2024 Election Predictions

16 October 2024

Liberals are freaking out, as usual. Less than a month out from election day, and despite record-breaking fundraising, Kamala Harris’s national polling lead over Donald Trump is within the margin of error, while Trump maintains a similarly narrow edge in key “swing states”, states that our archaic and anti-democratic electoral college has made all important electoral “battlegrounds”, as our war-loving mass media describes them. The obvious cognitive decline of Donald Trump, the craven evil of his running mate, JD Vance, and the promise of political retribution against opponents of the Republican party, have all animated the Republican base. The Republicans are clamoring for reaction against the so-called “most progressive president in modern history”, and Trump promises to give it to them.

Liberals are up in arms against “internet leftists” who have pledged not to vote for Kamala Harris over any number of left-wing complaints, ranging from Harris’s outspoken support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza (the focus of much left-wing organizing over the last year) and its terror-bombing campaign against Lebanon. Actually, it’s not the “online left” that liberals need to worry about (fretting about “online leftists” is a symptom of liberal commentators being “too online” themselves), but the Muslim and Arab-American communities in swing states that are not thrilled by the Democrats’ whole-hearted endorsement of the Gaza genocide and the Israeli war machine. The victory of Democrats in swing states like Michigan, where there are outsize Arab-American and Muslim communities, are threatened by abstention or protest votes against the Democrats. Democrats, never willing to give themselves credit for their losses, are already gearing up to blame Green party candidate Jill Stein again for acting as a “spoiler”, as Jill Stein is running on a principled anti-genocide, anti-zionist, platform, and as the Democrats have not succeeded in their usual attempts to deny minor left-wing parties ballot access.

All of this liberal fretting is a bad sign for their electoral prospects. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire; it all speaks to the real possibility that the Democrats lose badly in November. But let’s recall some facts: the frequently bemoaned “online leftists” are not listened to by anyone except other online leftists, and liberals who need a target for their own political failures. US socialist parties hold office practically nowhere, and hold a sum total of zero federal offices. The Democrats have been wildly successful at capturing socialist activists and rendering them faithful lapdogs for the Democratic party leadership. Online bullying of leftists by liberals – the refrain from the liberals to socialists this election cycle has been “see you in the camps”, forgetting, apparently, that socialists broadly have been subject to political repression and even internment by both major parties for over a century – signals desperation.

Here are my predictions. None of these predictions are scientific, they’re mostly based on my intuition and gut feeling, so liberal readers should feel free to disregard them, as they do with every other thought that comes from a socialist.

The House of Representatives

The GOP keeps the House by the skin of their teeth. Mike Johnson remains speaker, barring politicking from the GOP’s fascist bloc to instate their own speaker. Polls give the Democrats a slight edge in national generic ballot polling, but gerrymandered electoral districts and fading enthusiasm for the Democratic party give the GOP a significant edge.

The Senate

Republicans take the Senate by one vote. The Democrats since 2020 have had the slightest edge in the Senate, with 50 votes against 50 Republican senators, and a tie-breaking vote from the Vice President. This situation has always been shaky for them and has stalled liberal legislative ambitions, especially since the GOP took the House in 2022. The Senate election in Texas may be emblematic. While Ted Cruz has brought Texas great shame as a senator and is widely unpopular even in Texas, his opponent seems to be following the same losing right-tailing strategy that the Democrats in general have been following for as long as I can remember. Leftists in Texas have been given nothing to vote for in this Senate election besides a centrist who has signaled his willingness to jettison left-wing concerns to court Texan reactionaries. While the Republican rank-and-file are ecstatic about the possibilities afforded to them by this election, the Democrat rank-and-file lacks such enthusiasm.

The White House

Trump loses the popular vote (again), but takes the electoral college and the White House. The only way that Trump doesn’t win this election is if there is a huge cohort of “shy Harris” voters who do not want to admit to polling companies that they support an historically unpopular incumbent party. Michigan, with its large Arab-American voting bloc, will be the state which makes or breaks Harris, and the Democrats’ obsequious foreign policy towards Israel could be the issue which breaks them there. Harris is tied with Trump or leads by a mere one percent in the latest polls for the state. As Israeli genocidaires continue to act not only with impunity, but with vocal and unceasing support from the Democrats (a party which, I will remind you, has never been a friend to indigenous people), I find it unlikely that Arab-American voters will flock to Harris. Attempts to put pressure on the Democrats to change their stance on this from left-wing forces such as the Green party, who liberals accuse of being “spoilers”, have so far been unsuccessful. Unless the Democrats radically change their foreign policy within the next three weeks, Trump could win Michigan by a razor’s edge, and the Democrats will only have themselves to blame for failing to court voters on an issue of profound importance to them.

What should socialists do under a second Trump administration?

A second Trump administration promises to be catastrophic for the US working class. The GOP will be able to ram through its rollback of whatever might be worth saving in the “Inflation Reduction Act” relating to climate change and subsidies for “green” infrastructure and technology. The Supreme Court, perhaps the most anti-democratic institution provisioned by the slavers’ parchment of 1788, will continue the gutting of the regulatory state which it had begun under Biden with rulings like that which undid the Chevron rule, and with a GOP-controlled Senate, the Supreme Court will have a reactionary majority for the foreseeable future. While the reactionaries represented by the likes of the Heritage Foundation, with their Project 2025 legislative wish list, will probably be frustrated by the lack of political will or political capital to enact their most unpopular policies, the GOP will almost certainly succeed in passing regressive tax reforms that will squeeze working class people, and Trump may get what he wants with another “trade war” with China that will, likewise, negatively impact working class living standards by increasing the prices of goods imported from overseas, namely from China. The GOP will likely also take on the project of reforming federal labor laws, perhaps including the elimination of the National Labor Relations Board.

A GOP-led federal government will give socialists plenty to organize against, aboveground or underground, as the situation may be. Regressive tax reform, increasing costs of living, and the rollback of labor rights will antagonize the US working class, hastening the proletarianization of large fractions of the settler petty bourgeoisie and shattering once and for all the New Deal era class compromise between US workers and capitalists. Deregulation will also have its impacts on quality of life, with the rollback of environmental laws and the federal government’s power to enforce them subjecting the working class to a degraded environment.

But we were given this opportunity eight years ago, as well, and what did we do? Socialists flocked to the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA), a socialist organization which follows an entryist political strategy, entering into the Democratic party in an attempt to take it over. After eight years, what’s been accomplished under this strategy? The DNC is stocked by zero socialists and has largely succeeded at defeating this entryist campaign. Socialists in Congress have either been un-elected with the help of the DNC, or have been co-opted by the DNC such that they serve as sheepdogs, using their influence as public socialists to bolster support for the Democratic party (and not merely its socialist wing). Following the 2020 election, there were very clear signs that this strategy was failing, with DSA membership dropping off post-election, and continuing in secular decline ever since.

What seems important to me is that we don’t follow the same strategy as we did in 2016, and that socialists cease supporting the Democrats and focus our efforts instead on independent socialist party-building. What the socialist movement in the US requires is a political party that is outside of and opposed to the Democratic party, which is willing to call the Democratic party what it is: the country’s oldest bourgeois party. Reformist socialists in the DSA will need to reckon with the political failure of the strategy they’ve followed, and the enduring hostility of Democrats to socialism. Those of us outside of the Democratic party will need to drop sectarian attitudes, enter into open debate within and outside of our parties, and work towards the merger of our parties towards a non-sectarian and internally democratic socialist party, which can be electorally viable against Democrat and Republican candidates.

I am not forlorn by the failure of the Democrats and I suggest others not to be either. A re-evaluation of our movement’s relationship to the Democrats, who are actively hostile to our movement, is long overdue.