Global News Podcast - Bonus: The Global Story

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

A bonus episode from The Global Story podcast. Could just 100,000 people decide the US election? The Global Story brings you one big story every weekday, making sense of the news with our experts around the world. Insights you can trust, from the BBC, with Katya Adler. For more, go to bbcworldservice.com/globalstory or search for The Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

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Search for Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Hello, I'm James Reynolds. Welcome to this bonus episode of the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. This week, I'm hosting the BBC's Global Story Podcast, and along with some brilliant colleagues, we bring you fresh takes and smart perspectives on what's happening around the world. For a few weeks, we'll bring you highlights of the Global Story podcast here. But to hear a fresh episode every weekday, search for The Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts and subscribe so you don't miss a story.

Today, who will actually decide the US election? There are more than 160 million registered voters. And yet... It's going to only be 100,000 Americans, give or take, who decide whether it's going to be Joe Biden or Donald Trump. With no major surprises on Super Tuesday, and with Nikki Haley dropping out of the race, we can be almost certain as to who will be on the ballot in November. Choice is clear. Donald Trump's campaign is about him, not America, not you.

Biden, worst president. He's the worst president. He's the most incompetent president. Billions of dollars will be spent to sway the outcome. And a lot of that money will be spent chasing a tiny number of voters in a small number of counties in just a few states. They will get to pick the most powerful man in the world. Well, the line you heard earlier that just 100,000 voters could decide the election came from a friend of this podcast, the BBC's special US correspondent, Katty Kay. Hi, Katty. How are you? Hey, James.

Good to have you on the program. There is a lesson here, of course. If you say something interesting on the podcast, you know that we write it down and you know that we're going to come and follow you up and say, you know, that one thing you said, you might have thrown it away. Well, that's an entire episode for us. So it's my fault. OK. Yeah, exactly. Precisely.

Now what should we spend the next half hour wriggling out of that one? Yeah. And trying not to say anything interesting so that you don't have to do a new podcast created on the one thing you say in the previous one. We've also got Eli Yockley, a political analyst from the polling and data firm Morning Consult, who's been looking closely at the states and the voters that will decide this election. How are you, Eli? Hey, I'm very good. Good to be here. It is great to have you on the podcast. Well, we've just had Super Tuesday. Biden and Trump, familiar names, of course, secured the backing of primary voters in 14 states each. We are as certain as we can be that barring asteroids, meteors, alien invasions and apocalypses, they will be the candidates in November.

So attention now turns to that election. Let's start with that point that Katty raised, why the election could be decided by such a small number of people. It all comes down to the Electoral College. And Katty, I sat in the studio for ages just now trying to write up my own kind of bite-sized definition of the Electoral College that I could be proud of, that would make everyone understand it, that I could give standing on one leg in a lift. But I thought, why bother when we've got you? Is this where I can punt it straight to Eli and say, could he explain the Electoral College in such a way that our dear listeners in Middle England and Middle Europe and Middle Asia understand

that the American electoral system is complicated, and some would say pretty undemocratic in many ways. And what happens is that every state gets to elect a certain number of electors who then go to Washington after the presidential election and cast their ballots for whoever has won their state. Those people are known as the electoral college. And you have to get to 270 electoral college votes. Have I lost everyone already? You have to get to 270 electoral college votes, which is really all you just sort of need to remember in order to win the White House. And each state, depending on the size of its population, has a certain number of these electoral college electors. And there are certain states that will give you large numbers of electors.

And then there are certain states that will give you small number of electors. But what we're really interested in for the purposes of this podcast and for this election, really, are the few states that change from going Democratic to Republican, Democratic to Republican, depending on the cycle. They are called the swing states. And it is those swing states that decide the election because California is always going to be Democratic. And Texas for the moment is always going to be Republican. What you want to win is those states that are really up for grabs. I love it that you say, I'm going to punt on this. And then you decide, no, you know what, I'm just going to answer it. I thought that was too feeble at the beginning of the podcast and I'd give Eli a break and then I can reserve my punting rights. Yeah, you get those to the second quarter. Can you win that popular vote but lose the presidency in the Electoral College? Does that

ever happen? You can and you do. For the last several elections, Democrats have won the popular vote. But even in cases where they haven't won the presidency, they've lost the Electoral College vote. One exception was George W. Bush in 2000, a rare Republican in the last three decades to win both the Electoral College vote and the popular vote. Increasingly, the pattern in America is that Democrats can almost pretty much rely on winning the popular vote. Because if you were just to kind of have an election in which it's first past the post, right across the country, forget about the states, forget about the Electoral College, there are more people voting Democratic in this country

than there are people voting Republican. But because of this curious system of having to win a state and then win the presidency, as it were, you can win the White House without winning the popular vote. And the expectation is that in November, Joe Biden is likely to win the popular vote if recent history holds up. But we don't know whether he's going to win this magic number of 270 electoral college votes. I imagine, Eli, you wake up in the morning with the number 270 in your head. It's a tattoo on my arm. The thing is, a lot of these votes, a lot of these states are already decided.

And so, I mean, that's what we're going to be watching play out over the coming months now that we have basically nominees. There's not a lot of attention from a lot of these candidates given to many of these other states. I mean, I'm from Missouri, which is since, you know, Obama's first election has become a very

reliably red state. Since then, it's become very red. it's the only time the show me state ever saw presidential candidates was Republicans flying into St. Louis to raise a bunch of money. It's the same thing in many ways with Democrats in places like California and New York. And so the downside to it is a lot of these states are sort of omitted from the presidential campaign at some point. The American people are somewhat divided on the electoral college. We checked in on this after the 2020 election and 45% of voters supported, 38% opposed it. But it's not something that a lot of folks care about or want to change

maybe until it becomes election day. When you look back, the states or districts that swing elections, well, they're easy to spot when you've got the figures. In 2020, the candidates, the same guys as this time, made clear which states mattered to them. Hello, Florida. We love them. Hello, Florida. We love Florida. Hello, North Carolina. It's great to be here in Michigan. Hello, Michigan.

It's great to be back in Florida. Here in the great state of Arizona. Here in Wisconsin. Hello, Wisconsin. We're back. We're back. We're going to win. We're going to win this state.

One state appeared to matter the most. Hello, Pennsylvania. Hello, Pennsylvania. Hello, Pennsylvania. Let's go, Pennsylvania. Joe's a Philly girl. Well, I'm a Scranton guy. Early voting is open here in Pennsylvania.

Right here in western Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has been very important to me. I went to school in Pennsylvania. I'm from 2446 North Washington Avenue, and I'm happy to be home. That was 2020. We're in 2024. Katty, which states will matter this time? Well, it's all about, as we said, that map. And during the course of the next six months, both campaigns will spend a lot of time poring through data to work out if we put together this jigsaw puzzle of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, can we make it? Or if we put together Nevada and Michigan and Georgia and Wisconsin, can we make it then? And they'll be literally trying to see if I can get this state, I get this many votes.

If I get this state, I get this many votes. And I add those to my total and I get to 270. Five or six states, that's been the margin between the winner and the loser. Yeah. I mean, every month we've seen Joe Biden is trailing Trump in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. These are going to be the key states we're watching this year. Trump's lead is the widest right now that we've measured. It's in Arizona and Pennsylvania. He's beating Joe Biden by six

percentage points there, just like he is in Georgia and Nevada. These were key states to Joe Biden's electoral college victory. He's going to need to make up ground in those states. In some ways, that's an easier task than what Donald Trump has moving forward to try to revive the same kind of voters who backed him four years ago. And Donald Trump is going to be out of the campaign trail. Being heard by voters, that might work to his detriment moving forward. Here's a fun fact for you. The spending on the last US presidential election in 2020, I was just doing the maths, was about $14 billion. If you think that it's about 100,000 voters who really matter,

that is the grand total of $140,000 per voter. Could they just wire the cash to each voter? They could just. I could just move to Wisconsin. Actually, good idea. Why haven't we thought of this? And then get them to wire us the money. Looking back in time, I focused much of my life on trying to recreate the West Wing when I'm off air. And in living, that is my framework.

And I remember in one of the final episodes, the defeated candidate was thinking, what should he do after he lost the election? And he decided that he might take professorships in Florida, Pennsylvania or Ohio because those were the swing states at the time. And that was back in 2006 in the funny West Wing world, which I still live in and have not updated any cultural references since. But we haven't mentioned some of those states, Eli. They do change then over time. Yes, they definitely do. We wouldn't have been talking those states, Eli. They do change then over time. Yeah, they definitely do. I mean, we wouldn't have been talking about necessarily Georgia eight years ago. Florida is one of those places that has turned pretty red in recent years. It's one of the more conservative states in the country with a pretty popular Republican governor down there.

Ohio, we see as pretty far off the map. That might be something that started before Trump, but his ability to fire up the white working class economic concern base with some racial component, too, has really helped take Ohio off the map. How does a state go from being a solid state in one category or another to a swing state, as happened with Georgia. It happens pretty quick. Voters are able to react to circumstances they see. Part of that is the campaign's ability to identify them in some of these key counties that have pivoted. I mean, we saw the suburban flip in 2018, where Democrats were able to pick up votes from women-educated folks in the suburbs who make more money, who were disgusted by what they were seeing out of Donald Trump. The Biden campaign in 2020 was able to build on that. It helped them flip places in like Arizona too, or parts of Pennsylvania. The question is whether it sticks. I mean, the American electorate is so

partisan these days, it's really hard to find voters who are swayable. And they happen to dislike both of the candidates right now. I mean, I think the Cook Political Report's Amy Walters has talked a lot about the so-called double haters, these people who have unfavorable views of both candidates. That share of the electorate looks as big as it was in 2016 when voters did not like Donald Trump and did not like Hillary Clinton. Katty and Eli, you've both given us the roadmap then about where to look for swing voters.

Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, maybe Nevada and North Carolina. Next, the voters themselves. It all started with me asking my friends and family to write letters to my daughter Coco, sharing their experiences and giving her advice for her life ahead. The idea blossomed into Dear Daughter from the BBC World Service, the podcast where, with the help of your letters, I'm creating a handbook to life full of advice for daughters everywhere. Listen now by searching for Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Dear Daughter wherever you get your BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more from the BBC World Service. And if you're enjoying what we're doing and would like to hear more, remember at the end of this episode to search for The Global Story wherever you found this podcast. Now, on to those swing voters themselves. Katty, we know where they live, you've told us, but who are they?

Would you recognise them if they were walking down the street? It's hard to say right. I can zoom in and at 433 W Street in the suburbs of Philadelphia, there is a housewife who is a swing voter. Because actually it's this kind of weird, amorphous group of dissatisfied people who could go either way and who could go either way, depending on what's been in the news that week. Which means that one thing we do know is that the next seven or eight months are going to be very volatile because I think the polls will continue to reflect what has been happening

in the news in that moment. At the moment, immigration is driving people to say that they would rather have Donald Trump. Biden's conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America. Folks, on my first day as president, I introduced a bill I sent to Congress, a comprehensive plan to fix the broken immigration system and to secure the border. But no action was taken. Eli mentioned earlier the double haters, which kind of sounds like a Taylor Swift song, but has become the jargon of this election. And they are voters who are dissatisfied with Joe Biden and voters who are dissatisfied with Donald Trump and therefore could jump

potentially to one side or another or could jump to a third party candidate or could stay home. We think they make up about 19, 20 percent of the electorate. That's a big group of people because in 2020 they were only about 5 percent of the electorate. Amazing to hear that there is that concept of floating voters because of course of course, looking back, this is the first election since 1892 between two people who've already done the job. We know what each man is like as president. So, Eli, who becomes an up-for-grabs swing voter in a rematch between two very, very known quantities. Because these two candidates have run against each other before, we have a pretty good idea of what these voters look like, the kinds of voters Joe Biden needs to win. Right now, he is not leading Donald Trump in most public surveys. And a lot of that's due to the fact that he's weaker among his own 2020 voters than Donald Trump is among his voters.

There's more women among these double haters than we've seen ever since we started tracking this in 2016. There's more young people, especially Gen Z, who doesn't love the president's handling of the Israel-Hamas war. There's also a number of Republicans who are not thrilled about Donald Trump's re-ascendance in the Republican Party, the kind of folks who were out there supporting Nikki Haley throughout the primary process. These voters are going to be very decisive as we move forward. And Katty's very right, by the way. This is going to be a very volatile year the next year. The American public has not been paying attention to this like the political class in Washington has. They don't know every piece of Donald Trump's multiple serious legal problems.

They don't know every single thing that he said. But they are starting to pay attention. And especially among some of these conservative voters, old school Republicans like the Mitt Robbins of the world in these swing states. We've noticed them sort of voters organically mentioning things like NATO and Trump's comments on that. NATO was busted. One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, well, sir, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, Will you protect us? I said, you didn't pay your delinquent. He said, yes, let's say that happened. No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your

bills. The issue of the day is going to matter a lot moving forward. And that's why this economic improvement, the president's going to need to lean into highlighting that. And the immigration discussion we're having right now is clearly dragging him down. Katty, do non-swing staters, the vast majority of the population, do they ever get a bit jealous of these 100,000 people you're talking about? Or are they rather relieved to be avoiding all the fuss? There is a saying, particularly amongst Democrats, that maps don't vote, people do. And what they're sort of protesting there is the fact that in California, large numbers of people will vote. But because the state always leans

Democratic, people feel slightly disenfranchised. They feel that their vote doesn't matter as much as somebody in Michigan. I think that by the end of the election, once you've had these, whatever it was we said, $140,000 spent on you in political advertising, and you've been bombarded day and night with campaign ads and visits from candidates and more campaign ads, you're probably fairly sick of being a swing stater. Yeah, it must be pretty draining. It's a long, exhausting process of turning on your television and seeing yet another negative ad about Donald Trump or yet

another negative ad about Joe Biden. So we know where the swing states are in this particular election, and we know roughly who that 100,000 people are made up of. How then, we want to know now, are the campaigns trying to get them on board? Eli, are they ringing them up, or would it be more cost effective for each campaign to send an individual campaign worker to embed or live with that swing voter from March till November. Oh my gosh, the idea of moving in campaign workers would probably scare off some swing state voters. By the way, I love campaign ads. I love negative ads. They're fun to watch. It's like the fun part of politics. They are getting better and funnier.

Here's a question for you. Just how far are the radical left and inside the Beltway bandits willing to go to stop? They are funny and they like work. Yeah. I mean, that's why the campaigns run them so much is people are very responsive to it. It's called negative partisanship. We all know they hate him for winning the fight to protect life. And negative partisanship attacking the other side's here on Advantage works. And that's going to be the whole job of Biden's campaign over the coming several months, is he's got to revive this coalition from four years ago.

And the best way to do that is to remind all these voters why they hated Donald Trump in the first place. There's something dangerous happening in America. There's an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy. All of us are being asked right now, what will we do to maintain our democracy? History's watching. But on the other side of that, I mean, is the whole messaging war about the current president's age. I mean, people are seeing these clips of Joe Biden stumbling all the time. We saw the images yesterday of Biden stumbling around. And, you know, honestly, you know,

it's sad thing to see. You don't want to see anyone do that. But it was frustrating because, honestly, that was symbolic of the state of our country. And it's definitely breaking through. When I go back home to Missouri, it's the first thing people say to me is, do you think Joe Biden is as bad as he looks on TV? And that's going to be something he's going to have to contend with. It's why moments like the State of the Union matter so much in a way that they don't always. Can he give an hour-long speech at 9 o'clock without stumbling through it. The other challenge for the Biden campaign in these swing states, in these key communities, is going to be firing up the kinds of people he needs to do some of this traditional knocking on doors and meeting voters where they are. His problem right now in all of the data we're seeing is by some of these young folks who traditionally would have been the Democratic Party's ground army trying to rev up these voters in these key communities. He's going to have to do something moving forward in his campaign. He's going to have to spend some time figuring out how it is

to try to revive those folks who do kind of the hard work of campaigning every four years for the presidency. This election then looks set to be a sequel, the first between the same candidates since the rematch between Eisenhower and Stevenson in 1956. In Hollywood, some sequels are like The Godfather Part II, very successful, breaking new ground. Others are like Jaws II, a creative abyss and a flop. Katty, which will 2024 be? I'm not sure Americans love reruns. And maybe in the television age, reruns are inherently a

little bit boring. We do know that Donald Trump tends to drive up turnout, partly because people love him and partly because people hate him. So it's possible that this is going to be a very high turnout election. The key, you were asking about what the Biden campaign can do, because the volatility at the moment is on the Democratic side. The key is to build an anti-Trump coalition. And the way they do that, they feel, in my conversations with people from the campaign, is by goading Donald Trump into being Donald Trump at his worst. And they will do that, as they're starting to do on

social media by getting him to say outrageous, offensive things by pushing his buttons. Now, that doesn't lead for the most edifying political campaign. And I think if that's what the Biden camp feels they have to do for the next seven months in order to win back those people who may be flirting with the idea of voting for Donald Trump, but probably have more Democratic leanings. That's what they're going to do. So this is going to be a hard to predict, volatile and pretty dirty campaign. Eli, a rematch, a sequel, how does that go down in US history? It's going to be a dark year. I mean, we have an interesting kind of scary constitutional problem with the idea of these trials. I think you've seen reporting of the Biden campaign not talking about Election Day as the end of this campaign,

but about January 6th when the Electoral College meets being the end of the campaign, building off of what we saw happen after the last election. I think that's a scary moment in American politics. And, you know, what's going to, these key states are going to matter a lot because these are going to be decided by so few votes. The one thing we haven't talked about, and I think is probably something weighing on especially the Biden campaign, is the notion of, it was third party candidates in key states, like Michigan and like Wisconsin, that lost Hillary Clinton, the presidency, and RFK, Robert Kennedy Jr., who people are not hearing a lot about, Cornel West, a progressive African American candidate who could appeal to young progressive Democrats. They only need to peel away, as Eli says, a few thousand voters of these double haters, as we've called them, to swing the election one way or another.

Katya, you know, we said that we listen to every word you say, and that some of what you say, then we make into another episode. Well, third party candidates, you just created another episode with another of your paragraphs. And we will delve into that. What with what? Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Ross Perot, 1992 and so on up to Cornel West and Robert Kennedy Jr. If you're up for that. You're the historian. So we'll I'll be asking the questions. We can flip. Cathy, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks, Eli. Thank you, James. Eliie thanks so much for joining us thank you thanks eli thank you james eli thanks so much yep anytime we'll take you up on that

remember if you want to hear more episodes from the global story we release a new one every weekday monday to friday search for The Global Story wherever you get your BBC podcasts and subscribe. Thank you for listening. If you want to dig deeper into the US election, do check out our increasing back catalogue. There's one about Trump's inner circle and another about Biden's brain. There is a link to those in the show notes. And if you have ideas about what we should cover on the election or anything else, please send us a text or a voice note on WhatsApp at plus 44 330 123 9480 or email us at theglobalstoryatbbc.com. Goodbye. Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story, plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free.

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