The Left’s inability to understand voter anger over immigration and trade helped propel Boris Johnson to a surprise landslide victory in Britain, according to an American strategist who worked on the campaign, offering clear lessons for President Trump’s reelection efforts.
Johnson was returned as prime minister with a majority of 80 seats last week, a far higher margin than forecast. Analysts have been poring over the results trying to understand what it means for Johnson’s ally, Trump.
Brett O’Donnell, a veteran of campaigns headed by George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, spent three weeks in the United Kingdom preparing Johnson for televised debates. He said: “The size of the victory surprised me. But it proves those feelings are still running very deep, and I think they are running deep here in the United States as well.”
Britain’s shock vote to leave the EU in 2016 is seen as heralding the populist, anti-establishment wave that carried Trump to power five months later. O’Donnell said the same forces are still at work in the U.K., and although the headlines might have been about Brexit, the driving sub issues were immigration and trade.
“The people who threw Boris Johnson over the top are blue-collar workers who still believe that the European Union, through bad trade deals and immigration policy, have taken their jobs away, have hurt the economy, have hurt their lives,” he said. “I still think there’s a lot of people in the United States who believe that bad trade policy, bad immigration policy have affected them, and they want Donald Trump to continue to work on that.
“Democrats have far underestimated how important those issues are, because they aren’t really talking about them. They are more hung up on healthcare and other issues, and when they do talk about them, they talk about them in a way that won’t be appealing to blue-collar workers in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.”
His point is born out by a recent Democratic debate in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Six of the top presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg, were invited to talk about why they were the best candidates for American workers, yet there was no mention of trade policy during the two-hour event, according to Politico.
And in Britain, O’Donnell said, Conservatives campaigned to increase a health surcharge levied on immigrants, which they have to pay when applying for a visa. The policy has been popular since its introduction in 2015 but was opposed by the Labour Party.
“The same thing here,” he said. “Democrats want to give free healthcare to illegal immigrants. That’s a very unpopular policy, but I don’t think Democrats realize the extent to which that policy is so unpopular.”
Johnson has a reputation for being disorganized and weak on the details of policy. But O’Donnell, whose experience on presidential campaigns earned him the reputation of “candidate whisperer,” said the prime minister made for an outstanding pupil. He knuckled down for hours at a time in mock debates where senior Conservative Michael Gove played the role of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
“He was anything but fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell made sure that Johnson hammered his central message, that he was the candidate to “get Brexit done,” again and again and again.
“When we got ready for the second debate, we really emphasized that no matter what the topic was, you could drive the Brexit message, because Brexit is a gateway to getting anything else done,” he said. “You can’t talk about funding the NHS, you can’t talk about doing more on education, you can’t talk about doing more on cost of living, wages, until you get economic certainty, and the only way you’re getting economic certainty is by getting Brexit done.”
In contrast, he said, Corbyn changed tack on Brexit several times during the course of the campaign, promising a second referendum but flip-flopping on whether he would stay neutral.
“We were able to use that to our advantage,” said O’Donnell. “Corbyn was defending the status quo. He was defending more of the same, which British people were against.”
