Win some, lose some

A lot of virtual (and some real) ink has been spilled this past week over why Kamala Harris lost the US election, and a fair amount more on why Donald Trump was victorious. Consequently, many people have put in their two penn’oth, offering some interesting and often extremely cogent explanations.

One could therefore argue that perhaps my thoughts on what went wrong or right, depending on which side of the fence you sit (more on that later), are unnecessary, but I think it can be interesting to look at the result from a UK perspective and draw on some of our elections over the past 30 years or so.

For my money, there are many explanations for why Harris was not elected to the White House. I have to admit that I was surprised that she didn’t win. The polls suggested she had a good chance of victory, there was plenty of evidence that the Republicans were trying to game the surveys and even the highly reputable Allan Lichtman, who famously eschews the polls in favour of his ‘keys’, predicted that the Democrats would triumph.

Leaving aside any personal qualities or reservations that the American populace might have had about Harris (after all, they chose an egotistical and vain man who is a convicted felon and known sex offender), what was obvious throughout her admittedly short campaign was that she failed to land any killer punches.

She is not a seasoned campaigner like Biden at his best and was unable to cut through the noise and flimflammery of political insider discourse to appeal directly to voters in a language that they understood.

It was abundantly clear that she knew how to climb the greasy pole and glad-hand rich donors and celebrities, but that only gets you so far. Actually, just far enough to have the right to place yourself before the voters and make your case. That is the true starting point for any politician, and it is then, and only then, that we see what the candidates are made of, and whether or not we want give them our hard-won democratic vote.

Whether looking at the US or Europe, or indeed in most major economies around the world, it is clear that people are fed up with the impression that the world of politics is a closed circle, where our representatives talk in a codified language that is incomprehensible outside of their bubble and discuss things that have no relevance to our daily lives.

Worse than that, the things that politicians do talk about and prioritise seem to be focused entirely on the aggrandisement of an emergent class of super rich individuals. Individuals who seek to live in a space entirely separate from us mere mortals, to whom they wish to sell ever-more expensive products while paying their workers smaller and smaller wages, all the while pulling the levers of power by forcing the hands of elected officials and representatives spellbound by their immense wealth.

That, at least, is the narrative that is played out over and over and over again, particularly on social media but also in bars and at social gatherings all across the developed world. It doesn’t matter whether it is true or not. That is what people believe, so strongly that it becomes its own truth and informs almost every decision they make, and none more so than in choosing the President of the United States of America.

The problem for Harris is that she sounded like ‘one of them,’ just another self-referential politician trapped in the Washington bubble, unable to interact with ‘real' people. She came across as if she was talking down to the electorate, telling them they would be mad not to understand that she was the better choice and stupid not to see why her approach was best.

(Many people have said her apparent lack of concrete policies was an issue with voters, but I disagree. For Sir Keir Starmer, it was an advantage in the recent UK election as it made the target for attack too small for the Tories to effectively land any punches, and it could have been for Harris, if she had not come across as remote and aloof.)

When Biden was on the stump during the 2020 election against Trump, he knew instinctively how to make himself sound like an everyman, and to draw on his personal experiences and tragedies to convince the voters that he understood their concerns, that he felt their pain and that he would do something for them as individuals.

Harris’s lack of experience out on the road was made painfully obvious, and was made worse by not having had to campaign for the Democratic nomination (which I doubt she would ever have won).

The contrast with Trump here is stark. His off-the-cuff speeches, focusing on issues that seem like odd choices at best for a politician seeking election, and his earthy, everyday language when talking about fellow politicians and his rivals were so far from the rulebook for how politicians are supposed to conduct themselves that it seemed to self-appointed ‘reasonable’ people impossible that other reasonable people should vote for him.

But they did, in their millions. Why? Because that kind of rambling fallibility is exactly what they wanted to see and hear.

The second phase of the internet age (post-initial boom, when it became ubiquitous among the haves but not the have nots) imposed two things on individuals: that they be unimpeachably perfect in their day-to-day life; and that they ascribe to what the chattering classes dictated was the ‘right’ thing to believe (ie, to be at least centrist, if not socialist), with non-believers piled-on and, nowadays, cancelled with immediate effect.

As social media and tech spread out into the rest of the population (which is generally more conservative, with less interest in ‘advancement’ and more in ‘values’), there was, and continues to be, an enormous kick against the settled status of public discourse.

Out there in the real world, left-leaning liberals don’t get to interact, and certainly not confront their differences, with those further towards the right, and vice versa. But they do online, and they find it hard to adjust. After all, the left believes that anyone who doesn’t share their general values is some kind of fascist, and the right hates what they see as sanctimonious preaching from privileged people who don’t have to face life’s hard choices.

But right-leaning individuals are not fascists, no more so than any other group, and the left does talk down to non-believers. Conservatives simply have a different vision of how the world should be ordered and are suspicious of dismissing people for being all-too human, and Trump is their glowing (orange) representative.

(And before you argue that he is a rich businessman and therefore just as much an ‘insider’ as any politician, it is worth recalling that he is an utter maverick even in the business world, not least by not actually being very good at doing business.)

One way of looking at whether a politician has the ability to cut through and speak directly to the voters is to reach for the old, slightly hackneyed question: would you like to have a pint with [insert name of would-be leader] down the pub.

It may seem facile to hardened political thinkers studying polling data and issue-led campaigning to reduce everything down to that admittedly simplistic notion, but it gets to the heart of how many people think when choosing their representatives. Many individuals do indeed vote based on a cold, clear analysis of the candidates and what they offer, but many more, especially in the current climate, decide on a more personal, instinctive level.

In the last US election, it was obvious: Biden would be better and more enjoyable company than Trump (with all his preening narcissism) when sat up at the bar and chewing the fat. The same (by a slim margin) goes for Starmer versus the moneyed robot that is Rishi Sunak in the UK election earlier this year. And look at David Cameron versus Gordon Brown, Tony Blair versus John Major or, to come back to the States, Bill Clinton versus Bob Dole or Barack Obama versus John McCain.

It is telling that Harris could not pass that test against someone who had already failed it.

Of course, we have to be kind to Harris and understand that she always faced an uphill battle against Trump when he had the might of social media and the Russian disinformation engine behind him, but there was one more factor that counted against her in the eyes of the US electorate.

She is a woman.

This is so important that it should have come first, second, third and fourth in any discussion as to why Harris is not currently picking out wallpaper patterns for the White House.

The contrast with the UK or the rest of Europe (or indeed many major countries), where the idea of a woman leading a nation is no longer a question, could not be more notable.

Much as I love the US as a country, I have to admit that there is a misogyny that underlies all of American culture that runs far deeper than over here on this side of the Atlantic (although there is admittedly much work to be done here too). All you have to do is to look at the way women are forced to confirm to gender stereotypes in public and in the media if they want to fit in and be accepted.

It saddens me deeply, not because I particularly think that Hilary Clinton or Harris would have made good presidents, but because it is self-evident that to automatically discount half the population when selecting the best person to run a country seems ludicrous, at best.

That it currently seems impossible that a woman would be elected US president is not something that will change in an instant, or even a decade, but I hope for the sake of the next generation that this can, and will be, reversed.

Madam President. It has a nice ring to it.

Finally, I posted a new recipe on here last week. My recipe for beetroot soup started in Poland and has been adapted over the years, but I think it retains some of the characteristics of the simple, delicious fare that I first tasted over twenty years ago.