Joe Biden got his analysis in first. Speaking last Thursday at a fundraising event in San Francisco, California, just hours after exit polls predicted an overwhelming victory for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the UK General Election, Biden said:

Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so far, far to the left. It comes up with ideas that are not to be contained within a rational basis quickly. You are also going to see people saying, “My God, Johnson, who is kind of a physical and emotional clone of the president, is able to win.”

Is Biden right? Are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren too left-wing to be elected?

The truth is somewhat more subtle than that.

Of course Labour’s losing its “Red Wall” of safe seats in the post-industrial North and Midlands invites an analogy to Donald Trump’s 2016 election, keyed by his winning Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But it is dangerous to create a like-for-like comparison of Boris Johnson’s win in the UK with the Democratic primaries and the subsequent race against an impeachment-surviving Trump in the United States.

Not least because Britain remains a parliamentary system of government. Although inevitably, its general elections are pursued, and reported on, as if they were presidential, the actual decision depends on the result of 650 constituency elections. It’s not a perfect analogy, but if the U.S. had a similar system, Nancy Pelosi might now be Prime Minister following the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in the last mid-terms.

Both countries use a first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, but in America’s presidential elections, it applies on a state-by-state basis, where the allocation of votes in the electoral college creates a de facto gerrymandering lending more relative weight to smaller states (although there is some variation in the population size of UK constituencies, it isn’t as dramatic as what we find in the U.S.). Hence Donald Trump’s triumph in 2016, where he won Michigan by 10,000 votes over Hillary Clinton, and collected all its electoral votes, and where he won the electoral college while collecting nearly three million fewer votes than Clinton. But it was those rust-belt states to which Biden was implicitly referring: the abandoned British working class, he was saying, turned to Boris Johnson just as America’s blue-collar voters turned to Trump, and no left-winger could win them back.

But note that the anomalies mean that Johnson’s majority of 80 seats in Parliament came with an increase of only 304,000 votes over Theresa May’s Conservatives in the hung Parliament of 2017. The Tory percentage increased by only 1.2 percent, from 42.4 to 43.6 — and 43.6 percent will not elect an American president in 2020. And just as Johnson benefited from the system’s electoral imbalance, he benefited even more from the issue of Brexit, still unsettled after three years, which split his opposition. Combined with the withdrawal of the Brexit Party in seats held by Tories, this moment of divide and conquer reached a perfect storm when it met Corbyn’s inability to sell his own plan: renegotiating the withdrawal agreement Johnson had pulled from Parliament, and then offering the country a second referendum. In the face of Johnson’s campaign mantra “Get Brexit Done,” to which Corbyn had no reply, Labour’s campaign focus on saving the National Health Service and improving social welfare simply floundered as the Tories put up offers of more money towards those ends, plus Getting Brexit Done.

Americans have realistically only two parties from which to choose. There is no Brexit to divide either party, but more importantly, a plurality of voters actually identify as “independent,” leaning toward one of the two major parties without feeling boxed in by them, and the task of the two parties is to try to draw those voters into their orbit.

Biden’s call to Democrats to avoid moving left was clearly aimed at his two main challengers, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Biden didn’t need to explain; it’s understood in America that moving too far left risks alienating those independents who are assumed to be “moderates” occupying “the center” — both concepts which are fluid in their ill-definition. Both Sanders and Warren are placed along the left-wing of the American spectrum, even cast as radicals, though Warren would certainly see herself as a mainstream Democrat and Sanders as a throwback to the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt.

Drawing parallels between them and Corbyn is difficult because there is not a trans-Atlantic alignment of ideology, but more so because neither American faces the level of personal opprobrium which both the British press and parts of his own party directed at Corbyn.

Start with Bernie Sanders. The Labour Party’s manifesto, in American terms, was radically left-wing, but in European terms would have aligned Britain economically with Germany or the Scandinavians, not with the Soviet Union. Thus Sanders, a self-described Democratic Socialist or Social Democrat, may be the opponent at whom Biden was aiming closer.

Corbyn is a natural backbencher, a critic, and protestor thrown into the Labour leadership almost by accident, and thus unable to exert the authority necessary as a party leader to win a general election, especially against a candidate less inept than Theresa May. Whether or not you believe the accusations that he is an anti-Semite, a supporter of terrorism, a hater of the UK, or a doctrinaire Marxist aiming to turn Britain into Stalinist Russia, those are the beliefs Labour canvassers encountered on many doorsteps, even from traditional Labour supporters in that post-industrial North. The majority of the British press is the partisan equivalent of Fox News in America, but not even Fox would rush to heap such labels on either Sanders or Warren, nor would they reach as wide an audience. Having said that, Sanders, a Jew who lived on a kibbutz in Israel in the early Sixties, has already had an anti-Semitic tag levelled against him in sections of the right-wing press, eager to at least turn it into a charge which he must continue to deny.

Sanders, like Corbyn, tends to campaign on issues, not personality — a position Corbyn tried but failed to sell — but the Bernie personality has far more bombast and humor. He is, like Corbyn, an outsider to the party machinery; Sanders isn’t even a Democrat, and certainly appeared to have the party working against him in his 2016 challenge to Clinton. But his programme is far closer to Roosevelt’s New Deal than it is to Corbyn’s Labour Party, and rather than being a parliamentary gadfly from a safe London seat, Sanders has been elected a mayor, congressman, and senator from the small-c conservative state of Vermont, where he runs as an Independent, that crucial label for American voters. Even as a rare Independent in Washington, he has been an effective lawmaker, and when losing the Democratic nomination to Clinton, campaigned for her energetically.

Sanders, like Corbyn, is also popular with the young. Post-election polls of the voting breakdown by age groups showed voters aged 18–29 preferred Labour and Corbyn by 55 percent to 22 percent. But the election was won by the over-50s, where the Tory margin rose steadily (see chart below). Oddly, the Liberal Democrats ranged between 11–14 percent among all age groups.

Credit: Opinium (13–16 December 2019)

The idea that younger voters admire the general principles of equality in society, are better educated and abandoning those areas of the country where there are few job prospects, while the older voters they’ve left behind tend to seek the bedrock values of tradition, as the changes in their lives have left them worse off, seems to hold up. Thomas Frank’s landmark book What’s the Matter with Kansas tried to explain Republicans voting against their own economic interests in favour of those who appear to support their values. This is where Biden positions himself against Sanders, as the man whose values are in step with those of the left-behind Americans — and his age might work in his favour, even though Sanders at 78 is older than Biden’s 77 (Warren is a mere 70, while Trump is 73).

Biden is accurate in drawing parallels between Johnson and Trump. But as I have written here on Arc Digital, those parallels go far beyond the “physical and emotional” (though both are emotionally dedicated exclusively to their self-interest: imagine the reaction in the U.S. were Trump were to abandon his wife and children and install his mistress in the White House, as Johnson did at Number 10 Downing Street). The more important comparison is in political strategy, where Johnson (and his version of Steve Bannon, Dominic Cummings) have copied eagerly from the Trump playbook (though Johnson tried to disavow Bannon’s self-confessed assistance). One of the major tactics both camps share is to flood the electorate with disinformation; rendering “fact” meaningless. The aim, as I wrote in November, is simply to alienate the casual voter, leaving the election to the committed.

Johnson’s campaign worked, even though it resembled Theresa May’s in many ways. He avoided debates, dodged interviews, repeated his simple mantra (May’s was “Strong and Stable”) rather than answer questions. But May lacked Johnson’s public appeal, much of it generated by television appearances as an entertainer, just as Trump’s was. Johnson never paid a penalty for campaign gaffes, such as telling an angry father in a hospital children’s ward there were no press cameras present at his photo-op, as the photographers’ motor-drives whirred and TV cameramen jostled for position. Johnson’s campaign wasn’t hurt a bit by producing doctored news footage, nor by creating a scandal around a non-existent “attack” on a Tory campaign worker to distract from Johnson’s stealing a reporter’s phone to avoid facing a picture of a four-year old boy sleeping on the floor in a hospital emergency room. Trump would never have even been that close to such a scene.

There is a better, more American, analogy to Donald Trump, and that is Richard Nixon. In that context, Biden’s opponents, particularly Elizabeth Warren, become George McGovern. In the 1972 election, the Vietnam War was the Brexit issue that helped divide the Democratic opposition to the sitting Republican president, just as it had been when Hubert Humphrey lost the popular vote by a tiny margin in 1968, when the anti-war Democrats who had backed Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy, were lukewarm in their support for Lyndon Johnson’s vice president.

In 1972, McGovern, a decorated bomber pilot in World War II, was portrayed as a possible traitor against a president who had helped engineer the failure of the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 (the first “October Surprise,” although it would be derided as a “conspiracy theory” until being “proven” decades later). Americans, uncomfortable with the idea they could actually lose any war, much less one to a tiny country like Vietnam, rallied to the flag. McGovern’s hesitation to dump his vice-presidential candidate after it became known he’d suffered electroshock therapy for depression, was seen as a bigger character flaw than Nixon’s checkered history as “Tricky Dick.”

The Atlantic writer Tom McTague pointed out on Twitter that Corbyn was not a Marxist, but more a sort of “atheist Christian socialist” honouring a belief inherited from his parents. McGovern showed this very South Dakotan trait, and Warren, like McGovern, is a native Midwesterner with the kind of straight-talking moral tone she says she learned from her parents. Sanders also learned his values from his Jewish parents, but that was in Brooklyn, New York. Where he argues his facts with bombast, Warren presents her policies in reasonable terms — “I have a plan for that” is her mantra — full of nuance but without a catchy three word slogan. It is as if the audience were being offered a small morality play; it is assumed they will understand the logic. But in 1972, America didn’t agree with McGovern’s nuanced answers, and Nixon swept to the presidency telling us “peace with honour” was at hand. The press dismissed the Watergate burglary until well after the vote, and peace with honour never materialised. America finally pulled out of Vietnam three years later, nearly a year after Nixon, about to be impeached, resigned.

Trump would campaign against Sanders as a “crazy socialist.” He would pound “Pocahontas” Warren with accusations of lying about her ancestry to get a better job at Harvard. He would hope to be able to wrong-foot them in debates. He would obviously play on Biden’s two terms as vice president to Barack Obama, who is still detested by the core of the Trump base, and of course play the Ukraine “corruption” card, maybe chanting “lock him up” at Hunter Biden, for all that it’s worth. The ongoing impeachment saga will almost certainly reveal far more corruption on Trump’s part, both domestic and abroad. But as with Nixon, once American voters accept that you behave in a particular way, they punish you far less for your behaviour than they might punish someone offering them morality. Elizabeth Warren may be able to explain her one-eighth Cherokee application, but it will not matter: she has been proven a liar and Trump, who is proven a liar in new ways every day, will be judged as Trump is judged.

This — the notion of political style rather than the idea of their being “too left-wing”—is where Biden may be more correct with his analogy between his opponents and Corbyn. Biden is an inside-political fighter, not a true believer, who will give Trump little to pick apart on a policy level. He will offer those floating voters in the battleground states a kind of traditional appeal to Democratic Party values without basing that appeal on idealistic policies that need explaining, and seem to the left-behind to favour metropolitan people with different values. And perhaps most importantly, when it comes to personal hand to hand combat, Biden — who twice seemed to ignite Obama’s presidential campaigns when he serially destroyed Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan in vice-presidential debates — could turn out to have bigger hands than the president.