By Olabode Lucas
Donald Trump’s political blitzkrieg which started in 2016 with his stunning victory at that year’s USA presidential election over Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party shook USA politics to its very foundation and since then politics in the USA has never been the same. There was an interlude on Donald Trump’s hold on power in 2021 when he was defeated in the 2020 presidential election by Joe Biden, the Democratic Party candidate. Donald Trump, who is a Republican Party member, still disputes the results of this election up till today. Trump, who had never held an elective office until 2017, came back with a fury to win the 2024 presidential election squarely by beating Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party candidate. He had 77,284,118 popular votes while Kamala Harris had 74,999,166 popular votes and with respect to Electoral College votes, Donald Trump scored 312 votes to Kamala Harris’ 226 votes and subsequently became the first Republican candidate to win both the popular votes and the Electoral College votes since 2004.
It will not be wrong to assume that the two stunning victories of Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections jolted the Democratic Party which is the major political opponent of Donald Trump’s Republican Party in USA political setup. Donald Trump’s new movement in the Republican Party, whose slogan is Make America Great Again (MAGA), is now a strong threat to the Democratic Party politically. The movement with its racial undertone has now provided a political shelter for USA citizens who want a radical change to the policy direction of their country both at home and abroad. Whether the change will augur well for the USA is another different question.
The Democratic Party in the USA was founded in 1828 by Andrew Jackson, the 7th USA president and Van Buren, the 8th president. Interestingly, the party before the civil war supported slavery and even after the war opposed civil rights for the Blacks in order to retain its support in the southern states of the country. The party subsequently changed its racist and unprogressive policies under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president who introduced the New Deal when he became the president in 1933 at the height of the great depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt cobbled together in the Democratic Party, a winning coalition of urban voters, American Jews, union workers, college graduates and black voters.
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Since the beginning of US presidency in1789, the Democratic Party as a distinct party has produced 15 presidents to 21 produced by the Republican Party. Some of the consequential presidents produced recently by the Democratic Party included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, the first Black president and Joe Biden who vacated the office on 20 January 20. At present, the party has 45 senators, 215 members of the House of Representatives and 23 state governors. The party stands for abortion rights, voting rights, action on climate change, health care reforms, universal childcare, legalization of marijuana and LGBT rights.
Presently, the Democratic Party is not in a comfortable political situation in the USA, having lost both the presidency and the two legislative houses. There is no doubt that the party leaders like the fiery Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker, Charles Schumer, the Senate minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries the House minority leader and others who control the political machine of the party would be scheming on how to get the party out of the present political hole.
Many reasons have been adduced for the loss of the presidency and the two Houses by the Democratic Party, but I point to two major ones that brought grief to the party in the elections. The first is the bad state of the economy under Joe Biden. Despite his good intentions, he could not tame the economy and the rising inflation. USA voters are very sensitive to anything that would dent their standard of living. It happened before, during the time of President Bush Senior who despite his high approval rating after his success in the Gulf war, was defeated by Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election because of the deteriorating economic situation after the war. The second electoral albatross on the neck of the Democratic Party was the inability of the Biden administration to take decisive action to curb the unbridled influx of illegal immigrants into the USA from its southern border.
The leaders of the Democratic Party, which is a party with high sympathy level in Africa, need to examine critically while the presidential candidate of their party lost many votes among the traditional Democratic Party voters like the Blacks, the Latinos and the working-class people. The party leaders would no doubt be pained that the decisive states won by Joe Biden in 2020 were lost by their presidential flag bearer whose popular votes in the 2024 election were six million votes less than what Biden got in the 2020 presidential election.
It is not clear yet whether the poor performance of the Democratic Party was due to the personality and antecedent of its presidential flag bearer Kamala Harris, or due to some of the party’s bewildering left-wing policies on cultural and social issues especially those on gender which were repulsive to moderate voters. The Democratic Party should fine-tune its policies to make it electable again. The midterm election next year would give an indication on how far it has gone in this direction.