The blame game continued among Democrats this weekend even as the Republicans hailed an election where the good news keeps on coming. Donald Trump added Arizona to complete his sweep of electoral swing states, and the party is also on track to retain control of the House of Representatives, and thus of Congress.
“An earthquake election,” was the description on Sunday of Wyoming senator John Barrasso, expected to be the next Republican Senate whip. He said Trump’s return was “the biggest comeback politically in the history of our country”. He said Trump had “come back from two impeachments, from being dragged through the courts, from getting shot, and he won with over 300 electoral votes, the majority of the people and he brought us four new Republican senators. The people voted and want to get this country back on track.”
The nature of this election defeat – Trump is expected to have 312 electoral college votes compared with 226 for Harris – has led the Democratic Party to focus on the make-up of the vote. The aggregate results are alarming. Since Trump arrived on the political scene, Democrats have seen their majority of the national vote among under-30s dip sharply and their loyalty with the sub $50,000 income class fall from 22 percentage points above the Republicans to three points below. They have lost their no-college-degree voting constituency, their bedrock Black vote has fallen and their previously strong advantage among the Hispanic/Latino vote has been all but wiped out. Equally alarming is the diminishing return in the states they held in this election, like New York, California and New Jersey.
Wisconsin provided one of the starkest maps, illustrating what has occurred since Trump’s first time in office. When Barack Obama won the state in 2008, just 12 of the 72 counties voted for Republican candidate John McCain. On Tuesday night, just 11 counties remained Democratic blue. In keeping with the contrary nature of this election, Door County, the sliver of pastoral land above Green Bay, broke its streak of correctly voting for every presidential candidate since 2000, voting for Harris by a majority of fewer than 500 votes.
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On Sunday Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and figurehead of the liberal left of the party, remained trenchant as he repeated his post-election criticism that the party had abandoned the working class.
“The working people in this country are extremely angry,” he said, adding that they had a right to be angry. “Today in the richest country in the history of the world, the people on top are doing phenomenally well while 60 per cent of Americans are living pay cheque to pay cheque and millions of families worry that their kids are going to have a lower standard of living than they do. Twenty-five per cent of our seniors are trying to live on $15,000 or less. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth.”
Sanders rejected the mounting criticism directed at president Joe Biden for both deciding to run for a second term and for not abandoning that decision sooner.
“President Biden when he came into office said he would be the most progressive president since FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt]. And I think on domestic issues he has kept his word. But that agenda has got to be placed within the overall context of American society today and that is one in which tens of millions of working families and elderly are struggling.”
He added that he had supported Kamala Harris and that “it’s not just about the campaign, it’s about what does the Democratic Party stand for”.
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