One certainty: politics is changing

At the time of writing this column, we still don' t know the final outcome of the U.S. presidential election. We may not know for some time.

The uncertain outcome precludes a full reckoning with what the election results tell us about politics, public policy and broader trends in American society. But it doesn't mean that we can't start to draw some preliminary insights based on what we know thus far — including, of course, the unexpected tightness of the race between President Donald Trump and former vice-president Joe Biden.

Let me start with a mea culpa. I'm afraid that once again I underestimated President Trump's level of support with the American electorate.

In hindsight, this was based on a number of false assumptions on my part. I assumed that a large share of voters — including many who had voted for Trump in 2016 — had become turned off by his erratic handling of the pandemic, his norm-breaking leadership and the persistent drama that has followed him and his administration. I assumed that Biden's implicit message of a “return to normalcy” would resonate with politically exhausted swing voters. And, most importantly, I assumed that the pollsters, who overwhelmingly predicted a decisive win for Biden, had spent the past four years refining their methodologies to correct for the mistakes of the 2016 election.

I was wrong. Even if Biden pulls out a narrow victory, it's now clear that there are some fundamental lessons to be drawn from Trump's political fecundity. There are two, in particular, that will, in my view, be with us beyond whatever the outcome is in the coming days.

The first is that Trump has shown that the way we think about modern campaigning, including how politicians mobilize voters, is basically wrong. The conventional view is that voters are motivated mostly by appeals to their narrow economic self-interest. This is how we end up with a politics of transactionalism that, by and large, involves different political parties competing for target voters with a mix of niche tax credits and cash transfers.

Trump has now shown over two election cycles that transactional politics cannot compete with the politics of enthusiasm. He won in 2016 and has run a tight race this year even though he spent far less than his opponents on traditional advertising and conventional means of political campaigning. Instead, the Trump formula basically involved large-scale rallies and social media spending that gave people a sense of political identity and community. They weren't just passive observers. Trump supporters were active participants in a broader movement, including a staggering 14 rallies over the final three days of the campaign.

I suspect that this will reshape how we do politics in the future. The conventional model of socalled “message events,” where political leaders travel the country each day to announce new micro campaign promises, will feel anachronistic after the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Instead, we're likely to see more politicians aim to galvanize voters with a combination of big-picture ideas (including non-materialistic appeals such as solidarity and belonging) and sophisticated social media efforts to reach segmented parts of the electorate. The Canadian political party that learns this lesson will have first-mover advantage.

The second lesson is about political realignment. I've previously written about the realignment of voting populations in Western countries based on characteristics such as education, income and place. We're witnessing a “big sort” in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, whereby left-wing political parties are increasingly coming to represent urban, highly educated and professional voters, and conservative parties are now the voice of non-urban, less-educated and blue-collar voters.

The preliminary election results certainly point in this direction. Trump's victory in Florida, in particular, seems to show the potential for a conservative working-class coalition that is multi-ethnic, geographically diverse and big enough to win elections in large and fast-growing jurisdictions. This may have implications for conservatives elsewhere. The president's mix of economic nationalism (including a more active role for the state to cultivate certain industrial capacities) and cultural contrarianism (including a pushback to the rise of “cancel culture”) will no doubt offend some classical liberals but it may be a sweet spot for conservative parties across the Anglosphere.

Although we still don't know the outcome of the presidential election, the tightness of the race is a sign that Trump's election in 2016 wasn't an aberration. There's something bigger happening in the world of politics and in Western societies more generally.

A political realignment is occurring. President Trump's ongoing and durable support is a sign that we cannot ignore it.

THE TIGHTNESS OF THE RACE IS A SIGN THAT TRUMP'S ELECTION IN 2016 WASN'T AN ABERRATION.