This feeling is called hope

Three electoral lessons from a week of progressive victories.

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

There’s a set of unspoken rules underneath the surface veneer of media coverage.

One of those rules is that an election victory by the populist right proves that they have an intuitive understanding of the instincts of the electorate which liberals must humbly try to adapt themselves to. An election victory by progressives, on the other hand, is a freak aberration which will inevitably be reversed, probably due to the hubris and naivety of those who just proved triumphant. Victories on the left are contingent and transitory while victories on the right are abiding and profound.

This was the tone after the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York this week, along with other Democratic successes in Virginia and New Jersey. It was also the tone after Holland’s liberal candidate Rob Jetten upset expectations and beat back Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom.

In fact, the triumph of the far-right is not inevitable. They can be beaten and they regularly are. Each progressive triumph at the ballot box provides a learning opportunity.

The media will largely ignore this information in favour of a set narrative. Many progressives will ignore it too, out of a tribal hatred of either centrism on the one hand or socialism on the other. Establishment Democrats tried to undermine Mamdani and have almost certainly learned nothing. The British online left, however, is obsessed with him, treating him as a direct continuation of Jeremy Corbyn, even though he reveals much more about Corbyn’s weaknesses than his strengths.

Let’s take a better look at these campaigns, without preconceptions. I’m going to put the policy to one side for a moment and just focus on communication. It throws up three vital lessons.

Happiness

The first and most important attribute we saw this week was joy. Mamdani seems to have smiled for so long, for his entire life, that there are these permanent dimples on his cheeks. He has the face of a man who is going to age well, someone who is content within his soul. Similarly, I have never seen Jetten frown. I’m not sure he’s even capable of it. He seems to live with a permanent smile - a little more professional than Mamdani perhaps, but authentic, unforced, natural.

There is a jolliness test in politics. Does the candidate want to scold the voters? Or do they want them to have a good time? This is one of the reasons why Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. It is one of the reasons why Boris Johnson beat Jeremy Corbyn.

It’s actually quite telling to see so many old Corbyn supporters insist on the similarities between him and Mamdani. It’s true that there’s some rhetorical overlap - both talk about billionaires and the one per cent, both self-describe as socialist. But in terms of emotional appeal, they occupy different universes.

Corbyn despised the press. He treated it like a conspiracy out to undermine him. He sneered and snarled, his every comment an appeal backwards towards his supporters, not forwards towards those he needed to convince. He looked angry, vigilant, desperate for the camera to be off him. This is a problem because when voters encounter the candidate they do so through the camera, and the hostility therefore looks like it’s directed at them.

Mamdani wants the camera to come in. He is pleased to see it. He wants to reach through it to those on the other side. I mean, my God. Look at him talking to Sky News - a delight - and tell me Corbyn would have been able to do that.

Corbyn supporters say this is because the press was out to get him and it kinda was. But that was the same for Mamdani. The press will go for figures on the left. It’s up to you how you choose to handle that. Responding with irritation allows their attack to be more successful than it might otherwise have been.

One of the things progressives most struggle with about Donald Trump is that he is ultimately on the party-guy end of the jollity spectrum. His manner is comedic. If you’re on the same level as him - in other words, if looking at him doesn’t make you want to vomit up your fucking soul - then there is something amusing about the fact that no-one, himself included, has any idea what’s about to come out of his mouth. At his most effective, Nigel Farage is also a party guy. The fags, the pint, the easy laugh. It is all tremendously mannered, of course, but well cultivated and effective.

Now however, it’s getting harder to remember the joke. Trump rules by paramilitary thugs taking people hostage in the street. Farage is having to straighten himself out to look prime ministerial. The background noise is increasingly bleak: stubborn inflation, economic instability, a generalised sense of national decline across the West.

Those easy genuine smiles from progressive candidates, that sense of warmth and optimism - it’s probably the most compelling emotional appeal you can make right now. It’s a promise. It says: We can make things OK. Things don’t have to stay this way. We can make it less miserable, less fraught, less poor, less hateful. More joyous. In the words of Jetten’s campaign slogan: “It can be done.”

Tailored electorates

The Democratic party has tied itself in knots arguing about the relative advantages and dangers of Mamdani but the reality is perfectly obvious and perfectly comprehensible on the basis of this week’s results alone. In Holland, Jetten hardened his party’s asylum policy. In New York, Mamdani proudly projected a sense of diversity. Governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia were won by establishment-backed Democratic party moderates. The mayoral race in New York could appeal to a different electorate.

We live in a terribly stupid world, so these results are met by people saying that their model - compromise or principle, moderate or radical - is the only one which works anywhere, as a blanket approach. In fact, the lesson is that you pick the right candidate, with the right message, for the right area. And you create local political organisations with the freedom to do that.

Would you pick a self-proclaimed socialist to run in a swing state in the US? Probably not. Should you be relaxed about a radical figure in a liberal city? Probably yes.

Progressives benefit by having lots of different variants put in front of the electorate. Jetten’s asylum policy aims at a middle of the road compromise involving out-of-country applications under the auspices of UNHCR as well as day one language classes. He says Dutch people “just want to decently host people fleeing war and violence, but also be strict with the rotten apples who ruin the system”. It’s not language that I like and nor do I approve of out-of-country applications, but you can see the effort to find a defensible middle position on the issue. It is superior to the moral and strategic muddle we see from Labour. Similarly, many of Mamdani’s policies would not be helpful in London, others may be.

The basic problem comes when progressives view their differences as weaknesses, not strengths. Mamadami runs by being proudly multicultural. I love that about him. I love that his family looks recognisably like mine and the world he inhabits looks recognisably like my own, at a time when those values and lifestyles are being attacked. I love that London Mayor Sadiq Khan emphasises the diversity and patchwork elegance of my city. But I am not under the illusion that this would be a sensible campaign approach in the North-East of England.

The national campaign, in any country, will naturally be a compromise of sorts. Local campaigns can have different flavours and textures. There is no need for moderates and radicals to insist that their preference operates best across the political landscape. It doesn’t. They don’t. Embrace the diversity of the progressive alliance, rather than sabotage it.

Modernity

Both Mamdani and Jetten are something new. It’s not that they are politicians of the social media era - we’ve had that since at least 2016. It’s that they are politicians of the online video era. They’re Instagram and TikTok politicians. Jetten first changed from a routine cut-and-paste professional politician to a sensation after TikTok montages of a fictional romance in the Dutch parliament. His Instagram game is strong: professional, carefree, upbeat.

Mamdani is a social media triumph of simply unprecedented quality. He is a delight to watch and listen to, possessing that vanishingly rare quality of being a politician people actively want to hear more from. He was always going to struggle to get a hearing from the press or even TV, but he could sidestep that problem and go online, appearing on accounts that are the modern equivalent of Saturday night prime time for his demographic.

Whenever he did it, he emphasised the most valued quality in the modern information ecosystem: authenticity. Who else would say that Spanish is “kicking my butt” in a pitch to Latin voters, or show outtakes of him mangling the language? No-one. And that’s why he is brilliant, the perfect example of how to communicate politically at this precise moment in time. He makes everyone else look ancient.

We cannot train politicians into being as charismatic as he is or as comfortable in their skin or as nice to look at. But we can have communication strategies that are based on the 2020s rather than the 1990s.

Consider how far away any politician in the UK is from occupying this space. Farage performs best on Tiktok, but he is successful only in being better at it than everyone else, which is not hard. Green party leader Zack Polanski does OK, but like Farage, he gets his clicks by repeating a set of firm, slightly conspiratorial, political slogans. He still communicates in what is ultimately a fairly old fashioned way, as if he is doing a party political broadcast.

Labour’s communications policy is based on securing op-eds in newspapers which hate them, for a readership which does not exist. Everything operates according to a schedule which is so dated it is covered in cobwebs: a Sunday morning interview with Laura Kuenssberg, a place on Question Time, and a slot after 8am on the Today programme.

There is no fresh thinking about how to reach a new set of voters, there is no attempt to find the people who can operate in that space. There are millions of eyeballs online and yet the vast majority of British political attention is spent on the dwindling audience on TV and in print. It’s mad, on a basic mathematical level. It’ll be even more mad when the voting age is lowered to 16.

There’s been an awful lot of nonsense spoken about election results this week - a sense of inevitable defeat cultivated in the overall media narrative, an intemperate battle of tribal animosity between progressives. But there are extremely useful practical takeaways from what we’ve seen. Joy and hope are powerful, even radical, in an era of doom. Moderates and radicals should be relaxed about which approach is best suited to a given area and try to learn from each other, regardless of their differences. Effective political communication is possible online, with powerful results, if we dare to think outside of the traditional communication structures.

We can learn all these things if progressives are prepared to learn from one another, rather than try to batter each other to death over minor differences. Is that likely? No. Why change the habit of a lifetime? But we can at least hold out some hope. It’s a good week for it.

Odds and sods

This week’s i newspaper column was on Rachel Reeves’ newfound honesty about tax and the urgent need for widescale reform of the system.

This week’s episode of Origin Story was part one of our epic history of the Labour party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer. An endless tragicomic cycle in which right and left try to murder each other, succeed, fall apart, are murdered in turn, and then begin anew. 125 years of history made as breezy and effortless as possible, complete with pitch-dark humour and an abiding sense of the pointlessness of it all. What else could you ask for?

I’ll be doing two events next week. The first is at the Festival of Higher Education, where I’ll be discussing universities as a cauldron of liberalism. This is why the populist right despises higher education. It’s why even Labour doesn’t dare to defend it anymore. Because these institutions equip people to assess information critically, think for themselves, and question authority. No wonder they’re so hated.

The festival is extremely diverse, addressing every aspect of higher education, from policy to funding, values to practicalities, domestic to international. Skills minister Jacqui Smith will be there as will the chair of the Office for Students. If you’re involved in higher education in any way at all, it’s basically the place to be. Tickets are available here.

The other is Origin Story Live, where we dig into the weird, weird world of left and right. In part one of the show we’ll ask why conservatives are losing their minds by exploring some of the weird right-wing thinkers who have influenced the likes of Kemi Badenoch and JD Vance. And in part two,we’ll continue season eight’s story of socialism by looking at rising stars like Mamdani and Polanski. We’ll also rip into some of the misunderstood buzzphrases that are making our political discourse stupider by the day.

Culture pick this week is the new series of The New Gods by writer Ram V and artist Evan Cagle. I am a bit obsessed with Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga. It’s my happy place. A lot of this is simply down to the names. How the fuck do you argue with names like the Anti-Life Equation, Big Barda or Granny Goodness? You can’t. How do you argue with their design? You may not.

The New Gods is essentially an anti-fascist parable in the form of a cosmic epic. Kirby was a veteran of the Second World War, but he was writing during the 60s, in defence of hippies and young radicals. He wasn’t one of them, but he knew who his allies were.

This latest iteration of the story has all the poetry and grandeur you could ask for, with masterful storytelling from V and scenes of impossible beauty from Cagle. The only flaw is that the ending is very, very abrupt. But then: what a small price to pay. One of my favourite bits of the comics universe is back and on form. I’m feeling properly lucky about it.

Right, that’s you’re lot - fuck off. Have a lovely weekend.