3 Takeaways for Democrats from U.K.’s Conservative “Landslide” Victory

With the thumping victory of Boris Johnson and the Tories in last week’s election — they added (as of this posting) 48 new seats to achieve a stunning 78-seat majority in Parliament — nerves on this side of the Atlantic immediately began tingling: What does this portend for Democrats in 2020?

While it’s difficult to compare a parliamentary system with our representative system, a review of the campaign itself that Johnson and conservatives waged yields some takeaways for Democrats as they seek to defeat Donald Trump next year.

One: In the U.K. campaign, Johnson honed a simplified, if not simplistic message.

Johnson simplified his message — “Get Brexit Done”: finally, get Britain out of the European Union — and he wielded it like a sledgehammer, literally. In a widely-reported stunt, Johnson drove a road-grader through a Styrofoam wall — getting Brexit done, crashingly. The message resonated with a public exhausted after three-and-a-half years of parliamentary wrangling over implementation since passage of the referendum.

Takeaway for Democrats: Craft a simplified, overarching message — like, say, corruption. So polarized are we Americans now— in the ongoing impeachment process, we see Republicans’ embrace of Trump becoming cult-like — that nuance goes nowhere. Campaign 2020 will be conducted by bludgeon. Trump’s bludgeon against Democrats, we can guess; his repertoire is actually quite small. But Democrats need to…