When a party loses an election, they usually seek to determine what went wrong, almost inevitably coming up with two solutions for the next one: Back off or double down. The Republican Party went with the former after losing the winnable 2012 presidential election, releasing the Growth and Opportunity Project, which called for being more welcoming to Hispanics and embracing demographic changes more broadly.
Other times, parties double down. In 2019, the United Kingdom’s Labour Party determined that they had not been affirmatively left-wing enough, doubling down on a raft of progressive promises.
Both efforts failed. In 2016, Donald Trump took over the Republican Party and won the presidential election on a promise of building a wall across the southern border; eight years later, he won on mass deportations. Jeremy Corbyn was crushed in 2019, punished by voters for going too far Left. Five years later, his successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, won on a blandly centre-left platform.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member