Checks and Balance: Capitol gains

Hello and welcome to Checks and Balance. You're listening to a free episode. To listen every week, you'll need to be a subscriber to sign up to Economist Podcasts plus, click on the link in the show notes or search Economist Podcasts. The economist. Charles Dickens was not known for equivocation. In 1842, on his first visit to America, the novelist and journalist came to Washington. He visited Congress every day, walking the halls, sitting in the galleries and taking notes. He was unimpressed. Dickens described what he saw as the meanest perversion of virtuous political machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. While the carpets were nice, Dickens conceded he was disgusted by the spitting, the despicable trickery at elections and underhanded tamperings. It is the game of these men, he wrote, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal that sensitive and delicate minded persons shall be kept aloof. This year, on November 5th, 469 jobs in Congress are up for election. Will delicate minded persons once again be kept aloof? With 213 days to go until the 2024 election. Hi, I'm John Prideaux and this is Checks and Balance from the Economist. Each week we take one big theme, shaping American politics and explore it in depth.

Today.

What's at stake in the congressional elections this year? While America's focus has been on the presidential election, the race for Congress is even more volatile, with the thinnest majorities in the House and the Senate. Both chambers might flip in November. If that were to happen, it would be the first time in American history no party is likely to have unified control in January 2025, where the new Congress is seated. So what would that mean for governing and how will the outcomes of these elections shape the next presidency? With me and fresh back from their vacations are Charlotte Howard and Idris Kaloon. Idris, how was your break?

It was really good. I made a lot of bread and did a lot of spring cleaning and a lot of cooking generally, but I made pain de mi. I don't know how you say that in French properly.

Honey bread, I think. Crumb. Hmm, interesting.

It's nice. On toast. With toast.

Bet it was delicious.

It was good. I made baguettes. I made some sourdough. It was great.

I'm picturing you spending your entire break in a white chef's thing and a big puffy hat. Is that right?

I have a pink chef's apron that I wear and prance around the kitchen and.

Yeah, amazing. So good.

That is great. I'm so happy I know that. And Charlotte, how are you doing? How was your break?

My break was good. I spent it with my immediate and extended family and it was wonderful. And I carried lots of people and things and I'm happy now to be seated.

Tell us what you did.

I was going up and down mountains in France with my family and that was great. There was some delicious food. I didn't bake any of the bread, but the bread is truly delicious in France and the butter is even better. The French salted butter has no equal. So that was really good.

In my spare time and in preparation for this episode, I watched a few campaign ads. And one of the strange things about living in a state with fewer contested elections, you just don't get many campaign ads on tv. And I always find them to be a complete delight. They're very strange.

Well, I think even you may get.

Your wish this year because as we'll.

Come onto, there are a whole load of competitive Congress seats in in New York. But this week's discussion is going to begin with the Senate. Idris, before you went away on your baking themed vacation, you wrote a piece for the Economist about what's likely to happen in this year's House and Senate election. So what was the takeaway from that?

Right now both the Senate and the House are narrowly divided. So Democrats have a one seat edge on Republicans in the Senate and House. Republicans have a very narrow majority in the House. And what's weird is that after this election, it's quite likely that the control of Congress will be divided in the other direction. So Republicans have a very good chance of taking back the Senate and Democrats are pretty hopeful that they will take the House back from the Republicans. And that sort of double flip has just never happened in American politics before.

To talk through what the Senate map looks like this year, earlier this week I spoke to Jessica Taylor. She's the Senate editor at the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. That's a nonpartisan outfit that handicaps congressional races and is a great source of information about American elections. I started by asking Jessica how worried Democrats should be about their one seat majority in the Senate.

So the bottom line is this. With Joe Manchin's retirement, that seat, that Democratic held seat, we moved it to solid Republican. Barring something incredibly unexpected, Democrats have ceded that seat. It will go to Republicans. So we are at 50, 50 now. And that means that even if Democrats defend every single other Democratic incumbent, but if they lose the presidency, which would mean that a Republican vice president would be the tiebreaker, they've already lost the Senate, So maybe this is completely out of their hands. Now I have a hard time seeing if Trump wins that other seats don't fall because the Senate map lines up so in line with the electoral battleground. Now, Democrats point out that last cycle in 2022, which should have been a tough election cycle, historically a president's first midterm election, they did defend every single incumbent and they even flipped a seat, which really went against the odds. But I kind of look at it as in 2022, they pitched a perfect game. It's really rare to have back to back no hitters.

And so there are roughly seven competitive seats in this cycle. I don't know whether you'd agree with that, but that's what our colleagues think. Five of those are held by Democrats at the moment. And that just gives Republicans a lot more opportunities for pickups than Democrats have.

So we have seven that are either in our toss up column or our lean Democrat column. Those are our most competitive. We have some that are sort of on the fringe that we're still watching. Maryland became interesting when Republicans were able to recruit former Governor Larry Hogan. We have that one rated as likely Democrat. But it is a cycle where Democrats are virtually playing entirely defense. You know, they are targeting states, targeting Republican incumbents in Florida and in Texas. But I think in a presidential year, those just become very, very difficult. And really you have to play defense before you play offense. In our toss up category, we have right now, of course, Ohio and Montana, the open Arizona seat. And then this week we are shifting another race from our lean Democrat column to the toss up column, and that's Nevada. Nevada was the closest Senate race in 2022, decided by less than 8,000 votes. Nevada is just a unique state because it's so transient. Every cycle about a quarter of voters turnover. So the incumbents aren't as well known. It's more generic Democrat. And you know, despite this being a state that Democrats won both in 2016 and in 2020, it's one that we have seen very dire polling numbers, the trend line for Biden in that state. A poll just came out on Wednesday from the Wall Street Journal that has Biden now down 4.

Can we talk about a couple of particularly interesting individual Senate races? John Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. How do you see those at the moment?

Those are the two most vulnerable, I think just simply because these are states that Trump won twice and by, in Montana's case, double digits, 16 points in 2020 and eight points in both. 2016 and 2020 in Ohio. And what we see is that in presidential years, Senate elections line up so closely with the presidential results in the states. In 2016, every single Senate race went the same way as the presidential result did in that state. In 2020, only Susan Collins of Maine managed to win reelection as a Republican, even though Joe Biden carried that state. Now Tester and Brown have sort of those unique, more independent brands like Collins, but there I think becomes a max of where you can outrun the president. On average we see maybe five points. Now someone like John Tester, I think has a more unique ability and that is a state that is a little more used to splitting their votes, but you're just swimming against an upstream.

And Jessica, as you say, 2022 was a surprisingly good year for Democrats. And one conclusion that some analysts drew about that year was that Republicans shot themselves in the foot by recruiting poor quality candidates. What's your view on the quality of Republican or likely Republican Senate candidates this time around?

I think that the outlook is certainly better and we have seen the National Republican Senatorial Committee that is in charge of this playing field and recruiting candidates. They actually recruited candidates. Whereas the NRSC life cycle under Rick Scott had a very controversial tenure, both financially and especially. They took a very hands off approach in both recruiting and playing in the primaries. So that's how you saw candidates like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia and Blake Masters in Arizona. So they have taken an approach to try to get better candidates. They've been aggressive in playing in primary. So they got their favorite recruit against John Tester, Tim Sheehy. He's a former Navy SEAL Purple Heart recipient, runs an aerial firefighting company in Montana. In Pennsylvania they now have gotten probably who might have won that race in 2022 had he been the nominee. David McCormack, a former hedge fund executive. Also key here is that a lot of these candidates can self fund their races because there's been such a money disparity between Democratic and Republican fundraising. But I still think some of these candidates are a little untested. So you know, if you're a first time candidate on paper you look great. But when you get into the nitty gritty of the race. But I mean they also have candidates that they sort of at least privately wish they didn't have. You know, in Arizona and now open seat with independent care, not running, they are sort of saddled with Carrie Lake, who was one of those problematic candidates. In 2022 she ran for governor. A former TV anchor, she lost, but she has still been challenging the election, saying that she won and that it was rigged. She is very maga, one of Trump's most vocal supporters, and has continued to question, falsely, the 2020 election results. You know, there's some hope that she sort of tones that down, but I think that's a little bit of wishful thinking as we go on. There are weaknesses that could come up.

Idris, you're our chief Senate watcher at the Economist. Do you see things the same way Jessica does? Yeah.

No, I think she's entirely right. It is worth emphasizing that in the last election cycle in 2022, Democrats needed to, and actually did basically hit a straight flush in terms of the seats that they won, actually gained one seat, which was unusual in a president's midterm year. And this time, if you look at the map, it's particularly bad for them. All of the contested races are on Democratic territory. Like Jessica said, Republicans are definitely taking West Virginia back, which means that the Senate's starting point is 50 50. So Democrats, again, basically need to be dealt a royal flush and hope that they win the White House in order to maintain the control of the Senate by the slimmest majorities. And that obviously has implications for what the Biden presidency could do. And also if Trump wins and the Senate goes Republican, as I think would probably happen if Trump were elected, that also has implications for the Trump presidency. So the kinds of people who Trump would be able to appoint to cabinet positions in Supreme Court offices and federal benches would change a lot and would probably be in a more MAGA direction than if the Senate remained in Democratic control.

Charlotte, we have some idea of what Donald Trump presidency with the Republican Senate looks like, because we've seen that before. What would a Joe Biden second term with the Republican Senate look like? What would that mean for American governance? Idris has touched on that a little bit already, but what are your thoughts?

Well, I think Idris is right to point to judicial appointments as a very important activity of the Senate. That would be no doubt slowed down if Republicans controlled the Senate. But then also, you think about the big legislative accomplishments of Biden's first term. So the CHIPS act, the Inflation Reduction act, which was largely a climate bill, the Infrastructure act, build back better, which was his initial plus legislative plan, didn't come to pass, but he did get a lot of stuff done. And in a second Biden term, if he were to win and Republicans were to control the Senate, it's just very hard to see how there would be any additional Big pieces of legislation that would move through. I mean, if you go back to build back better, a lot of what was left on the cutting room floor was stuff related to human capital. So this idea that America should invest not just in new factories, but invest in childcare and subsidized child care, paid family leave, more care for elderly and disabled Americans, which in turn would, they argue, free up adult caregivers to use their time in productive ways to enhance economic growth. So all of that stuff, which was about human capital, free kindergarten, more investment in community colleges. I think Biden would want that to be part of a second term. And it's very hard to see how it would be if Republicans controlled the Senate. One thing that I'm really curious about is Biden is trying to make Roe v. Wade and anger over the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, into a big theme for his campaign. And he says that he would want to make the right to an abortion the law of the land. That would require an act of Congress. And again, if Republicans controlled the Senate, I don't think that would happen.

So whatever the outcome, the majority is going to be very narrow one way or the other. In the best case scenario for Democrats, it's basically plus zero with Kamala Harris breaking the tie in their favor. In the Republican case, if they have a very good year, maybe they pick up three seats. It's slim. It's not enough to give them a filibuster proof majority. I wonder. We've seen the filibuster weaken over time. So we've seen that it used to be the case you could filibuster a Supreme Court nominee. It used to be the case you could filibuster Cabinet appointee. The filibuster has been nuked for both of those categories. And the last remaining category is on legislation, and especially those that aren't budgetary in nature. So I wonder whether the filibuster, if it is still constraining Republicans, will remain. Maybe it will if Biden is the president. It's obviously useful in that case. If Trump's the president and Republicans also have the House, I think that you might see the ultimate demise of the filibuster as well.

I would underline a point that Idris made earlier, which is I continue to be somewhat awed by Trump's effect already on the judiciary, not just the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well. If you look at his first term, he appointed 54 appellate judges in four years, which was about the same as Obama appointed in two terms. So if Republicans were to control the Senate and Donald Trump were to control the White House, again, I think it's hard to overstate just how sweeping the effect would be on the judiciary writ large.

Yeah, the last thing I'd add just on the Senate is that if Democrats do lose control, which at the moment we think they will, looking further ahead to the rest of the decade, it looks very hard for them to win back control of the Senate at any point in the2020s. And I think that has to be a pretty sobering thought. Even if you're a Democrat who likes Joe Biden's chances in November, and many don't, the idea that a future Democratic president anytime soon will have control of both chambers of Congress and be able to pass sweeping legislation, that just looks pretty far fetched to me at the moment. Okay, we'll go back to one of the last times the Democrats managed to flip a chamber of Congress while also winning the presidency in a moment. But before we do that, Charlotte and Idris, what did you particularly enjoy from the Economist coverage while you were away on holiday?

I really liked a piece that our colleague Shashank did on this attempted hack of a tool called ssh, which is basically used all the time to securely tunnel from one computer to another. And the way that this was done was basically someone infiltrating open source contributions, which a lot of technology just relies on. And I think it's a very interesting story. It's kind of a scary story also, because you imagine what sort of hacks that are really sophisticated like this are just simply undetected and embedded in all the technology that we use every day. So I found it kind of gripping in a digital whodunit sort of way.

I'll second that recommendation. And then I think that our colleagues who are writing about artificial intelligence and generative AI really do so better than anyone else. And that continued last week in talking about AI Generated music, which was a fun read.

Yes, I'll second those. I also really enjoyed hearing Andrew Palmer's extended interview with the late great Daniel Kahneman on the weekend Intelligence. So do go back and listen to that if you missed it. This episode of Checks and Balance is free to listen to, but normally to join us you'll need a subscription to the Economist or to Economist Podcasts. Plus that'll gain you access to cheques. Plus all of our other weekly shows like Money Talks and special series like the Princess about Xi Jinping.

White house for rent in 48 will the present occupant renew his Lease the chief executive had not said yes or no as the year ended, but the political straws were blowing hither and yon. Thomas E. Dewey was still a name to be reckoned with at the GOP nominating convention. And Earl Warren.

1948 was a peculiar election year. The incumbent had never run for president, but the challenger had. Harry Truman had come into office in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt died and this was his first time running for president. But his rival, Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, had lost to FDR four years earlier.

Names for a free people to ponder. But whomever they may include, the presidential tickets for 48 will face the man on the street's biggest personal campaign issue, the rising cost of living. Housewives shopping for their holiday dinners found food prices 40% higher than 18 months ago.

In the 1946 midterms, Congress had flipped Republican after 14 years of Democratic control of both houses. Accepting the nomination, Truman attacked Congress wholeheartedly.

Ever since its inception, that party has been under the control of special privilege. And they concretely proved it in the 80th Congress. They proved it by the things they did to the people and not for them. They proved it by the things they failed to do.

He blamed it for being obstructionist, labelling it the do nothing Congress.

Now, my friends, with the help of God and the whole hearted push which you can put behind this campaign, we can save this country from a continuation of the 80th Congress and from misrule. From now on, I must have your help. You must get in and push and win this election. The country can't afford another Republican Congress.

Truman even used his conference speech to call Congress back into session to pass laws improving Social Security and health care.

Now what that worst 80th Congress does in this special session will be the test. The American people will not decide by listening to mere words or by reading a mere platform. They'll decide on the record. The record as it has been written and in the record is the stark truth that the battle lines in 1948 are the same as they were back in 1932, when the nation lay prostrate and helpless as a result of Republican misrule and inaction.

In that special session, Congress still didn't get much done. Meanwhile, Dewey was running a very safe campaign. His platform accepted most of the New Deal reforms as fact and supported Truman's foreign policy. He just promised a more efficient, decisive government, as a Republican newsreel laid out.

The governor of the Empire State has also shown that he can work successfully with the legislative body. During his six years in the state Capitol. This teamwork has produced many sound and forward looking laws.

Truman stuck to his campaign, bashing the Republican Congress. With the failed special session complete, he crisscrossed the country on a special train designed so that he could make speeches from the rear carriage.

The President's schedule Today calls for 14 rear platform talks throughout upstate New York, in Little Falls, in Syracuse. At every stop, he hammers away at the record of the 80th Congress, accusing Republican leaders of using a meat ax on forward looking legislation and of ignoring the.

With a split vote from the Dixiecrats and the Progressives, the Democrats were expected to lose resoundingly. Every major polling organization predicted Dewey would win. The Chicago Tribune famously started printing papers saying Dewey defeats Truman.

The Democrats are conceded an outside chance only in the Senate where Republican candidates like Minnesota's incumbent Joseph Ball are being fought into strenuous last minute stumping by underdog Democratic rivals like the 37 year old mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey Jr. 32 of the Senate's 96 seats are at stake. But in states like Illinois, untried Democratic contenders like Paul Douglas, a university professor, are given little chance against Republican veterans like Curly Brooks. At best, the Democrats hope for a two seat Senate majority.

But just like Truman, Democrats like Paul Douglas campaigned hard. He made over a thousand speeches while running for Senate. And just like Truman, he won, gaining 55% of the vote. Attacking the do nothing Congress proved a powerful campaign slogan up and down the ticket. 1948 was an upset for Truman for sure. He later took an infamous picture with that Tribune headline. It was also an upset for Congress. Democrats took nine Senate seats from the Republicans. In the House they flipped 75 seats, getting sizable majorities in both chambers. Not until 2020 would the Democrats again swing a chamber of Congress during a presidential election. In 1948, the most popular songs in the Billboard list included those sung by Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. So it's pretty good year for American music. And then if you look at the movies, it's a real reminder of how highbrow American popular culture was in that post war period. So the top grossing movie of 1948 was a film called the Snake Pit, which is not one I've ever seen. It's about a character who finds herself in an insane asylum and wakes up there with no memory of how she got there. But it was obviously a big year for American politics too. What struck you as the parallels or the differences? Looking back at 1948 and thinking about 2024 well, I'll get to that.

But I do think that in retrospect, things always seem highbrow. I mean, if you imagine in 50 years people will be consuming 3 second videos as their main form of narrative entertainment, then a Marvel film will feel like Shakespeare. So what I'm struck by from the late 40s through the early 1990s is just how common it was for a state to vote for a Republican president but choose a Democratic senator. And that's really not been the case in recent years. You have only Maine in 2020 as the one state that had split voting. So it's really a newer phenomenon where this has become so much less common. What strikes me most about doing that this year is that this president is so unpopular, right, even among some Democrats. And you see candidates like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, they're gonna have to try to find points of difference with him or hope that they have a strong enough brand on their own to differentiate themselves from the presidential race. Ohio voters are most likely gonna elect Donald Trump. And so you see Brown trying to seize on issues that transcend presidential politics. So abortion is certainly one of those, particularly in a state like Ohio that passed a ballot measure guaranteeing the right to an abortion. It's no surprise that Sherrod Brown really seized on that as an example of why Ohioans should choose him rather than a Republican candidate. For Republicans, it remains really tricky to know, I think, how to navigate Trump. But you see people like Tim Sheehy, a Republican candidate in Montana. If you go to his website, he has a red banner at the top saying that Trump has endorsed him. There's a pop up image of him smiling next to Donald Trump, each of them with their right hand in a thumbs up. So different candidates are making different bets about how closely they want to align themselves with the former president. But it is quite a risky gamble given how divisive Trump remains.

Idris Quite a lot has changed in American politics since 1948. But what strikes you as common between 2024 and 48?

Well, one thing that's different is that Paul Douglas is a famous economist who he studied in school. He made up this functional form called the Cobb Douglas, which you would have to take lots of derivatives of if you're studying macro. So that's quite fun. And now we don't elect people like that to Congress anymore. So that's one thing that's different, but one thing that's similar that I think has continue American politics for a while is this almost paradox where political scientists have this idea of thermostatic public opinion that people feel like politics are too hot, so they turn the thermostat down and then they elect the other guy and then they feel like it's too cold. And so they go back and you see that with Truman. And you see that in modern politics as well, in that when presidents are first elected, they tend to get full control of Washington, then two years later, voters tend to give the opposite party a way in, and then they enable the president to run against Congress. So in Truman's case, it was the famous do nothing Congress. But we saw that with Obama as well, and I think we'll see that with Biden too. But to go to the point about split ticket voting and why it was so common then, Lee Drutmann has made the very good argument that the American two party system at the time really contained many different parties at once. So there were all of these cross partisan coalitions that divided Democrats and Republicans. So there were all of these divisions that meant that politics wasn't as nationalized as it is now. So I think that's the big difference.

I always, despite being on a podcast, I'm reluctant to make broad statements about political laws because it seems like anytime you have a really long running trend, there's always some exception to it.

Right.

So in the case of the states where you think there might be a split ticket. Idris, can you talk us through the math and probabilities here?

Yeah, I mean, split ticketing does exist. So you saw in 2022 in Georgia, for example, voters there elected a Republican governor and a Democratic senator and the split was reasonably large. So Brian Kemp won election over Stacey Abrams by a margin of about seven and a half points, whereas voters went for Warnock over Herschel Walker by a point, there then had to be a runoff. But there was roughly a eight and a half point split. And in a state that's as big as Georgia, I think that's probably the maximum you can imagine the split being. I think also a lot of it had to do with Herschel Walker being such a bad candidate. But I think that's a good benchmark for how much splitting we can imagine. In small states there is a little bit more of a brand association with certain politicians that allows them to float for a while longer. You saw that with Susan Collins, you saw that with Joe Manchin, and I think you see that with Jon Tester as well. But that is hard to cultivate. You can't do it anew. And so I think that when you look at A state like Ohio, Sherrod Brown does have a lot of brand name recognition. He's been in politics for decades there. But it's becoming harder and harder. Right? I mean, Trump could easily win that state by more than 10 points, at which point it's hard to imagine 1 in 10 Ohio voters splitting their vote. And similarly in Maryland, where Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor, is running, Democrats are going to win that state very easily. And although Democrats do like Hogan, I don't know that, you know, one in five or one in four would actually vote for Biden and Hogan. And so I think that as the margins have shrunk, the possibility of these split ticket votes has shrunk.

Okay. Well, so far, we've mainly been talking about what's going to happen in the Senate. We'll be back in a moment to look at the races for control of the House of Representatives. Erin Braun covers the west coast for the Economist, and she's based in California. Normally, California gets a bit neglected in political coverage in a presidential year, but this year, there are 10 competitive house races in the state. I spoke to Erin about how those tight races reflect the national picture.

So there are a few regions of the state that have more competitive races than others. And I should say it's not weird for California to have a bunch of competitive House races. There are 52 congressional districts here, which is more than any other state. So it's normal that California would have more than anywhere else. But I think people forget a lot that there are millions of Republicans in the state, even though it is overwhelming, overwhelmingly liberal. And so you have these pockets of the state in the Central Valley especially, and then on the southern coast around Orange county that have become especially purple in recent years. And so that's where we see the majority of these 10 competitive seats. There are a couple others sprinkled in, but those are more anomalies.

And what's going on around Orange county to make that change?

So we've seen in the last couple of years, really since Trump took office and then kind of took over the Republican Party, that Orange county has changed from a pretty strong Republican region to a purple one. And that's sort of because if you think about what California Republicanism used to be, it was a bit more moderate, more centrist than you might find in the rest of the country. Lots of California Republicans believed in climate change. They were for abortion rights. And as Trump took over the party, that began to change. And so Orange county folks probably voted more for Democrats than they might have otherwise. And you saw that with the election of people like Katie Porter, for example.

And so, Erin, the character of California's Republican delegation to Congress is changing. And I suppose one of the biggest symbols of that is the retirement of Kevin McCarthy, who's represented the area around Bakersfield for such a long time.

Yeah, it's so interesting to think about what McCarthy's retirement means for California. I think it's partly interesting because for a long time, California had these real power brokers in House leadership, like Kevin McCarthy and like Nancy Pelosi. And now Kevin McCarthy is gone. Nancy Pelosi is just a normal House member. But in terms of The Republican Party, McCarthy leaving is, I think, a bit less important for the politics of his district and more important for how well Republicans will fare in these congressional elections in California. Bakersfield and the area around it is staunchly Republican. The guy who is leading in the race to replace McCarthy is a former aide of his and a longtime ally. So it's not as if it's a very kind of Trumpian person who would have primaried McCarthy had he stayed. It's staying relatively stable. Where I think Republicans will feel the loss of McCarthy is that the former speaker was such a prolific fundraiser, and he knew that in order for Republicans to keep their House majority, they had to pay attention to these California seats. And so the super PAC that was associated with him had this what they called a blue state strategy. And they were targeting places like California and like New York in these swingy districts that they knew that they would have to pick up in order to keep the majority. And I'm not sure if Speaker Johnson has the same strategy, but that was something that even as late as I think August of last year, a couple months before McCarthy's ouster, he was very focused on.

And Erin, California obviously has lots of Hispanic voters. A few weeks ago, we had an episode on how the presidential campaigns are trying to reach out to them. How does that dynamic look from where you are?

It's super interesting. Recent voter registration data suggests that more Californians are registering as Republicans than Democrats lately. And that's especially true in certain counties where Latinos are highly represented. And I'm thinking about places like the Central Valley where some of these seats will be fought. And so some folks I've talked to have said California is a bit late to the party in terms of of Democrats losing Latinos to the Republican Party, but I think that we're starting to see it begin to happen now.

Erin, you've written about the Republican Party in various states this year. And one of the things we've seen, one of the features of 2024 is even though Republicans are doing pretty well in polls in several states, the Institutional Republican Party, the state Republican Party, is withering and beset by various crises, whether those be financial or to do with personnel. How strong is the Institutional Republican Party in California?

It's a really good question. I've written about this a couple of times over the years. I think that we're at a place where the California Republican Party doesn't really know what it is at the minute. It's not the case that California Republicanism kind of remains the centrist outlier anymore. Trump is extremely popular in the party. He headlined the state party's convention in Anaheim in September. And so it is, I would say, almost or just as Trumpy as the rest of the state parties that I've written about, Nevada and Arizona. But in California, they have this big problem in that Trump has never galvanized enough voters to be competitive in state elections in California in the way that he has and other states. I think that's why we've seen this kind of disconnect between what the state party is offering and what these kind of more centrist Californians want.

Idris so as you began by saying, this is a year where you might see both chambers of Congress change control in a presidential year, which would be very strange and hasn't happened before. I can see the scenario where Joe Biden wins the presidency, Democrats lose the Senate, but Democrats take the House. Republicans have a really thin majority in the House at the moment, but is there a plausible scenario where Donald Trump wins the presidency and Democrats take the House? Because normally the House is pretty reflective of the popular vote and tends to go to the same party that wins the presidency. How likely do you think that that is?

You're right that if Trump wins the presidency, it's less likely the Democrats do take the House. But I think that you could still see it happening. And there are a few reasons for that. One, you know, the number of competitive House districts has declined over time, similarly to what we were talking about with the decline of split ticket Senate seats. But at the moment, there are just many more Republican incumbents who are defending districts that Biden won, maybe three times as many as there are Democrats in Trump districts. And so basically, unlike in the Senate side, the Democrats have more of the political field to play offense on than they do to play defense. That's one point in their favor. The second is that House governance by Republicans has been particularly historically awful. Over the last year since electing Kevin McCarthy, very briefly, House Republicans then kicked him out because they were upset that they basically weren't able to force Joe Biden to accept the policies they wanted. That had never happened before. They elected Mike Johnson, who basically did the exact same thing when he was speaker, for which he suffered relatively few consequences, although some people want to defenestrate him as well. All in all, it's been a pretty poor showing. Johnson is not as good of a fundraiser as Kevin McCarthy is, which might hinder them a bit. But I think overall, the record of governance has been pretty poor, and I think that'll weigh down on some of the incumbents when they try to defend their records as well. And then third is New York has gone through a redistricting process that will probably benefit Democrats a bit. If you put those three factors together, you can come up with a compelling case for why Democrats might, even if Donald Trump wins the presidency, take back the House.

Yes, I think that the precarious control that Republicans have over the House, which has been exacerbated by a few resignations in retirements. I mean, I think there are a lot of different instances in which Republicans in the next few months may exacerbate the bad public perception of them, just because it's a really hard group of congressmen to wrangle and to keep in line.

And Charlotte, like California, New York is a state that tends to get a little overlooked in presidential years, despite its population weight, because it's just not in play. But as far as the House is concerned, there's a good chance that the districts that decide control of the House of Representatives next year are in New York State. So you won't have to go very far from home to be bombarded with political advertising. So congrats on that.

Yeah, I can't wait for that. It's not often that you get to say where New York politics go. The rest of America follows. But in this instance, there are a number of races that I think will be illustrative for the challenge that Republicans face and Democrats face nationally, which is the same old story. Looking to the suburbs, thinking about how suburban voters might tilt. So I think you'll see some patterns in New York that will be replicated elsewhere.

In this episode. We've mainly been focused on the outcome of these elections, who's likely to win. And that's important. Cause clearly it's very consequential which party controls each House of Congress. But is there anything more that you guys would like to say about what political power in the House or the Senate for Democrats or for Republicans would mean in terms of governance, in terms of policy?

Well, it's very likely that voters render a split decision for Congress and the White House. And that means that a lot of the presidential agenda that we're going to spend a lot of time talking about over the next few months, a lot of it will be dead on arrival. Because there is very little chance that Democrats would give Donald Trump a policy win if he were back in the White House. Very little chance that I see Republicans giving Joe Biden policy wins if he's back in the White House. You will have a continuation of the brinksmanship and the gridlock that we've seen dominate politics over the last few years and that very much resembled what we saw under Barack Obama. I think that there are some must pass things that Congress will have to look at. They've punted as much as they can on Ukraine. At some point, maybe in the next few weeks, they will actually have to consider whether or not they want to spend additional funding. I don't think that problem is going to go away. I don't think Taiwan is going to go away. These are going to be crises that even a divided government is going to have to deal with. With the next presidency goes through 2028. The trust funds that store up payroll taxes to pay for Social Security and Medicare are going to be pretty close to hitting zero by the end of that term. So if any president is going to be serious about reforming how entitlements are funded or dispersed, it would need to be this one. And it might be so dire that Congress does actually have to act. But I think on the whole, divided government would continue to function in the way than it has in the last few years, which means that it won't be functioning very much at all.

One thing that seems likely is that you're gonna have a pretty thin majority. And there is some weird fantasy world in which that ostensibly could lend itself to deal making and cooperation, where you try to find things that please one party and things that please another. But that assumes a basic interest in government and governing. And it remains a puzzle to me that people who choose to work so hard in their campaign to join government seem to have no interest in doing the job of governing. And the thing that is interesting, I think about this cycle in particular, is just how many reasonable people are getting out. So you have Mitt Romney in the Senate. We've spoken about Mike Gallagher, Republican Congressman from Wisconsin. There have been a lot of people who have decided that they're not running again. There are 50 in total across the House and Senate, compared with 39 at this point in 2020. And a lot of them, interestingly, aren't going to run for governor or state attorney general. Some of the people are, but a lot of them are just retiring from public office, full stop. And I think that bode's really ill for governing going forward. As Adri said, there are some issues that Congress will have to deal with, in particular the tax code. They can't get around that because elements of Trump's tax cuts are expiring, and there'll be some kind of deal that will be hashed out. But I just think this wave of people who are leaving public office is troubling.

Yes, I agree with all of that. And just to add as a final note, though Idris rightly says that it's quite likely that the outcome is a split decision, it's likelier that Republicans win a trifecta in November with all the power that comes with that than Democrats do. Considerably likelier, given the difficult position Senate Democrats find themselves in. And so that's something to keep in mind as well as we start to talk more about the consequences of this presidential election in November for public policy in America and for the rest of the world. Okay, let's leave it there for now. It is quiz time. We spoke earlier about highbrow culture in 1948. Today's quiz is about the food that Americans were eating that year, which was somewhat less chic. Question 1. What snack food was introduced in 1948, making use of the same dehydrated Wisconsin cheddar that the American army had invented for use in its World War II rations?

Hmm.

Cheez Whiz seems too advanced. But what's your take, Idris?

Was it Cheez? Its maybe.

You're very close. It was Cheetos.

Cheetos. Interesting.

Ugh, I hate Cheetos.

I have no opinion on Cheetos. I've never eaten one. But they were made by the inventor of the Frito, a guy called Charles Doolin. And his cheesy snack hit shelves in 1948. Doolin had been a military supplier, where he'd gained expertise in the wonderful world of dehydrated dairy products, which he then put to good use.

Hmm. I'm a big fan of Doritos, but Cheetos? No.

Question two. What kind of cooking themed party was first held in 1948?

I'm anti cooking, so this feels like a biased question.

In fairness, it's more about storage than cooking.

This is an amazing question. What party isn't cooking themed?

Yeah, no, it's a good point. Adris.

Storage adjacent.

What cooking storage containers.

The answer, I'll put you out of your misery, is a Tupperware party.

Oh yes.

So Earl Tupper founded the company in 1946. By 1954 it was making more than $25 million in sales annually, which would be $280 million today. So the first Tupperware party was in 1948. Question 3 as we mentioned earlier, inflation spiked in the post war years as troops returned and the economy reset for peacetime. Many turned back to depression era recipes to make ends meet. One 1948 cookbook lists a recipe for mock apple pie. What replaced the apples in mock apple pie?

Canned peaches.

That sounds delicious. Actually, it has to be something more sad than an apple. And more available potatoes. That would be sad.

That'd be really sad.

Okay, we have canned peaches and potatoes.

It was neither canned peaches nor potatoes. The answer is crackers.

Gross.

12 to 15 white Waldorf soda crackers to be precise. Essentially, the recipe instructs you to make a sugar syrup and then just pour it over the crackers and bake the whole thing. There is a bit of flavour in there. There's some cinnamon, a dash of nutmeg. It wouldn't taste much like apple though.

I've learned a lot from this.

I wish our listeners could see Idris's expression of disgust and disdain.

Total contempt on Idris's face. Well, that's it for this week's episode. Thank you Idris. Thank you, Charlotte.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The episode was produced by Stevie Hertz. Carla Patella is our sound engineer with thanks to Hannah Mourinho, Aaron Braun and Jessica Taylor. If you like the podcast, then please let people know and leave us a rating and and a review. We also have a Checks and Balance newsletter. You can sign up for that@exterator.com newsletters and you can get in touch with us by email. The address for that is podcastseconomist.com thanks very much for listening. Stay safe and stay sane. We'll have more Checks and balance next week. Sam.