Judgement Day

This week: is it possible that helplessly awaiting your fate does bad things to your head? Also, some frankly mad electoral college maps from US history; and the world’s fluffiest penguin.

After I sent last week’s newsletter, in which I wrote not about the news but about grief and depression – thank you for all being so nice about that, by the way; I’ve cheered up a little now – I realised there was another possible trigger for my sadness. For the last few months, the entire world has been waiting on an event that could render everything else irrelevant. Those of us who make their living in and around British politics, in fact, have been waiting for two. It’s just possible that the sense of powerlessness thus engendered might have been affecting my mood.

The first of these has finally, today, arrived. Almost since day one, Keir Starmer’s Labour government had felt rudderless. There are a number of explanations for that – lack of experience, a terrible inheritance, warring factions in Number 10. But a big one is surely that, until the Budget settled departmental spending limits, there could be in many areas no policy. There was talk of loosened fiscal rules to allow investment (which is good) matched by cuts to day-to-day spending (which is terrifying). There were proposals that would be more or less defensible depending on everything else the government was doing, but which when reported in isolation inevitably meant terrible headlines.

Well, the waiting is finally over: the Budget has finally arrived. I’m not going to attempt too much detail – I don’t want you all unsubscribing in droves, and anyway I’m still waiting for people far cleverer than I to finish digesting, so I can be influenced by (steal) their ideas. 

But my insta-take, such as it is: a decent enough stab at plugging the fiscal black hole without breaking the letter of the government’s promise not to raise a single tax on workers. Those taxes that have been raised are those that will be paid by those more likely to be rich (employers, non-dom, dead people with large estates) rather than those almost everyone pays (income tax, national insurance, VAT). 

Elsewhere, the boosts to housebuilding and NHS spending are good; the inevitable impact the latter will have on cuts to other departments will hurt. The increase in investment is positive, but smaller than expected; the refusal to raise fuel duty, even as you raise bus fares, is baffling. 

The only worry, and it’s a biggie, is that everything this government is doing is premised on delivering growth, and the OBR has suggested this might cut it. “Stability is change,” was Starmer’s message during the election. True enough, but it remains to be seen if that’s enough to fix a fundamentally broken country.

At the very least it has happened, and the rest of the government can now get on with its job. We can all move forward, right?

Well, no. Because there’s a whole other bit of politics about to hit the world like a meteor – and this one won’t just affect Britain but the entire planet. 

The case for optimism, which means of course the case against a Donald Trump victory, is as follows. He’s visibly a lot more erratic and lethargic than he was four years ago. He consistently posts negative favorability ratings. His former chief of staff gave an interview calling him a fascist. He’s never received above 47% in a national election; Harris, who has led most polls since becoming the nominee in the summer, very rarely falls below that. 

And his closing argument – made in New York, a state he’s never going to win in a million years – was to employ a D-list comic who personally offended several million Puerto Rican voters, many of whom live in swing states, with a gag so bad that even a Republican audience didn’t laugh. Trump should be toast, right?

Except, he very obviously isn’t. He seems to have been closing the gap with Kamala Harris. Both Jeff Bezos and, friends tell me, financial institutions seem to be acting in a way that suggests they think Trump is going to win. Democrats seem to be panicking. And even if the latest numbers are good, if you looked at the economic fundamentals and nothing else, you’d probably predict a change of government this year.

The bottom line is: we don’t know. Coin toss; too close to call. (I’ve given up trying to make sense of early vote data, on the grounds it’s both depressing and pointless.) In one version of events, the American public, sick of those MAGA weirdos and their racist, sexist, creepy agenda, is about to repudiate a guy they can’t stand and who keeps forcing his way back into their lives. In another, they care a lot less about that than they do about the fact there’s been some inflation – and American democracy, the western alliance and Ukraine are all stuffed.

And all the rest of us can do is wait for a few tens of thousands of voters in a handful of states to let us know their decision, and to hope that there’s no civil war afterwards.

Perhaps, when waiting helplessly to find if the plane you’re on is about to slam straight into the ground or not, a little light depression is an entirely rational response.

Good luck, everybody.

Where the borders meet

I’m so sorry, I really thought I’d come up with a better joke by the time we hit publish, but we are where we are.

Anyway! I recently appeared on the UK In A Changing Europe podcast, to discuss the relationship between borders, maps and identity with the host, Professor Sarah Hall, and Lewis Baston, author of the annoyingly brilliant Borderlines: A History of Europe, Told from the Edges. Lewis is a lovely chap, and our books make excellent companion pieces, so if you enjoyed mine you might want to pick up his.

Also, just in case you missed the multiple announcements I’ve made about this slightly ridiculous turn of events already: I’m on the shortlist for Foyles’ Book of the Year, along with a Nobel prize winner, Gillian Anderson and Sally Rooney! Goodness.

Some frankly mad electoral college maps

The most populous of the United States is California, home to nearly 40 million people and worth 54 votes in the electoral college. Alas, despite accounting for more than a tenth of the 538 electoral college votes on offer all by itself, it weirdly doesn’t matter: it’s definitely voting for Kamala Harris, as it’s voted for the Democrat in every presidential election since 1992, and so no one’s paying it any attention now. The next biggest state is Texas (30 million people; 40 electoral votes; growing where CA is shrinking). But that’s voted Republican every year since 1980, so nobody is looking at that either.¹

This year, as ever, the debate is focusing on a tiny handful of swing states – seven, by my count (Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia). The other 43? Meh. We already know how they’ll vote. Who cares?

Every four years, when a presidential election rolls around, and the 96% of us who don’t live in the US tune into the internet to helplessly await our fate, we hear a lot about swing states and become weirdly obsessed with the views of a few tens of thousands of voters in a few specific places we’ll never visit in a country an ocean away. The identities of the states in question, though, change over time, thanks to demographic shifts or political realignment. Former bellwethers Ohio and Florida are this year firmly marked Republican red on maps; Virginia now seems as firmly Democratic as it was once Republican. And a bunch of the most contested states this cycle (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) are ones the Democrats took for granted as recently as, well, 2016, when Donald Trump first won them.

The last four elections summarised: purple means two wins apiece. Image: Wikipedia.

While only 15 states have changed hands at any point since 2008, that’s still twice as many as look competitive now. Indeed, the idea of red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) states – the notion that large parts of the country were entirely uncompetitive – only dates back to around the 2000 election, when we must assume that nobody at the various news networks bothered to check what colours political parties anywhere else were using.² You don’t have to look far back into the last century to find all sorts of electoral maps that look, from a modern perspective, absolutely insane.

Because I still think I should be engaging with the biggest news story in the world this year, but I still can’t face the reality of the actual vote, here are some of my favourites. I should warn you up front that there are a lot of images coming up, so it’s possible your email client won’t have downloaded the entire email. (If it hasn’t, it’ll be one click to read the rest.)

That ‘90s Show

The most convincing electoral college victory this century was Barack Obama’s first election in 2008, when he won 365 electoral college votes. (I was there to see it! It was great.)

Bill Clinton beat that twice, winning 370 in 1992 and 329 four years later. In both cases he was helped along by an unusually strong third party candidate, target of one of my favourite jokes in The Simpsons (“Homer, would you please stop reading that Ross Perot pamphlet?”). All the same, he won over 30 states, twice. Check out the maps: