There’s a dollop of good news for Democrats from the British and French elections, but it’s bad news for President Biden.
The basic lesson is that liberals can win elections but perhaps not as incumbents. The election results abroad strike me as one more reason for Biden to perform the ultimate act of statesmanship and withdraw from the presidential race.
The U.K. elections on July 4 resulted in a landslide for the Labour Party, ending the Conservative Party’s 14 years in power. Keir Starmer, the new Labour prime minister, achieved this result in part by moving to the center and even criticizing the Conservatives for being too lax on immigration. He projected quiet competence, promising in his first speech as Britain’s leader to end “the era of noisy performance.”
But mostly, British voters supported Labour simply because they’re sick of Conservatives mucking up the government. The two main reasons voters backed Labour, according to one poll, were “to get the Tories out” and “the country needs a change.” A mere 5 percent said they backed Labour candidates because they “agree with their policies.”
British voters were unhappy with Conservatives for some of the same reasons many Americans are unhappy with Biden. Prices are too high. Inequality is too great. Immigration seems unchecked. Officeholders are perceived as out of touch and beholden to elites. This sourness toward incumbents is seen throughout the industrialized world, from Canada to the Netherlands and Japan.
Frustration with incumbents was also a theme in the French election, where President Emmanuel Macron made a bet similar to the one that Biden is making — that voters would come to their senses and support him over his rivals. Macron basically lost that bet, although the final result wasn’t as catastrophic as it might have been.
After the far-right party of Marine Le Pen led in elections for the European Parliament in June, Macron rolled the dice and called national elections. The second round of those elections on Sunday led to a three-way split in which a leftist coalition came in first, Macron’s centrist alliance came in second (apparently losing its ability to govern) and Le Pen’s grouping came in third. Macron may now be stalemated in an era of divided government, but at least right-wing nationalists are not anointing their own prime minister.
A lesson from France, as from Britain, is that voters are very willing to support candidates from the left but are eager to smack incumbents.
Yet there’s another lesson for American Democrats: Shaping electoral choices can be a very successful tactic to mitigate the damage. In France, the far right ended up performing poorly because candidates from the rest of the political spectrum treated the election as a national emergency: Leftists and centrists cooperated to push some of their own candidates out of races and concentrate the anti-rightist vote. This was painful, but strategic withdrawals by certain candidates prevented the rise to power of a right-wing extremist.
Hmm. President Biden, your thoughts?
Analogies with Europe are imperfect. But I hope Biden appreciates the headwind he faces as an incumbent at a time when electorates are grumpy — now compounded by doubts about his mental acuity.
Polling is uncertain, and November is a ways away. But for now Democrats appear on course to lose the presidential election to a felon who was ranked by scholars this year as the worst president in American history. Biden at the top of the ticket may also increase the possibility that the G.O.P. will win Congress and many state and local races — conservatives already control the Supreme Court — so that Donald Trump would face few constraints. “Donald Trump is on track I think to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide and take with him the Senate and the House,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, warned on CNN.
Perhaps Biden might recover his political footing, but I suspect it’s more likely that he’ll face a steady drip-drip of troubles. That’s partly because of biases that lead us to highlight information that buttresses pre-existing narratives.
Gerald Ford, for example, was one of the most athletic and graceful of presidents, but he took one tumble and the story took hold (quite unfairly!) that he was a klutz. From then on, every time he slipped, tripped or fell — even while skiing — a clip of it made television news and confirmed the narrative. And because cameras are always on the president, slips on camera are inevitable.
Likewise, fair or not, Biden is under a microscope: Every time he misspeaks or has a senior moment, voters will see clips of it, amplifying the discussion of whether he is infirm. And that’s without another disastrous episode like the presidential debate last month; if something like that happens again, God help the Democrats.
If Biden is right about the stakes this fall, doesn’t it make sense to do what the French did and juggle candidates to reduce the risk of a cataclysm? Vice President Kamala Harris sometimes polls better than Biden against Trump, and my guess is that someone like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan (perhaps paired with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey) would do even better in November because she could run as an outsider against the Washington establishment.
It’s bizarre to see a billionaire septuagenarian ex-president campaign against elites, against the establishment and against a rival for being too old. It would be a fine thing to see Whitmer and Booker direct that line of attack against Trump himself — and raise necessary questions about Trump’s mental and physical fitness. We should also be talking about Trump’s acuity, but that’s not a topic Biden can raise.
The Brexit vote in Britain in the summer of 2016 foreshadowed the populist anger that would elect Trump that fall, and I worry that the European elections this summer are an omen of a Trump victory this November, too. So I hope the Biden family wrestles with this reality: The best evidence we have suggests that Trump is a weak candidate, but Biden is an even weaker one and thus risks the precise catastrophe he most fears.
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