What Britain can learn from Donald Trump’s victory

This has been the year of ejection elections. Across the democratic world, incumbents have been thrown out and insurgents have triumphed. And nowhere has the establishment been so humbled, the insurgency so resurgent, as in the US – still the world’s greatest democracy.

For Democrats, it is mourning again in America. Just as in 2016, it is not just their candidate who has been defeated but their beliefs about their country. There are lessons for them, and for all political actors across the West, in Donald Trump’s victory.

The Democrat campaign was premised on a series of assumptions: that you could win an economic argument if you had the better statistics; that concerns about migration were misplaced at best and fascist at worst; that abortion was the most important issue for female voters; and that wayward rednecks would repent of their darker prejudices when educated out of them by the enlightened.

On economics, the Democrat campaign had no effective answer to Trump’s insistent questioning of voters: were they better off now than they were four years ago? Kamala Harris and Joe Biden could point out that on their watch America’s growth figures had outpaced other countries. But for voters, the valid comparison was not with the OECD’s basket of nations but with their own experience under the Trump administration. Economists might say that GDP was increasing, but the experience of citizens was that store prices were the only things going up.

The Democrats’ conviction that the principal motivating issue for female voters would be ‘reproductive rights’ was another mistake. Upholding feminist principles might be number one in the court of Queen Kamala, but for most Americans, male or female, Bill Clinton’s rule still held – it’s the economy, stupid.