After a year of assassination attempts, last-minute changes of candidates and protests, the US elections, which have been dominated by Israel's genocide in Gaza, have finally come to an end. According to the results in the first hours of the morning US time, Trump won critical states and regained the presidency. The main reasons for this were the genocide that everyone watched on live TV for a year, the melting wages and the republicanisation of the Democratic Party; they said nothing different from Trump. The biggest result of these elections is that the voters punished the genocide. The other, also related to this, is the percentage of votes received by the third candidate and the parties. Otherwise, the two candidates were no different.
As the CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company, said days before the election, it "doesn't really matter" who wins the US presidential election because both Trump and Harris will be good for Wall Street: "I'm tired of hearing that this is the biggest election of your life. The truth is... it doesn't matter... it really doesn't matter; we're working with both administrations and meeting with both candidates.
Throughout the night, critical states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona were, as expected, very close, and Virginia was added to these states for a while. But as the hours went on, as expected, the knot was untied in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In these states and in the base of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party turned a deaf ear to demands such as forcing a ceasefire and stopping Israel, developing policies against the climate crisis and treating immigrants as human beings; on the contrary, the Democratic Party insisted on a pro-genocide and pro-war, anti-environment and anti-immigrant platform. As a result, before midnight it was clear that Trump was going to win, the faces of the CNN anchors began to fall, and the Democratic election watch party fell silent.
PROTEST VOTES
The anti-war Green Party candidate Jill Stein emerged as the protest vote of this election. As the clock struck midnight, Stein had received more than 500,000 votes. Together with the other parties and independent candidates, the number of votes that did not go to either party was nearly two million. In the reactionary US electoral system, the third way is for a party to get 5 per cent of the vote nationally. Then the third party can get on the ballot and qualify for subsidies without having to collect a lot of signatures and money.
Months ago, on 3 March, I said: 'Biden will be defeated by his own voters' protest against 'abstention' on genocide. What started with abstentions in the primaries has spread to the streets, campuses, Democratic Party rallies and finally to the ballot box. Dearborn, Michigan, for example, is a city with a high concentration of Arabs and Muslims who have historically voted overwhelmingly Democratic. In addition to the blank cheques and bombs that Biden and Harris gave to Israel, all the demands of these communities, even their request to speak at the convention, were denied, and their leaders were banned from campaign events. Finally, as if in mockery, Zionists like Ritchie Torres and Bill Clinton were sent to Michigan to defend Israel's genocide. By midnight in Dearborn, Trump had 45 per cent of the vote, Stein 33 per cent and Harris only 15 per cent.
A Trump presidency will not solve genocide and wars, nor will it cure the erosion of wages or the climate crisis. But liberals, for example, who for a year have accepted genocide and tried to rationalise it, will now become anti-genocide because Trump is in the White House. As in the first Trump era, it is likely that Democrats will once again organise and take to the streets against Trump's policies, from the economy to the environment. The Democrats will have learned once again that being for war and genocide does not help the Democratic Party, and perhaps the rise of third parties will continue.
Aras Coşkuntuncel
