What are the reasons for Donald Trump’s victory? What mistakes did the Democrats make? What will be the consequences of the U.S. presidential election for Europe and its strategic autonomy? And what strategy should liberals adopt against populists? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Garvan Walshe, a political strategist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the pro-democracy AI company Article7 Strategies and co-founder of Unhack Democracy, which works to build an entrepreneurial civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): What is your first reaction to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election in the United States?
Garvan Walshe (GW): The question was whether the exit polls would actually stand up and it turned out they did not. It turned out that Donald Trump has managed to pull off a victory fairly. There is no question of Russian disinformation, manipulation, or cheating.
He simply managed to get more of his supporters out to the polling stations than Kamala Harris did. And this is one of the lessons we have to think about. Sometimes we lose elections, and it is no good to start complaining about why we might lose them. We have to think about how to win over more supporters, how to build up a political coalition that puts our candidates in office and in power.
The polls were within the margin of error. They could have gone either way. The real question was whether Donald Trump was able to get more young men, particularly young black and Latino men, to go out and support him than he had been able to do previously, and whether Kamala Harris was able to get more women out to support her. It seems that Trump won that mobilization battle.
The polls could have shown that the election was a toss-up, and Trump won it. It is not a surprise. Meanwhile, there has been a lot of wishful thinking, hoping it would not happen. Nonetheless, he won the election before. He did not win the popular vote before, but he won the election. He lost it clearly, but not heavily last time against Joe Biden. And this time, it looks like he has won it clearly, though, again, not heavily against Harris.
America has been a 50-50 country for a long time, and even big wins like Obama’s only managed to eke out a couple of percent when it comes to the actual vote share.
LJ: The Democrats, the mainstream media, and academic experts warned that this a very high-stakes election for democracy. At the same time, the Democrats decided to cling on to Joe Biden as their candidate well beyond the time when it seemed to be viable or necessary. It was not until very late in the campaign that they went with the candidacy of Kamala Harris, who – being from the mainstream of the Democratic Party, perhaps left of center of the party and very much left of center from the nation – was not really the most qualified candidate to win this election. Did the Democrats lack the intelligence to win the election?
GW: Obviously, Biden, just like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, stayed on too long. These are human things. Politicians and indeed Supreme Court justices tend to be people with very big egos, otherwise they would not get that far, so persuading them to step down is extremely difficult. It would have been much better if they had Biden step down and allowed a primary process to take place. Harris was an ‘okay’ candidate, but probably not the best that the Democrats could have had – and certainly not the best one against Trump that the Democrats could have had.
There are others. The immediate one that came to mind was Josh Shapiro, because elections are about aesthetics. They are not just about policy. They are not policy seminars. For the Democrats to win against Trump, they needed somebody who looked a little bit more right wing, slightly more conservative. Kamala Harris was not that, despite her record as a prosecutor. She comes across as a pretty standard American liberal with all the positives and negatives that this creates in people’s minds.
Some swing voters supported her, others did not. What we need to remember is that politics is a game of casting. If you pick good candidates, they win. We have seen that also in the case of the Turkish elections in Istanbul and Ankara, where Ekrem Imamoglu and Mansur Yavaş were able to win, whereas when they put up Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as the main candidate (who is like the Biden of Turkey), he lost quite heavily despite the country itself also being very finely balanced.
Furthermore, when the Democrats talk about democracy, one of the problems is that they have been crying wolf. When they were campaigning against actual pillars of democracy like John McCain or Mitt Romney, one of the most decent politicians ever to run for the presidency, they subjected them to a bit of a tax and suggested that the American way of life was under threat if either McCain or Romney were elected. That kind of hyperbole has come back to bite them because a lot of people who are center, center right, will have perceived the Democrats as simply saying the same thing over again, when they actually said it already about McCain, and so why should they believe them about Trump?
The Democrats did not keep their powder to dry, and that is one of the reasons those allegations are less powerful than they should, even though Trump obviously allowed a mob to try and disrupt the election result last time and has said he admires authoritarians as contempt for the American constitutional condition. The Democrats had already used up some of their material before.
LJ: One of the most powerful slogans of this election was that ‘Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.’ Do you think that the attempt to define who stands closer to the ‘regular voter’ constituted a defining moment of the campaign? How is it possible that Trump, an actual billionaire, succeeded in convincing the voters of being a better choice to tackle the issues that average U.S. citizens care about?
GW: Donald Trump is very good at slogans and conveying emotion. Even though the words he uses are a bit unorthodox, you always know what he is getting at. That is one of his great skills.
He understands the power of visuals and modern communication much better than almost anyone else. And this allowed him to present himself as at least culturally ordinary. Sure, he is rich, and he pretended to be self-made, even though he inherited everything from his dad. But other people also want to be rich, and he sells that aspiration. On top of that, he sells hope as well – a hope for American capitalism, which the Democrats have forgotten to talk about. He also sells a certain amount of irreverence, and he does not take himself too seriously.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris comes across as someone who can take herself too seriously, even though she laughs a lot. Now, she had started her campaign very well – by talking about freedom, her role as a prosecutor, and saying ‘Vote for the prosecutor, not the felon!’. But then this message got kind of lost. During the two months of the campaign, after the convention, she stepped off the gas. She did not drive those messages home.
Even in the last couple of weeks, people were saying, what is Kamala Harris’ slogan? What does she stand for? That was still very unclear, even to the people who are reasonably informed and do follow politics. Some of these people were pro-Trump, others were against Trump. They said, ‘Look, I am voting against Trump, but I do not really know what Harris is about.’ And, sure, she did not have much time to define herself, but she should have been much clearer about defining that message, why she was standing for freedom, why she was for a better America. And she missed that opportunity.
LJ: Perhaps one of the lessons from this campaign is that if you really want to defend democracy, don’t talk to your voters about democracy.
GW: When you are in the campaign, almost all the people who have decided that the opponent is a threat to democracy are already on your side. Yes, you need to target them, you need to get them out to vote, you need to make sure they turn up. But you also need to offer something for the other voters, something that can compete with what the other candidate is offering.
Maybe this time in the American case it would have been an economic campaign, an economic program. It was not clear what Harris’s answer was to inflation having gone up. People talked about inflation. They felt the price level was higher. What was Kamala Harris’s answer? What was her way of saying, ‘Actually, maybe this is all Trump’s fault’ or ‘It is the pandemic’, or ‘I am going to do the following to counteract?’ No statement like that ever came out.
Perhaps she should have spent more time talking about that and less time about the democracy because the democracy issue, though, it did land. It was a major reason why people voted for Harris according to the exit polls. It did land with a lot of people, but I suspect it would have landed with people who would have voted for her anyway and would have high propensity to turn out.
LJ: What are the lessons from this campaign for the liberals and democrats all over the world? Do you think that ‘wokeness’ or the fact that some ideas that we care about are being hijacked by the very hard lefts pose a problem?
GW: First of all, they need to be more liberal in the European sense rather than centrist. They have tended to be the kind of people who will take two sides of an argument with themselves in the middle, which is fine when you are governing a lot of the time, but if you are campaigning, this can mean that you are extremely difficult to define. People do not know what these guys are saying, they think they are offering complex policy solutions, they do not have a clear story.
As for ‘wokeness’, it is damaging, it makes the Democrats seem a bit alien, and what they need is a new kind of language to talk about some of the concepts behind being woke that are pretty universal and things people can relate to. If you are talking about ‘she, they, you, me,’ just call people what they want to be called, that is fine. You do not need to get into a very ideological way of talking about it. Yes, there is an ideological fringe of the Democratic Party, but my god, there is an ideological fringe of the Republican Party too.
This fact, in itself, should not be a problem, but the candidate should know how to symbolically neutralize that attack from the extremes, show that she (I mean Kamala Harris here) is more of a ‘normal kind’ of person. Again, here we come back to the issue of casting, and that is something that Kamala Harris from California is going to find difficult to do – compared to somebody from a Midwestern state or Virginia, states that are more of swing states.
LJ: What should we expect in terms of policy proposals from the Trump administration? Is it going to be a full-on Trump 2.0 project, unconstrained and dangerous, or is going to be something else?
GW: Policy proposals are not necessarily the point, but the character and the style of the presidency are very important here, so we can expect him to try and do the main things he said he would do. For instance, we can expect him to put tariffs on China. We can also expect him to try and corral Europe into that, possibly threatening his own tariffs, and as a consequence Europe will have its own tariffs back.
Trying to manage this trade war is going to be very important. What Trump does is going to be domestically very disruptive to the United States. Even if he is not particularly keen on pursuing unstable foreign policy, the attention of Washington will be distracted. They are not going to be able to be on top of crises and they are not necessarily going to get the best people in to try and manage those crises, at least at the beginning.
We might see a period where he just goes ‘full-on Trump’ and, after that, he has to try and bring people who are a bit more competent into the administration to deal with crises that will come.
We may also expect him to have a different policy towards NATO, towards European defense. The Biden administration has not been as strong as many people have hoped for in regard to Ukraine. Therefore, in a sense, it is not like it is going to fall from being ‘a perfect American government’ to being a terrible one.
Clearly, Donald Trump respects different things. He respects ‘shows of strength,’ not necessarily real strength – he respects the appearance of strength. So, it would be important for Ukraine and Ukraine’s allies (like Poland with the Baltic States) to be able to demonstrate commitment and strength.
Obviously, Poland increasing defense spending is very important there. There might be an argument for saying that the northern and eastern Europe should deal more directly with the Trump administration.
I suspect that Trump and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will not get on, as they do not see eye to eye, even though, ironically, they might agree on the Ukraine policy. However, psychologically, they are very different, almost opposed people.
Therefore, if you want to try and maintain European strength, you have to do things that show that we have good technology, good soldiers, and overall strong military. With Trump, a lot of this comes down to appearances and the visual aspect. If you can persuade him that something looks good, then he buys into it. If, however, it is a dry policy paper or an appeal to abstract concepts (like rules-based on international order), he will not understand what they are about.
Trump always fears that people are stiffing him, that they are going to screw him. As such, he is very suspicious about things he cannot see.
LJ: The first Trump presidency really ignited a discussion about strategic autonomy. Will the second term result in creating strategic European defense for real?
GW: Here, there is a bit of a paradox in that the countries that talk a lot about strategic autonomy (particularly France) are not providing the resources needed to achieve it. Meanwhile, the countries that might not want it – because they do not trust those countries – are the countries that are putting into resources.
Getting France to increase its defense spending significantly will be challenging because they have a huge budget deficit. Germany has its coalition problems. And France and Germany do not view the Russian war in Ukraine as an existential threat (like Central Europe and the Nordics do).
Therefore, it may not be a case of strategic autonomy, but it may be a case of increased defense effort from northeast Europe. If they try really hard, they can actually do it. It will be enough to contain Russia – particularly, if the Brits were on this side as well. But it would be unnecessarily difficult and obviously we would like to see French, German, and Italian contributions to that (with French, German, and Italian industry contributing to providing solutions). They have such a huge amount of talent in the areas of technology and military equipment that if Europe were to rearm, it would have a positive impact on those industries (and the economies in general) in the industrial regions where the defence industry is based.
LJ: What should we do as the people who care about liberal democracy around the world? How to fight populism and defend democracy at a time when the United States has once again gone from being part of the solution to being part of the problem?
GW: The first thing is to remember that politics is not a policy seminar. It is about people and about getting the people who believe in democracy in positions of power. This is how you protect democracy. It is then about having political parties that also understand that democracy is part of their values, so that people have an ideological core to them that is saying ‘These are the things that we are going to do, these are other things that we will not do.’
It is also about separating out democracy from the full, thick, centre-left human rights agenda. We had some years (particularly, from the post-financial crisis until the last European elections) where people said, ‘Well, if you believe in the rule of law, you also have to believe in a permissive immigration policy’. However, these certain views of the government are not necessarily the same as the fundamental structure of the democratic society. You need to be able to build alliances with people who have different views on particular policy issues (like immigration, trade, healthcare administration, or climate change), while keeping support across both sides of the aisle for continuing with the democratic system.
One of the populist’s most effective techniques has been to delegitimize all of their opponents and, essentially, make their arguments fall into question, while at the same time the defenders of democracy have tried not to delegitimize their ‘other people’ because they are afraid of having that fight. Populists like to drag politics down into the gutter, but politics is more of a combat sport than certain policy professionals would like it to be. It is, thus, legitimate in a political debate to bring the character of your opponents into question.
What we do in democracies is we hire people for public office. It is right that we discuss what their character is in many ways more than what their policies are, because their policies will have to adapt depending on circumstances. New things will come up. Policies are a way to understand what they might do rather than literal promises about what people do.
Back in the 19th century, there was a very old-fashioned adage ‘Not men, but measures’. Now, we could say that it is, actually, the other way around: it is about people, not policies. The important thing is making sure that people who want to support the democratic system are the people who have the levers of power.
The second thing is understanding that it is paramount not to retreat when you are accused of politicization. This is something that civil society, particularly in Central Eastern Europe, worries about. An authoritarian demagogue will bring up a new issue and then say to whatever NGO is working on it, ‘See, stop politicizing that issue!,’ even though they themselves have politicized the issue. They need to not retreat from that space and understand that they then, unfortunately, will have to play politics too.
Politics is part of public life and public activity. It is not a specialist profession, like hairdressing. Yes, for many people, elections come around every so often – just like haircuts come around, we do not bother with the details. But there needs to be a critical mass of people in any democracy that is involved in the democratic system and in civil society in that political way. That it is involved in preserving it.
Building up that critical mass is important for surviving various episodes of populist or demagogue rule, which are as old as electoral systems and democratic systems have been. It all goes back to ancient Greece, or perhaps even before. It is a regular feature of democratic politics, and we have to be able to weather those things. Eventually, populists usually fail. And when they do, people then have permission to regret their vote for the populist and change their minds. Lecturing them out of wild populists in power really does not work. We need to hold on, protect the institutions, and then pick good, charismatic candidates who can actually appeal to a wide range of people.
Charisma should not be the monopoly of the demagogues. Non-demagogic politicians can also use charisma for more reasonable and normal political purposes, and they should be doing that. In order to be ready for that, political parties need to train people in how to speak properly and how to win over voters beyond their own bubble.
Finally, we are in a very personalist kind of a political age because of… social media. Currently, people have many more direct routes to build up their own support than they used to do – and that means that the personality has become a bigger part of politics than it might have been 30 or 40 years ago.
Things used to be more programmatic than they are now. Now, it is primarily about the direct personal relationship with the one who is holding office, and it is unlikely that this phenomenon will change. As such, we must get used to it.
Garvan Walshe was a guest of the last edition of Freedom Games, a festival of ideas held annually in Łódź, Poland, held on October 18-20 in EC1 Łódź. The European Liberal Forum was the Co-Organizer of the festival.
This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.
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