right party. This fact is the reason why politicians such as Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are seen as radical, as they are truly left leaning politicians in a swarm of conservatives. 

The ideas that the Democratic Party decided were “too radical” for the United States consist of universal healthcare, government funded childcare, student debt relief and supporting a Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal, having been proposed in Congress a multitude of times, would revolutionize the United States, allowing us to move past the destructive and inefficient reliance on fossil fuels along with a wide variety of other policies such as ensuring each citizen has a family-sustaining job, affordable housing and healthcare, access to clean air and water and an overhaul of the transportation system in the United States. The United States, year after year, is the highest producer of CO2 emissions, and by easing off the use of fossil fuels and combustion engines in cars, we will be able to drastically improve the state of the environment and the overall quality of life for everybody. 

But this is far too radical for the Democratic Party. 

Instead, the main focus of the Harris campaign was to appeal to undecided voters and Republicans who were scared off by Trump’s dangerous rhetoric. In theory, this is a fairly solid strategy as early in Harris’ candidacy, it seemed as though a large number of Republicans were going to cross party lines to vote for Harris, however exit polls proved this effort to be all but futile. 

Campaign mistakes

The biggest mistake of the Harris campaign was flaunting the endorsement of one of the most evil men alive, former Vice President Dick Cheney. The warmonger’s endorsement furthered infighting in the Democratic Party as young people, Muslim Americans and Arab Americans grew increasingly infuriated with the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s continued genocide of the Palestinian people. Harris and the Democratic Party brought Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney, along on the campaign trail hoping her partisanship would draw more conservative voters to vote against Trump. 

Anyone who has been alive at any point of the last 20 years has felt the effects of the Bush administration war machine, with the United States finally, after decades of imperialist power, pulling out of Afghanistan. 

The Democrats further alienated themselves through their failures on the campaign trail, for example by failing to address the deplorable comments made by the Trump campaign regarding Puerto Rico which caused a large swath of Hispanic voters to turn to Trump as they felt the Harris campaign did not care about them. 

These groups that the Democrats alienated themselves from would have guaranteed a Harris victory, but by attempting to appeal to a small portion of the population, it is generous to say that the Democrats shot themselves in the foot. 

As stated above, infighting amongst likely-Democratic voters has been growing since the Oct. 7 attacks Hamas launched against occupying power Israel. Since this, conservatives on both sides of the aisle have rallied in support of Israel, whether disingenuously in order to secure campaign funds from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or not, many stating that they are in favor of the expansion of the Israeli state. By failing to appeal to the most radical, even their slightly further left base, the Democrats successfully sacrificed a large portion of the vote, effectively losing the election. 

Now who could have appealed to this base? This brings us back to one of the most robbed politicians in history, Sanders. It is clear that Democrats across the country were far more excited about a prospective Sanders administration compared to a Biden administration, so why not capitalize on this excitement? Why continue running centrist campaigns when we saw what happened when this was the strategy in 2016? 

Since 2015, Trump has been appealing to his most radical base which consists of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and criminals like himself, which has been wildly successful, as cemented by his second win in which there was not one single state where he did not outperform his numbers from 2020. If anything, Trump has done the opposite of the Democratic Party’s strategy, increasingly appealing to his most radical base, take for instance Jan. 6. By perpetuating the big lie about his claims that the 2020 election was stolen, Trump has further instated himself as the figurehead of the Republican Party and has effectively reinvented the Republican Party as the “Party of Trump.” 

This is the biggest flaw within the Democratic Party: Nobody within the party has a backbone, and they are too caught up in how they are perceived in the media. On the flip side, the Republican Party is unapologetic with their agenda, steering the party further and further right and bringing the rest of the country along with it. Of course I condemn in the highest the policies of the Republican Party and the platform the Trump regime plans on subjecting this country to; however, the ambition and effectiveness of the Republican Party’s strategy must be acknowledged. I never thought I’d say this, but the Democrats could learn an awful lot from the Republicans. 

That said, the Democrats continue to be vague with the platform of their candidacy outside of the fact that they are not Trump. This was the Achilles heel for Hillary Clinton, Biden and most recently for Harris, as the only slightly memorable piece of policy that was mentioned by Harris on the campaign trail was her tax credits for new families and small businesses. This simply is not enough to drum up support, let alone excitement within the United States. Yes, it is important to underline the contrast between the two candidates, as this matchup could not have been more obvious, but this, too, is not enough to pave the way to the White House. 

Like I said, the contrast between Trump and Harris could not have been clearer. Trump made it abundantly clear what he believed: Immigrants are poisoning the blood of America and we must rid the country of them to return to what he believes is how this country began: A Christian nationalist white ethnostate. 

At his rallies, Trump would scapegoat immigrants, blaming them for everything from inflation to the alleged deaths of pets in Springfield, Ohio. While failing to take credit for the 922 page manifesto that is Project 2025, Trump continually echoed the fascist ideals presented in the “Presidential Transition Playbook” written by the Heritage Foundation, such as disbanding the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the National Weather Service and doing away with the separation of church and state by forcing Catholicism into public school classrooms and into the policy making process. 

Not only this, but there have been whispers regarding the overturning of Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage on the federal level. While this seems incredibly radical and unrealistic, on its face, this is entirely within the realm of possibility, especially following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned the 50 year precedent of Roe v. Wade, leaving the legality of female reproductive healthcare at the discretion of state legislatures which was made possible by the appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court by Trump. 

If the Democratic Party chose not to run centrist candidates and tried something “new” with Bernie Sanders in 2016 or 2020, we never would have seen a second, or even a first, Trump administration. 

The Democratic Party must learn from the mistakes made over and over again, with 2024 being almost a mirror image of the 2016 election in which Clinton was leading in nearly every poll leading up to election day, convincing nearly everyone she would win by a landslide. 

Trump is the culmination of the failures of the Democrats over the past 10 years and with every passing day, he and his loyal subordinates feed off the discontentment, disorganization and ultimate dysfunctionality of the Democratic institution. It was only a matter of time until a radical conservative rose to prominence, and the only group the Democratic Party can blame for this is itself. 

Jackson Small is a columnist. Contact him at [email protected].