Red ripple: America’s midterm elections

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman.

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

Favelas, Villas, Barriobajo. The names vary, but around 120 million people in Latin America live in slums surrounding major cities. Argentina has embarked on an ambitious slum improvement plan led by an equally ambitious politician.

And one clear trend from the war in Ukraine is the rise in the use of drones and precision anti aircraft missiles. So good old fashioned ground attack aircraft aren't as safe or as useful as they once were. As of this war, they might be in a terminal tailspin.

First up though, On Tuesday, Americans went to the polls. Today, early results for the midterm elections have come in. Thank you very much. The Republicans look likely to take narrow control of the House of Representatives, as the current minority leader, Kevin McCarthy told supporters at an election night party.

Now, let me tell you, you're out late, but when you wake up tomorrow, we will be in the majority and Nancy Pelosi will be in the minority.

But while Republicans have something to cheer about, the predicted red wave did not appear. It looks more like a Republican ripple in the race for the Senate. Democrats hold 48 seats while Republicans have 47 with five left to be called. In the key battleground of Pennsylvania, the Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman prevailed over his Trump endorsed rival, Mehmet Oz.

I never expected that we were going to turn these red counties blue, but.

We did what we needed to do.

And we had that conversation across every.

Every one of those counties.

We bet on the people of Pennsylvania and you didn't let us down. And my promise to all of you is I will never let you down.

But several key states that could tip the balance have yet to declare and overall, the results were decisive for neither party.

It looks like Republicans are on course to win a majority in the House of Representatives, which is in line with expectations.

John Priddo is the Economist United States Editor.

And the Senate remains too close to call. Overall, this has been a good night for Democrats, I think.

And why do you say that? Why is it a good night for Democrats?

I think it's a good night for Democrats relative to expectations. Right. So losing the House would not be good for Democrats, but the president's party always, almost always does badly in midterms. The only exceptions in recent times have been the midterms following Bill Clinton's impeachment and the midterms following 9 11. So almost everyone expected Democrats to lose the House. It looks like Republicans will only win by quite a narrow margin. So that's sort of better relative to expectations than many people thought. And then in the Senate, of course, the chamber is evenly balanced. It's 50, 50, and the Vice President gets to cast the deciding vote. Given the national environment, given Joe Biden's low approval ratings, given inflation above 8%, I think a lot of people expected that in these very tight races, the results would just break for Republicans. And actually, though we can't say yet who's going to control the Senate, it seems quite possible that the Democrats will hang on to their extremely thin majority there.

So tell us what we know so far. Let's start with the Senate and the House. What are the most significant results so far?

I'll start with the Senate. The most significant result there is that the AP has now called Pennsylvania for John Fetterman. That's a seat that Republicans therefore lose because the retiring senator there was a Republican. It was a closely watched race because it was the Mehmet Oz race. Oz is a former TV doctor and Trump favorite. And so it was seen as a test of Donald Trump's ability to get weird candidates who he had endorsed into the Senate. John Fetterman's won that one, according to the ap. So that's a pickup for Democrats. That gives them a bit of margin in the other tight states that we're waiting for. I'm thinking of particularly Georgia and Nevada and Arizona to some extent as well. In the House, I was struck particularly by Virginia 7th. That's Abigail Spamberger's district. Impressive centrist Democrat, former CIA agent. Her seat in the House of Representatives, Isabellweather, and was thought to be under threat. She's hung on there. Now, that tells you something about her qualities as a candidate, but it also suggests that this election is more of a red ripple than a red wave. And that's consistent with a fairly narrow Republican majority in the House.

And what about the governor's races. What have we seen there so far.

In terms of the governor's races? I think you can divide them into states where the result was expected but significant, like Texas, where Greg Abbott has won re election by a comfortable margin in a very large state and therefore that's a consequential result. Same in Florida. Ron DeSantis did particularly well. And then there are some states that are much tighter swing states, places like Wisconsin, Michigan, where Democratic governors have done well. So again, to my mind, that points to a surprisingly good night for Democrats, I think.

And what about ballot initiatives?

Well, we're still waiting to see the results of some of the more interesting ballot initiatives, but it seems so far that pro choice campaigners who were worried about abortion rights in various states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade have done fairly well. So that's the case in California, which you'd expect, but also Michigan, Virginia and Kentucky.

And what about the races that are too close to call? What are you going to be watching over the next couple of days?

In the coming hours? I'm going to be watching the results from those key Senate seats. Those matter, of course, because who holds the Senate matters a lot for how America is governed. And the seats that we're really paying attention to now are Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. And it's perfectly possible that Georgia will go to a runoff, which would then move mean the election is decided in December. So we might be waiting until then to find out which party controls the Senate. The other thing that the Economist will be watching closely is how the results of the secretary of state races go. Economist readers will know that those are the posts that are important when it comes to election administration. And there are a lot of Republican candidates for secretary of state in key swing states this time around who bought into the 2020 election conspiracy, denied the result. And so those results really matter too.

What about the other races? When can we expect them? And beyond that, how big a fight do you think we can expect over final results?

Well, the general rule there is that the closer the result, the longer it takes to count. And so I can't give you a really good prediction on when we will get those definitive results. As for election lawsuits, I expect you're right that these results will be litigated, particularly on the Republican side. If, say, Carrie Lake loses in Arizona, you'll see election lawsuits. Those didn't go particularly well for Republicans last time around, so I don't expect they would make a huge difference. But that's something we'd have to factor in as well. I think overall, one of the surprising things I've noticed, particularly for foreign observers, is people outside the US Are just surprised by how long it takes America to get election results and how uncertain the timeline is for getting a clear, clean result.

And when we get those results, how will they affect the next two years for the Biden administration?

Well, let's start from the assumption that Republicans hold the House. That would then make it much harder for legislation to pass through Congress and be signed by the president. I expect that you'd see showdowns over government, government funding, maybe a government shutdown around this time next year, or at least the chances of that increase. And you'll also see House committees pursuing investigations into Hunter Biden and his business dealings. Then let's turn to the Senate. So even if Democrats don't have much of a majority there, the thin majority they have at the moment makes it a bit easier for them to confirm people to run government departments and agencies, which matters from a getting things done point of view. And it also makes it possible for Joe Biden to nominate judges and expect to have them confirmed. That matters quite a lot for how things play out over the next two years.

And let's look beyond the next two years. Looking ahead to 2024, how do these results affect, do you think, the next presidential election?

Well, I was having a conversation with the Economist data editor Dan Rosenheck, who built a the Economist's election forecast model along with Elliot Morris. And just to give them a shout out, our election forecast model looks like it was pretty accurate in terms of predicting this result. And Dan's take was that if you're an elected Republican, you will look at these results and note that all of Trump's guys have done pretty badly. Right. Donald Trump waded into Republican primaries, particularly in the Senate, picked a whole load of candidates in places like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Hill are bad candidates. And non Trump candidates I think would have done better. Meanwhile, he points out Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, won by nine points and made the election look like Ronald Reagan in 1984. So yes, Donald Trump has a lot of influence over Republican primaries and a lot of Republican primary voters still like him a lot. But when it comes to the general election, his candidates do much worse than they should. More ordinary, generic Republicans do much, much better. So I think a reasonable observer could conclude even from these incomplete results that Donald Trump remains a big net drag on the Republican Party.

All right, John, always good to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks.

Argentina's Slum policy is a rare bright spot in the country. Despite differences among political parties, there seems to be a common goal to make life in the slums better, and it stands out as a strong example for other Latin American cities.

So via 31 is Buenos Aires oldest slum. It's actually been renamed now after these integration efforts. It's now called Barrio Padre Mujica, which means Father Mojica neighborhood. And last year was actually the first slum in Argentina to be added to Google Maps.

Ana Lankes is our Argentina and Chile correspondent.

It sprawls across 72 hectares, or 178 acres, and is home to over 40,000 people. And it's right across the street, actually, from one of the poshest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires called Retiro, which is the kind of place where you can buy a bag of coffee beans for $22 and order a kale pesto salad at a really cool restaurant. But though via 31 may not be as glamorous as Retiro, it is catching up. And that's largely due to Argentina's policy on slums and money being spent on the area.

What is the government doing?

So lots of slums are currently in the process of being upgraded in Argentina. That's jargon for basically being beautiful infrastructure being built. But none has been as successful as Vi31, which has become the flagship for the policy. So since 2016, the city government, with funds from the World bank and the Inter American Development bank, has spent some $300 million on paving roads, titling land, laying sewage pipes, electricity cables. So, for example, the slum used to have only one asphalt road, and today all the streets are paved. Or in 2016, no public school existed, and now the neighborhood has three. And the biggest changes have become tangible. Since 2019, you've got four different bus lines that go into the slum, a bank branch opened up, and also a McDonald's. And the biggest change has come for the 1,200 families that once lived under the highway that cuts across the slum overhead. It was really dangerous to live there, so the city government built apartment blocks for them in a safer part of the slum, and it's been a huge improvement.

How did all of this come about?

So slum integration is actually a rare point of consistency and consensus in Argentina's otherwise pretty fractured politics. So Argentine politics is split up into the Peronist movement, which currently is a populist leftist movement and a liberal center right opposition. And they don't tend to agree on a lot of things. But there has been consistency on this policy. So in 2009, a law sought to improve via 31's infrastructure, and it was promoted by Mauricio Macri, who was then the Liberal mayor of Buenos Aires. But not very much happened really, until 2016, when Horacio Rodriguez Lareta, also a Liberal, succeeded Macri as mayor. And then in 2017, when Macri was president, they created a national registry to identify slums. Upgrading became a national priority, and that has also continued under the Peronist government, which is now in power. So just in October, the Senate approved a law that bans evictions from slums for a decade. And it added another 1,100 settlements to the registry, which takes a total up to 5,600. That was approved by near unanimity in both houses of Congress. So that shows to you the level of consensus that exists over this policy.

So how does what's happening in Argentina, meaning both the existence of slums around major cities and government, strive to improve them, compare with Argentina's neighbors?

There's lots of projects across Latin America to upgrade or integrate or beautify slums. And that's partly because Latin America is the world's most urbanized region. So around 80% of Latin Americans live in cities. But almost every big city is encircled by slums, which house around 120 million people, or 20% of the region's population. Population. And they go by different names. In Argentina, they call them Villa, which is short for Villa Miseria, or miserable village. In Brazil, they're known as favelas. In Mexico they're called variovajos. So various governments have tried to improve them. And actually many of them have also just tried to evict people from slums and destroy the slums. So there's been kind of different approaches. Chile pioneered a market oriented approach in the 1970s and 80s, so tax breaks were given to construction companies that built social housing. And between 1980 and 2000, around 2 million new homes were built for the poor, which represented around 43% of the total housing stock. But though the effort was considered mostly successful, lots of families were given really shoddy houses in areas far from their jobs, and they were moved often to the south of the city, which is much poorer.

You mentioned Brazil. Tell us about what's happened there.

So one of the biggest kind of slum upgrading projects happened in Rio de Janeiro between 1995 and 2008, and it cost around $600 million. And the plan was to integrate almost 160 favelas which housed around 250,000 people. And it seemed to work well for the first 10 years, like neighbors were really happy. But last year, the Inter American Development bank published a follow up report, and it suggests that neighborhoods that took part in the project actually ended up being worse off in terms of rubbish collection and sewers than those that didn't take part in the project. The scope of the report wasn't enough to really give a super detailed answ around why this happened, but some experts have suggested that it might be because of three reasons. Local gangs sought to reassert control by destroying the new streetlights and making kind of potholes in roads so that police and rival gangs couldn't enter their territory. Then the infrastructure couldn't really keep up with population growth. So between 2000 and 2010, Rio's population grew by around 3.4%, but it grew by around 30% in the favelas. And it was also really hard to get to the steeper, hillier parts of the favelas, which meant that a lot of the infrastructure couldn't be maintained.

Do you see those types of issues in Argentina?

So far, Via31 has managed to avoid these problems. Its central location really helps. Obviously it's in a really rich part of town, which explains in large part also why it's gotten so much attention. And Buenos Aires has few gangs. It has an even lower homicide rate than Boston or New York. And since 2016, there's been an increased police presence in the Visha, which has reduced crime further. So I spoke to a 26 year old Senegalese street vendor named Omar who moved there in April. He said to me, you know, five years ago, I would have never come here. There were no police and the roads were made of mud. But now it's all changed. So all that could make Vija31's transformation a lasting success, but pretty hard to replicate elsewhere. If you get out of the city and drive into the province of Buenos Aires, which is much bigger than the city. It houses around a third of the country's population of 45 million people. It's full of slums, and the governor there has been overseeing a large integration project. But the job is much harder because poverty rates are three times higher than in the city. The city only has 58 shantytowns and around 3 million people, but the province has nearly 2,000 shantytowns.

So what do residents think about their new homes in Via31?

So in two recent surveys of the new apartments, a majority of residents actually complained of leaks and poor insulation. They had been used to brick houses and these houses are made of plaster and steel. Higher rents are also a sore point for some people. But most residents I spoke to were really happy with the changes that have been carried out. In via 31. I spoke to Lismiguel, a 49 year old Peruvian cook who was so happy when she received the title to her new house. She said to me, I told my boss, I told her, now I have my house. I have my house and it's in my name. I have the title. Mikasa Itango Conciama. That day I looked at the girl from the city government and I didn't know how to hug her because we were in the pandemic. But I was so happy I wanted to jump for joy. But the political results of the project have so far been mixed. So last year the mayor lost the primaries in the slum, but now he's hoping that with the new changes becoming more tangible, that the publicity from Via31 can help him win the presidency next year, which he is expected to run for. So adverts across Buenos Aires push his slogan. The transformation doesn't stop. Mr. Lareda is a Harvard trained technocrat and he kind of lacks the pizzazz of some of his populist counterparts, but he's hoping to show that Argentina needs competence over charisma.

All right, Ana, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, John.

The war in Ukraine keeps revealing lessons about the hardware of modern conflict off the shelf. Drones have ended up shaping Ukraine's response. Cheapish munitions such as the Javelin make Soviet era tanks into sitting ducks. What isn't playing much of a role is good old fashioned close air support aircraft, raising questions about the future use of these combat stalwarts.

So in contrast to most strike aircraft that bomb targets that are assigned to them in advance, close air support aircraft fight alongside soldiers and attack battlefield targets that appear at the time, like gun positions or tanks.

David Hambling writes about technology and defence for the Economist.

The problem is increasingly this is getting very dangerous because of the volume of air defence systems and the days of aircraft being able to fly overhead and strafe targets with cannon or rockets now seem to be over, at least on the modern battlefield.

So how are those aircraft being used at the moment?

Well, Russia operates a fleet of SU25 Frogfoot aircraft and they're doing very much what they're designed to do, which is flying along low and slow at low level beneath the radar and attacking targets with cannon and rockets. The Su25 is armoured it's got protection over the engines and fuel tanks. The pilot sits in this bulletproof bathtub, and it also carries radar warning receivers and infrared flares and other means of distracting air defences. But in spite of that, because of losses, they've started to use much more cautious tactics. In the last few months, we've seen a lot of videos of them lofting rockets. So that's rather than firing directly down on a target, they actually release their rockets from several miles away on an upward trajectory, so lobbing them into the distance in the general direction of the target. It's not accurate, but it's safer. But in spite of that, they do still seem to be suffering pretty severe casualties.

Casualties, that is to say, they're losing a lot of these aircraft on the battlefield.

We don't know the exact numbers they've lost. We believe that Russia had a fleet of about 192 SU25s at the start of the war, though we don't know how many of those are actually operational. We do have a minimum estimate from Oryx, which is a Dutch analyst team, which looks at all the verified photographs of definitely destroyed equipment, and they've counted at least 23 SU25s lost so far. The Ukrainians say they've shot down about four times that number. And there's certainly many losses that we don't know about. Russia really stepped up its air activity in September in response to the Ukrainian counter offensive, and we have unverified claims of at least 15 more SU25s lost since then. So certainly the numbers are high. But the other side of the equation is, what is it for? What are these ground attack aircraft achieving? And certainly, given that they are only firing at long range and there's very few videos of them actually destroying targets, it's highly doubtful about whether they're effective and whether the game really is worth the candle. And that applies not just to Russians, but also the Americans sending similar types of aircraft to Ukraine.

So this isn't really a comment, then, on how these things are being used in Russia. This is more broadly how these things are effective or otherwise on the battlefield. In a more general sense, this is.

Very much up for debate, because some Americans have proposed sending some of their A10 Thunderbolt 2 aircraft, better known as the Warthog, to Ukraine. This is an aircraft with a huge following. It's been described as a flying Gatling gun, because basically it's an aircraft wrapped around a giant armoured cannon, and it was designed for the battlefield of the 1980s and shooting up columns of Soviet armour. So in theory, it's exactly what the Ukrainians need. But as very many people have pointed out, back in the 1980s, air defences were a lot lighter than they are now. And certainly seeing what's happened to the Russian ground attack aircraft, it looks pretty likely that the A10s would get destroyed in very much the same way.

Well, but there's also the issue of whether the Americans want to send aircraft at all.

Very true. At the moment, America has declined to send any types of jets to Ukraine because of a wish not to escalate. And Ukrainians, for their part, have said they don't want Warthogs. What they want are F16s, because the F16 is a more versatile aircraft. They could use it to establish air dominance over Ukraine. They can use it to shoot down missiles and drones and they could also use it for hitting ground targets. So they would much rather have that than something like the A10, which is seen as far too vulnerable. And certainly the Russian experience would tend to back that up in practice. What I think we're going to see in future is air strikes carried out from very long range with guided missiles and guided bombs, and there simply isn't going to be any of this shooting at things with cannon and rockets from aircraft anymore.

Thanks very much for joining us, David.

Thank you.

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