To the grim roll-call of electoral defeats for centre-left parties this year, another must now be added. The Democrats’ drubbing in America’s midterm elections last month represents the party’s worst defeat for over 70 years.

These were, of course, always going to be difficult elections for the party. Like Labour in 2001 and 2005, the Democrats were defending seats won deep inside their opponents’ traditional territory. The Republicans themselves cocked a snook at Obama’s attempts to change the way politics is done, and, as they did in 1994, then reaped the electoral benefits of the damaging image of gridlock of which their strategy was the principal author. Most importantly, stubbornly high rates of unemployment fuelled an atmosphere of resentment and fear, one in which progressive parties rarely thrive.

Drawing wider lessons from what are essentially local contests is difficult. Nonetheless, the Democrats’ dismal performance offers further warning signs for Labour.

The great gaping hole in the centre of the Democrats’ coalition – previously filled by skilled working-class and lower middle-class voters – bears an uncanny resemblance to the demographics of Labour’s defeat in May. The Democrats trailed the Republicans by 29 per cent among white working-class voters in the congressional elections and thus suffered heavy losses in the electorally crucial Midwest states – shades here of Labour’s losses in Essex, the Medway towns, and along the M4 corridor.

Analysing the similarities between the Democrats’ difficulties and those of the European centre-left, the American writer and historian Michael Lind has partially explained this estrangement by contrasting the popularity of universal government programmes (ranging in Britain from the NHS to pensions) with the unpopularity of means-tested ones aimed at the poor. The right, he argues, has been careful to ‘limit their libertarianism’ with regard to the former, while exploiting public hostility to the latter.

The vigour with which the coalition has proclaimed its support for the NHS, its preservation of universal benefits for the elderly, and its apparent generosity when it comes to the state pension – all of which stands in stark contrast to the glee with which it pledges to slash the welfare bill – suggests that it understands this political imperative very well. The Republicans appear to, too: their ‘pledge to America’ promised to bring down the deficit without raising taxes or touching US entitlement programmes like the social security pension programme or the Medicare healthcare programme for the elderly. Similarly, Lind notes the manner in which the right, on both sides of the Atlantic, has found in immigration an issue to drive a wedge between the centre-left and many of its traditional supporters.

Throughout the 1980s, the Democrats, like Labour, lost because they came to be perceived as the party of the poor and upper middle-class liberals. By contrast, working-class ‘Reagan Democrats’ and ‘Essex Man’ flocked to the resurgent right. Only in the 1990s when Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, like New Labour, built a broad-based, cross-class coalition would the centre-left win power once again. The midterm elections, like the general election in May, offer a warning of what happens when that crucial lesson is forgotten or ignored.

Three further warnings should be noted, too. First, while universal government programmes may be popular, a perception of being the party of ‘big government’ is a toxic one. Like some in Labour’s ranks, many Democrats appeared to believe that the financial crisis had lessened this danger. The election results should swiftly disabuse them of this notion.

Second, Obama’s victory in 2008 rested on the fact that he wooed ‘floating’ independent and formerly Republican voters, while expanding the electorate, encouraging groups – like the young – to turn out in much greater numbers than they traditionally do. This year’s election – where independents swang heavily to the Republicans and the electorate shrank to become older, whiter and more conservative than two years ago – shows the difficulty of maintaining a coalition which relied so strongly on groups whose visits to the polling station are, at best, intermittent.

Finally, the disenchantment – much of it unfair – surrounding Obama’s first two years in office, which, in turn, helped to depress turnout in the elections, may indicate the limitations of the kind of movement politics which has so enthralled many in the Labour party. The president has found the movement he brought together as a candidate around amorphous concepts such as ‘hope’ and ‘change’ difficult to mobilise in pursuit of concrete policy goals once he reached the White House. As Hillary Clinton suggested during the 2008 primaries, it took a combination of what we might term the ‘movement politics’ of Martin Luther King and the ‘machine politics’ of Lyndon Johnson for civil rights to become a reality.

The Democrats’ defeat caps what has been a grim year for progressives everywhere, brightened only briefly by the Australian Labor party’s re-election in August (itself horribly close-run). Only by truly understanding why this has been the case will 2011 and beyond be any better.

Photo: Beverly & Pack