In the days and weeks before Americans vote for their next president, Donald Trump has reached deep inside the gutter for his latest stump speech material. He spent much of September insisting that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating the pets of locals. “Illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life,” Trump said at a California press conference in September. In his lone presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump claimed, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Even as local officials insisted that nearly all of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally, Trump promised to organize a large-scale deportation of them anyway. More recently, at a rally in early October, Trump traveled to Aurora, Colo., to rail against immigrants he described as “animals,” “barbaric thugs,” and “sadistic monsters.” As if to make Trump’s point, the campaign adorned the stage with life-size photos of the faces of Latino men.

Trump’s campaign has been fueled by racism, misogyny, and homophobia, a consistent and extraordinary display of bigotry in person and via commercials bombarding swing states across the country. And yet this race is razor close, leaving us to guess who may eventually win. Even as Trump’s campaign has offered little more than racist rants, lies, and a few incoherent economic policies (higher tariffs and eliminating taxes on tips for service workers), he stands as good a chance as Harris of winning the presidency.

How can this be? There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also shows that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, a recent survey found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

But even with these stark distinctions between the candidates, and also between Trump and voter preferences, Harris has struggled to rise in favorability or distinguish herself from Trump in this race, which remains a toss-up. Beyond identity, Harris was slow to fill out her presidential platform with programming to indicate how she would be different from Trump and the president she currently sits behind. When asked on a recent talk show how she diverges from Biden, Harris distinguished herself by highlighting her intention to appoint a Republican to her future cabinet. These kinds of antics threaten to undermine her support with Democratic voters who see themselves as progressives. While Democrats describe Trump as a fascist and Joe Biden went so far as to say that Trumpism and elements of the Republican Party seemed akin to “semi-fascism,” it is odd, as some kind of gesture toward bipartisanship, to insist on putting a Republican in the cabinet. Yet she is reaching for political gimmicks because even with what one could point to as the successes of the Biden administration, like its aggressive efforts to recover from the catastrophic economic effects of the pandemic, these issues have not earned Harris voters any more than they did for Biden.

Since Biden delivered his last State of the Union address in January, the U.S. has enjoyed the highest rate of economic growth, its lowest inflation in the past year, and the strongest wage growth among its peer nations in the G7. Rates of poverty and unemployment have fallen and remain at historic lows. This includes Black workers, who are also experiencing historically low rates of poverty and low rates of unemployment — though they are still higher than for white people. Biden’s presidential campaign was impervious to this supposed economic good news. Indeed, Harris’s run was made possible by the national shrug about Biden’s economic recovery — the so-called vibecession. But the problem was never just vibes. Much of those real material gains were undone by historically high inflation in 2022 that ate into the rising wages that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the worst of the pandemic as businesses tried to lure workers back. Almost half of Americans say they are not as “well-off now” as they were when Biden took office. Nearly 60 percent say the economy is getting worse. Given the ever-rising costs of essential goods — especially housing, health care, and education — they are not wrong.

Economic uncertainty and insecurity are underwriting some measures of the skepticism confronting Harris’s historic run. She has attempted to distance herself from Biden’s record, but it is difficult to do so when you are the vice president. But the reluctance of some segments of the Democratic Party’s core constituency to embrace Harris points to deeper problems for the Democratic Party. Harris’s weak support among Black voters has been a canary in the coal mine for months but has been ignored on the assumption that Trump’s bigotry would cohere these voters into alignment with Harris. Instead, Black support has continued to be a drag on Harris’s momentum.

Harris continues to poll lower among Black voters compared with Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. She has been stuck at around 80 percent with Black voters who say they will cast ballots for the Democratic candidate in the coming election. Black women are Harris’s biggest supporters, but the 83 percent who say they will vote for her is a notable drop from the historic high of 96 percent who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and even the 91 percent who voted for Biden in 2020. All the efforts of the Democratic Party to cast Harris’s campaign in the same light as Obama’s run in 2008 miss the ways that Obama’s legacy had changed by the end of his second term. By the time Obama left office, he and Michelle Obama might have been personally revered, but many Black voters were disappointed with his underwhelming presidency.

In 2016, with Trump challenging Hillary Clinton, 51 percent of Black people agreed that Obama’s presidency was “one of the most important advances” for Black Americans, but that was down from 71 percent in 2009. Only 37 percent of African Americans thought his administration had improved “race relations.” Last, 52 percent of Black people polled said that Obama’s policies had “had not gone far enough” to help Black people. But the most important barometer of disappointment with Obama’s presidency was the eruption of the Black Lives Matter social movement during the twilight of his administration. The idea that Harris is a revival of the spirit of Obama in 2008 fails to comprehend how the persistence of economic inequality and police abuse and violence created disillusionment at the end of his term. Of course, no one believed that it was Obama’s responsibility to single-handedly undo generations of racial discrimination during a two-term presidency, but when he was running for president in 2007, he obliquely presented his candidacy as the fruition of generations of civil rights struggles. When he traveled to Selma, Ala., in 2007 to give a speech to former leaders of the movement, he said, “We’re in the presence today of giants whose shoulders we stand on, people who battled not just on behalf of African Americans but on behalf of all of America; that battled for America’s soul, that shed blood, that endured taunts.” He added, “I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Of the previous generation, which he called “the Moses generation,” he said, “They took us 90 percent of the way there. We still got that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side.” But by 2012, when a chastened Obama was asked whether his administration had done enough for Black businesses in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, he said, “I want all businesses to succeed. I want all Americans to have opportunity. I’m not the president of Black America. I’m the president of the United States of America.”

In a recent poll of 589 Black voters, 84 percent of Democrat-affiliated respondents affirmed that their party “understands the problems of people like me” and 75 percent agreed with the statement that the Democratic Party “can fix the problems facing people like me.” But when confronted with the statement that the Democratic Party “keeps its promises,” only 60 percent agreed. The unresolved crises of both the Obama and then the Biden administrations — namely, persisting economic inequality and the continuing problem of police brutality in Black communities — have shaped many Black voters’ concerns and substantiated the claims that Democrats don’t keep their promises. Consider that nearly three-quarters of Black people in the U.S. believe that the “prison system” was designed “to hold Black people back” and almost 70 percent believe the same thing about the police, according to Pew. Sixty-five percent of Black people believe that “the economic system was designed to hold Black people back.” The numbers are even higher among Black adults with a college degree. The lack of resolution of or even serious engagement with these issues in the race for president has turned into a political crisis that now threatens to undermine Kamala Harris’s campaign. History is not cyclical but is in fact cumulative.

This is a better context with which to understand the small but clearly significant appeal of Trump to some Black men and a modestly increasing number of Black women. Instead of addressing the specific concerns Black voters have with the Democratic Party, Obama took it upon himself to intervene with one of his infamous scolds of a Black audience. In early October, during an election appearance in the swing state of Pennsylvania, he dismissed the erosion of support for Harris among Black men as sexist: “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” That may be a part of the mix, but the underlying assumption that Democrats are simply entitled to Black votes without having to account for their record is part of a larger political problem that is coming home to roost. The bigger issue for the Democrats is not the defection of Black voters to Trump but the potential indifference of Black voters to the election more broadly.

In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

It is a strategy that risks Harris’s standing among the core constituents of the Democratic Party, and it may threaten her influence among other voters as well. In focusing on the future, Harris avoids talking about the past. She has defined her campaign as a “new way forward,” but this framing — intended both to distinguish her campaign from Trump’s while also distancing herself from Biden — has left her campaign unable to politically contextualize and explain the inflation experienced during Biden’s term, which Republicans have blamed on his excessive spending. Instead of embracing the popular pandemic-era programs and the bolder aspects of Biden’s legacy — expanded unemployment insurance, student loan relief, antitrust measures, climate investments, and pro-union stances — and pledging to reintroduce or expand them, Harris acts as if it were all a mistake to move beyond in favor of some nebulous future.

Not just a poor strategy, it reflects the natural resting place of the Democratic Party. Biden’s gamble on a big welfare state in 2020 was the product of the combination of an unprecedented protest and a devastating pandemic, not a real commitment to using public money to break with decades of neoliberal austerity. The previous two presidential races unfolded against a backdrop of an insurgent Black Lives Matter movement and the leftward pull of Bernie Sanders placing uncomfortable demands on the party. In this race, though, activist currents in the dormant BLM movement quickly fell in line to back Harris with no demands and a narrow focus on simply getting out the vote. Sanders, along with many members of the Squad, are also marching in lockstep with the Harris campaign, despite her retreat from the more progressive positions she took in 2020. Harris’s consultants and campaign operatives have restored the Democrats’ messaging around policing, market economics, and reactionary immigration policies while dropping any pretense of social democratic programs that made Sanders’s run for president so popular. Moreover, Harris’s refusal to consider any deviation from Biden’s commitment to Israel has also undermined her support from constituencies she needs to win this year’s race.

The irony is that when Sanders ran in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party primaries, his candidacy set the terms for a broad field. In a race to catch up with the front-running Sanders, Harris even adopted his policy proposals around free public health care and college. But in this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters.

It remains to be seen how many of these voters — Black, brown, young, working-class, without college degrees — can be mobilized to vote for Harris. But the Democratic Party’s dependence on the charisma of its older cohort, particularly Obama, relies on a stagnant image of history, one where we never learn the lessons of the past. In reality, voters carry their political resentments and disappointments into the future — not for the sake of cultivating political villains, but because their circumstances have not improved enough that they can afford to forget.