“SMELLING THE COFFEE IS ABLEIST”: British conservative polling guru Lord Ashcroft is out with his 2020 edition of “smell the coffee” – a warning to the defeated party (Labour in this case) of why they *really* lost the last British election. The Labour establishment has said it was all about Brexit. Lord Ashcroft’s findings:

[T]he feeling that the Labour Party was no longer for [former Labour voters] went beyond Brexit and the Corbyn leadership. While it had once been true that “they knew us, because they were part of us,” Labour today seemed to be mostly for students, the unemployed, and middle-class radicals. It seemed not to understand ordinary working people, to disdain what they considered mainstream views and to disapprove of success. The “pie in the sky” manifesto of 2019 completed the picture of a party that had separated itself from the reality of their lives.

As far as many of these former supporters were concerned, then, the Labour Party they rejected could not be trusted with the public finances, looked down on people who disagreed with it, was too left-wing, failed to understand or even listen to the people it was supposed to represent, was incompetent, appallingly divided, had no coherent priorities, did not understand aspiration or where prosperity comes from, disapproved of their values and treated them like fools.

I couldn’t possibly comment about possible parallels with American politics.