The tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

I mean, yeah, it looks like Kamala didn’t get the dem base out to vote for her because no one wants “more of the same” when following an incredibly unpopular president. Kamala was very openly telling the base to fuck off, and made her race singularly about attracting white, upper middle class suburban women at the cost of everyone else.

But that’s the micro view. In the macro view, Michael Roberts’ analysis of rates of profit shows it’s been falling for a while now. Capitalism was in crisis during the Great Depression, only to be “saved” by WW2. The reconstruction of the industrial world led to good times for a couple decades until there was a profitability crisis in the 1970s. Capital’s response starting the 80s was offshoring, privatization, and financialization - neoliberalism in other words. But the gains from that was only able to keep things going until 2009 or so. Since then profitability has been shit. Capital has no answers beyond just tightening the screws (austerity at home and imperialism abroad). Just increasing misery in order to slow the decline of the rate of profit.

The US needs that surplus value extracted primarily from the global south to keep running. That surplus value is how capital is able to buy off the domestic working class. But that slice of the pie keeps shrinking, i.e. material conditions keep worsening. Things are getting worse as every year goes by and everyone knows it, even if they don’t understand it. That’s why we keep bouncing between parties every four years instead of the steady 2 term presidents we had in the era of neoliberalism. Most people are not doing in depth political analysis. They are just seeing their situation get worse and blaming whoever is in charge.

Of course the economy won’t recover under Trump. It will almost certainly get worse, and I happen to think the odds of a major economic crisis are pretty high. I would bet everything we get a dem president in 2028. Things just get worse and people are fumbling around for a solution.

And that’s where we come in. WE HAVE THE ANSWERS. It’s our job to bring the light of Marxism to the world. I’m not even gonna pretend we can make much of a dent in 4 years but this is a multi-generational project.

The real story here is that Trump won the popular vote. That signals an enormous shift in sentiment and culture, and should be the subject of any serious analysis here. This is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of the liberal project and liberal vision–a total implosion of the do-nothing “centrist” political consensus. Democrats have shown over and over and over again that they have nothing to offer the majority of Americans. The Harris campaign was just the apotheosis of the trend: courting capital and neo-conservative ghouls while jettisoning any talk of policies that might help people. This is not a winning election strategy. That should be screamingly obvious now. People are angry, hurting, and looking for anyone that even suggests they understand that pain and might do something about it, even when the suggested solutions make no sense. The only sane response to this result is a SWEEPING reexamination of the neo-liberal consensus. Liberalism in its current form has failed most people, and the Democrats have failed to articulate any message or position that appreciates that. Until someone in the United States starts articulating a positive vision with policies to engender some hope for the future–healthcare for everyone, housing as a human right, SERIOUS action on climate change–the far right will keep winning. They’re the only ones with ideas.

Because it’s less a matter of more people voting republican and more a matter of not enough people voting Democrat.

Why did people not vote Democrat? The party refuses to be popular, had no real policy proposals, and actively alienated key voting blocks in key swing States.

there are 50 reasons and all of them boil down to the democratic party’s refusal to be popular. at this point the party is run by committed neocons and centrists who despite knowing that progressive policy is popular (let alone morally correct) will never campaign on it. whatever organized left exists in this country must break with the democrats if there is any hope for the future

1. Really hard to run an attack campaign when you’re the incumbent party. If your messaging is just “im a bit better than the other guy” people are just gonna point to the shit job you’re doing right now. Historical levels of unpopularity is real hard to come back from, bush needed 9/11.
2. The whole Biden debacle was disastrous, probably ended any chance of scooping up the moderate vote they were desperately pining for.
3. Gaza, immigration, and generally running to the right put a bullet in any chance of bringing this campaign back. They tried really desperately with the weed stuff at the last minute, but the damage was done.
4. Democratic party reeks of putrescene

The democrats’ main pitch was: We are doing a shitty job, but the other team will be worse.
The republicans’ main pitch was: They are doing a shitty job, we wont.

Democrats main offer was doing what the republicans did. Why go for a cheap knockoff that’s only in it for the votes, when you can get genuine homemade rabid racism? The democrats have nothing to offer and they’re not even willing to admit shit is fucked. Republicans have lots of stuff to offer: Fascism and they are willing to admit shit is fucked (because of immigrants, not the rich)
If you’re an average voter and your choice is between someone offering to do genocide while denying it and someone offering to do genocide while enjoying it, then the average voter (who is a fascist) will go for the ones who are open about it.

On top of that the democrats method of campaigning via smug condescention and veiled threats does not do them any favours. Pointing at a graph and saying “you don’t get it, inflation is going down!” (which just means it’s going up slower) to a person who has to choose between paying utilities or eating every day, isn’t a good idea if you want that person to vote for you.

It also doesn’t help that democrats do anything they can to kneecap their own strong grassroots movements (See: Bernie Sanders being fucked over in the primaries two elections in a row, the dems turning on #metoo, the dems marginalising the BLM activists that won them georgia in 2020)

When you run on the status quo, and the status quo sucks, people are gonna turn to whoever manages to present themselves as an alternative.

When you run to the right on stuff like immigration and the military, and the people who like right-wing policies already have a party waiting on them hand-and-foot, they’re not gonna switch over to you, and you’re just going to alienate the parts of your base/coalition that are affected by those policies.

People are gonna blame the left or say it’s because she’s a woman of color. But Tammy Baldwin, a queer woman, looks set to win Wisconsin, and Elissa Slotkin is ahead by a hair in Michigan, so that narrative is dead in the water.

Look at the vote totals, (as of right now) Harris 66 mi vs Trump’s 71, compare this to 2020, 81 Biden vs 74 Trump.There is also this Pew article which shows the breakdown of non-voters

The simple conclusion is that the singularly most important thing a politician can do is excite and move their base. For how awful/low energy his campaign was this year, trump still excites and moves a base, while kamala was confused about what base to cater to- first calling Republicans weird then copying their platform and getting the dick Cheney approval.

This all could have been avoided if the Dems actually had a primary this year, but I think the DNC is actually afraid of progressives taking the party back over

Because the democrats have done nothing but piss on people and tell them it’s golden rain for 4 years, then campaign on “that guy will piss on you harder” while actively courting that guy’s main supporters instead of getting votes from people who don’t want to be pissed on

All good points but something that I don’t see talked about more is how many Reps voted Early/Absentee this election. In 2020, early voting was 44% Dem with 30% Rep . In 2024, the percentages were almost dead even. I think Democrats saw the early voting results and wrongly assumed that they’d overwhelming go Dem because they did in the past. Because of this, Democrats were expecting a blue surge at the end to help balance out red votes early in the night. This did not materialize.

Other than that, it’s a million small things that any competent campaign could’ve avoided. Don’t alienate the Muslim community, hammer actual policy positions in your questions, have an actual primary instead of a rigged process, etc etc.

This was a referendum on biden. People don’t like him. They voted him out, and at every opportunity Harris showed that besides the gender, age and race, they were the same person

Democrats had nothing to offer beyond not being Donald Trump. They copied his policies, celebrated endorsements from hardcore republicans, and bragged about wanting to put republicans in positions of power in Harris’ cabinet. Every vote for Harris was a vote for Trump. Trump has been the center of the democratic party since he won the 2016 primary. The two cornerstones of democrats strategy have been that they are not the person Donald Trump and that any criticism of the democratic party is Russian propaganda. It works better than it should because most Americans have the memory and political literacy (and sometimes even the literal literacy) of a goldfish, but it doesn’t work well enough to win elections unless their opponents do an even worse job campaigning.

Turns out the ‘moderate republican White women upset over abortion’ that Harris kept casing were at the end of the day…still White Women gasp

Honestly this is why.

“Things were cheaper under trump” which is sort of true.

Sure there are the extremities of the republican party who are deadset on abortions or trans people or whatever but I promise the majority that vote republican do so because things were cheaper under trump.

Political discussion in America is not very nuanced

In reality I think there’s probably not just one reason you can point to. Inflation, refusal to do a primary, abysmal campaigning, et al. All of it is probably a factor to one extent or another.

End of the day the one thing I do hope all of us on this site can agree to is that whatever the actual material reasons for it: the Democrats absolutely unquestionably deserved this loss.