A DISENCHANTED ELECTORATE

BEYOND IMMIGRATION

The search for policy responses to the populist surge must look to infrastructure and education

Andrew Cooper

The year of 2016 will forever be associated with the populist surges that ambushed the political establishment, taking Britain out of the European Union and installing Donald Trump in the White House.

In Trump's encapsulation, it was a vote 'for nationalism and against globalism'. Emotive and often bitterly divisive debate revealed a deep gulf in both countries between, as Tony Blair put it, 'open' and 'closed' outlooks. Those who believe in globalism – and that an open economy is innately better than a closed one – need to reflect frankly on how and why these arguments were lost in 2016, or they will continue to lose.

Polling failed to foresee the victories for Brexit and Trump, but deep data analysis of the results tells us a great deal about the forces driving the march of populism. This starts with the important conclusion that the demographic pattern of leave voters in the UK and Trump voters in the US was almost identical. The significance of this is further underlined by the fact that the same pattern also applied to voters in the Austrian presidential election for the narrowly defeated ultra-nationalist Norbert Hofer, those in Italy who voted successfully to reject Matteo Renzi's constitutional reforms, and the supporters of the Front National in France who are lining up enthusiastically behind the 2017 presidential election campaign of Marine Le Pen. The same forces, more or less, are changing the political landscape in these countries and others; they charged the campaigns of Geert Wilders in the Dutch election in March and will charge those of the Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany's election in the autumn.

There is no single demographic factor behind these political movements and a lot of commentary has over-simplified what happened, often in order to confirm pre-existing biases about the right political response. On the left, many have wanted to believe that the political eruptions of 2016 were, in essence, the revolt of the economically left-behind against a failing global economic orthodoxy – caused by inequality. On the right, many have preferred to conclude that these votes were the assertion of national identity and economic self-interest over a metropolitan elite internationalist consensus.

Close examination of micro-level demographics reveals a rather more nuanced picture. There is a stark geographical pattern in the support for Brexit, Trump, Hofer and Le Pen, as well as a consistent demographic pattern. Archetypally, support was anchored among voters who shared not one or two demographic factors in common, but several. Compared to the average in their country, they were older, whiter, less well-educated, living on lower incomes and in lower-value housing; they were more likely to be obese and in less than good health. Definitively these voters were concentrated in places characterised by lack of diversity; homogeneous areas of ever more heterogeneous countries. Voting behaviour was strongly driven by people's proximity to diversity as well as by their social and economic situation; to make sense of what happened we must take account of both of these dimensions.

The 2016 US election map shows that poorer rural areas voted predominantly for Trump. But analysis at the level of the 3,143 US counties rather than its 50 states, reveals a more pixelated map in which the most unequal areas of America swung away from the Republicans, not towards them; income inequality is, overall, negatively correlated with support for Trump. Over the last 10 presidential elections, the average Democrat voter has become steadily wealthier and the average Republican voter steadily poorer – but over the same period cultural and identity politics have grown in impact too: the diversity dimension has become increasingly significant. Trump's victory came from a coalition of relatively prosperous, predominantly white traditionally Republican voters and relatively poor, overwhelmingly white former Democrat voters.

Brexit, like Trump, did best in less urban, more rural areas – and in places where the population has been getting older; support for the UK staying in the EU, like support for Hillary Clinton, was much stronger in urban, especially metropolitan areas, and in places where the population has been getting younger. Over recent years, more economically and socially mobile people (who tend also to be younger) have moved into more urban and diverse places; the places they have moved from have become correspondingly older and 'left behind' physically and culturally as much as economically.

Cultural attitude was a strong determinant of how people voted in both the EU referendum and the US election – much more so than party affinity or economic situation alone. There is, for example, a close and direct correlation between whether someone voted remain/Clinton or leave/Trump and their feelings about concepts like multiculturalism, globalisation, social liberalism, the Green movement and feminism. Those who view these things as a force for good were overwhelmingly likely, if they are British, to support staying in the EU and, if they are American, to support Hillary Clinton.

This tells us something important: for most who voted in the momentous electoral tests of 2016 – in Italy and Austria as well as the US and Britain – the decision was the consequence of a worldview, not just...