The United States went to the polls on Tuesday, 5th November, 2024, and delivered a shock result that no one really expected. Donald Trump not only won the Presidency of the United States but the Republican Party took control of both Congress and Senate.
The results by the numbers were:
Kamala Harris: 74,327,659 votes.
Donald Trump: 76,838,984 votes.
Kamala Harris: 226
Electoral College Votes:
Donald Trump: 312
Congress:
Democrats: 213 seats
Republicans: 219 seats
Undecided: 3 seats
Senate:
Democrats: 45 seats
Republicans: 53 seats
Other: 2 seats
Governors:
Democrats: 23
Republicans: 27
What happened? How did a bigoted religious conservative backed by high-tech billionaires and Wall Street executives and shareholders get back into the White House? To understand why Kamala Harris lost the United States election in 2024 we need to look at the global supply chain. This may seem to be an odd thing to examine when looking at the election results but the defeat of Harris begins to make more sense when we look at the bigger economic picture, of which the global supply chain is a major part of it.
The average car is made up of hundreds of parts. As long as the car works we don’t think about the parts until something goes wrong. Increasingly, it can take a while to get spare parts because the average car is made up of parts from at least thirty-six countries. To get everything needed to build a modern car from thirty-six countries to the factory where it is assembled is a major logistics exercise. All that is needed to throw a spanner in the works is if something goes wrong with the supply chain, such as a ship breaking down in the Suez Canal or a worldwide pandemic that shuts down factories where vital parts are produced.
Prior to Covid-19 most people had never heard of Wuhan yet it is in the factories of this Chinese city that critical parts for a wide diversity of products from smartphones to chips for car ignition systems. When Wuhan’s factories were closed down as the result of Covid-19 those parts not being manufactured or supplied caused major problems. For example, Ford was still churning out thousands of cars but they sat in car parks because a critical part needed to start the vehicles were missing. Hence, there were thousands of cars sitting around that couldn’t start because the parts were being made in Wuhan!
What made matters worse was that, as millions of people went into lock down, factories and transportation companies expected demand for products to go down and slashed back on transportation and container storage space. Instead, the opposite happened: millions of people in lock down in the United States began to order goods online. Suddenly, there wasn’t enough container ships or space on containers for the goods that were now in demand. As the supply of transportation was limited the cost of moving goods around by sea became extremely expensive. As with any costs involving transportation the costs were passed onto the consumers. Hence, the costs of just about everything that needed to be transported by sea increased dramatically in price.
When the factories of countries like China reopened they were confronted with major issues. One of those issues was that many of the factory workers had either died or refused to return to the factories. Thus, they simply didn’t have the labour to produce the parts and they didn’t have enough driver’s, trucks or containers to transport the parts to the ports. Even if the parts did manage to get to the ports they were left sitting on the wharves due to the lack of space on the shipping containers and the lack of ships in general. These delays and critical shortages of containers and ships led to hefty spot charges and costly delays in getting things moved. Naturally, this resulted in escalated costs for the American consumers. Even if the parts did get across the Pacific Ocean they sat on board ships or on the docks because there wasn’t enough dock workers, trucks or rolling stock to move them from the docks to the handful of factories still operating within the United States.
The situation facing the railway networks and railway workers was, and is, all too typical of what has happened with infrastructure under neo-liberal economic systems. Decades of neglect and railway line closures to a handful of very profitable lines meant the railway networks simply could not cope with the demands Covid-19 placed upon them. Indeed, a sign of just how run down the railway network and its rolling stock had become was highlighted by the 2021 Montana train derailment near Joplin which killed three people and injured forty-nine people. According to Wikipedia:
In July 2023, the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] released their final report into the derailment. The report cited poor track conditions — worn and damaged track — missed by the railroad’s inspectors for the derailment as the cause of accident. Unstable rail bed also contributed to the derailment. Additionally, the NTSB stated the failure of some windows to stay in place caused passenger ejections, contributing to the severity of injuries.
More importantly, neither could the railway workers who are effectively working as indentured labourers on near poverty level wages. Through the use of obscure legislation dating from the mid-1940s both Donald Trump and Joe Biden effectively denied railway workers the right to any sick leave, annual leave or other forms of leave. The result is that railway workers have simply quit in disgust, making a bad situation worse. It is partly because of this that the most powerful unions in the United States refused to endorse either candidate, which undoubtedly contributed to Kamala Harris’s defeat.
In the case of truck workers the situation isn’t much better. Although they are paid more money they are often in debt to trucking companies for the cost of training and the trucks which means truck drivers are being forced to hand over much of their wages to the trucking companies and being forced to work off their debts as indentured labourers in all but name.
From the shortages of parts to the lack of transport for goods these things stem from the “Just in time” business practices where businesses used the justification of avoiding waste to only produce and supply goods only when they were needed. No provision was made for the possibility that anything could go wrong with the global or local supply chain. Thus, as the Covid-19 pandemic shut down factories and killed millions of factory workers and those workers employed in the transportation of goods in China, Europe and the United States, and the demand for goods from people stuck at home due to lockdowns increased to record levels, shortages in just about everything began to occur. These shortages led to skyrocketing costs at a time when the wages of most Americans have either stagnated or fallen in real terms.
What is more galling for millions of American workers is that – as their wages become increasingly worthless, their living costs escalate and the price of everything continues to skyrocket – the profit margins of the robber baron corporations that now dominate the American economy continue to soar to record highs. During his time as President, Biden did nothing to improve the lives of ordinary working class people or to tackle the robber baron corporations that now dominate American society. Biden did nothing to increase the funding or powers of the agencies entrusted with preventing the domination of the American economy by monopolies or near monopolies that dominate the American economy. Biden did nothing to curb the manipulation of the American political system by powerful individuals and organisations.
During her election campaign Harris endorsed everything that Biden did and offered next to nothing to help anyone other than the struggling middle classes whose numbers have been dwindling as their service sector jobs are outsourced overseas, replaced by algorithms and chat bots or downsized in the name of “reducing wasteful expenditure”.
For all of Trump’s faults he did at least pay lip service to some of the concerns raised by working class people, hence his appeal to many of the working poor of the American working classes. Trump has also gained a reputation for being an anti-Establishment figure who has consistently claimed he would “drain the swamp” of Washington DC bureaucracy and deal with the illegal migrants robbing Americans of their jobs. Of course, he has no intention of doing anything that would improve the lives of the working classes because he needs the money from his multi-billionaire mate Eion Musk and his Silicon Valley bros to fund his enterprises.
Harris merely talked down to working class Americans and ignored the bread and butter issues such as skyrocketing costs and low wages brought about largely because of global supply chain issues, robber baron corporate price gouging and low wages and lousy working conditions.
Harris lost the 2024 elections because she paid too much attention to the college-educated liberal elites in the cities and not enough to those millions of working class Americans who have simply been dismissed as ignorant, bigoted and entitled Karens and Kens. What American workers wanted to hear was how the Democrats were going to deal with basic bread and butter issues. Instead they got a patronising baby boomer telling them about how she worked at McDonald’s as a teenager and enjoyed it. Back in the 1980s most people worked at McDonald’s to get money to party, go on holiday or raise money for their college education. Today, most McDonald’s workers work there because minimum wage work in fast food outlets are often the only jobs available in town because big barn and online sweatshop retailers have driven everyone else out of business.
Her McDonald’s anecdote only proved how utterly tone deaf she was to the plight of millions of ordinary working class Americans impacted by a failed economic ideology of “Just In Time” capitalism, the collapse of the global supply chain and the domination of the American economy by robber baron corporate oligarchs and monopolists who cynically exploit and underpay their workers.
In conclusion, the 2024 elections proved beyond a doubt that the working classes of the United States have had a gutsful of the American political establishment and they are looking for change. They are stumbling around in the dark trying to find their way out of the abyss they’ve been pushed into. Trump’s voice was louder on November 5th, 2024, but the American working classes who responded to his voice failed to see the minefield that lay hidden in the dark between them and Trump. His promises to shake up the American establishment sound enticing but Trump is a master showman and a convincing liar. Harris was a tiny voice in the dark encouraging them to believe there was a light at the end of the abyss.
What the American working classes need to hear isn’t a tiny voice in the dark promising a light at the end of the abyss or a loud voice enticing them with seductive lies about making America great again. They need the light of Communism to show them that Capitalism is an abyss that keeps them penned in and makes them vulnerable to attack by class enemies including the bourgeois and to see the way out. True freedom can only come from leaving the abyss of Capitalism and entering the green fields of Communism.
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Image of Kamala Harris is from Times of India. Image of Donald Trump is from CNN. Image from Joplin, Montana, train derailment is public domain via Wikipedia.