Rumblings and Grumblings

A dissatisfied European electorate makes its feelings known. And there are some takeaways for our own election in November.

Image courtesy of CNN

2024 is the largest election year in the world’s history, and it’s already looking to be a pivotal year, with results a bit all over the map. The right is resurgent, except where it’s not. Nationalists are gaining, except where they were already in power. Is there a common theme to be gleaned from all this, and does it carry lessons for us here in the U.S.?

Let’s take a look at some recent results and polling ahead of upcoming elections.

EU parliamentary elections were held this weekend, and the far-right parties saw some disturbing gains, especially in the largest nations of France and Germany. While the centrist parties still hold enough seats to form a parliamentary majority, the results reflect deep dissatisfaction with immigration and the economy in the heart of the EU. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party performed so well in fact that French President Emmanuel Macron called for snap parliamentary elections in just 20 days, a risky move that could force him into a power sharing arrangement.

But conservative, nationalist governments also faced a reckoning from voters. While Western Europe saw right-wing parties make gains in countries like France, Germany and the Netherlands, the centrist parties scored big in Eastern and Central Europe, with Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition the major winner in Poland, and Victor Orban’s Fidesz party having its worst showing in almost twenty years. And that is cause for optimism.

Meanwhile, based on fairly consistent polling, the ruling Tories in the U.K. are staring at a political abyss in upcoming elections, while in the world’s largest democracy, Narendra Modi’s Hindu Nationalist BJP underperformed polls in India and failed to gain an outright governing majority.

So what gives? Before we throw up our hands at these seemingly contradictory results, I do discern a common theme. It carries important lessons for our own election in November, and it may explain Biden’s tougher stance on the border.

Voters in Europe are rejecting the status quo

The world’s democracies are grappling with a post-pandemic, deeply insecure global reality. The economic shocks from Covid, coupled with the profound loss of peace and stability following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the bloody and devastating war in Gaza, have turned electorates angry at whoever is in charge.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether the government is right or left or center. For the voters, the problem is the way things are being handled, from inflation to migration, and the solution is to call for change.

Europeans face multiple crises, including low economic growth, high costs for nearly everything, a surge of migration from non-European regions, a faltering climate change agenda, and an increasing and even existential threat of Russian aggression. While many voters in Western Europe are signaling mistrust of the whole EU project and want greater national autonomy, many voters in the middle and south of the continent, where countries are facing internal autocratic threats and the possibility of outright invasion by Russia, want ever closer ties to Europe.

Meanwhile, in the U.K. nothing seems to be running correctly, and the Tories, who comprise the oldest continuous political party in the world, face an unprecedented wipe-out in parliamentary elections in just a few weeks. As commentator Ian Dunt noted recently on the popular Fast Politics podcast, the British government’s response to its own obvious mismanagement of nearly everything has been to focus instead on culture war issues, including an obsession over trans health care. 

Sound familiar? Happily, most voters in the U.K. aren’t taking the bait and remain wholly unimpressed. To them, the focus should be on trains, not trans. And the economy under Tory rule has yet to emerge from the deep doldrums wrought by Brexit and Covid.

U.S. voters have many of the same vibes

In a world where voters want anything but business as usual, a U.S. presidential election that is a geriatric rematch of 2020 leaves many understandably dissatisfied. Both candidates remain deeply unpopular, albeit for different reasons, and certainly neither represents a fresh start, unless facism feels fresh to the MAGA crowd.

But if U.S. voters, like their European counterparts, are also unsatisfied with the party in charge, it isn’t clear where they will direct their ire. For example, Republicans in the House have proven they can’t govern at all, and they are being held hostage by extremists within their own ranks. As a consequence, the congressional GOP has low approval ratings with voters, and the GOP House majority is at serious risk. 

There is also a broad sense that SCOTUS is no more than a political arm of the GOP and, with its radical, regressive agenda, now represents the greatest threat to individual liberties and freedoms. If voters want to take out their anger on the powers that be, the Court is an increasingly likely target. So far, however, the Biden Campaign has not leaned harder on the question of the Court’s corruption and the dire need for reform, instead being satisfied with attacking horrific decisions like Dobbs. Perhaps we will see more calls from the Biden Campaign for voter rejection of the extremist Court as Election Day nears.

The economy in the spotlight

Economic woes remain an albatross around the necks of European leaders struggling to win over voters. But the relatively strong U.S. economy could mean that President Biden won’t get swamped the way other leaders did in their own elections.

Positive sentiment around the strong economic performance of the U.S., particularly versus the rest of the industrialized world, is finally beginning to show up in the polling. For example, the most recent Financial Times / Michigan Ross monthly economic poll shows Biden has closed the gap considerably against Trump on the question of whom voters trust to handle the economy, with 41 percent saying Trump and 37 percent picking Biden. While Trump still leads here, the four point spread is a far cry from the 11 points that Biden trailed Trump by back in February. Notably, Biden has made significant gains and now leads Trump by one point on this question among voters over the age of 55, who also are the group most likely to vote.

While I am a big believer in not trusting the polls to tell us the absolute numbers on how people will vote come Election Day, especially this far out, I would add that looking at the same poll with the same methodologies, even if flawed, can often produce valuable insight into where things are moving from a relative sense. And all signs point to a softening of attitudes against Biden, particularly on the economy as inflation has hovered near normal levels for well over a year.

Biden has faced a “vibes” problem on the economy for a long time, where most individual voters rank their own and their home state’s financial circumstances as fair to excellent, while giving poor marks for the rest of the country. That disconnect has always existed but is exacerbated today by consistently false reporting by right-wing outlets Fox and tepid to negative reporting by mainstream media sources such as the New York Times and CNN. 

But with markets at all time highs, disposable income on the rise, continued historically low employment, and a possible interest rate cut in September, Biden’s numbers on the economy—an issue that remains among the biggest headaches for European leaders—likely will see continued improvement.

The nonexistent migrant crime wave Biden must still address

That leaves two other “vibes” problems the Biden Campaign must solve: migration and crime. These are “vibes” precisely because, as things currently stand, the facts demonstrate that migration across the border is down 54% from its highs, and there is simply no evidence of migrants committing crimes in waves, despite the enormous attention right-wing media gives to certain outlier cases. 

Nonetheless, Americans, like Europeans, tend to believe what they see on social media and in hyped-up media stories, and within that skewed world the U.S. is facing an unprecedented crisis in the form of migrant crime. To counter this false narrative, Biden has done the nearly unthinkable and pegged to the right of the GOP on the border, effectively shutting it down to asylum-related crossings at unauthorized entry points. As I’ve written about for The Big Picture substack, this Executive Order, however strong and muscular, isn’t likely to withstand court challenges, and perhaps the Biden White House well knows that. 

And yet, the move is popular with voters. It mirrors the tough stand against migration that the center-right European People’s Party, led by the German president of the EU’s executive body, Ursula von der Leyen, took in the recent European Parliamentary elections. The Biden Campaign is no doubt taking note that the EPP was one of the only governing centrist parties to actually gain seats in the last election, in part because of its tough stance on migration.

In the coming weeks, we will likely see what will feel like contradictory results: a resurgent right in France inflicting serious electoral damage upon a liberal governing party on June 30, and a conservative Tory party in utter collapse with a new Labour Party in power in the U.K. Pundits will try to tell us that the former is very bad news for Biden and liberal democracy, even while the latter is unique to Great Britain and should be discounted. 

Please ignore these takes. The fact is, governments who have mismanaged big messes are being punished by their voters, plain and simple. Here in the U.S., our messes result not from the Democrats in the White House or the Senate, but rather from the chaos, dysfunction and corruption of the GOP in the House and the Supreme Court. We need to hone and deliver that message this November.

Moreover, we need to amplify the fact that the economy is actually doing quite well compared to everywhere else, and that on the question of the border, it is Democrats who are acting to solve the “crisis,” even if, understandably, you might strongly disagree with the methods employed.

If that messaging comes through clearly this fall, Joe Biden might well avoid the electoral fate of his European counterparts. Instead, he could once again defy the polls and the predictions and win reelection handily. Indeed, it appears he is now positioning himself politically to achieve just that.