Mary Cooper has been visiting Rye for the festival for many years. She wrote articles in Rye News in 2021 about the previous US election and lives in Washington DC.
When I was asked to write a reflection on the 2024 election, I looked forward to doing that thinking that we were on the verge of a new era. Our beloved president, Joe Biden had withdrawn from the race because of deteriorating health and had nominated his vice president, Kamala Harris as his successor. A former senator from California, she had a long history in government service, being his closest colleague and adviser for over three years. She would be opposing a disgraced former president who had been defeated by Biden in 2020 after grossly mismanaging the Covid epidemic and who faced trial and sentencing for criminal activities against the federal government and in several states.
The Democratic convention where Vice President Harris was nominated to succeed President Biden in January 2025 was a joy-filled triumph of theatrical management, featuring addresses by Presidents Biden, Clinton and Obama and their wives and including the nomination of Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota for vice president. Harris and Walz, with the former presidents and a number of stars from the entertainment world immediately spread out all over the nation campaigning and introducing Harris to the nation. Everything seemed to be going very well.
For the Republicans, former president Donald Trump performed as he always had, making long, rambling speeches in which he angrily attacked nearly every group in the society and blamed them for the country’s crime rate (which is actually declining), inflation (also declining), and for an “invasion” of immigrants over the southern border. During his first administration, immigration was a major issue but his policies to combat it were non-existent or ineffective and during the Biden years he had pressured his followers in Congress to prevent the passage of legislation that would have handled the situation humanely.
While he was president (2017-2021) Trump appointed judges all over the country and on the Supreme Court who opposed abortion, and the Supreme Court issued a ruling that put an end to 50 years of availability of medically administered abortion services, ruling “that the Constitution makes no reference to abortion and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision”. Many states immediately passed bans on abortion care, leading to a number of deaths of women who were unable to obtain a variety of necessary health services. Clearly this issue would be a major factor in the 2024 election and people would unite behind Harris and other candidates who supported the availability of the full range of medical services to women.
Another issue was the US role in the current conflict in the Middle East. The Biden administration sides with Israel, a position that is increasingly unpopular with the growing Muslim population in the country. Vice President Harris did not make her position clear on how to resolve this issue, which lost her support in states like Michigan with a large immigrant population.
Prior to the election, Trump stated that if he were not elected his supporters would likely protest as they did the last time, when they attacked the US Capitol. Just a day before the election, in a particularly vitriolic speech, he suggested that a former congresswoman who opposed him, the daughter of a former vice president, should be surrounded by nine men with guns aimed at her face. He has announced that he will carry out mass deportations as soon as he is in office, and he promises to appoint a health czar who opposes vaccines and wants fluoride removed from tap water. He wants to destroy NATO and withdraw the US from all international organizations. He is, essentially, an isolationist.
Democrats went into election day, November 5, feeling confident that their candidates, VP Harris and Governor Walz were very popular given the huge crowds they drew everywhere they went and the endorsements they had from popular politicians and celebrities. They relied heavily on the support of women of all ages, not realizing how effective Trump’s appeal to men who felt disenfranchised had been. The votes in nearly every state were close and participation was quite high, but in the end Trump was triumphant. Votes are still being counted in some places, but Trump has won the 270 electoral votes necessary to attain the presidency so the remaining votes are relevant only in some unresolved congressional races.
The next four years will be a challenging time for the United States and, because we live in an interdependent society, for the world.
Image Credits: PICRYL/The White House https://picryl.com/media/white-house-fb103e Public Domain CC https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/, commons.wikimedia.org https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Capitol_east_front_in_2020.jpg cc https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en.
Good too see a non bias article