Adam Roberts 'Digital Editor' of The Economist today.
In my email this morning, November 10, 2024: Newspaper Reader
The Economist today
A Sunday edition of our daily newsletter ( November 10, 2024)
Adam Roberts
Digital editor
Hello from London,
I’ve just returned from watching a momentous week unfold in American—and world—affairs. Even in New York City, that redoubt of liberal cosmopolitans, the share of support for Donald Trump surged. Those who focus on the voting habits of various demographic groups can point to almost any category of voter—by education, ethnicity, geography, income or whatever—and see that the Republicans gained. This weekend the Republicans seemed poised to retain control of the House, giving them full legislative control for at least two years. I can see only one tiny disappointment for Mr. Trump: it appears that turnout dipped slightly lower than the 67% who voted in 2020.
Editor: this ‘dip’ hardly seems relevant to the repudiation of the New Democratic candidate Kalamala Harris: who managed to be a total disappointment as an alternative to the Trump windbag. Though Trump did appear on Joe Rogan, and Harris did not. Which is indicative of a kind of tone-deafness of the whole Harris Campaign! This the Hallmark of the Clinton Cotree!
Some ask if American voters are sexist. After all, the Democrats have now twice seen a woman candidate defeated by Mr Trump. I don’t buy it. Our new article on the topic sets out why other explanations for Kamala Harris’s loss are more compelling. My hunch is that no incumbent candidate, of either sex, could have won this election: voters the world over are in a surly mood and mostly want to throw out the ruling bums. The surest way for the Democrats to have won in 2024? They should have lost the contest four years ago and thus run this time as the real candidate of change. (My guess is that in that counterfactual world, we would today have been writing about the success of president-elect Gretchen Whitmer.)
Editor: Some did not ask ‘if America voters were sexist’ it was a politically desperate Barak Obama, who scolded black male voters for not being enthesitis in their support for Harris. She disappointed consistently, that takes real work as Trump’s Political Chatter riffs on free imaginative variation in its various keys!
Why are voters everywhere so furious? We are living in an era of grouchiness. When the German election is held, probably next spring, you will see the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz badly thumped. In France, Emmanuel Macron gets to preside for a couple more years yet, but he will leave office in 2027 with voters’ insults ringing loudly in his ears. Already, in Britain, voters are cooling on the new government of Sir Keir Starmer, just months after Labour won a landslide victory.
Editor: Adam Roberts ask one questions: ‘Why are voters everywhere so furious?’ that he does not answer, he places it as an aside. And then answers it with the utterly jejune ‘We are living in an era of grouchiness’ which sidesteps the issue that the toxin of Neo-Liberalism, that still holds sway in Western Democracies, is somehow irrelevant to the rise of Trump and the Tea Party as his political precursor in America.
The answer, I think, lies in trends that are common to all democracies. I look at the lingering effects of covid lockdowns and of previously high government spending that must now be rolled back. Voters see they are paying high taxes but their public services, too often, are falling to bits. They suffer prices that have surged for years and remain high (whatever official inflation rates might say), especially when you factor in the cost of renting or buying property, or paying for education. Wages may have risen too, but every individual believes he or she earned their pay rise. That will never make up for prices being high.
Editor: Mr. Roberts resorts to a sweeping historical frame: ‘The answer, I think, lies in trends that are common to all democracies.’ It’s a political history made to measure, of the effects of ‘covid lockdowns’ and its various political distensions!
Add to that the uneasy feeling among many voters (maybe small-town ones especially, and perhaps men and older voters more) that the world is moving too fast. Cultural change, such as having to face new ideas of sexual identity, or how to talk about race, or about climate change, is deeply unsettling for some. All of the above can then be summed up in a simple idea, such as that immigrants, especially illegal ones, are to blame for everything. And who is to blame for letting in those foreigners? Why, the government of course.
Editor: Mr. Roberts political distensions become a psychological portrait, that really needs a Freudian pastiche to make it breathe as a functioning entity? Though its capaciousness renders it null…
So, welcome to the era of grouchiness. It, too, may pass. Let’s hope so.
Editor: An Inauspicious ending for this portion of Mr. Roberts essay.
Editor: Mr. Roberts opines that the ‘pollsters flopped’ never ever a surprise. And the utterly boring ‘Last week I stuck my neck out’ dreck!
Once again, pollsters flopped. For the third presidential election in a row they underestimated support for Mr Trump. Polling companies know they have a problem: they can’t get enough of the people who support him to respond to their questions. Their answer had been to try clever ways of weighting poll results in his favour, but that’s harder to do than it sounds. As for those—such as The Economist—who build predictive models on the back of polls, there are evidently challenges, too. But predictions are incredibly hard to do well, and it’s all too obvious when they go wrong.
Last week I stuck my neck out and guessed that Mr Trump would win, but only narrowly, taking 281 electoral college votes. It appears he is set to collect 312, versus 226 for Ms Harris. Congratulations to Roberto Burgess and Douglas Aird, who both foresaw precisely that outcome. As for the collective hive mind of this newsletter’s readers, the median guess was for just 259 votes (and thus a loss) for Mr Trump. The modal average—as you can see in our chart—was for 268. That was close to our election forecast model. Its final forecast was that Mr Trump would get just 262 seats. You can’t win them all.
Newspaper Reader