Phil Rodgers: Lessons about politics to be learned on both sides of the Atlantic after US elections

The US elections on 5 November brought triumph for Mr Trump, and disaster for the Democrats. But they also brought a number of lessons about politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Here’s a look at six things we can learn from the American elections, and what they tell us about elections closer to home.

Lesson one: In a polarised world, turnout is king

There are two main groups of American voters: people who might vote Democrat, and people who might vote Republican. As US politics has become more and more polarised, the overlap between the two groups has got smaller and smaller. For many Americans, elections are not so much about which of the two competing parties they will choose, but rather about whether they will support their preferred party, or not bother voting at all. As a result, party campaigns focus mainly on motivating their own supporters to turn out, and demotivating the other lot. Persuading people to switch allegiance is always a bonus – but getting your own supporters out is key. In the UK, the political picture is more complex, and voters are perhaps a bit more ready to switch between parties, but turnout is still critically important. In Cambridge, typically only about 30-40 per cent of people vote in local elections, so campaigns are all about building a list of supporters and then running an effective polling day operation to get them to go to the polling stations.

Lesson two: Big victories come from small margins

Although Donald Trump ended up with an emphatic 312-226 electoral college victory over Kamala Harris, this was built on pretty slender majorities in the seven swing states, and Mr Trump had just a 2 per cent lead nationally in the popular vote. Similarly, Labour’s thumping win in July’s General Election gave them 63 per cent of the seats on just 34 per cent of the vote. In this year’s Cambridge city council elections, Labour did nearly as well, winning 64 per cent of the seats on 41 per cent of the vote. These wins are largely the result of disciplined targeting – focusing campaign resources on battleground areas while giving less attention to areas where the outcome is more certain – but they can mean that a small shift in the vote back the other way may result in large losses. Local elections are often very close too – many a Cambridge council seat has been won or lost by less than 50 votes.

Lesson three: Incumbency hurts

While there are certainly some advantages to being in power when you’re seeking election, there are also distinct disadvantages. A key Republican message in the US election was that Kamala Harris had been in office for four years, and was therefore to blame for all the bad things that had happened during that time. Similarly, in the UK general election, Labour hammered the Conservatives over their 14-year record. Now that Labour are taking some unpopular decisions in government, they are on the receiving end of the incumbency effect. We have already seen the results locally in by-elections in Romsey and Histon & Impington, with significantly reduced Labour vote shares. Next year’s Cambridge local elections may be a lot more of an uphill struggle than Labour are used to.

Lesson four: Demographics are shifting

The Democratic party’s defeat will be analysed for years to come, but it’s already clear that part of the story was shifting patterns of support among different groups of voters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Donald Trump did better with male voters, but Kamala Harris didn’t get quite as much support amongst female voters as she had hoped for. While the Democrats still led with non-white voters, the Republicans made some inroads here too. Demographic patterns are also shifting in UK elections. Social class was once the strongest predictor of party allegiance, but this is no longer the case – now the biggest factor is age, with younger voters tending to the left, and older ones to the right. Level of education is a strong secondary factor, with university graduates more likely to vote Labour or Lib Dem. In Cambridge, with its relatively youthful and highly-educated population, Conservative election wins have become very rare indeed, and it’s likely to stay that way until some other demographic factor comes into play.

Lesson five: Money talks – but only so loudly

UK election spending limits have increased quite a bit in recent years, but they are still pretty small compared to the unbelievably vast amount of money that sloshes around in US election campaigns. However, campaign spending will only take you so far. This was perhaps illustrated most vividly by Michael Bloomberg’s failed 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination, which cost more than $500million and brought him nowhere near winning any primaries. This year, the Democrats comfortably out-spent the Republicans in the swing states, but still lost every one of them. Beyond a certain point, election campaigns reach ‘saturation’, when further campaigning effort has no effect on shifting the vote. We see the same effect in UK elections. Years ago, when I was an activist in a particularly closely-fought by-election campaign, I remember putting a leaflet through a letterbox only to hear the resident say “Oh no, not another one” as he picked it off the doormat. I’m sure a lot of voters have felt the same way.

Lesson six: Polls aren’t perfect

There are several reasons why opinion polls don’t always get the outcome of an election right. Even under ideal conditions they always have a margin of error, typically plus or minus 3 per cent; political opinion is a moving target during election campaigns; sometimes voters are shy about declaring their true allegiance; and it’s difficult to ensure that a sample of voters is truly representative of the whole electorate. Many news reports said the polls were showing a very close presidential election, but it would have been more accurate to say that it was very uncertain. In some of the swing state polls, Kamala Harris had a small lead in the final days of the campaign, but even these polls were within a couple of points or so of the actual result. Indeed, they were quite a lot more accurate than the polls for the UK general election, which typically gave Labour a 15-20 point lead over the Conservatives, and put the blue team only slightly ahead of Reform. When the votes were counted, though, Labour were only 10 points ahead of the Conservatives, who themselves managed to stay nearly 10 points ahead of Reform - but this better-than-expected Conservative performance still represented a shattering defeat.

Finally, a seventh lesson: British elections work pretty well. Admittedly, a US election is one of the biggest exercises in democracy in the world, but it still seems surprising that it took more than a week after polling day to determine which party had won control of the House of Representatives. In contrast, UK exit polls can give you a pretty good idea of a general election result before Big Ben has finished bonging, and an army of council workers in sports halls manually counting paper ballots overnight seems to get results a lot quicker than American voting machines do. We may have a pretty uncomplicated way of counting elections, but it does a good job. Long may it continue!