‘If you haven’t spoken to non-voters, you haven’t explained the election’: making sense of Trump’s victory

In June Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with political consultant Peter Feld about the Democratic primaries, AIPAC’s big spending, and how the presidential election was shaping up.

This was weeks before Joe Biden dropped out of the race and Kamala Harris took his spot on the ticket, but Feld’s analysis remained just as relevant.

“We have a number of months to go and you know we’ll see what happens, but I think there’s a danger of dispirited and demoralized Democrats not voting in a presidential year,” he told Mondoweiss. “That’s an existential threat, not just to Biden’s reelection, but to Democrats down ballot. Now, on the other hand, you know, there may be this over performance and we might see, you know, some strength for Democrats down ballot that that doesn’t help Biden. And that’s bad also because for Democrats, because obviously if Biden doesn’t win, we’re heading into a very a serious situation where Trump is going to be very, very focused in taking over a lot of parts of the Executive Branch, which he didn’t manage to do the last time he was in office.”

Arria spoke with Feld again to break down what went wrong with the Harris campaign, to what extent Gaza factored into the election, and what the resistance to Trump might look like.

Mondoweiss: We spoke earlier this year, shortly before Biden dropped out of the race. I was looking at the interview and a lot of what we spoke about remained relevant despite the candidate changing. You said the Democrats’ election issue went beyond Gaza and the results certainly prove that.

However, I am wondering how you think people should view the Gaza issue when they look at this election. To what extent do you think it factored in and what should the takeaways be?

Peter Feld: Those are great questions. On a national level, the argument that’s happening right now is partly an argument contrasting persuasion versus turnout.

The persuasion model that most of the political establishment and the consulting establishment are completely set up to use is to look at the swing voters. Who were the swing voters? How did they decide? Were there swing voters in Dearborn? Did Arab American and Muslim American voters become swing voters?

An alternate way of looking at it is that at least 6 million Biden 2020 voters stayed home this time. As far as we can tell, Trump only slightly increased his vote totals from 2020, but Biden got 81 million in 2020, and Harris looks like she’s at about 75 million. That seems like a big missing piece of the puzzle.

If you remove the people who usually vote Democratic, what remains looks a lot more Trumpy. You could go beyond Gaza for this. You could go to a lot of the tough-on-the-border talk that Harris had. Now people are saying, look what happened. The Latino vote was much more pro-Trump than anybody ever thought it would be.

I think we’ll need to get more data, but if Democratic Latinos stay home, the ones that continue to vote look more Republican. People staying home makes an area or a demographic group look more Republican.

To me, that’s a discussion that’s not finished because clearly, people changed their minds.

If you want to look at Dearborn and you want to look at the Arab population, the Muslim population, the Palestinian population, you have to factor in the anger. Regardless of any discussion where people were saying, “Trump’s going to really be worse, you’re going to have Jared Kushner setting up beachfront condos in Gaza.” I think that the Palestinian community and the Palestinian solidarity community were looking at what’s actually happening now.

“We’ll have to look and see who stayed home, not just how the voters voted. I don’t think you can explain this election without explaining the non-voters.”

The end of the election completely coincided with the total devastation and ethnic cleansing of North Gaza. Endless attacks on people sheltering in tents, people in hospitals, and then this forced march of people out of North Gaza followed by the complete destruction of all the neighborhoods. Turning the area into rubble. Total destruction.

People look at things like this and say, how can this get worse? How are you telling me that Trump is going to be worse when Biden and Harris are letting this happen right under their noses? In fact, Harris said repeatedly that she wasn’t going to really do anything different from Biden. Anybody who wanted to hope that she would do something different from Biden was shut down.

You can pile on to that the overt insults that the Harris campaign delivered to Palestinians. Sending [pro-Israel New York Representative] Ritchie Torres to Michigan, where he said that the Democrats couldn’t risk having a Palestinian speaker at the DNC because they might say something against Israel. He confessed what people had suspected, which was that there was a hardcore shutdown of any Palestinian expression throughout the Democratic convention. They sent [former President] Bill Clinton to Michigan, where he said a bunch of deranged things about Palestinians and launched into this false history of the region, going back to like King David, who is not even necessarily an actual historical figure.

You really can’t do this to people and expect them to turn out to vote. I think Abdaljawad Omar on your site did one of the best and most gracefully written post-election pieces that I’ve read. He points out that this stuff probably deflected volunteers and killed so much of the enthusiasm. Nobody is going to get excited about the “politics of joy” and “endless brat summer” when they’re watching a kid raising his hands while he’s being burned to death attached to an IV. It pretty much puts an end to any of the vibes that they were trying to run on.

We’ll have to look and see who stayed home, not just how the voters voted. I don’t think you can explain this election without explaining the non-voters and I think some of the post-election polling that’s come out and attempts to explain it by talking to voters is going to miss this story. If you haven’t spoken to non-voters, you haven’t explained the election.

You mention Palestinians being shut out of the convention and the campaign, but then we have all this recent polling showing that Democratic voters are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and increasingly skeptical of Israel. There were also multiple polls showing that Harris could have improved her support by moving in a different direction than Biden on this issue.

Can you talk about that disconnect? Looking specifically in terms of trying to win the election, what is the logic behind keeping a Palestinian from speaking? Is it just fear that Trump would have attacked them on Israel or something deeper? What’s the logic behind giving people concerned about this issue absolutely nothing?

I think you have to take a step back and say this didn’t happen by accident.  She was told not to give a glimpse of daylight to any real hope that policies would change and become more pro-Palestinian. The donors and the political establishment made it clear that you cannot deviate one inch on this issue. You cannot let a glint of light in to give any hope other than expressing humanitarian concern for the Gazans who have died and are being killed. It was an intentional shutdown, and they made it super clear by sending Clinton and Torres into Michigan. And Israel intensifying its starvation and ethnic cleansing of North Gaza in the weeks before the election without a peep from Harris was also sending a power message — “we can do anything we want, and the Democrats won’t say one word, even if it means losing the election.”

As you said, the base has moved. 77% of Democrats in a CBS poll that was done in June said that they wanted the U.S. to cut off arms to Israel. There’s no question in my mind that they ignore this knowingly. They knew what they were doing.

You could say they thought showing any softness on supporting Israel was going to wreck their potential to appeal to so-called “Nikki Haley voters” or “responsible Republicans” or whatever people want to call it. Their brains were laser-focused on appealing to Republicans. That’s why they trotted out [former Wyoming Rep.] Liz Cheney and welcomed the endorsement of [former vice president and war criminal] Dick Cheney.

It is almost impossible to know where the donors leave off and the consultants pick up because the donor class exists to fund the consulting class, and the consulting class exists to do the donors’ bidding. That’s what led them to a completely different strategy of appealing to Republicans.

The results now show that this attempt to appeal to Republicans was a total failure. She lost Republicans 94 to 5. I think that was actually one point worse than what Biden got in 2020—and he didn’t even have that much of a Republican outreach strategy.

She campaigned all over the place arm in arm with Liz Cheney, a politician with absolutely no following in either party whose ratings among Republicans are 60% unfavorable to 12% unfavorable.

It was an ill-begotten strategy, to begin with, but if they were thinking relentlessly about how to appeal to Republicans I can see how they wouldn’t want to take any steps to make them look soft on Israel.

It’s easy for somebody like me to be cynical and say, they chose defending apartheid and genocide over winning and saving American democracy, which they said was at stake in this election. I don’t think they were wrong about that part. I think our democracy is over in this country.

Harris significantly outspent Trump. Can you break that down? How does someone spend that much more and lose?

I would say a few things. Number one, money doesn’t buy you everything in politics. Especially in a presidential election where there’s so much free media. In the last several cycles, you could actually argue that the ads were not that decisive. I don’t know if they were very decisive in 2020. I don’t know if the ads were very decisive in 2016. 

That’s not the sum total of what the money gets spent on, of course. It gets spent on the field, and some people have given high marks to the Democratic field program. People have also said they didn’t do a good job of getting out Democrats in the swing states. But if your money is you being used to put out a message that isn’t catching on, you can have all the money in the world and still lose.

So you have a Democrat out there spending lots of money saying, “We’re going to shut down the border,” and a lot of crackdown type of talk. There are lots of problems with that messaging. Number one, I don’t think it’s credible to Republicans, or to the kind of people that are really concerned about the border, that Kamala Harris is better at shutting down the border than Donald Trump. That’s just not a credible message. Further, could it depress your turnout?

So there’s been all this discussion, for example, about Latino voters becoming more conservative. But suppose you subtract some of the Democratic Latinos from the turnout. The ones that are left are going to be pro-Trump. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Latinos are really swinging to the right on the border. It means that the ones who took the trouble to turn out and vote are more conservative, and many who are pro-immigration were too demoralized to vote.

Maybe they didn’t think it was important or didn’t really think Trump was going to be worse than Harris on the border because Harris was constantly on television telling people she was going to be just as tough on the issue. So anybody who is motivated by a humane approach to immigration might feel like there’s no point in voting, even though it was pointed out that Trump was fully planning to do mass deportations.

One of the phrases that stuck out to me was somebody saying, “It’s the turnout, stupid.” 

Now, you can’t leave out the economy. When she was asked, what are you going to do about families struggling with prices? Her go-to answer was always, “Listen, I grew up in a middle-class family” as if that would allay anybody’s concerns. This is the Democratic illness. Democrats think that you campaign through portraiture. Your typical campaign ad for Congress is like, “My daddy taught me about Alabama values.” 

Trump doesn’t do that. Trump doesn’t draw upon his lived experience. He doesn’t say, “Growing up in Queens, my dad taught me the importance of building strong businesses.” He doesn’t do any of that in fact, his persona is really almost a provocative barrier to any of that. He just tells you what he’s going to do. “We’re gonna make America great. We’re going to lock up the criminals, we’re going to deport people, we’re going to be violent.” He tells you exactly what he’s going to do.

There’s a great article that was published at The Awl in 2016 after Trump won the first time that basically said: Trump told a story and Hillary didn’t.

I think we have that again now. Trump told a story about what he was going to do and Harris just had all these vibes. “Trump is terrible, this is a threat to our democracy, and I’m supported by all kinds of Republicans.”

As far as the economy goes, I think the problem wasn’t just the message but how the Biden administration chose to govern over the last four years. Even though you have what a lot of people think is a good economy right now, it is not tangible to people. They’re still struggling with prices. Biden was under pressure from moderates like Manchin within his own party, of course, but he didn’t play hardball as much as he could have.

Biden did not get through a lot of the things he campaigned on, such as the Child Tax Credit, Paid Family Leave, and expanded Medicare. In the end, student debt relief was minimal. It only touched 9% of debt holders, and student debt payments that had stopped under Trump actually resumed under Biden. Stimulus payments, the eviction moratorium, and extended unemployment ended. There’s a really good article on The Guardian right now by Ben Davis. He rejects several theories of why Harris lost and proposes that it was really the collapse of the COVID social welfare state. People felt protection from the panic that the pandemic caused, but then all this stuff pretty much went away. Biden didn’t replace it with any of the middle-class benefits that got stripped out of Build Back Better.

The irony is, the last time we spoke we were talking about how [recently ousted New York Rep.] Jamaal Bowman got attacked for voting “no” on the bipartisan infrastructure bill after it got delinked from Build Back Better. In the end, I think history will show Bowman and the Squad were right to insist on linking the infrastructure bill with the middle-class benefits that were in Build Back Better. For their trouble, they were attacked over that vote by the Israel lobby, and Bowman and [Rep. Cori] Bush lost their seats.

They were right to draw the line because I think the failure to provide the middle class with those benefits is a big part of why the electorate was in such a cranky, negative mood about the economy, despite so many good indicators like unemployment being down, inflation beginning to lower, interest rates cut toward the end, and the stock market hitting record highs.

So, when you talk about the economy, I think [Vermont Senator] Bernie Sanders is right to criticize the abandonment of a working-class agenda. There wasn’t too much talk about labor, and there really wasn’t a lot of emphasis until the end when Harris came up with a good proposal for home care, but even that proposal didn’t really get out that much.

I think the main message that broke through from Harris was the outreach to the Republicans. In the end, that delivered nothing, and it may have played an important role in keeping the base home.

You mention Bush and Bowman. There already wasn’t a huge contingent of Israel critics in Congress, but now it’s seemingly getting smaller. Democrats tend to move to the right in response to virtually everything, but is there any chance some Democrats shift on this issue because they just watched Harris reject Palestinians and lose?

I do think that there are Democrats who are privately horrified by what’s been happening, but not enough to stop aid to Israel, obviously. There’s some reason to hope that some people who’ve been saying things in private might feel more compelled to say things in public. 

I don’t think enough Democrats are going to get the message until they start losing primaries over Israel.

But I don’t think enough Democrats are going to get the message until they start losing primaries over Israel. That didn’t happen this year. The opposite happened, but as we talked about earlier this year, the Israel issue wasn’t really directly litigated in the Bush and Bowman races. 

That may change next time. We have to see what happens in the 2026 primaries, and if there will be any challenges to Democratic House members over their support for Israel that goes against the party base.

To pick one example, [New York Rep.] Dan Goldman got only 65% in his primary against two opponents who had no money and no name recognition. He’s nervous.

According to a spreadsheet I just saw this morning, on November 5, he ran behind a Democratic member of the state assembly whose district overlaps his. Over 1% of the vote went to a write-in campaign for Hind Rajab [a five-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces].

We can see the impact of this in the fact that Goldman and [New York Rep. Jerry] Nadler were not among the 52 Democrats who voted this week for HR 9495 to declare nonprofit organizations terrorist groups. There are Democrats that represent either progressive areas or areas with a lot of Black and Latino voters—obviously not Ritchie Torres, who doesn’t care, but others—who are going to have some hesitation with these votes because they think they might be vulnerable. Does anyone challenge Goldman next time? Does somebody challenge Ritchie Torres next time? And if they do, how far do they get, and will they be willing to challenge those members specifically on their support for Israel?

It seems like a lot of liberals have been despondent to Trump’s victory this time, whereas there seemed to be immediate resistance to him in 2016. Most of these legal attempts to stop Trump in recent years have failed. It seems Congressional Dems are going to play ball with these Cabinet picks. It seems like a lot of people are feeling beat down about his return. He faced a lot of protest during his first presidency but how do you see opposition to him shaping up for the next four years?

Kelly Hayes has a great essay out now about exactly what shape the resistance will and should take. She says we have to organize and resist differently this time and shouldn’t just throw ourselves into arrests. Street visibility is important and it has an impact, but if the protests are just expressive and they burn people out and don’t produce results, then that’s a problem.

The alternative is to be really strategic in the resistance, which I think is a process that’s just beginning to take shape. We don’t know what form it’s going to take, but we’re going to see things we’ve never seen before.

The level of repression is going to be much more serious. I think that they’re going to find a way to get this bill targeting nonprofits passed, even though it was just stopped. 

I’m obviously concerned that they’re going to target the Palestine solidarity movement. There’s a real danger of a tremendous chilling of speech because a lot of people can’t afford to take the risks that they feel they’re exposed to.

When Trump won in 2016, everybody felt completely empowered to speak out and to raise their voices. This time, there are people who are just going to think, “They’re going to come for me next,” because whatever happens with the Palestine movement is going to take place against the backdrop of what they do to immigrants. I have no doubt they are going to do mass roundups, that they’re going to separate families and deport children who are U.S. citizens. They’re going to strip naturalization from U.S. citizens based on politics.

So the real question is what type of resistance is going to take place under a vastly ramped-up regime of repression, and we don’t have a template for this. We didn’t go through this during his first term.

It’s going to make the resistance very strategic.