Harris represented the status quo and consensus – Trump stood for change and confrontation

Trump’s victory is a challenge to those who believed that condemning racism, police violence and the far right are key to energising non-voters. It didn’t work. There’s no shortage of theories as to why.

Barack Obama’s election to the White House in 2008 was supposed to herald a new era for an America that was more diverse, smarter and fairer. At the time, the Democrats’ victory was seen not as an ideological or political rupture – America’s first African American president was an intellectual who hated confrontation – but rather as the culmination of demographic and social change. The arrival of new immigrants was steadily diluting the proportion of white voters, a majority of whom were Republicans. At the same time, younger, more educated, and thus more enlightened, generations had replaced older ones who clung on to outdated traditions.

This vision of a brighter future seemed especially opportune as it apparently dispensed with the need for effort or struggle, since demographics would fulfil the role of political destiny. This was good news for Europe’s struggling social democrats and inspired France’s ‘Terra Nova strategy’, set out in May 2011 by the Terra Nova thinktank. Its aim was to help former French Socialist finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn – then head of the IMF – win the following year’s presidential election.

Strauss-Kahn had already theorised at length about the left’s loss of working-class voters in 2002 and resigned himself to it. Terra Nova posited that a new coalition, made up of women, young people, graduates, ‘minorities and residents of working-class areas’ – in other words, the French version of Obama’s coalition – would enable European social democrats to circumvent the disaffection of their traditional working-class base. ‘The historical leftwing coalition centred on the working class is in decline,’ Terra Nova said. ‘A new coalition is emerging: “the France of tomorrow” – younger, more diverse, more female’. We know how that turned out.

Today, the sense of disillusionment in the US is even stronger. If November’s election had pitted an aged, diminished Joe Biden against Donald Trump, the result might have felt less significant. (...)

Full article: 2 357 words.

Serge Halimi

Serge Halimi is advisor to Le Monde diplomatique’s editorial director.

(1) Terra Nova, ‘Gauche: quelle majorité électorale pour 2012?’ (The left: what electoral majority for 2012?), 10 May 2011.

(3) Antoine Léaument, Sud Radio, 8 November 2024.

(4) On 24 November, election results were still incomplete but indicated that Kamala Harris got 74.5 million votes (compared to Biden’s 81.3 million in 2020) and that Trump went from 74.2 million (2020) to 77 million (2024).

(5) Carine Fouteau, ‘Et maintenant, un “cinglé” fascisant aux manettes du monde’ (And now a fascist madman with his hands on the levers of power), Mediapart, 6 November 2024.

(6) See Serge Halimi and Pierre Rimbert, ‘The circus leaves town’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, March 2021.