Transcript: Does the economy still matter for elections? With John Burn-Murdoch

This is an audio transcript of the Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes podcast episode: ‘Does the economy still matter for elections? With John Burn-Murdoch’

Soumaya Keynes
It is election season, and that means that things are very busy for my colleague John Burn-Murdoch, the FT’s chief data reporter. Now, you might know John as the guy who does the amazing charts on social media. I know John as my nemesis. So our columns go online in the FT in the same day. And look, I’m a competitive person and occasionally I might have thought of ways to make sure my column wins. You know, a bit of like, sabotage. But then I think, oh no, I am actually just really interested in pretty much everything he writes about. So I guess I’ll just read it. And here we are. Today we are going to talk about John’s work, asking about the data behind elections covering both the US and UK. And I’ll ask: does the economy still matter for elections?

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This is The Economics Show. I’m Soumaya Keynes in London, joined in the studio by John. Hello. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. Look, great to be here. And I, you know, I loved your intro there. I have to say, if I’m one thing, it’s also a competitive person. I do look at the analytics. And I was pretty furious the other week when I saw that, not only had you beaten me, but it was on a column about the data of running. And I mean, I’m the data guy. I’m the runner. Outrageous. 

Soumaya Keynes
Excuse you. I run very slowly, several weeks, at parkrun. It’s not very fast. And I hear you’re actually fast, but, well, you snooze, you lose. 

John Burn-Murdoch
OK. So for total time on the road, we’re probably similar. 

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. (Laughter)

John Burn-Murdoch
Fair enough. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, look, let’s talk about the data. And I want to start by stepping back because, you know, when thinking about votes in elections, it’s really easy to get just very deep into the weeds of every national story. You know, the recent debate performance, what’s happening with the Lib Dems and some random constituents in the UK. But at the same time, it does seem like there is this common thread that’s happening across lots of different countries of essentially incumbents being punished for the recent economic rollercoaster that we’ve just been through, being punished for this inflation that we’ve just had. Now, how much truth do you think there is to this idea that there’s a common economic thread running through the stories of lots of different countries’ elections? 

John Burn-Murdoch
It’s really tricky. I think straight out of the gate, if we see a load of elections this year where the incumbents perform very badly, lots of them get booted out of power, some like Modi don’t, for Modi reasons — I think we can’t conclude that economics, the economy doesn’t matter. But when we look at what people are saying about the economy and what they’re saying about their politicians, it’s messy. It doesn’t look like you would expect. It’s very hard to know what’s driving what. And on the surface, if you’re just looking at people’s assessment of the economy versus their assessment of their leaders — in the US certainly, and increasingly in the UK — that relationship is weak to non-existent. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. That’s interesting. So I think many people have in their heads this idea that there is this connection. Is the connection there anywhere? 

John Burn-Murdoch
So up until about the year 2000, maybe the early 2000s, wherever you looked around the world, this relationship was very clear. So if you ask people what they think of the economy or how they expect it to fare in the next 12 months, and you compare that to what they’re saying about their president, their prime minister, the government, there’s a very clear relationship. So economy gets better, people say the government is doing better.

But since the early 2000s, there’s been this divergence. So in the US it’s clearest that you get essentially now zero relationship. That means when the economy was tanking in 2007, 2008, this wasn’t having a dramatic impact on politics. And all the ups and downs that we’ve seen over the last three or four years, again, have had very little relationship to what people are saying about Biden. I mean, just look at the last two years, as inflation has been receding, consumer sentiment in the US has trended steadily upwards, Biden’s approval has been flat, if not declining.

In western Europe, in most of western Europe, you actually see a pretty clear link still. So in France, views of the economy, views of whoever’s been in charge at any given time have still remained pretty much in lockstep. In Germany, again, pretty strong connection between the two. In the UK, somewhere between the two, but increasingly weakening, that link. And I think some people don’t appreciate this because we think this is just like those crazy polarised Americans.

But if you look, so Ipsos has this really nice series called their Economic Optimism Index, where they just ask people every month for the last several decades, what do you think is gonna happen to the economy over the next 12 months? Over the last 14 years, while the Conservatives have been in government, pretty much every month, what you see is people who plan to vote Conservative saying, economy is great, economy is doing pretty well. Even in the depths of pretty bad times, Conservatives are much more optimistic about the economy than Labour voters. Whereas, I asked Ipsos, do they have that data going back before May 1997, and similarly, that data in 2010, the two times we’ve had a change of government. And you see this complete flip. So for the duration of Labour’s government, Labour voters said the economy was doing better than Conservatives. Flipped in 2010. And the most fun is in the last couple of months, as I think voters in the UK have completely internalised the fact that Conservatives are definitely losing and Labour are definitely winning, suddenly, Labour voters are saying, economy is great. You know, nothing much has changed in the economy. Conservatives have become more pessimistic about the economy in the last couple of months. Labour have become more optimistic. So again, this is not to say the economy isn’t driving things, but it’s to say that it’s certainly the other way around in survey responses. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK, so this sounds very American. It’s almost like these measures of economic sentiment are not telling you what you would hope that they would be telling you, right. That they’re just telling you how people are gonna vote, essentially. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah, exactly. And I think we’re getting into this space now where the question is: is it better to go with what people are saying in response to these survey questions, or to use, for example, consumer expenditure data? Like, you know, we’re hearing, a lot of your listeners will be very familiar with this, but we keep hearing in the US about people saying the economy’s crap. But when you look at consumer spending in the US, it’s high. So something’s happening. Maybe there’s more of a correlation between consumer spending and what people are saying about Biden. But specifically when people are asked, how’s the economy doing? Something happens in their brain and they interpret that as: how do I feel about the general state of my country? And that gets filtered through partisan lens. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. So I want to now switch to a different way in which, you know, people have spoken about economics influencing elections, which is, there’s this idea that there are groups of voters who are negatively affected by economic changes, the so-called left behind, maybe disaffected Trump voters. In the UK, that was the red wall. So how important do you think that dynamic is of people hurt by economic change, reacting and lashing out through to their voting behaviour? 

John Burn-Murdoch
Yes, that’s clearly a real thing, right? I’m sure we both read similar papers which looked at, for example, county-level data in the US and showed that the swing towards Trump was greater in areas that have been exposed to some of these China shocks, for example. But I think while that is true, it’s still generally happening through a sort of values lens. And what I mean by that is how people think about the broader things that the party stand for, and how that meshes with their own views. So most of the realignment in the US over the last, what are we now, eight years, has been people who previously identified as conservative, for example, but used to vote Democrat for sort of legacy cultural historical reasons, those people have been shifting towards Trump. And it’s been more about those people’s sociocultural views than about their economic circumstances. It’s true that Trump now wins a significantly higher share of low-income voters than Republicans used to do in the past. But if we focus on nonwhite voters, for example, where a lot of this realignment has occurred, he’s also making significant gains among higher-income voters.

Similarly, in the UK, what stood out about the red wall? It was not that these were the poorest parts of the UK. It was not that these places were those with the highest deprivation, with the most flat or negative-sloping economic trajectories over the past few years. It’s that these people were those whose values, whose demographic had always looked like they should have been natural Conservative voters, and factors like Brexit and the desire not to have Jeremy Corbyn in power helped them sort of realise that latent conservatism and shift over. If you look in the UK at people’s levels of economic insecurity, the most economically insecure still overwhelmingly vote Labour. So 100 per cent, I think there’s something real here. There’s a definitely a group of people for whom there’s a growing sense that the economy isn’t working for them any more. They are now reaching out for different parties. But I think that is perhaps more of a search for populists in general than a complete partisan thing. And that’s why maybe more of them are going for Trump in the US, but we’re not seeing that same thing in the UK. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK, so what you’re saying here is that economics doesn’t really matter and culture really does matter, or it increasingly matters. For the slightly panicky economics podcast host, can you tell me, are there any areas where really economics does matter? I mean, you know, we know that income and education has historically correlated with voting behaviour. Those relationships are then weakening in the kind of parallel way in the UK or the US? Or are they still pretty strong? 

John Burn-Murdoch
So there’s been a bit of a swapping of the relative importance of the two. So if you go back a couple of generations, the big divide was income. It was rich vote for the right, poorer vote for the left. That has to an extent been replaced by education. So the divides that have come into place after Brexit and after Trump are much more about the more highly educated voting for the left, the less highly educated voting for the right. And that is even after adjusting for the fact that more highly educated people tend to earn more. So in that sense, there’s been a bit of a swapping of the two.

I think one of the strongest arguments for an area where economics is still a big factor is a . . . It’s almost you’re taking a step back and it’s not about the partisan slant, it’s about the fact that we just live in a lower economic growth environment these days. And I think that might explain in the UK, for example, the increasing voter volatility with people switching from side to side, the increasing sense of frustration and disillusionment. Everyone is just saying this isn’t working, but it’s not necessarily about that pushing them in one way or the other. It’s just a sense that we’re not feeling that sense of progress any more. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Interesting. OK. Now I want to talk about another area, which I suppose touches on both economics and also culture, which is immigration, right. So this has obviously been a big part of the US political debate. How is that being discussed there? And then I want to ask you about the contrast with the UK. But first let’s talk about the US. 

John Burn-Murdoch
So one of the interesting things, I think, about the US debate on immigration is that for whatever reason, Americans do quite well at talking about legal and illegal immigration separately. You know, partly because this is to a large extent, a country of immigrants. There’s not this sense that anyone coming over is bad. And I think that just means you can have a more rational and evidence-driven debate. You can have Biden being increasingly firm about what happens on the southern border without that leading to sort of blunt instrument conversations around what should happen to overall immigration numbers to the US.

If you ask people in America questions, if you ask a binary question of what should happen to immigration, should we allow more people in or allow fewer people in, you get a very similar partisan blue-red divide to what you’d expect. If you introduce a third option, which is we should be tighter on the southern border, but we should make it easier for people to come in legally, you will get plenty of Republicans agreeing with that, for example. So I think that just allows for a healthy debate where we can actually see people responding to policy. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK, interesting. And what about the UK? 

John Burn-Murdoch
The UK, I think we’re maybe getting slightly better, but certainly until very recently, the UK conversations just use one word — immigration — to mean all of the above. And I think that’s really unhelpful because on the one hand, something that I think liberals, progressives have to concede is that, if you ask Britons a straight question, should the UK take in more of your immigrants, a majority of Britons say we should take in fewer. So if you look at that, well, it’s clear we need to cut immigration. However, you ask a second question, which is, what about highly skilled workers? What about lower-skilled workers? What about people who come to work on farms, people who come to work in NHS, students? And for almost every single subgroup, a large majority of Britons say no need to reduce those numbers. Maybe we should even have more.

It’s illegal immigration to the UK, which at the moment mainly means people coming over the Mediterranean on small boats, which is where there is almost unanimous agreement that this is a problem and those numbers need to come down. But the fact that the polls, the media discussions, the political discussions just tend to use this one word, this one blunt instrument, immigration, means that people, I think, are misinterpreting things. It means it’s not clear that, well, if we reduce the number of doctors coming to the UK, are people actually gonna be happy? You know, we’ve left the EU, we’ve got a points-based immigration system now. There is a much more clear divide in the data and in the ground truth between legal and illegal immigration into the UK than there ever was. And I think it would be really helpful if that translated now into more of a distinction in the way we talk about it. 

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. I mean, healthier debate sounds good for America. Is that the only area where the debate is healthier? You know, I guess we’ll dawn on something. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. Look, I think American politics and society as a whole has many, many, many problems. But this is one thing when I think we can look over that enviously. I also think in terms of the economic side of this, it’s potentially a big advantage for the States. So we know that for maybe demographic reasons, immigration, especially of higher-skilled people, is becoming this pleasingly scarce resource that countries are now competing over. Even the likes of Japan and Korea, who’ve historically had very, very low rates of immigration, are now actively seeking people to come and work in their economies. That means, I think, countries that could absorb these relatively large numbers of skilled workers with minimal sort of political and cultural fuss are gonna be at a big advantage. And I think the fact that the US is able to talk generally quite positively, including on the right about people coming into the country legally, the fact also that the US economy is just doing so much better than most other places, and therefore, people’s general sense of unease, anxiety, of losing out in the zero-sum game is much lower — those are all things, I think, that mean the US is likely to sort of extend its advantage in that regard by absorbing all these skilled people. Whereas UK, Europe, much less easy. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK, interesting. OK. I really want to push on this competition between the US and the UK because I remember, you know, particularly after Trump, that, you know, in the kind of around Brexit times, maybe just before the pandemic, it was something that I experienced personally, almost a competition between Brits and Americans to say, no, no, no, our system is the most broken. No, no, we’re having the worst time, that we’re more embarrassing. And so what I would like you to do is build the case for each one, right. So we’re gonna start with the US. So I want you to outline the case for why the US is the most broken of the two. 

John Burn-Murdoch
I think the best version of this is just how extraordinarily entrenched the two sides are now in the US. You know, we saw recently Donald Trump be convicted of a crime. And you’d seen in the lead-up to this, plenty of Republicans saying, yeah, you know, if someone is convicted, that would be bad. And it would change how I view that person. It would change how likely I would be to vote for them. And then, of course, after the conviction, the polls essentially didn’t move at all. And those Republicans who had previously been saying conviction would be bad, now suddenly had started saying, oh, you know, conviction, conviction, who among us, etc. 

Soumaya Keynes
To be clear, many among us have not been convicted of a felony. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Indeed. But yeah. So I think the fact that US politics is so unresponsive to even very, very, very significant failings of its politicians like that — and we’ve already discussed its unresponsiveness to the state of the economy — is just not great, right? It means it’s not a sort of meritocratic government system. You’re not electing leaders who are going to be especially effective, who are going to enact good policies, who have enacted good policies. And I think that’s probably the best argument for the problem in the US. There’s an increasing disconnect between how good a president is by most measures and how likely they are to be reelected. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK, well, we shouldn’t go on without mentioning the presidential debate, where my hot take is that the performance of both candidates was pretty scary in different ways. But the question is: is there any difference in the way that Republicans and Democrats respond to failings among their leaders? 

John Burn-Murdoch
I think that’s a really good way of asking the question, because for all this talk about the US, US politics, talking about is one thing. There are some subtle differences. So the Republicans generally are just even more entrenched than Democrats in terms of their views of things. And people talk about this idea that Republicans boo and cheer louder than Democrats in their response to things. So I really struggle to come up with anything that Donald Trump could have said or done on that stage that would have caused any more than a sliver of his supporters to change their views of him in a more negative direction. Whereas Democrats, although still very, very, very partisan, are more likely to say, you know what? That was pretty bad from our guy.

We see this in the economic data as well. So Democrats’ ability to respond to the economy in their views of Biden is that little bit stronger than Republicans. They will waver a little bit more. Now, again, whether that determines who they’ll vote for when push comes to shove is another question, but I certainly think it’s more likely that we’ll see the polls move in response to, and particularly, Biden’s performance in that debate than we would had it been the other way around. 

Soumaya Keynes
Do you think they’re gonna switch to Trump, or just not vote? 

John Burn-Murdoch
I would definitely think not vote. I mean, I think we’re gonna see very little votes switching, most to the extent that we see a different result this year versus four years ago at all, it will mostly be from differential turnout. So perhaps some people who didn’t vote last time showing up for Trump in a general sort of burn-it-all-down movement or, some people who voted for Biden last time staying at home. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK, so what we have here, listeners, is two British London-based journalists opining on the brokenness of the American political system. You’re welcome. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah, but funny thing is British journalists opining on the US are actually some of the most trusted journalists that Americans encounter. So their media landscape is so polarised. You basically have a load of media organisations that are consumed by people on the left and load that are consumed by people on the right. Neither trust each other whatsoever, which ironically leaves the BBC as one of the most, if not the most trusted news source in the US. 

Soumaya Keynes
Oh, OK. Well, “why not the FT?” is the follow up question, but maybe that’s for a different podcast. OK, well look, that was a very strong case. I now want to talk about Team Britain. Right, so if you were a Brit and trying to make the case that actually the UK has a more messed up political system, if you want to do that, how would you? 

John Burn-Murdoch
So whereas in the US you’ve got this super-polarised, highly entrenched system that just doesn’t move in response to anything, in the UK, we almost have this opposite problem of less and less and less attachment to the main parties, which mean people swap their votes all over the place and you have these wild swings like we’re likely to see this week. So you’ve got a situation where in recent UK elections, as many as 40 per cent of people have been switching between parties, and this time it could even be as high as 50 per cent. So very weak attachment, wild swings, total chaos. 

Soumaya Keynes
Well, I mean I hope the Americans listening to us think very hard about what a 50 per cent change in people’s voting behaviour would look like in the US. It would be very, very different. But of course, the UK system is also set up so that these not even very big swings in voting behaviour can then translate into these absolutely enormous swings in the number of seats. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Exactly. I mean, we have this first-past-the-post system, a bit like what you have in each individual US state where it’s winner-takes-all. So you can have a flip from 51-49 to the other direction. And that completely changes who’s got the power. And it’s important, the fact that we’re getting this weaker attachment to parties in the UK and more switching because first past the post works best when you have a clearly defined two-party system. This year in the UK, where we’ve essentially got a four-party system, and I mean, I can easily imagine a situation in five years where the largest party in the UK gets less than 40 per cent of the vote, and at that point crazy things happen due to that combination of this system set up for two parties and having lots in reality. 

Soumaya Keynes
Is it possible to kind of quantify how distorted the election result is likely to be because of this first-past-the-post system? 

John Burn-Murdoch
So this year, if the polls are accurate, the Labour party is gonna end up on something around 41 per cent of the vote, but about 71 per cent of seats. And at the same time, the parties of the right — so the Conservatives and the radical-right Reform UK — they’ll probably get about 35, 36 per cent of the vote between them, but maybe as few as 10 per cent of seats. 

Soumaya Keynes
Wow. And that’s more extreme than previous elections? 

John Burn-Murdoch
Far more extreme. So this will be the most extreme ever. Also the most extreme distortion of any major country in the world in recent years. So just increasing, increasingly little relationship between how many votes are cast for a party and how powerful it is. 

Soumaya Keynes
I mean, that does seem like a problem. Do you think that there might be any change to the UK voting system as a result of this? Or is it not in the incumbents’ interest to change it? 

John Burn-Murdoch
Honestly, I would say no, but purely on the basis that it ranks so low down voters’ priorities. There’s, you know, people like me, like, politics nerds are certainly very excited about this. But the average person, well, if you ask them, shall we change the voting system? They’ll say, yes. It’s so far down that shopping list of issues. So there’s not really any demand on the parties from voters to sort this out. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Now, can I ask you about polarisation? Just to wrap up this section on broken Britain, because we have this insane polarisation by age, right? Isn’t that a sign that something is wrong? 

John Burn-Murdoch
Yes. In a word, young people in Britain have essentially stopped being responsive at all to what this government does because they’re already so polarised against it. Only like 7 or 8 per cent of under-30s would vote Conservative at the moment, whereas big majority of all the people. But I think what we might be about to see is that this age polarisation in the UK turns out to have been a function of this specific Conservative government, rather than Conservative politics. Full stop. So we’ve got this radical-right populist party Reform UK, which in recent months has actually started to pick up quite a bit of support among young Britons, especially young men. So I think it may be that this UK exceptionalism, when it comes to this insane age divide, stops being a thing. And it turns out that was just a Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Conservative thing. But legacy Conservative young people might not move right. 

Soumaya Keynes
That’s experienced in other countries as well? 

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah. So you look at France, look at Germany, look at the US, and you will consistently see 30, 40, even higher percentages of young people voting for rightwing candidates. So the UK has been the weird one here. And I think that may now change. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Two compelling cases have been made here. I’m gonna put a gun to your head and make you choose which of the UK and the US political system you think is most broken. 

John Burn-Murdoch
So maybe this is just the patriot in me, but I think the US system is more broken than ours. You’ve got a system which just doesn’t seem to respond to incentives at all. Everything is locked. Everyone’s either red or blue. Nothing changes. Versus the system in the UK that for all its dysfunctions, things move around. That does at least mean it’s responsive to a good or bad government. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK, well look, let’s cut to a break now. And when we come back, I’m going to ask, what’s next? What is going to happen in all of these elections and beyond? 

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Soumaya Keynes
We are back from the break. So what is going to happen? It seems fairly obvious that Labour is going to win. The FT’s Labour endorsement leader just, was published today, but I want your prediction for how big their win is going to be. What do you think is going to happen? 

John Burn-Murdoch
I’ve been saying for a couple of weeks, I think the Tories will end up at about 100 out of the 650 seats, so that would be by far their worst-ever result in 190 years of existence. 

Soumaya Keynes
And just for the benefit of listeners, how many do they have now? 

John Burn-Murdoch
Well, for the last election, they got 365. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. 365 down to 100. Bad news for many of them. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Pretty bad news. A lot of people will lose their jobs here. And that would mean Labour on probably around 450, 460. So, huge majority . . . 

Soumaya Keynes
And that’s a more extreme majority than Tony Blair got in 1997, which is a kind of historic . . .  

John Burn-Murdoch
Indeed. Yeah. Just a huge victory, a huge majority. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, that’s the main two parties. But in the UK, as you were saying, we’re now not really in a two-party system any more. And recently there’s been the rise of Reform, which is on the right end of the spectrum. How well do you think they’ll do? 

John Burn-Murdoch
So vote share, I think they’ll probably get somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent. But again, because of the weirdness of this first past the post, winner takes all system, that might translate into only one, two or three seats. So very little power in parliament, but an increasingly vocal part of British politics. 

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah, I think this is just an area where it’s going to get harder and harder. I mean, there are many who think that, you know, a benefit of the current system is to keep the far right out of parliament, I suppose. But the cost is that you do have this divergence between realised politics and what the voters want. And of course, next time it could be your party that loses out from this system. OK, that’s the UK. What about the US? 

John Burn-Murdoch
The US is, their polls are very close, but in the swing states, certainly time after time we’re seeing Trump ahead. I think Biden’s performance at the debate certainly hasn’t helped things. I know the likes of FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver, people are coming out with their forecasts now. And generally it’s, people are saying it’s somewhere between too close to call and looking pretty solid for Trump. So, you know, I don’t have any unique insights beyond that. But I would certainly say Trump’s looking the most likely at the moment. 

Soumaya Keynes
Oh, dear. Well, look, that is generally quite terrifying for American democracy. But I guess in a vague attempt to keep this light, have you ever done an emotional hedge, John? Do you know what that is? 

John Burn-Murdoch
So, is that where, like, I prepare myself for a bad outcome so that it won’t hurt as much? 

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. So you bet on something you don’t want to happen, right? So if I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next US president, I would vote on him to win. So that if he wins, at least I get a payout, right? So my irritation is that the odds on him winning are now so great that the payout would be really, really small. So, I mean, right up until when he won the first time, you could get pretty good odds that he was gonna win. And so it was actually possible to kind of make a reasonably cheap emotional hedge. Right now it’s really expensive. And given recent scandals around betting on election stuff in the UK, I’m kind of hesitating to place it. But if the odds had been better, maybe I would have done it. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Yeah, I mean, the fun bit, of course, was after 2021, Trump was still in the courts trying to claim that he could win and it was still possible to bet on Biden winning long after Biden had won. So there’s definitely some money to be made there. But, yeah, as you say, this time, I think you’d have had to get the bets in before the debate. 

Soumaya Keynes
Yeah. Have you ever bet on anything like that? 

John Burn-Murdoch
I did make some money in 2020 from doing exactly what I just said. 

Soumaya Keynes
Well done. OK. Getting that free lunch. OK. Final question. What happens if Biden pulls out? 

John Burn-Murdoch
Look, I mean, it’s difficult to know exactly because of so much that would change on the surface. There’d be more of a perception of chaos with Democrats, perhaps. But if we look at the hard numbers, we see that Biden underperforms a generic Democrat in the question of running against Trump. He’s also underperforming the generic congressional ballot for the House elections. He’s underperforming lots of Democratic Senate candidates. So I think there’s a lot of upside if the Democrats do pivot. 

Soumaya Keynes
OK. Well, look, that’s a moment as optimistic as we’re gonna get on this podcast. We should wrap up here. Thank you so much, John. 

John Burn-Murdoch
Thank you. 

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Soumaya Keynes
That is all for this week. You have been listening to The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. This episode was produced by Edith Rousselot with original music from Breen Turner. It is edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. I’m Soumaya Keynes. Thanks for listening.