On Nov. 6, the day after former President Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election against Vice President Kamala Harris, Pomona College faculty, staff and students gathered in Frank Dining Hall’s Blue Room to hear politics professor Susan McWilliams Barndt’s talk, “The 2024 Election: The Day After.”
Four-time winner of the Wig Award for Teaching and expert on American political thought, McWilliams spoke as part of the Dean of College Speaker Series.
The room overflowed with attendees. Some sat down on the carpet while others leaned against the wall and listened solemnly. McWilliams began by acknowledging that it was too early to speak with certainty.
“Political theories are good at helping you think through slowly,” McWilliams said. “Whatever I can do or say in this speech, I can’t fix where most of you are hurting or scared and I can’t tell you that it’s wrong to be hurting or scared.”
In her analysis of the election prior to the Harris campaign’s loss, McWilliams said she had overlooked the impact of economic pressures and everyday struggles of average Americans on the outcome. She suggested that the defeat of the Democratic Party ultimately laid in their failure to address working Americans’ concerns.
She cited a recent CNBC report showing the average age of U.S. homebuyers is now 56 — a record high — due to dwindling pensions, economic instability and stagnant wages.
“In the last decades for most Americans, work has become ever more perilous and precarious. Regular employment has been displaced by the gig economy — a jazzy way of saying irregular employment. Fewer Americans than ever have pensions of 401ks,” she said.
McWilliams noted that those in higher education aren’t exempt from this economic precarity.
“Here at Pomona, we rely more on temporary faculty than we ever have and those faculty are strung along year to year, underpaid relative to their highly specialized skills and not being able to plan their lives more than a few months in advance,” she said.
As a member of the Pomona’s ad hoc Budget and Inflation Advisory Committee in 2023, she said a quarter of the faculty privately shared their struggles to make ends meet while long-standing staff salaries barely matched minimum wage.
“The increasingly two-tiered American economy is leaving more and more people behind than it raises up and no amount of celebrating the stock market or discussing Goldman Sachs economic politics will speak to that reality,” McWilliams said.
She lamented the missed opportunity for the Democratic campaign to highlight how Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., is one of the only vice presidential candidates to have never owned a stock.
“One provisional consideration is that the Democratic candidates may have been speaking the language of the people who live at the top of the hill and it did not resonate with the people who are working hard and exhausted trying to pay their rent checks,” she said.
In this vein, McWilliams discussed a relative success in Arizona the night before: Ruben Gallego’s Senate victory. Gallego’s lead advisor, Chuck Rocha, was the only major Democratic campaign advisor who was not college-educated. His campaign appealed to Latino voters as members of the working-class community, rather than solely as members of a minority group.
“[Gallego’s] campaign consistently ran up against the national Democratic establishment that wanted him to fight on elite culture tones instead of on working-class modalities,” McWilliams said. “There is a big education gap in the electorate. Only 35 percent of adults in the U.S. have college degrees. Simple mathematical matters: You cannot win by speaking to college-educated interests.”
“One provisional consideration is that the Democratic candidates may have been speaking the language of the people who live at the top of the hill and it did not resonate with the people who are working hard and exhausted trying to pay their rent checks.”
McWilliams then addressed most voters’ alienation from elite ideologies and institutions like the 5Cs. Only a tiny percent of Americans graduate from exclusive small liberal arts colleges.
“One of the hazards of working here or going here is that we have outsized cultural power because we believe that everyone in society is chasing the cultural and educational prizes that we have obtained by virtue of being here. We think that more people think like us than do or have the sense of opportunity and possibility that we try to cultivate here,” McWilliams said.
However, McWilliams felt that the virtue of liberal arts colleges could be endangered by the Trump administration.
“There is a lot of energy to humiliate and downgrade institutions like this. I don’t think anyone should be naive — schools like this one will not insulate you or be insulated from whatever happens next,” she said.
She mentioned Pomona’s dependency on Pell Grants and the possible repercussions of potential federal stipulations.
“If we were to lose federal funding for things like Pell Grants, would we continue to have a Pomona with a relatively equal number of families with financial aid and families who pay full tuition?” she said.
A majority of Americans were in favor of progressive policies but only when those policies were not presented alongside party or candidate names, McWilliams noted. She highlighted progressive policy wins in red states: Missouri voters had voted to back the state constitutional amendment to end the abortion ban and voted to raise the minimum wage and paid sick leave while Kentucky voters rejected an amendment for school vouchers by a substantial margin.
“This, provisionally, might have something to do with the fact that the majority of American voters see Democrats merely — not entirely wrongly — as defenders of the system that is broken and not working,” McWilliams said.
She introduced the term “political sectarianism” as a more fitting concept than political polarization in contextualizing the results.
“Vast majorities of Americans can find some common ground,” McWilliams said. “However, there’s a tendency of political groups to align on the basis of moralized identities rather than shared ideas for policy preferences.”
McWilliams observed that Democrats often operate under a misguided assumption that nonwhite voters primarily identify by their race or ethnicity. Notably, 14 percent more Hispanics voted for Trump compared to 2020.
“Those assumptions have been really baked into democratic strategy and policymaking such as presuming Latinos are all really concerned with immigration, which is a very racialized assumption,” she said.
When asked whether the Democratic Party would make substantial changes in their campaign strategy, McWilliams referenced Lynn Vavreck’s theory of calcification.
“When things are close, neither the people who have won by a little [nor] the people who have lost by a little have an incentive to change their strategy. The real question coming out of this election is, ‘Have Democrats lost by enough to change their strategy?’” McWilliams said.
Attendee Silas Mihm PO ’28 said he felt disappointed with the results in his home state of Georgia. He described the poverty in rural counties near his hometown and said that Harris could’ve appealed more to the working class.
“I realized that even though the economy wasn’t a salient feature for me at the time, it illuminated some of the problems with Harris’ campaign,” Mihm said. “Some voters were voting for Trump not because he was a good candidate but because they felt desperate.”
Attendee Alex Benach PO ’28 described feeling anger and fear following the outcome.
“It’s gonna be a long four years of organizing, tactical opposition, advocacy and mutual aid,” Benach said. “It’s gonna be a fight that should rest on the shoulders of people who are privileged. I hear discussions about how we’ll be okay because we’re in an elite institution in a blue state but we need to look out for the noncitizen students, low-income students and students that will be deeply affected by policies especially if institutional support and resources could go away.”
Referencing novelist Kurt Vonnegut, McWilliams concluded by calling the 7C community to insist on our common humanity.
“In a nation and world where so much wrong is done under the cover of bureaucracy and impersonality and distance, we have a rare and special — and maybe even sacred — capacity on this very small campus to treat each other with individual recognition and personal generosity,” McWilliams said. “I want to call upon you, my colleagues and students, to join me in holding a belief in mutual humanity.”
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