What can we learn from the results of the 2020 election?

The 2020 election broke the record for the most ballots cast and is set to be one of the largest percentage turnouts of eligible voters recorded. The massive vote total produced all sorts of contradictory results. In Florida, Trump won alongside a $15/hr minimum wage ballot measure. In California, Democrats won a thumping victory even while referendums for workers rights and rent control went down by large margins. Legal weed triumphed in “deep blue” New Jersey and “dark red” South Dakota. The Movement for Black Lives and QAnon have supporters in the incoming Congressional freshman class while Arizona, but not Illinois, voted to tax the rich. The record participation — and record cost — seems totally incongruous to the main battle. President-elect Biden campaigned principally on character and competence rather than any particular policy. Biden infamously assured wealthy donors “nothing would fundamentally change.” He sold access to campaign policy advisors, trumpeted Wall Street support for his economic plan and constantly promoted cooperation with the right-wing. All this was packaged as a return to the “pre-Trump status quo.” Ultimately, the election boiled down to a referendum on Trump and his program. But the results defy oversimplified narratives. A variety of journalists in the corporate media are attempting their own crude type of “class analysis,” trying to draw out larger political truths about the U.S. working class based on the results. These should be viewed with skepticism. Their analysis is skewed not only by their own individual class biases but distorted fundamentally by the main choices on offer in the election. Put simply, no working class program was on the ballot when it came to the two main ruling class parties, while both presented themselves as better for working class households. Additionally, the corporate media uses totally flawed definitions of class and their reporting, as a rule, omits large sections of the poor and working people who did not vote. With all that being said, there still is value for socialists in studying the election results and identifying significant trends within them. A few preliminary conclusions are: the “middle classes” continue to play a decisive role in electoral outcomes, national oppression retains a deep significance in U.S. politics, and the much-discussed “white working class” is not the homogeneous political subject that the corporate media asserts. Read the full article: https://www.liberationnews.org/what-can-we-learn-from-the-results-of-the-2020-election/