Republicans should see the demise of the Tories as a warning

When the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom won a landslide majority in the 2019 general election, it did so with a simple message of "Get Brexit Done," which earned the party seats in traditional Labour Party strongholds.

These seats were dubbed the "red wall" and voted to leave the European Union in 2016 but were nevertheless considered out of reach for the Conservative Party under even the best of circumstances. But in 2019, these seats sent Conservative candidates to parliament.

Five tumultuous years later, a number of the Conservative members of Parliament that represented these historic Labour strongholds are packing their bags and heading home as voters ousted them from office in a show of disdain for the party that has governed.

But one member of Parliament did hold on to his seat: Lee Anderson, who represents Ashfield. He quit the Conservative Party to run as a member of Reform UK, an upstart populist party led by Nigel Farage, who was also elected to Parliament in Clacton.

Anderson understood, unlike the other members of his party, that the Conservative Party had failed to deliver on the mandate of the 2019 election, which tasked the government with implementing Brexit in such a way that would allow the nation to regain its sovereignty on immigration and restore the industrial class of the U.K.

The wipeout for the Conservative Party is a warning for the Republican Party across the pond that ignoring the interests of white working-class voters who previously supported the opposing party will all too quickly return to that party if they do not feel heard.

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The seats that make up the "red wall" have a similar socio-economic profile to the so-called "rust belt" states that make up the "blue wall" of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — those states were considered reliably in the Democratic Party's hands until Donald Trump won all three in 2016 — as well as now-reliably Republican states such as Ohio, West Virginia, and Iowa.

The people of these states are reliably voting Republican today or open to voting Republican because they rightly see that the Democratic Party is catering to the highly educated elites that inhabit the coastal cities of the country, whether it is New York, Boston, Los Angeles, or Washington. But if the Republican Party fails to listen to the concerns of these voters, they will tune out of the party, just as the "red wall" voters did in the U.K. to the Conservative Party.