Let’s get this party restarted: Republicans reel from the midterms

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1:25The Economist.

1:32Hello, and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Ore Ogumbiyi.

1:41Today on the show, parents are spending more to go above and beyond for their children. And why TV dramas are turning you against the underdog.

1:56But first.

2:05Over the weekend, President Donald Trump sat down on CBS's 60 Minutes to dissect the Republicans' colossal midterms defeat. Give me your political analysis of what just happened. Well, number one, I was not on the ballot. But I campaigned hard for some people. And I think if I was on the ballot, it would have been a much different situation. He appeared, at least, to recognize that some of the policies he once defended most fervently actually worked against him. They didn't like the war. They didn't like the fact that gasoline went up. And there's a great dislike, incredibly, for Israel. Do you think immigration hurt you in the midterms?

2:50Do you think the crackdown hurt you? I think it both helped and hurt. But he's not the only one being blamed. Within the Republican Party, an acrimonious post-mortem has begun. And the question for both Republicans and Democrats is how to move forward as they look towards 2028. These have been enormous results for both Democrats and Republicans, hugely consequential. And in a way, the scale of this result poses big, big questions for both parties. Shashank Joshi is our Washington bureau chief. It has laid bare the faults of Donald Trump's leadership, his foreign policy, his governance of the party.

3:33But after years of living in the Trump era, Democrats are also trying to draw the right lessons from their victory here. Before we get into the parties, let's talk about Donald Trump. How might he cement his legacy after these results? Well, despite the rebuke, I would describe his mood as being unrepentant. He has said, although he appreciates the Iran war was a cause of his setback, he would do it all again. He's given no indication he plans to course correct, whether that's on tariffs, which voters didn't like, whether that's on the economy, whether that's on the Middle East. In fact, the decision to appoint Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff really suggests that he's doubling down.

4:21Stephen Miller, of course, is this ultra-nationalist official who has been the spearhead of the immigration crackdown, of the administration's battles with the courts. It doesn't suggest that he's in the mood for compromise with the Democrats, that he's in the mood to reach across the aisle, that he's in the mood to moderate his policies. In fact, it looks like quite the opposite. Shashank, how much sway do you think Trump still has on voters? I think his sway over the voters is obviously declining. You can see that in his cratering approval ratings, which have fallen and fallen. But that's not the same as his standing in the party or his standing amongst the MAGA base of the party.

5:04I was talking to one Republican strategist who said, look, in primary elections to see who becomes a candidate for a Senate race or a House race, Donald Trump's endorsement can still guarantee a candidate maybe 30 percent of the vote. And that's often enough to carry the day. So his grip over the party is almost certainly going to decline after these elections because his own favoured candidates in places like Texas, South Carolina, they did very badly indeed. But he still has this charismatic authority over a segment of the fringe of the party that does count for a lot. And therefore, I think we're at the beginning of the end of the Trump era.

5:45We're absolutely not at the end of the Trump era. Now, we spoke a little bit about the fate of the Republicans in our results show. But what about the party? What has the fallout really looked like for them? Well, I was trying to get a sense of what Republicans are saying about their defeat. And I was talking to some of them. I was reading long electoral autopsies by others. And I think you can see a pretty acrimonious debate that's broken up into a few factions. Loyalists who are basically saying Trump was great. He was let down by the party establishment who didn't throw their weight behind controversial candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas, who was viewed as very corrupt and incompetent.

6:26I think that's a fairly small section of the party. You've also got the MAGA purists, you could call them. who are people like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, maybe Joe Rogan, the podcaster. They had already broken with Trump before the election over the Iran war, saying basically Trump had betrayed them on foreign policy. And they have been really scathing. Well, that was a disaster. And not just a metaphorical disaster, but a real disaster. On his show, Carlson blamed the war. He blamed corruption. He said the administration was too fixated on protecting Jewish interests. So there was a slightly anti-Semitic strand to some of this.

7:05And I think the most interesting person orbiting that faction is J.D. Vance, the vice president, who didn't blame Donald Trump by name. That would be politically fatal. But he took this pretty stunning step, I think, of blaming his boss's policies, the war in Iran specifically as being the root cause of this defeat, and the relationship with Israel, saying America needs to distance itself from Israel. So Vance is clearly appealing to that disaffected MAGA crowd. but he's, I think, sailing pretty close to the sun. What does all this mean for the Republicans as they look to 2028? What emerges in a post-Trump era?

7:40I think we're still in the foothills of the 2028 debate. It's very early. But what you can see is you've got the old guard, the establishment Republicans saying, let's go back to free markets and going back to alliances and restore all of that. And that's sort of Mike Pence. Maybe it's Mitt Romney who's been very critical. But I think what's more interesting is the more pragmatic Republicans who want to distinguish themselves from Donald Trump, but also have to acknowledge how much the party has moved on economic and cultural issues in the last 10 years. And I would point to Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis.

8:11Ted Cruz is the last remaining Republican statewide officeholder in Texas, which has otherwise gone blue. Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, which essentially held off the blue wave to some degree. And both of them have broken with Trump on the war, despite the fact that they're hawks, they supported the Iran war at the beginning. they're now saying, no, no, this should have been over and done with. And that's a sign of how much the mood has changed on foreign policy. But they are not saying you can just go back to free trade, you can go back to doing what we did as Republicans 10 years ago.

8:42If you look at Ron DeSantis, in his own post-election critique, he was striking some of the same notes as the MAGA crowd, saying actually the Republicans had failed to deliver on their pledge to release files relating to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile, which is a very, very touchstone issue within the MAGA movement. We need to have a ban on stock trading by members of Congress. And that's a way of saying we recognize what the electorates are saying that we think the government is too corrupt. So that, I think, tells you about some of the issues and topics that Republicans will be elevating and discussing as they try and craft a post-Trump future.

9:23But there's a long, long way to go on that. Okay, so we've got a sense of where the Republicans may be headed, but let's turn to the Democrats for a moment. It was obviously a huge result for them, but are there any indications about how they might be thinking about 2028, even in these early days? Well, I think the funny thing is Democrats have just won this generational victory, some of the biggest swings in the House vote for decades, and reaching deep into deep red states. And of course, being Democrats, they've immediately devolved into factional warfare. And I think you can see this fight over Michigan particularly.

9:57Is Abdul El-Sayed the future of the party or is he the fringe? And progressives would say, look at this guy. He is a progressive candidate who fought on a very progressive platform in Michigan. And he won despite people saying he couldn't win, despite Republicans tarnishing him as a terrorist, throwing these Islamophobic attacks at him. And what the centrist Democrats are saying is, well, okay, yes, he did win, but he won by a smaller vote share than many other Democrats. and the future of our party really has to lie amongst those candidates who won in really red states or purple states, who outperformed the National Party.

10:31People like John Ossoff in Georgia, people like Tallarico in Texas, who downplayed culture war issues, who actually were quite populist on the economics, but didn't really talk very much about Israel-Palestine or foreign policy because that's not the kind of thing that wins votes in very purple states. So I think that progressive, be-centrist debate is going to be an absolutely critical one. But also, now that they have won this stonking great majority in Congress, they are also going to have to decide on who runs the party. Will it be Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who many on the left of the party dislike and would like to see dislodged?

11:09And then how will they use their newfound power in Congress? Should they use it to hold Trump to account and pursue revenge against members of his family, against people who've made money in the Trump administration? Should they focus laser-like on the cost of living? I think that's going to be a really powerful debate inside the party. And the way it plays out will give us clues as to which of these factions is rising or falling in influence ahead of 2028. Xiaoxian, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me.

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12:58It's not just wealth that sets the rich apart. It's how they spend that wealth. Typically, they've forked out lots on their offspring, shipping them off to the best schools and paying for them to access the best clubs. But as competition for university places and well-playing jobs heats up, it's not just the rich who are doing it. Parents across income levels are bankrolling their children's futures by spending more and more outside school. And they're going big. Parents are paying for tutoring, piano lessons, coding camps. But a big drain on their finances is youth sports. More than half of American children now play a sport after school or over the weekend.

13:45Vinjeri Mukandariri is a news editor at The Economist. And it doesn't come cheap. In the US, the main sport for a single child costs the average family just north of$1 ,000 a year. That's up 46 % since 2019, twice the cumulative rate of inflation. And it's a time drain too. American parents are dedicating more than 15 hours a week to children's sports. That includes driving kids to training and tournaments, as well as the admin of liaising with coaches. It's a commitment on par with a part-time job. And aside from sports, you mentioned tutoring as well. How is spending on that changing? Parents are spending a lot of money on private tutoring in the West.

14:30But we know that private tutoring has long been an obsession in richer parts of Asia. Three in four school-aged South Koreans took paid lessons last year. But what's striking is how deeply embedded this is across the income spectrum. Even in the lowest income quintile, 57 % of families are paying for tutoring. In fact, the OECD estimates that the average spend per pupil has ballooned to roughly a tenth of the average household disposable income. And now other Asian parents are splashing out too. Take India, where more than a quarter of all students and nearly a third in cities now receive private tuition.

15:08And in China, spending on extra tuition has actually grown fastest in the country's poorest provinces. And is this a trend that we're seeing beyond Asia as well? Yes. So we've seen that in France, one in three students aged 15 to 18 gets private coaching. and among state-educated pupils in the UK, the gap between the rich and the poor students has almost evaporated. And part of that narrowing gap is down to state intervention where government-funded tutoring schemes have done some of the heavy lifting in the UK, but parents are paying too. So 30 % of British secondary students in state schools say that they've had private tutoring and that figure rises to 45 % in London.

15:52Vingero, why is this happening? Why do parents think that they need to spend all this money on their kids? Well, increasing inequality and the belief that a stable middle class lifestyle is no longer guaranteed means that parents are less relaxed. In fact, we've looked at a study which shows that the more economically unequal a society becomes, the less value parents place on soft virtues like imagination or independence. Instead, parents' focus shifts to qualities like hard work, which is something that this intensive style of parenting tries to instill. And just how much are we talking here?

16:31How much are parents spending on these things? Researchers at the National Transfer Accounts Project added up the average total investment in a child's education. That combines taxpayer funding with private spending on everything from tuition fees to after-school coaching, regardless of whether the child goes to university or not. And back in 1990, they found that private family money in America made up about 18 % of that total. But by 2020, that share had climbed to nearly a quarter, equivalent to$68 ,000. In South Korea in 2023, private family spending accounted for 42 % of the lifetime cost of an education.

17:12That's roughly$152 ,000 per child. But is all this money actually resulting in better outcomes for the children? Not necessarily. So parents are spending more, but it doesn't actually seem to be opening the doors to upward mobility. That could be because although the poor spend more, the rich aren't taking their foot off the gas either. So everyone's running faster to stand still. Over the past decade, the likelihood that a child would do better than their parents has completely flatlined in places like France and Spain, and in Singapore and South Korea, it's collapsed entirely. And getting into top universities is harder than ever.

17:51Harvard admits 3 % of applicants today, down from around 30 % in 1960. At Peking University in China, rural students used to make up roughly a third of the student body between the late 70s and the late 90s. But by 2021, that fell to about a sixth, A decline far sharper than the demographic shift from countryside to city would explain. OK, but is it at least making a difference when these children enter the workforce? The research shows that having a degree doesn't deliver the same returns if you don't come from money. Take the US. Among graduates whose parents went to university, 41 % go on to join the top fifth of earners.

18:31But for first-generation graduates, that figure drops to just 30%. And this comes as even more people from non-graduate backgrounds are attending university than ever before. Over the past decade, the share of adults from non-graduate families earning a degree climbed by 10 percentage points. Yet their college earnings premium slumped by 11 points. That's the financial boost that their degree is supposed to guarantee. And we see the exact same pattern in Britain. A think tank called the Resolution Foundation tracks students a decade after graduation. And even after graduating from the exact same university with the exact same qualification, those who grew up poor and on free school meals were earning 7 % less than their peers.

19:16So it seems that in a competition for their children's future, rich parents still have the edge. Well, I better start saving now then. Vinjeri, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

19:41He is a philandering tech baron. She is a preening actor. Andrew Miller writes Backstory, our column on culture. When they split up, how much of his fortune should she get? The answer to the big question in the new TV show War is, who cares? As a dispatch from the front lines of dueling spouses and divorce lawyers, the glitzy new drama flops. But it is, I think, a telling snapshot of a different conflict. The class struggle, waged here by a revealing figure, the working-class villain. Now, rags-to-riches fables are staples of fiction, from Charles Dickens to The Great Gatsby and beyond. Is it possible, stories like this ask, to rise above disadvantage and vested interests.

20:32And what does it take to do so? The portrayal of the lower-class outsider as a baddie in war and in other recent TV shows is a striking turn in this age-old narrative, which I think suggests a fatalistic social mood. The high-powered solicitors in war spend lots of time striding portentously in and out of lifts. One of them, though, is not like the rest. What can I get you? We would like some contracts, please. Some lawsuits to start, maybe throw in a last will and testament. Maybe some affidavits for the table.

21:14Johnny is a working class boy who claws his way into a job at one of the swish, brawling law firms. He's also landed a posh, devoted girlfriend. You might expect the show's verdict to be good for Johnny. But, and here's a spoiler alert, Johnny is a liar and a traitor who is sneaked into his job by the firm's hated rivals so he can spy for them. When he's at risk of being rumbled, he incriminates a blameless colleague when a snarling superior calls him a jumped-up little twat. It's hard to argue. He does the dirty on his girlfriend, too. Speaking of girlfriends, The Girlfriend, a daft hit last year, has the same air of justified snootiness.

21:59How could you be so cruel? Cruel? You left me in the hospital. You didn't even have the decency to do it in person. Oh my God. You don't know what she told me, do you? Laura, a high-rolling mother, distrusts her son's brassy new love interest. Laura thinks her name, Cherry, is déclassé. Cherry claims her dad was an architect who's actually a builder, and to have gone to a fancy school, which she didn't. She's also disappointingly bad at tennis. Is Laura's condescension out of order? Au contraire. She's entirely vindicated. Cherry turns out to be a malignant sociopath. 15 seconds to the print. It's going to be soft, then we're clear.

22:46No, Harper, you can't trade your way out of this. That is unacceptable. It's reckless. This is where we are now. Harper! Just wait. The announcement's coming in five. Or consider industry, a multi-series saga in which Harper, a young black woman from a troubled family, penetrates the citadel of high finance by forging her academic credentials. Before long, she is insider trading and backstabbing her friends. All this, I think, is a departure. Because in recent egalitarian decades, storytellers have generally sided with the underdog. So, in fact, did many of their predecessors. Even Victorian novels that satirise social climbing like Vanity Fair or The Way We Live Now tend to ridicule the snobs at least as much as the Parvenous.

23:37War and other contemporary dramas are much harsher on their little guys. Today's upstart characters are heirs to Tom Ripley Patricia Highsmith's anti-hero who prospers through lies, murder and impersonation, only mostly without his talent. The reason I think this newly jaundiced view of aspiration matters is that it reflects a bleak reality of stalling dreams. Rates of social mobility in Britain and America have long trailed those in other rich countries. And now, from a low base, they've been on some measures declining in both places. So Johnny's experience in war, as he struggled to capitalize on his education, may be representative of his generation.

24:23Now law here is presented as a viperous profession, just as in industry, finance is a snake pit. It isn't just that the odds are long. These working class villains don't really deserve to overcome them. In a pessimistic commentary on what is a stratified era, these characters keep being told that they don't belong. And by and large, they don't.

24:59That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

25:31We'll be right back.

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