Boris Johnson and Donald Trump firm as masters of their universe

Two unlikely would-be heroes of a Western resurgenc­e bent the univers­e to their wills this week.

We can be heroes: Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Picture: AFP

Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, the two bizarrely unlikely would-be heroes of a Western resurgenc­e, bent the univers­e to their wills this week. Both strengthened their chances of re-election.

Johnson faces voters on Dec­ember 12, Trump next November.

In Britain, Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader, announced he would not field candidates in the 317 House of Commons seats that Conservatives won in 2017. That structural change boosts Johnson’s prospects hugely.

British voters rank leaving the EU, or not, the most important election issue. Johnson must consolidate the Leave vote better than Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn consolid­ates the Remain vote.

Where the Brexit Party, or before­ that the UK Independence Party, have stood, they frequently take enough votes from Conservatives to hand seats to Labour under first-past-the-post voting.

Trump, even in the midst of impeachment, got a less decisive but still big advantage. Hillary Clinton, Trump’s dream opponent, said she is still tempted to enter the Democratic Party primaries.

Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire and former mayor of New York, also filed papers for candid­acy in a couple of early primaries, though he hasn’t decided whether to run. Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick did jump late into the primaries.

This is good for Trump becaus­e it indicates that serious Democratic strategists and powerbrokers are extremely uneasy whether any of the 16, or is it now 17, Democratic primary candidates, with Joe Biden still frontrunner, can beat Trump. Nothing is better for him than the smell of weakness in his opponents.

Trump and Johnson are vastly different personalities. But they are both populist insurgents. The unexpected victory in the Brexit referendum in 2016, which Johnson led, does bear one acutely suggestive resemblance to Trump’s equally unexpected presidential election victory.

Both campaigns persuaded people to vote who generally do not vote, who may never have voted before. These extra people were working-class, older, socially conservative, mostly white. They were not in themselves the bulk of the Trump or Brexit voters. But in both cases they were the victory margin.

Farage was effectively forced into his statesmanlike decision. The exit deal Johnson negotiated with the EU is far from ideal but it is a thousand times better than Theresa May’s surrender deal.

Farage’s matey, earthy, imperturbable demeanour disguises what a historically significant politicia­n he is. Britain simmered with amply justified discontent over the many madnesses of the EU but Farage campaigned over 20 years to give this discontent focus in a single policy: leave. Demon­ised and ridiculed by the media, his parties, first UKIP then Brexit, won too many votes to ignore­. He forced David Cameron into holding the referendum.

If he had run Brexit candidates in every seat and campaigned loudly that Johnson’s deal was an unconscionable sellout, Farage might have ensured a Corbyn prime ministership and a retreat from leaving the EU. He is still running candidates in Labour seats the Conservatives need to win, and that could still cost the Tories. But the momentum now is gone from a vote for the Brexit Party. People who want Brexit will vote Tory. It was the strength of Johnson’s position, his ability to own the Brexit issue, that pushed Farage into this accommodation.

The polls after the Farage announce­ment reflect the trend. Take the YouGov poll as credible and representative. It showed the Conservatives at 42 per cent, Labour­ at 28, the Liberal Democrats at 15 and the Brexit Party at 4. If those figures are repeated on election day, there will be a very big Conservative majority.

These polls will be welcome and frightening for Johnson. May enjoyed even bigger leads before the 2017 election. The sense that she was going to win a landslide, that Corbyn had no chance, frightened some voters and enabled ­millions of others to vote Labour on social spending issues, happy that Corbyn, with his unique histor­y of supporting terrorists, anti-Semites and communists, would not be PM. In this election, the Conservatives need the prospect of a Corbyn prime ministership to be real and frightening.

The other fascinating element of the polls is that the Tories are now scoring higher ratings with working-class voters than they do with the upper crust. It is just possible that Britain is undergoing­ a long-term transform­ation of the political and social basis of its politic­s. Brexit has scrambled the old left-right divisions.

Johnson, like Trump, has abandoned traditional centre-right concerns about balanced budgets and fiscal prudence. Like Trump, he will guarantee virtually all socia­l spending. Not only that, while polls show that voters rate leaving the EU as the No 1 issue, health is No 2. The Tories have trad­itionally been weak here. It is the only issue that, at the start of the campaign, Labour was trusted to manage better than the Tories.

Some polls show Johnson’s Tories now matching Labou­r in health. The reason is simple. Johnson plans to spend on the National Health Service until his eyes water. If it were not for the staggering, almost insane, spending promises Corbyn is making, Johnson’s profligacy would be an issue.

Polls show the No 3 issue for British voters is crime. Johnson, and the Conservatives generally, had become very woke and socially liberal in recent years on all kinds of issues. But on crime Johnson has broken with all that and gone back to a hardline, police-centric view of law and order.

A leaked Tory campaign documents shows the party thinks it has strong chances with five sets of voters it didn’t get in 2017. They are Labour voters who supported Leave in the 2016 referendum; soft Labour voters concerned about Corbyn; Brexit Party supporters; traditional non-voters; and Tory Remain voters who yet may accept­ that Johnson’s EU deal embodies a measure of compromise and that Corbyn is just too scary.

Labour’s performance in the early part of the campaign has been reassuringly chaotic. Corbyn is committed to introducing a four-day working week. But he is also committed to vast expansion of the NHS. Naturally someone asked whether the four-day week would apply in the NHS because if it does this will wildly increase the cost of the scheme. Labour did not have a coherent position on this basic issue and frontbenchers contradi­cted each other.

After criticising India harshly over Kashmir, and selecting very few Indian candidates, Labour is offside with many British voters of Indian heritage. Corbyn embarrassed himself by saying Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Bagh­dadi should have been arrested rather than killed, seemingly unaware­ that the Islamic State leader was wearing a suicide vest.

Corbyn keeps changing his position on another referendum for Scottish independence. But Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon has declared she won’t support Labour forming the government unless she gets a refer­endum commitment. Labour almost certainly would need SNP support to form government. That means a Labour government would probably oversee two referendums next year — one for reversin­g the 2016 Brexit decision, one for Scottish independence.

All of this does not guarantee a Johnson victory. Voters have never been more volatile.

The same is true in the US. Election analyst Nate Silver has argued that Trump has a 50-50 chance of re-election.

There are iron rules in American politics and each US presidential election result breaks one or more of them. Thus a very common predictor is that an incumbent president will always be re-elected if the economy is doing well and the US economy right now is doing extremely well, despite­ a modest recent slowdown. So Trump wins.

But wait! Another model shows that a president with an approval rating just above 40 per cent will lose. Yet another shows that a big negative response to the poll question “is the country on the right track?’’ also means the incumbent loses. So, on those models, Trump loses.

I think the situation today is that the odds for Trump are a little better than 50-50, maybe 55-45. The impeachment process has hurt him a bit.

Trump’s four achievements in office are substantial: he has cut taxes, deregulated business, boosted defence spending and appointed good judges across all the courts for which he has responsibility. Voters tend to recognise this. Everyone recognises the econo­my, but millions of Americans also care about defence and judges.

All these people are what you might term rational Trump voters, even if they find his personality objection­able. Millions vote for Trump because he represents rebellion against the cultural elites.

How is this all affected by impeach­ment? Trump has held his base very effectively but he will almos­t certainly need at least a littl­e more than the base to win this time. The Democrats will be highly motivated. This was evident not just in their winning the House of Representatives in the mid-term congressional election last year but in the extremely high turnout they got. As many people voted for the Democrats in the house last year as voted for Trump in the presidency in 2016. That’s more or less unheard of.

Impeachment has slightly depressed Trump’s approval rating and has helped prevent his broadening of his base to independents who would be attracted to his economic record.

There is no doubt Trump has behaved poorly in relation to Ukraine but it is utterly absurd to argue that this amounts to a crime that should result in the 2016 election being overturned and him thrown out of office.

The Democrats have decided to label their allegations against Trump as bribery. But Trump paid no money to anyone, the hold-up in aid to Ukraine was temporary, and the Ukrainian government didn’t do anything political which Trump wanted them to, namely launch an investigation into the activities of Biden’s son. The whole impeachment circus looks like a gross abuse of process.

The Democrats could pass a congressional resolution criticising Trump over this and then campaign against him fiercely in the election, but impeachment is anti-democratic.

The Republicans look as though they could hold all their members in the house, and perhaps all their members in the Senate, when it comes to voting on impeachment. So Trump will stay in office and the Republicans will render impeachment a meaningless act of partisanism by Democrats and therefore impeachment won’t decide the election.

The polls are fascinating. Biden, despite his weaknesses, has reconsolidated himself as the leading Democrat. But clearly Clinton, Bloomberg and Patrick think he can’t beat Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump is well behind­ all the main Democrats in national­ polls. But in the six key swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina — he beats Elizabeth Warren handily.

In some of those states he’s notion­ally just behind Biden and in others just ahead. The political effects of the impeachment circus could well decline over time. Right now, they might be at their height and Trump is still fiercely competitive. Gosh elections are fun!