Statement by Deborah Weinstein, Executive Director, Coalition on Human Needs 

We need to ask – what were voters looking for? 

According to the exit polls, two-thirds said the economy was not so good or poor. A large majority of those – 69 percent – voted for Trump. 

When asked to pick one out of five issues as the one that mattered most to them, a lot picked the economy, and nearly eight in ten of the voters who picked that voted for Trump. 

Close to 60 percent thought that either the ability to lead or to bring about needed change was the top quality they sought in a president – large majorities of those who picked those qualities voted for Trump. 

We don’t know from the exit polling what the voters thought about the state of health care or housing or tax breaks for the rich, but plenty of other sources show that people care about these issues. We do know that voters in a number of states cared about public investments – they approved ballot measures to increase funding for public school construction and mostly opposed privatizing schools.  

Only 11 percent chose immigration as their most important issue, and more than half (56 percent) said that undocumented people living here should be offered a chance to apply for legal status – fewer, 39 percent, said they should be deported back to the country they came from.   

Women tended to vote for Harris, but obviously not enough, and a majority of white women voted for Trump.  In polling and ballot questions, for the most part voters wanted to secure protections for the right to abortion. But that alone was not enough to select a president.   

In other demographics, huge numbers of Black voters supported Harris, but compared to four years ago, Trump made significant gains among Latinos. 

So, while many voters concerned about our democracy voted overwhelmingly for Harris, Trump was the candidate they chose for strong leadership and change, and for doing something about the economy. People with incomes between $30,000 and $100,000 voted for Trump. Now we await what he’ll choose to do. 

He’s said he’ll give Robert F. Kennedy some kind of health position, and maybe he’ll create a role for Elon Musk to propose ways to cut the budget. Musk recently tossed off the idea of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, but when it was suggested that might have a severely destabilizing effect on the economy he replied “that sounds about right.” 

It is entirely unclear how people will feel about actual decisions out of a Trump administration. But he will have a Senate majority able to confirm appointments and judges. Right now it is still possible that the Democrats will gain the majority in the House, although the latest estimates are not too encouraging. If both House and Senate have Republican majorities, they can pass funding bills under budget rules requiring only a simple majority in the Senate. They won’t get that if the House is under Democratic control. 

So what do human needs advocates do? We want change – the kind that extends more affordable health care, housing, and food to people. We want change – the kind that says no to the multi-millionaires and billionaires and powerful corporations when they want to evade taxes and jack up the amount we have to pay for medicine and rent and so much more, and says no to unfettered financial scams, perhaps like bitcoin, that could tank the whole economy. 

We don’t want the kind of change that slashes programs to protect and invest in people, or that widens inequality by denying health insurance and the Child Tax Credit and child care and home care for the aging to those most in need while providing every kind of break to corporations and the rich. 

We’re going to have to stand together to stand against that kind of change. Much of what we’re going to see proposed will be built on a willful misreading of economic causes and solutions. We must stand together to tell the truth. We must provide a megaphone for people whose health has been improved because they got Medicaid or Affordable Care Act insurance. We have to lift the voices of people whose children were poisoned by lead as well as those benefiting from progress in lead removal. For problem after problem and solution after solution, we have to lift up these truths. We must make sure that members of Congress hear these truths from their constituents. 

And we have to be smart and share every tool available to slow and stop dangerous plans. We’ve educated ourselves about Project 2025, and some of what’s in there will be tried. We’ve had experience working together to fight budget cuts. We haven’t had to deal with efforts to prevent wholesale dismissals of federal workers who are implementing the law and serving people, but will be thought not to be loyal to the new regime. We’ll have to pool our expertise and defend federal workers, because we cannot meet human needs without a competent workforce. We’ll have to use all the tools available to counter harmful administrative proposals. When necessary, we’ll need to support and publicize litigation by working closely with organizations that can file the lawsuits. We’ve done this work before, successfully – but now we’ll have to ramp it up. 

We have been through threats to shut down government or plunge it into default. We may face all that again. We have won in the past because officials understood that the public would blame them for these self-inflicted catastrophes. We must ensure that enough officials recognize that they will be blamed for recklessness.   

We have stood together through times of threat and times of possibility. Each of us has something important to contribute, and something we can learn to do our work better. CHN is already at work with many great organizations to build the way to respond. Next week our Wednesday morning meeting will go into detail about how to maximize outcomes in the lame duck session – with the election results, this end-of-year work becomes even more important. And we’ll do a bigger community-wide post-election webinar during the week of November 18 – watch this space for details!  

Please – stick with us. Strengthen us with your ideas and your voice.  A lot of people, whether they know it or not, are depending on our continued work.