America's next top-job model: our election forecast

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

More than 200 million people are infected with malaria in Africa each year. But progress in fighting the disease had stalled. Now two new vaccines and other clever innovations are creating a buzz.

And there's a growing passion for a long-retired vision of 1950s domesticity, in which a woman's job really is no more than making her home beautiful, her meals from scratch, and her husband happy, we meet the tradwives of TikTok. But first, the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are being run in the shadow of America's justice system. Yesterday, Mr. Biden was the one to chalk up an American first. His son Hunter was convicted on 3 felony charges, all related to the younger Biden's drug use, lying on a federal background check, and possessing a gun while, as the prosecutor put it, in the throes of addiction.

No one in this country is above the law.

Everyone must be accountable for their actions, even this defendant.

However, Hunter Biden should be no more accountable than any other citizen convicted of this same conduct.

Donald Trump is being stalked by his own Justice Department shadows, and on Monday had a crucial interview with his probation officer. His hush money felony convictions may yet get him a prison sentence or probation or nothing at all. To be blunt, it's not a good look for either candidate. And at this point, lots of pollsters see these two men as neck and neck, the election practically down to a coin toss. Yet unlikely as it might once have seemed, our data gurus think one candidate actually has the edge here.

Most observers thought that the January 6th attack on the Capitol and Donald Trump's second impeachment would put an end to his political career.

Dan Rosenheck is The Economist's data editor.

Now, what once seemed unthinkable is starting to look probable. The Economist's new statistical forecast model gives Mr. Trump a 60% chance of returning to the White House.

Okay, how did you arrive at that number? How does this model work?

Our model combines two main types of information: polls and fundamentals. Fundamentals are expectations based on historical precedents of things like how the economy, presidential approval ratings, and how long the president has been in the White House tend to affect election results. We combine that with each state's track record of voting in recent elections to come up with a starting point estimate of how each state is likely to vote and thus determine the Electoral College. We then combine those expectations with all the polls conducted of this campaign at both the national and state level and try to fit all of this information together into a coherent picture of the electorate's true voting intentions. This currently shows that that although the national popular vote is roughly a tie, Trump has a narrow but clear lead in all of the competitive states, particularly those in the Sunbelt.

And I don't suppose that the model has any insights as to how it is that Mr. Trump has, has risen to this level in, in the model after seeming to be in the political wilderness a few years ago.

The model looks at what people are telling pollsters, not why. I can offer some theories.

Go on then, give me some theories.

The first thing is that Joe Biden is extremely unpopular, and historically presidential elections have been referendums on the incumbent, not the challenger. There's lots of potential reasons for that, but if we look outside the U.S., the global bat of inflation in 2021 and '22, terrible for approval ratings for incumbents all over the world, and there's no reason to think that America would be an exception. A second factor is that Trump's biggest gains in the polls have been with groups who haven't voted in midterm elections are off-year elections and don't tend to pay a lot of attention to politics. Instead, they're probably just looking at how things are now, deciding they don't like Biden and choosing to vote for the other guy. One of the most striking findings in recent polling is that 17% of American poll respondents blame Joe Biden for the end of the Roe v. Wade decision that prevented states from legalizing abortion simply because he happened to be in power when the Supreme Court justices nominated by Mr. Trump cast the necessary votes to end Roe v. Wade.

You framed what you said there on the basis of what Mr. Biden has done, or at least what's happened during his tenure, not so much about what Mr. Trump has done.

So voters have short memories. The Trump presidency was 4 years ago, and particularly for young voters, that's quite a long time. Trump was recently convicted on 34 felony counts in New York State, and preliminary polling evidence suggests that some wobbly voters in the middle may be shifting either from Trump to Biden or just from Trump to undecided in response to that news. But such effects tend to be small and short-lived. For better or worse, the polls have barely moved in the past 6 months, and we haven't yet seen any major surprises that would inject more volatility into the race.

Well, what kind of form might such surprises take? What might change the stability, the stasis here?

I think it would probably change the race substantially if Trump were actually thrown in jail before the election. but I think that's pretty unlikely to happen based on the status of all the court cases. Other than that, I think the Fed cutting interest rates could possibly give the economy a tailwind that might help Biden. But really, voters are mainly angry about the increase in prices that happened in 2021 and '22, not inflation now. And there's nothing anyone can do to bring the price of eggs in nominal dollar terms back to where it was.

So that's it then.

You sound like you're convinced that the, the spread that you see now is likely to be the spread on, on election I think there's room for the polls to move somewhat between now and Election Day, but I wouldn't expect either candidate to open an enormous lead. This year's polls, like those in 2020, have been remarkably stable. There was a lot of up and down volatility in 2016 and more significant ups and downs in 2012, '08, and '04 as well. I think part of the reason for this stability is that the electorate has become more polarized, and in particular that we're getting a rematch between two very well-known candidates. Candidates about whom opinions are pretty firmly formed.

And let me ask you perhaps an uncomfortable question, Dan. Why, why should we believe you? How reliable is this model and why?

All statistical models like this extrapolate historical patterns into the future, and they're only as good as their training data. If there's some fundamental shift in the way American politics works, our model isn't going to pick it up, and its projections will likely be very wrong. But we are seeing a rematch between the same two candidates that ran in 2020. So at the very least, data from the most recent cycle is probably going to give a decent indicator of where things are likely to stand. In 2016, I think a lot of pundits fell victim to what you might call unthinkability bias, the idea that just because something either hadn't happened before or they thought it was so terrible that they didn't want it to happen, they assumed that it couldn't happen. Although the 2016 election results relieved many observers of those kinds of illusions, I fear we're back in the same place. It seems unfathomable to a standard observer of American politics, proceeding from conventional assumptions and expectations, that a president who presided over the January 6th attack on the Capitol, got impeached twice, and has just been convicted of 34 felonies could ever be willingly returned to office not even just with an Electoral College majority, but it's possible with an absolute majority of the popular vote. Yet so far, this year's polls are suggesting that there's a very good chance that that might happen. Just because you think something shouldn't happen doesn't mean it won't.

Dan, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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You probably recognize that sound. Though I hate mosquitoes, they seem to love me. But in some parts of the world, these insects aren't merely pests. They carry a parasite that can kill. Mosquitoes infected with malaria plagued the ancient Romans, and centuries later they infested the swamps of Washington, D.C. Today, the fight against the disease is largely confined to a single continent. 97% of all deaths from malaria occur in Africa.

What's astonishing about malaria is just how many people it kills every year—around 600,000—and mostly this is children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Natasha Loder is the health editor of The Economist.

From the year 2000, we made a huge amount of progress in driving down the number of cases and deaths from malaria. But since 2015, progress has really stalled and actually gone into reverse a little. And this is not just a human disaster, it's an economic one. These deaths, these sicknesses are a huge drain on household finances. And on the economy of these countries as well. And we are now at quite a pivotal point in the fight against malaria.

Why has this gone into reverse? Why is now such a pivotal time? So funding has plateaued.

A significant portion of the at-risk population in Africa still lacks access to basic interventions. And the other thing that's happening is there is a lot of concern about emerging new threats. Mosquitoes are developing resistance to insecticides, and also the malaria parasite called Plasmodium falciparum—that's the worst form of malaria that you can get—is actually becoming resistant to one of the primary drugs used to treat it. And so that's why we're just seeing so many children continuing to die, even when we do have quite a lot of tools that could help.

And what might some of these other tools be? Are there other innovations that are also giving us hope here?

Yeah, well, this is where it gets really exciting, actually. First and foremost, what we have today for Basic interventions would be insecticide-treated bed nets, antimalarial medicines. There's quite a lot going on in innovation as well. In the vast majority of countries where malaria is endemic, some mosquito species have just become resistant to the most common insecticide that is used to treat these bed nets, the pyrethroids. And so we now know that if you combine this with another insecticide, we have that that's going to be much better. It's going to halve the chance of infection in children. There are also tools like baits, which lure mosquitoes with sugar and then poison them. But one of the most important is now not one, but two groundbreaking new vaccines. And we've had the first one in really small quantities for a couple of years, but it's quite expensive. There's not much of it. But what's happened now is a new vaccine has started rolling out. It's called R21. It's much cheaper. It's been developed by Oxford University and the Serum Institute in India. And it can be made in huge quantities, although there's only about 25 million doses available so far. So there's a lot of excitement about this new tool and hope that this could represent a turning point once again in our efforts to drive malaria out of Africa.

Amazing that we might be at a turning point. Why has it taken so long to get this far?

Well, there's a short answer and a long one. The short answer is, firstly, it was a really tricky scientific problem to make a vaccine, and also that it's actually quite hard to make money making vaccines for developing countries. And so the first malaria vaccine that we managed to make was by GSK, the pharma firm, That was in 1987, and it just wasn't a commercial product for them. It hung around for a long time. Eventually, people like the Gates Foundation and other international bodies supported it to go through trials and eventually to be manufactured. But GSK is not particularly interested in making this vaccine and has only ever committed to making a small number of doses. And so that's why this new vaccine, R21, is so important. And it's actually been down to the Serum Institute in India and its boss, Adnar Poonawalla, which saw this vaccine at an early stage and said, 'We're going to fund trials, we're going to manufacture this at risk, we're going to build the plant to make it in large quantities.' And that indeed is what's happened.

So it sounds like an incredible amount of progress, but there's the risk that we might blow the opportunity to do something amazing because it's expensive?

Yeah, so the R21 vaccine is actually a fraction of the price of the GSK vaccine, but even so, it is expensive. You need 4 doses. It's a little over $3 a dose. And so the money does need to be found. One of the questions, of course, for developing countries and also the international community is how much money we're going to put into these vaccines. What you really don't want to happen is for countries to say, 'Oh, we've got a great new vaccine. And let's stop funding bed nets. The vaccines are not completely effective. And so actually, if you want to save lives maximally, you're going to need bed nets and vaccines. So until we have even better vaccines that offer even more protection, there's the question of how much money are we going to spend and how we're going to balance spending between vaccines and other tools that we have to control malaria.

Thank you so much, Natasha.

You're welcome.

Tradwives also believe that they should submit to their husbands and serve their husbands and family, and that triggers people because the words submit and serve, it makes women think that we're saying that we're less than a man. That's not what we're saying.

You're too smart just to be a housewife. Yes, I've had this said to my face. Everyone wants to make the world a better place, but for some odd reason, serving our families is not considered doing that. Putting the needs of others in front of our own is honorable. A question I ask myself often is, what legacy of servanthood am I modeling for my family and my children?

I'm sorry if I'm a little out of breath and shaky. I'm currently working out in the home gym that my man provided for me. Oh my God, my life is so bad, guys. A tradwife is a traditional homemaker, and we're seeing lots of them on social media telling other women how to look after their homes and husbands.

Caitlin Talbot writes about culture for The Economist.

The hashtag #tradwife has been viewed more than 600 million times on TikTok.

So who's making these videos? Why are they so popular?

So these videos are being made by young women. They I suppose mid-20s. They might already have a couple of children, or at least talk about wanting to have children. They'll wear pretty floral dresses usually, talk about frolicking and being a homemaker. And the idea of a housewife, it comes from a history of idealizing parts of domesticity. So cooking or decorating have come to be seen as pastimes, leisure activities that we do at the weekend. There's also kind of a long history of matrons who have offered advice. So someone like Fanny Craddock in Britain, Everything in life is so easy when you know the way. It's just a question of the pleasure that I get selfishly out of sharing the ways of the things I've happened to discover with you.

And so it's not just about household tips, it's about your role in the world as a wife and as a housewife.

Is that right? Yes, definitely. Some of these housewives are very much saying that the woman's role is in the home, and that's where she's most useful and also most fulfilled herself. They're kind of really advocating this. As a place where women shouldn't be at work. I remember one video said, "Men don't want boss babes. Men want homemakers." And I just found that so striking. I think more striking is the fact that women who I see as my peers are saying, "Yes, I think this is right." And I'm thinking, "I'm not sure about that." But at the same time, I'm kind of taken in by these videos in some sense. I like looking at clean homes and nice food. So I suppose I understand the appeal. And if you're fed up with your 9-to-5 and you've come home and you've seen this, you see a window onto a life and someone's telling you this is what you're supposed to be doing. And you think, "Oh, that would be lovely to kind of have all that free time." I think it's very much selling a dream that isn't rooted in reality. We notice that it's very unlikely that they're going to be showing videos of them replacing loo roll, changing nappies. They're going to be showing videos of them playing with the children, cleaning in a very aesthetic sense. So they'll show a messy room and then a clean room. So we think, "Oh, that's lovely." wouldn't that be lovely if it was that easy? Or baking very, very elaborately, like making cheese from scratch. I'm not even sure how you do that, but offering it in kind of 3 simple steps, and you think, oh, maybe I should make cheese this weekend.

So beyond offering a kind of romanticized version of sourdough and life at home, does it really matter that there's this tradwife trend?

So the movement isn't as harmless as it first seems. There's videos that say 4 ways to honor your husband, or saying things like, reminder, masculine men like feminine women. It doesn't take long before you do come across some quite bizarre videos, which do feel dark. Some say, "Feminism is not freedom," and then a couple of videos later say that vaccines are a scam, or that abortion is not healthcare. I think for some, but not all, there's a racial element to this as well. There is a worrying lack of diversity in a lot of these influencers. They're kind of encouraging their audience, which is made up of a lot of white women, to go and have lots of children. And the aesthetics of it, It does feel like it's harking back to a past time, papering over all of the problems within that time.

For some of these women, presumably, it really is about their choice. They want to be a tradwife, and they're proud of it, and they're shouting about it. Yeah, I mean, definitely.

I think that maybe that's part of the appeal, is that you're watching and you're thinking, "Well, I do have the freedom to choose." And in some senses, feminism is about freedom of choice. I think that there's a definite problem here in that in order to have the choice, you have to come from a certain socioeconomic background. You know, many of them have family money or husbands that have very high-paying jobs, or for a lot of women, it's not something that they could easily do.

But some of these women are actually making money out of being a tradwife, right? Yeah, exactly.

I think that's the irony at the core of this, is that a housewife's quite a marketable thing, and they've all got products, and they're really entrepreneurs more than anything. And I suppose they're selling a false ideal in many senses, one of which being that they don't work, they're at home all the time. The truth is they probably are working a lot behind the scenes because they kind of sell everything from aprons to natural skincare to the tables you see in their kitchens.

So is there actually any evidence of this movement existing beyond social media? I mean, are any women actually giving up the 9-to-5 for aprons and sourdough?

Despite the huge popularity that these influencers are gathering online, women aren't yet leaving the workforce. In fact, in places like America, they seem to be working more according to the the Bureau of Labor Statistics in America, and the number of women 25 to 54 in the workforce neared an all-time high this year. So we're definitely not seeing in the data yet. For a lot of women, this isn't a choice. It might be their dream life, they might like to watch it, but it's not something that they can physically do. So I don't expect that you'd see kind of droves of women leaving the workforce. Thank you very much, Caitlin.

Thanks, Rosie.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Self-directed investing, trading, full-service wealth management, automated investing, financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning. Phew! And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage, or experience, Schwab has everything you need all in one place so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more.