Mike Dixon, Chief Executive of the Liberal Democrats, has written to members, musing on the US elections. It’s worth quoting at length:
I woke up this morning to Trump saying he’d won the election and that no more votes should be counted.
I can’t remember a darker speech by a major world leader in my lifetime.
A lot will be written about this election. But here are two important lessons for us:
- Campaigns run into trouble when they pull back on contacting voters.It looks like the Democrats stopping knocking on doors because of coronavirus – with the Republicans continuing – in some key areas has mattered a lot. Over the coming months before the elections in May, we need to keep talking to voters and getting our message across – safely and responsibly.
There is a lot we can do through lockdown.
Don’t give up or hunker down.
- Many people hoped this result would be a firm rejection of a divisive, fake news approach to campaigning.
It hasn’t been.
And that means the tactics Trump has used will be adopted even more aggressively in May and in 2024 by many of our political opponents.
The rollercoaster of emotion we’ve all felt today must be a wake up call. We can’t take anything for granted.
You can take action to stand up for a better, fairer world.
Yours in the fight for a better future,
Mike Dixon
CEO of the Liberal Democrats
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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10 Comments
Friends in Florida say this is exactly what happened in Miami-Dade county where Biden performed way below what Clinton got in 2016. The mayor of Miami-Dade, a Republican and prominent Cuban-American activist, ran a campaign for the US House heavy on local issues and his team did not pull out of face-to-face doorstopping even in the middle of COVID. He gained a congressional seat for the Republicans and put a real dent into the Democratic totals for Biden. A major reason why Biden lost Florida despite building up his vote share elsewhere in the state.
How does Mr Dixon measure/asses the “darkness” of speeches?
Might the declarations of war/armed intervention relating to the deaths and sufferings imposed upon Iraq and Libya have been darker?
How many deaths etc are Mr. Trump’s “dark” speech likely to cause?
Might some adhered to policies which support the natural world and real world economies help?
Whatever you think about Trump – in my case not much- there is no escaping the fact that he has got the second highest vote ever recorded for a presidential candidate after Biden and higher than Obama. That has got to tell you something about the USA today. It so much reminds me of the Brexit referendum.
It’s not all about knocking on doors; but that undoubtedly helps. It IS about putting yourself in other people’s shoes and not being judgemental. It’s also about recognising that what the leaders of our western democracies need to do is to get out of their elitist intellectual bubbles and confront the realities of globalisation as it has impacted on the working lives of millions of their citizens.
I am sorry about coming back with my thoughts, but I have been thinking about the number of people who are swayed by the pronouncements of the extreme right wing politicians both here and abroad and find it rather worrying that so many are swayed by their rhetoric, something similar happened in the 1930s!
Sorry one to many swayed in my post!
@ John Marriott The population of the USA has gone up by 31 million since the Obama election, John.
I was going to add something but think this by John near enough sums it up:
“It IS about putting yourself in other people’s shoes and not being judgemental. It’s also about recognising that what the leaders of our western democracies need to do is to get out of their elitist intellectual bubbles and confront the realities of globalisation as it has impacted on the working lives of millions of their citizens.”
There will be millions of American’s waking up soon relieved that the nightmare is over – considering makeup of the Supreme Court and likely makeup of the Senate this might not be true – but hundreds of thousands of others are worried that the jobs Trump brought back to the USA and focus on forgotten towns will be moved on from too. Yes, there were many people who had embraced racism voting for Trump but a few months ago we were saying that racism is learnt, that no-one is born racist so cannot cast off all those people as “just racists” when analysing why they voted the way they did. If we haven’t learnt that through Trump and Brexit then it’s going to happen again at some point.
The lesson I draw is that politicians need to constantly be aware of how the public actually thinks about issues and not assume what they think is widely shared.
My feeling is that there are many unscrupulous politicians in the world, always has been, who see an angle to manipulate for their own advantage without the faintest intention of fixing that angle, why would they when that division gives them power and a platform for their own personal agenda.
I think that the left/liberals need to understand Trump.
It’s easy to say that he’s just racist. There has been a “race” that left and liberals have tended to stop talking about which is white working class – perhaps particularly boys and men. It’s not that nothing is done for them – a lot is.
But they see us talking about BAME community, middle class concerns of climate change, waitrose shopping bags etc. and it is not that BAME have not had a raw deal – they have but people see traditional industries and northern in particular towns going to seed. It may be that revivals of traditional industries are not possible and town centres certainly need to be re-invented but we need to think how we can communicate better with these communities.
It is of course if anything an even bigger problem for Labour but we need some support in these communities.
We need and has been raised in these pages a “Blue collar Liberal Democrats” group which I don’t think has come about – but just might have done.