Despite vastly outspending her opponent and drafting a galaxy of celebrities to her cause - Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey, Ricky Martin, Taylor Swift - Democratic candidate Kamala Harris lost the Electoral College, the popular vote and all the swing states.

This has bewildered and dismayed liberals - and much of the mainstream media. In the aftermath, progressive Senator Bernie Sanders excoriated the Democratic Party machine.

"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them," he said.

He continued: "Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.

Harris ran a campaign straight out of the centrist political playbook. Sanders observed that the 60% of Americans who live pay cheque to pay cheque weren't convinced by it.

She sought to dampen social divisions rather than accentuate them. She spoke of harmony, kindness and future prosperity, of middle-class aspiration rather than poverty and suffering. Her speeches often repeated rhetoric like her promise to be "laser-focused on creating opportunities for the middle class".

This was unlikely to endear her to those for whom social mobility appears impossible.

Words of blood and thunder resonated

Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, refuted Sanders' claims, saying:

"[Joe] Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime - saved union pensions, created millions of good paying jobs and even marched in a picket line."

But did those workers feel like the Democrats were speaking to them? And did they like what they heard?

Class politics needs to not only promise to redistribute wealth, but do so in a language that chimes with people's lived experience - more effectively than Trump's right-wing populism.

Harris's genial, smiling optimism failed to strike a chord with voters hurting from years of inflation and declining real wages.

And her use of celebrity advocates echoes writer Jeff Sparrow's criticism of the left as "too often infatuated with the symbolic power of celebrity gestures" after Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential election loss.

By contrast, Trump's words of blood and thunder hit the spot - not only in his rural and outer suburban strongholds, but among those voters in rust-belt inner cities, who had voted decisively for Biden four years earlier.

The greatest threat to America, he said, was from "the enemy from within". He defined them as: "All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country; that's a bigger enemy than China and Russia."

Harris's attempt to build her campaign around social movements of gender and race failed abjectly.

In particular, the appeal to women on reproductive rights, and to minority voters by preaching racial harmony resonated less than Trump's emphasis on law and order and border control.

Women voted more strongly for Harris than for Trump, but not in sufficient numbers to get her into the Oval Office. Latinos flocked to Trump despite his promises to deport undocumented immigrants.

This shows it takes more than political rhetoric to bake people into voting blocs.

Those of us who fixate on politics and the news media tend to overread the ability of public debate to set political agendas, especially during election campaigns.

In fact, few voters pay much attention to politics. They rarely watch, listen to or read mainstream media and have little political content in their social media news feeds. Exit polls indicate Trump led with these kinds of voters.

Is populism the new class?

In much of the Western world, class has receded from the political vocabulary. As manufacturing industries declined, so did the old trade unions whose base was among blue-collar workers.

In 1983, 20.1 percent of Americans were union members. In 2023, membership had halved to 10%. Few of those in service jobs join unions, largely because many are precariously employed.

These days, politicians in the old social democratic parties, like the Democrats in the US and Labor here in Australia, are much more likely to have come up through law and business than the union movement.

In the US, ex-teacher Tim Walz was the first candidate on a Democratic Party presidential ticket without law school experience since Jimmy Carter.

The language of populism - the people versus the elites - is a smokescreen that obscures real structures of power and inequality. But it comes much more easily to the lips of Americans than that of class.

Trump's political cunning rests in his ability to identify as one of the people, even to paint the left as the enemy of disenfranchised so-called patriots.

"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," he told a Veteran's Day rally last year.

He conjures up (an illusory) golden age of prosperity in a once-great monocultural America, where jobs were protected by tariffs and crime was low, helped by the reality of rising cost of living and falling real wages.

There is plenty of room on this nostalgic landscape for Mister Moneybags, an old-fashioned tycoon, even one with the "morals of an alley cat", as Joe Biden said in the debate that finished his 2024 candidacy.

The elite, by contrast, are faceless: politicians, bureaucrats, the "laptop class", as Elon Musk calls knowledge workers, and the grey cardinals of the "deep state" (a conspiratorial term for the American federal bureaucracy).

According to Trump's narrative, they conspire in the shadows to rob decent, hardworking folk of their livelihoods. This accords with a real geographical divide: people in cities with high incomes and valuable real estate, and those in the rust-belt with neither.

Australian populism

In Australia, the language of populism has deeper roots than that of class. Students of Australian history learn that national identity was based on distinguishing ourselves from the crusty traditions of the motherland: the belief that, as historian Russel Ward wrote, all Australians should be treated equally, that "Jack is as not only as good as his master … but probably a good deal better".

The Australian Labor Party was there when this egalitarian myth was born. But as the gap between rich and poor grows here, as elsewhere, it has become less plausible than once it was.

It remains to be seen whether Anthony Albanese - whose life journey has taken him from social housing to waterfront mansion - is prepared to bring the sharp elbows of class politics, in both policy and language, to next year's election campaign.

The experience of Kamala Harris suggests he would be well advised to do so.

• First published in The Conversation
• George H Morgan is Associate Professor Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

The ongoing coronavirus epidemic is in part responsible, having reshaped voters' worries and expectations, but the role played by religion in Biden's resurrection should not be overlooked.

Indeed, Biden's comeback began in South Carolina, where his win gave much-needed momentum for Super Tuesday.

In that state, black voters make up a majority of the Democratic electorate.

So it is no surprise that all the Democratic presidential candidates, including Bernie Sanders, flocked to African-American churches before the primary.

Black Americans, who are largely Democrats and older and less liberal, are the most religious group: 83% say they believe in God (compared with 61% of whites).

They are also more likely to attend church and pray.

Greater presence of religion in American life

Even outside the African American community, the American people as a whole continue to stand out for their religiosity: In other words, Americans are still far more religious than people in any other wealthy nation.

A match between a secular socialist and a centrist Catholic.

Of all of the presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders is probably the least religious. He identifies himself as both Jewish and secular, does not participate in any organized religion and defends the separation of church and state.

Sanders has a political vision of religion. He connects religious beliefs in general, and his Jewish heritage in particular, to social and economic justice. He often praises Pope Francis, and calls him a socialist.

But the rise and success of identity politics suggests that race or religion may matter more than economic justice.

Sharing faith, making connections

Joe Biden's record on race may be great, but he was vice president to the first black president, Barack Obama. Contrary to Sanders, he has not been talking about religion but rather about his faith.

And he has done so not in political terms but in emotional and personal terms.

For instance, in a town hall meeting in South Carolina, he was able to connect with an African American pastor whose wife was killed by a white supremacist by sharing personal tragedy: the loss of his own wife and daughter in 1972 and his son in 2015.

By building an empathetic bond with voters, he also avoids taking pointed positions on controversial issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

This seems to be working: he is the only Democratic candidate considered "rather religious" by more than half of American adults (55 percent).

While expressing genuine grief, he has turned his sorrow and pain into political assets, having no qualms about using them in this campaign ad, for example, where he says almost word for word what he expressed in the CNN town hall interview with the pastor.

He won 65% of the most religious black voters in South Carolina as well as a good size of the religious white voters (43% compared to 16% for Buttigieg and 14% for Sanders).

Religion in Congress

If you have doubts about the relevance of religion in politics in the United States, just look at the US governing bodies. The 116th American Congress is more diversified on the religious level, but remains overwhelmingly Christian (88% against 71% of the adult American population).

Only one elected representative, Senator Kyrsten Sinema (Democrat of Arizona), claims to be nonreligious and no member describes themselves as an atheist. Even someone as far to the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentions her Catholic faith in Congress and even quotes the Bible on social networks.

Religion in the White House

Religiosity is even more visible in the White House. US presidents have been invoking faith and God ever since George Washington expressed his "fervent pleas to this Almighty Being who rules the universe" in his 1789 inaugural address.

Moreover, scholars observe that the use of religious language and even explicit references to God have increased in presidential rhetoric since the 1980s.

For example, David Domke and Kevin Coe write that iterations of the phrase "God bless America," the most explicit statement linking God and country, are now expected in all major speeches, although they were almost entirely absent prior to Ronald Reagan.

According to a recent study by semantic scholar Ceri Hughes, this trend seems to be even more pronounced with Donald Trump.

Although he claims to be a Presbyterian Protestant, there is ample evidence, as historian John Fea has shown, to suggest that the current tenant of the White House is the least religious president of the modern era. Yet he invokes religion the most, and the political strategy is obvious: after all, in 2016, 81% of white Evangelicals voted for Trump. His promise: to defend them in the culture wars, especially on the subjects of abortion, LGBTQ rights and school prayer.

Beyond the particular case of Donald Trump, all presidents of the modern era have identified as Protestant Christians, with the notable exception of John Kennedy whose Catholicism proved to be a campaign issue for him. No person of the Jewish faith has received a presidential nomination from a major party (Joseph Lieberman received only the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 2000), and the Mormon affiliation of Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate in 2008, was not without controversy.

A changing religious landscape

The ever-increasing presence of religious rhetoric in political discourse is both the reason for and the consequence of the politicization of religion, particularly of white Evangelicals, since the 1970s.

This politicization has highlighted the racial divide that exists in the United States. According to the PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute), a non-profit, non-partisan organization, "no religious group is more closely linked to the Republican Party than white Evangelical Protestants."

The label "evangelical," however, is a complex one. It is a trans-denominational movement mostly within Protestant Christianity based on a set of personal core beliefs:

• The Bible at the centre of faith
  The atonement for sins through Jesus' death on the cross.
  Personal conversion and salvation.
  The sharing of the gospel, from which this movement takes its name.

But not all evangelicals are white and conservative. There is a small proportion of non-white Evangelicals (about 25%) as well as some white Evangelicals who are progressive (about 15 percent) and tend to vote for Democrats.

Nevertheless, statistics show a slow erosion in the number of Americans who identify as Evangelical Protestants__ since the 1990s, particularly in the younger generations. Similarly, the number of Catholics has slowly declined, while the number of historic Mainline Protestants has virtually collapsed.

The trend most discussed by academics (here, here, or here) is the increase in the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion, namely the nones (not affiliated with a religion). They are now at least as numerous as evangelicals, if not more. But as researcher Lauric Henneton notes, nones have in common only that they do not want to be counted as belonging to a religious group or established traditions. It says nothing about their actual beliefs.

A 2014 Pew Research Center survey shows that atheists and agnostics are on the rise, but still account for less than a third of nones, with the rest identifying themselves as "nothing special." Unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders is a favourite among the nones.

Religion and younger voters

Younger generations are increasingly unaffiliated with a religion or a church, but they are also the generations least likely to vote which reduces their impact on the elections.

Even if they voted more, as they did in 2018, America's institutional political structure amplifies the power of whiter, more rural, more Christian voters.

Religion is thus likely to continue to play a major role in US elections for years to come.

And with the help of what Katherine Stewart calls the "Christian nationalist machine," Donald Trump will certainly make religious identity a central element of his campaign.

• Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy Assistant lecturer, Université Paris Nanterre - Université Paris Lumières
• The Conversation. Republished with permission.

The five-minute meeting took place in the foyer at the Pope's residence at the Vatican.

Pope Francis later referred to the meeting as "a matter of politeness".

The Pope added " . . . and if anybody thinks that greeting somebody amounts to meddling in politics, they should go find a psychiatrist".

Mr Sanders had attended a conference on economics at the Vatican on Friday.

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But how this came about has become a point of contention.

While the US senator said he accepted a Vatican invitation, one of the conference's organisers said that his campaign had lobbied for his inclusion.

Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which is hosting the conference said "Sanders made the first move, for obvious reasons".

The invitation sent to Mr Sanders was signed by Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

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