UK Labour, Ontario, Ford, And A Global F'ing Realignment
Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
When was the last time the Global Centre-right beat expectations in the suburbs?
That question’s been rattling around in my head for the last 12 hours, since it was clear Labour would win Wandsworth at this week’s local elections in the UK and it was becoming increasingly likely they’d flip Westminster, a pair of results both totemic and totally expected.
Westminster and Wandsworth are, plainly, posh inner London – Tory bastions where those who work in banking, high finance, and big law live and work, the playgrounds of the rich professional class. The sons of Eton and the fathers of Eton’s next generation live in those two boroughs, the owners of the two lowest council taxes in the country because that’s what those voters want. It is to London what the Upper West Side is to New York, except the UK Tories remained an acceptable brand to vote for for longer than New York Republicans did. These results – the first time Wandsworth has been red since Thatcher was but a leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, and the first time ever for Westminster – are truly totemic results. And my reaction to them was “that’s nice”, before I got back to sweating Colorado against Nashville last night, because it was obvious it was coming.
When was the last time the global centre-right beat expectations in socially liberal bastions like Wandsworth or Westminster? Easy – Australia, 2016, when their leader was a pro-gay marriage moderate who gave a fuck about climate change. Make me go back one more, and I’m not gonna lie, it’s hard. It’s probably Mitt Romney, whose extreme wealth and general disposition leant himself well to the Southlakes and Forsyths of America, even if his support was fairly piss in the white working class areas the GOP would dominate not 4 years later.
And that’s the thing – what do Mitt Romney and Malcolm Turnbull have in common about their one general election as head of their respective parties? Good results in the suburbs helped mask their truly horrible results in the regions, and the second their parties switched to candidates who can crank the culture war to 11, their parties did really badly in the suburbs and really well in the regions. Look at the massive swings to the LNP in Queensland, where MPs on tiny margins are now well and truly safe just one election later, or the way that the now-Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party is flailing around in the Melbourne suburbs.
You want to see the point illustrated? In 2016, Labor won Longman (Previous LNP 2PP: 56.9%) and Herbert (Previous LNP 2PP: 56.2%) in regional Queensland, but the Liberals got a 2.3% boost in their 2PP in Kooyong on a night when they lost right around 3% nationally. I’m sorry, is any of this surprising with, you know, the rest of the world’s results? In 2019, Kooyong swung 6% against the Libs on a 2PP level on the same day they got a 1% swing to them nationally, while they flipped back Longman with a 4.1% swing and Herbert with an 8.4% one. This is literally as easy as it will ever come, guys.
We’re likely on track to see similar results in Australia this year, where the expectations are pretty clear that Liberal losses, no matter the size, will be predominantly in the inner suburbs and the damage will be less so in the regions. Everyone’s expectations for Queensland are the same – if Labor has a good night, they might unlock a decent trove of seats in and around Brisbane, but the chances of Labor grabbing any of the regional seats is unlikely.
It’s the same reason that the seats where Democrats mostly beat expectations in 2018 were left-trending suburban seats, winning Minnesota’s (Twin Cities-based) 2 and 3 on the same day they lost (regionally based) 1 and 8. Outside of Staten Island and rural Kansas, which I sort of put down to disastrous GOP candidate effects and lower turnout, where did Democrats really have some spectacular night in their old working class base? They couldn’t flip Ohio, they couldn’t tap into any old Obama-era strength in rural Florida, they lost Senate seats in a wave with incumbents in North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri, and Florida … it was a night where Democratic successes came from outperforming expectations in the suburbs. Flipping Georgia 6th, getting such solid results in both Texas 32 and 7, flipping all 7 Clinton-GOP seats in California, and getting Oklahoma 5 were the really impressive accomplishments, all accomplished not on the backs of reversion, but Democrats flipping white wealth.
Yes, Republicans won Virginia, but they did so by extending the Trumpier coalition more than they did by flipping back large swathes of Romney-Biden voters – and also, the “beat expectations” qualifier should probably read “reasonable expectations”, which was that the GOP would win. (If you seek to suggest that I am implying my expectations for that race were, therefore, unreasonable, your only error would be to suggest I am merely implying it. My head was up my ass.) I’m not saying there was no Romney-Biden-Youngkin voting, but the GOP’s win wasn’t predominantly about that – it was a bit of reversion, but it was the GOP blowing it out in the culturally conservative south and west of the state and low Black turnout which really swung it.
What does all of this have to do with Ontario? Nothing, in a sense, but also everything. We are all addicts of this – every single person who reads this site is a political junkie, for whom polls and projections are our vice, and which we seek to inject in whatever form possible at any time possible. It is our heroin, it is our cocaine. What it also is is extraordinarily limiting in scope. We are all so far in the weeds on this stuff that very basic common sense gets ignored, and people say things of such stupidity as to be insane. The people who freaked the fuck out over 72 person Atlantic Canadian crosstabs in 2021, or the people who hung on every word of Quito or Frank, who freaked out about fucking Forum, all of you were so in the weeds of that campaign that you lost perspective.
What does this all mean for Ontario? Nothing, in a sense – it’s not like I’m just stubbornly going to project a victory for the side I want, because that would just be an explicit, intentional version of what I did in Virginia, whether I knew it or not then. But it does remind me that the case for the Liberals doing better than their province wide vote in the wealthy suburbs does exist – and that you’ll need a very persuasive argument to tell me they’re not going to, and “Doug Ford” isn’t exactly one.
Ford has always been a populist rabble-rouser, a champion of the working class against the snobs of the elites – many of whom live in many of the seats that look and feel like Westminster or Wandsworth. When a Ford Government Minister talked about being a government for people who shower at the end of the day, not the start of it, he was implicitly valuing the work of tradespeople and those working “real” jobs over the work of the white collar “professional” class, the exact sort of jibe that 20 years ago would have been standard Labour fodder against the Conservative Party of the Eton and Oxford educated.
The Tories are sometimes explicitly, and sometimes implicitly, running a campaign against the sorts of voters that they’ll need if they’re to win government – a campaign for the working class against the middle class, for the drivers instead of the transit takers, for the kinds of people who do the “right” jobs in their eyes. You want to see what that gets you? Tune into Australia in two weeks as Labor wins government out of the suburbs and without seats they used to rely on.
Might Ford prove me wrong, and be the first substantial centre-right leader to lead his cause to broad suburban overperformance of expectations without genuflecting to moderation in a decade? Sure, maybe. I can’t rule it out, but I also highly doubt it. At this point, if all you did was go into every election and expected the left to do better than an average swing in the socially liberal areas of wealth and the right to do better in the culturally conservative bastions of whatever place they’re in, you’d probably be batting a better % than if you spent every day of the campaign closely analyzing the minute distinctions.
Labour’s results in London were historic and barely elicited a response from me. Expecting the right to get kicked in the teeth in suburbia is just smart at this point – and it’s certainly my starting position for Ontario.