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Voternomics: What’s Worse Than Inflation? ‘Useless Politicians’

Published May 10, 2024, 12:29 AM

Ben Page, chief executive of market research company Ipsos, joins Voternomics this week to outline what he’s discovered about voters and what they think about their politicians, governments and economies. He tells Stephanie Flanders and Allegra Stratton that trust in politics is the “lowest we’ve ever measured.” 

Also on this episode, Flanders, Stratton and Adrian Wooldridge ask Bloomberg Opinion columnist John Authers whether—given the question of when the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates between now and the election—the central bank can remain above the political fray.

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

And I think you can definitely see it in the United States. If you look at the values of Republicans and Democrats in the nineteen nineties, you can see that they're like two sort of mountains, but they're quite close to each other, and over the last thirty years those have progressively moved apart.

Welcome to Voteromics, where politics and markets collide. This year, voters around the world have the ability to affect markets, countries and economies like never before, so we've created this series Votermics to help you make sense of it all. I'm Stephanie Flanders back in the London studio this week.

I'm Adriom Woodridge and I'm Alegri Stratton.

So at the top of the show, you just heard from Ben Paige, chief executive officer of IPSOS and Multinational Market Research and Consulting. Later in the episode, Legra and I chat with him about what the polls are telling us around Europe, around the US and the UK elections, so stick around for that. He's had thirty five years plus in the business. We also have John Author's talking about whether the Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell is going to be playing politics with his interest rate decisions over the next six months. But first there's plenty for us to talk about this week. But the top of the agenda is the domestic but also the global fallout from what's happening on the ground and in and in diplomatic discussions around Rufa and Gaza. Maybe start with the domestic Allegra and Adrian because we saw in those lob We're not going to talk too much about the UK rather obscure local election results, but we did see probably the one negative point for Labor in those otherwise very sort of optimistic results. Very bad news for the Conservatives would be that their vote was not holding up in some key areas thanks to the debate over the Middle East.

Yeah, I wouldn't be too worried about it. I think that the results were pretty forceful and sent a very strong message to Downing Street. But it is very interesting, and particularly it's interesting since that West Midlands result was closer than Labor would have liked because, as you say, Steph, because of the.

Gaza the mayor or.

Yeah, and what we've seen since then is the new Labor West Midlands mayor come out and say he would like an arms embargo, and you've seen already noises off from other parts of the party saying hold on a second. You're the West Midlands mayor and you're not the foreign affairs spokesp person, and you don't write foreign policy for us. And I think if we do, at some point this year get a Labor government, I think these tensions are going to be the new sort of defining tensions of what we all write about, because it isn't straightforward for a Prime Minister Starma to do an arms embargo, potential straightforward for a Labor leader opposition needed to do in it. I'll say, yeah, okay, we do believe in an arms embargo, but I think for a PM it has all kinds of implications for our global relationships and we perhaps can discuss that at length. And I think, yes, it gave them a fright, but I don't think it's in enough places for it to be mission critical to them getting in at the next election.

It's not a major problem for Labor now. I think it will be a very significant problem when they take power if what's happening in Israel continues to happen. I think for Biden. It is a huge problem because it splits his party much more than it splits the Labor Party, because there's a very significant, long term, long standing Jewish vote for the Democratic Party. On the other hand, a lot of young people who ought to be part of the Democratic base are very angry. It also creates because of all the protests in the United States, which are spreading here a little bit but are very big in the United States. Creates a sort of sense of disorganization of society falling apart of Plogesian dot being really in control, and that is very good for people who pose as strong men like Trump. So I think this could be one of the things that in a tied election actually shifts it towards Trump and the Republicans.

Just as we're recording this on Thursday, you've had President Biden be explicit about holding back on heavy arm shipments if there is a full scale invasion of Rougher. Our sense is that certainly in the last week or so, it was the Israelis who were choosing to make that pressure public, so that the administration had actually still been doing through diplomatic channels questioning pausing shipments. But again that was actually intended to be private, and it was Israelis who decided to make that public. So it's an interesting game that they're playing, wanting to make things more politically tense for Biden because the Republicans are obviously coming back concerring his starts. The other thing I was struck by, and we actually had a story about it this week about Gaza is China's new wedge issue to split the US from the global South, and what that was trying to get at was I felt the global fallout for the US in terms of its diminished moral standing coming at a time when actually Biden had wanted to be on the front foot providing a counterweight to China's increasing clout, whether it's in the Middle East, but also explicitly in places like Latin America and Africa. And we are seeing China intervene actively to stir up countries and point to the Biden's position in Gaza as a reason not to be building more ties with the US, and I think that could be very corrosive.

Absolutely, We've seen China for a long time has been posing as a sort of development model for the emerging world that follow us, and you will have state driven growth, and that's a wonderful thing. Now it's going back to the old days of follow us, and you'll be putting a stick in the eye of the evil capitalists who are causing all this trouble. The evil United States is going back to the old world of advocating the position of the oppressed in the world. So China can shift between the development model on the one hand and the sort of the anti evil imperialist model on the other hand.

And of course, a couple of years ago, back when I was in government, there was the American and Boris Johnson following suit response to the Belton Road initiative. So the sort of trendy idea of the time was, I mean it began being cooked, remember, built that better and then build that world, and it morphed all the time. And then Boris wanted it to be called the Clean Green Initiative, and that was helping the global South become more climate resilient through aid from America and France and journal and so on and so forth. These ideas that one has, I don't hear people talk about their very much debt initiatives.

It's probably more likely to do.

Also, I thought was fascinating. We've got this Institute for Strategic Dialogue saying that there's a pro Chinese Communist Party operators known as Spammerflage, using accounts posing as right wing Americans and targeting the Guards of Water to flame internal US division. We think of Russia as playing these games, but obviously it is also China. And I'm quite keen to hear what these right wing spamouflages are actually called fos games.

You're probably playing into the hands of Trump because, as I said earlier, disorder leads to a desire for a strong man. Now do we think that the Chinese actually want Trump?

In Paris?

Clear that Netinna who would rather have Trump than Biden, But what about the Chinese and the Russians may well be the same thing.

All right, We're going to do it's a handbrake turn now, this being about the collision of politics and markets. The fact that we are just at the sort of turn of an interest rates cycle, both in the UK and in Europe and in the US, I think does pose a question for many central bankers both sides of the Atlantic, how they're going to navigate a time when they're just deciding whether or not to start bringing interest rates down, managed to dodge a recession, and the timing is going to be quite unfortunate, sort of on either side of an election potentially. I was asked about it on Bloomberg Television on our special around the Bank of England interest rate decision. Very excitingly no change in interest rates, but those of us with variable rate mortgages we at least have prospect of potentially having a rate cut next But no, because it's still bloody staying with it anyway. But I think it's in a funny kind of way. Although the Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has to worry about his own politics, the image and the fact that he's had a lot of criticism, the fact that Labour's so far ahead makes you feel that any decision the Bank of England takes is not going to be considered to be so politically decisive going into this election, whereas the US it's quite a different story. Are one of our best read opinion columns, alongside Adrian Obviously, John Author's joins us Now from New York because actually your column this week addressed the subject of whether or not pow, the head of the US Central Bank would be playing politics with monetary policy over the next six months. What do you think.

I think, ultimately, given the utter intensity of the political climate here at the moment, it's more or less impossible for the Fed to do anything that might not have a political impact. I think where the notion that Powell was behaving particularly politically took hold was in the pivot so called, particularly last December, when the whole language about the possibility of rate cuts and the speed with which they would want to cut suddenly changed very sharply. The other point that people give to suggest that he is tried to duce up the economy to help Biden was actually from last week when the FED reduced qt quantitative tightening. The amount by which it was actually selling bonds into the market that was more than was expected. I think you can probably account for them more by the normal factors that would affect the Fed than by any particular desire to help Joe Biden. Bearing in mind that Jay Powell is actually a registered Republican who served in Republican administrations.

John just sketch for us what would be the behavior by Pow that would incense and enrage a President Trump.

The most I think if he starts cutting rates now, he is going to have to take a lot of abuse from Donald Trump. Yes, because this is what they have been braced for, that the Fed would cut before it really was justified, to create more light at the end of the tunnel, to cheer things up. I find this. I can very easily believe that the Fed will make a mistake, just as I can very easily believe that the back of England could make a mistake. I cannot imagine that any move would be made for political reasons, and apart from anything else, We've all cited Milton Friedman on the lags of monetary policy often enough over the last few years of a rate cut now would have a minimal impact on anybody's sense of the economy between now and the election.

That's not really on the cards, is it right now?

What a rate cut or it is fair to say that.

There are.

If the Fed really wanted to cut rates, if it was if the White House was breathing down the Fed's neck in the way that Donald Trump very publicly breathed down the Fed's neck four or five years ago, you can definitely construct an excuse to start to start cutting rates. The number of generally conservative common tators who say that inflation is actually below two percent already, it's just because of quirks in the way that housing inflation shelter inflation is calculated, which is a rabbit hole I go down. There are plenty of There are plenty of reputable people making the argument that that is a much more of a real problem than it appears.

You've hinted there to the irony of the criticism by Trump, or the possible criticism by former President Trump, because a lot of Republicans, including him as saying he wants to get a new he wants to replace j. Powell if he wins, so that we could then have someone who cuts rates more.

If you want to analyze Donald Trump's economic policies consistency.

There is, yes, but we try all the time.

But I do think in the current environment there's another one of these many areas where there's where it's quite frustrating. There are valid arguments to be made about central bank independence. Paul Tucker, the ex Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, write a book called I Think It was Unelected Power something like that about ways in which at the moment central banks probably are too independent of the of the political process. Given how important monetary policy is, it's quite strange that there is so little democratic direct input into it, so that there are very valid arguments to be had about this. It's just those valance expressed in this ugly debate.

So that's a tip to Donald Trump if he wants to have good reason in arguments and someone helping him make the case for reducing the fed's independence, you can call you. It sounds like John.

Or Paul Tucker.

Yes, yes, people seem to be much more worried about inflation than the underlying figures seem to indicate. And I wonder if those people are so completely crazy, because there seem to be an enormous number of hidden charges, hidden costs that hit people when they actually come to pay their bills.

Do you sound like your people when you say.

I read presents people perceive you I represent the ordinary man.

Okay, we do have Michigan, a University of Michigan, which does huge amounts of research on consumer sentiment consumer opinion does and has for the last few years, given data for people who separate data for people describing themselves as Democrats, Republicans, and independents, and the divergence is quite stunning at this point, higher than it's ever been before. And Republicans think inflation is higher than Democrats think it's lower. Republicans think we're all going to hell in a handbasket, Democrats don't, in a quite dramatic fashion in a way that does suggest that the narrative is framing perception in both on both wings, but perhaps more dramatically because the Republican. Whatever else you think about Donald Trump, he's very good at getting his message across. People are very unhappy about it.

Last question, just to bring your attention to the United Kingdom, can you give me the month when you think that Andrew Bailey starts cutting.

We're running out of time, so this is going to be a short one, but we just need to lay our bets obviously rich month.

From this side of the Atlantic, it looks to me as though he could go next time in June. I think I think you were commenting earlier if if there is some way in which the Conservatives are going to pull out this election, it's not going to be anything the Bank of England does in either direction, and to some extent that he's really, really exempted from some of the political pressures that Powell is under, and he also has a weaker economy that for whom for which the case for rate cuts is stronger. So my initial take looking at what he said today is that he's definitely nudging people towards expecting a cut earlier. So may well be June.

All right, place your bets well. That also puts you in line with our estimable chief UK economist, Dan had some Bloomberg economics, i should say, in the Fed's to Feds, or at least again pointing to a bit of research that that Bloomberg did. We have David Wilcox, who was the chief economist at the FED for many years, now working for US as an advisor, and he actually looked at how the weather just taking the sort of standard there's a tailor rule which is too complicated to go into, but a sort of basic policy rule that the FED is if some version of the FED usually follows. And he looks back and says, have they departed from that rule, that sort of mechanical rule more or less than usual in the year before an election, And they actually find they seem to have stuck more closely to that rule in the twelve months before elections than at other times, which is an interesting I guess that's another thing that the Fed could be putting in people's face as well. For how many elections going back, going back a good twenty five thirty years. I think he finds that he was a little bit. It was a bit too tight relative to that rule with Bill Clinton's ninety six real election campaign, and a bit too loose leading up to George W. Bush's re election campaign. But anyway, there's no we can't find it in the data. Suffice to sayeteen.

Ninety six would have been one of the one of the examples of the economy going quite unreally well, it didn't. It didn't do too much harm. If they were if they heard a little on the side of conservatives.

Then no, exactly exactly, Thanks John, Thank you. So I do think that set us up well for the Ben Page interview, which Adrian sadly you missed. Remind me of your excuse again, it's.

Very far from being an excuse. I got to my train station. I got to my train station in Petersfield. I noticed that there were no cars there. I waited for the train for a bit. There were no trains, and then I finally found a uniformed person and I said, when it's the next train? He said, it's not until Saturdays.

You know, you work for a news organization that's aware of things going on. Without even going down to the station, you could have found out there was a strike.

I didn't listen to any rival news organizations that morning, or he could.

Have walked here. Okay, So while Adrian was stuck on his train platform, Stephanie and I were joined by Ben Paige, who is CEO of Global CEO no Less of IPSOS, the polling organization which many of you will know about very well. With him, we talked about dissatisfaction amongst voters in the US, the UK and Europe and why he thinks that's translated into more support for the far right or nationalist candidates instead of an active socialist agenda.

There are places like France where there is a socialist party and then they picked up some votes. Melanchean did quite well last time, but I think your broader point is absolutely right, and I would put it down to immigration and demography. The last time people were feeling this squeezed, we hadn't had these cumulative waves of migration from the south to the north, and the change that people have now observed. Also, of course you've got aging populations in many western countries and in Japan. Italy going to be, of course, the oldest country on earth, almost guaranteed no more Italians at all than one hundred and seventy years. If they don't sort themselves out, they're literally become extinct on current trends. So I think all of that means that you've got a sort of in some ways a scapegoat for the situation. People feel unsettled. And of course, actually even before the global financial crash in two thousand and eight, you were seeing the overall GDP grow, but not GDP per capita because partly because we were just importing lots of people, so the pie was growing, but actually we were also importing people as well. So I think all of this means that it's a different situation than if populations were just stable, and therefore the appeal of the right that it's.

Someone else's fault.

There are minorities we can identify that are disrupting things. They're the answer those simple messages which can cut through and when people visibly notice change that's when you see this sort of unease. And in in fact, we've measured in Britain something called the Hirpindel Index of racial heterogeneity, which is I know, I didn't even know what it was called. We just observed it literally in the data and it's basically how heterogeneous racially a population is. But basically the faster the rate of change, the more basic crudely unhappy people were. So if you remember back to Barking and Dagenham, this is very parochial, but two thousand and eight the BNP won in every single ward they stood in and when we ran it through the maths, Barking and Dagenham had been a white island in the rest of London because of the Ford Motor Plant. Those families that had spent their lives there, and gradually Black Londoners, of whom there are plenty, had noticed that there was plenty of cheap housing in Barking and Dagenham, so they started but moving there and that's when at that point you get this reaction. So I'm using that as a sort of dramatic extreme example, and of course at the next election Labour took those seats back, but it shows that people are susceptible, and so if they're feeling under pressure and they noticed that migration is changing the country, they will be more willing to listen to right wingers about scapegoats, etc.

I'm interested in this idea. I don't want to be parochial, but nonetheless, if you've got a Kirstarma government coming in the UK or your polls.

Suggest so, yes, absolutely.

Firstly, how does a left wing government ride that trend in your opinion? And secondly, I'm just wondering whether we're moving into this period where you have a lot of one term governments because people come in, they are there's a sea change, there's a swing in opinion, and then they just can't ride the beast because the dissatisfaction is just so volatile.

Well, I think Allegli, you're right to pick up that it's highly likely at the moment that Labor will be deeply unpopular eighteen months to twenty four months after they win the election.

That long, and that's not a facetious question.

It's interesting because they may be able to if they can come up with enough messaging about what is going to happen. Then one of the things that I always find very striking is if we go back to the nineteen ninety seven wins and he puts in place spending plans with Brown that Clark said were just unmanageable and unstickable to But they do it because people's expectations were so high. And of course there was also economic growth, and the economy was picking up in nineteen ninety seven, so public services didn't improve to start in the much in the first four years, but everybody knew the money was coming. The cavalry were coming down the hill, and they were willing to suspend disbelief. So there is a period that they will have a grace period. The question is, and I think you're right to ask the question, how long will it be? I think it's not so much strong man, strong woman. Let's think of Italy. People are grasping around for solutions to this massive macro problem that we can see in the West and indeed in Latin America, the loss of the future. This idea that nine out of ten people in most of these countries believe, looking back at the last fifty or sixty years, that the normal state of affairs is the next generation is richer than the current one, and now over the last two decades have seen that turned.

I guess we should always ask ourselves, is it really so different? Is everyone always unhappy with this state of.

Political It's fair.

You're absolutely right to say that people are always unhappy. And even in I think nineteen ninety seven, forty six percent thought the country was going to the dogs, but the figure is now seventy six percent. People have always believed that politicians are duplicitous. You remember the wonderful nineteen forty four survey where the British were asked, do you believe that the politicians in Parliament are acting in their own interests, in the interests of the country, or in the interests of their political party? And in nineteen forty four, as we fought the Germans in Europe with a coalition government, only thirty five percent believe the politians are acting in the interest of the country. But the point I would make now is that let us fall into six percent. And so trust in politicians has never been high, but it is now the lowest we've ever measured, and we're spontaneously now getting in Britain, and I think in many countries, people just saying when I ask them what the biggest problem is. They don't say inflation, they don't say public services. They say it's just useless politics.

And I think that.

But the challenge for the politicians is that trying to please our populations that they now serve is far more challenging as an audience and a group of people than say, the populations that they were trying to please fifty or sixty years ago. Because of fragmentation, because of just a demographic change, and because of income distribution, show that there are now many rich people that just weren't who weren't there in large quantities in the past. So for in all, for all those reasons, it's much harder to be a politician.

I'm sort of obsessed with this, but the fact that we spend all our time looking at billionaires on television, that they're so visible and they're so overrepresented in dramas, that I think it's much more part of people's lives, this kind of super rich phenomenon, which as you say, was not necessarily a feature of previous eras.

Don't augment your earlier question, Stephanew I was really struck in your research where it's in July nineteen seventy eight forty percent thought Britain was the worst place to live. July twenty three, that goes to seventy six. But the interesting thing for me was that in May twenty that was already at seventy one percent. Yes, because if I think back to some of the elections I've covered, we used to talk about apathy. Yeah, right, and now we it feels that we don't talk about apathy anymore. We talk about maybe anger.

I think the other point you make, though, that already by two thousand and eight people were dissatisfied, is absolutely right. It's this failure of real wage growth again in Britain, but in many European countries and bits of the US where there was a long period of no real wage growth, and that's now cumulatively starting to have I think an effect.

We talk about parties people feeling not represented, but actually, compared to some of the other European countries or even the US that you look at in some of your polling, quite a high number of people feel represented by one of the two main parties. In the UK, I know it was sixty nine percent versus only fifty five in France. The sort of disenfranchised group is actually larger in quite a lot of other things.

Yes, we should.

It's always worth remembering that Britain is only really moderately unhappy. It feels we feel like, oh god, actually when you start, it's always good to have some international contexts and on that. If you want to really look for real misery, look at South Africa and parts of Latin America, where the rising middle classes saw a more prosperous future which has then been snatched away from them, and that is where you're seeing people are dying in riots in every single week, which again people describe London as a sort of unlivable city, et cetera. Frankly, come on. So that's why I think some perspective is important. But nevertheless, for voters here, for wealthy voters in the United States, by any international standard, there is still a lot of discontent, and it is much greater than in the past.

One argument that's sometimes made to me in France as they look, for example, as they look ahead to the next presidential election and there's obviously quite a strong chance of Marine La Penn winning the presidency on the current polling, they will say, you've inoculated yourselves in the UK by Brexit, a combination of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn. The sort of extremities have already been attempted and have now been discredited, and as a result we have what looks compared to that, yes, like a slightly more kind of somber choice in this election. When you look at the polling and the sort of longer term effect of Brexit, has it changed people's view of kind of radical answers.

I'm not sure that I would put it that way.

They just want competence and whether that sort of somebody can come up with radical solutions that they appear to be able to execute competently. Actually, you could argue Brexit was in some ways a radical solution. Whether it was executed competently we can argue about. I think you could say, therefore that if you compare that to the situation in France, the French haven't yet done something that extreme. I think the question is whether the center holds in France. And this because of the one of the things I admire about the French system, and I think I believe that in Britain if we had this on the Brexit voit we probably wouldn't have left, is that they have a.

Two round thing.

You may get an outright winner the first time round, but you probably won't. And then at this point suddenly everybody comes back. And we saw it with Marie Lea Penn's father two decades ago. They didn't bother voting in the first round. Hang on a minute, it's that it's the Penn and then finally they come back in and vote.

That is true.

It is that view that has a supporter has allowed Macron to win, certainly to win reelection.

Even though he's not particularly popular, so I think, but of course it's who's going to replace Macron? But I think, yes, let's not write off the center yet.

When you're talking about what can government do, or when we naturally think what are the ways that an incoming labor government or any government who wants to change things around can deliver?

I guess what.

Makes me nervous When I look at the data. You can see this in the US, even when you have delivered on some of the things that people say is important to them. Wages that have grown faster than inflation, growth, employment growth, we've seen that in the US, But we actually see people not believe in those things if they're not already Democrat if they're not already supporting Biden. And it's this kind of idea of value based facts or belief based facts, that your beliefs about the world stem from your political views rather than the other way around. Is that something that's changed in your lifetime as a Polster.

Absolutely, and I think you can definitely see it in the United States. If you look at the values of Republicans and Democrats in the nineteen nineties, you can see that they're like two sort of mountains, but they're quite close to each other. And over the last thirty years those have progressively moved apart. And basically, if your Republican guns must be good and that gun control is bad, and if you're a Democrat, even when you show people evidence one way or the other, you show people biased evdances, they just they will follow their political beliefs. Britain hasn't seen the same. We are not as polarized as America. We're more fragmented, i would say, than polarized in the UK.

What's the difference, It's.

Just been America is your Republican or Democrat. It's just a bit more wanced. And that actually what the first past the post system is doing in Britain is keeping together two parties that probably if we were in Europe, would have fractured into four parties. And that's why Macron was able to just wipe out the left wing and the Republicans in France, because that's what the system does. Our system is designed to preserve the two parts.

More it's not.

True in other parts outside the US. Does that mean there is at least a bit more hope that an effective politician could actually persuade voters that things have got better?

I think some making things better is obviously very challenging, but we know what to do.

We know we need to invest in infrastructure.

We know we need to build houses in a way that we haven't built them before. We know we need to do things on skills. I think you could come in with a story to build those things and people willing will swing behind it.

Well.

I would say that people's fundamental beliefs in the welfare state, in public services, in the NHS, so to be honest, are always there. By twenty ten, they had bought the argument that we needed to save money, but it rapidly after austerity, they rapidly shifted back again. And now, of course we've got the effects of a lack of capital investment in public services screaming at us. And so the question is who and how is it going to be paid for? And that's where I don't think either of the parties, the Tories have set up a big bear trap with science bear trap next to it for labor, and labor are just keeping stum and saying, well, somehow do reform without spending more money, when everybody, actually most people know that more money needs to be spent, and probably some of it will have to come from more affluent over fifties, which is not.

Something the authologician wants to.

All the orthodoxy on what's politically it's possible, what's going to get you hurt in the ballot box is very similar to what it would have been ten or twenty years ago.

I tend to agree that you have to show that you're going to be fiscally responsible, that you're going to be competent if you can somehow do it and show and the issue is always really hypothecation. People believe in public spending for public services in Britain, but they have to believe that you're going to do it, that you can do it competently. It's why Blair's pseudo increase in National insurance, which, of course, as we know, National insurance doesn't really go on the things that it's advertised to go on necessarily on.

The Treasury hate it, yeah, but it was it was popular with the public. Put up.

He put a penny on income tax on taxes, effectively to pay for something specifically that people knew needed money. And so you could probably get away with saying that we've now examined the books. The NHS needs more money. You know, it needs more money. We're an aging population. We can all these medical advances. We want to deliver these things.

They're doing that more and more, like with the defense spending, they're saying, if you believe it, we'll do it. We'll fund it from reducing civil servant numbers.

Which yes, game, yeah, let's see.

To your point, it seems to be the way that they think. And as I said earlier, look, the Treasury don't like it because this definitely says it's just.

It's money, right.

Yeah, but to this point about people, they feel they need to have some kind of contract. You we are doing this out of this rather than we're just doing it.

It's a good idea.

We've been very grandiose talking about the state of the polls in general dissatisfaction. We've done a bit on the UK. We shouldn't let you go without asking you the sort of more mundane question that you have to al capolster who's going to win in the US.

To be honest, at the moment, I would toss a coin.

Well, specifically, I should ask you what should we be looking at to.

Look at Biden's popularity and see if it goes back above forty percent, and look at the other thing, is that eighty five percent of the time, it's our eighty five percent rule. The person who is strongest on the key issue of concern to the American electorate wins. And bizarrely, Trump is doing better on many aspects of the economy, Biden is doing better on threats to democracy. I think that the court cases are a wild card. Biden's and actually Trump's age are both wildcard. Statistically, something could happen to either of them in terms of their medical condition by the autumn. But I think don't do not discounter a Trump win by any stretch of the imagination. And of course the people he is now surrounded with will be more competent than the ones he had the previous time.

It looks like, well, more competent in implementing, in doing what he wants to do. But I just but on.

That point about this, So the eighty five percent rule is just tell us exactly what that is.

Is that the person who's best on the key issues of concern to the American elect today. What let me just double check it, because I'm always.

The zigzags between defending democracy and the economy front of you.

All right, So you look at that and that will tell you if it says defending democracy.

If that rises and Biden's well ahead, then that will probably mean that Biden will be okay. The other thing is Biden hasn't really started campaigning yet, whereas Trump is on a permanent campaign. He saw a small improvement for Biden after his State of the Union address where he came out and started to lay it in. And so if you look mathematically at all polls that we've ever measured over decades, at this point, the poles can typically be seven points different than what actually happens, given that their neck and neck. Some weeks we have Biden ahead by a few points some weeks Trump it's really too it's really too close to call at the moment. There's so many wild cards.

Looking at those poles. I mean, obviously, one debate that has been on the sort of edges of ebbed and flowed among Democrats as to whether the parties should have persuaded Joe to stand down, Yeah for this election. What are the polls tell you on that?

Well, I think there's still an incumbency effect that I think clearly the candidate is old, so are some of the electorate. But the incumbency effect maybe is as important as the any what was the alternative?

So there has to be a very high bar for not going with the incumbentant.

And remember in American politics is it's more normal to get too terms. Legra is suggesting that we might be moving into this one term politics, both in the UK and the US, which in a volatile situation.

Like the polling, don't you to tell you for every single incumbent is dire.

Yes, that's right, but that in general the history has been the incumbency still counts and actually being parochial again back in Britain, incumbency helped in the mayoral elections.

Is amazing to see the label lead be so solid.

It is.

It is quite but I think it's the it's the when you look at the bottom line, it is the deep unpopularity. Sunax ratings are the same as Liz Trusses, which is quite impressive given that she's back. You can you can quote me on that if you want to. And then in terms of the ratings of the government and satisfaction with the government of the day, again under Sunac's watch, it has now been cumulatively the worst rating I think we've seen for any government we've ever measured, which is quite impressive in Britain. That's kind of things, aren't We've just come out of a recession technically, but so I think it's more that people are utterly fed up. And I'm back to the Callahan quote from nineteen seventeen. Yes, you know, basically there comes a time when whatever you say and whatever you do will make no difference. The people have decided, and in the case of the Conservatives, I think that's the case in Britain at the moment.

Bempage, thank you very much, pleasure.

What I thought was very interesting but also very well captured was this phrase he had, which was the loss of the future. Was pretty gloomy, poetic, but also pretty gloomy. And I think that's what we've been driving out in a few of these episodes of autonomics now, which is the sense of the longer term, not recent, but the longer term diminishing people's expectations for themselves and their families. I loved I think you did too, the idea that the UK is not extremely unhappy. It's his phrase he had that actually, and then he went on to comparison to quite countries, we're not usually compared to South Africa, and yeah, I thought that.

Was sort of that took the edge off it a bit. But I ahead also John Todd this chart which sort of suggested that relative to many other places, the average Britain actually feels more or less represented by the two main parties, which is of course often what you certainly not what you get when you listen to Reform talking about how that the number of people who are excluded from the political mainstream. I thought it was interesting that again on that many people in Europe feel much more disenfranchised.

Yeah, I think it's quite interesting that actually that Brexit may have served a positive purpose in that sense that the people who felt excluded suddenly were included in Brexit. Not necessary to the benefit of the country in the long term, but there was a sense that the system was responding to their concerns in a way that it doesn't seem to quite so easily in Europe, certainly not on the European Union level. But I was very impressed by this notion of discontent and polarization. That there is a level of discontent. There's always discontent with the political establishment, but it's just much bigger than it ever has been before, and that is manifesting itself in a sort of anti incumbency sentiment. And looking forward, I think the anti incumbassy moods has some very interesting implications for the forthcoming British election, because aren't we at the beginning of a long period of one term president, one term prime minister. We had Thatcher for three terms, we had Blair with a very strong long term prime ministership. I'm not sure that we're going to get that with Starmer, partly because they don't have an agenda in the way that Blair and Well it's interesting that their inheritance is so bad.

It is interesting because if they're a Starmer spokesperson here they I think they are talking about a two term They need two terms, something like leveling up. You can't do that in one parliament. You can't do that in it's two three.

I think the two terms depends on the Tories really. I think if the Tours fall apart, which looks very likely, then they do get.

To well and this is how you end up with what happens to reform. It's so significant because we could be just looking at a very we could be looking at a much stronger Labor Party if that depending on how that has torn the Conservatives apart.

Ben's talking about the geology is exhausted to be looking for competence. But on the other hand, if you look at the fringes of British politics, you have the growth of a sectarian politics, of white identity politics with reform, various sort of gaza based sort of political insurgencies in heavily immigrant areas. There is something going on, perhaps still on the periphery of politics, but moving into the center of politics, which is a very different and in some ways Trump's style and far left American democratic style of politics which is all about identity and not about competence.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end of this week's photon Nomics from Bloomberg. This episode was hosted by Me, Stephanie Flanders, Adrian Wildridge, and Allegra Stratton. It was produced by Sammer Sadi with help from Chris Martlou and Julia Mant. Editorial direction from Victoria Wakely, sound design by Blake Maples. Brendan Francis Newnham is our executive producer. Sage Bowman is Head of Podcasts. With special thanks to Ben Page and please, especially if you like it, subscribe, rate, and review this podcast wherever you listen to it.

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