Continuing my series into understanding the factors that contributed to Donald Trump’s re-election as President of the United States, I turn now to the question of the role the Democrats played.

First was the role that outgoing president, Joe Biden, played. To be frank, it was a folly for him to have been the candidate in the first place. During the 2020 election campaign, messages from his campaign gave the impression to many — especially young voters — that he intended to be a bridge candidate, that he would not seek re-election, and that he would instead oversee a generational transfer of power within the Democratic Party.

This was never made formal, the rationale being that doing it early on would render Biden a lame duck, undermining his negotiating power with Republicans. Nonetheless, it was widely thought in Democratic circles that he would not stand again and instead preside over an open primary to select his successor.

That this didn’t happen demoralised large swathes of the Democratic base. That his apparent cognitive decline had been stage-managed, only to be revealed in his disastrous debate performance, further compounded the problem for the Democrats — especially with swing voters. In a sense, the damage was done at that point and the Democrats faced a near-impossible task to salvage their campaign — and left a poisoned chalice for his successor and the future of the party.

The key lesson here is that, faced with an unpopular and ailing candidate, the Democrats left it too late to change course — arguably it might have been better to stay the course to not set back the next generation of Democratic leadership.

That Biden’s successor, Kamala Harris, faced both racist and sexist attacks from the Maga movement is best treated in a separate piece looking at how both White and male fragility is a core aspect of American fascist resurgence.

Harris thus found herself in a poor starting place to begin with; however, that doesn’t mean her defeat was inevitable. It was decisions by the Harris campaign that compounded her problems and ensured her defeat.

One of the problems for the Democrats was their position on the genocide in Gaza. In the face of daily atrocities by Israel — even if Western media engaged in self-censorship — internal assessments by the US Government itself, well-catalogued evidence of atrocities by respected international bodies such as the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, blatant genocidal intent voiced by Israeli officials, and rulings by the International Criminal Court, the Democrats took the political decision to aid and abet genocide in Gaza.

Even their “red line” on Rafah was found to be less a red line than a green light, with no real repercussions in the face of war crimes and atrocities. The result of this was to alienate key sections of the Democratic voter base, especially the youth vote and, importantly, the Arab vote in the key battleground state of Michigan.

This is not to say that Trump is a friend of Palestine — something underlined by his recent advocacy of mass ethnic cleansing. However, for Democrats, this strategy of supporting genocide overseas and alienating key voters, was not simply self-destructive behaviour, but political suicide.

As if their support for genocide wasn’t enough, the Democrats then actively looked to further hurt their chances by moving away from popular policies.

When Harris became the Democratic candidate, she voiced a position of economic populism, taking a strong stand on greedflation — corporate gouging of consumers through artificial inflation — the need for greater rent control and subsidies for first-time homebuyers, and a general focus on addressing corporate greed. These were extremely popular policies — and even the Democrats’ internal polling showed that they were the ones most likely to win voters away from Trump.

Nonetheless, by mid-September the Harris campaign pivoted away from these policies. What happened? The very corporate elites that Harris’s initial economic populism critiqued gained increasing power over her campaign, leveraging their campaign donations, and this led to her going silent on those popular policies. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune, as the saying goes. This cost the Democrats working-class voters, particularly in key battleground states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, further reducing their potential path to victory.

As a final act of self-destruction, the Democrats then adopted yet another strategy: tacking to the Right to both attract old-school Republicans and Trump-leaning swing voters. Having alienated key members of their support base — youth, Arab-Americans, workers — the idea appears to have been to compensate by attracting “Republican Lite” right-wing voters. Thus, the spectacle of the key Bush era, Trump 1.0, even reaching back all the way to Reaganites, with the Democrats attempting to portray themselves as the true heirs to Reagan. Rather than attracting Republican voters — analysis of post-election polls showed even non-Trump Republicans voted overwhelmingly for Trump — all this achieved was to further alienate the Democratic base.

The key lessons, then, are:

1, If your leader is unpopular and ailing, change your leader, sooner rather than later

2, Don’t confuse what’s popular with your elite donors with what’s popular with your actual voters

3, Don’t aid and abet a genocide, especially when you have built your main argument on being more ethical than your rival

4, Don’t try to be a lite version of your rival — conservatives will always prefer the original

• Jonathan Starling is a socialist writer with an MSc in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Heriot-Watt University