President-elect Donald Trump’s victory has prompted deep introspection among groups that typically support the Democratic Party, including progressives.
Dorian Warren, co-president of Washington-based Community Change, is among those processing the election results. He said his organization, which partners with grassroots groups across the country, has focused on engaging “infrequent Black, brown and immigrant voters” in battleground states since early last year. Since January, these efforts reached 2.5 million voters through door-knocking, texting, email and phone calls, according to Domenica Ghanem, a spokesperson for Community Change.
Warren said that more must be done to motivate hard-to-reach voters, many of whom “stayed on the couch.” He also attributed Trump’s win to broader failures in Democratic Party messaging, including mishandling issues such as immigration and the pervasive influence of conservative media, as well as the need for progressive organizations to better reach key voting blocs.
Looking forward, Warren emphasized the need for bold action. Protecting low-income communities, immigrants and others at heightened risk during a second Trump term will require “improvisation, creativity” and a willingness to “take more risks with civil disobedience and disruption” than the progressive movement did during Trump’s first term, he said.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: What were your partner organizations hearing from voters? Did they have a sense that things were not going their way?
Dorian Warren: We kind of knew all along that there were some red flags in terms of lack of motivation, people not feeling some of the real objective economic policy wins of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration, as much as people from D.C. were shouting from the mountaintops, “Look at this record.”
Did they talk about being economically stressed?
Feeling economically stressed, yes. I think the harder challenge was a sense of political cynicism and powerlessness, like it doesn’t matter what I do.
Do you have a sense about where that political cynicism comes from?
I don’t know. I’m not saying it was across the board. But there is a sense of mistrust or disillusionment, a feeling like the system is rigged against us, that has built up over decades. I think you could say the same at the local and state level.
As we kept getting closer to Election Day, many of our base were motivated by the switch to Harris being at the top of the ticket. A lot of folks were motivated by the Trump threat, not necessarily the positive Harris campaign, but the threat.
“There’s lots of misogyny in the Black communities. But when they show up, almost eight in 10 Black men vote for the feminist candidate.”
What role did anger about inflation play in Trump winning the popular vote?
I would say the Democratic Party didn’t deliver tangible economic change that people felt. Did they objectively deliver economic change? Absolutely. Was it in a way in which people felt it? No. Did they stumble around immigrant rights on the border? Yes. Did they spend money on the wrong things? Yes. Could they have been more populist? Sure. Was there an anti-incumbent sentiment post COVID? Yes. Was there entrenched racism and sexism? Yes. Were they outplayed by conservative media? Yes. Did Harris fail to distance herself from the unpopular status quo of Biden? Yes. I mean, it’s like all of the above, right?
What about the xenophobia and racism that was front and center in his campaign?
I don’t know how to put more weight on some causal factors or influences over others. But here is the question I would ask: For all the talk about voters feeling economic anxiety, Democrats abandoning the working class, how was it the case that poor and working class Black women didn’t vote the same way as poor and working class white women? Or white men? You know what I mean? They were experiencing the same conditions. And they came to a radically different conclusion.
If the exit polls are correct, Trump deepened his support among Latino and Black men as well as among his white working class base. Did your partner organizations observe any signs of this?
Yes, there were some gains among Black men. But Black men are the second most feminist voting bloc in the country behind Black women. There’s lots of misogyny in the Black communities. But when they show up, almost eight in 10 Black men vote for the feminist candidate. OK, so that’s my rant.
I think the answer to your question is partly found in the eligible nonvoters who didn’t turn out. What we see is a shift to the right in the electorate. That doesn’t mean that the electorate as a whole shifted right; it means a whole bunch of people stayed on the couch. That was always what we were struggling with in terms of, particularly, Black men.
For Latino men and other communities, yes, we were hearing a little bit about support for Trump, but not in all cases. What we’re finding out now in the last week and a half is that a lot of Trump voters now feel like they can come out of the closet because there was a sense that before the election, it was almost shameful. We’re seeing a lot more people saying, “Yeah, I voted for him.” There was something going on that we have to reckon with, as progressives, about why we weren’t able to have those hard conversations.
Once people started becoming engaged, there was something that Trump was selling that appealed to them. There was something that Harris was selling that did not appeal to some of those voters. But even more so, it’s the voters that stayed on the couch that we couldn’t motivate to get off the couch to the polls that requires some deep reckoning on our side.
You said earlier that you felt like the Democrats had mishandled talking about the issue of immigration. Can you say more about that?
We keep falling into the right-wing trap on immigration. We saw the vice president campaigning on border security and doing the trip to the border. That was still in the Trump and the Republican frame. There was no alternative frame offered. It’s always a losing fight. And I think that’s one of the hard lessons learned. We really need a radically different story and an organizing project focused on immigrants and nonimmigrants alike.
“The job of leadership is not to be a thermometer. You should be constantly checking the public opinion, but your job is to be the thermostat and shift it.”
Didn’t that movement on the part of Democratic candidates reflect changing views among some of the voters they needed to win over?
Of course. There has been a shift. I just saw a social science study that looked at the role of Fox News in the last 20 years and empirically documents the causal effects of Fox News by itself on shifting the entire electorate to the right. So there’s no question that we’re dealing with some very powerful and wealthy forces here.
But Democrats have to decide, do you want to be a thermostat or a thermometer? The job of leadership is not to be a thermometer. You should be constantly checking the public opinion, but your job is to be the thermostat and shift it.
Can you give an example of how that could play out around the issue of immigration?
Gov. Greg Abbott from Texas [threatened to send] a whole bunch of migrants up to Chicago to create a crisis [in a city with a] progressive Democratic mayor and particularly to create a crisis around the Democratic National Convention.
inauguration speechBut he’s very lonely. There are a few other Democratic electeds who lead on this. The vast majority, especially the pundit class and the consultant class, run like cowards from this all the time, and so then the right owns the issue.
How should progressives be responding to the threat of mass deportation?
We have to do our best to protect people, to offer sanctuary, to offer pathways for solidarity for ordinary people to be heroic in this moment and to not be bystanders and watch the harm happening but really step up and say, “No.”
We have to act strategically. Let’s not assume that the Trump coalition is unified. There are lots of industries and corporations that we know rely on exploited immigrant labor. If there are mass roundups and deportations, where is big agriculture going to fall on this? Where is the meatpacking industry going to fall on this? What are a whole bunch of immigrant-heavy industries like Silicon Valley and tech going to do at this moment?
I would love for some of the centrist forces to organize them around putting a stop to some of the real, frankly, mass harm that could be on the horizon.
More broadly, what do you anticipate from a second Trump term?
I think it’s going to be worse than we can even imagine. Having said that, the voters and the leaders we’ve touched base with in the last two weeks, people are sad, but people want to plug in.
We’re going to have to figure out what strategies and tactics worked last time that might still work. … [We’ll have to] improvise, be creative and, frankly, take a bit more risk [than during Trump’s first term] in terms of civil disobedience and disruption to really block the harmful things coming our way. [We’re going to have to] do this in a way where we’re constantly pointing out the strategy of the other side to divide us. [We have to] keep talking about oligarchs like Elon Musk. I use the term “oligarch” and not “billionaires” because “oligarchs” refers to how the wealthy use their power politically to advance their interests against the rest of us.
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