ANALYSIS | We Live in a New World Now: Takeaways From the 2024 Election

On Tuesday, Donald Trump emerged with a clear victory in the presidential election. Republicans also gained control of the Senate, and are poised to do the same in the House. The GOP also flipped control of at least one state legislature, broke some Democratic supermajorities, and gained some of their own supermajorities, all while retaining a higher number of governorships and legislative majorities overall.

Washington, by contrast, was the only state in the nation to shift left. Besides expanding control of our state’s two legislative bodies, we elected Democrats to every single state executive office, from Governor on down to the obscure but incredibly important Commissioner of Public Lands position. Incumbent U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez beat out MAGA Republican Joe Kent in the state’s District 3, which Trump won. In Seattle, we sent progressive candidate Alexis Mercedes Rinck to the City Council over appointed incumbent Tanya Woo with a 58% to 42% lead and an eye-popping 70% turnout — a stunning mandate, thanks to the turnout boost she got from being on an even-year ticket. Her fellow progressive, Shaun Scott, enjoyed a similar victory in the city’s 43rd Legislative District, smashing We Heart Seattle founder and not-so-secret Republican Andrea Suarez 68% to 30%. We also passed the all-important transportation levy by about 66% to 34%.

Better yet, three out of the four initiatives proposed by conservative hedge fund millionaire Brian Heywood failed miserably, preserving our state’s first-of-its-kind cap-and-trade program, our socialized long-term care insurance program, and a capital gains tax on stock profits that provides massive funding to education.

So, while the outside world may be on fire, we’re fine, right? Kind of.

Sure, newly elected Gov. Bob Ferguson can rely upon his legislative trifecta to enshrine abortion rights in law, extend protections to immigrants, and generally shield our state from the worst that Trump can do as president. Indeed, Ferguson and his successor for Attorney General, Nick Brown, have already said they’ll fight back against Trump’s bad policies. Ferguson rose to fame by suing the Trump administration 82 times. When it comes to our rights, we can certainly rest a little easier here than the rest of the country.

What we can’t afford to do in Washington is ignore the lessons of this election. Sure, it could be interpreted as a turn toward bigotry, hate, and fear — and in many ways, it is — but that would take away from the main takeaway here, which is that our fellow citizens’ patience with the existing order has finally worn thin. Trump won the popular vote, but he did it without gaining any votes over his previous showing. Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, lost about 11 million people who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

Make no mistake, Harris ran entirely on an appeal to preserve the existing order. By the end of her campaign, she pitched herself as a hard-line moderate, making campaign appearances with none other than Dick Cheney, the architect of the Iraq War, and promising to include Republicans in her cabinet. Meanwhile, she derided Arab American voters and young voters upset by our country’s ongoing support for war and genocide across the globe.

As many, many people warned, Harris’ coterie of Never Trump Republicans did absolutely nothing to sway actual Republicans and undecided voters. Why, if you are upset with how things are going, would you elect the people who have kept them going that way for decades?

Rejecting that coalition, rejecting those people, is a rejection of the government those people built. Both parties — the Democrats and the pre-Trump Republicans — have built a government that does virtually nothing the people it governs want and virtually everything that corporations and the ultra-rich ask of it, all while the leaders of that government thumb their noses at anyone who dares to complain about it. So while 11 million people who voted for Biden saw Harris and her crew and said, “Ight imma head out,” it doesn’t mean they’re disengaged. It means they want a government that works for them, both literally and figuratively, and in tangible, legible ways. They want a government that doesn’t laugh at their concerns. 

Trump, even though he is worse in so, so many ways, has always understood this. When the government begrudgingly coughed up some stimulus checks to keep the economy from absolutely collapsing during COVID-19 lockdown, Trump made a point of signing his name on every single one. It may be impossible for a man with a golden toilet to understand everyday people, but he at least understands that money talks, and that it talks especially loudly to people who don’t have much of it. Indeed, his campaign is marked by constant promises to improve the basic economic lives of Americans, even if he is frequently lying outright or living in a fantasy (How, exactly, are tariffs going to reduce grocery prices?). 

What’s more, despite the fact that it was motivated by pure political cynicism — his researchers determined at the last minute that an anti-war message was a winner in key battleground states — he listened to voters on issues related to war and specifically the war in Gaza. Even if he’s only paying lip service, he’s at least paying attention, which is more than you can say for the Democratic Party. Harris and her associated acts have limited their engagement on the issue to smarmily patronizing, outright ignoring, or even mocking anyone who asks for an honest answer about why we keep sending Israel weapons.

Long story short, we very clearly don’t like what the two-party system has been doing, and we’re ready to do away with it. Even if it means smashing the country to bits, apparently.

In Washington, where we’ve had one party in charge for a very long period of time, things are a bit different. As some have pointed out, one-party rule has done okay by us, which could explain why establishment Democrats did so well. As evidence, the one Washington race that had the most to do with questions of war, in District 9, went to incumbent District 9 U.S. Rep. Adam Smith over anti-war, pro-Palestine challenger Melissa Chaudhry by a handy margin. And while Gluesenkamp Perez’s win was a nice surprise for Democrats, she herself is pro-Israel and far from progressive. Which is all to say that, while Democrats in Washington didn’t suffer for their party’s arrogance on the issue of Gaza, they should not ignore what it cost Harris.

The fact that she lost the important Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, by 2,600 votes, while Biden won it by 17,400 in 2020 should still be a shot across the bow of the pro-war arm of the Democratic party, especially given that progressive, pro-Palestine Democrat Rashida Tlaib won the district with more than double Harris’ vote totals. Disparate as the results of our local elections may seem from national ones, it’s also worth noting that Harris is set to take home over 600,000 fewer votes in Washington than Biden did, despite winning the state.

While Smith, Gluesenkamp Perez, and the Washington State Democratic establishment writ large may have gotten a pass that Democrats in other states didn’t, it also doesn’t mean the same hunger for change doesn’t exist here. Turning our eyes to more local election results, there is plenty of evidence that voter frustration played a part.

To wit, Rinck’s victory was a repudiation not so much of what the centrist City Council promised to do, but the fact that, handed a mandate of sorts in the 2023 election, it’s done what every Council does in Seattle: nothing anyone who doesn’t work for Publicola could explain to you.

Rinck may be an arch-bureaucrat herself, and is by no means the police-abolishing, window-smashing protester attack ads made her out to be, but she does actually have some straightforward ideas about what she wants to do. To make a very long story short, she wants to build social housing, tax the rich, and invest in proven solutions to homelessness, like JustCARE. 

While her opponent, Tanya Woo, certainly had some ideas — or at least listened to some other people with ideas — about what to do about homelessness, housing, and other hot-button Seattle issues, Woo joined a Council that was essentially promising to clean up downtown overnight. A year is not so long to do that, but when the evidence of your failure is several entire city blocks long, well, we got to see exactly what happens at the ballot box.

Rinck’s vote totals exceeded not only her opponent, but also the vote totals of every single right-leaning incumbent who won their seat in 2023. Inasmuch as vote totals translate to mandates, hers is bigger than current Council President Sara Nelson’s. No wonder the conservative Seattle Times editorial board is already bleating about the need to keep City Council elections on an odd-year cycle. When voters turn out en masse, as they did for this election and tend to do in even years when there are national races on the ticket, they vote for candidates who can clearly articulate their ideas for a better society.

Anyone who is struggling to afford housing in Seattle (or anywhere in the state), anyone who is stuck in line waiting for a ferry that’s been canceled due to crew shortages or maintenance issues, anyone who is still out on the streets after we’ve spent untold billions to “end” homelessness, anyone who is bouncing around pothole-ridden streets with a lapful of hot coffee on a loud, dirty city bus — all of these people can tell you in pretty plain language what we need to do better. 

Rinck, a renter and transit rider, is one of those people. So is Scott, whose “A Better Washington” platform includes simple, legible facts, like, “The majority of renters can’t afford rent.”

It’s time — past time — to translate the work of our government into that kind of plain language. To do good work and communicate clearly what we’ve done. Our state has made some decent starts, like with the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) and its widely communicated, well-articulated connections to improvements in our transit infrastructure and tax revenue. Heaven knows the CCA would not have survived the onslaught of I-2117, whose backers did not hesitate to package their bad ideas in appealing, easy-to-understand messaging, if it was not easy to understand how much money the carbon market has already made us to do things we like, like providing free youth transit and fixing sidewalks around schools.

What our state’s politicians will be tasked with, going forward, is to do a lot more. To stand up to Trump will take more than 82 lawsuits this time around. It will take our politicians drawing a contrast between his bombastic, low-information style of governing, and what has the potential to be a no nonsense, action-oriented administration with wins on housing, homelessness, transit, infrastructure, and all the other things that touch people’s lives in tangible ways. We need to stop talking about things like progressive tax reform, free public transit, and social housing as wild-eyed impossibilities and make them actualities.

Here in Seattle, to break up the torpor introduced by the current Council’s dearth of ideas outside of paying cops more, we’ll need a Council minority in Rinck and District 2 Councilmember Tammy Morales that kicks and screams and cries bloody murder until their colleagues join them in doing something, anything, to improve our city. Our city will need a Democratic Socialist like Scott in the legislature, loudly telling more senior politicians to stop talking and start doing. And showing up with suggestions on what, exactly, to do.

What happened on the national stage happened because the basic contract between the governed and those they are governed by has broken down in this country. We stopped believing we had a say because the people in power didn’t give us one. As this journalist learned in Argentina last November, when a centrist, neoliberal government stops listening, the fascists are always more than happy to take their place.

Here in Washington, however, we didn’t take the bait. The contract is more or less in place, and thus we’ve got a unique opportunity to prove that it can still work. That politicians can listen more to constituents than to the donor class, and by doing so, craft policy that meaningfully improves people’s lives. Hopefully, our local politicians take advantage of that opportunity. The period following this election may be their last chance to do so.