Two essential qualities of political success are luck, and timing. The rest, is waiting.
Boris Johnson’s career has been an abject lesson in those truisms. Having being unceremoniously demoted in 2004 as a shadow cabinet minister for lying about an affair and then dismissed as editor of the Spectator newspaper a year later, Johnson threw his hat into the ring for election as London Mayor against the formidable leftist incumbent, Ken Livingstone. Despite being labelled as a lightweight and buffoon by the establishment press, he parlayed his almost inexhaustible energy and eccentric charm into a solid electoral victory, followed by easy re-election in 2012. Like his hero, Winston Churchill, who was also derided and admired in equal measure, Johnson kept coming back and waiting for the Main Chance he was sure would come.
Returning to parliament as an MP in 2015 amid rampant rumours that he was positioning himself to replace David Cameron as Prime Minister, Johnson watched as his old Oxford contemporary first led the “No” forces in defeating the Scottish 2014 independence referendum, then storm home to a surprise majority government a year later. Flushed with hubris and believing in his own legend as a master communicator, Cameron called the Brexit referendum that ended his political career, and allowed Johnson to emerge as the dominant proponent of the ‘Leave’ campaign, in effect the one politician in the UK whose support successor Theresa May absolutely needed to try and give herself credibility with the 52% of voters who’d wanted no more part of a European superstate they saw as nothing more than a bloated bureaucracy intent on reducing British national sovereignty. Three years later she too was gone from the scene.
And today, after enduring merciless scorn and opprobrium after several attempts to pass a hastily negotiated Brexit deal and then being foiled again and again by an opposition of improbable parties seeking to punish his minority government’s desire to call an election, the British electorate has acted unpredictably once more. They handsomely rewarded John with the largest parliamentary majority since Margaret Thatcher’s third electoral victory in 1987 and the shock waves from that contest are reverberating far beyond the United Kingdom’s borders. As with every disruptive event that has shaken the global socio-political body politic since 2015, what has just happened there has profound implications elsewhere, including the United States as it lurches toward the 2020 election.
Much like the 2016 contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the British vote highlighted the ever-widening gap between urban and rural areas of the U.K. and a potentially seismic reshaping of the party coalitions. The results underscored, in a related way, the disdain many of those nonurban voters have for the elites as well as the power of a nationalist message, something else that has affected American politics.
The almost total rout rendered on the opposition Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has provided nothing less than a clear warning of the limits of a left-wing, quasi-socialist “progressive” agenda. Despite what appears to be an inherent decency Corbyn is simply more to the political left than any of the Democrats candidates running for their party’s nomination and was laden with anti-Semitic accusations he weakly refuted. Labour's defeat - the fourth election loss in a row and worst performance since 1935 – could in some ways help shape the thinking of many Democratic party U.S. voters as they begin the process of picking a standard bearer with the Iowa caucuses less than a month away.
In the post-Brexit era British politics has resulted in scrambled coalitions. While a traditional left-right division still exists – the Conservatives versus Labour - there is now also a Brexit division that has split the coalitions of both major parties. The recent election wreaked havoc on the Labour coalition’s so-called “Red Wall” of constituencies as working-class areas outside of London, that had been voting for the party for generations, “flipped” to the Conservatives. These were districts where voters had strongly supported “Leave” in Brexit referendum, and these long-frustrated voters finally handed Johnson a swath of ridings resulting in his handsome majority. Conversely, the Tories, long seen as the party of the upper middle class and aristocracy, have now gained a new voting bloc that, if cultivated properly, can help them usher a period of political realignment that could conceivably last generations. At the very least, given the government’s numerical majority, barring any national or personal calamity, Johnson will be in power for a decade, a feat equalled only by Thatcher and Tony Blair.
A similar thing has been happening in America as traditional party coalitions undergo profound changes. Though the Democrats have long claimed (since FDR's days) to be the party of the white working class, that conceit has been belied by recent Trump-driven voting patterns. As much as the demographic reality that the Republicans have lost momentum with Hispanics and African Americans so too must the white voter conundrum be faced by the Democrats as they think about how to assemble an electoral college majority in 2020.
The exhaustion factor may have contributed to the results in those areas in Britain that abandoned Labour for the Conservatives. After nearly four years of wrangling over how to exit the E.U., many voters may have decided that only by giving Johnson a freer hand could the country get past this gridlock in Parliament, whatever the consequences.
In the United States, issue fatigue could cut differently - exhaustion caused by the volatility and chaos sewn constantly by Trump. Democrats are hoping that will help to motivate voters on the fence to back their eventual nominee and limit Trump's presidency to a single term. Republicans hope that voters have tired of the Muller inquiry, unproved Russian collusion and impeachment sideshows and will repudiate the opposition by granting Trump a second term.
There is more to what has happened in Britain than just Brexit or dislike of Corbyn and his policies. The loss of once-impregnable Labour seats could also reflect that the party no longer truly represents the interests of people in these areas, that the cultural disaffection among those living in outlying areas of Britain, areas that have suffered long-term economic decline, brought about a new voting pattern. So too must Democrats reflect on why their grip on similar electoral districts in the US appears to have slipped, as demonstrated first in the primaries where populist Bernie Sanders carried states which the more elitist Hillary Clinton subsequently lost in the general election (i.e. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin come to mind).
The Labour Party now faces a period of bloodletting and internal turmoil over the way toward a post-Corbyn party. That its left wing will now be pitted against the centre is an inevitable conflict, as evidenced before by rebellions from elected MPS against those grassroots machines like Momentum which originally projected Corbyn to leadership. A more virulent strain of the debate is already underway in America's Democratic Party. Corbyn's defeat is a clear warning to Democrats that Senators Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could deliver the same result if they become the party's nominee. While neither carries the decades-long neo-communistic baggage that Corbyn was shouldering, no Democratic nominee perceived by key demographics (and the white rural vote is one such key representation) has ever won a presidential contest. Coupled with Trump’s signature take-no-prisoners ferocious campaign style the British election results will add to the pressures on those two candidates to dissuade voters that they would be too risky in facing Trump in a general election.
There is another salient point to consider: the urge to leave the European Union is in part a reflection of the nationalist strain that has gripped countries like India, China, Spain, Italy and Germany. In the United States, Donald Trump has weaponized it with a potent name: America First. His base has responded to that message, bringing with it more black and independent votes than Mitt Romney managed in 2012, and he is counting on it to reassemble in greater strength next November. Despite the President’s own endemic lack of popularity and personal limitations, Trump, like Johnson, had luck and timing on his side in 2016. If the Democrats select either a left-wing nominee a la Warren or a throwback to a different age of politics like Joe Biden, Boris Johnson's ability to produce sizable margins in so many of the nonurban districts stands as a possible template for the Trump campaign.
Whether the president has reached the turnout ceiling in his strongest voting blocs or has more votes to pull is debatable and impossible to determine, though his campaign clearly believes there are more to gain. Like Johnson, Trump has a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to surprise.
Will the Democrats really win back enough working-class voters to tip the balance in at least two of the three states mentioned previously, and if so how? Or should they concentrate on maximising the returns from the 2018 midterms and subsequent elections that have shown the power of the suburban vote as a foundation of the party's likely new post-Obama coalition?
It will be folly to read too much into what happened in Britain. Yet, dismissing those results as of no relevance to politics in the United States is whistling past the graveyard.
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