What Britain’s Next Leader Can Teach Joe Biden
What Britain’s Next Leader Can Teach Joe Biden
The president needs to distance himself from his party’s activist wing.
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On Wednesday, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stepped into the streaming rain outside No. 10 Downing Street to announce that he would call parliamentary elections on July 4th, much earlier than had been expected. As Sunak tried to convince the nation that the country’s economic situation was finally improving after years of hardship, his words were drowned out by a distant prankster blasting the most famous political campaign song in British history: “Things Can Only Get Better,” the upbeat anthem by D:Ream which helped to fuel Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.
Sunak’s botched announcement is emblematic of the sorry state of his government. After 14 years in office, the chaos of Brexit, a rocky pandemic, and a parade of five ill-fated prime ministers—remember Liz Truss?—the Conservative Party is internally riven, visibly exhausted, and widely loathed. As soon as Sunak announced the date of the upcoming election, commentators began to joke that it would soon be known as Independence from the Tories Day.
So if Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, now looks overwhelmingly likely to succeed Sunak, one obvious reason lies with the desultory state of the competition. Indeed, polls indicate that Starmer himself is strikingly unpopular. Only 31 percent of British voters believe that the Labour Party is fit to govern, and only 24 percent believe that it has a good team of leaders. (Luckily for Labour, voters have soured on the competence of the Conservatives even more drastically, with 15 percent believing that the party is fit to govern and 12 percent trusting its leaders.) As the head of Ipsos, one of Britain’s biggest polling companies, recently told The Guardian, “Starmer’s personal ratings are the lowest Ipsos has ever seen for an opposition leader who is so far ahead in the overall voting intention.”
The situation in Britain provides a fascinating contrast to the United States. Like Sunak, Donald Trump is very unpopular. Like Starmer, Joe Biden is a moderate politician who does not elicit especially strong feelings in the population. But unlike Starmer, Biden has so far seemed unable to capitalize on the weakness of his competition. While Starmer is on track to become only the second leader of the Labour Party to win an outright majority in over 50 years, Biden now trails Trump in both the polls and the betting markets—an ominous development given the immense damage the former president is likely to inflict on the country, and the world, if he reconquers the White House.
So what is Starmer doing right? Or, to put the question the other way around, what is Biden doing wrong?
Starmer rose through the ranks of the Labour Party while Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist firebrand, was its leader. He won the race to succeed Corbyn in 2020 by positioning himself neither as one of his ideologically rigid disciples nor as one of his vociferous critics. When he took over, many observers expected Conservative predominance to endure, in part because it seemed unlikely that the Labour Party could tack back to the center.
But it turns out that Starmer had been underestimated both by his friends and his foes. Once he was firmly in charge of the Labour Party, he broke with the party’s left flank with astonishing efficiency. Starmer abandoned many of the most radical pledges of his predecessor, such as plans to nationalize key industries. He ditched many of the party’s most toxic stances on cultural questions, such as its palpable discomfort with any form of patriotism. He removed some of the most toxic figures from the party, either because they had engaged in blatant antisemitism or because—like Corbyn, Starmer’s former boss—they had proven persistently unwilling to fight it. Most importantly, he did all of this in a decisive and transparent way: Even when breaking with the radical elements in his party cost him support, he publicly persisted—and that visible willingness to bear a cost for distancing himself from the far left was a big part of what made the public trust him on the issue.
Starmer won power within his party as a loyal foot-soldier of the left, and then moved to the center in anticipation of a national election. Joe Biden, over the course of the past five years, has made a journey in the opposite direction.
Despite the lack of palpable excitement about Biden’s candidacy and concerns about his advanced age, he won the 2020 primaries by being the most moderate major candidate in the race. But as he geared up to fight the election and staff his White House, Biden came to prioritize party unity over fidelity to his own political instincts. He was the only presidential candidate in recent history to move away from the center between the primaries and the general election. Once he was elected, he staffed his administration with legions of advisors and policy wonks who had cut their teeth in the senate offices and presidential campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Even as the White House faces troubling polling numbers, it seems intent on staying that course. The major policy announcements and executive orders of the last few months are clearly designed to mobilize the progressive base and satisfy activist groups. On cultural issues, such as mandating that universities equate gender identity and biological sex, it has consistently placed itself far outside prevailing public sentiments. And even its economic policies have been shaped by the demands of progressive interest groups. The administration has, for example, spent billions of dollars on forgiving student loans—even though its biggest electoral weakness is with working-class voters who did not go to college, and student loans came in dead last when voters under 30 were asked to rank fifteen policy issues in order of importance. (The conflict in the Middle East ranked fourteenth.)
Perhaps most importantly, Biden never broke with the left in as public a fashion as Starmer. In his best moments, as when he rejected the idea that we should defund the police, Biden disagreed with progressive orthodoxy but never explicitly with progressive politicians. More often, he backed down at the first hint of public pushback. During this year’s State of the Union address, for example, he strayed from prepared remarks, using the term “illegal” in reference to an undocumented migrant who had murdered a young woman; when advocacy groups condemned Biden for the remark, he rushed to MSNBC to apologize for his choice of words.
These differences in Starmer’s and Biden’s approaches to the left flank within their own movements have led to them being perceived very differently by the general public. British voters, who have no special love for their likely next prime minister, trust that he will be a steady hand at the tiller. American voters, by contrast, worry that Biden is too old or too willing to indulge his party’s activist wing to ensure that Democrats don’t do stupid shit. And so Starmer is ahead by twenty points—while Biden, according to the latest polls, is trailing by one or two.
Every comparison contains similarities as well as dissimilarities. The differences between Britain and the United States are obvious. Democrats are in office while Labour is in the opposition. Biden is old and frail while Starmer is comparatively young and energetic. And American elections are nearly always extremely tight while British elections are all about the swingometer, which television networks display in ever more dramatic fashion in their election night broadcasts, with voters often giving an incoming prime minister a sizable majority. It would be naive to think that Biden would now be on track for a landslide victory if only he had taken a page out of Starmer’s book.
But, especially with Biden trailing in the polls, and the stakes in America much higher than in Britain, it would be just as obtuse to assume that Democrats couldn’t possibly learn anything from Labour. Starmer would not be on track for a big victory if he had not convinced voters that he is willing to stand up to the most misguided, and least popular, constituencies within his own party. And I fear that Biden will not get back on track in the American elections until he proves that he is capable of doing the same.
British voters are looking for an excuse—any excuse, really—to vote against the Tories. In distancing himself from the unpopular left wing of the party, Starmer did just enough to give them that excuse. Plenty of American voters, too, are looking for an excuse—any excuse, really—to vote against Trump. But because he has failed to distance himself from the unpopular left wing of the party, Biden has, in their eyes, not done enough to give them that excuse. If he wants to beat Trump, a candidate who is far more dangerous than Sunak or even Boris Johnson ever were, he has until November to change that.
Yascha Mounk is the editor-in-chief of Persuasion.
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According to the Harvard poll cited, young voters' top concern is inflation. I'm not really sure what Biden himself has said on the issue, but his surrogates have mostly claimed it wasn't happening, and then insisted it was no big deal.
Meanwhile, the migrant crisis was also a top issue for young voters despite Harvard's best efforts to obfuscate the issue with a bunch of happy talk questions about how aren't immigrants so nice. Turns out you can think immigration can have positives and also that we can't allow everyone on earth to crash the border, make a bogus asylum claim, and get set loose to be magically undeportable forever, even if they go on immediate crime sprees. Making a complete mockery of our laws and national well-being.
Thank you for writing this. After voting in every election including school board, volunteering for, and donating to Democrats for decades, I'm not voting for Biden (or anyone else for president). I am appalled and heartsick that he has, through infirmity or some misguided desire to connect only with Democratic activists, decided to pursue the social progressivism of the far left. To me, Trump and Biden are both unsuitable for different reasons. I'm a voter in a swing state who will not be voting.