The Left Resurgent? Recent elections and campaigns in context
As a researcher who studies comparative politics, the last few weeks in politics have been fascinating and, in many ways, unprecedented. As an African American woman who was born 10 days after presumptive-Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris, the last week hasbeen mind-blowing. I have many thoughts about what is happening in American politics that I will be sharing over the next few months, but what is on my mind today is that there has been a lot of discussion about unity — but that is clearly a fleeting thing. We are seeing coalitions form in both expected and unexpected places. However, those coalitions are often informal, messy and prone to falling apart when push comes to shove. This is particularly true for Left parties, which tend to be made up of diverse factions.
One of the similarities in what has happened in France, the UK and the US is the issue of timing and coordination. In France and the UK, snap elections were called by leaders who were hoping to catch other parties off guard, to maximize their chances of winning/retaining seats. That didn’t work out very well for Macron or Sunak, given that the Labour party was already prepared and far ahead in the polls, and the very divided left parties in France were able to come together quickly to forge an electoral coalition.
However, the two recent elections in the UK and France demonstrate two different examples of the ways that snap elections can work to consolidate parties that have to come together both internally and with external players. Left and moderate right parties in France coalesced around their common goal to avoid putting the far right into government. Even I had predicted that the Rassemblement would win the most seats, “The short time for campaigning is creating a great deal of uncertainty, but clearly one of the winners is likely to be Marine Le Pen and her party’s prospects for the next presidential election in 2027, barring Macron’s resignation, which seems unlikely for now.”
It’s not clear yet what strategies were playing out with Biden’s team before his shock announcement, but some have argued that the timing was designed to keep the focus off Kamala Harris during the Republican Convention while giving her enough time to consolidate her support before the Democratic Convention. The speed with which the Democratic party has come together is stunning, given the divisiveness of the past few weeks, as well noted by Seth Masket in his blog, “importantly, what we’ve seen over the past few weeks is a form of party strength that I honestly didn’t think still existed in the US — a party strong enough to remove a sitting president. US parties, even in their strong moments, have tended to be highly deferential to their presidents, even when it looked like those candidates might lose the next election (see, for example, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter).”
The other important component in the US is fundraising. The Harris campaign has broken all fundraising records by raising over $85 million dollars in 24 hours, mostly from small donors. Many who were sitting on the sidelines, dispirited by the ongoing calls for Biden to step down, turned around and have enthusiastically supported Kamala Harris’ bid to be the Democratic nominee, both financially and volunteering. Webinars by groups of Black men and women garnered over 100,000 participants, and the first few rallies held by Harris have been full of excited supporters.
The diverse group of people who for the democratic party, as well as independents, seem to be more energized now, which may lead to this rather difficult coalition to come together, as it did in 2008 when Barack Obama won the presidency. The tide has most definitely turned, and it will take high turnout and a maintenance of this momentum to turn it into a blue tide in November. We will see if what happened in France can be replicated in the US.
Since November 8, 2016, political scientists (myself included) have become leery of making predictions for elections. Although a few colleagues predicted a Trump win, those of us who weren’t looking at the data as closely were shocked by the outcome. However, that has not kept us from trying to prognosticate, despite the volatile and divided nature of electorates, not only in the US but beyond. As someone who has been studying the populist radical right since the mid-1990s, I have not been surprised to see their rise across Europe and beyond.
What happened in France was actually a confirmation of my theories going back to my first book, Voting Radical Right in Western Europe. There I argued that parties could work together to use pre-electoral coalitions to encourage strategic voting, depending on the nature of the electoral system. This type of coalition was called the cordon sanitaire or republican front, that called on candidates from the left and mainstream right to work together to give voters only one option against the radical right in the second round of voting. That strategy was a resounding success in this case, although the front had broken down in previous regional elections in particular. However, in this case, it led to the Left winning the most seats, followed by the mainstream right and the Rassemblement in third place. This leaves the French assembly in a state of upheaval, but voters were jubilant that they had beaten back the radical right’s move to power.
Does this outcome have any meaning beyond France? The fact that President Joe Biden decided to step down, requiring a quick turn-around by the campaign and the Democratic party to turn to Vice President Harris has a similar feeling to the snap elections in both France and the UK. It’s a risk, but so far the response seems to show that it might just turn out to be a winning strategy.
