Luke Akehurst: Clinton’s fate shows Labour the danger of ignoring white working class voters

When I first started following US elections in 1988, pretty much the most reliable states of the not very many that were reliable for the Democrats were in the “Rust Belt”. Places that had been the heartland of US industry, both mining and manufacturing, and were suffering in the Reagan years just as their UK equivalents suffered  from de-industrialistation under Thatcher – though the process has been far more thorough in the UK so even in the Rust Belt a lot of manufacturing remains.

The real stronghold for the Democrats was West Virginia, impoverished and dominated by coal mining. It was the US equivalent of the Rhondda or Hemsworth or Easington.

But by the time Obama successfully constructed a winning coalition in 2008, West Virginia had moved dramatically into the Republican column. The Republicans played on a mining industry backlash against environmentalism to shift a state from one end of the political spectrum to the other.

West Virginia was in many ways the early signal that it was possible for the Republicans to target white working class voters who had traditionally been a core component of the Democratic coalition and play on their cultural alienation from the liberal values of the big cities on the coasts.

The Republicans had done this before with poor white voters in the South over race issues – the Deep South had been solidly Democratic in all elections from the Civil War until the 1960s, but is now solidly Republican.

Last night Trump won by following up on the 2000 capture of West Virginia by picking up a bunch more Rust Belt states where working class voters had previously been Democrats.

He took Pennsylvania and Ohio, always swing states, and added Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin (100 years ago the most socialist area of the US due to its German migrant community) and almost took Minnesota, once the most reliably Democratic state in presidential elections.

This may well prove to be a realigning election, one where the Republicans create a new majority including white Rust Belt voters in the same way they took Southern white voters in 1968.

Trump was able to do this because globalisation has alienated and angered many white voters in Rust Belt areas who feel they have been thrown into a hugely competitive global market both against overseas labour (because of trade deals struck by Bill Clinton and Obama) and migrant labour, that their living standards have stagnated and that only Trump sounded like he cares or will do anything about it. For instance 61 per cent of Wisconsin working-class whites told pollsters they thought Obama’s trade policy takes away US jobs. In Wisconsin 64 per cent of voters had an unfavourable view of Trump yet 30 per cent of those who said so still voted for him. They didn’t like him, in fact half of his supporters hated the guy they voted for, but they saw it as a way of kicking an establishment that they felt didn’t care about them.

He also won in states economically dependent on the energy industry – coal, fracking, oil – which don’t like the Democrats’ green agenda.

Trump won non-college educated white men nationally by a 49 per cent, taking 72 per cent of them.

Clinton won unionised households but only by 8 per cent compared to Obama’s 18 per cent lead among them in 2012.

Hillary Clinton would have made a great President. It would have been wonderful to have the first woman President and one with sound centre-left politics. She was almost over-qualified for the job. Like her husband she had great policy ideas which ironically would have benefited the people in the Rust Belt who rejected her. But labelling half of Trump’s supporters “deplorables” made all of them think she was an establishment snob who cared about every minority except white working people.

The coalition Hillary did assemble might win an election in eight or 12 years’ time due to the huge demographic changes in states like Texas and Georgia.

But for now trying to win without a very clear offer, appeal and ability to connect with white working class voters is a recipe for defeat.

And morally it stinks. Who is the party of the left supposed to represent and fight for, if it isn’t working people and the least well-off?

The Brexit vote shows Labour is already well down the track to making the same mistakes.

As I said after the referendum:

“We need to rebuild an electoral coalition whose fundamental glue is the economic self-interest of the less well-off half – plus enough to win – of society. The interests of ordinary working people have to be restored to the driving seat in Labour party policy making. We should welcome well-off social liberals who want to be part of our coalition but we have to start from the principle that they don’t get to impose policies that fit their moral values on working people who are adversely affected by them.

“The alternative electoral strategy of building a coalition around cultural values rather than economic interests – a ‘progressive coalition’ attractive to former Lib Dems and Greens and shaped in the image of the Guardian’s editorial stances – has been tried and failed under Ed Miliband and now doubled-down on by Corbyn. There is no ‘progressive majority’ even in a binary referendum with an obviously more progressive option. Any delusion that the 16 million votes for Europe are the potential starting point for a winning Westminster first-past-the-post coalition is destroyed by their lop-sided geographical distribution. You can’t win a Commons majority by piling up 70 per cent of the vote in bits of London, Brighton, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge and the student quarters of northern cities because there just aren’t enough MPs elected there.”

This is exactly what happened in the US – Clinton stacked up huge majorities in liberal strongholds like California and New York and lost narrowly in marginal states.

Unlike the Democrats we have no long-term Hispanic demographic saviour because our minority populations are so much smaller in the UK.

We can either rebuild the traditional Labour coalition with working class voters at its core or we can see our constituencies in the North and Midlands and Wales – Britain’s equivalent of West Virginia, Wisconsin and Michigan – fall to right-wing populism of either a UKIP or Tory variety in similarly dramatic fashion to the loss of Scotland that already happened.

As I said in June, Labour requires:

• A genuine contrition for the mistakes made in exposing our own core supporters to the economic blizzard of free movement of labour.
• Party policy-making that reflects the views of our potential voters, rather than the prejudices of a self-selecting and very middle class and metropolitan membership.
• A leadership which can communicate with, empathise with the values of, and not terrify, the third of our voters who backed Brexit and the voters we had already lost to the Tories and UKIP.

Otherwise whether the election here is a snap one in 2017 or the scheduled one in 2020, we will be seeing the British remake of what we’ve just seen in America’s Rust Belt.