| 8 mins read
Centre-left governments around the world are facing considerable challenges in governing and in seeking re-election, as populist right-wing candidates and political parties make ground with a discontented electorate. What can the Labour Government and other centre-left parties learn from the fate of those governments, particularly from the US Democrats?
Incumbency doesn't (fully) explain defeat
Plenty of observers have concluded that the defeats of the ‘pandemic leaders’ who had to deal with an unprecedented global pandemic, the effect of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and rapid inflation, mean that the most obvious explanation is that incumbent leaders paid the price for stalling living standards, inefficient state spending and faltering public services. In other words, the centre-left shouldn’t take defeat too personally. Whilst it is true that the centre-right is not having its political moment either, citing the ‘incumbency factor’ alone overlooks the structural problems facing the centre-left in securing more stable majorities.
At the root of the centre-left’s problem is its dislocation from its traditional electoral base, namely working-class voters, with all the myriad of country-specific meanings that come with references to social class. For more than two decades, working-class voters have been pulling away from centre-left parties, or more accurately, the centre-left parties have pulled away from them. In Europe, the collapse of the social democratic vote after the financial crisis of 2007-08 led some parties to near extinction. Most have not fully recovered their former electoral competitiveness, and their dislocation with their changing working-class base is at the heart of the problem. The overall vote share among social democratic parties over the past thirty years has fallen in virtually every developed democracy. There is no centre-left party in any developed democracy that can win a majority in their respective parliaments without significant support amongst working-class voters.
The centrality of social class
In the US presidential election of November 2024, Democrats lost voters everywhere, but most crucially they continued to lose working class Americans. Donald Trump overwhelmingly won the working class by 52–39 points, including winning working class men by 56–39, working class women by 48–38, making serious in-roads into the Democrats’ historic lead with Hispanic working class voters at about 37–50 Trump-Harris, and about 26–67 among Black working class voters.
UK strategist Deborah Mattinson conducted research on behalf of PPI, tuning in to voters who formed part of this neglected voting bloc. Often, they would describe themselves as part of America's middle class, but shared many of the same traits as the UK working class.
Top of mind was the cost of groceries, fuel and heating; in the US, the cost of medicines. Beyond the immediate inflation worries, working Americans would describe life getting harder. As one woman in a swing state put it in August 2024, ‘there's less of a legit middle class … People are just working, working, working, and I think that's really unfair.’ In a separate survey by YouGov in the UK for PPI, 59 per cent of working class adults tended to agree that ‘you get less in return for working hard than you did a decade ago’.
The perception that the deal whereby if you work hard, you can get on has broken down is backed by reality. Low economic growth in the UK has contributed to the flatlining of real wages in the last decade compared to the forty years before, costing the average worker £10,700 per year in lost wage growth. Whilst Keir Starmer prioritised reconnecting with working class voters, Labour’s margin of success was much narrower than with middle class voters.
In the US, the crucial working-class voters the Democrats needed if they were to win were unconvinced that Kamala Harris, and Biden before her, could further their prospects. Inflation, jobs and the economy and immigration were what mattered. As a postal worker from Nevada explained, ‘Democrats just represent radical views right now. They cater for every small group, not the majority.’ People who said that the Democrats had moved too far to the left stood at 58 per cent, whereas 47 per cent said Republicans had moved too far to the right. As polls closed, 58 per cent of working class voters agreed now that ‘the economy will work for working people’.
‘Bidenomics’ didn't land with voters
Why didn't the unprecedented investment in the US economy, which produced such strong economic growth, deliver electoral benefits for its architects?
Through a programme of legislation Biden termed ‘Investing in America’, the administration invested $756 billion which they claim helped attract over $1 trillion in private sector investment announcements. During the Biden years, the American economy outperformed many of its competitors, experiencing strong growth of around 3 per cent in 2023 and 2024.
Much of the difficulty was that inflation grew as well, peaking at 9.1 per cent in June 2022, with food prices rising by 22 per cent during Biden's tenure. Whilst every developed economy was affected by the inflation induced by spiked energy costs as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many American voters attributed rising inflation to government spending.
At the same time as heralding the long-term investment in hard infrastructure, some of which will take years before the benefits are visible, the Biden administration made some political choices that signalled to hard-pressed working-class voters that their priorities laid elsewhere, such as spending $175 billion cancelling student college debts.
Lessons for UK Labour and the global centre-left
As the Labour Party reflects on its first six months in government, what lessons should be drawn by the challenges that have centre-left parties have faced around the world?
The strategy that Labour undertook to get into government – to prioritise the needs and interests of the broad definition of working-class voters – is fundamentally empirically correct. It also happens to be true for the centre-left parties PPI’s project has reviewed around the world. However that focus in opposition on the interests of those on low to middle incomes, who are so poorly served by our economy and our politics, has to be maintained in government too. The major conclusion of the research is that those voters need to hear and see their concerns and interests reflected by the party of government, otherwise they will look to the alternatives. The power structures in our society are so easily tilted towards the higher educated, more affluent class, that centre-left parties have to be resolutely focussed on the lives of ordinary working-class voters.
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