SPECIAL EDITION: ‘Murica & Straya Election Analysis

Now that Donald Trump’s second presidency has begun (words I never thought I’d type) it’s time to finally¹ deliver the post-election analysis I promised you all. It’s a long one, but with an Australian federal election just months away there is a lot we need to consider and discuss. You let me write 2400 words about the Barbie movie, so surely we can spend the same amount of words on this?!

First, some grounding context just so we’re all on the same page:

• Ultimately, by the numbers the Presidential election result was somehow both the close battle that was predicted and a clear Trump win – depending on which numbers you look at. Trump won all seven swing states and therefore the electoral college vote, which makes his victory margin look huge. But the popular vote was almost a 50/50 split, with Kamala Harris only losing by a mere 1.5%². 

• Although we’ll use the terms “left” and “right”, “liberal/ism” and “conservative/ism” here, I think the US political landscape in the US has changed to the point that these words no longer apply the way they used to. But I’ll stick with them for now because they are the terms that most people understand best, and we don’t have better, clear labels.

• This is my analysis, filtered through my own biases and opinion. I’m focusing on the points most relevant to Australians and addressing questions I have been asked directly. If you are American this is probably not for you, sorry!

Okay, enough caveats – let’s goooo. 

1. Capitalism’s Final Destination

2. The Education Apocalypse

3. Democrats vs leftists: Understanding political strategy

4. What this means for Australia’s federal election?

Capitalism’s Final Destination

This election result is what happens when you speedrun capitalism. Democracy and late-stage capitalism cannot coexist, because your ability to participate in democracy becomes tied to your finances and economic status. America could not be a clearer example of this.

In this article ($), Bernard Keane explains the acceleration of this started in the 1980s, taking decades to build to this political moment – the beginning of American corporate oligarchy:

“[Ronald Reagan] helped establish a new era of privatisation, smashing unions, deregulation, free trade and obeisance to corporations, which lasted until the Obama years. It initially delivered rises in standards of living but dramatically worsened inequality, increased the political dominance of corporate interests, eventually gutted the American middle class, deindustrialised much of the economy, and imposed precarity as a fundamental aspect of economic life on all but the richest Americans.”

When you exist perpetually on the brink, there isn’t time to consider much beyond surviving. We don’t often talk about the level at which you need to stay informed in order to participate in democracy effectively – yes, even in Australia. I’ve made a career of telling people they need to consume media widely, even knowing that 90% of people don’t listen to my fantastic advice – because they can’t. Who has the time!?

When you hear those captured by the MAGA-right talk about how the white working class has been abandoned and betrayed by “the elites”, they are both racist and correct. The entire working class (not just the white ones) including white collar professionals have intentionally held down to prop up the wealthy and corporations. The splintering of America’s economy began with Reagan, but both parties betrayed the people by failing to create it.

Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the UnitedHealthcare CEO, is a good example of what I mean. The support for him does not fall cleanly along partisan lines or the left-right divide. It is an issue of class. The poverty cycle, the punishment of working class people by America’s brutal economic system, happens across the political spectrum. 

History shows us that economic hardship paves the way to fascism. And now, here we are.

The Education Apocalypse

Then there is the education element. Multiple studies have found that more than half of Americans read below a 6th grade level – that’s reading at best as well as an 11 year old. You might have heard this online wrapped up in the “dumb Americans” trope, but when you really sit and consider the structural and systemic ways³ the American public has been let down by its education system, it’s heartbreaking. Many commentators are saying the US education system is on the brink of collapse. But it’s not happening to everyone equally. The expensive, elite private schools are not failing to educate and equip students like the criminally underfunded and politically-abandoned public schools.

With this in mind, consider how an American with grade 6 literacy skills might engage with the political campaigns of the 2024 election. The Democrats’ key message was that democracy is at stake under a second Trump president – very true. But how does an 11-year-old understand ‘democracy’ as a concept? What does this message really mean? Trump, on the other hand, just says things that people angry at the system want to hear, in very simple language. The lack of policy detail is an advantage, because the voting public is mostly incapable of understanding those details. For example, he said imposing tariffs would bring groceries prices down. “Cheaper groceries” is something everyone can understand, even a child. They don’t understand the policy part⁴, but it doesn’t matter because they voted for the promise, not the policy.

The splintering of Australia’s public and private schooling systems is not as extreme as in the US, but it’s still worrying and plays a role in how people vote. Our national literacy data is badly out of date, but according to the latest ABS literacy survey in 2013, only 13% of Australian adults read at a grade 6 level or lower. 

Democrat vs leftists: Understanding political strategy

In the 2024 election, the Democratic Party saw themselves as a centre-left party that made a choice to appeal to centre-right voters (who they considered to be ‘moderate’ traditional Republicans too sensible to vote for Trump). To win those voters, Harris and her team shifted the party’s policies and rhetoric to the right. 

In reality, by this election the Democratic Party was already a centrist party⁵. Chasing those ‘moderate’ Republican voters meant the party moved to the centre-right, too far for their centre-left voters base.

They figured there were enough people who would always vote Democrat no matter what; who would grit their teeth and forgive the party for taking a more conservative stance to pick up moderate Republicans in order to win (especially with Trump as the ‘Big Bad’ alternative). But it turns out there were a) not enough voters who would unconditionally support the Democratic party, and b) not enough ‘sensible’ Republicans who would actually vote blue. 

Moving away from the political left lost them votes – about 6.3 million votes when compared to Biden’s performance in 2020. It’s unlikely that the majority of these people ‘flipped’ to the Republican party (Trump also got around 3 million less than he did in 2020), which means they either didn’t turn up or voted for a third party candidate.

Which brings us to something I’ve been nervous to write about: the strategy of Withholding Your Vote. Many progressives online said they didn’t understand the strategy behind withholding votes (Abbie Chatfield made a lot of TikTok videos asking about this) so I think it’s important to unpack. 

Many voters were justifiably upset about the Democratic Party’s commitment to continue funding Israel’s apartheid and genocide of Palestinians. So, they made a public demand of Harris’ campaign: change your stance on Israel or I will not vote for you. 

Come election time, the only thing you have that a politician wants is your vote. They are asking you for something, instead of the other way around. It’s the one time you have a lot of leverage (which I’ve written about before). Withholding your vote and publicly stating why, is one way to use that leverage at a critical time for the politician or party. There are two important factors in making the demand:

• Timing: If you make the demand after the politician has already won, they can just ignore you. They already got what they wanted, so what you want is irrelevant (until the next election campaign, many years from now when the situation will have changed).
  

• Consequences: If you say “You must change your stance on Israel, but I will vote for you anyway” the argument is much less compelling. The politician has nothing to lose if they ignore you, as they already have your vote – the only thing they want. They can ignore your request (no longer really a demand) and focus on convincing others whose support has not been guaranteed. 

The leftist strategy here was to publicly pressure the Democrats to back off on the genocide, with clear consequences: the threat of either not voting at all, or vote third party. It’s making the point that your vote is not guaranteed and must be earned. It’s a negotiation tactic. 

As part of this strategy, what you actually write on the ballot is irrelevant. You could still vote Democrat (many online said that’s what they ended up doing), could vote third party (especially those in safe blue states where the votes mattered less) or not vote at all. The drop in votes suggests many took the third option.

Here is an example of this strategy in Australia: Before the date of the Voice to Parliament referendum was announced, Senator Lidia Thorpe made Albanese a deal – if he agreed to implement the recommendations of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, she would not campaign against the Voice. She believed the Voice would be performative and that a treaty (among other things) was more important. She withheld her support to get something she wanted. Albanese refused the deal, and Thorpe campaigned for a No vote that ultimately won. 

In the end, the leftist strategy of withholding votes obviously did not work in the US election. There is no such thing as a foolproof strategy. Just because you don’t agree with a certain tactic, that does not mean it is illegitimate or that it lacks logic. It could just as easily be said that the Liberal strategy of voting Democrat first and asking for action on Gaza after the election is an illogical strategy that is doomed to fail. 

What does all this mean for Australia?

Ok, I really hope you read all of that but if you just took the jump link straight here, I don’t blame you! 

We need to be very, very wary of importing the US election talking points directly into the coming federal election. Yes, Peter Dutton’s Coalition, News Corp, Nine and SevenWest Media, and fringe extremists like Pauline Hanson are trying to copy-paste the issues and strategies here… which is exactly why we should resist doing the same. Australia is not immune to the conservative shift happening in some places (not all places!) around the world, but there is so much about our social, cultural and political landscape that is different to the US. We are not at the same endpoint of late-stage-captalism-giving-way-to-corporate-oligarchy that America is! Social democracy is part of Australia’s political history, in a way that it has never been in the States. We do not have a two-party system like America! We do not need to play that game. 

Think about it: if Trump deployed these tactics in the US and won, and the Democrats tried a strategy and lost… then we should not replicate the Democrats strategy. Right?

That lesson applies both to the Labor party and us as voters.

The lesson for Labor: You cannot win by shifting to the right. Like the Democrats, Labor is not a party on “the left” and hasn’t been for a long time. When you’re already centre-right, the voters to the right of you are… people who are probably not going to vote for you anyway, based on what the ‘Labor’ political brand used to represent decades ago (even though they probably would agree with the party’s current policies and stance). The evidence is in the ‘teal’ independent movement – as much as voters in Wentworth and Kooyong and Goldstein hated Morrison and wanted to get rid of him, they have never and will never vote for Labor7. Shifting to the right will only diminish the true Labor pro-worker base who believe that some services are better provided by the government than private business (you know, social democracy).

The lesson for voters: I am terrified by the amount of people that I see on a daily basis saying that criticising Albanese or the Labor party directly benefits Dutton. I am very concerned to see people spreading the myth that “splitting the vote” by voting for the Greens or independents will elect Dutton’s Coalition. The Labor party is itself spreading this myth, which is incredibly irresponsible and disempowering. Labor and the Liberal party are both working to weaken the status of independents and minor parties and would love to move towards a more US-style two-party system to retain power for themselves.

Our system is far from perfect, but voting for a minor party or independent is completely different to voting “third party” in the US. Australia’s preferential voting gives you so much control. 

Dutton has every reason to use Trump’s playbook, because it worked! But we have the power to stop it working – we can reject the ideas, we can refuse to entertain them socially (by that I mean, while responsible media should still continue to report on what Dutton promises and does, as individuals we don’t have to debate his ideas with each other in social settings as if they are legitimate). We can continue to hold Labor accountable for the ways it failed in government. We can continue to ask tough questions of Greens candidates and independent candidates. Now is the best time to do all of the above. 

No normal person I know wants Australia’s political landscape to become more like America’s. The good news is, that’s entirely within our control. 

– Crystal
Founder & Chief of Everything at Zee Feed
Follow me on Instagram or TikTok

FOOTNOTES:

1 Apologies that it’s coming later than I had hoped! I knew I wouldn’t be able to do this analysis justice while travelling with family over the summer break and being knocked on my ass with a few consecutive illnesses. Hope this is worth the wait!

2 For reference, the controversial 2000 Al Gore vs George W Bush election that was so close it had to be decided by the Supreme Court had a margin of 0.5%. In the 2020 election, Biden won the popular vote by 4.4% over Trump. 

3 A big part of the reason is that for basically an entire generation, the American school system did not teach kids to read properly. You know how in primary school you were taught phonetics, how to sound out letters and sounds to make words? Yeah, in the US they taught them to… guess. I’m not joking. Reading this article explaining the insane method they were taught is so heartbreaking, and is a big reason why so many adult Americans are illiterate. The flow on effects are huge, and are starting now – how does a parent who can’t read help a child with their homework?  

4 There was a spike in searches for “who pays for tariffs” weeks after the election when Trump started announcing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. The answer is, of course, consumers, which a portion of voters did not know or believe at before voting for Trump. 

5 This was an interesting read (published during the campaign) on America’s rightward slide.

If you found this email thought-provoking, will you share it with a friend? Sharing helps us grow 🌱 and makes you look really smart.