May as well: Boris Johnson’s electoral bet

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. America's Democrats are choosing a candidate to to take on President Donald Trump. But the front-runners don't necessarily have the best chance of ousting him. We hit the campaign trail with Amy Klobuchar, who's trailing in the party polls, but who might be a more effective candidate next year. And the health consequences of drinking too much are well known, but not much heeded. So there's a push to spread the message of moderation more widely. The curious thing though is that it's being financed by the alcohol industry itself. But first, after weeks of pushing for an early general election, Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson at last got what he wanted.

The ayes to the right, 438. The noes to the left, 20.

The country will go to the polls on December 12th. Mr. Johnson is betting that his Conservative Party will win the parliamentary majority that it lacks. That would smooth the path for his Brexit deal.

And there is only one way to get Brexit done in the face of this unrelenting parliamentary obstructionism, this endless, willful, fingers-crossed, not-me-gov refusal to deliver on the mandate of the people, and that is, Mr. Speaker, to refresh this Parliament.

Meanwhile, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, sounds equally confident, despite being a hugely unpopular party leader.

We are ready for an election. We're going to go out there with a very strong message of how we transform our society to end inequality and injustice and deal with the devastating poverty that so many people face.

Mr. Johnson is right that an election will shake up the paralyzed Parliament, but the plan may be a bigger gamble than he likes to admit.

Well, Boris Johnson has read the polls and sees that he's got a very large poll lead, and he also is leading a government that that does not have a majority in the House of Commons.

John Peat is our Brexit editor.

So having lost many times in the House of Commons, I think he sees that the best way forward and the best way to deliver his Brexit deal is to go to the country and seek a bigger majority than he has now.

Do you think he's right to trust in the polls that much?

I think it's a dangerous gamble because as past experience has shown, including the experience of his predecessor Theresa May, you can start a campaign with quite a big poll lead, But as the campaign goes on, you can lose that poll lead. And this is a particularly unpredictable election because it's not just between the Conservatives and Labour. The Liberal Democrats are doing quite well. The Scottish Nationalists are going strongly in Scotland. And so when you have several parties all sort of, you know, in double figures, predicting the result is extremely difficult.

What are his weaknesses in this campaign?

He's obviously quite a good campaigner. That's how he won the Tory leadership. So I think that's, that's going to be a plus for Boris Johnson. But he's trying to win seats, particularly Labour seats, in the north of England and the Midlands. And these are places where traditional sort of working people have not voted Tory, possibly never voted Tory before, and they don't have a tradition of voting Tory. And they could look at Boris Johnson and see that he's just a typical southern old Etonian type, and they may not want to vote for him. They may prefer to vote for other parties. He's also weak in Scotland, where the Tories are likely to lose seats, and he's weak in London, where the sort of pro-staying-in-the-EU vote is likely to be particularly strong. And we saw even in 2017 that the Conservatives lost seats in London, like Kensington, and they're quite likely to lose more seats in London now.

Well, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, is talking anyway as if he's as confident as Mr. Johnson is. Do you believe that Mr. Corbyn is right to be confident?

Corbyn had a very low rating in 2017, and he campaigned effectively and actually did much better than people expected. Clearly, the people around him hope that he can repeat that trick in this election. I think it's going to be harder for him to do that. He's become a more familiar figure. His popularity rating is the lowest for half a century. Century for the leader of the opposition. And I think many people think he's, you know, very far left, not the sort of person they want to be in charge of the country. So I think he's going to find it very difficult. On the other hand, people who don't particularly want to vote Tory may decide that they want to vote tactically. And so in some seats where Labour is ahead, they'll hold their noses and vote Labour just to get the Tories out.

But this election in particular isn't the sort of normal two-horse race between Conservative and Labour. There are other parties that could act as spoilers. I mean, talk me through what you think the dynamics of that are.

I think a big question in this election is going to be whether voters vote tactically. Tactical voting, which means you aim to get one of the parties out and you vote for whichever other candidate looks like the most likely to do that, it has been growing over the decades. And in this election in particular, voters who want to remain in the EU or to have a referendum on whether to leave the EU may well look at the parties and say, look, 'we need to defeat the Conservatives.' If we're in a seat like Richmond in Southeast London, the best way of doing that is to vote Liberal Democrat. In some other seats, the best way of doing that might be to vote Labour. And I think we can expect to see quite a lot of people who would normally support smaller parties voting tactically. There is also the Scottish Nationalists who will do well in Scotland, and the Brexit Party, which is very critical of Boris Johnson's Brexit deal is likely to run in quite a lot of northern seats where they would hope to take seats from the Conservatives and conceivably even win one or two seats.

Do you think that this entire election campaign will be entirely about Brexit, or will people at last return to thinking about what's going on aside from Brexit?

I think this election is going to be mainly about Brexit because Boris Johnson's pitch is to say, I've got a Brexit deal, I haven't got it through Parliament, I'm going to deliver Brexit on the 31st of January, 'If you want that to happen, please vote for me.' But in any election, it's quite difficult always to focus on one issue. And I think at different times people will say, 'Well, we want to know about the public services, about crime, about all the traditional issues that come up in elections.' And in some of those, I think the Tories will benefit. They may benefit if people are fretful about crime or security. But in others, like the health service, education, the public services in general, They may say, well, look, the Conservatives have been in power for 9 years and they made very large cuts in public services. Why should we trust them to make good those cuts when instead we could vote for the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats, who are traditionally likely to spend more money on public services? So I think those issues could easily come back in the election, particularly towards the end.

I wouldn't dare ask you the likely total political outcome, but let me put it to you this way. What are the odds that this election will bring more clarity than we currently have on Brexit? Brexit?

I think the most likely result of this election, given the polls, is indeed that Boris Johnson emerges with a majority. But given also his— some of the areas where he's not going to do as well as some of his people hoped, it's going to be a pretty small majority. Now, the really crucial thing is how small, and does that make it difficult for him to keep passing his Brexit deal? I suspect he'll just about be able to cobble together enough people to pass the Brexit deal, but that's only the first stage of the whole process of leaving the European Union. And it may not make— may not leave him in a strong enough position to negotiate a future trade relationship with the European Union and to handle all the massive legislation that leaving the EU requires. So it may bring a little clarity, but I don't think it'll necessarily resolve all of Boris Johnson's problems.

John, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

In a congested field of Democratic nominees, there are three front-runners: former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Senator Bernie Sanders. The rest lag far behind. But Democratic supporters might like to reconsider their allegiances. The leading trio aren't necessarily the ones with the best chance of pushing the current president out of the White House.

So anybody who listened to the sort of rhetoric that's coming out of the Democratic primary would think that Democratic voters are really concerned about healthcare policy.

It's long overdue for the United States to join every other country and say healthcare is a right, whether you're poor.

About environmental policy.

We've got to confront the existential threat of climate change.

About tax policy.

It's time for a wealth tax.

And they are, but there's a massive caveat to that. Democratic voters are overriding concerned to beat Donald Trump at the general election next year, and they want the candidate who is likeliest, in their view, to do that.

James Astill writes Lexington, our column about American politics. He's been following the campaign of one of those trailing candidates.

So I waited with a small crowd of Amy Klobuchar fans in eastern Iowa for the senator to roll up in her shiny green new Amy for America campaign bus.

But this is just so exciting, and I think you all know we're going to be going on this 12-county tour across Iowa, including Linn County.

She got off it, she cracked a few jokes. People needed cheering up. It was a cold morning in Iowa, and the senator also likes to crack jokes. She thinks that humor is an important part of her political persona.

She keeps telling me they were jeans. But anyway, she—

And I interviewed her in some detail about her policies and where she thinks she stands in this race.

And that is because I don't just want to be the president for half of America. I want to be the president for all of America.

And so what are those policies? Where is she sort of pitching herself?

Amy Klobuchar is a pragmatic, moderate, center-left Democrat. She is in step with her party on the main progressive principles that have become so important to it. She's solidly for abortion rights, gay rights, all that sort of thing. But she underlines the need for consensus, for building coalitions across the political divide if you want to get anything done. She says that you can't be a progressive unless you make progress, and therefore she offers essentially a watered-down of some of the left-wing promises that you hear in this primary. She's not for Medicare for All. She thinks it would be unattainable and also wrong to throw millions of people off their private health insurance, and therefore she promises an expanded version of Medicare. For example, she doesn't promise free 4-year college degrees like Bernie Sanders. She promises free 2-year degrees in some circumstances. And in the same pragmatic vein, she says that what Democratic voters really care about in this election is not social or economic policy. It's getting rid of the current incumbent of the White House. Senator, what is the question that most Democratic voters are asking themselves in this primary season?

Who can win, who can beat Donald Trump. I promise you, that is it. And that is what unites people, whether they are on the left, in the middle, on the more conservative side of our party. And it actually what brings in some independents and moderate Republicans. So that's why I think you're seeing, even in a small town in a county like Keokuk of only 2,000 people in the whole county, why you see people showing up, filling up a cafe, because they are making those kinds of decisions. And I have a very straightforward answer for them. And that is that I am someone that brings people with me and I have the track record to show it.

So why is it that she would pose more of a threat to Mr. Trump than other candidates might?

She has a record of building coalitions, of winning votes from independent voters, moderate Republican voters, even in Minnesota, which is somewhat swing state. It has a lot of conservatives. Its Democrats have to be moderates like her. And she stresses, of course, that it's those kinds of states, those swing Midwestern states, that are likely to prove crucial to the Democrats' hopes of defeating Mr. Trump in the general election. By turn, they're absolutely crucial to the president's hopes of winning reelection. It was by winning Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania in 2016 that he managed shockingly to beat Hillary Clinton. Her argument is essentially that she is the best-placed candidate to win back those Midwestern states for her party because she has a record of winning her own Midwestern state of Minnesota.

You look at the facts here, 2018, a woman won governor in the state of Kansas, not exactly a bastion for Democrats. That's because she fit the state. She wasn't a celebrity candidate, but she knew what she was doing. Uh, we We won in Wisconsin. We came back after losing badly in the presidential and won in Michigan with a new woman governor there whose slogan was fix the damn roads. It was very direct. Pennsylvania, we won there. So I actually have the facts on my side. The facts for me as being someone that gets things done and wins in the areas more than anyone else on that stage. I am the one that's won in those red rural areas and won in the suburban areas that are also very important that don't get talked about enough.

Well, with all that in mind, why is she trailing in the polls so much?

I asked the senator that, and she said it wasn't such a difficult question to answer. It's a crowded field. She doesn't have the name recognition of some of the front-runners, for example.

There were 24 candidates at the beginning. We've gone down a few. And I always like to make the glass half full argument that I'm ahead of 18 of them, including the ones that dropped out, including all the governors and the mayor of New York City. And when you look at the history in these elections, it's always been those winning candidates like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama were not nearly at the top of people's lists. Even at this point, they were behind in states like this. And so the fact that I have been able to get where I am and that we're surging, that we raised $1.5 million in just 36 hours after that debate from small donors all over the country. Those are good signs.

And what's your take on that answer?

I think that Amy Klobuchar's candidacy stands or falls on what happens to Joe Biden. The many Democratic voters who are going to vote for whoever they think is most likely to beat Donald Trump are currently all stacked behind Joe Biden. They're typically voters who are somewhat moderate, who are suspicious even of the big promises that come from the left of the party, and also they're voters who may not be paying close attention to the primary race at this moment. That would account for the fact that they're staying loyal to the former vice president despite the fact that Mr. Biden is palpably not performing very well in this primary campaign. He's been weak on the debate stage, for example. He's looked his age on the trail. Now, If those voters stay with Joe Biden, then these trailing moderates like Amy Klobuchar really don't stand a chance of making headway. But if they decide that Joe Biden cannot do this for them, is not strong enough to win this primary, then they will probably leave him quite dramatically. And in that circumstance, there will be a strong run from one of the lesser-known moderates in the race. And Amy Klobuchar does stand a chance of being that moderate.

James, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

When I'm not hosting The Intelligence, I have something of an unofficial role at The Economist's sister magazine, 1843. I'm their cocktail correspondent. Recently, I've noticed a series of campaigns encouraging the public to drink less. And they come from the last place you'd expect: the alcohol industry.

Alcohol has been linked with more than 200 different health conditions, and those include cancer, heart disease. It's not just for heavy drinkers. Even moderate or very light drinking increases the risk of breast cancer and several other types of cancers.

Slaveja Čankova is The Economist's healthcare correspondent.

Interestingly, the alcohol industry has pitched itself as part of the solution to overdrinking.

We're all going on a no-alcohol holiday.

Drink-free days for me and you. But there are lots of people who are doubtful that they're being sincere about this.

Well, I mean, understandably. Why would big booze be trying to convince people to buy less of their products?

So they fear that if they do not voluntarily try to do something about this, then governments may just go ahead and regulate and actually force them to do something more drastic. In Britain, for example, more than 100 producers and retailers of alcohol have signed a so-called responsibility deal promising to do all sorts of things that will help people to drink within guidelines. Mostly they're doing this by buying ads promoting drinking in moderation. But they're also having all sorts of websites where you can go and put in the things that you drink and then calculate how many units of alcohol that adds up to and how it compares with guidelines. Or they might put some sort of signage on the bottle saying, you know, that pregnant women shouldn't drink. But mostly those are things that people already know quite well. So this isn't going to put off lots of people from drinking.

Well, I note some skepticism from you there as well. Why are people skeptical about these efforts?

Well, if these efforts were to work, they would be commercially suicidal for the alcohol industry. Researchers in Britain have calculated that almost 70% of industry revenues are from heavy drinkers or really problematic drinkers, and something like 44% of alcoholic drinks consumed in Britain are above the guidelines. So if that would disappear, then obviously it's a big problem for the industry. But you also have to look at really what they're doing behind those websites and labels and so on. So the alcohol industry in America now spends more on lobbying than the tobacco industry. They spend about $30 million a year.

Well, to a degree, the alcohol industry seems to be kind of between the devil and the deep blue sea, right? So there's the threat of government regulation. There is the threat of losing a large fraction of their custom, though that might be better for the world. And people aren't kind of believing them in their efforts here. Is there no other way to do it? Perhaps just, I mean, by increasing prices, for example?

Indeed, industry executives are trying to square the circle by saying that they want people to drink less but drink better, meaning buying fewer but more expensive drinks. So to upgrade. But if people would actually drink in moderation, then to make up for the drop in revenue for the industry, prices would have to increase between 22% and 98% per alcoholic drink if people don't switch the type of stuff they actually drink.

Well, what might governments do to try to speed things along if these awareness campaigns that they're behind don't go far enough?

Well, what governments could do is pretty much what they've done with tobacco, really, and that is to raise the taxes on alcohol and make drinking making more expensive, to limit where and when it can be sold, just make it less convenient to buy. And in fact, right now Scotland has the only law in the world that has a minimum unit price for alcohol, which means you tax an alcoholic drink depending on how many units are in it. So that raises the prices of all sorts of drinks, and that seems to be working. Alcohol consumption has really declined already in Scotland.

From a consumer's point of view, if you still want to, you know, still want to go to the bar, you still want to consume a number of drinks on a fun night out, you could just have lower alcohol drinks, I suppose.

That's right. And they're becoming increasingly popular. That's the big new trend right now. And all big alcohol companies, in fact, they're investing a lot in research and development to make those drinks taste as good as the real stuff. And with beers, apparently they're quite successful. I think Heineken has something like 40 of their brands in a zero-alcohol version.

I mean, there's certainly a similar trend that I have seen myself in my cocktail research, let's call it. There are some perfectly good cocktails out there that are very deliberately low alcohol. So there's hope for us if we want to keep going out and having these fun nights.

I'll drink to that.

Silveja, thanks for your time. Should I say cheers?

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.

Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover. And to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Visit optum.com to learn more.