Whether they’re confident, terrified or “nauseously optimistic,” there’s one sentiment many Democrats agree on: The presidential race shouldn’t be this close. My colleague Hayes Brown lays out that case today, thoroughly documenting all the reasons why Donald Trump has no business being anywhere near the presidency.
But what is isn’t always what should be. It’s unlikely that either candidate will be routed Tuesday. And only in breaking down why this election has been so competitive can we understand how we were led here by a broken system whose failures go far beyond Trump.
That Harris enters Election Day with roughly equal chances after just three months as the nominee is a minor miracle.
Let’s start, however, with the former president. We know Trump’s floor from his first two campaigns, when he received close to half the popular vote. He may have been consistently unpopular throughout his political career, but being the Republican nominee comes with a nigh unbreachable floor. Most Americans’ minds are made up about Trump and have been for close to a decade. As senior Kamala Harris adviser David Plouffe told New York Magazine, “I understand there’s some Democrats who say, ‘How could Donald Trump get 48, 48.5 percent of the vote?’ That’s the country we’re living in. That’s the electorate that we have.”
Consider also how the pandemic’s effects and the related inflation have hammered other governments around the world. From Canada’s Liberals to Britain’s Conservatives to France’s centrists to India’s nationalists, incumbent parties are reeling, regardless of ideology. MAGA’s international wing has not been spared: In Hungary, the Fidesz party of Trump ally Viktor Orban suffered its worst result ever in a European election.
By contrast, Harris remains competitive, Democrats expect to lose fewer Senate seats than they feared coming into this election, and they have a decent chance of retaking the House of Representatives. As in other countries, spiking inflation driven by pandemic-snarled supply chains and exploitative corporations left Americans reeling. And we still face fundamental economic problems. But during President Joe Biden’s administration, our economic recovery from the pandemic has far outpaced other countries’. Inflation has come down, unemployment remains near historic lows and, as The Economist magazine declared this month, the U.S. economy is “the envy of the world.” Democratic policies — and the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling — have prevented political disaster.
Yet for all Biden’s successes, his decision to run again steepened the climb for Harris. Democrats can rightly grouse that Trump’s own mental stumbles haven’t received nearly as much attention. But the first presidential debate dealt a fatal blow to Biden’s re-election hopes. That Harris enters Election Day with roughly equal chances after just three months as the nominee is a minor miracle — and damning of Trump’s campaign.
The words “equal chances,” though, bring us to the systemic failures that are much larger than Trump. Because if this election were decided by the popular vote, we would not be talking about “equal chances.” Harris would instead enter Election Day at least as the narrow favorite. But thanks to the Electoral College, Democrats can lose the presidential race while winning the popular vote for the third time in the last seven elections.
Until recently, this form of minority rule was the exception in American politics. Today, it is very nearly the rule. Trump won in 2016 despite receiving 3 million fewer votes. He nearly won again in 2020 despite receiving 7 million fewer votes.
Minority rule would not be enough for Trump without another systemic failure
In Congress, the system favors the GOP’s minority rule in other ways. The Brennan Center estimates that Republicans’ aggressive gerrymandering has given them a 16-seat advantage in the House. The Senate’s small-state bias is more extreme and more partisan than ever: From 2014 to 2022, Republicans held at least half of the chamber’s seats without ever representing a majority of the population. Four of the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices — the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade and speciously granted the president (but mainly Trump) sweeping immunity — were confirmed by senators who represent a minority of the population.
But minority rule would not be enough for Trump without another systemic failure: decades of widening inequality that has allowed the wealthiest to consolidate power. This failure long predates Trump. Since the 1970s, an alliance of right-wing politicians and conservative tycoons has steadily expanded each other’s political power. The results have been a windfall for the wealthiest: In 2018, for the first time in U.S. history, billionaires paid a lower tax rate than working-class Americans.
Thanks to Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, the plutocrats’ influence over our political system is greater than ever. In this cycle alone, 150 billionaire families have given nearly $2 billion to presidential and congressional candidates, and over 70% of that has gone to Republicans. The top seven donors and their families, including Timothy Mellon, Elon Musk and Miriam Adelson, have donated $818 million almost entirely to help Trump. Without this support, Trump’s cash-strapped campaign would be nearly dead in the water. Mellon, Musk and Adelson have, by themselves, donated nearly as much money as Harris and Biden raised from millions of small donors across the entire campaign.
And there is much at stake for the uber-rich to defend, for they have spent decades hoarding it. Unless your net worth can be expressed in the hundreds of millions, it is exceedingly likely that for much of your life, people who are wealthier than you have leeched off your work. Year after year, American workers have increased their productivity, only to see their salaries languish while executive salaries and shareholder returns skyrocket.
Into this gap have marched reactionary forces, often funded or supported by those plutocrats, either openly or in secret. Through cable networks and social media, they encourage racism, sexism and other forms of hate as scapegoats. They whip up imaginary threats of invading immigrants and predatory drag queens — anything to point people away from the yawning inequalities that leave so many Americans behind. No wonder these billionaires spend so much to preserve this broken system, where they live large and leave little for the rest of us.
“We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Whether Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis actually uttered those words often attributed to him is unknown. But however apocryphal, they remain as true today as in the Gilded Age when he made his name. Trump has exploited a political system hollowed out in the name of hoarding wealth. So long as America remains so unequal, it will be at the mercy of men and women like him.
