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This past year, Donald Trump became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. It hadn’t happened since George W. Bush was reelected in 2004. This is not an insignificant fact.
While we’re on the topic, let’s go ahead and get some of the other facts out of the way. Trump narrowly beat his opponent, Kamala Harris, by about 2.2 million votes: she received just over 75 million votes, compared to his 77.3 million. It’s worth comparing this to the 2020 election, of which Trump was also a part — then, he received around 74.2 million votes, while his opponent, Joe Biden, won in a landslide with roughly 81.2 million votes.
The general feeling on election night, and the days after, was that the country was shifting to the right. But, as Sarah Longwell, a Republican political strategist, told NPR, it’s not necessarily that the electorate as a whole is becoming more conservative. Rather, it’s the fact of the economy’s preeminence among this election’s hot button issues, and voters were, and are, rightfully frustrated. For all intents and purposes, our economy is technically strong right now: job growth is rapid, inflation is at the Federal Reserve’s desired target, manufacturing decline is slowing, and so on and so forth. But this doesn’t paint the whole picture.
Working-class voters, a bloc Trump performed well with, are frustrated with the economy despite its strength, despite the very real, material numbers indicating its success. Here are some more facts: the current minimum wage in the U.S. is $7.25 an hour; at 40 hours per week, for 52 weeks in a year, that’s a $15,080 gross income — still under the federal poverty line of $15,650 for a one-person household. The U.S. is still the only developed country in the world that doesn’t guarantee healthcare as an intrinsic human right by providing a universal healthcare service. As such, according to the KFF, as of last year approximately 14 million people here owe more than $1,000 in medical debt. In fact, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported last year that the total household debt in America is something around $17.94 trillion.
Fantastic numbers on the global stage mean little when the working class still struggles in its day-to-day realities. It’s true that Trump is hardly the appropriate solution to these maladies, and, most likely, will make them worse. His focus on deregulation, his attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and his predilection toward corporate tax cuts and tariffs were, ultimately, harmful to workers during his first term, and there’s little reason to believe his second will look much different.
But it’s also true that Americans saw little desire for progress from the Democratic Party, and, whether because of short-term memory loss or some other reason, they turned toward a demagogue promising truly radical change.
Like any good demagogue, Trump has preyed on voters’ fears and concerns in a way that distracts them from the real problem. He has shifted their focus toward immigrants, queer and transgender people, and, ultimately, themselves. Despite his veneer of economic populism, he has inhabited his White House, predictably, with useful political cronies and wealthy benefactors like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Linda McMahon and Elon Musk, among others.
It’s easy, then, to laugh in the face of his supporters. What did they expect, really? Isn’t this exactly who they voted for? They got what they asked, there’s little room to complain now. This anger, this bitterness, is understandable. But it’s much more important — if much more complicated — to attempt to understand exactly why they chose to vote for this demagogue in the first place. And it’s from this analytical process that everything else must move forward. People do not bring fascism upon themselves, no matter who they voted for: they are victims of a fascist manipulating them, using their material conditions for his own political benefit.
The left does not win an election, nor any political victories for that matter, by assuming that every person who voted for Trump is a soulless, irredeemable demon for being taken advantage of by a political opportunist. Nobody’s decisions, nobody’s political ideologies, exist in a vacuum independent of their social realities. We shouldn’t tolerate, under any circumstances, the hatred and vitriol spewed by Trump and his supporters toward those marginalized groups they so desperately want to blame for their anger. But it’s total idealism and defeatism to assume that half of the country is unrecoverable. Transforming a fight against the ruling class into a fight against millions of working-class people achieves nothing.
Everyone, ultimately, is a victim of oligarchy and everyone, ultimately, is a victim of fascism. Trump supporters are right in being angry at the establishment political rule that has done nothing to change their material existence. But they are wrong in believing a capitalist like Trump — or, for that matter, any of the capitalists in Silicon Valley who’ve placed themselves at the forefront of his campaign — will alter their conditions any differently. But it’s on the collective, not the individual, to craft a political alternative that demonstrates to them their misjudgment.
The Democratic Party, as it currently stands, is not this alternative. As it demonstrated in the 2024 election, it has failed to garner the sort of support needed to quell what its candidate called an “existential threat.” For the left to defeat the radical right, it must be equally as radical in its fight for equality and liberty. Simply put, to conquer fascism, one must begin to construct a world where it's less desirable.
Joey Sills (he/him) is a senior studying English, comparative literature and political science.
