‘We don’t repeat, but we rhyme’: Parallels between US, BC elections

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Some of the voting trends that produced a second Donald Trump presidency also affected the results of the recent B.C. provincial election.

Experts say growing divides between rural and urban areas, and between white collar and blue collar workers, are driving the polarization that led Trump to win back the American Rust Belt and the NDP to lose ground south of the Fraser and nearly get shut out in B.C.’s North and Interior.

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Demographer Andy Yan said that B.C. and the U.S. “don’t repeat, but we rhyme.”

He said while urban cores such as Vancouver and Victoria are dealing with challenges around homelessness and public safety, economically they are doing OK and voted overwhelmingly for the NDP.

In other regions, such as Surrey and outside the Lower Mainland, working-class families are struggling to get by and in many cases voted Conservative.

Yan said this is a flip from the days when the NDP was the party of labour and appealed to those working in the trades, resource sector and service industry. The same phenomenon hit the Democrats in the U.S. Yan believes neither party has figured out a way to adjust.

“The belief that the NDP was the party of the working class. I think if you look at who now lives south of Fraser, that’s where really a lot of the working class voters are,” said Yan. “It’s really the folks who were working in blue collar and service jobs that have been really, I think, challenged.”

Yan’s SFU colleague Sanjay Jeram, a political scientist, agreed. He said that where somebody lives is becoming more important to how they vote and that fewer seats in B.C., and states in the U.S., are being closely contested.

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He said that the results of both elections show voters feel things are getting worse, whether that be rising housing and grocery costs or problems getting services such as health care.

“We have this sort of balance between pocketbook issues and what we could call culture wars,” said Jeram, explaining that attempts by both the NDP and Democrats to paint their opponents as conspiracy theorists didn’t resonate with voters.

“It could be that there’s a bit of exhaustion with that kind of politics and people maybe have come to believe that it doesn’t actually amount to anything, regardless of who is in power, that the constraints of power constrict whoever holds it from enacting or acting upon these sort of impulses.”

Some believe Trump’s promise to deport migrants and Rustad’s promise to scrap B.C.’s sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum appealed to certain voters.

A University of Victoria political scientist, Will Greaves, said that while cost-of-living is certainly the No. 1 issue for voters in the U.S. and B.C., right-wing populism is growing in popularity.

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“There is a kind of commonality between the right-wing populist forces that propelled Donald Trump to victory this week and which ultimately underpinned the Conservative Party of B.C’s rise to prominence and their very near success in forming government,” he said.

“They’re not the same, but they seem to be motivated by similar baskets of concerns, both on the economic and affordability, cost-of-living kind of fronts, but also very much around a set of similar culture war issues that have succeeded in mobilizing significant numbers of voters.”

There is also a shift in how ethnic communities are engaging with politics, believes former B.C. United press secretary Andrew Reeve.

He said both the Conservatives and Republicans did a good job appealing to groups with more conservative social views, such as Latino, Chinese and South Asian voters.

“Trump actually increased his vote count among black men, amongst all Latinos, amongst pretty much everyone, except for young white women and the over-65 crowd,” said Reeve.

“Look at how well the Conservatives did with the South Asian community, with the Chinese community. It’s not what the progressives in the NDP would tell you their coalition looks like, but really it was the B.C. Conservatives that had a very multicultural slate, both elected and in terms of the electorate who voted for them.”

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He also said economic indicators show the U.S. had a fast economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, but that is not what Americana feel on the ground. Likewise, he said the NDP can rattle off statistics about the number of family doctors hired, but what British Columbians see is long waits and closed emergency rooms.

Conservative strategist Allie Blades believes the message politicians on the right can learn from both elections is the focus on affordability by voters.

She cautioned there are still differences between Canada and the U.S. and it would be wrong to stretch the similarities too far.

“People are frustrated at the cost of living in the USA much like here and affordability messaging triggered interest from red and blue voters,” she said. “The conservative voter archetype knows no limits and it was proven in states with cultural communities like the Latino vote.”

The left has focused too much on “lofty ideals” instead of communicating what they would do to address concerns such as affordability, believes Jeff Ferrier of Framepoint Public Affairs.

Ferrier, a former director of communications for the B.C. Ministry of Health, says people in the NDP and the Democrats need to be doing more to connect with working-class people by attending the same events and using simple, straightforward language.

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“When the top issues are inflation and housing, they’re not prioritized. When the message comes across as about democracy or this is about character, the message that’s being conveyed to the electorate is progressives know better, and that creates a disconnect,” he said.

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