The United Kingdom’s Labour Party and the Democratic Party in the United States share a problem, which is their struggle to win over working-class voters.
Despite adding 32 seats in Thursday’s general election, the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, who espouses left-wing populism, lost working-class votes at the expense of the Conservatives, who gained such votes despite losing their parliamentary majority.
The higher the share of people with a university degree, the better Labour fared – and the larger the swing to Labour from the Conservatives. Despite the election being seen by many as a disaster for the Conservatives, the party has gained working-class votes.
Is the Labour Party under Corbyn capable winning more than 40.3% of the vote, as it did on Thursday? And if not, what must Labour do to reclaim a majority? Dump Corbyn, centrists say. “We could have won this election if we had a half-decent leader, as [May has] imploded,” one anti-Corbyn Labour candidate told BuzzFeed News.
The challenge on this side
Democrats here in the U.S. confront a similar challenge. Donald Trump became president in part by winning significant support in the Midwest and Rust Belt among whites without a college education.
But the distance that Democrats find themselves from such voters may be farther than they think. Writing in the Times, Tom Edsall surveys the extent of Democratic losses among working-class voters, which, it happens, was not limited to whites.
As many as 9.2 million people who voted to re-elect Barack Obama voted for Trump, based on estimates cited by Edsall. Many of the counties that switched to Trump from Obama are concentrated in the Midwest and Rust Belt.
Amazingly for the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, “Obama-Trump voters were more likely to think more Democrats look out for the wealthy than look out for poor people,” Geoff Garin, a pollster whose firm conducted the surveys and focus groups, told Edsall.
Edsall quotes Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, who wrote recently that “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class problem.’ They have a ‘working-class problem,’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly.” (In his latest column, Frank Bruni reports on Democrats’ difficulties connecting with voters in New York’s Hudson Valley.)
The data that Edsall summaries shows a pullback in support for Democrats among working-class voters of all races, including many turned off by the party’s support for trade agreements that voters perceive as costing jobs, as well as a perception of the party’s being out of touch with the economic stress of voters, particularly older ones, in small town and rural America.
“For all the harm he has done, continues to do and proposes to do, Trump has successfully forced Democrats to begin to examine the party’s neglected liabilities, the widespread resentment of its elites and the frail loyalty of its supporters,” Edsall writes.