Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Democrats and Leftists Should Learn Lesson from British Labour's Election Debacle

Don't count your chickens before the eggs hatch, for one thing.

From Michael Wolff, at USA Today, "U.K. election: Painful lessons for Labour, leftists, pollsters":

LONDON — Many popular media notions of what a restless electorate is against (bankers, corporate power, tax dodgers, economic austerity) and what it is for (fundamental change, leveling the powerful, taxing the rich and big social program promises) came a cropper in the British election last week.

Rather than endorsing this leftward shift in politics — a view arguably now animating the Hillary Clinton campaign for president in the U.S. — voters returned the Conservative Party to No. 10 Downing St. with a heretofore unimaginable majority.

It was, in Britain, a conservative revolt, an unwillingness to play loose with hard-won economic stability, or risk the gains, however small, that have been made over the last few years.

The Conservatives painted a picture of a country that was moving steadily forward in place. The Labour opposition painted a picture of a floundering nation that needed to be overhauled and rescued by new spending plans paid for by new tax-the-rich schemes — a view rejected in almost every way.

Labour not only got the mood of the country wrong, but so did the news media. Indeed, part of Labour's problem was likely to have only seen its future, and understood the ambitions of the electorate, through its own favored media. The left-leaning BBC was wrong; the left-leaning Guardian was wrong; digitally centric Buzzfeed, trying to make inroads in Britain by targeting news to a young audience, was wrong.

The American pollster Nate Silver, famous for his 2012 U.S. polling, also got it wrong. Conservatives, at least those in Britain, don't necessarily like to admit they are conservatives. And Obama campaign consultant David Axelrod, hired to advise Labour for $500,000 and offering a strategy of economic populism, was wrong.

In a sense, the Internet itself was wrong: Many polls promising a tight race or a Labour win were conducted online. Those done by phone, reaching a less digitally inclined electorate, were more accurate.

Perhaps the high point of wrongness in the campaign was in the week before the vote. It was the well-publicized, middle-of-the-night meeting of Labour's leader and would-be prime minister Ed Miliband with Russell Brand, the entertainer famous for pseudo-revolutionary positions, 9/11 conspiracy theories and a big social media following. The Brand meeting was reportedly an Axelrod idea designed to court the youth vote. Indeed, there was a surge of youthful registration, but with few of those votes going to Labour.

It was the U.K. Independence Party, the far-right, anti-immigration party that was once assumed would undercut the Conservative vote, that in fact siphoned off many more votes from Labour. UKIP's Labour votes were a kind of replay of 1980's Reagan Democrats.

Labour's leftward position was not only a wrong move but also a carefully calculated one. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, the British political grail had been that Labour only had a hope of ruling the country if it forsook its trade union roots and found a centrist, business-tolerant tone. That was the success of Tony Blair's new Labour — 13 years in power as Bill Clinton-esque centrists.

Miliband's promise, on the other hand, was to take Labour back to its left-wing roots and offer voters a clear choice. And Labour's rejection and rout seemed to be a rather striking demonstration of how, as the right-leaning Daily Mail put it, "Middle England rose up to humiliate the pollsters and save the nation from Red Ed."
More.

PREVIOUSLY: "British Pollsters to Conduct 'Independent Inquiry' After Polling Debacle in General Election 2015."

Over sample leftists and you come out looking like blithering idiots.

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