Democrats in 2016 were slow to understand what the Brexit vote meant: that anti-elitist populism was a powerful global force that overpowered their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and helped elect Donald Trump.
Since the president’s poor performance in last Thursday’s debate, Biden and his team have been so focused on their own problems and on remaining at the top of the Democratic field that they may not have time to think about the impact of the French vote. They should think again.
Macron called the snap election after his centrist coalition suffered a crushing defeat in European Union elections in early June. The decision to call the election, which even the prime minister himself did not expect, was a big gamble for an unpopular leader in his seventh year in office. And now that gamble is coming down on him.
The Rally National is the political party led by Marine Le Pen. It is a far-right, nationalist, anti-immigrant party rooted in anti-Semitism. Her father, who led the Rally National’s predecessor movement, was a Holocaust denier. The Rally National is one of many right-wing parties that have emerged in European countries in recent years.
Macron gambled that he would confront French voters with the possibility of Le Pen’s party coming to power and rebel against that future. In the first of two rounds of voting, Macron suffered a dramatic defeat. The shape of the French parliament and the ultimate strength of the National Rally will not be known until the next round of voting on July 7. There is a possibility that the parliament will be left in limbo, with no party holding a majority.
But the results of the first round were enough to show that Macron’s claims were off the mark. He pulled out all the stops to rally voters to reject his National Rally proposal. He said France could be doomed if populists came to power. He slammed both the far-right and the left-wing coalition, which came second in Sunday’s vote. Macron’s centrist coalition slumped to third place.
Democrats ignored the impact of the 2016 Brexit vote. The result was shocking, but the prevailing sentiment in the US was “Brexit isn’t happening here.” In an era of anti-immigrant and populist right-wing protests everywhere, these words should be expunged from the political vocabulary. The Brexit vote was a challenge to the political establishment, a rejection of elites who warned of chaos and upheaval. Ordinary local voters ignored it.
The referendum on Britain’s departure from the EU was called by then-Conservative prime minister David Cameron, who hoped voters would reject such an extreme policy and fade the debate over Britain and Europe that had divided his party. Like Macron this summer, Cameron’s gamble failed spectacularly, and Britain has been living with the consequences ever since.
British voters go to the polls on Thursday and all indications are that the Labour Party, which hasn’t been in power for more than a decade, will win in a landslide victory. If that happens, Democrats shouldn’t get too complacent.
The story of the UK election is that the Conservative Party, in power since 2010, is now out of steam. It has had five prime ministers. It is out of ideas, distrusted by voters, deeply divided over its future course, and its prospects are bleak. Labour is the beneficiary of these divisions and failures. British voters want change.
At the moment, the Conservatives are not only losing ground to Labour, but also facing a challenge from the right from the populist, anti-immigration Reform Britain Party, led by former Brexit leader Nigel Farage.
In 2016, many Americans could not have imagined voters would elect Trump as president. Trump mocked the elites, who dismissed and denigrated him. Trump attacked illegal immigrants, stoked racist and anti-Semitic sentiment, and promised to give a voice to voters who felt slighted by those in power. Angry voters turned out to the polls in November of that year, and even though the country rejected Trump in 2020 and Biden took over the White House, American politics has changed since then.
For Biden and Democrats, one lesson from Sunday’s vote in France is clear: Trying to scare voters with dire predictions about what a Trump victory would mean for the future of American democracy may not be enough to win the election in November. Such warnings will work with Biden’s core supporters, but they alone will not carry him to victory. election.
The threat of Trump’s reelection is real, and so are the warnings against the policies of Le Pen’s party. Biden likes to say that “democracy is on the ballot,” and he’s right. But the vote is about much more than that: perceptions of the aging president, individual voters’ assessments of his policies, and how their lives would be affected by Trump’s reelection, not by an extension of the incumbent president’s term.
Since Thursday’s debate, the Biden campaign has argued that focus groups have shown the president’s policies are seen as better or more popular than Trump’s. National polls suggest otherwise. Trump is more trusted than Biden on a range of issues, including two big ones: immigration and inflation. A CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday showed that voters by a wide margin think the economy would be better off under Trump.
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg conducted a Dial Meter survey during the debate, including so-called “dual haters” — voters who dislike both Biden and Trump — and those leaning toward third-party candidates. He found that inflation reduced Biden’s approval rating by 6 to 7 percentage points. A summary of the results showed that the debate hurt Biden more than it helped Trump, but that’s little consolation.
The Biden campaign has tried in the days since the debate to dispel rumors that the party should choose someone else as its nominee. Newspaper editorials and prominent Democratic commentators have called for Biden to step down, but so far the team has avoided alienating major party leaders and elected officials through its hard work behind the scenes and public messaging.
Biden’s long-term challenge will be to sharpen the positive message to accompany his attacks on Trump. Biden’s team has recently settled on a tough message that describes Trump as dangerous and self-interested. Before the debate, Biden’s advisers believed that was working. But as Macron learned in France, stern warnings to the opposition may only go so far. Trump may be as dangerous, vindictive and unwilling to accept the results of the election as Biden claims. But that may not be enough for voters.
“I don’t think the Biden team, who only talk about saving democracy, is going to save democracy,” a former Democratic elected official said a few months ago. The official, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, added, “Biden has to get specific. He has to say here’s where I am, and what I want to do to make your future better, especially young people. It’s not just about saving democracy. It’s about saving your future.”
