Pastor present: Georgia’s Senate runoff

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today from London, I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Algeria looked to have a strong hand on its future when popular protests ousted an unpopular president in 2019. But our correspondent says that problems have mounted once it became clear that the new boss was very much like the old boss. And chalk up another game that souped up software can win over human masters. This time, it's diplomacy. It's a game that requires deals to be struck through, chats with other players, and they didn't even know they were playing a computer. But first, America's midterm elections last month didn't provide the red wave of Republican congressional wins that many predicted. Democrats hung on to the Senate. Just but one cliffhanger remained the race in Georgia between the Donald Trump backed Republican candidate Herschel Walker and the incumbent Democrat, Reverend Raphael Warnock. Neither got an outright majority of votes, so it went to a runoff. And after another month of vigorous campaigning and campaign spending, Georgia's voters made their choice yesterday.

It is my honor to utter the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy. The people have spoken.

Mr. Warnock will head back to Capitol Hill, completing an outright Senate majority for Democrats and adding to a growing narrative about Trump backed challengers.

It was a narrow victory. Not all the votes are counted at the time we're talking, but 99% of them are, and it looks like a 51 to 49 win for Warnock.

John Prudhoe is our United States editor and presents Checks and Balance, our sister show on American politics.

So last night, Warnock declared victory to a packed ballroom of his supporters, who were all chanting, six more years.

Are you ready, Georgia? I'm ready. Stand up for workers, stand up for women, to stand up for our children. I'm ready to build a stronger Georgia. God bless you. Keep the faith and keep looking up.

His opponent, Herschel Walker, has conceded, and I have to say, conceded grace, which is not something that we can take for granted anymore in American politics. So that was good to see.

And how much is it a surprise that Mr. Warnock won?

On the one hand, it's not a surprise in the sense that he was ahead in the polls, but I have to stress that it was only a narrow lead. And the reason we were in this situation with a run off election was that neither candidate managed to break 50% in the first round of voting. So this was a tight one. And, and Georgia, Jason, it's not quite a purple state. I mean, Republicans did very well statewide in the other elections. So this is quite a peculiar result in some senses, especially given the fact that it's a midterm election and the president's party normally does pretty badly in midterms. And so Raphael Warnock, the incumbent, had quite a lot of headwinds, yet he's managed to win. And I think that tells you something about the state the Republican Party is in nationally at the moment. And also something about Warnock's own qualities as a candidate, which I think are considerable. And I should also say that Walker was among the worst Republican candidates of this cycle. You know, this election was a test case for the theory that Donald Trump's endorsement could propel a Republican candidate who wasn't really suited to be a senator to the top of the ticket and that they could then win through partisanship, the partisan reflexes of Republican voters in a state like Georgia. And actually, we've seen that theory proved wrong in various cases in the midterms already. And this is another one and perhaps the most high profile one.

So tell us a bit about Mr. Warnock and what we can expect from another term.

Raphael Warnock is 53 years old, makes him fairly young for a senator. He's got quite an unusual CV for a member of the Senate as well. He has a PhD in philosophy. And most remarkably, he's the head pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. That's an extremely famous church. He holds the same position there that was once held by Martin Luther King. So that's a pretty extraordinary CV for a senator. He spoke about Martin Luther King Jr. And about faith in politics at a rally at the Georgia Institute of Technology a few days ago.

Martin Luther King Jr. Was killed before I was born, but his voice captured my imagination. And part of what I was drawn to was the way in which he used his faith not as a weapon to crush other people, but as a bridge to bring us together. Because he understood that God is known by many names and worshiped in many houses. And I've taken that same spirit with me. I've tried to take that same spirit with me to the United States Senate. It is my faith that drives me to do this work.

In terms of his politics, he's a liberal senator, but I think he's quite independent minded also. He's not somebody who can just be relied upon to vote with the rest of Democrats on everything. He's got a pretty strong interest in Veterans affairs, which is a vote winner, and he makes bipartisan noises. So he's a pretty moderate Democrat. He's good at talking to religious voters, unsurprisingly. And I think the thing that's perhaps most remarkable about him, Jason, just politically, is that because of this strange rule in Georgia whereby if you don't get 50%, you have to have a runoff, he's now faced four Senate elections in a purple state because he's been in two runoffs. He ran in a special election in 2020 and then there was then a runoff in 2021, so there was two. And now he's had two elections this year. So he's very unusual in the sense that senators are elected and serve six year terms here. Warnock has won four times in a purple state in very different political environments. That's the kind of political skill that gets you national attention.

So how did he do it? How would you characterise his campaign?

Well, I think we probably have to start with his opponent, Herschel Walker, who is beloved by many people in Georgia because of his skills as an American football player. He's very famous in Georgia, but he was completely ill suited to campaigning in such a high profile race. He was a political novice. And even though voters quite often give the impression that they want career politicians out of office, it turns out that knowing how to campaign and not say dumb things is important. And aside from that, all sorts of things came out about Walker's personal life during the race that made him look duplicitous and a bit estranged from the truth. So Walker was a really poor candidate. But then I think you'd also have to say that Warnock has real political skills. This is a state where statewide Republicans did really well in this cycle. They won all the other races. Stacey Abrams, who's a well known Democratic campaigner, lost her campaign for governor in the same cycle that Warnock won for the Senate. So there's something special about him, I think.

And Mr. Warnock's win now seals the Democrats outright lead in the Senate.

That's right. So up until now, the senate has been 5050 with the Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding votes. 51 votes in the Senate gives Democrats a little bit more breathing room in practice. In legislative terms, that doesn't make a huge amount of difference. The fact that Republicans control the House means that it's going to be extremely difficult for those 51 Democratic senators to get what they want. But it does make some difference, the operation of the Senate in the sense that with 51 votes, the Democratic senators now control committees that could be quite important for things like the Judiciary Committee that vets Supreme Court nominations. So I would say not a huge difference in terms of legislation, but something of a difference in terms of the way the Senate operates and make it easier for federal judges to be confirmed and also cabinet members and executive branch officials who need Senate confirmation to get through. And so that makes staffing the administration a bit easier and day to day operation of government a bit smoother.

So at last the midterms are over. With this result, with a bit of distance here, what does it all tell you about the state of American politics?

I'd say two things. This particular election tells you something about the state of Georgia. It's not quite a purple state yet. As I mentioned, Republicans did pretty well statewide, but it's trending purple. And so that changes the map in terms of presidential elections and other elections in the future. But the other thing I'd say, Jason, is that when we last talked about the midterms, which was probably the morning after the election, it takes such a long time to get the fine grained results from these votes that it's only really now that we're able to look through all the results and run some analysis and see where these elections were really won and lost. And when you look at the numbers, a couple of things stand out. One is that Republicans did incredibly well in House seats, but that they hold already. So essentially, they ran up the score in incredibly safe seats that they were never going to lose. Democrats, by contrast, did really well in more marginal seats. That tells you that the Republican Party, with Donald Trump at its head, is an absolute base turnout machine, but is very bad at persuading voters who might be somewhere more in the middle. And actually, that's a really bad strategy in American elections. We did some analysis that showed that candidates who Donald Trump had endorsed performed considerably worse than those he hadn't endorsed. I also think it was interesting that Democrats seemed to get quite a bit smarter in this election. So they learned something from 2020, when being associated with phrases like defund the police and abolish ice, which is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, really hurt them. And you didn't see candidates using any of those slogans beloved by the left wing of the Democratic Party. So I think that Democratic Party's taken a slightly more centrist turn. The other thing I'd say is that even in a race like the Walker Warnock one, where it seems extremely clear who the strongest candidate is, American politics is just so competitive now. The parties are so evenly divided that in a race like that that has, I think, the clearest contrast you could possibly have in terms of candidate quality, the result was still very marginal. That tells you something about the enduring strength of partisanship in America.

And at the mention again of Mr. Trump, what do you think all of this means for him?

Well, I think anyone independent minded looking at the results of the midterms would conclude rightly that Donald Trump is a serious drag on the Republican Party at this point. I have no doubt that senior Republicans in the Senate believe that. And yet we're still in a situation with the Republican Party that a lot of senior Republicans are loathe to pin the blame on him for this poor midterm result because they're still scared that he'll go after them, and they feel that they need voters who love him in order to win their primaries. So we're still in this strange situation where Donald Trump looks like a vote loser but still has considerable power over the Republican Party primary electorate. There've been so many opportunities for the Republican Party and Donald Trump to part ways. You might say there's a new one now, or maybe two new ones after Herschel Walker's defeat and the Trump Organization tax trial verdict, which has just come through, and where the jury decided that Donald Trump's company had effectively cheated on its tax returns. And yet, Jason, this is a familiar story you and I have talked about this a lot over the past few.

Years, more times than I wish to count or remember.

Elected Republicans have just missed so many opportunities to break up with Donald Trump, and so at this point it looks like a bad relationship that they're not quite brave enough to leave.

John, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks Jason.

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As regularly as the rising sun, acts of violence and terror continue to make life in Algeria a life of horror.

Algerians are no strangers to bad government, political protests and conflict. The North African country fought an eight year war to gain independence from the French, winning it in 1962. For most of the 1990s, a civil war simmered. Then in 1999, after disputed elections, Algerians were landed with President Abdelaziz Butaflika. Buttaflika kept tweaking the constitution to be able to run again and again. He ran for four terms. As public fury grew, he withdrew more and more from the national stage. He hadn't been seen for two years when he announced a run for a fifth term in 2019. That public fury spilled into national protests that swiftly led to his resignation. With Butaflika gone and with piles of wealth flooding into the country thanks to high oil prices, you'd think Algerians were at last getting a break.

If only I would say Algeria is basically an unhappy country run by a very opaque and unpopular government.

Zan Smiley is editor at large for the Economist.

There are a couple of words in the local Algerian lexicon which pop up all the time. One is Hoghra, which has a sort of wide variety of meanings, but it's a central one is a sense of oppression, a sense of humiliation, even a sense of hopelessness. And I think a lot of young people, especially in Algeria, have this feeling. The other word that popped up quite a lot as well was haraga, which literally means those who burn. It applies to illegal emigration. A lot of young people now get onto rickety boats and head across the Mediterranean, mainly to Spain. And the reason it's called those who burn is that they burn their passports or identity papers and head for a better life abroad. Those two words did come up a great deal when I visited the country recently, and I think they encapsulate the mood of ordinary Algerians, especially young ones.

So a lot of Algerians see no other way but to leave. Are there a lot of them going?

Well, according to the European Union's border force, at least 13,000 have left Algeria in rickety boats in the course of the past year. And then at the upper scale of society, a lot of them seem to go to the Gulf or Europe or even America.

And coming back to the first word that you mentioned, the one with the connotation of oppression, what's driving the use of that word, that feeling?

I think there's a feeling that the government is unaccountable, it's opaque, it's run essentially behind the scenes by a sort of military security apparatus. Basically the economy is in very poor shape. Everything depends on oil and gas, which Algeria has a great deal of. But they've really failed to diversify beyond those two things. Unemployment is quite high. Nobody knows the exact figure, but it's probably at least 15%. And for younger people, the reckoning is it's two or three times higher than that. So that is why there is this prevalent feeling of so called hogra. But there are one or two global factors, chiefly the high price of gas and oil, which is keeping people at the moment relatively quiescent.

And how does that work? Why does that reduce any pressure?

Well, I think there are several factors that seem to stifle the disgruntlement. The first, quite simply, is that the price of oil and gas, which Algeria has a great deal of, is very high, so the coffers are relatively full at the moment. And the second is that because of the high price of oil and gas, there is a sort of social contract whereby the government subsidizes massively the basics of human life, such as food, petrol, cooking oil and even housing. And as one of the critics of the government said, nobody in Algeria goes hungry, very few do. And another factor which I think should be mentioned is that Algeria has had an incredibly violent history, going right back to the war of independence in the late 50s, early 60s tormented Algiers Frenchmen.

Clashes with Frenchmen as students and veterans riot in protest against de Gaulle's announcement of a plan to give Algeria its own choice between independence or continued association with France.

But Also again in 1992 onwards, the so called dark decade, when the Islamists were poised to win the second round of an election which the army then cancelled, precipitating a very violent civil war which went on for almost a decade and in which between 150,000 and 200,000 people were killed. So anybody over about 40 has a very sharp memory of that terrible period. And this, I think, makes people pause before thinking of going back onto the streets or setting about a revolution that might get rid of a repressive government.

It doesn't sound like a very robust set of conditions, though, to keep people off the streets.

I think what's happened is that after the fall of Buttaflika, a new regime came in and a lot of Buttaflika's friends and relations, indeed his brother, two past prime ministers, heads of the security service, string of ministers, at least a dozen generals, were all put in prison. Most of them are still there. But that having been done, the new regime began to look very much like the old regime. And I think that's one of the reasons that people are still, on the whole, pretty depressed, because nothing really seems to have changed. And my reckoning is that if the price of oil and gas collapsed and the government found it difficult, as it were, to pay off the people, then dissent and disgruntlement could get very much worse and the regime could find itself wobbling all over again.

And do you get the sense that the regime feels that way as well, that it has some precarity, that it all hinges on foreign oil markets?

The regime gives off a very odd kind of mood. On the one hand, official Algeria feels it should be a sort of leading light in the old global non aligned movement. It's very proud. For instance, Algeria is the largest country in Africa in area. It tries to play a big part in bringing together the Palestinian movement against Israel. It has a neuralgic feeling of hostility to Morocco on the western side of it. It's almost obsessed with its position in the world. And yet at the same time, it's also somewhat paranoid. And if anything goes wrong, it tends to blame others for its misfortunes, that unspecified powers want to destabilize Algeria and do it down and are driven by hatred and so forth. So it's a sort of very strange mixture of boastfulness and paranoia.

And so where does that leave us in terms of a prediction? Is that to say that things will only become more repressive and more bureaucratic and what have you? Or is there a hope for reform here?

Well, there's talk of reform, and there was talk of reform when the new president came in. But most people, I think, feel that it just simply hasn't happened. And therefore I would expect if there isn't any reform and if there isn't really an improvement in the economy, and particularly if the price of oil and gas were to fall, I would guess that eventually the regime will come up against real opposition on the streets.

Zann, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you very much indeed.

It's easy to forget just what a big deal it was in 1996 when an IBM computer beat Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess.

Magnificent display by Deep Blue. You can't believe it.

That surprise was renewed 20 years later when some artificial intelligence from the company DeepMind beat a so called 9th Den, expert player of the Chinese game Go.

To be honest, we are a bit.

Stunned and speechless, but in some games not all the action actually happens on the board and computers are catching up there too.

I would like to introduce you to Cicero. This is an artificial intelligence program that was designed by a group at Meta, Facebook's parent company, and this artificial intelligence program was designed to play the board game Diplomacy.

Abby Bertix writes about science and technology for the economist.

AI participated in an online anonymous league. It played 40 games and it ended up being in one of the top 10% of players. And I guess more importantly, none of the players realized that it was playing against an AI.

So let's wind back. Tell me about the board game Diplomacy.

First of all, this board game was invented in the US in the 1950s. It harkens back to pre World War I Europe. There are two to seven players and each player represents one of the great powers at the time. It can be Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia or Turkey. Each player has armies and navies and resources. And the point of the game, much like Risk, is to capture as much of the European map as possible. But unlike Risk in Diplomacy, there is no randomness. The way that you capture territory and the way that you fight and raise more forces is by negotiating with your counterparts. So there's this negotiation phase where you talk to the other players of the game, you decide on strategies, and then after the negotiation phase is when you see who are your true friends and who are your enemies, because every single player writes what their move for that round is and then the game plays out from there.

Sounds like a fiendish game even before you bring AI to it. I mean, how do you teach a computer program to do all of this?

So the standard way that AI is taught to play most games is via reinforcement learning. So this is when an artificial intelligence plays against itself or another version of itself over and over again with this kind of objective goal in mind to win the game. So first it will act randomly. And the reinforcement learning is kind of this carrot and stick approach. It gets Rewards when it does well, it gets punishments when it doesn't do well, and it kind of eventually learns to win. But for diplomacy, it's a little more complicated because in addition to needing to choose which moves to make, it has to know how to communicate in order to do those moves. The key to this, the meta engineers, what they did, is they combined reinforcement learning with natural language processing, giving Cicero the ability to talk like a typical diplomacy player, and also the ability to figure out the strategy to win.

And so, by letting Cicero learn the game by playing itself and learning how to talk about the game by watching how others do, apparently it got very good that if it ends up in the top 10% of players, yeah, it.

Did learn to play very well. It didn't win everything, notably. So the way that Cicero works, it's very step by step and logical. First, it kind of tries to figure out what other players might want to do, the moves that they might want to make, and then based on what it thinks the other people are going to do, it decides what move is best for it to make. Once it figures out its best move, it figures out how to say, how to communicate, who to talk to, what to say in order to implement that move. It generates multiple possible options of what to say, throws away the bad ones, and then it talks with the other players via what it's come up with. It negotiates, it convinces, it cooperates. But notably, Cicero never actually backstabbed or stabbed any of the other players. It kind of always negotiated in good faith. And I guess this is interesting for two reasons. First, the fact that it was able to perform so well without being malicious or without backstabbing anybody is kind of notable. But also maybe that is the difference between being in the top 10% and being the best player. Perhaps if Cicero could intentionally mislead or intentionally backstab other players, it might have performed even better.

So is that to say then, that the AI this reinforcement learning, the way that these games have been learned, like chess and Go and so on, simply don't involve. We haven't taught computers yet to lie.

I would say that's accurate. The researcher said that Cicero did, quote, strategically withhold information from players in gameplay, end quote. But we can't ask Cicero whether it actually strategically withheld the information. We're humans interpreting and anthropomorphizing what Cicero is saying. And we might say, oh, yes, it's lying. We might say, oh, yes, it's withholding information. But the ability to lie kind of comes with the theory of mind. That you actually also have to know the truth and you're intentionally doing it. And that's really hard to adjudicate with these AI models.

Well, I don't look forward to the day when AIs independently discover how much better for them things can get when. When they get really sneaky. Abby, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

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