United States:
Elections in the Midst of Crisis and Wars

Nov 23, 2024

The following is a text of a report comrades of The Spark made in early December at the 54^th Congress of Lutte Ouvrière, to which The Spark was an invited group.

The elections obscured or obliterated almost everything else in the United States. Even the wars going on in Ukraine and Gaza were seen through the prism of the election—to the extent they were even mentioned.

From the point in July when Biden dropped out and Harris was anointed, there was only the election—if you gauged from the front page of all the important media, from the New York Times to Fox News, to CNN right on down to local papers and TV stations like the ones in Chicago, Detroit and even Los Angeles.

It was the most expensive election ever, even just looking at the official committees that had to report their expenses—although a significant fraction of the money donated to Trump went to pay off debt to his lawyers and other trial expenses. In the three-and-a-half months Harris was a candidate, she collected more campaign money than Trump did from the beginning. But at the end, Trump had more mega-billionaires like Elon Musk shoveling money at him.

If the point was to get people more determined to vote, the money seems to have been wasted. The turnout was lower than in the last presidential election, in 2020.

Trump did not win by a “landslide”—despite what the first TV news and the next morning’s New York Times declared. He didn’t win an “unprecedented and powerful mandate,” as he declared election night. He didn’t even have a big increase in votes. His vote total was up just enough to keep him even with the share of the electorate he had in 2020, when he lost.

The big change is that the Democrats lost almost eight million votes—when just to keep even with 2020, given the increase in the size of the potential electorate, their vote should have gone up by about two million.

But the issue is not simply the overall size of the vote. This year saw a further shift of working-class voters into Trump’s column. It is no longer only rural white laboring people shifting to the Republicans. White workers in traditional Democratic counties where industry is located—they shifted to Trump—as more well-off middle-class people shifted to the Democrats or sat it out.

A notable minority of black workers went to Trump. The polls show about 20% of black men gave him their vote—the black population has traditionally been 95% or more Democratic. An even larger share of Latino voters went to Trump. The seven majority Latino counties along the Texas-Mexico border voted this time for Trump, last time Democratic. The four Detroit suburbs with an Arab population, usually reliably Democratic, shifted to Trump over the Democrats’ policies on the war in Gaza.

Given what a scumbag Trump is, was this result surprising? It shouldn’t have been.

The Democrats paid the price in this election because the economy had torn up the lives of so many working people, white, black, Latino, Arab, Asian—and the Democrats couldn’t even admit it, insisting that the economy was doing very well. Well? Maybe prices were leveling off—unless you had to pay for food, housing or transportation. The lack of decent paying jobs was forcing more people to work two or even three jobs, or slide into the underground economy. And all the measures of social disintegration were painfully increasing: homelessness, drug usage, overdoses, suicide, domestic violence.

People were voting, as the saying goes, their pocketbook—and workers’ pocketbooks were empty. What were the practical choices that confronted workers outraged about their situation—in a country that has had only the same two major parties and no other since 1856, and only four campaigns by Eugene Debs over 100 years ago? Workers could vote for the party not in office, as a way to vote against, or they could sit out the election. And that’s what most did. The largest plurality didn’t vote, more than those who voted for Trump, more than those who voted for Harris.

Bernie Sanders, on the day after the election said, “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Unfortunately, he didn’t say that before the election, during which, as he normally does, he campaigned for the Democrats. We can be sure in the coming months, he will seek to bring back all those who strayed from the Democrats’ fold.

Are there deep strains of racism and misogyny in the U.S. lodged in the population? Absolutely, and Trump will continue to play on them as he rests on his so-called “mandate.” The danger here is that there could begin to be real divisions in the working class, setting one part of the working class against another, as the situation grows worse—not because of Trump, per se, but because the working class isn’t organized to face the attacks they are receiving.

In recent years, decades really, we could see those divisions crumbling in places where workers did mobilize over their own issues. Last year, there was a 6-week strike at all three auto companies, as limited as it was; this year, a 7-week strike at Boeing and a number of strikes at auto parts plants, following an important 11-week strike at Kellogg’s in 2021. The problem is not that divisions kept workers from fighting alongside each other. The problem is that there were so few fights. Up until now, most strikes depended on initiatives coming from the union bureaucracies—and those bureaucracies were reticent to move, tied as they were to the Democratic Party.

Some workers began to search for a way out of the impasse. The union leader who directed the 11-week strike at Kellogg’s Nebraska plants, and who was then fired—he just ran as an independent candidate for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, winning almost 47% of the vote against the Republican incumbent by talking about the problems facing workers. The same state, solidly Republican, voted for a constitutional amendment instituting paid sick leave.

Similarly, referendums supporting the right to abortion passed in seven of the ten states where it was on the ballot this year, in Republican-run states, as well as Democratic-run states.

The Working Class Party Election Campaign

A major part of our work over the past year was to take part in the election in the four states where we are. It’s obvious that a really small group like ours cannot have an impact on what happened. But our campaign shows that it is possible to break through the stranglehold the two-party system has on the population. A very small group was able to reach at least a fraction of the working class in a few states on the basis of the workers’ own class interest.

So what did we do? I’m going to start with Los Angeles, since that seems to be the result that attracts the most attention here. Our comrade, running in a Congressional district enclosed within Los Angeles has won 44,372 votes, almost 22%, as of November 21, with some thousands of votes still to be counted.

That’s the best result we’ve ever had, but these numbers are less significant than how we managed to get into the November election. California has a unique way of organizing its elections. Everyone runs in a single primary, so there can be, for example, four Democrats, three Republicans and one or two from small parties and even a few independents running—all in the same contest against each other. Only the top two, regardless of party, make it into the November election. We got on the ballot in November because our candidate, running as a so-called “independent,” came in second, getting more votes than the second Democrat in the March primary, and more votes than a candidate of the Peace and Freedom party, a long time California third party. Even just to get into the March primary, our comrades had to collect 2,000 signatures of registered voters. They started 8 weeks of petitioning in September 2023, then made it through the March 2024 primary with 8,917 votes, 10.4% of the vote. Since our candidate was the only opponent of the Democratic incumbent in November, did he get votes from Republicans, other minor parties, and independents opposed to the Democrats? Undoubtedly. But while he was listed as “an independent,” he and our other comrades campaigned calling for support for the prospect of workers building their own party, both in March and November. He got votes from people who saw that on the ballot he had identified himself as “a worker.”

In Chicago, our comrade won 10,702 votes, 5.2% of the vote in a single Congressional district. Here, also, we had to petition to get into the November election. We needed to get 6,800 valid signatures in 13 weeks time, and got almost double that. What’s different this year is that we got enough votes to keep us on the ballot next time, without having to petition. The petitioning is an aggravation, ends up making the election our focus for a longer period of time—this year, from the end of June until November. But the fact we are already on the ballot in one district may open the way for us to use our forces to petition in another one, letting us reach more people. And petitioning is not so bad, it also lets us talk to many more people, often for more time, than does campaigning itself.

In Michigan, our percentages were not as impressive, although one of our candidates, running for a statewide education position had 233,682 votes, 98,000 more than last time. That was our largest vote. But more important is the fact we had more candidates running this year than two years ago, 15 instead of 11. Six of the candidates were our own comrades, but nine were others, in some cases, sympathizers from other work, in some cases, people attracted by our previous campaigns. We haven’t had to petition since 2016. Our votes kept us on the ballot. But because we’ve pulled other people to run with us, that has developed a different work which is time consuming but useful. Each of these candidates was responsible for expressing our ideas in the district where they ran, since each one was in a separate district. We may have had common campaign material, but the work of preparing them to answer different questionnaires or appear in different meetings or be interviewed let us develop a small milieu around us that it is closer to us politically than before the campaign. The other interesting thing about the Michigan campaign is that our team of candidates allowed us to touch the whole state, with two candidates running state-wide, meaning that everyone in the state of Michigan could vote for one or both of them. Plus, in over half the state’s Congressional districts (7 of 13), they could vote for Working Class Party candidates.

In both Illinois and Michigan, our candidates appear on the ballot with Working Class Party under the name. And in Michigan, at least in the statewide and Congressional races, our candidates always faced, in addition to Democrats and Republicans, at least one other candidate from a minor party. Two of our candidates faced three other minor party candidates. One faced all four. We could maybe say in those cases that when someone voted for us, their vote wasn’t just a vote against the Democrats and Republicans, but perhaps they were making a conscious choice to vote for something they wanted, that is for the working class to have its own party. And in every district our candidates came in first of all five of the minor parties.

Finally, in both Illinois and Michigan, where we had some candidates on the ballot in the same districts as last time, all of our candidates, with the exception of one, got better scores than two years ago, a couple of them doubled their score.

Our comrades in Baltimore were not left out of the election circus, since they have been gathering signatures to put Working Class Party back on the ballot in Maryland. They seem to have more than the 11,000 they need to get there.

At times, it may have seemed like we couldn’t get our heads above the election waters.

But we did continue our regular work. Workplace newsletters continued to appear every two weeks at three auto plants, two large state offices, an insurance company, a photo-finishing plant, transit authority facilities, a Fed-Ex shipping facility, O’Hare Airport in Chicago. Even though some of our worker comrades have retired, we still occupy some union positions.

Our newspaper, The Spark, comes out every two weeks; our political journal, the Class Struggle, appears every three months.

And we find a few, very few, but still some new people. Some are introduced to us by other new people we found, some came as the result of our election work.

We continue to exist, to maintain a communist flag, a Trotskyist banner. The work we have done on the elections over these last few years lets us know that there is a part of the working class that is open to us, to our perspective. And that gives us confidence for the future.