In the United Kingdom’s 2017 general election, Jeremy Corbyn pulled off a Trump-style surprise, coming from far behind to finish almost even in the nationwide popular vote. Like “The Donald” a few months earlier, Britain’s Labour Party leader had benefited from an asymmetry of expectations. While then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s pledges were endlessly pored over and evaluated, his were treated as harmless jokes. Few commentators bothered to pull his promises apart — not least because he had an army of fanatical online supporters ready to excoriate anyone who criticized him.
Hardly any pundits noticed his heaving rallies. When the result came in — the Labour Party won 40% of the popular vote to the Conservative’s 42% — it was an even bigger shock than the previous year’s Brexit referendum.
In December 2019, there was a rematch. Only this time, the pundits took Corbyn and his manifesto very seriously indeed. Although the polls consistently showed that he was well behind Boris Johnson, the new Tory leader, no one wanted to trust them, having been burned the previous time. But when the results came in, the polls were shown to have been right all along. Labour’s support slumped to 32%, its worst result since 1935.
Will President Trump be Corbyn-2017, the outsider who comes from behind and stuns the establishment? Or will he be Corbyn-2019, the inevitability of his defeat masked only by the unwillingness of columnists to believe the pollsters?
All the signs point to the second. Like many observers, I got this wrong last time, which gives me pause now. But there is a difference between pausing and overcompensating. The national polls, the state polls, and the number of Republicans for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, with almost no one the other way, all tell us the same thing.
The idea that Trump has an almost mystical ability to appeal to blue-collar voters under the radar is more often asserted than explained. Because the 2016 election was a shock, pundits felt they had to construct an explanation proportionate to their sense of surprise — hence the endless articles, especially by liberal journalists, about how they had missed the growing anger among calloused Michigan steelworkers or gap-toothed Appalachian mountain men or whatever.
I always felt that the likeliest explanation for 2016 was the simplest one. After two terms, it was the Democrats’ turn to lose, and bizarrely, they had put forward the least-appealing candidate they could find — even so, she still won the popular vote. If Trump truly had a unique ability to pull in non-Republicans, he should have significantly outperformed GOP congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 2016. But he didn’t. With a handful of exceptions, down-ballot Republicans did better than he did. Every Republican Senate candidate outpolled Trump, for example, except in Nevada.
For four years, I have listened politely to conservative friends explaining how only Trump talks to those forgotten voters who dig things and drive things and make things, but I have never really bought the analysis.
What will happen down-ballot this time? In 2016, Trump was not really seen as a Republican except in the technical sense. The party leaders hated him, and he spent part of the campaign attacking them. A number of his positions — on trade, on migration, on benefits — were radically outside the Republican mainstream. Indeed, his greatest successes as president, notably on tax reform, deregulation, and judicial appointments, have been in the areas that he has been prepared to leave to those swampy K Street Republicans about whom he is so rude.
This time, the Republicans are altogether Trumpier. A party always tends to attract new candidates in the image of its leader, and several establishment figures have, Marco Rubio-like, accommodated themselves to Trump’s statism and protectionism. While four years ago several GOP candidates picked up a small but not nugatory vote from what we might call traditional conservatives — Republican voters who were put off by Trump, either on grounds of character or policy — that seems unlikely to happen again.
It is, all in all, a deeply depressing outlook. We need a confident, wealthy, open America to lead the rest of the free world out of lockdown. Instead, we are likely to end up with an amiable old boob who struggles to remember the office he is running for or the candidate he is trying to beat. “Four more years of George, uh, George, uh,” Biden told a TV interviewer.
Maybe he has been watching Hamilton. If these are truly the best two candidates who the vast, rich, innovative, enthusiastic, liberty-loving American nation can come up with, something has gone horribly wrong. In retrospect, four more years of King George III might not have been such a bad thing.
