Dave Weigel in the Washington Post on the British election and the US 2020 Election on the link below:
EVERYBODY IS WRONG
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds a sign as he arrives at a Dec. 2 rally in Colchester, England. (Hannah McKay/AP)
On Friday morning, Americans found out that the United Kingdom had relocated somewhere between the Great Lakes. The governing Conservative Party had won its fourth election in a row and its largest majority since the 1980s. Whether British voters knew it or not, they were sending coded messages to the Democrats.
“Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left,” said Joe Biden. “Jeremy Corbyn’s catastrophic showing in the U.K. is a clear warning,” said Mike Bloomberg, referring to the left-wing Labour Party's leader. The two moderate Democrats were echoed by commentators arguing that the election “show[ed] the limits of the Twitter Left” or proved that “wokeness” would kill the Democrats in a 2020 election.
The election was traumatic for America’s left-wing movements, especially its resurgent socialists, who adored Corbyn. His 2015 takeover of the party mirrored the rise of Bernie Sanders, and Sanders himself welcomed the comparison. After the 2017 election, when Labour scored its highest vote in a decade, America’s left saw vindication: Milquetoast liberals lost elections; anti-austerity socialists could win them.
“We got our Bernie,” said Marcus Barnett, an organizer with Momentum (a left-wing campaign organization formed to help Labour win) at the 2017 convention of Democratic Socialists of America. “Don’t give up hope. Your time is coming now.” That optimism kept up through Thursday afternoon, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a Sanders endorser, and former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, a Sanders campaign co-chair, tweeting their support of Labour.
What happened in two years? Some trends, such as Labour’s decline with white voters in postindustrial Britain, mirrored what has happened in America — coal towns went Conservative, just as West Virginia and Minnesota’s Iron Range have gone Republican. Labour gained in big cities, suburbs and university towns, just as Democrats have shed votes in rural Pennsylvania while building electoral steamrollers in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
But Labour’s particular weakness came from developments with no American analog. Scotland, a Labour stronghold for decades, fell in 2015 to the Scottish Nationalist Party; imagine California suddenly giving its votes to a breakaway party, not the Democrats, and the problem is obvious. Corbyn, who marched for every left-wing cause of his lifetime, took positions that Sanders wouldn't, such as opposition to NATO and the re-nationalization of energy companies. And Corbyn was tangled again and again in allegations of anti-Semitism and of not doing enough to stamp it out in the party.
The Labour Party that fought that 2017 election was deeply skeptical of Corbyn, riven by the sort of infighting that made the 2016 Democratic primary look tame. It got worse over time. This year, nine Labour MPs bolted the party, citing concerns about Corbyn's leadership in general, and the anti-Semitism controversy in particular.
All of that hurt, but Brexit made it worse. The 2016 vote to leave the European Union scrambled the country's map. Outside London and Scotland, many historically Labour communities, skeptical of trade, globalization and in many cases immigration, backed Leave. Labour's 2017 position on Brexit was no more complicated than the Conservatives': The country had voted, and it was time to get the best possible deal.
“The question now is what sort of Brexit do we want,” Corbyn would say, arguing that Labour would focus on a “jobs-first” exit from the European Union.
At the time, that stopped the Conservatives, then led by Theresa May, from making real gains with Leave voters. What really hurt was the governing party's manifesto. (British political parties, unlike ours, run closely on their party platforms.) Leave campaigners had promised that quitting the European Union would lead to millions more in funding for the National Health Service. The manifesto didn't deliver, instead piling on more means-testing for services. Corbyn turned the election into a choice between “austerity” and generous benefits, reversing years of business-friendly tax cuts.
It nearly worked. Corbyn's Labour smashed turnout models in 2017, winning 40 percent of the vote, the party's highest total in 16 years. Never popular, he was briefly seen more positively than May.
And then it fell apart. The Brexit saga isn't worth getting deeply into here, but Labour suffered as the debate over leaving the E.U. dragged on. Pro-Leave voters who stuck with the party grew angry as Labour denied votes to potential deals, repeatedly delaying an E.U. exit. (Read Sebastian Payne's thread of conversations with disaffected Labour voters). The Conservatives entered the election with a promise to “get Brexit done,” while Labour's new position was that it would renegotiate a deal and put it up to a new national referendum.
Johnson avoided the mistakes of 2017, promising to hire more nurses and otherwise protect the NHS. Given a choice between a widely disliked Corbyn and his muddled Brexit position and an only slightly unpopular Johnson who promised to increase services and make Britain carbon-neutral, pro-Leave Labour voters walked away; many pro-Remain voters went for the Scottish National Party or the Liberal Democrats, options with no equal in American politics.
If the 2017 election validated the left's theory of politics, this election validated Johnson's version of populism: less immigration, more nationalism, and more wealth to spread around at home. Trump, an on-again/off-again fan of Johnson, is all in on the nationalism. And an underrated factor in Trump's 2016 victory was his willingness to abandon Republican norms on Social Security, Medicare and trade. But he hasn't shown the same flexibility on “entitlements” since then, giving back an advantage to Democrats.
Britain's election has plenty of lessons for Republicans, who are unlikely to adopt them because it would mean abandoning their fiscal and social welfare policies. It has warnings, but few lessons, for Democrats; the problems that broke Labour may be specific to the U.K.
I know a lot of y’all get mad when I show you what your candidates actually believe. So please don’t take this personally. 
