Progressive Perspectives on Where Democrats Went Wrong in the 2024 Presidential Election

– Source

It’s been just over a week since last Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election and the stunning defeat of the Democratic Party by the Donald Trump-led Republican Party which now controls the presidency, the senate and the house. It was an unprecedented “red wave” that swept all in its path.

Significantly, the Democratic Party and its selected candidate Kamala Harris were defeated in all seven swing states and, nationally, lost by a margin greater than all third party votes combined. This latter reality means that the so-called “spoiler effect” of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein can’t be used as an excuse for the Democrats’ decisive loss.

In the time since Team Blue’s electoral trouncing, a lot of folks have expressed dismay at what they perceive as a “blame game” taking place within the Democratic Party as party officials, pundits, and voters try to figure out where and how it all went so terribly wrong. I don’t see what’s going on as a “blame game” but rather as a much needed and long overdue process of holding those in positions of power and influence accountable.

Longtime Democratic National Committee (DNC) member James Zogby agrees, noting that members of the Democratic Party establishment/elite, their consultancy groups, and their corporate media sycophants “will find fault with the voters and their choices [but] not with the poor decisions they themselves made.”

It is in this spirit of holding those in positions of power and influence accountable that I share the following perspectives on what went wrong for the Democrats in last Tuesday’s national elections, including the presidential election.

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Every election since 2008 has been a referendum on the system and the change candidate has won. Obama was able to hold onto the presidency in 2012 due to sheer charisma and his ability to still wear the cloak of change agent.

2016 Trump was the change agent, 2020 it was Biden, 2024 Kamala’s unwillingness to break with Biden or even name a single thing she would do differently cemented Trump as the agent of change.

So many of our political problems today stem from Obama and the Democrats inability or unwillingness to provide meaningful change after the 2008 mandate. No accountability for the Wall Street criminals, no accountability for Bush and Cheney war mongering and lies, no systemic change to the political system which is incapable of solving problems and no change to the economic system that ensures the majority of Americans live in perpetual insecurity.

As time goes on and the average worker’s lot in life gets worse – worse standard of living, less job security, more financial anxiety, increased costs to basic necessities – the more polarized and radical people’s politics become. The Democrats effectively crushed any populist energy from their left flank in 2016 and again in 2020. This has left people no where to go but right, and that’s where they’ve gone.

I don’t think people are stuck in this position, but as long as the power structure and political system make it impossible for a true populist left movement to emerge, people will continue to get sucked into this right wing trap. And let me be perfectly clear, this outcome is preferable to the Democratic Party establishment and the capitalist power structure. A Trump is much preferred to a Bernie to the DNC and business elite.

There is a lot of anger in the country, much justified, nearly all of it wrongly placed. It’s not immigrants or China that’s destroying this country, it’s the wealthiest among us who want to keep us poor, stupid, and bitterly divided. It’s easier for them to rip us off this way.

– American Reformers
via social media
November 7, 2024

From the outside, Harris’s entire campaign seemed to be about saving an economic system (neoliberalism) that she described falsely as “democracy,” which isn’t working for large segments of both the political left and right; at the same time she and Biden were flouting an international system of laws in order to arm and finance a genocide in Gaza. The hypocrisies were too transparent to sustain.

. . . Harris’s flip-flop on fracking is emblematic of her entire campaign, a relatively minor issue that gave devastating insight into her vacuous political character. She could never explain it because the only explanation was pure political calculation (and a bad one). She was willing to invalidate her climate policy to court a few thousand votes in Pennsylvania. It was the equivalent of Hillary telling Goldman Sachs she had one policy in public and another in private. But even more inept. How could you make the campaign about honesty and trust, once you’d shown yourself to be dishonest and untrustworthy on an issue you’d described as being an existential threat to human life on earth? Harris sold out the climate movement (and the climate) and still lost Pennsylvania.

. . . In the end, Harris didn’t outperform Biden in a single county in the country.

Maybe they should’ve had a primary?

– Jeffrey St. Clair
Excerpted from “Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold”
CounterPunch
November 6, 2024

2024 has taught us a hard lesson: in a global society defined by consumption rather than production, voters loathe price increases and are ready to punish rulers who preside over them. Across the biggest election year in modern history, with billions voting worldwide, incumbents have taken a beating, left, right, and center: the Tories in Britain, Emmanuel Macron in France, the African National Congress in South Africa, Narendra Modi’s BJP in India, Kirchnerism in Argentina last fall. Today post-pandemic inflation, aggravated by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has claimed the scalp of yet another incumbent government.

In America, the Democrats’ position was doubly dire. Across the last decade, the defining pattern of national politics has been class dealignment: a vast migration of working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, matched by a flood of professional-class voters away from the Republicans. This was the decisive factor in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was toppled by the same Rust Belt proletarians who had elected Barack Obama. And it continued, more quietly but with unchecked motion, in the years when Democrats made up for their losses by winning more suburban professionals, in 2018, 2020, and 2022.

Kamala Harris’s campaign was an embodiment of this shift. She herself ran a cautious but mostly competent race, moving to the right on the border, as voters seemed to demand, pummeling Trump on abortion, and – at least in her paid messages – wooing working-class voters with a bread-and-butter focus. But in the end, these narrow tactical decisions were overwhelmed by the altered nature of the Democratic Party as a whole.

Even as Harris herself tried to avoid the toxic identity politics of Hillary 2016, she was overtaken by the “shadow party” – a constellation of NGOs, media organizations, and foundation-funded activists who now constitute the Democrats’ institutional rank and file. Thus “White Dudes For Harris” and its kindred, the effort to promote Never Trump Republicans in media, and the embarrassing attempts to win over black men with promises of legal marijuana and protections for crypto investments. These shadow party interventions in the race helped raise historic sums of money – over $1 billion in just a few months – but also marked Harris as the property of an educated professional class, focused entirely on “democracy,” abortion rights, and personal identity but largely uninterested in material questions.

. . . Above all, Harris and the Democrats failed to reach voters who have a negative view of the economy — not just Republican partisans but two-thirds of yesterday’s electorate. With her modest bundle of targeted economic initiatives, joined occasionally to a half-hearted populist rhetoric, is it a surprise that she failed to convince these frustrated voters? Almost 80 percent of the voters who listed the economy as their top issue cast a ballot for Trump. How much can a few months of targeted advertising do, compared to a broader Democratic shadow party that has been trumpeting the health of the economy — low unemployment, wage growth, and a booming stock market — for over a year now? If voters did not believe that Harris had a real plan to make their lives better, materially, it is hard to fault them.

– Matt Karp
Excerpted from “It’s Happening Again”
Jacobin
November 6, 2024

Following is a November 7 interview with author, activist, and former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. As my friend Mark notes about this particular ABC News Live interview:

I sense much grace and soberness in Marianne Williamson’s voice as she diffuses the “vindication” slur/giddiness pitched at her in this interview. I’m curious as to what my peers are feeling they’re being guided toward over the next four years so as to find a path towards environmental and humanitarian hopes of leadership within the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party abandoned the working class. Kamala Harris ran on a ticket of moving toward the right, you know, shifting, pivoting toward the right, bragging that Liz Cheney is endorsing her. And so, there was really no program to focus on the actual suffering of working people across the board.

. . . We have a class that’s suffering, but we don’t have a class that thinks of itself as a class. If we had a class that thought of itself as a class, then working people would say, “We refuse deportation. We refuse racism. We refuse transphobia,” because that’s what the class does. Solidarity is what’s missing — the sense that we, as a class, you know, have to protect each other. Trump is seen as the person who can fix things, the person who represents the CEO who could step in and solve problems in a culture in which the only solidarity we’re seeing, the primary solidarity, is coming from the capitalist class, you know? So, I’m not sure that there’s such a radical shift from 2016 to 2020 to 2024. It’s a failure of the Democratic Party. And even under Biden, the Democratic Party actually pivoted a little bit toward labor, in a way that the Harris campaign did not.

. . . The absence of cohesion has to do with the general – two things, I think. One, the general absence of solidarity in a long-standing kind of neoliberal culture where people are taught to solve their own problems, a kind of deep individualism, and that corporate interests are the only ones — in other words, private interests are the ones that can solve your problem. Government is a problem. Government gets in the way. This is the kind of discourse that we’ve been seeing for at least three, four decades. And so, even though we see amazing developments in the labor movement with the UAW, we see discussions and talk of solidarity – the Boeing strike, for example – but in terms of those who are either unorganized or at the sort of edges of a concierge economy that is no longer based in high-wage manufacturing, what ends up happening, it’s almost impossible to organize people and to think as a class. You know, the Amazon strike in Bessemer is a really good example of what could have been, but how the combination of fear, insecurity and the failure to really think of solidarity – in other words, the care for our neighbor, the care for those who are not us but maybe we share the same class, that sense of solidarity, that Audre Lorde talks about at the beginning of my piece, that’s missing. And we haven’t done the work, the political education work, to build that sense of cohesion.

. . . [S]omehow the right, for many people, is attractive. And we have to figure out why it’s attractive. And if we don’t think of ourselves as a class, a class with power, a class in which the state could be the lever of equality rather than deep inequality, then we’re going to be stuck supporting Trump[-like figures] for generations.

– Robin D.G. Kelley
Excerpted from Democrats Abandoned
the Working Class: Trump’s Win and
the Need for Class Solidarity
Democracy Now!
November 7, 2024

Let this be a reckoning. In 2016, I warned that Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders alone, could defeat Donald Trump. The country was ready – desperate – for transformational change. The air was thick with a demand for something real, something that spoke to the soul of working people. Yet, the Democratic establishment fought this truth tooth and nail. They threw their weight behind Hillary Clinton – the so-called “safe choice” – dismissing those of us who saw the storm coming. They believed the path to victory lay in moderation, in reaching to the middle, as the books and scholars of traditional politics have always taught.

And here we are again. In 2024, they turn to Kamala Harris, who walks beside Liz Cheney, while Sanders is cast to the shadows. The outcome? Trump has won the popular vote. Once again, the establishment was wrong. Wrong in 2016, wrong in 2024 – will you be wrong again in 2028?

. . . And let me say this, to those who’ve been ignored, belittled, and alienated for nearly a decade: to the supporters of Sanders, to those who stayed home [last] Tuesday because they could no longer recognize the party that once claimed to fight for them – we owe you an apology. A true one, unflinching. And we must give you a reason to believe in us again.

– John Riley
Excerpted from “Can We Finally
Admit Bernie Was Right?”
Daily Kos
November 6, 2024

Following is a 10-minute segment from the Politics Done Right podcast’s November 9 show. This segment highlights Dr. Eddie Glaude’s recent on-air exchange with MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle on why Kamala Harris did not win. According to Politics Done Right host Egberto Willies, how Glaude speaks about the reasons Harris lost is how we all “should be tackling racism, sexism, and misogyny.” (NOTE: Other progressive voices disagree that Harris's loss essentially boils down to sexism and racism rather than her policies – or lack thereof. See, for example, Sabrina Salvati’s video commentary here.)

[Alan Minsky’s November 7, 2024 Common Dreams op-ed, “Progressives Must Challenge for the Leadership of the Democratic Party – and Win” is] another feckless call for nominal progressives to reform the Democratic Party from within. Pathetic.

The last eight years have demonstrated that reforming neo-conservative, Wall Street Democrats is a fool’s errand. Post-1970s Dems have proven to be the greatest threat to the American left, and the Democratic Party has become the graveyard of progressive movements.

You want to make a difference, House and Senate “progressives?” Easy peasy: Dem-EXIT en masse and declare yourselves Green Party representatives and senators. Your first order of business: agitate like angry hornets for sweeping election and campaign finance reform, complete with instant-runoff voting, so progressives don’t get attacked every 2-4 years by malignant, genocidal, right-wing “centrists” with delusions of liberalism.

On issues of importance to progressives, duopoly-liberated Green Party representatives and senators can caucus with whichever party holds positions we agree with. We can caucus with the Republicans pushing to end the Ukraine War, and we can caucus with Democrats if they ever push for Medicare-for-All or anything else of value.

But only a mass-defection from the neo-fascist Democratic Party by principled liberals and progressives has a chance of putting this country on the right track.

The rest of the “leftists” who sheepdog for Team Blue without making a single demand – and the precipitously-endorsing “progressive” activists who beg and beg Democrats to do the right thing – are pissing in the wind.

Until you advocate for a complete abandonment of the Democratic Party that abandoned us decades ago, you are part of the problem.

You’re why Trump – and worse demagogues to come – have such an easy path to victory. You stand for nothing and fight for less.

– x1jodonn
via Common Dreams website
October 29, 2024

Speaking of the Green Party, here’s a 16-minute segment taken from Breakthrough News’ Election Night coverage featuring Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein sharing her thoughts on the election results.






On the day after the election, renowned consumer advocate, corporate critic, and four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader was a guest on Democracy Now!. Here he talked about the “collapse of the Democratic Party” and the roots of Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris.

It all started when the Democrats . . . started getting corporate cash in 1979, dialing for the same commercial values [as the Republicans]. That blurred their difference from the New Deal-type Democrats to the corporate Democrats. Then they contracted out the election to these corporate-conflicted profiteering consulting firms, which the mass media never seemed to want to investigate in this campaign. And then they abandoned public media. Basically, they abandoned radio to the Rush Limbaughs and created the Reagan Democrats. And then they never learn from their mistakes. They didn’t learn from the mistakes of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Then, they never fire anybody after they lose, in one state after another, to the worst Republican Party in history.

And so, what is the message that they gave to the American people? The message is Trump is terrible, and you can’t believe how bad the Republican Party is. It’s too general a message, too simple. A vast majority of people think corporations have too much control over their lives. They didn’t fill the blanks, denial of healthcare benefits. And they didn’t fill the blanks on a living wage. They didn’t fill the blanks on cracking down on corporate crooks. They didn’t fill the blanks on reversing a tax system which undertaxes the very wealthy and the big corporations. They didn’t reverse themselves really on trade. They didn’t know how to rebut Trump on immigration. He called the people coming in rapists, criminals, drug traffickers, etc. Instead of saying, “Well, they’re fleeing oppressive countries that are backed by the U.S., dictators and oligarchs in Central and South America,” they didn’t say that millions of Americans trust immigrants to harvest their food, to care for their children, to care for elderly, to provide critical services that nobody wants to work in in the U.S.

So, you know, there’s such a bill of particulars against this Democratic Party. And what’s happened, of course, is that millions of people are basically saying, “We’re sick of throwaway lines. We’re sick of not having the government return the benefits of massive taxation to us. We’re sick of – all we hear about is empire abroad. All we hear about is more military budgets by the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress, giving the generals more than they ask for, eating the public budgets that should be providing public services and public infrastructure in communities all over the country, creating key jobs.”

– Ralph Nader
Excerpted from “The Roots of Trump’s Win Over Harris”
Democracy Now!
November 6, 2024

The following is a 25-minute segment from Marc Lamont Hill’s Upfront show on the Al Jazeera network. In this segment. Lamont Hill speaks with Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University; Katie Halper, co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast; Ryan Grim, reporter and co-founder of Drop Site News; and Emma Doyle, former Deputy Chief of Staff under the Trump administration.

I close with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges’s insights on the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.

This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides – especially among middle-aged white males – morbid obesity and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.

Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative – destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.

Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base – 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

. . . We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.

– Chris Hedges
Excerpted from “The Politics of Cultural Despair”
ScheerPost
November 7, 2024

Related Off-site Links:
Here We Are, America, But How Did We Get Here? – Lynn Parramore (Common Dreams, November 5, 2024).
Will Trump Try to End Democracy? Yes – But These Scholars Claim He Can’t Pull It Off – Émile P. Torres (Salon, September 29, 2024).
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Democrats Demobilized Their Base. A Movement Is Now Needed to Oppose Trump – Democracy Now! (November 6, 2024).
Forging a Coalition of Conscience: This Isn’t the End. It’s the Beginning – Marianne Williamson (Transform, November 6, 2024).
Statement from Abandon Harris National Spokesperson, Hudhayfah Ahmad, Regarding the 2024 Election – Abandon Harris ’24 via YouTube (November 6, 2024).
How Much of the Vote Did Jill Stein Receive? – Jeff Arnold (NewsNation, November 6, 2024).
10 Reasons Why Kamala Lost – Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs, November 8, 2024).
Marianne Williamson: If the Democratic Electorate Was Exposed to Their Options, We Would Have Won – Jessie Watters Primetime (November 8, 2024).
Corporate Media Meltdown Post Election – Sabrina Salvati (Sabby Sabs, November 9, 2024).
How Will the Pentagon Deal with Trump?: An Interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson – Chris Hedges (The Chris Hedges Report, November 11, 2024).
Bernie Sanders Decides to Fight the DNC Eight Years Too Late – Kit Cabello (Hard Lens Media, November 11, 2024).
Jon Stewart on What Went Wrong for Democrats – The Daily Show (November 11, 2024).
Dems Blame Everyone But Themselves for Kamala’s Loss – Glenn Greenwald (System Update, November 12, 2024).
Republicans Win Control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Solidifying Their Total Control of Congress – NewsNation (November 12, 2024).
How the Democrats Can Rise – Marianne Williamson (Transform, November 12, 2024).
“The Elites Had It Coming”: Thomas Frank Skewers Democrats in Post-Election New York Times Op-Ed – Due Dissidence (November 13, 2024).
Anya Parampil on Why Kamala Lost – The Grayzone (November 13, 2024).
A Conversation with Marianne Williamson – Annalise Grueter (The Sopris Sun, November 13, 2024).

UPDATES: 2024 Election Was the Oligarchic Elite vs. Corporate Elite: An Interview with Chris Hedges – Bad Faith (November 14, 2024).
The Divide Between Democrats and the Working Class: A Conversation with Sarah Smarsh – Jon Stewart (The Weekly Show, November 14, 2024).
Marianne Williamson on the Future of America, the 2024 Election and Her New Book, The Mystic Jesus – Laura Rose Max (I Just Have to Say, November 15, 2024).
Democrats’ Abandonment of Working Class Led to Trump Victory: A Conversation with Zana Day – Jordan Chariton (Due Dissidence, November 15, 2024).
Why Harris Lost: New Post-Election Poll Shows Issues and Endorsements Won Voters: An Interview with Mark Penn – Julia Manchester (The Hill, November 15, 2024).
Results Are In, Complete Democratic Failure Against Trump – Kit Cabello (Hard Lens Media, November 16, 2024).
Abby Martin: “Democrats Would Rather Have Fascism Than Bernie Sanders’ Populism” – The Real News Network (November 16, 2024).
Jill Stein and Butch Ware’s First Post-Election Interview – The Katie Halper Show (November 19, 2024).
Post-Election: Bringing Hope Back to Life – Robert C. Koehler (Common Wonders, November 20, 2024).
Decades of Data Shows How Democrats Became So Out of Touch – Due Dissidence (November 23, 2024).
Trials and Tribulations, Signs and Wonders: An Interview with Marianne Williamson – Ade Adeniji (The Ink, December 16, 2024).
Democrats’ Working-Class Failures, Analysis Finds, Are “Why Trump Beat Harris” – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, December 17, 2024).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• “A New Chapter of the Democratic Party Needs to Begin”
• Venice Williams on How We Get Through the Next Four Years
• Marianne Williamson on the 2024 Presidential Election Results
• Something to Think About This Election Day
• Prayer of the Week – November 4, 2024
• Progressive Perspectives on Kamala Harris’ Faltering Presidential Campaign
• Jeffrey C. Isaac: Quote of the Day – October 28, 2024
• “We Give Reasons for People to Come Out and Vote”: An Interview with Jill Stein
• We’re Witnessing a Liberal Meltdown Over Jill Stein
• Miles Kampf-Lassin on the “Flashing Red Warning Signs” for the Harris Campaign
• Peter Bloom on the Unmasking of the “Democratic Charade”
• Progressive Perspectives on the Harris–Trump Presidential Debate
• “People Are Sick of the Bullshit”
• Yousef Munayyer: Quote of the Day – August 30, 2024
• Breaking Down Kamala Harris’ DNC Speech on Gaza
• Peter Savodnik: Quote of the Day – August 22. 2024
• Voices on the Issues That Really Matter
• Progressive Perspectives on the Presidential Nomination of Kamala Harris
• Progressive Perspectives On an American Coronation
• Chris Hedges on the End of the American Empire
• Marianne Williamson: “‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ Is Not Enough to Win”
• “Let the People Decide”: Marianne Williamson on the DNC’s Efforts to Deny and Suppress the Democratic Process
• Marianne Williamson on How Centrist Democrats Abuse Voters with False Promises
• Cornel West: Quote of the Day – December 3, 2020
• Jeff Cohen on How Obama’s “Corporate Liberalism” Led to the Rise of Trump
• Progressive Perspectives on the Rise of Donald Trump (2016)
• Progressive Perspectives on the Election of Donald Trump (2016)