Democrats in 2016 were slow to appreciate what the Brexit vote in Britain meant: that anti-elite populism was a powerful global force that could overwhelm their presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect Donald Trump.
Biden and his team, focused on their own problems since the president’s faltering performance in Thursday’s debate, may be too preoccupied with his survival atop the Democratic ticket to think about the implications of France’s vote. They should think again.
Macron called the snap election after his centrist coalition took a beating in E.U. elections in early June. The decision to call the election, which caught even his prime minister by surprise, represented a huge gamble on the part of an unpopular leader now in his seventh year as president. Now it has come crashing down on him.
National Rally is led by Marine Le Pen. It is a hard-right, nationalistic, anti-immigration party with antisemitic roots. Her father, who led a movement that has become National Rally, was a Holocaust denier. It is one of a number of right-wing parties in European countries that have been on the rise in recent years.
Macron bet that he could force French voters to confront the prospect of Le Pen’s party in power and that they would recoil from that future. In the first of two rounds of voting, he lost in spectacular fashion. The shape of the French Parliament and the ultimate strength of National Rally won’t be known until after another round of voting July 7. A hung Parliament, with no party in the majority, is possible.
But the results of the first round are enough to show that Macron’s arguments fell flat. He pushed every possible button to rally voters to reject what National Rally offers. France, he said, could be in ruins if the populists grabbed the reins of power. He railed against both the hard right and the coalition of left parties that ran second in Sunday’s voting. Macron’s centrist alliance limped into third place.
Democrats ignored the implications of the Brexit vote in 2016. Shocking as the outcome was, there was a notion among many in the United States that “it can’t happen here.” In an age when anti-immigration movements and the populist right have been rising in many places, those words should be struck from the vocabulary of politics. The Brexit vote was a thumb in the eye of the political establishment, a rejection of elites whose warnings of chaos and disruptions were dismissed by rank-and-file voters in the countryside.
The Brexit referendum had been called by then-Conservative Party prime minister David Cameron. He anticipated that voters would reject such an extreme course and that the debate over Britain and Europe that had divided his party would fade. Like Macron this summer, Cameron’s bet proved spectacularly bad, and Britain has been living with the consequences since.
Voters in Britain will go to the polls Thursday for their own national election. By every indication, the Labour Party, which has been out of power for more than a decade, is on track to sweep to victory. If it does, Democrats ought not to take too much solace.
The story of the British election is of a Conservative Party that has held power since 2010 and is now a spent force. The Tories have run through five prime ministers. They are out of ideas, distrusted by voters and badly divided over their future course, bleak as it is. The Labour Party is the beneficiary of those divisions and mistakes. British voters are ready for a change.
At this point, the Tories are not only facing defeat at the hands of Labour, but they are also being challenged from the right by the populist, anti-immigration Reform UK Party. That party is led by Nigel Farage, who was a leader in the push for Britain leaving the E.U.
In 2016, many Americans could not envision voters ever electing Trump to the presidency. He mocked the elites and they in turn dismissed and denigrated him. He attacked illegal immigrants, roused racist and antisemitic sentiments and promised to be a voice for voters who felt disrespected by those in power. Those angry voters turned out that November, and American politics hasn’t been the same since, even though the country rejected him in 2020 and put Biden in the White House.
For Biden and the Democrats, one lesson from Sunday’s voting in France seems clear. Trying to scare voters with grim predictions of what a Trump victory would mean for the future of American democracy might not be sufficient to win the election in November. Those warnings will work for his core supporters, but those voters alone probably will not win him the election.
That threat of a second Trump presidency is real, just as the warnings about the policies embraced by Le Pen’s party are real. Democracy is on the ballot, Biden likes to say, and yes, it is. But more than that is on the ballot, including perceptions of the aging president and evaluations by individual voters of his policies and how their lives would be affected by a second Trump presidency versus another term for the incumbent.
Since Thursday’s debate, Biden’s team has claimed that, in focus groups, the president’s policies were seen as better or more popular than Trump’s. National polls suggest otherwise. Trump leads Biden as more trusted on a series of issues, including two big ones: immigration and inflation. A CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday showed that by a wide margin, voters think they would be better off financially under Trump.
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg conducted dial meter groups during the debate. Participants included so-called “dual haters” — voters who dislike both Biden and Trump — as well as some voters leaning toward third-party candidates. He found that Biden lost six to seven percentage points of margin on inflation. According to a summary of the results, the debate hurt Biden more than it helped Trump, which is small consolation.
Biden’s team has spent the days after the debate trying to stamp out talk that he should let the party choose someone else as its nominee. Newspaper editorials and prominent Democratic pundits have called for him to step aside, but for now, the Biden campaign, through assiduous behind the scenes work and some public messaging, has avoided public defections by any major party leader or elected official.
The longer-term challenge for Biden will be to sharpen an affirmative message to go along with the attacks on Trump. His team has recently settled on a harsh message describing Trump as dangerous and only out for himself. Before the debate, his advisers believed it was working. But dire warnings about the opposition may go only so far, as Macron learned in France. Trump may be all that Biden claims — dangerous and vengeful and unwilling to commit to accepting the results of the election. But that might not be enough for voters.
Months ago, a former Democratic elected official offered this observation: “I don’t think a Biden campaign that just talks about saving democracy is going to do it.” The official, who asked not to be identified to offer a candid opinion, added: “Biden has to put some meat on the bones. He’s got to say here’s what I’m doing and what I want to do to make your future better and especially to young people. It’s not just saving democracy. It’s saving your future.”
