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Five insights on race, class, and gender in the 2024 presidential election from Professors Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Leah Wright Rigueur
Two days after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Professor Leah Wright Rigueur hosted an online conversation addressing the current political moment. Examining exit poll data, the two historians worked together to make sense of the election’s outcome — and what it means for the future of American democracy.
In case you missed it, this article recaps the most salient points from the webinar hosted by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project.
The evening began with a reflection on the promise of Vice President Kamala Harris as an historic public figure. Professor Rigueur pointed out that, as the first Black woman and first Southeast Asian person to be a major party candidate, Harris carries undeniable “substantive symbolism.”
This symbolism, she explained, imbued Harris’ campaign with “the potential to turn itself into a movement.” However, the campaign ultimately fell short, as the vast majority of U.S. counties — urban, suburban, and rural — swung to the right. Given the razor thin polls, Biden’s low approval ratings, and the last minute emergence of Harris as the Democratic Party candidate, Rigueur said we ought to have known better, lamenting, “The writing was on the wall.” She reassured the audience that the rightward shift is not necessarily “a hard shift or a permanent shift.”
Although the discussion centered on recent political events, the two speakers maintained a focus on the future. “It is an election that should force us to think differently about both our class politics but also our racial politics,” explained Rigueur.
A recurring concept throughout the evening’s discussion was that of ‘grievance populism,’ which is a form of populism that plays to people’s frustrations — both real and perceived — with the status quo. Rigueur shared how, in this election, grievance populism “allowed Trump to use the vehicle of whiteness and privilege to push a very specific agenda” by scapegoating economic and social grievances onto people of color and immigrants through racist narratives.
Rigueur posed a critical question to the audience: In the context of the 2024 election, why did the Democratic Party experience an erosion of support when it came to addressing grievances?
Exit poll data from the 2024 election and the prior four elections show that voters of color, and Black voters especially, have remained loyal to the Democratic party. Seventy-seven percent of Black men cast their vote for Harris, which was just two points less than they had for Biden in 2020.
Muhammad took exception to news reports that Black and Latino voters equally swung toward Trump. “The intensity of the shift towards Trump is not the same in both of those groups,” he showed.
Agreeing wholeheartedly, Rigueur called out those who use Black male voters as a scapegoat for the Democratic Party’s loss. Her retort was straightforward: “Black and Latino men are not the problem. In fact, [they] are behaving in ways that look very historically accurate in terms of their relationship to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.”
Rigueur went on to explain that “it is absolutely a fallacy to assume that demographics must be destiny. The remarkable thing is: the Republican Party figured that out. It is amazing to me that the Democratic Party has yet to figure that out.”
The conversation reached its peak when the professors animatedly discussed a recent opinion piece in the New York Times by David Brooks, in which he criticizes the Democratic party for not focusing enough on class inequality and thus too much on racial and gender inequality. In the article, Brooks ridicules Democratic elites for engaging in “identitarian performance art.”
Both speakers called out Brooks’ contradiction in ignoring the way Trump has weaponized his own identity and those of millions of other white men in order to argue they are under attack by Democrats. Muhammad challenged the causation that working-class white voters were ignored by the Democratic Party because, as Brooks puts it, the Democrats focus too much “on racial inequality, gender inequality, and LGBTQ issues.”
Though the speakers disagreed with Brooks on the mutual exclusivity of racial politics, gender politics, and class politics, they did agree with him on a key takeaway: the Democratic Party’s “milquetoast centrist approach,” as Rigueur described it, was not meeting the needs of the working class.
Rigueur depicted the relationship between working class voters and the Democratic party: when voters says ‘Hey, we are feeling the pain’, the Democratic party responds, ‘But the other guy is racist!’ She commented, “That doesn’t solve the pain that people are feeling on a day-to-day basis.”
Muhammad quoted another article by Natasha Lennard in The Intercept, which criticizes the Democratic Party not only for failing to offer a progressive economic agenda, but also for trying to out-compete the Republican Party for right-of-center voters. Lennard writes, “The Democratic establishment has made clear that it is committed to a failed policy of appealing to the right, only to lose to the right.”
The future of American democracy, the speakers noted, is closely tied to the left’s ability to confront and counter rising fascism. With so much at stake, the audience was eager to hear their visions for the left.
By the end of the conversation, the historians took the webinar’s opening question one step further, asking: How do we build a movement that can challenge the right’s grievance populism?
Rigueur spoke with urgency: “We need to see a movement politics that is unafraid to ‘take a risk’ of leaning into the most vulnerable populations in our nation.” In other words, there is a need to build a movement around working class white voters and the very people Brooks suggested were getting too much attention from Democrats: Black and Latino voters who are economically doing worse than their white counterparts and have less education.
An ‘aha moment’ came for the webinar when Rigueur offered a clear vision: “It’s not simply enough to mobilize a movement — you also have to institutionalize a movement” by building the Democratic Party from the grassroots up. Otherwise, she warned, once the election is over, the movement dissipates, moving the country back into a rightward-shifting cycle.
“At the end of the day, I’m not willing to blame the left,” Muhammad shared. “When it has become a non-starter to talk about the Green New Deal as somehow alienating to white populist voters ‘because it’s socialism,’ that’s absurd. [The fact that] the Democratic Party itself would give that up only for the purposes of winning elections, to me, misses the opportunity to build a mass movement around the necessary ingredients, both to put people to work, and to build an infrastructure that is sustainable.”
Looking beyond the country’s two-party system, Muhammad wrapped up the webinar and offered a bold vision: “I want to put my hat in the ring for a new vision of greater choices for voters that are not constrained by a zero-sum choice, as we consistently see, and the people who keep losing by it.”
A recording of the webinar is available for free via YouTube, published by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project promotes antiracism as a core value and institutional norm through rigorous research and real-time policy analysis. The IARA Project researches what works — and doesn’t work — to create antiracist change. Founded and led by Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the IARA Project is based at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. Learn more at iara.hks.harvard.edu.
Additional Resource
The insights and feedback gathered at the event will guide IARA’s forthcoming report, which aspires to catalyze ongoing policy, advocacy, and community-based efforts for social change.
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Additional Resource
The insights and feedback gathered at the event will guide IARA’s forthcoming report, which aspires to catalyze ongoing policy, advocacy, and community-based efforts for social change.
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Six seasoned speakers offered practical strategies for confronting the anti-DEI movement at the sixth annual conference of the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project.
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