Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was superior to Donald Trump’s in almost every way. But Trump won because he had a stronger, more emotive and relevant narrative.

Trump’s campaign borrowed its narrative strategy from the story shaped by conservatives in the United States over the past couple of decades. It’s called the “latte libel”. Despite having had a profound effect on public discourse in the US and here in Australia, the latte libel is poorly understood. But conservative strategists get it, and they love it. Tony Abbott’s Liberals used it with similar vigour in their campaign against Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard. It has proved a very effective tool in attacking women in politics.

The original latte libel goes something like this: “Folks, we know working people like you have suffered. Like you, we have had enough of those big-city elites who are not listening. That multi-ethnic cabal of feminists, refugee-loving environmentalists, nanny-state lovers, chardonnay socialists, ungodly pro-abortionists, homosexuals, big-city Jewish bankers, and cosmopolitan latte-sipping liberals look down on authentic, hardworking people. Their environmentalism destroys our jobs, their family values are about legalising pot and same-sex toilets. We are the real America/Australia [insert country of choice]. They are not. We are angry. We have not forsaken you.”

The latte libel is how Republican strategists persuade Democrats on low incomes to vote against their interests and support the likes of Reagan, Bush and, now, Trump.

Here is how it’s done. First, the latte libel narrowly redefines the category of working Americans (class) into white people living outside the big cosmopolitan cities – the victims. It then confects a new category, the latte-sipping ruling Democratic elite containing the plurality of categories of progressive identity politics including, notably in an election like this, women. It might also include the equivalent of the ABC in Australia, ie somewhat moderate journalists, and, of course, Guardian readers. Meanwhile, in this fictitious narrative, the actual Republicans escape any responsibility for their actions. They are the narrators posing as the champions of the working people, lambasting this many-headed “elite” for its indifference to the hardships of the same neoliberalism that Republicans themselves have championed.

The story is wildly theatrical and deliberately emotive. It is an invitation to vent against refugees, women, the LGBTQI community, environmentalists, the left, the centre, and any identity or ethnicity that isn’t white. With a narrative like this, Hillary Clinton becomes a bigger target, as did Gillard: blame this feminist symbol of the new “elite” for all your ills. In Trump’s case, he didn’t just give permission to vent against your preferred identity, he said it was OK to really enjoy it. That won him support, and encouraged Clinton-hating in ways that were reminiscent of the Gillard experience.

There is, of course, more than misogyny at play. There is truth in parts of the latte libel accusation levelled against the Democrats in the US, and the Labor party in Australia. Both are out of touch and have played pivotal roles in creating neoliberalism and social inequality. It is both their legacies. But the Republicans and Australian Liberals have distinguished themselves with their efforts to pose as champions of middle- and low-income folks, combining this with their playful, brazen use of misogyny and bigotry to engage voters’ emotions and win elections.

The term latte libel was coined in 2004 by the Democratic commentator Thomas Frank in his book What’s the Matter With America? Despite Frank shining a light on the strategy, the latte libel – and narrative strategy in general – continues to be misunderstood or ignored by many progressives in Australia and the US. After all, rather like those empty “three-word slogans” Abbott used to win power, why should such a load of nonsensical waddle be taken seriously?

Because it works, and because it’s not met with an effective counter-narrative, we find conservatives in the UK, in Australia, in New Zealand and – most emphatically – in the US, flogging variants of the same strategy and winning.

Democrats in the US, and Labor and the Greens in Australia, don’t often campaign the same way. Instead of a story (crazy or otherwise) that voters can identify themselves in, they offer more of a shopping list of policies or solutions to fix problems. HillaryClinton.com is a classic example of this. The “vision” is in fact a list. Swinging voters find this kind of rationalist offering less emotionally relevant. When presented with the option – “Will I conflate my rage against the machine with my prejudices and support the outspoken firebrand, or will I embrace the intellectually rigorous policy prescriptions of the uber-educated woman who has been at the head of the circle of power for a decade?” – they say, stuff the “elite”.

This should not be news. George Lakoff and other political communications experts in the Democratic establishment have made it very clear that you can be smarter, more articulate and have a better set of policies, but if you don’t communicate to voters in a narrative they can relate to, you will crash and burn. Despite this, many key strategists and journalists passionately believe, contrary to all the evidence, that people make rational decisions in elections based on policy debates. This is nonsense. Our brains don’t work like that. Your policy is only as good as the narrative or public discourse you have hung it on.

For these reasons, the latte libel works against progressives in general, but it gains extra momentum when the contest is also structured around gender. Women leading political parties are attacked because they are symbols of social change. They are made scapegoats for the social insecurity caused by neoliberalism, particularly where the decline of traditionally male industries is concerned.

Cast your mind back to Abbott – leader of the party of “big business” as they call it in focus groups – striding the floor of factory after factory, hard hat, orange vest and factory workers in tow. He painted the Liberals as the champions of working families, and refugees and the Clean Energy Act (carbon tax) were invoked as their enemies. And he scratched the misogynist itch, addressing a crowd in front of a banner calling Gillard “Ju-Liar, Bob Brown’s bitch”. It was a powerful invitation and added momentum to the vitriol. After the election show was over, Abbott’s Liberals promptly tried to enact the real austerity through the parliament.

Women like Gillard, Clinton and the former Greens leader Christine Milne, who are in a contest against a conservative man, are especially susceptible to the latte libel for a number of reasons. As Kerry-Anne Walsh noted in The Stalking of Julia Gillard, there are plenty of men who are prepared to try to bring them down because they are women.

Equally importantly, university educated women in politics will often be more measured and less theatrical because in their professional experience, women venting is seized upon as a sign of weakness. This can leave women on the centre and left – who find themselves in a tussle against an entitled man firing off the latte libel rhetoric – looking either somewhat disarmed, as in the case of Gillard, or looking more clinical, as in the case of Clinton.

For women to lead parties like Labor and the Greens and be successful, they’ll need to challenge neoliberalism, do it with a powerful narrative, and to have the support of a large enough cohort of their colleagues and the media to withstand the shitstorm of hostility. Gillard lacked a narrative, did much that was neoliberal, lacked good advice and the proper support of her colleagues. Milne had a good narrative and a critique of neoliberalism, and more support from her colleagues than Gillard had, but the animosity towards her was still disproportionately ferocious and persistent from the media and some men inside her party.

For women to become more successful in winning elections – and we need them to be – the party strategists and the women leading the party need to be cognisant of how the latte libel strategy operates, and to fortify against it. Perhaps most of all, they must have a candidate with the gift of the gab, who is predisposed to tell stories about life in a systematic and compelling way.