See update for November 4, 2024, at end of post.
Driving around the parts of the South Hills around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that I mostly do offers a pretty lop-sided perspective—it’s a conservative area and the Donald Trump signs heavily outnumber the Kamala Harris signs—but I’m increasingly persuaded that Trump will win, largely because Democrats are doing what they have done my entire adult life: take the Progressive vote for granted.
This was Harris’ race to lose and I believe she likely has lost it specifically due to her unwillingness to deviate from an unpopular president’s policies, for her support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, and for her adherence to neoconservative and neoliberal doctrine.[1] It’s costing her votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, the two biggest swing states—neither candidate can win without them—and presumably elsewhere. She can’t afford to lose these votes, but she has chosen to do so.
Some will point to alleged misogyny costing Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016 and, of course, they’ll say the same of Harris with a dash of racism besides. But Barack Obama had been deeply insensitive to the plight of underwater homeowners and the unemployed in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. He, with Clinton as Secretary of State, had pursued the Transpacific Partnership that would have sent even more millions of jobs overseas. And he took far too long, again with Clinton’s support, to get us out of the disastrous Iraq War. Clinton was clearly of the same neoconservative and neoliberal mold—the “Washington Consensus.” Too many people felt betrayed. Harris makes the same mistakes. And people still feel burned.
And the reality for Progressives is that we need another plan. The few progressive Democratic Party representatives in Congress we have are ineffective; they mostly function to mask the neoconservatism and neoliberalism of the Democratic Party. And this has been going on for decades—I’m 65 years old and I’ve been watching this my entire life: We vote for the “lesser evil” in an institutionalized false dichotomy (the two-party system) and then we are surprised when we get evil that grows worse with every cycle. It now enshrines genocide. This isn’t working in any way, shape, or form.
Update, November 4, 2024: It turns out it isn’t just the portions of Pittsburgh’s South Hills area that I mostly drive in. The Pittsburgh metropolitan area has been shifting toward Republicans pretty much since the collapse of the steel industry,[2] which cut in a way[3] that particularly favors the authoritarian populism that formed Donald Trump’s original base.
While the boundaries between tendencies of conservatism are fuzzy, in my dissertation, I was unable to support a distinction between authoritarian populism and paleoconservatism—with his overt, rather than coded, racism, Trump has been sounding increasingly paleoconservative—on the topic of immigration.[4]
Kamala Harris might well win the city of Pittsburgh, but I now have to expect she will lose the metropolitan area.
[1] Michael Brice-Saddler, “In a Michigan city, Harris has failed to catch fire with Black men,” Washington Post, October 15, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/15/kamala-harris-black-men-pontiac-michigan/; Pamela Brown, “Why, As a Black Woman, I Will Not Be Voting for Kamala Harris,” SOS, October 25, 2024, https://pamelaannbrown.substack.com/p/why-as-a-black-woman-i-will-not-be; Paola Nagovitch, “Young voters on the left reject Kamala Harris: ‘She has made it clear that she doesn’t value my vote,’” El País, October 29, 2024, https://english.elpais.com/usa/elections/2024-10-29/young-voters-on-the-left-reject-kamala-harris-she-has-made-it-clear-that-she-doesnt-value-my-vote.html
[2] Ryan Deto, “Democrats, once supreme in Pittsburgh region, now overtaken by GOP,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, November 4, 2024, https://triblive.com/local/regional/remarkable-transformation-dems-once-supreme-in-pittsburgh-region-now-overtaken-by-gop/
[3] Jason Togyer, “Fear and Loathing in the Time of Coronavirus,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 25, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/special_report/mckeesport-year-of-fear-covid-19-pandemic.php
[4] David Benfell, “Conservative Views on Undocumented Migration” (doctoral dissertation, Saybrook, 2016).