Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Democrats Demobilized Their Base. A Movement Is Now Needed to Oppose Trump

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris and what it means for the country and the world, we are joined by three guests. John Nichols is The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent. He’s joining us from Madison, Wisconsin. Wisconsin voted for Trump. Rami Khouri is a Palestinian journalist, a senior public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut. He’s also a nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. And in Philadelphia, we’re joined by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Professor Taylor is contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, let’s begin with you in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which has been decided. Pennsylvania has gone to Trump. Can you share your response to what has taken place?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, I have to say that on some level it’s shocking that someone like Trump could be back in this position, but it’s not really surprising. I’ve written about, really since the Democratic National Convention, that the Democratic Party was playing a dangerous game, that — essentially downplaying the base in order to reach for new centrist voters to try to appeal to Republicans. And we can see with some of the preliminary exit polls that that was an abject failure, that Republicans voted for Republicans. Democrats voted for Democrats.

But I think, overall, the Democratic Party really underestimated the extent to which lots of people in this country are in crisis. I think that they have insisted for months, from when Biden was running throughout, that the economy is good, that they had overcome the issues with inflation and that things were looking up. And those are the voters that they appealed to. But if you look at the exit polls, the at least preliminary exit polls, there was a total washout with working-class voters. People making between $30,000 and $50,000, people making under $100,000 went to Trump. And I think that there’s a rise in homelessness, historic rise — historically high rise in homelessness from 2023 to 2024, and on pace to exceed that this year. Rent is 20% higher today than it was in 2020. Hunger, hunger insecurity on the rise compared to even just a year ago. And for even when the extent to the crisis doesn’t express itself in that way, in the first quarter of this year, Americans took on $17 trillion in personal debt. And so, this is completely unstable.

And Kamala Harris had very little to say about that. She was running as an incumbent, trying to distance herself from those aspects of the Biden administration, but really unable to do so, really unwilling to chart a different course, to articulate how things would be different under her administration. And they are really — you know, we are seeing and dealing with the consequences of that today.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Keeanga, I wanted to ask you about the — 

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — the male-female divide, especially with the communities of color. There was a lot of talk early on in the preelection polls about Latino and African American men gravitating more toward Trump. We don’t know yet the turnout levels in these communities, but it does appear that there was a major shift among African American men. According to the exit polls, about 20% of them went for Trump, whereas among African American women it was over 90 — I think 93% for Harris. And among Latinos, it was even more stark. According to these exit polls, a majority of Latino men voted for Trump, whereas two-thirds of Latina women voted for Harris. So there was major, major gender gap in the Black and Latino communities. I’m wondering your thoughts about that.

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: I think that in terms of the extent of crisis that we see in this country, that can be measured by employment rates, that can be measured by poverty rates, that can be measured by a sense of the quality of one’s life, all of the barometers that we use to measure the mood of the country have really been in decline. And I think for men, for Black men, in particular, they have felt — they have felt the brunt of that. And I think that it has been largely dismissed. I think, you know, President — former President Barack Obama got lots of attention when he came out weeks ago and essentially dismissed those concerns as just sexism. And so, I think — you know, I’m sure that that is part of the mix, but to reduce all of the economic anxiety of Black men and Black communities to sexism is, again, really to fail to capture. It’s a failure to capture what is actually happening on the ground, that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates of poverty. But there is historically high sense of insecurity and a sense of not knowing what is actually going to come next. And I think that the Harris candidacy, that the Biden candidacy that preceded it, have really ignored the extent to which there has been continuity, whether we go back from the Obama administrations to the Trump administration to Biden’s administration, a continuity in insecurity, a continuity in uncertainty, a continuity in just not knowing what the future is going to hold, so much so that it builds a sense of cynicism that it doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter how you vote.

And then, in another sense, I think that Trump satisfies something different, because, to be honest, you know, the Republicans don’t have any answers for that, either. And Trump’s policy proposals guarantee to make the situation worse for Black men, for Latino men. But what it does offer is an opportunity to give the finger, to thumb your nose at the status quo, at the condescension of someone like Obama, who just a week ago I saw an ad that popped up on Instagram, and he’s talking to a twenty-something young Latino man and saying to this young voter, who’s trying to decide who he should vote for, that “I know it looks like nothing has changed in your community, but you have to consider some woman was able to get her prescription. Someone else was able to get a bag of groceries.” And it’s like, what are we talking about? A prescription or a bag of groceries is not actually going to get it done. And so, the low expectations that they offer of what we should hold — what we should have for elected officials is part of the problem, because the attacks on people, on people’s incomes, the rising rate of rent, all of those things [inaudible] ability to respond to that in a substantive way is part of what is driving this. And so, the lower expectations doesn’t actually instill confidence that Democrats can get — can make a difference in people’s lives. And so, that, I think, is the larger context to understand the small but significant defection to Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, there’s an interesting —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring John Nichols into the conversation. John, I wanted to ask you particularly — during the campaign, President Trump focused a lot of attention on immigration and on his threats to begin the biggest, the most massive deportation of undocumented in the country’s history. Your sense of the results and what this will mean for the immigrant community and progressives, overall, in the coming weeks and months?

JOHN NICHOLS: Look, this is a devastating result. And I think people have to recognize it. Donald Trump won by, it looks like, a reasonably comfortable margin in the Electoral College, when all is done, although there’s still votes out, and I think we have to be a little careful about overassessing it. It is possible he’ll win the popular vote, although I still think there are a lot of West Coast votes out that will definitely make it closer. And it could even still tip it slightly against him.

But what we’ve ended up with now is a situation where Donald Trump, as a president who has very few guardrails, has the potential to do — to take horrific actions, which, remember, in his first administration, he tried to do, as regards immigrants, refugees, working-class people, people who are in difficult situations across the board. And so, what we have to look at — and I think there’s two things that are really important here. First, there’s going to have to be a resistance to this. There’s no question of that. But that resistance has to have at least some, hopefully some, traction on Capitol Hill. And that’s where the results of the House and Senate races, that are still very much in play, become central to what we’re talking about.

The Senate is going to be Republican. It will have at least a 52-48 Republican majority, and that majority could well grow. There are still six seats that are undeclared. I think about four of them will go to the Democrats, maybe less. But I think there’s a good possibility two of them will go to the Republicans. If the Senate is that wide a Republican majority, Trump is going to get easy approval for a lot of what he’s doing. There may be some places where, as we talk about something like the immigration issue, there could be pushback. But to do that pushback, you would have to build a coalition, whatever Democrats are there, and to find at least some Republicans who wouldn’t vote for a Trump Cabinet pick or for a Trump initiative on, again, immigration, working-class issues in general, all sorts of things. The only way that’s going to happen is if there is tremendous organizing on the ground, beginning now, today, in states where you have Republicans who have in the past broken with Trump at least on some education and related issues, people like Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Susan Collins up in Maine.

But the real opposition, ultimately, is going to have to come in the House of Representatives. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the House. It is still very much up for grabs. There are 54 seats that are uncalled, much more than 10% of the House. If a majority of those seats, a good majority of those seats, goes to the Democrats, they’ve got the potential to be in a majority in the House of Representatives. It wouldn’t be big, but they do have that potential. And this is not, you know, a foolish prospect to entertain, because most of the undeclared seats are on the West Coast, in California, Washington, Oregon. A lot of them will go Democratic. So we don’t know where this is going to sort out, but this is the critical thing, Juan.

If you get to a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, then you have the next test, which is whether they feel beaten down and weakened, and they just don’t really want to fight, and they’re saying, “Oh, we’ll find ways to work with this new administration,” blah, blah, blah, things that they often say. Trump is going to take full advantage of that. And on the other hand, if they unite as a small but politically very powerful Democratic majority, that’s where you can stop a lot of Trump initiatives. Again, as regards the House of Representatives, you’ve got to have vital organizing on the ground beginning now, so that if Democrats take control, they know that there are going to be people pressing them to do the right thing, to effectively be the opposition.

And one final thing I’ll say is, and Jamie Raskin and others have talked about this, Donald Trump has talked during this campaign about using the presidency in incredibly aggressive ways, not working with Congress but just going on his own with executive orders and all sorts of other initiatives. This is something that has to be challenged in the courts and, to the extent possible, in Congress. I know people are deeply disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court. I certainly am. But it is absolutely vital that there be court challenges wherever possible, because there are places in the states and at the federal level where you might be able to push back on some of what’s going on. Bottom line, at this point, Republicans have a lot of power. Donald Trump has a lot of power. The only way to counter that is going to be organizing that is highly focused, that demands that those Democrats who are still in positions of some authority resist Donald Trump in a realistic and effective way. That’s possible, but that is, as we know from history, not certain.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, it’s been raised that President Trump could nominate Aileen Cannon, the judge who dismissed the case against him, to the Supreme Court. And if the Senate, as it is, goes Republican, he might succeed in making her a Supreme Court justice. But I wanted to ask you, John, when you talk about people organizing right now, about a point that was raised during the Obama years. In the last months of the Obama presidency, there was a call for him to pardon undocumented migrants before Trump was sworn in. Trump is now promising mass deportations. The question is: Could Biden preemptively pardon them? And what I mean by “pardon,” NYU Law Review, in the waning days of the Obama administration, with Trump’s crackdown promised, over a hundred advocacy organizations joined forces to urge President Obama to permanently protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants from deportation by pardoning their breaches of civilian immigration law. John Nichols?

JOHN NICHOLS: Sure. Look, I am going to defer to the NYU Law Review and to legal experts who have worked on these issues for years and know much more than I do about the specifics of how you would mount such an initiative.

But what I can tell you is this, and this is the critical thing, I think, for progressives across this country to understand. The presidency is for four years. It is not for three years and 10 months or something like that. The last months of a presidency have to be used in smart and effective ways. And you have to look at all the powers of the presidency. What that means is that Joe Biden has several months left in which to do what is right morally and politically. And there has to be, again, I think, pressure there. We were just talking about, you know, organizing on the ground as regards to the Senate to put pressure on Republicans who might work with Democrats, organizing on the ground as regards to the House to put Democrats to actually be Democrats, what Paul Wellstone used to refer to as the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. But then, finally, there must be pressure on the ground and even toward Washington on Joe Biden, to make sure that he uses the last months of his presidency in a clear and effective, moral and politically smart way.

And so, what I would suggest to you is, folks who are deeply frustrated or overwhelmed by these results have a right to be so, and I won’t deny that. But I think that one important thing is to recognize that time matters in these struggles. And so, if you are going to lobby members of the Senate, members of the House and the president himself, you need to do that now, not wait months until January 20th or something like that. And again, what I would emphasize is, there’s a lot of organized groups across this country that are concerned about these issues. They have relationships with sitting members of Congress, with Republicans and Democrats. And they need to — you know, they need to open those conversations, to have those town hall meetings, to have those protests, to have those marches, to speak truth to power in a way that might yet be heard and might yet have an impact.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to bring Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor back into the conversation. Keeanga, your sense of what the potential steps now are for the progressive and resistance movement to this incoming administration?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah, I think that we have a real problem. I mean, I appreciate the sentiment that John is expressing about the need to be mobilized and to resist now. But, you know, activism and social movements don’t often work like that. They’re not water faucets, where you just turn them off, and then, when you need them, you turn them back on. I think that the movement, movements that we have understood them to be over the previous decade, with something like the Black Lives Matter social movement, at its center, have been damaged and have been demobilized. I think in the last election, in 2020, that there was so much focus on getting Biden elected and then winning those Georgia Senate races a few months later, that the whole focus of external pressure on elected officials was dissipated, and to such an extent that Biden faced no protest, really, until the end of the twilight of his term, last spring, when the Palestinian solidarity movement exploded, in a way, because it couldn’t be coopted by the Democratic Party, in ways that these other social movements not necessarily coopted, but absorbed into the Democratic Party program, organizers convinced that they had access to the Biden administration, that they had the ear of the Biden administration. And so, I think that we actually have a lot of rebuilding to do. I don’t think we’re going to see the same initial response that we saw in 2017 with the Women’s March and the immediate reaction to Donald Trump. There’s a lot of rebuilding that has to be done.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. She’s professor of African American studies there. Keeanga, I am looking at a Semafor article from May 29th, its headline, “’A dying empire led by bad people’: Poll finds young voters despairing over US politics.” And it starts off by saying, “Young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born, according to new polling from Democratic firm Blueprint obtained exclusively by Semafor.” And I think it’s interesting that you raised the protests around Palestine. In a minute, we’re going to speak with the Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri. But the protests in the spring that, you know, the encampments across the country, and this feeling that young people have, if you could comment on it, “a dying empire led by bad people”?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Look, there was a lot of focus on what would happen with Black voters, what would happen on other voters. Harris got wiped out on 18-to-29-year-olds relative to Biden in 2020. I think she was down 22 to 24 points among the youngest voters. These are people who really have this sense of what does the future behold, right? These are young people whose entire lives have been shaped by American wars, American empire, American occupation. Many of them are saddled with debt that they cannot repay, debt that there are no jobs available to them that would allow them to repay it. They are faced with exponentially rising rents, rents — laissez-faire housing market. And so, it’s a very dark, dystopic horizon for young people in this country.

And some of the things that provided a sense of hope, you think about the 2020 protests that brought tens of millions of especially young people into the streets, that gave them a sense of vitality, that gave them a sense that they could actually influence the direction of politics and the direction of this country through their own self-activity and organization, and the way that those protests were siphoned into the presidential campaigns of 2020 and the way that people were actively demobilized and told that the access to the Biden administration could produce the goods that they wanted. And even as that was falling apart, even as the Biden administration was unable to follow through on the promises it made, no response, no leadership, no direction. And so, that is something that is going to have to change, and that it’s going to have to come from those people, those young people, whose future looks very dark in the hands of others, but that they have the capacity to get organized, they have the capacity to be mobilized, and they have the capacity to change the direction of this country.

And so, this is a very grim, dark day. And I said before that I’m not — I am shocked that this happened, but I’m not surprised. We could see the trajectory of this happening for the last three months. But this does not have to be the final chapter. But in changing the — turning the page and changing the story, we have to rethink lots of what we are doing in terms of our relationship as progressives, as part of the left, our relationship to the Democratic Party, our inability to act independently, to be completely tied to the electoral ups and downs, the electoral cycle of the Democratic Party, when we look at the actual policies and practices that they’re pursuing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to bring John Nichols back into the conversation. John, the climate crisis, we have been faced — the entire world has been faced in recent years with constant hurricanes, floods, forest fires. And now we’re facing a Trump presidency where he is still using in his campaigns the slogan “Drill, baby, drill.” Your sense of what the climate — the movement to stem the climate crisis now faces in the United States?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, as my colleague says, this is a dystopian result. And where Donald Trump is coming from on these issues is not one of even a traditional Republican kind of tip and nod of the head to concerns about the climate, but then a decision to go where the fossil fuel companies tell you to go; this is a situation where Donald Trump has aggressively said and will make central to his agenda an effort to let fossil fuel companies do as they choose, to let the financiers who back them do as they choose. I mean, it really is devastating in this regard.

And if I can just build on this, one thing relating to what was just said about Gaza, it is very important to note that people in Congress who stood up on Gaza, who spoke out on it, and who made it through primaries where AIPAC tried to defeat them, did very, very well yesterday. Bernie Sanders won by two to one up in Vermont. Ilhan Omar won with more than 70%. Rashida Tlaib, who did not endorse Kamala Harris, won with more than 70%. Greg Casar in Texas won with almost 70%. Summer Lee, who’s in a much more competitive district than some of these other folks, she won with a percentage, you know, in the high 50s. And so, the bottom line is that taking a strong stand on Gaza in this general election, that didn’t hurt people. In fact, I think it may well have helped some candidates.

And the same thing is true with climate. It’s notable that everyone I just mentioned there who’s been outspoken on the issue of Gaza, and some other folks, too, who have been outspoken on Gaza, like AOC, have made climate very central to their service in Congress. And other people who did well also. The problem here is with the leadership of the Democratic Party, because in this election, not only did they refuse to talk in any kind of consistent or effective way on the issue of Gaza, they also refused to talk in any consistent, effective way on climate. And, you know, they would say occasional good things, but it wasn’t as central as it needed to be.

And then, if we pause here and ask ourselves, “OK, well, when we look at polling, when we look at anecdotal evidence, what are the issues that young people care about?” Well, we hear about climate. We hear about Gaza. Certainly, we hear about racial justice. When you see that decline in support from young people, I think it’s not that hard to explain. I think an awful lot of young people in this country simply did not hear what they needed to hear from the Democratic Party. And if they continue to have that silence or that lack of outreach on those issues, then I think you’re in a situation where the Democratic Party is going to continue to struggle with what has been one of its most vital constituencies in recent years, and that’s young voters.

AMY GOODMAN: This update, just as the House is up for grabs, Republican Mike Lawler of New York — and it looks like New York and California will determine the balance of the Senate [sic]. Republican Mike Lawler has defeated Mondaire — will determine the balance of the House. The Senate has already been determined, and it is going to be a Republican majority. But in the House, Mike Lawler has defeated Mondaire Jones. I want to thank you both for being with us, John Nichols of The Nation and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Coming up, we’ll be joined by Rami Khouri, Palestinian American journalist. And then we’re going to look at referenda around the country and how they fared. Stay with us.