Howie Hawkins’ Dispatches from Europe #10: Election Reflections

Election Reflections

People in Ukraine were following the U.S. presidential election more intensely than most Americans. The future of their country might be at stake. Would Harris continue Biden’s miserly drip feed of ammunition and weapons to defend against Russia’s military offensives, or would Trump come in and get together with Putin to sell Ukraine down the river? The election returns started coming in at around 1 am in Ukraine and the next day I met many blurry-eyed Ukrainians who had followed the elections until the bitter end when Trump’s victory was announced at around 5 am.

Most Ukrainians seem disappointed, but stoic, about the Trump victory. They will continue to resist Russia’s aggression and occupation no matter what the U.S. does. The gallows humor going around two days after the election was people would look at their watch and say, when is the war going to end? Trump promised to end it in 24 hours.

I was invited to talk about the U.S. election on Irish public radio the day after the election. The other U.S. guest was a woman representing Republicans Abroad. She was as batshit crazy as MAGA Republicans come. She said climate change is a hoax, Robert Kennedy Jr. is going save us all from deadly vaccines, Project 2025 has nothing to do with Trump, and so forth. I let her hang herself with her own rope. But when she thanked me for supporting Trump by supporting Stein, I had to interrupt and say our Green votes for Stein are votes for Stein and against Trump and all he stands for. I don’t think the Republicans Abroad spokesperson helped Republican standing with the Irish public, which polls leading into the election showed the Irish favoring Harris at 84% over Trump at 16%.

My precinct in Syracuse, New York, is not Irish, but has the same overwhelmingly anti-Trump sentiments. My precinct, or election district as we call it in New York — Ward 19, District 1 — is about 90% African American and most of the rest are Puerto Rican. The precinct voted 213 or 95.5% for Harris, 8 or 3.6% for Trump, and 2 or 0.9% for Stein. I am not surprised at those results because I know how people in my precinct despise Trump for his mean-spirited racist scapegoating and know that his tax cuts for the rich mean public service cuts for the working class.

My precinct’s 0.9% vote for Stein’s more than doubled her national average of 0.4%. But we’re talking tiny numbers. I know the two of us who voted for Stein. With some canvassing, we certainly could have gotten a few more. But Stein was a write-in vote in New York. It hardly seemed worth the trouble after all the effort we put into our Green Party ballot access petition. Due to New York’s new exclusionary ballot access law, New York was the only state in the nation with only Harris and Trump on the presidential ballot. It now takes 45,000 signatures in 42 days, plus at least 500 signatures in each of 13 congressional districts, to secure a ballot line for a statewide candidate not in a ballot-qualified party in New York. The Stein campaign spent $300,000 to come up short with 42,000 signatures. The Kennedy campaign spent $1.1 million to get enough signatures, but he was disqualified by a successful Democratic Party challenge to his stated residency.

Qualifying candidates from non-ballot status parties for statewide office in New York is now three times harder than in Putin’s Russia. In Russia, an independent candidate for the State Duma, their national parliament, which is an oblast- or state-wide candidacy, takes 15,000 signatures in 45 days. The pre-2020 New York requirement was 15,000 signatures in 42 days. I have joked with state legislators and their staff members that the Greens would be happy just to get back to the “Putin standard” for ballot access that New York used to have. The legislators and staffers laugh nervously at that crack and admit we are right, but so far they have always found excuses not to buck the Democratic leadership and introduce a fair ballot access bill.

New York’s ballot access laws reflect the anti-democratic trend we see across the world today, where the far-right is rising with billionaires backing far-right parties, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the U.S., Bidzina Ivanishvili in Georgia, Pierre-Edouard Stérin in France, Ilan Shor in Moldova, Edir Macedo in Brazil, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani in India, among many examples. We made some gains in democracy in the U.S. on Election Day with the passage of ranked choice voting (RCV) ballot initiatives in Washington, D.C., Oak Park, IL, and Peoria, IL. We defeated an intiative to repeal RCV in Bloomington, IN. Unfortunately, the ballot initiative of statewide RCV in Oregon failed.

Initiatives to combine jungle primates with RCV in the general election for the top 4 or 5 failed in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada. Jungle primaries are all-comers primaries where candidates of al parties participate. The proponents call them Open Primaries, but that is misleading branding. Many states already have open primaries where voters can choose which party primary to vote in. Jungle primaries take away the right of party members to nominate their own candidates. It is a party-destroying reform that will lead to primaries being dominated by big money that organized people in a party cannot will have an even harder time than now to defeat. So the failure of these initiatives that combined Jungle Primaries with RCV is probably a good result. We can come back with a program of RCV, Yes! Jungle Primaries, No

Two days after the election I was on a podcast called The Left Lane out of London, England about the U.S. elections. Of the three guest commentaters, two us were from Syracuse, although I was in Kyiv and Matt Huber was in London. Matt is a geography professor at Syracuse University who writes about climate justice. His most recent book is Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022). We have some differences on climate policy, but now is not the time to got into them. We did largely agree on this podcast about why Trump won and what the left should do now.

It just so happened that the third day after the election, today, I was asked to contribute a short piece to a symposium of U.S. socialists for Workers Liberty on the question what the U.S. left and labor movement should do now in the wake of Trump’s election. So here is that reflection on this election.

What should the US left and labour movement do now?

The first thing we should do is understand why a majority of the 65% of eligible voters who actually cast ballots elected a far-right authoritarian by a narrow 51% to 48% margin.

The American working and middle classes are angry at the economic precarity that the powers that be have given them after five decades of corporate neoliberalism. Trump presented himself as the outsider anti-establishment change candidate, while Harris ran as the moderate establishment candidate. The swing vote was the 10 million or so 2020 Biden voters who Harris lost, not to Trump but to disaffection from the Democratic establishment.

The election returns show that Trump did not receive many, if any, more votes than he received in 2020 when he lost to Joe Biden by 7.1 million votes. Trump’s total in 2020 was 74.2 million. At this writing three days after the election while some mail ballots are still being counted, Trump had 73.4 million votes.

Harris had received only 69.1 million, compared to Joe Biden’s 81.3 million in 2020. The difference in this election is over 10 million Biden voters who stayed home instead of voting for Harris. Harris ran to the right, trying to get moderate Republican votes, and lost enough of her progressive base to lose. Those 10 million or so 2020 Biden voters who did not vote in 2024 would have come out for Democrat who campaigned as a change candidate on a progressive populist economic agenda. Harris’ refusal to condition arms to Israel on adherence to human rights, which is U.S. law and supported by a majority of Americans, also depressed the Democratic vote for Harris.

The corporate funders and professional cadre who control the Democratic Party are intractably committed to a neoliberal and imperialist agenda. The Harris campaign reflected their politics.

So what the left must do now is build its own political party. It needs to be a movement party that is as active in the unions and social movements as in the elections. Indeed, without organized intervention in the unions by a leftwing party, we won’t have a labor movement that is more than the business unions we have now that are narrowly focused on servicing a shrinking membership base that is now down to only 10% of all workers and 6% of private sector workers. It will take leftwing party activists to organize union rank-and-file members to transform their unions into social movement unions that engage and educate their own members, organize the unorganized into unions, join forces with other progressive social movements, and take independent working-class political action.Since the Communist Party led the U.S. left and labor movement into the Democratic Party under the Popular Front policy in 1936, the socialist left has disappeared as a distinct political force in the U.S. with its own identity, social analysis, and policy program. Most of the shrinking numbers of self-identified socialists have been supporting Democratic Party candidates in elections for nearly a century now. With no left competing for their votes, the Democrats have taken progressive voters for granted as they moved to the right over the years, from the mildly social-democratic New Deal Democrats of the 1930s to 1970s to the harshly neoliberal corporate New Democrats since the 1980s.

So it is past time for the U.S. left to undertake the long overdue and fundamental task of breaking with the Democrats and building its own party. The Democrats, who have normalized the far-right Republicans by seeking bipartisanship compromises that accommodate to their extreme rightwing policies, have proven that they don’t know how to fight the right and defeat it politically. For that we need a left party that campaigns against both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism and for a democratic socialist and ecological society that takes care of all the people and the planet.