JULIA HARTLEY-BREWER
The lesson from this US election is simple – and it applies on both sides of the Atlantic
There’s a lesson for us in U.S. election: If politicians don’t listen, then voters will elect someone who does
WELL, haven’t the past few days been fun?
After Donald Trump marched to victory in the US Presidential election on Wednesday morning, half the country were whooping with joy while the other half were left in shocked bewilderment and horror.
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And it wasn’t just in America where we saw this divide, as Britain’s own woke Left and media luvvies lost their minds in paroxysms of hysterical weeping and wailing.
As the Foreign Secretary David Lammy was forced to eat his words calling Trump a “racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser” with a congratulatory post on X, and the likes of Emily Maitlis, Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, Carol Vorderman and pretty much everyone at the BBC going into meltdown, it was all a delight to behold.
Did the meltdowns, the anger and the disbelief feel familiar to you?
They should do, because it’s exactly what happened here in Britain in 2016 when 52 per cent of us voted for Brexit.
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Remember that Friday morning when the ranks of BBC staffers sitting behind the newsreaders on the telly looked shell-shocked as they cried into their Guardian newspapers?
Yet again, the ranks of the great and the good have been left flabbergasted that, horror of horrors, not everyone thinks or votes the same as them.
Their faces looked exactly the same this week as the realisation slowly dawned that Taylor Swift had not, after all, delivered their gal Kamala Harris to the White House and that the dreaded Orange Man was back.
Yet again, the ranks of the great and the good have been left flabbergasted that, horror of horrors, not everyone thinks or votes the same as them.
But how do all these oh-so-clever people keep getting it oh-so-wrong?
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Because it wasn’t just Brexit when they proved themselves to be catastrophically out of touch with the majority of their fellow citizens.
There was also Trump’s first White House win in 2016, and Boris Johnson’s 80 seat majority in 2019 and this year’s surge in votes for right-wing parties across Europe.
Moment Emily Maitlis refers to Trump as 'batsh**' on TV as co-host apologises
It keeps happening and the soy latte-sipping metropolitan types are left shaken and shocked EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Of course, once again there will be an inquest into what went wrong.
Questions will be asked, the wrong answers will be given and the right lessons won’t be learned.
The Trump victory will be blamed on racist, sexist men who wouldn’t vote for a black woman to sit in the Oval Office, while everyone else was probably duped by Trump’s lies, Elon Musk’s disinformation on X and they’ll throw in some Russian electoral interference too for good measure.
What they won’t do is face up to the real reasons why Kamala Harris lost: The Democrats (just like the Remain campaign here in 2016) are completely out of touch with what ordinary voters think and the policies they want.
Victory came down to policies
What the Democrats have to ask themselves is, if Trump is so awful, why were so many Americans willing to vote for him?
After all, they denounced him as a fascist and a neo-Nazi and a threat to democracy.
He was a convicted felon who faced a total of 91 criminal charges, accusations of sexual assault, adultery and dodgy tax dealings.
Yet here he is, the President-Elect again.
Trump’s victory came down to policies, rather than just relying on 'vibes' or celebrities to help deliver votes into the ballot boxes.
So what is the answer? Well, in part it’s down to the choice of Kamala Harris as the Democrat candidate, a woman of no substance and an excruciating laugh whose claim to the job seemed to come down to the fact that she was a black woman and she wasn’t Donald Trump.
But more importantly, Trump’s victory came down to policies, rather than just relying on “vibes” or celebrities to help deliver votes into the ballot boxes.
And, crucially, his policies chimed with what most voters want and care about: Boosting the economy, tax cuts, more and better-paid jobs, restoring border controls as well as law and order, and getting rid of the Net Zero and woke zealotry on issues such as trans and race that Harris has championed.
The woke Left can talk all they want about Trump’s personal failings — and this is a man who needs a Boeing 747 to carry all his baggage — but what matters to voters who can’t afford to pay bills is what a candidate is going to do to help them.
The cost-of-living crisis has hit ordinary working Americans just as badly as it’s hit Brits.
And while we worry about thousands of Channel migrants coming to our shores, the US has seen a staggering 11million illegal migrants crossing the Mexican border since 2019.
Radical wokery
If Trump carries through his promise to secure the border, what he did or did not do with a porn star just doesn’t matter to his voters.
Will the Democrats learn the lesson and tackle their total disconnect with ordinary American voters? I doubt it.
Instead, they will probably double down with yet more radical wokery while sneering at the “basket of deplorables” who voted for Trump.
As Starmer’s disastrously plummeting popularity proves, Britons didn’t vote for a left-wing Labour opposition, they voted against a left-wing Conservative government.
There are also lessons to be learned for the new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch too.
While the US has shifted to the right, along with most of Europe, Britain appears to be bucking the trend with Labour’s victory in July.
But we aren’t the political outlier many think we are.
As Starmer’s disastrously plummeting popularity proves, Britons didn’t vote for a left-wing Labour opposition, they voted against a left-wing Conservative government.
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The lesson of the US election is simple, and it applies on both sides of the Atlantic.
If the political elites refuse to listen to ordinary people’s concerns and to deliver the policies they want, then they shouldn’t be shocked when their fellow citizens vote for someone who will.
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