PSL election analysis: More than 5 million voters refused to consent to genocide

Presenter: Oregon members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation analyze the election and plan for a protest on Inauguration Day. On Nov. 15:

Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Election night at the Portland Liberation Center, we had an amazing night. We had Abby Martin and Mike Prysner of The Empire Files in our office. And we had probably more than 100 people come through over the course of the evening to talk about what we were seeing, to talk about the election results as they came in, to talk about this absolute hellscape of a campaign.

And overall, I felt, very prepared, very ready to start the next phase of struggle, basically. It’s just a sad reality that these are the two options that this country has provided people, and that this was the choice that millions of people made. But I was so encouraged by the fact that so many people responded electorally to the Gaza genocide, by voting for third parties.

[00:01:07] I spent that evening feeling very grateful for the growing community of people who are ready to fight back.

[00:01:16] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): Yeah, we just wrapped up the Claudia / Karina campaign and just want to thank everybody who supported. We reached out to a lot of people. I talked to a lot of people who are not in the party who I know voted for Claudia De la Cruz and the work that we were able to do in organizing people and spreading our message was really great.

[00:01:34] That said, it looks like the state is not going to tally the votes for Claudia De la Cruz. I was on the phone with the Secretary of State yesterday, and they made that clear. Even though she’s kind of registered to receive write-in votes, they’re simply not going to tally them. So we’re never going to know exactly how many votes she got in Oregon.

[00:01:53] That highlights the fact that this is the law, basically. It’s the law that they won’t tally the write-in votes. It highlights how insulated the Democratic Party in Oregon wants to be from the possibility that there could be any other choice for working families.

[00:02:08] I agree, you can’t do a livestream genocide like they have gleefully done and win. That’s good that you can not win, that you won’t be rewarded with another term of that program. It’s bad that the alternative is Donald Trump and the far right and that political realignment is something that I think our party has had the pulse on since the election has ended.

[00:02:33] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): This political realignment, yeah. When we see the pundit class, you know, the CNN and MSNBC, these analysts, their version of what this election turned out to be, all the poll results, is that the whole country has just politically realigned to the right. All the individual people who cast their votes, they’ve all just suddenly become more racist, more right-wing, more captured by the Trump agenda, that more people are actually excited about Project 2025.

[00:03:08] And they’re trying to sell us this really horrible, bleak vision that we as a society are just regressing, right? We’ve made all these gains of progressive values over the last even just 10 or 20 years in my lifetime. And they’re telling us that it’s all just been taken away in one election?

[00:03:27] The reality is really different from that, actually. Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral college, but his total number of voters—

[00:03:38] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): Yeah, he didn’t receive meaningfully higher vote totals than he did in 2020, like, he doesn’t have a meaningfully higher coalition than he did in 2020.

[00:03:47] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Yeah, it’s also true that fewer people voted for the Democrats than they did in 2020.

[00:03:52] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): Yeah, the fact that Joe Biden got over 80 million votes, and not all the votes are counted yet, but it looks like, Vice President Harris, say she gets up to 75 million. The best-case scenario is that they lost six million people.

[00:04:06] And that’s not counting the people who just didn’t vote in either election, because they already understood that neither of the choices made sense to them. So, to talk about that political realignment as being one that happened among the people just makes just absolutely no sense.

[00:04:21] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Another good example that flies in the face of this idea that the whole country has just moved to the right and it’s become more regressive, is that in 10 states, there was a significant abortion rights or reproductive rights referendum, a measure. And in seven out of those ten states, people in those states voted to protect abortion rights.

[00:04:44] And that includes a very red state like Missouri. Missouri voted to protect abortion rights, even though the state of Missouri went to Trump. Montana also voted to protect abortion rights, and this is a really infuriating example. In Florida, 57% of voters voted to protect abortion rights, but the law states in Florida there needs to be a 60% approval of that ballot measure.

[00:05:14] This narrative that the country has moved to the right is actually only true for the ruling class. The ruling class of this country has moved to the right. The Democratic Party has moved to the right. That’s the political realignment that’s happening. The rest of the country is moving in a different direction.

[00:05:35] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): The campaign the Democrats ran was a far-right campaign on immigration, on Palestine and the Middle East, on war generally, on China.

[00:05:44] Imagine Kamala Harris running on a campaign of $15 minimum wage, free health care for everyone, free child care—the things that really matter to working people.

[00:05:54] These are things that she’s restricted from doing because she is a representative and is a member of the millionaire and billionaire class that operates both parties. So, we need to be really clear that broad swaths of the population of the United States are being left behind. They are seeing that neither of the parties represents their interests and are acting that way. They’re not voting for them. They’re being left behind totally and they’re looking for something else.

[00:06:22] A really, really important thing that we need to understand about this moment is that this is what happened in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. In 2016, there was a massive far-right movement and when he was elected on the basis of this far-right program, many people hit the streets, people were upset, people were ready to fight. They were ready to resist, and they were doing so, and it was a totally independent movement that was ready to resist the far right.

[00:06:54] And then it was co-opted. It was co-opted by the Democrats. And one of the ways that they co-opted it is that they made it about Donald Trump the person. And if the problem that we’re having in the country is Donald Trump the person, he is the one who has to be defeated immediately, the Democrats are the best choice to defeat him. We can beat him electorally and then it will be over. And they managed to successfully co-opt that movement and, you know, look where we are now, right?

[00:07:25] Donald Trump did not write Project 2025. Donald Trump did not have any of the ideas behind Project 2025. Donald Trump is a salesman and a showman, and he knows how to sell these projects to broad swaths of people.

[00:07:42] But without Donald Trump, the movement still exists. It’s not about cutting off the head. The far right that’s been organized, extremely centralized, serious about pushing this project of continuing to immiserate us in the crisis of capitalism, that army is still going to be there no matter what.

[00:07:59] So, I think we really need to be clear this time that whatever the Democrats were offering to stop that movement by electing them and not electing Donald Trump did not work, has not worked. He’s back, and he’s back not because of himself, but because this movement is strong and because the Democrats in attempting to address the issue have decided to follow over to the right and left millions of people with no option to cast a vote that they can feel morally responsible about…

[00:08:31] And they know that. And that’s why the entire system of U.S. capitalism is organized in the way that it is, to obfuscate; to give this veneer of democracy at a time that we know we don’t have any input into what happens. For example, 80% of Democrats in last November wanted a ceasefire.

[00:08:53] So we know that what we think doesn’t matter unless we’re organized and ready to revolt about it. And that actually does tie their hands at times, when they know they can’t go too far or they’ll have a revolt on their hands.

[00:09:08] The answer (to us) is to build the working-class movement. If the ruling class is going to be centralized and organized in the things that they are doing, in their whole shift to the right to maintain capitalism, even in all of its crises, what we need to respond is a centralized, organized, committed movement of the working class which is much larger and has much more power than we can show than when we’re disorganized, right? We’re not powerless. We’re just harmless when we’re disorganized.

[00:09:43] And that’s why we have been putting out our program and we have been trying to convince people that we can’t keep pretending that the Democrats are going to come in and save us or that anyone is going to come in and save us.

[00:09:55] Honestly, we all saw students peacefully sitting across campuses all around the country, and they were attacked by the cops, brutally, on video. And this was Joe Biden, and it was in cities and states with Democratic mayors. The Democrats are not against authoritarianism. If they were, they would not peacefully transfer power to one.

[00:10:16] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): Our movement is going to continue to get more serious about our resistance to the program of the billionaires, the program of Trump and his cronies, the program of the ruling class that is fundamentally against the people of the United States. It’s against our interests. It’s against our values.

[00:10:37] Already, since he was elected, every day we have received some of the worst news about the people that he is choosing to lead the Trump government in 2025. Elon Musk is amongst them, and this is a total mask-off moment because it should be so obvious to us now that this is not just about Trump.

[00:10:59] It is about the vast majority of the ruling class, the billionaires that truly think that they run this country. and it’s about the project of those billionaires and their vision for total control over our lives, for total control over the government with as little oversight as possible, with as little democracy as possible.

[00:11:23] Marco Rubio, extremely hawkish on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, China. Marco Rubio wants war. That’s what he wants. Tom Homan as the Trump border czar. Was actually appointed by Obama and was actually given the Presidential Rank Award by Obama for his successes in deporting more people than had ever been deported in a single period. That is who is going to be in charge of the immigration policy. That is the man who says he will begin mass deportations in the first 60 days of the Trump presidency.

[00:12:00] And one way that we can show how serious we are is mobilizing on Inauguration Day. In 2016, the anti-Trump protesters outnumbered the attendees of the Trump inauguration. We’re going to do it again.

[00:12:15] So Jan. 20, which is a Monday, and it’s also a federal holiday, a huge coalition of organizations have called a demonstration in Washington, D.C. And the PSL all around the country, in coalitions with many other organizations, are organizing demonstrations across the country, will mobilize in Portland on Jan. 20 (we haven’t announced details yet), to remind the ruling class, to remind Trump and his movement, that there is opposition.

[00:12:46] There is a multi-part series on LiberationNews.org that details Project 2025, all of the impacts that it could have for working people in this country, and how we can fight back. So highly recommend that.

[00:13:00] Rob Fisette (PSL Eugene): One thing people can do is go to pslweb.org/join, go there and check it out and get connected with us. Here in Eugene, we just launched an Instagram page. You can find us on Instagram, PSLEugene, and all of our events will be posted on there. So if you’re just looking to maybe attend, check us out. That’s a good place to start.

[00:13:23] Liberation News, which Mariah mentioned, has great analysis of Project 2025 and everything else that is going on in the world from the party’s perspective. And I also want to plug Breakthrough News which is a great place to get information about the struggles that are going on, not just in the U. S., but also around the world, from a working class perspective.

[00:13:45] And we’re having a Socialism 101 forum. We’re meeting with a lot of the people that have gotten in touch with us since the election. And it’s a free event open to the public. And we’ll be talking about capitalism socialism, what it is we’re actually fighting for, and how we’re going to do it.

[00:14:01] Mariah Denman (PSL Portland): And then for Portland events, this Sunday, Nov. 17, from 12 to 4 p.m., we have open hours at the Portland Liberation Center which is 6529 NE Sandy Blvd. We’ll discuss those Project 2025 articles, but you can also just come and hang out, check out our space, and meet some like-minded people.

[00:14:23] And then on Friday, Nov. 22 at 7 p.m. also at the Liberation Center, we will have a PSL interest meeting. You can come and learn about the PSL, meet our members, meet our organizers, and talk about, learn about how you can get involved. And we would love to see everyone there.

[00:14:41] Presenter: Mariah Denman in Portland and Rob Fisette in Eugene invite you to join the PSL in organizing to fight the Trump administration.