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House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) in some regards might be considered the second most powerful Democrat in the country right now. He is second-in-command in the chamber behind Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and he was given a primetime speaking slot before last week's vote to impeach President Trump. Yet Hoyer is also about to become the latest prominent Democrat to face a serious primary challenge.

The House leadership is simply not cutting the mustard, Hoyer's challenger, McKayla Wilkes, told The Week in an interview. A young black woman from a working-class background, she says current party leaders are out of touch with the country and their own districts. "Hoyer and Pelosi are leading the party badly," she said, "because they're taking tons of corporate money, not standing up to Trump, and they're not championing crucial ideas like Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal."

Wilke's challenge is rightly seen as part of a growing leftist insurgency within the Democratic Party. If she manages to knock off Hoyer, it might be the strongest signal yet that the movement is winning the battle for the future of the party.

To be sure, party leadership was always going to be a challenge after Democrats won control of the House in 2018. The rise of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren has demonstrated that the party's previous moderate consensus has fractured. There is a large appetite from progressive voters for more confrontational, left-wing politics, particularly among younger people, a sentiment which is only growing as Millennials reach early middle age and Generation Z reaches voting age. It was these voters who largely propelled the victories of fresh faces like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.

And yet, the House leadership including Hoyer, which essentially holds institutional control of the party so long as President Trump remains in office, has done little to capitalize on this movement. Instead, they treat the left wing much as they did in the 1990s: as annoying gadflies to be ignored whenever possible.

Instead of a full-bore attack on Trump, they opted for a narrow impeachment focused solely on the Ukraine scandal and only after dragging their feet for months. Instead of locking Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, or Mike Pompeo in the House basement to force them to testify, they proceeded with the impeachment vote without hearing from some of the central conspirators. And they have largely ignored Trump's wildly corrupt and unconstitutional profiteering off the presidency, not including it in the impeachment inquiry or any other major investigative hearing.

Their legislative priorities have also been less than bold. They passed a trade deal with Mexico and Canada that allows Trump to claim victory in his favorite policy area. And while they have passed a number of messaging bills that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promptly bottled up, even there the leadership has stymied the left. House leadership froze out progressives from negotiation over a bill to ostensibly lower drug prices, pushing a weak version that included one absolutely loony provision that would increase drug costs outside of Medicare so that program could get more money. That was removed only when the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatened to vote against the bill.

This brings me back to Hoyer's home turf, Maryland's 5th District. It is a very comfortably blue area: In every election since 1998, none of Hoyer's various Republican opponents got over 36 percent of the vote. Yet Hoyer is squarely in the middle of the Democratic caucus, and on its right in some areas he voted for the Iraq War, is a firm partisan of Israel, voted for Wall Street deregulation in 2000, and voted to give China permanent normal trade relations that same year.

All these are major reasons why Wilkes is running. "My vision of the Democratic Party is a party that doesn't take corporate money and instead of triangulating to reach 2 percent of swing voters, does a ton of organizing to reach people who don't normally vote."

Her campaign is also about specific Maryland concerns on which Hoyer has failed to deliver. Wilkes supports a massive program of 7 million new social housing units not just because her district has a severe housing affordability problem, but because "I have friends, actually, who live in the woods in an abandoned school bus," she says. She supports sweeping criminal justice reform not just because of the mass incarceration crisis, but because she has personal experience with the Kafkaesque prison bureaucracy, having once been jailed without bail for the ridiculously piddling offense of driving on a suspended license. She supports Medicare-for-all not just because it is good policy, but because she personally knows "people struggling with long-term care, preventative care, and drug prices." Wilkes supports the Green New Deal not just because of climate change in general, but because her district's coastal communities are under dire threat from rising sea levels. "In Anne Arudnel County, in St. Mary's County, people are concerned about the level of the sea rise. People have homes that are on the water," she says. "It's actually amazing that we haven't been wiped out by a massive flood, because there are parts of Maryland that are surrounded by water."

World greenhouse gas emissions reached yet another record high in 2019. Neither the 5th District nor the country as a whole can afford more Democratic Party dithering as happened during the Obama years, with minor subsidies for renewables coupled to an epic fracking binge that made the U.S. the biggest producer of oil and gas in the world.

It's a bit hard to understand the mindset of the Democratic leadership. Age is certainly one factor. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (who has a primary challenger herself in attorney Shahid Buttar) is 79 years old. Hoyer is 80. Majority Whip Jim Clyburn is 77. At that age, it's rather common to get stuck in one's ways.

But it's not the whole story. Bernie Sanders, the most famous leader of left-wing Democrats, is 78. Elizabeth Warren is 70. Clearly being old in itself is no barrier to progressive politics or to being enormously popular among young people. No, the issue with Pelosi and company is not their age so much as how long they have been in politics, and particularly how long they have been at the top of the party.

Both Hoyer and Pelosi were elected in the 1980s, and both have been in and out of various House leadership positions for decades. Top Democrats of this generation internalized the Reagan revolution believing that the New Deal was dead and buried, that capitalism is basically good, and that America is an unalterably center-right country. Hence left-wing candidates always lose (1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2016 notwithstanding) and the best that be done for the American people are fiddly tax credits and janky market-friendly schemes like ObamaCare. And while it is always possible for someone to change their mind, the top House Democrats plainly have no intention of doing so.

The only way to change direction, it seems, is to knock the leadership out of their individual seats, and put in some fresh folks with fighting spirit. A leader can't "be a leader in just name only. You have to be a leader and actions have to show that. We have to be bold and we have to be brave," says Wilkes. Leadership is about "sticking your neck out there for the people who actually elected you." Her primary is April 28.

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Democratic leadership should be afraid of McKayla Wilkes - The Week

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., speaks with ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga., at Monday's impeachment hearing. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., speaks with ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga., at Monday's impeachment hearing.

Updated at 6:51 p.m. ET

Democrats in the House took the next step toward impeachment on Monday with the presentation of what they call the evidence of President Trump's improper conduct in the Ukraine affair.

"President Trump's persistent and continuing effort to coerce a foreign country to help him cheat to win an election is a clear and present danger to our free and fair elections and to our national security," said Daniel Goldman, the Democratic staff counsel who presented the Democrats' case in the Judiciary Committee hearing.

Goldman, a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, presented evidence congressional investigators had gathered about what he called Trump's "months-long scheme to solicit foreign help in his 2020 reelection campaign, withholding official acts from the government of Ukraine in order to coerce and secure political interference in our domestic affairs."

Democrats said they believe the case for taking action is obvious.

"The evidence shows that Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, has put himself before his country," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York said in his opening statement. "He has violated his most basic responsibilities to the people. He has broken his oath."

Republican ranking member Doug Collins of Georgia argued that Democrats are pursuing impeachment because of a "personal vendetta."

"They can't get over the fact that Donald J. Trump is president of the United States," Collins said, "and they don't think they have a candidate who can beat [him]. It's all a show."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., confirmed last week that she and her lieutenants have decided to draft articles of impeachment against President Trump. So now, the Judiciary Committee says it must first receive the Intelligence Committee's report formally and then assess what charges to prefer.

"Read the Transcripts!"

During the hearing, President Trump asked his Twitter followers to read the account of the phone call he had on July 25 with his Ukrainian counterpart.

"Read the Transcripts!" he wrote.

But interpretation of a July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is the key to whether what the president did was improper and impeachable.

During that call, according to a call summary released by the White House, Trump asked for a "favor, though" after Zelenskiy mentioned key weapons that Ukraine needs and has been using in its fight against Russia at its eastern border.

Trump proceeded to ask for help investigating two conspiracy theories one about Ukraine's involvement in the 2016 election (for which there is no evidence) and a conspiracy theory about former Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter's role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

Several witnesses, which included senior diplomats and national security officials, testified over the past few weeks that they thought the call was inappropriate, that the request was political and intended to help the president's reelection and not about corruption writ large in Ukraine.

What's more, the American public says that what the president did was wrong 70% in the most recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll said it is not acceptable for a president to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent.

The Trump administration was withholding a White House meeting and almost $400 million in military aid, while a pressure campaign was taking place, led by the president's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who had multiple contacts with Giuliani, the president and Ukrainian officials, testified that there was a "quid pro quo." He said a White House meeting was being held up until Ukraine announced the investigations Giuliani and President Trump sought. That meeting has never happened.

The aid was eventually released Sept. 11 without explanation.

Republican counsel Stephen Castor, who asked many of the questions during the Intelligence Committee hearings, questioned the strength of Sondland's testimony. He said Sondland had "no firsthand knowledge" of a direct "quid pro quo" linkage to President Trump.

"He merely presumed there were preconditions," Castor said.

Castor said Democrats are centering their evidence of wrongdoing on the call summary the White House released with Ukraine's president. But, he contended, "it is not" evidence of of impeachable conduct. He also called Democrats' reasoning "baloney."

Castor was also critical of Democrats' timeline for impeachment, calling it an "artificial and arbitrary" deadline. On the process, which began in September, he accused Democrats of "fundamentally unfair" tactics, calling the impeachment inquiry a "rushed, take-it-or-leave-it approach."

One of the potential articles of impeachment Democrats could bring against the president is obstruction of Congress. That centers on the number of witnesses and documents that have not been released from the Trump administration despite subpoenas for those witnesses and documents.

Castor later contended that Trump was "not asking for a personal favor" on the phone call with Zelenskiy.

"He was speaking on behalf of the American people," Castor said.

Republican complaints about phone records

Beyond the contents of that Trump-Zelenskiy call, Republicans voiced frustration with congressional investigators gathering phone records of key players involved in the pressure campaign. Those records included, perhaps surprisingly, Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Nunes was integral in the questioning of witnesses during the public and private impeachment proceedings and depositions. He strongly made the case for the president and against the Democratic process, in particular.

The records found several contacts between Nunes, Giuliani, and Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who has been indicted by federal prosecutors for violating bans on straw and foreign donors.

Collins objected to those phone records being included and demanded to know of Goldman who ordered them to be included. He called their inclusion a "gratuitous drive by" and a "smear campaign."

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin went so far as to call it "a clear abuse of power" and that those who issued the subpoenas and released the records "should be ashamed of themselves." He then added, "The surveillance state can get out of control."

Goldman declined to get into the details of how the investigation was conducted, but said subpoenaing phone records was standard practice in this type of investigation.

Progress toward impeachment

Nadler's committee will be tasked with writing articles of impeachment against the president that could include abuse of power and bribery, obstruction of Congress and obstruction of justice.

"We'll bring articles of impeachment presumably before the committee at some point later in the week," Nadler said Sunday on NBC's Meet The Press.

Nadler, though, said he had not yet decided which articles to bring. A sticking point among some Democrats is whether to include findings of the Mueller Russia investigation to support an obstruction of justice article.

Republicans led by ranking member Collins have complained all along about the impeachment process and argue that the case about Ukraine not only is meritless, but that Nadler and Democrats have been reckless and sloppy.

The Judiciary Committee would charged with introducing, then amending the articles of impeachment. Then, the committee, controlled by Democrats, would vote on whether to send the articles for a vote of the full House. That is expected before Christmas.

If a majority of the House supports it, that would trigger a Senate trial, likely in January. Republicans control the upper chamber, and they're expected to acquit Trump. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he'll convene a trial as required under the Constitution but that he thinks it's "inconceivable" that the needed 20 Republicans would break ranks to remove Trump.

Trump, for his own part, has said he hopes the House moves quickly to impeach him in order to set up a Senate trial that Republicans could use for their own political purposes.

The Trump administration has so far declined to participate in the process.

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In Impeachment Hearing, Democrats Argue Trump Actions Are 'Clear And Present Danger' - NPR

Impeachment is a rarely used procedure that often comes with some misunderstanding. The Associated Press explains the process. (Oct. 15) AP

WASHINGTON Rep.Elissa Slotkin can tell when another TV ad criticizing her recent vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump has just aired in her central Michigan district: the angry calls to her congressional office spike.

As a Democratrepresenting a district Trump won handily in 2016, the former CIA analyst is used to navigating choppy political waters on a host of controversial issues. But now with a historicvote to impeach the president just days away, the freshman is facing the toughest moment of her nascent career on Capitol Hill.

"Theres over $1 million in attack ads running in my district on this issue. I knew when I called for an inquiry, it would be controversial," Slotkin recently told USA TODAY. "You just have to watch my town halls to know it has been."

Shes not alone.

Thirty other Democrats from Trump districts,most of whom are freshmen,will be casting voteson the politically volatile issuethisweek. With hard-liners on both sides dug in, those centrists will be the ones decidingwhether Trump becomes the third president ever to be impeached.

More: For 3rd time in US history, full House to vote on impeachment of a president

So far, the handful of Trump district Democrats who have announced how they'll vote are breaking in favor of impeaching the president on at least one of the two articles abuse of power and obstruction of Congress that the House Judicatory Committee approved Friday.

The panel passed both articles 23-17 along party lines, puttingimpeachment before the full House as soon as Wednesday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi D-Calif.,isn't strong-armingrank-and-file Democrats to support impeachment, calling it a vote of conscience. But to help them, she and her deputieshave found ways to entice moderates to support such a politically risky move.

Party leaders kept the articles narrowly focused on Trump's conduct with Ukraine and not on broader charges progressives pushed for, including thepresident's finances,hush-money deals with women,and the findings of the Mueller report.

Not happy:'Disgusted.' Trump rails against Democrats after impeachment vote, backs short Senate trial

The articles pertain toallegations Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukraine, an ally, to go after political rivalJoe Biden in a way thatwould benefit the president's 2020 re-election, and then tried to cover it up by stonewalling Congress from getting records or witness testimony.

Moderates said it also helped that leadership scheduled the final impeachment vote to be sandwiched between votes on two key issues: ratification of a new North American trade agreement and spending bills that include priorities for their districts.

That's given centrists theability to counter the charge from GOP lawmakers that the obsession to impeach has smothered any ability to get things done on Capitol Hill.

"My main thrust is to get people to know that Congress hasnt stopped working," said Arizona Rep. Tom O'Halleran,a second-term Democrat representinga Trump district."And theres a perception out there that it has. And its really a bad perception.Were continuing to have committee hearings and everything else."

But votingto endorse the removal of a president who remains popular among many constituents won't be an easy sell for Democrats in red districts.

Slotkin was part of the blue wave in 2018 that flipped the House to Democratic control. Because two-thirds of those Trump-district Democrats have been in office for less than a year, they lack the advantage of long-term incumbency that could help them weather a risky vote in a battleground district.

And their 2020 Republican challengers are watching.

Read the articles: Read the full text of the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump

As soon as Rep. Conor Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democratwho represents a Trump district, told a local TV station Thursday he would support impeachment, GOP opponent Sean Parnell pounced.

"Hey@ConorLambPA,today you sold out the vast majority of people in Western Pennsylvania by supporting this sham," he tweeted. "You put your party, BEFORE the will of the people you promised to represent. The people of Western Pennsylvania deserve better. #PA17"

With a full Hose vote approaching, at least seven of the Trump district Democrats, including Lamb, have said they plan to back impeachment.

Only one so far JeffVan Drew of New Jersey has come out in opposition. The Democrat is expected to announce this week he is switching parties and becoming a Republican following a torrent of criticism from progressive Democrats about his stance.

A second Collin Peterson of Minnesota is expected to vote against it as well. They'll be joining the chamber's 197 Republicans, none of whom have expressed support forimpeachment.

With 233 seats and independentJustin Amash of Michigansupportingimpeachment, Democrats could lose up to 18 members and still have the 216 needed to impeach Trump.

Van Drew: 'Unsavory,' not impeachable: Democratic lawmaker explains why he opposes removing Trump

The lack of bipartisan support, which Pelosi initially said was necessary forimpeachment, has given opponents ammunition to dismiss the process as the partisan witch hunt Trump has so often labeled it. That criticism is likely to grow louder even if just a few Democrats join them.

In a story first reported by Politicoand confirmed by USA TODAY, agroup of Democratic moderates, including several representing red districts, briefly explored the idea of proposing a resolution to censure the president rather thanimpeach, believing a verbal rebuke is a more appropriate remedy than calling for removal.

While these Democrats say they realize a censure will not be considered, the idea showed a discontent by some of the caucus' most vulnerable members and raised questions over how they might vote.

For the 31 Trump district Democrats, it's a tough spot: vote for impeachment and risk losing the fragile coalition of swing voters that carried them into office last year or vote against it and face the wrath of progressives who want Trump punished.

Associated Press reporter Mark Sherman explains how a trial in the U.S. Senate would work if the House of Representatives impeaches President Donald Trump. (Oct. 31) AP, AP

There's already talk of a Democratic primary challenger next year against Van Drew.

The message that helped many freshman Democrats win in 2018 was a promise not to become immersed in the"circus atmosphere" surrounding the president, including partisan warfare, saidPatrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute in New Jersey.

"That's the trick: there are two sides of this," he said. "You definitely have to thread that needle between keeping the baseexcited that you're still fighting the good fight and keeping the moderates in line by saying I was able to do the job that you sent me to Washington to do."

Rep.Elaine Luria, whose Virginia district went to Trump by about 4 points, said she will vote for impeachment. But she also saidit's important to show constituentsthat impeachmentis not stymieing progress on bread-and-butter issues.

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 24: Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., (Center) and Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., (right) speak to reporters after leaving a House Democratic caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol where formal impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump were announced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.(Photo: Win McNamee, Getty Images)

On Wednesday, she attended a White House ceremony with the president where he signed an executive order on anti-Semitism.

"I'll stand with the president and next to the President when he does something right," she said. "But I'll stand up to him when he does something wrong."

Many of the 31 Democrats in red districts told USA TODAY they have yet to make up their mind on impeachment and are still reviewing documents, notably the 300-page Trump-Ukraine impeachment inquiry report the House Intelligence Committee issued.

But O'Halleran, the Arizona congressman, a former Chicago homicide detective who represents a district Trump won in 2016, said he has decided to back impeachment after reviewing the evidence much like he would a criminal investigation.

"I will vote to impeach the President because this bribery and abuse of power violated the constitution and put our national security and our international relationships at risk," he said. "In our democracy, we must hold elected officials accountable when they break thepublic trust and put their own interests before the good of our nation."

Rep. Max Rose of Staten Island, whose New York City district went for Trump by nearly 10 points, also is backing impeachment.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., reads a statement announcing a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 24, 2019. (Photo: Andrew Harnik, AP)

He was one of the moderates whose opposition to a broad set of impeachment articleshelped convince Democratic leadership the chargesneeded to focus only on Ukraine.

"A president coercing a foreign government into targeting American citizens is not just another example of scorched-earth politics, it serves as an invitation to the enemies of the Unities States to come after any citizen, so long as they disagree with the president," he said.

No 'hate': Nancy Pelosi gives a sharp response to a reporter who asked if she hates President Trump

Earlier in the week, the formerArmy veteran who served in Afghanistan reflected on the magnitude of the decision, noting it was deserving of time and deliberation.

"I mean everyone's doing different things from calling key people in their life to pick their brain to rereading the intelligence reports, the testimonies, to some probably are praying, he said.

As monumental as their vote will be to the nation and their political legacies,many moderates interviewed said impeachment is not an issue that dominates back home. Constituents would rather talk about health care, the economy or trade, they said.

But in case the severity of the decisionis not lost on them,Republicans keep reminding them.

Centristswin: In hard-line Congress, moderates boosted with Trump impeachment articles, trade deal

After Pelosi announced earlier this month thatthe House would move forward on drafting articles of impeachment, Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager, tweeted out polling in Democratic freshman Rep. Kendra Horn's Oklahoma district.

"Nancy Pelosi is marching members of her caucus off the plank and into the abyss," he wrote. "Impeachment is killing her freshmen members and polling proves it."

Although Horn told USA TODAY she hasnot decided on impeachment, her constituents in the district Trump won by more than 13 pointsalready have reached a verdict judging from the calls that flood her office from both sides.

"People have already made up their minds," she said. "I'm still of the mind that it is our job to take a look at all the informationand assess it in a fairand balanced way."

Slotkin said she's reading the transcripts from the testimony provided by the Intelligence Committee, studying the rules of the House,and speaking to members from both parties who were in Congress during Bill Clinton's impeachment 21 years ago.

"Im going to do what I was trained to do as a CIA officer, which is sit down with the full body of information and make an objective decision based on what I believethe facts are," she said. "Im not looking at polling. Im not looking at consultants. Im not weighing what this will do to my political career. I think this is beyond politics."

Contributing: Nicholas Wu

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Wrestling with impeachment: Democrats representing Trump districts will decide president's fate - USA TODAY

Fear That Good News for the President is Bad News for the Democrats

The stock market is roaring. Unemployment is at a record low. The economy added 266,000 new jobs in November. Though these things are objectively good, of course, they are less good if you are a Democrat and you dont want the current president to get credit for anything that might help him get re-elected.

Take Mr. Trumps announcement in October that U.S. Special Forces had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State movement. That could be considered positive news for the president, some Democratic voters conceded in interviews, except that Mr. Trump presented the news in such an unpleasant way, they said, embellishing his narrative with unsubstantiated details about Mr. al-Baghdadis last moments.

Trump had to make a 50-minute speech about how wonderful he is, said Jane Worm, 77, of Dubuque County, Iowa.

In Durham, N.H., Barbara Feldman, 68, said she was worried that Mr. Trump would capitalize on the incident to bolster his popularity.

I do worry about his base, and his support, unless the young people get out and vote, she said.

For the last three years, therapists have reported an increase in patients who say that almost anything having to do with politics is making them uneasy, angry and hopeless, a condition that Jennifer C. Panning, a psychologist in Evanston, Ill., has christened Trump anxiety disorder.

In a survey of 3,617 American adults released in November, the American Psychological Association found that 56 percent said that the 2020 election was a significant stressor as opposed to 52 percent before the 2016 election.

It depends on what side of the aisle youre on, but for many people theres the question, What is going on with this country that someone can get away with so much? said Dr. Mary Alvord, a therapist in Maryland who teaches psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine.

See original here:
Democrats Agree on One Thing: Theyre Very, Very Nervous - The New York Times

But it also highlighted a more profound parallel in the often synergistic US and UK politics that potentially poses longer-term threats to progressive parties: culturally and politically, they have lost touch with their heartland working-class voters -- the very people they were set up to represent.

The most significant warning for Democrats from Jeremy Corbyn's disaster may be that when a party gets consumed by its own ideological debate, it risks losing sight of subtle changes in its own base.

In the UK, as in the US, such constituencies had suffered economic blight for decades -- ironically, many from liberalizing economic reforms introduced by the Conservatives in the 1980s. As a result, they have harbored fierce resentment against upper class Tories from down south -- like Johnson.

But the Prime Minister, helped by his simple demands to honor the referendum to get the UK out of the European Union -- a goal many working class voters support and on which Labour has a muddled policy -- engineered a generational political shift.

Labour hotbeds have also been changing, a factor that seems to have escaped its ideologically radical left wing leaders in London. Some of those former industrialized areas have also started to regenerate. New industries are beginning to spring up in the place of mining and steel manufacturing that were driven out by globalization.

That has changed the demographics of some seats in Labour's red wall, and memories are fading of the great industrial strikes and battles against the Conservative governments of the 1980s.

Once, Labour was untouchable in the mill towns and mining villages of northern England and the shipyards of Scotland, piling up power through once-huge labor unions.

But it is seen increasingly as a socially liberal, metropolitan party that has moved on culturally from many of its more conservative working-class voters in the UK's rust belt. The power of unions is not what it was, and the urban liberal versus rural conservative divide is as important in UK politics as it is in America.

This has occurred as Trump has refashioned the GOP's country club image and worked to corral working-class voters disillusioned with conventional politics and economic policies that they believe left them behind.

It's ironic that it took a billionaire from Manhattan with his name splashed across his private jet and an Eton-educated toff to find a new political language to attract working class voters.

Did Corbyn go too far left?

The themes of the political post-mortem among progressives in Britain after Johnson's rout will be familiar to anyone following the Democratic presidential race.

Moderate candidates like Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden are accusing their more radical rivals like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders of adopting a perilous Corbyn playbook.

The former vice president leaped on the comparison at a fundraiser on Thursday night as the UK results rolled in.

"Boris Johnson is winning in a walk," Biden said, predicting headlines reading, "Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left. It comes up with ideas that are not able to be contained within a rational basis quickly."

"Jeremy Corbyn's catastrophic showing in the U.K. is a clear warning: We need a Democratic nominee who can defeat Donald Trump by running a campaign that appeals to Americans across our divides," Bloomberg wrote on Twitter Friday.

The Democratic primary has seen pitched debates over issues like expanding the federal government's role in health care and free college, and squabbles about how ideologically pure the party should be.

A similar debate has been going on for years since Corbyn took over the Labour Party. He reversed former multiple-election-winning Prime Minister Tony Blair's modernization project.

A cultural as well as political shift

There are often similarities between US and UK politics. After all, these are two great Western democracies that are prone to similar economic, cultural and demographic forces and issues.

Former President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher forged a linked conservative renaissance in both nations in the 1980s. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair bonded over Third Way centrism a decade later.

And on Thursday, Britons chose to stick with a blond-haired, thin-on-details, populist-style leader with a complicated relationship with the truth and open contempt for the press.

Trump certainly took inspiration for his own fortunes after Johnson secured the biggest Conservative majority since Thatcher's second reelection race in 1987.

"It might be a harbinger of what's to come in our country. It was last time," Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.

Will Britain lead the way for Trump again?

Britain's surprising referendum vote to leave the European Union in 2016 foreshadowed Trump's victory later that year and was based on some similar populist, anti-establishment trends -- though Trump's repeated claims that he predicted the result are a flight of fancy.

Still, Conservatives' win -- and the Democratic presidential race and omens for Trump's reelection -- are not a perfect comparison for the primary race of the 2020 US election.

And Corbyn's problems were not just political.

It's unlikely that whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee will advocate values quite so antithetical to millions of voters.

Britain's vote was also overlaid by complications over Brexit that make it difficult to draw direct lines with the US.

Corbyn had a muddled position on the issue that did not appeal to core Labour voters who wanted out. Johnson campaigned on a simple phrase -- "Get Brexit Done" -- that recalled the clarity of Trump's "Make America Great Again" mantra. His challenge in the next few years will be to lock in voters who supported him over Brexit who have a generational suspicion of the Conservative Party and might return to Labour if it returns to a more moderate path.

Trump is seeking to do exactly the same thing in his reelection race in 2020 in midwestern swing states. And the President has been careful not to replicate one of the Labour Party's mistakes: His entire presidency -- with its riotous rallies and careful appeals to the base on issues like abortion and gun control -- sometimes seems like an attempt to stress his cultural affinity with the people who put him in power.

But while Trump frequently praises Johnson and both are seen as populists of the same mold, the comparisons can be overdrawn.

Johnson and Trump do share deep suspicion of the European Union. And their populism and the revolt against the establishment does seem motivated by political expediency.

Trump, in his years as a flamboyant real estate magnate and tabloid target, was often snubbed by Manhattan's social and political elites. But Johnson is hardly an outsider. He was educated at the elite Eton private school and comes from a social class that still regards itself as born to rule. While Trump seems dedicated to tearing down the social and political order, Johnson, whose hero is Winston Churchill, is simply clambering back to his ordained place in its upper echelons.

And the British Prime Minister is -- Brexit apart -- an utterly conventional figure. He's less radical than Thatcher in his conservatism. And from his belief in climate change to his position on the Iran nuclear deal, he's far closer to European leaders than Trump.

He's vowing to pour billions of British pounds into the country's state-run national health service -- a position that puts him closer to Sanders and Warren than to Trump.

In fact, Johnson sits comfortably in an ideological spectrum that encompasses leaders like Blair, Clinton, Barack Obama and former Prime Minister David Cameron. He's far from the disruptive, tear-down-the-establishment instincts of Trump.

And Britain's Labour Party is generally to the left of the Democrats -- its radical wings are far closer to authentic socialism than Sanders' proposals. And the balance of power of the Conservative Party, which, while radicalized over Europe, is to the left of the GOP's ideology on social issues.

So while there are clear comparisons and lessons to be drawn from the UK election result as the US looks towards 2020, the most important one might be this: every country and every election is unique.

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Analysis: The real reason Democrats should study the UK election - CNN