CAMERON MILNER: The moral superiority that doomed the Democrats has infected Labor too

Cameron Milner
The Nightly
Many Australian voters in 2022 voted against ScoMo rather than vote for the small target Albanese. They will revert to type in 2025. 
Many Australian voters in 2022 voted against ScoMo rather than vote for the small target Albanese. They will revert to type in 2025.  Credit: Supplied/The Nightly

Donald Trump didn’t just win, he won really big. Just like last year, Anthony Albanese didn’t just lose the Voice, he lost really badly.

The No to the Voice and election of the Left’s greatest enemy Trump is all about the “we the people” people defeating the latte-sippers, the kale-and-goat’s-cheese-munching elites and the sneering socialists.

The comprehensive loss by Kamala Harris is also proof that hanging out with A-list celebrities is no substitute for clear policies and being authentically yourself.

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Albanese made the same mistake with people like Alan Joyce during the Voice campaign.

The Left so love to sneer and roll their eyes while chatting away in some bathhouse or Zen garden about Dutton and Trump, regaling friends: “Imogen, darling, how could anyone vote for that orange man with small hands and a felony conviction?”

The moral superiority positively oozes from woke lefties doing well in inner-city former workers’ cottages, now million-dollar-plus pads, with their kids in private schools and a Tesla in the driveway.

Though after that “nasty” Elon Musk backed in the Donald there’s confusion in leafy EV land about what they can drive next.

No doubt many will be holding their noses to the human rights abuses of Uighurs as they slip into a Chinese-made BYD perhaps?

These elites actually have no experience of the white-hot anger of those not benefiting from globalisation or of the dehumanising effects of the cost-of-living crisis.

Likewise, Democrats completely miss that African Americans or Latinos who are now upwardly mobile no longer identify as working poor or want to be taken for granted in the Democrat base.

Trump won 30 per cent of the vote in the Bronx. He has swept the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, just as only 30 of 151 Federal seats ended up voting for Albo’s Voice.

Springsteen might’ve stumped for Harris, but the streets of Philadelphia are filled with brotherly love for Donald Trump.

There’s an overarching theme from the Left in both Labor and the Democrats; it’s a superiority complex, a haughty dismissal that Dutton and Trump are just political bumpkins.

Hillary Clinton described Trump voters as “deplorables” and Biden called them “garbage”.

Albanese might’ve said he was shit scared of Trump, Rudd grabbed a chortle from the chattering classes calling Trump “nuts”, but the gold standard goes to Australia’s answer to Bernie Sanders, ALP national president Wayne Swan.

Swan tells us what Labor really thinks of Trump when he said: “we were the ones who despised him the moment we saw him’”.

To be clear, Trump’s won two out of the last three presidential elections in the world’s second largest democracy by a clear margin. That speaks volumes.

President Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump. Credit: DOUG MILLS/NYT

Bereft of a policy platform to fight inflation and restore pride in a hard day’s work, Labor and the Democrats have reduced themselves to snide soundbites alongside smear and fear.

The Left’s use of abortion, just like in Queensland recently, backfired for the Democrats. They just assumed women would vote for them on this issue alone. They missed completely that intelligent, politically conscious women are capable of voting on a number of political concerns, including cost of living.

Proof of this strategy’s failure is that pro-abortion measures got voted up in Nevada and Arizona, just as Trump looks likely to win in both as well.

The Left elites are shouting into a smaller and smaller echo chamber of supporters all while Trump just speaks authentically, so often off script. Harris simply too often handed the microphone to a Hollywood celebrity.

Labor has plenty to learn from the Trump landslide, as much as they should from the silencing of the Voice and the anaemic polls they currently enjoy.

The first is that campaigning on abortion will get you headlines, but it won’t get you the votes.

The second is that a leader well past his cognitive prime, who gets totally confused under pressure and is tone deaf and out of touch while fudging answers, can’t be kept a moment longer.

And then there’s Joe Biden. Biden should’ve stepped down to give Harris a chance to actually be president much sooner.

A Trump win according to Labor’s own Treasury secretary will keep our domestic inflation high and push off a rate cut well past May.

Trump promises to “drill, drill, drill baby and frack, frack, frack”. He may well pull out of the Paris Agreement again and challenge the renewables orthodoxy that Albanese champions.

If Trump delivers on his trade tariff mandate, Australia is going to get crunched and it won’t be golfing buddy Joe Hockey asking for a hall pass for Aussie Steel, it will be Kevin Rudd.

As Labor’s Albanista brains trust rolls out their set piece rent-a-crowd campaign events with their own version of MAGA — Make Albo Great Again (as if he ever was) — there’s the reality that Dutton is now more electable than ever before.

The polls predicted the US election was tight, a toss-up. The reality is voters plumbed for Trump in a huge way, as Trump told one of his rallies: “We’re going to win big, too big to rig”.

Six months out from the Voice it was only “rednecks from Queensland” opposed, then it was every State and support went from 60:40 in favour to 60:40 against, all thanks to Albo.

The Left derided Trump for saying the 2020 election was stolen, but he screamed home in Georgia on Tuesday night with voters wanting to deliver emphatic certainty.

The Left overplayed the Congressional riots as well as using partisan legal processes in an attempt to cancel Trump.

Democrats spent more time knocking on judges’ doors than voters’ doors. Lawfare became an excuse to do little else in four years in office.

Many Australian voters in 2022 voted against ScoMo rather than vote for the small target Albanese. They will revert to type in 2025.

Another lesson is that inflation is an incumbent killer. Cost of living is still crushing average people in the burbs even if Albanese thinks it’s “mission accomplished”.

There will be lots of self-serving comments from Labor insiders after the Trump win. Most will completely miss the lessons.

If your leader is incoherent at best, then replace them. With Albo though it’s much worse. When polled voters say he’s “weak, useless and incompetent”.

And when you do change leader, make it a real change and put a reform plan to the people.

Kamala’s biggest mistake of her campaign was when answering a soft Dorothy Dixer. To the question “what would you like to have done differently?” don’t answer after a long pause “Actually nothing, I wouldn’t change a thing”.

Dutton will now no doubt use the famous Reagan line, now owned by Trump, with his own version of: “Ask yourself, are you better off now than three years ago?”

The danger for Labor under Albo is that voters will answer that question at the ballot box in only six short months from now.

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