Traumatized Democrats must learn how the British Labor Party recovered from the 2019 election disaster

Unlike Kamala Harris, Pat McFadden knows how to win a national election. Shell-shocked Democrats might want to pay more attention to how Work rebuilt after 2019 as they process the reasons why they lost the White House Donald Trump.

Trump emulated Boris Johnson’s success in 2019 by reaching parts of the electorate that no right-wing party had done before. In the case of the Republicans, that meant winning white working class women, black and Hispanic voters – all key Democratic constituencies that Harris desperately needed to keep aside.

After four years of painful inflation and stagnant wage growth, he focused ruthlessly on bread-and-butter issues and ridiculed Democrats for identity politics. The transphobic jokes, racist comments, and misogynistic attacks were distasteful, but they worked to a point, as did an avalanche of misinformation on platforms like Elon Musk‘s

For McFadden, a senior member of Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet and the mastermind behind Labour’s election victory over the Conservatives in July, the first part of Trump’s message was crucial.

“I’ve suffered from losing results and also been involved in winning campaigns, and I don’t want to be lecturing to people after they’ve lost an election,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

But the minister stressed: “If I can think about what we did in changing the Labor Party between 2020 (when Sir Keir succeeded Jeremy Corbyn) and 2024, we had a real focus on living standards and how people felt.

“And the question ‘Are you better off than four years ago?’ – originally the Ronald Reagan question from the 1980s that Donald Trump asked in the campaign – was actually a question we asked.”

Exit polls confirm McFadden’s position. Complete 45% of American voters nationwide said their family’s financial situation was worse off today than four years ago. Only 24% said they were better off today than in 2020, when Joe Biden defeated Trump.

No incumbent has ever held on to the White House despite so much discontent. But Vice President Harris faithfully said there was no policy distance between her and Biden.

Harris, an accidental candidate thrust into the bright spotlight after Biden’s belated withdrawal from the campaign, has never been able to answer voters’ most fundamental question: How will you improve our lives?

That has devastated her prospects, at a time when voters wanted change. Many said after the vote that even if Trump was flawed, he could articulate their concerns better than a Democratic leadership seen as out of reach.

These concerns include immigration. There were many minority voters, including recent legal immigrants, who responded to Trump’s message that uncontrolled flows across the U.S.-Mexico border posed an existential threat.

For the border in the United States, read small boats crossing the Channel for voters in Britain. Sir Keir, McFadden and their team vowed to tackle the problem. They recognized that voters concerned about such issues were not all raging racists, a lesson lost on some Democrats.

Harris lost in must-win states like Michigan — even as Democratic candidate Elissa Slotkin won a Senate seat in the Rust Belt state with a message that better reflects voters’ fears about high prices. The vice president also lost Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, completing a hat trick of defeats against Trump in the Democratic “Blue Wall.”

Johnson demolished parts of Labor’s “Red Wall” in northern England in 2019 with a loud call to “get Brexit done” after the 2016 EU referendum, which revolved around many of the same issues that defined this US election. Trump himself drew the comparison when he said in his victory speech that Americans had “regained control of their country.”

But now comes the hard part. The Johnson government collapsed despite its seemingly impregnable majority. The Covid pandemic would have been a huge challenge for any leader, but his own poor discipline cost him.

Will Trump 2.0 be more disciplined than in his chaotic first term? He’s promising a new “golden age” for the unwieldy coalition of supporters that propelled him back to the White House, but how will voters feel if that means little more than tax cuts for the wealthy and talk of cuts to cherished benefits? ?

There will be opportunities for Democrats to capitalize on missteps once Trump takes power in January and the honeymoon is over. But as Labor discovered after 2019, and as the Tories are discovering now, they must first win the right to be heard again.