What America’s Allies Can Learn from Our Recent Elections A populist reaction to Trump is brewing. Liberal governments in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere must join the fight. by Paul Glastris The biggest question facing democracies worldwide today is what has led voters to support authoritarian politicians and parties. Is it economic anxiety? Cultural factors, such as trans rights, immigration, or race? Failing institutions, including traditional political parties? Or the behavior of aggressively anti-democratic politicians themselves? Obviously, all these elements matter to some extent. But which, if any, is the driving force? Without an answer, it is hard for liberal parties and politicians to know precisely what to prioritize in their fight to defend democracy and the rules-based international order. In a recent book, The Backsliders, Susan Stokes, the University of Chicago political scientist, provides an answer. She and her colleagues analyzed the growth of illiberalism in 22 countries from the end of the 20th century through to 2020, ranging from Hungary, Serbia, and Poland to the Philippines, Turkey, and the United States. They tested against a range of possible drivers of democratic erosion. Ultimately, Stokes finds that economic inequality within a country is the key variable. “The statistical association between inequality and erosion was very robust,” Stokes writes. “Try as we might, we had difficulty getting rid of the statistical result.” Now, maybe you don’t trust the regression analyses of some academic you’ve never heard of to guide electoral strategy. But over the last year plus, we’ve had a real-world test of that hypothesis. In 2024, as inflation eroded the living standards of middle- and working-class families worldwide, every incumbent party in every developed country that held elections lost vote share, marking the first time this had ever happened. In the United States, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris, promising to overthrow the old order with far-reaching policies—including steep tariffs and a crackdown on illegal immigration—billed as solutions to declining wages and manufacturing jobs. Just as he did in his successful 2016 presidential campaign, Trump won the sympathies of vast numbers of voters in the bottom 60 percent of the income bracket who for decades have seen their living standards stagnate or decline, even as the balance sheets and lifestyles of the top 20 percent have soared. Many of these vulnerable voters think God sent Trump to save them, and they would walk over a cliff for him, believing they are flying until the moment they hit the ground. Millions of others, however, don’t much like Trump, are fully aware that he is a crook and a wannabe dictator, but voted for him anyway, hoping he would shake things up and provide some economic relief. This first year of Trump 2.0 is not yet over, but there is already mounting evidence of buyer’s remorse. The president’s job approval ratings have been underwater since March. By even greater margins, voters now hate his tariffs, military deployments to blue cities, cuts to federal medical research, and, most of all, his handling of the economy. Sure enough, on Tuesday, November 4, Democratic Party candidates running against Trump’s policies and actions, and laser-focused on affordability, swept off-year elections across the country, in both blue and red states. The most celebrated of those outcomes, especially in the international press, was Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City. An immigrant Muslim who proudly identifies as a democratic socialist, Mamdani ran on a bold platform to make the city more affordable, featuring free buses, publicly run grocery stores, and lower fees for small businesses. His victory has been widely interpreted as an indication that the Democratic Party is shifting, or at least should shift, strongly to the left. That is a misreading of the election results. More telling were the elections for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. In both cases, the winners were women with strong national security backgrounds—Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA analyst in Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot in New Jersey. Both candidates are widely seen as and identify as political moderates. Both won by double-digit margins far beyond what most polls had anticipated. States, of course, have more politically diverse voter bases than cities, which tend to be far more liberal. But even at the city level, Mamdani’s victory seems more of an outlier than a trend. Consider Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd was killed in 2020 and where “defund the police” became a national rallying cry for young progressives. Voters in Minneapolis are at least as left-leaning as those in New York City. Yet this month, another Muslim socialist candidate, Omar Fateh, lost to the mainstream liberal incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey. Frey won a third term on a record of reducing crime by putting more police on the streets and orchestrating a home-building renaissance that has kept a check on rent in that city. This month’s elections, in other words, were more a victory for the moderate wing of the Democratic Party than for the left. But it is crucial to understand the policies these moderate Democrats are advancing. Yes, as a rule, they oppose defunding the police, loosening borders, and elevating identity politics and climate change above all other concerns. At the same time, however, they cut a different path on economic issues. Unlike centrist Democrats of the recent past, who openly sided with and represented the interests of large corporations and Wall Street financiers, today’s Democratic moderates are quick to side with hard-pressed citizens against corporations using excessive market power to exploit them. In her campaign, New Jersey Governor-Elect Sherrill promised to freeze electricity rates, which have skyrocketed; challenge grid operators controlled by investor-owned monopoly utilities; prosecute price gouging by food companies; and take on private equity firms that buy up housing and jack up rents. Virginia Governor-Elect Spanberger vowed to lower energy costs by making data centers “pay their own way” and to target pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen who inflate prescription drug costs. Washington Monthly editor Nate Weisberg has given Democrats like these a label: “populist moderates”. They are in many ways invading Trump’s populist territory while framing him as an ally of the mega-rich whose policies are devastating average people. Sherrill, for instance, lashed out at Trump’s tariffs, especially on Canada, as “massive tax hikes on New Jersey families” and at his tax cuts for “billionaires like Elon Musk” coming at the expense of working families. This populist-moderate movement in the Democratic Party is just emerging. But I think it is the future. That doesn’t mean that the upwelling of support, especially among young people, for democratic socialists like New York City Mayor-Elect Mamdani, isn’t also real. It is. Mamdani is a gifted politician who communicated an ambitious affordability policy agenda that resonated with a majority of New York voters. He and like-minded democratic socialists will be formidable competitors for attention and votes within the party. If the U.S. had a parliamentary system, politicians like Mamdani, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would form their own party. But at present, there is an overlap between these two factions around populist economics. Each side will need the other to build a broad and durable majority that will put America on the path of democracy, the rule of law, and responsible leadership in international affairs. Alas, we have a long way to go between now and then. Barring unforeseen circumstances, Donald Trump will be in the White House until 2029. What can America’s traditional allies in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere expect from Trump in the next three years? And what hope should they have that American rivals will check his worst instincts and behaviors? Of course, no one knows the answer, but here are some facts to consider. For at least the next year, and possibly the next three, the place where the most effective challenge to Trump will happen will not be Washington, but states controlled by Democrats. We are already seeing that happen—for instance, with blue states matching red ones in congressional redistricting. States in our system exercise significant sovereign power. Political leaders in Canada and Europe would be wise to find creative ways to short-circuit Washington and partner directly with states in international fora that Trump has abandoned or denigrated. For instance, as my Washington Monthly colleague Markos Kounalakis has written, why not bring California into the G7 and other international bodies? Our democratic allies in other countries should also pay attention to which independent organizations in America have resisted the Trump administration’s aggressions and which have caved. The latter category includes large corporations, especially those that require something—such as merger permission or tariff relief—from the federal government. The higher education sector, by contrast, has been far more steadfast overall. In the face of massive cuts to federal research dollars and threats of further reductions to come, a few universities, such as Columbia, initially bowed to the administration’s demands that they adopt conservative priorities in hiring and curricula. But the vast majority have refused, and some, like Harvard and UCLA, have sued and won court rulings that the administration’s tactics are unconstitutional. Why have universities acted resolutely and corporations like quislings? The answer is that university leaders are under immense pressure from powerful constituencies—students, faculty, university senates, and alumni—to stand their ground. In contrast, corporate leaders answer to institutional shareholders who demand the opposite. Elected officials in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere are torn between the competing demands of their voters for defiance, their corporations for compromise, and their own fears of losing the American security umbrella. Their strategies for dealing with Trump have consequently been muddled. At some point, they are going to have to choose.
If left to his own devices, we can expect Trump to continue to use tariffs as an all-purpose Veg-O-Matic, the tool he thinks can solve all problems. Fortunately for our trading partners, the Supreme Court may ultimately do what submissive Republicans in Congress have failed to do: insist that only Congress, not the president, has the constitutional power to levy tariffs. On Ukraine, there is no reason to expect Trump to change course. He will always side with Putin. Ignore his words, look at his deeds. His supposedly tough new sanctions on Russian oil have had little discernible effect so far, and he is already exempting countries like Hungary from them. Despite “plans” to allow NATO countries to buy and ship U.S. weapons to Ukraine, so far not one American bullet has flowed to Ukraine that wasn’t already approved by the Biden administration. On his new policy of sinking alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, understand it for what it is: Performative machismo meant to cover his steady, unwise, and cowardly disengagement from our allies across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Should Democrats retake the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections (a high likelihood) or even the Senate (a low probability), they can throw sand in Trump’s gears. But on foreign policy matters like these, U.S. presidents traditionally have wide latitude. U.S. policy will change only when a different president sits in the Oval Office, one who believes in the small-d democratic tradition, in the vital importance of allies, and in a rule-of-law-based international order. But that will only happen if a broad majority of American voters can be convinced to support it. The only path to that majority, in my opinion, is for the Democratic Party to pursue policies that markedly improve the economic circumstances of the least-affluent 60 percent of the American public. Such policies will need to be far more thoroughgoing than the moderate wing of the Democratic Party has hitherto been comfortable with, and far more intelligent and pragmatic than the left wing of the party has hitherto chosen to support. But if both sides can come together around such a policy vision, and bring some disillusioned Republicans along with them, I think we have a good chance of getting out of this mess. This essay is adapted from a speech Glastris gave at the Transatlantic Legislators’ Liberty Dialog in Toronto, Canada, on November 14, 2025. |