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      The Democrats lost because they ran a weak and out-of-touch campaign | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      I turned on MSNBC after the election results came in and this, verbatim, was the commentary I heard: “This really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign. She had Queen Latifah [who] never endorses anyone! She had every prominent celebrity voice, she had the Taylor Swifties, she had the Beyhive. You could not run a better campaign in that short period of time.” Democrats, it seems, are already blaming their defeat this week on a host of contingent factors and not on their own shortcomings.It’s, of course, true that inflation has hurt incumbents across the world. But that doesn’t mean that there was nothing that Joe Biden could have done to address the problem. He could have rolled out anti-price-gouging measures early, pushed taxes on corporate super profits and more. Through well-designed legislation and the right messaging, inflation could have been both mitigated and explained. That’s what president Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered his supporters in Mexico and his governing coalition enjoyed commanding support.However, more than policy, Americans craved a villain. An incompetent communicator in old age, Biden couldn’t provide one. He couldn’t grandstand about hauling profiteers in front of Congress or taking on billionaires. He couldn’t use his bully pulpit effectively to tout his successes creating good manufacturing jobs or put America’s inflation (and GDP growth) in global context. He couldn’t do much of anything.As a result, 45% of voters, the highest number in decades, said they were financially worse off than they were four years ago. These people weren’t misled by the media, they were lamenting what’s obvious to everyone who lives in the United States: the soaring costs of groceries, housing, childcare and healthcare are both distributional and supply problems that the government has not tackled with urgency.Donald Trump, for his part, ran a less than impressive campaign. He wasn’t as coherent as he was in 2016 when he more frequently spoke to the economic grievances and personal experiences of ordinary workers. In a less populist mood, Trump felt comfortable enough to openly pander to unpopular billionaires like Elon Musk.As for Kamala Harris, her problem began all the way in 2020 when she was selected on identitarian grounds as a vice-presidential candidate despite performing terribly in the Democratic primaries. At a debate in March 2020, Biden pledged he would nominate a woman as vice-president. A host of influential NGOs then urged him to pick a Black woman. From the beginning, Harris was a choice driven more by optics than merits.Harris had an uphill battle from the start. She was forced to govern alongside an increasingly senile president and given poison-pill assignments like a role as “border czar”. Biden’s belated departure from a race he couldn’t win meant Harris didn’t have the legitimacy afforded by an open primary, a primary that if conducted early enough might have yielded a stronger candidate like the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock.Once given the reins of the party, the vice-president ran a campaign that was in both style and substance – like today’s Democratic party as a whole – driven by the professional class. Weakly populist ads targeted to swing states sat uneasily with attempts to make the race about abortion rights or Trump’s contempt for democracy. There was no unifying economic message that blamed elites for the country’s problems and laid out a credible vision of change. People knew that Harris was not Trump, but they didn’t know what she was going to do to solve their problems. She had the burden of incumbency without its benefits.Harris was smart enough to not overemphasize her own personal story and how historic her victory would have been. But the Democrats as a whole were still associated with the identitarian rhetoric and an emphasis on anti-discrimination over class-based redistribution that drove Harris’s selection as vice-president to begin with. Many of us sounded the alarm early about the prominence of efforts like White Women: Answer the Call and Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders for Kamala that focused on mobilization through skin color and gender instead of shared class interest. But a party increasingly divorced from workers ran with the activist base that it had rather than the voting base it needed to have.The result was a staggering shift in working-class support across demographics. Exit polls suggest that Harris lost 16 points with “voters of color” with no degree compared with Biden, with particularly sharp losses among Latinos. The abortion emphasis didn’t pan out either – Biden led among those who believed that abortion should be “legal in most cases” by 38 points. Harris appears to have tied Trump with those voters.In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer infamously argued: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Without a New Deal–sized economic vision with a unified working class at the center, the Democrats have seen that calculation fail for the second time in eight years.

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      Where do the Democrats go from here? – podcast

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      “This was a pretty sweeping victory for Trump,” Lauren Gambino, political correspondent for Guardian US, tells Michael Safi. “It was decisive, and he may very well end up with full control of Congress, which would really help him implement some of these pretty dramatic proposals he’s laid out throughout the campaign.”Speaking to Democrats processing the result, Gambino says there is a sense of devastation.“Some of them are calling for a full overhaul of their brand. Bernie Sanders has said they’re no longer the party of the working class.”Safi also reports from Kamala Harris’s concession speech at Howard University, Washington DC. He speaks to Harris supporters reflecting on what went wrong, and asking: what next?Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More

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      Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie elected mayor of San Francisco

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      After years of negative headlines and post-pandemic economic struggle, San Francisco has picked a wealthy Democratic outsider with no government experience to serve as the city’s new mayor.Daniel Lurie, 47, is one of the heirs to the Levi Strauss jeans company fortune, and previously spent 15 years as the executive of a San Francisco non-profit he founded. He defeated several Democratic challengers, including the current mayor, London Breed, in an election that was expected to break local campaign spending records.“I’m deeply grateful to my incredible family, campaign team and every San Franciscan who voted for accountability, service and change,” Lurie said in a statement. “No matter who you supported in this election, we stand united in the fight for San Francisco’s future and a safer and more affordable city for all.”Lurie poured more than $8m of his own money into his campaign, while his billionaire mother, Mimi Haas, backed him with another $1m. He will be the first San Francisco mayor since 1911 to win office without previously serving in government, making him the city’s “least experienced mayor in a long time”, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.But the Chronicle also ended up endorsing Lurie, praising the “balance of compassion and toughness” in his planned approach to dealing with the people in San Francisco struggling with homelessness, and saying the city needed a change in leadership, making Lurie’s inexperience potentially worth the risk.Lurie had touted his experience funding and building affordable housing at the Tipping Point Foundation as evidence that he could lead San Francisco in the right direction.San Francisco is dominated by Democrats, and so the choice was effectively between moderates and progressives, with voters focusing on pragmatic centrists. Lurie beat and will replace Breed, the city’s first Black female mayor, who has led the city since 2018.Breed, who was raised by her grandmother in public housing, conceded the race on Thursday when it became clear she could not overcome deep voter discontent and was trailing Lurie, a philanthropist and anti-poverty non-profit founder.“At the end of the day, this job is bigger than any one person and what matters is that we keep moving this city forward,” Breed said, adding that she had called Lurie to congratulate him. “I know we are both committed to improving this city we love.”The northern California city has come to represent the challenges faced by many large US cities that have struggled with an uneven economic recovery and rising cost of living since the Covid-19 pandemic. Standout issues across all candidates’ campaigns were housing and crime, even with crime down 32%.San Francisco has the highest median household income among major US cities, but homelessness remains intractable. Since a June supreme court ruling, Breed’s administration has been actively sweeping unhoused encampments.Her critics pointed out that sweeps are temporary fixes and the city has not done enough to offer shelter to its unhoused population.In an interview with Reuters, Lurie said sweeps were a tool for the city to combat homelessness and promised to stand up 1,500 emergency shelter beds in his first six months in office.Lurie is an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co fortune through his mother, Mimi, who wed Peter Haas when Lurie was a child. Peter Haas, a great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, was a longtime CEO of the iconic clothing company who died in 2005.Both the Levi’s name and Haas family philanthropic foundations are deeply embedded in San Francisco’s history and identity.Lurie’s father, Brian Lurie, is a rabbi and longtime former executive director of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation. More

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      Republican Dave McCormick wins Pennsylvania Senate seat in key race

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      The Republican Dave McCormick won the Senate race in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Thursday, denying the Democratic incumbent, Bob Casey, a fourth term and expanding his party’s majority in the upper chamber.When the Associated Press called the race at 4.09pm ET on Thursday, two days after polls closed in Pennsylvania, McCormick led by 0.4 points. The narrow margin raised the possibility of a recount, although his victory is expected to stand given his lead of roughly 30,000 votes.A spokesperson for Casey insisted that thousands of ballots remained uncounted, refusing to yet concede the race to McCormick.“As the Pennsylvania Secretary of State said this afternoon, there are tens of thousands of ballots across the Commonwealth still to count, which includes provisional ballots, military and overseas ballots, and mail ballots,” Casey spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said in a statement. “This race is within half a point and cannot be called while the votes of thousands of Pennsylvanians are still being counted. We will make sure every Pennsylvanian’s voice is heard.”With McCormick’s victory, Republicans have now secured at least 53 seats in the Senate, erasing Democrats’ previous majority in the chamber. Two Senate races in Nevada and Arizona remained too close to call as of Thursday afternoon.Although he fell short, Casey outperformed Kamala Harris, who lost Pennsylvania to Donald Trump by two points. Trump also won the two other “blue wall” states of Michigan and Wisconsin, but Democrats managed to hold on to both Senate seats that were up for grabs in those states.The call in Pennsylvania brought an end to a contentious and expensive Senate race that saw the two candidates trade barbed attacks on the cost of living, abortion access and McCormick’s recent residency in Connecticut. Casey attacked McCormick, a former hedge fund CEO, as out of touch while McCormick linked Casey to the “reckless” government spending of the Biden administration.At their debate last month, Casey mocked McCormick as “bought and paid for by these billionaires and corporations”. McCormick returned fire, saying: “When you don’t have a record to run on, which Senator Casey does not, you attack your opponent.”The high stakes of the race made it into one of the most expensive Senate elections in the nation, as the dueling campaigns and their allies spent more than $300m on ads. One pro-McCormick organization, the Keystone Renewal Pac, spent at least $54m on the race, making the group the highest-spending single-candidate Pac involved in a Senate race of this election cycle.Most public polls of the race showed Casey leading by several points up until recent weeks, when McCormick narrowed that gap to just a few points. Despite that trend, Casey appeared to be in a slightly stronger position than Harris, who was running neck and neck against Trump in Pennsylvania up until election day. Leaders of both parties had identified Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes as the potential tipping point in the presidential race.“I think both races are going to be very close, but I think the people of our state know it’s a very, very clear choice,” Casey told the Guardian in September. “It’s never been clearer.”Before election day, Democrats held a 51-49 majority in the Senate. Republicans’ victories in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia had already guaranteed control of the Senate, but McCormick’s win will give the party even more leverage to enact Trump’s agenda when the new Congress is seated in January.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Mississippi mayor claims bribery charges are ‘political prosecution’

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      The mayor of Mississippi’s capital city said on Wednesday that he had been indicted in an alleged bribery operation, and he said it was a “political prosecution” to hurt his 2025 campaign for re-election.“My legal team has informed me that federal prosecutors have, in fact, indicted me on bribery and related charges,” Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the Jackson mayor, said in a video statement on Wednesday, WJTV and other news outlets reported. “To be clear, I have never accepted a bribe of any type. As mayor, I have always acted in the best interests of the city of Jackson.”Lumumba, a Democrat, has been mayor since 2017. An indictment was not immediately available on Wednesday in federal court electronic records.The charges come after undercover FBI agents posing as real estate investors invited the mayor to a fundraiser in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, on 3 April, WLBT reported. The agents said they wanted to develop property in downtown Jackson and help fund the mayor’s re-election campaign.Jackson city councilmember Angelique Lee, a Democrat, resigned in August and pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges as the result of the same FBI investigation.Lumumba said his legal team will “vigorously defend me against these charges.“We believe this to be a political prosecution against me, primarily designed to destroy my credibility and reputation within the community,” he said.The Jackson city council president, Virgi Lindsay, released a statement asking Jackson residents to be patient after the mayor’s indictment, WAPT reported.“I remind myself that the presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of our criminal justice system,” said Lindsay, a Democrat. “Therefore, I will remain steadfastly focused on the work of our city council, and trust the legal system to unfold without undue commentary from me.” More

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      Swing state voters process Trump win with hope and fear: ‘This is a powder keg moment’

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      “I am still processing my feelings, but what I do know is that my country keeps finding ways to break my heart,” said Adrienne Pickett, a 42-year-old single mother of two who lives in suburban Detroit.The Kamala Harris voter lives in one of seven states that helped decide the US presidential election on Tuesday. All appear to have voted in Trump’s favor by small but significant margins .Like many Democrats in these states, Pickett is coming to terms with a victory by Donald Trump and a new political reality for America. Republicans in these states are also looking ahead – some with excitement, but not all. We spoke with voters for both parties to hear their reactions.These are Pickett’s worries for the future: “We can expect exactly what Trump promised: mass deportations, pardoning criminals who destroyed the capitol and injured and killed police officers on January 6th, vendettas carried out against his perceived enemies, and maybe most frightening of all, a Project 2025 house of horrors brought to life.”In North Carolina, meanwhile, Jess St Louis, 34, a trans woman in Greensboro who canvassed during the election with the progressive group Carolina Federation, said she was nervous and scared about the future under a second Trump presidency. But she also drew comfort from the defeat on Tuesday night of the Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson who has been embroiled in a scandal over his alleged racist and sexist comments on a chat board, which he has denied.“It’s a mixed bag,” St Louis said. “I am scared, but I’m also proud about the governor’s race and about breaking the Republican supermajority in the North Carolina House. I can feel a rising tide of folks in North Carolina actually pushing back against hatred and extremism.”There had been fears that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene would suppress turnout, in the western part of North Carolina, where 23 of the 25 stricken counties were won by Trump in 2020. But record-breaking early voting and the creation of makeshift polling stations in areas devastated by floods and landslides appeared to have mitigated the problem.While Trump grew his base in North Carolina’s large rural areas, Harris failed to build on Joe Biden’s showing in 2020 in the big cities, despite significant investment in ad spending and field operations.View image in fullscreenWinning should have felt better, thought Jen Dopke, 51, a retail worker from north-east Wisconsin, as the results came in on Tuesday night. Counting still continues Thursday, but Trump has a lead of about 1% – 30,000 votes out of 3.4m cast. Dopke hopes Trump will usher in an improved economy and end American involvement in foreign wars. But she isn’t celebrating yet.“I don’t feel like this was a big win, because we’re not all on the same page,” Dopke said. She watched nervously as people in her life blocked each other on social media the day after Trump secured a second term in office. Dopke supported Trump, but her friends who voted for Harris don’t know that, and she’s wary about them finding out — worried her support for the former president could jeopardize a friendship.“I [hear] what they’re saying, and I think, ‘I just totally don’t believe the same thing, and I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to hear where I’m coming from,’” said Dopke. “It’s terrifying to me. I don’t know what we’re going to do to come together.”Georgia proved a political comeuppance for Trump on Tuesday after his razor-thin loss by 11,799 votes in 2020. This year he was winning by well over 100,000 votes at press time.Alejandro Lopez, a military veteran and social services advocate from Stone Mountain, Georgia, said he was “pissed off at the Republican party for not holding up the rule of law against one of their own,” he said.“To have seen all these members of congress in support of a felon just made me sick to my stomach. The laws created by the US congress now seem to apply to the people and not the legislators themselves.”View image in fullscreenLopez, who has been a close observer of Georgia politics for years, was also with Democrats – in Georgia the Trump campaign pitted Latino citizens against the undocumented with a deftness that went unrecognized by the Harris campaign. Nationally, too, there was a collapse in Democratic turnout and a realignment of Latino voters from a Democratic bloc to a near 50-50 split, which provided the margin of Trump’s victory in swing states even as other demographic groups largely held steady.“I just did not see the Democrats engaging the Latino community as much,” Lopez said.He fears being targeted for his sexual orientation, ethnicity and politics.… “I will keep my nose down so not to create any attention to myself.”The Associated Press has yet to project a winner in Nevada, as the state continues to tally mail-in ballots in its most populous counties. But early results suggest it may be poised to select a Republican for president for the first time since George W Bush in 2004.James, 23, who had cast a vote for Kamala Harris – unbeknownst to his family and coworkers, who are die-hard Trump supporters – said he yearned for a time when he and his loved ones could have civilized conversations about politics.“I would love to say I think things will calm down after this,” said James, who didn’t want to provide his last name so he could avoid further conflict over politics. “But I my heart I know it won’t.”“This is a powder keg moment,” he added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Pennsylvania, Rick Carrick, a 69-year-old retiree, was walking his dog Elvis outside the Lackwanna county courthouse in downtown Scranton as he processed the election results on Wednesday. He said he was ready to move out of the country.“I just told my daughter, I said guarantee first thing he does when he’s sworn in is he gives everybody from January 6 a full pardon,” said Carrick.Lackawanna county, home to Scranton, was one of several key areas in Pennsylvania where Donald Trump improved his performance compared with 2020. Joe Biden carried the county by eight points in 2020, Kamala Harris carried it by about three points this year. The county was once a Democratic stronghold – Barack Obama won it by nearly 28 points in 2012.Carrick said he had no idea why Trump had been able to do so well in the county.“I’m just looking at the big picture. OK, maybe Trump is better on the economy, and to be honest with you, the first time he ran I liked a lot of his ideas, like we can’t be the bank for the entire world,” he said. “But then other things that he does, it’s like he wants to be king.”Debbie Patel, a retired attorney and progressive activist from the Milwaukee area, said she sees a “dark road ahead” – “for Americans generally”.“The first targets will be the ones he’s been vocal about, and then, because he lacks the capacity to empathize with others. it’s anybody’s guess who he will go after next.”Still, Patel is hopeful about the possibility of establishing common ground among “all people”. She cited efforts by groups like Braver Angels, a nonprofit that seeks to depolarize US politics through facilitated conversations between Democratic and Republican Party voters, as exemplary models for seeking common ground.Ali Asfari, 33, lives in Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Arab American population. The Biden-Harris administration’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza influenced his decision to vote for Trump, but that wasn’t the only issue.“When he [Trump] was in office there were no wars, and inflation nowadays is bad because of the Joe Biden administration. But hopefully now, with the promises that Donald Trump has given us, it’s going to be better,” Asfari said.“We’re going to have a better economy. We’re going to have better family values, in schools, especially. And we’re going to make this country great again. We’re going to have the entire planet to respect this country again as usual. Because with the Biden administration, nobody had respect for us.”Asfari , who voted for Biden in 2020, added:“She did a terrible job, her and Joe. Look at the wars around the world. Look at the economy over here, with inflation. You know, we middle classes, we go for groceries, everything is double the price. The jobs, we barely find jobs, they’re barely hiring and everything is expensive. Family values went down, down, down, especially in schools. You know, they want to join the boys and girls in one bathroom. They’re doing terrible stuff. So that’s why we have to end all this kind of things and go back to Republicans.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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      Post-election in Saginaw, Michigan, the swing county in the swing state that swung right

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      Saginaw county’s Democrats were sure that the lessons had been learned and that this time it would be different.The Kamala Harris campaign flooded this bellwether county in the crucial battleground state of Michigan with canvassers and advertising, a reaction to Hillary Clinton’s complacent and, as it turned out, misguided belief that she had the area sewn up in 2016.The vice-president and Tim Walz campaigned in Saginaw. Leftist hero Bernie Sanders rallied the local university’s students. Door-knockers and phone bankers urged people to the polls in the hope and expectation of at least eking out the narrow win Joe Biden enjoyed in Saginaw county four years ago.But through it all, there were warnings from those closest to key groups of Saginaw’s voters – union organisers, Black community leaders, social workers for lower-income families, Latino activists – that denouncing Republican demagogue Donald Trump and making vague promises from Harris of a better future were not enough.They cautioned that Harris was not getting through to large numbers of those who struggled the most in a county marked by large economic disparities because she was failing to directly address their concerns, not least inflation and the cost of living.Others said that Harris looked too much like one of the machine politicians so many voters have come to despise, particularly as she avoided taking a stand on key issues or bent to the prevailing political wind.All of them warned that it could cost her the election in Saginaw county, and beyond.And so it proved.Trump won Saginaw county decisively. The vice-president lost by three times as many votes as Clinton in 2016 and did even worse when compared with Biden four years later.Trump beat Harris by more than 3,400 votes on about the same turnout as 2020. In that election, the then president lost to Biden by 303 votes.This year, Trump won an outright majority in Saginaw county with nearly 51% of the vote, more than 1% up on his 2020 tally.On election night, the leader of the county Democrats, Aileen Pettinger, a retired firefighter, bounced into a watch party at a local union hall confident that female voters angry about the US supreme court ruling on abortion and the broader assault on women’s rights had won it for Harris.Local Democrats worked hard to try to bring female Republican voters on board over access to abortion, even leaving Post-it notes in women’s bathrooms reminding them that no one would know if they secretly voted for Harris.But as the results trickled in, the party began to feel like a wake. People drifted away. Whoever was in charge of the music stopped playing Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now. A silence fell as hope bled away.Across town at the Republican watch party, Trump supporters burst into a rendition of the Christian hymn How Great Thou Art after the former and future president gave his victory speech.The initial election results for Saginaw appear to show that Harris lost Biden voters to Trump in some of the poorer areas of the county, including minority neighbourhoods, as well as mostly white suburbs. Harris also failed to mobilise the large numbers of people who usually do not vote in Saginaw. The turnout in the main city was only about 50%.A month ago, Jeff Bulls, president of the Community Alliance for the People in Saginaw, told the Guardian that many voters in lower-income parts of Saginaw were disenchanted with the political process because they did not see that it improved their lives.Bulls warned that Harris’s failure to address issues such as inflation and the cost of housing in a way that would make a difference to those struggling to get by was undermining her campaign. After Harris’s defeat, Bulls said “it’s not unexpected for me”.“She wasn’t really speaking to real people’s issues. You have a lot of poverty here in this county, whether it’s in the city of Saginaw or whether it’s rural people out there. And if you don’t speak to that, you’re not going to inspire people to vote for you, and I felt like her campaign was mostly about just blaming Trump or saying he’s racist. She wasn’t really inspiring people with her own policies, with her own vision, and I think that cost her,” he said.Similar warnings came from union organisers who saw members going with Trump, even though Biden kept telling them how good the economy was, because rising inflation had hit them hard. As loyal Democrats, some couched their warnings carefully in public, not wanting to give ammunition to the Trump campaign.Others were more forthright, including Carly Hammond, a Saginaw organiser for the US’s largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO. She told the Guardian a month ago that the Harris campaign was failing to address the deep distrust of politicians in general, and the Democratic party in particular, among many working people.“It’s the Donald Trump voters in unions that I see. I think most of them are still in the same place,” she said in October.“The trend that I see with labour people who are Trump supporters is a tendency to be very upset with the status quo, which everyone should be. People are going to stick with Trump until they see and they feel like things are getting better for them.”Hammond, whose grandfather worked at one of the many car factories that were once dotted around Saginaw but have since closed, said the Democratic campaign was the biggest election mobilisation she had seen but that Harris lacked “concrete plans” to motivate voters.After the result, Hammond issued a statement saying she was “angry that neither presidential candidate had real acknowledgement of, or plans to address, the real suffering and struggle so many Americans are going through”.Black and Latino community leader organised get-out-the-vote campaigns in the last days before the election as they warned of disenchantment and lack of enthusiasm for Harris.Dan Soza, whose father was the first Latino elected to the Saginaw city council, is a child welfare officer who is deeply alarmed by Trump’s threat of mass deportations. He said that Harris failed to connect with large numbers of Latino voters in the city on what they cared about most: the economy.“There was never any really specific plans. OK, the $25,000 for new home buyers was specific, but where was the specific plan for inflation? Not that the other side added any better answers, but they just never really came out with any concrete plans on what they were going to do,” he said.Soza said that the rise in Latino men voting for Trump in other parts of the country was replicated in Saginaw. He said a lot of that had to do with “fear of a female leader, machismo”.But he said the Democrats also made a mistake in thinking that opposition to Trump’s stance on immigration would play well with Latino voters in places such as Saginaw, where there is a long established Latino community, mostly of Mexican origin, when many of those crossing the border are from Central and South America.“Immigration isn’t as important to them as we think. They took to heart issues like the economy,” he said.The scale of Harris’s loss was emphasised by the success of other Democrats in Saginaw.Kristen McDonald Rivet decisively beat a Republican former prosecutor, Paul Junge, for the open seat in the US House of Representatives covering Saginaw and neighbouring counties. McDonald Rivet took about 51% of the vote, meaning that some people split their vote to support her and Trump.But Bulls is not alone in thinking that the Democratic party needs a wholesale rethink of what it stands for if it is to win back voters in Saginaw.“The Democratic party has to have a come-to-Jesus moment and really revisit who they represent because they’re not speaking to kitchen-table issues. There’s a lot of rhetoric around the middle class. We largely don’t have a middle class, especially in the Black community. We have working class. We have people that are in poverty, and they’re not speaking to them and their struggle, to real issues that poor people are really, really dealing with,” he said.“I would hope that there’s a reckoning and that they revisit who they actually represent, because right now it’s not us.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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