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No two countries have the exact same politics or political environments. But the drubbing that French President Emmanuel Macron's party took in elections on Sunday should come as a warning to President Biden, his campaign and the whole of the Democratic Party.
For the second time in eight years, a shocking election result on one side of the Atlantic appears to have implications for the presidential election in the United States. The first was in June 2016, when a majority in Britain voted to leave the European Union. On Sunday, voters in France put the far-right National Rally on track to be the largest bloc in Parliament.
Democrats in 2016 were slow to appreciate what the Brexit vote in Britain meant: that anti-elite populism was a powerful global force that could overwhelm their presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect Donald Trump.
Biden and his team, focused on their own problems since the president's faltering performance in Thursday's debate, may be too preoccupied with his survival atop the Democratic ticket to think about the implications of France's vote. They should think again.
Macron called the snap election after his centrist coalition took a beating in E.U. elections in early June. The decision to call the election, which caught even his prime minister by surprise, represented a huge gamble on the part of an unpopular leader who is in his seventh year as president. Now it has come crashing down on him.
The National Rally is led by Marine Le Pen. It is a hard-right, nationalistic, anti-immigration party with antisemitic roots. Her father, who led a party that in 2018 was rebranded as the National Rally, was a Holocaust denier. It is one of a number of right-wing parties in European countries that have been on the rise in recent years.
Macron bet that he could force voters to confront the prospect of Le Pen's party in power and that they would recoil from that future. In the first of two rounds of voting, he lost in spectacular fashion. The shape of the French Parliament and the ultimate strength of the National Rally won't be known until after another round of voting, this coming Sunday. A hung Parliament, with no party in the majority, is possible.
But the results of the first round are enough to show that Macron's arguments fell flat. He pushed every possible button to rally voters to reject what Le Pen's party offers. France, he said, could be in ruins if the populists grabbed the reins of power. He railed against both the hard right and the coalition of left parties that ran second in the first round of voting. Macron's centrist alliance limped into third place.
Democrats ignored the implications of the Brexit vote in 2016. Shocking as the outcome was, there was a notion among many in the United States that "it can't happen here." In an age in which anti-immigration movements and the populist right have been ascendant in many places, those words should be struck from the vocabulary of politics. The Brexit vote was a thumb in the eye of the political establishment, a rejection of elites, whose warnings of chaos and disruptions were dismissed by a majority of voters.
The referendum on Britain leaving the E.U. had been called by Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative. He expected that voters would reject such an extreme course and that the debate over Britain and Europe that had divided his party would fade. Like Macron this summer, Cameron's bet proved spectacularly bad, and Britain has been living with the consequences since.
Voters in Britain will go to the polls Thursday. By every measure, the Labour Party, which has been out of power for more than a decade, is on track to sweep to victory in the election. If it does, Democrats in the United States ought not to take too much solace.
The story of the British election is of a Conservative Party that has held power since 2010 and is now a spent force. The Tories have run through five prime ministers. They are out of ideas, distrusted by voters and badly divided over their future course, bleak as it is. The Labour Party is the beneficiary of those divisions and mistakes. British voters are ready for a change.
At this point, the Tories are not only facing defeat at the hands of Labour, but they are also being challenged from the right by the populist, anti-immigration Reform UK party. That party is led by Nigel Farage, who was a leader of the Brexit campaign.
In 2016, many Americans could not envision voters ever electing Trump to the presidency. He mocked the elites, and they, in turn, dismissed and denigrated him. He attacked undocumented immigrants, roused racist and antisemitic sentiments, and promised to be a voice for voters who felt disrespected by those in power. Those angry voters turned out that November, and American politics hasn't been the same since, even though the country rejected him in 2020 and put Biden in the White House.
For Biden and the Democrats, one lesson from Sunday's voting in France seems clear. Trying to scare voters with grim predictions of what a Trump victory would mean for the future of American democracy might not be sufficient to win in November. Those warnings will work for Biden's core supporters, but they alone probably will not win him the election.
That threat of a second Trump presidency is real, just as the warnings about the policies embraced by Le Pen's party are real. Democracy is on the ballot, Biden likes to say, and yes, it is. But more than that is on the ballot, including perceptions of the aging president and evaluations by individual voters of his policies and how their lives would be affected by a second Trump presidency versus another term for the incumbent.
Since Thursday's debate, Biden's team has claimed that the president's policies were seen in focus groups as better or more popular than Trump's. National polls suggest otherwise. Trump leads Biden as more trusted on many issues, including two big ones: immigration and inflation. A CBS News-YouGov poll released Sunday showed that voters, by a wide margin, think they would be better off financially under Trump.
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg conducted dial-meter groups during the debate. Participants included "dual haters" - voters who dislike both Biden and Trump - as well as some voters leaning toward third-party candidates. He found that Biden lost six to seven percentage points of margin on inflation. According to a summary of the results, the debate hurt Biden more than it helped Trump, which is small consolation.
Biden's team has spent the days after the debate trying to stamp out talk that he should let the party choose someone else as its nominee. Newspaper editorials and prominent Democratic pundits have called for him to step aside, but for now, the campaign, through assiduous behind-the-scenes work and some public messaging, has avoided public defections by any major party leader or elected official.
The longer-term challenge for Biden will be to sharpen an affirmative message to go along with the attacks on Trump. Biden's team recently settled on a harsh message describing Trump as dangerous and only out for himself. Before the debate, the president's advisers believed it was working. But dire warnings about the opposition may go only so far, as Macron learned in France. Trump may be all that Biden claims - dangerous and vengeful and unwilling to commit to accepting the results of the election. But that might not be enough for voters.
Months ago, a former Democratic elected official offered this observation: "I don't think a Biden campaign that just talks about saving democracy is going to do it." The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid, added: "Biden has to put some meat on the bones. He's got to say here's what I'm doing and what I want to do to make your future better, and especially to young people. It's not just saving democracy. It's saving your future."
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