Socialist mobility: a telling Michigan vote

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0:57The Economist

1:04Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

1:14Today on the show, the vast cleanup of China's Yangtze River and the world enters a post-postcard era.

1:29But first...

1:35It's primary season in America as the two parties choose their contenders for the midterm elections in November. On Tuesday, voters in five states cast their ballots. Today we're going to focus on one of them, Michigan. We took on a machine. Democratic voters picked Abdul El Saeed, a former public health official turned podcaster, as their party's Senate nominee. He beat the establishment pick Haley Stevens, a four-term member of the House of Representatives, on a particularly lefty platform, opposing aid to Israel and getting corporate cash out of politics. They want us to think that the reason some of us ain't got is because of other people got.

2:18But it turns out that the reason so many of us ain't got is because of the system that has corrupted our politics to take it away from us. And that is the thing that we are taking on now. That movement to get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, pass Medicare for all, it is a big movement. This stuff is good fodder for the Republicans. Dr. El-Sayed is not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the leftiest of the Democratic left, but he is aligned with them. So the Senate Republican Campaign Committee called him dangerous, the most radical Democrat Senate nominee ever. Dr.

2:54El-Sayed won, but what does that primary win say about the next ballot he'll be on?

3:00John Prideaux: Party primaries sometimes throw up results that underline that there's a really big change going on within the party. If you think of Dave Bratt beating Eric Cantor back in Virginia in 2014, or AOC beating Joe Crowley in New York in 2018, this is a result like that. John Prudeau is an executive editor at The Economist and hosts Checks and Ballots, our show on American politics. We've seen fights between the so-called establishment wing and the progressive left of the Democratic Party for the whole season. And I think this is the biggest win for the left wing of the party so far. So tell us about the race that preceded the win.

3:39Who is Abdul El-Sayed and then how did he get over the line?

3:42John Prideaux: Well, James Bennett talked to Abdul El-Sayed last week for Checks and Balance. I strongly recommend folks go and listen to that. El-Sayed is a former public health official. He has an impressive academic background. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He has a medical degree from Columbia, and he also is a podcaster. So that's an important underrepresented demographic in American political life. Jason, America needs more podcasters in Washington. As a political candidate, he doesn't have a great record. He lost a race to be governor a couple of years ago. If you go further back in his life, he's the son of Egyptian immigrant parents.

4:20John Prideaux: There's a decent number of Arab Americans in Michigan. and as for his policies, I think that's where he really stands out. There are some policies aimed at changing American politics, getting money out of politics, which is pretty standard democratic stuff, abolishing filibuster, which has become a cause on the left, and term limits for Supreme Court justices. And on economics, there are also some standard far left policies, big taxes on billionaires, Medicare for all, and so forth. But then if you get away from the policy platform on his website and look at the positions that he's taken previously, which he's now having to defend.

4:58John Prideaux: Some of them include some openness to defunding the police, some more out there criticism of Israel than is standard within the Democratic Party or has been until recently. And quite a lot of these policies, though popular among Democratic primary voters, are not popular in the country at large. And actually, even among Democratic primary voters, he didn't quite get to 50 % in this primary in Michigan. So that wasn't quite a ringing endorsement of his program, but nevertheless, he's won. Not quite a ringing endorsement, yet you say it is a telling, a significant win. Why? For a few reasons, Jason.

5:41John Prideaux: One of them is where it is, where this has taken place. This is Michigan. This is not New York City. Michigan is a swing state. Donald Trump won it in 2016. Joe Biden won it in 2020. Donald Trump again in 2024. So this is truly competitive political territory. And it's one thing for a candidate on the far left of the party to win in a very blue place in California or New York or in Chicago. But this is Michigan and it's a statewide election. It's a state where the traditional base of the Democratic Party, African-American voters, working class voters, are well represented. It's home to the car industry.

6:21John Prideaux: So there's a big union presence through the UAW. So the fact that Elside was able to convince enough primary voters to elect him here either tells you something about how the Democratic primary electorate is changing, which I think is true. Or it tells you something about how the left wing of the Democratic Party is becoming mainstream. And I think there's some truth to that as well. Before we talk about the changing nature of the electorate, let's talk about the political stakes here. Democrats need this if they want to win control of the Senate. Is that now harder or easier? I think it's a bit harder to back up here.

6:56John Prideaux: In order to win a majority in the Senate, which Republicans currently have, Democrats would need a net gain of four in November, four Senate seats. They already hold Michigan. So this is not about expanding their territory. This is about keeping what they have, and they absolutely have to do that if they're even to think about getting a majority in November. And if you look at betting markets, at least, the odds of Democrats, a Democratic candidate holding Michigan, dipped a little bit after El Saeed won. So that's useful information. President Trump called his victory great news for the GOP. No surprise there.

7:36John Prideaux: He wrote on social media that El Saeed is a communist loser who hates Jews and Israel. And so that gives you a flavor of what the Republican attacks on him will be. It's also true that debate about Israel and the war in Gaza and the role of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby in American politics were a big part of this race. Abdul El Saeed has called for an end to military aid to Israel and other what he describes as authoritarian countries in the Middle East. That's led to attacks on him that he's anti-Israel, perhaps he's even anti-Semitic, which I think he's not. And he addressed those criticisms head on in his victory speech on Wednesday.

8:22And to all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith or any faith at all or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.

8:37John Prideaux: And so, Jason, you can be sure that Mike Rogers, who's the Republican nominee, will hammer El Saeed on his opposition to Israel. It's going to be really interesting to see whether that attack line works as well as it used to. Well, tell me about Mike Rogers. Who's he? Rogers, I think it's fair to say, is a less exciting candidate than El Saeed. He ran uncontested in the Republican primary. He's a former member of the US House from Michigan. He chaired the Intelligence Committee and served on the Armed Services Committee. He has a pretty traditional sort of pre-Trump blue chip CV. You know, he's a veteran, a former FBI agent.

9:14John Prideaux: He left Congress a decade ago and moved to Florida, which is the ambition of all good Michiganders. And he's tried to find his way back into the Trump Republican Party now. But just to underline, this race is not done yet. You know, Rogers could beat El Saeed. Our midterm model says it's about a coin toss at the moment. And let's come to what you hinted at before, the sort of changes in the left wing or feeling about the left wing of the party, given Mr. El Saeed's victory. The standard bearer for the left wing of the Democratic Party nationally these days is Zora Mamdani, the mayor of New York, who's affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America.

9:52John Prideaux: But as I said before, it's perhaps not surprising that somebody with that platform could win, A, as a mayor, where he doesn't actually have control over national taxation or Medicare, but B, in a place that is stuffed with highly educated Democratic voters and where Republicans don't have a hope in hell of winning. There's a similar dynamic in Washington, D.C. Very liberal cities likely to select a democratic socialist as mayor. Democratic socialists haven't had it all their own way. The left wing of the party hasn't had it all its own way in the primary season. Graham Platner imploded in Maine.

10:29John Prideaux: But Abdel al-Said gives this faction of the party, which draws its support largely from highly educated progressives, a real shot in the arm. The next race to look out for in this long-going battle between the left and the centre of the party is in nearby Wisconsin, where the DSA is on a tear as well. Why is that the one to watch? Well, Wisconsin, like Michigan, is a true swing state on the presidential level. So it's a fairer test of whether these sorts of candidates can win in primaries in competitive places. and in Wisconsin a state representative Francesca Hong looks likely to win the democratic nomination for governor and she is a very vocal liberal she's called like El Saeed has in in the past to defund the police something that she's reversed recently as he has as well that's the next test in this battleground I think it's important just to underline again that though El Saeed won in Michigan, he got less than 50 % of the vote.

11:31John Prideaux: So this isn't a knockout blow for one faction in the Democratic Party. So this conflict is going to run throughout the remainder of primary season. But I thought the party had kind of learned already that these kinds of positions, the extreme ones that you're talking about, like defund the police, ultimately they're unelectable policies. You would have thought so, right? There's enough evidence from the Trump era that the Democratic Party heading farther to the left is not a great political strategy, I would submit. And there's also a lot of polling evidence that some of the positions that Abdel al-Sayed and his colleagues have taken are just not popular nationally.

12:08John Prideaux: This is an area where the primary electorate really distorts behaviour. People get a sense from primaries about what's popular in the country that is misleading. It's awfully reminiscent of the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party pre-Donald Trump. But I think what it does tell you is that there is such a desire for change that voters within the Democratic primary, you know, they're responding. They don't want the same old, same old. They want somebody who's going to come in and shake it up. And that is one reason why they went for Abdul El-Sayed over Hayley Stevens. John, as ever, great to talk to you.

12:44John Prideaux: Thanks. Thanks, Jason.

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14:21well-looked after. Sewage and industrial waste pouring in, and millions of tons of fish being hauled out. In its waters, the Chinese paddlefish, a massive sword-nosed beast, went extinct. The Baiji, a nearly blind white-bellied dolphin, probably has two. Happily, though, things are clearing up at last. After decades of overfishing and pollution, the Yangtze, China's longest river, is making a remarkable comeback. Gabriel Crossley is a China correspondent for The Economist. Fish biomass, which is total mass of all the fish in the river, is up by over 200 % since 2021. There are cleaner waters, so more hospitable to wildlife.

15:06And all this seems to be down to sweeping protection measures that China's government put in place in 2021.

15:18So tell me about the protection measures. The center was a 10-year ban on all commercial fishing, which used to be a huge industry on the river. That had resulted in the number of fish in the river plummeting since the 50s. Some fishermen were resorting to using electroshocks to catch the remaining fish or dynamite fishing. Really devastating methods. So in 2021, all of that was banned. It was enforced with river patrols, drones, surveillance cameras, and so on. And at the same time, China moved a lot of chemical factories to reduce pollution. It reshaped some cities in the river basin to make sure that less polluting stormwaters ran into it.

16:02And most important of all, Xi Jinping, China's president, has been championing this ban. So he makes sure that everything gets put in place. And from what you're saying, it sounds like everything has in fact been put into place. The numbers show a pretty remarkable recovery so far, at least. Of course, this is an initial recovery. The Yangtze is not a pristine waterway, but it's on the way back there. And it worked much better than many were expecting. That being said, the government is still doing things to the river, which are not good for it. Most important of these is building giant dams. China's built huge dams for hydropower and to control floods for decades, including the Three Gorges Dam, the world's biggest hydroelectric facility.

16:45And these are really bad fish, so they stop fish moving up and down the river to spawn and such. China's still building lots of those. So that's a big blind spot in all of these protection measures. And it seems clear that losers from this plan must be all the fishermen who were suddenly completely made unable to fish. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we're talking about 230 ,000 people, according to the government, possibly more than that. China's state media says that large numbers of these people retrained and found other jobs. I went to check out some fishing communities along the river in southern China in Xinjiang County.

17:21It seems like the picture is a little more negative from their point of view. Some locals said that only one in five fishermen were compensated for the loss of their livelihoods. These places are pretty empty these days. Many people have just left to work as migrant laborers elsewhere. Some were encouraged to go into aquaculture to raise eels in ponds, but that's a tough business to make money in. So yeah, these communities suffered a lot of damage. And that's another lesson in the way sort of complete state control can just grab an industry like that in China. What do you think we learn from it?

17:58From a scientist's point of view, the Axie was in such a terrible state that it probably needed some very sweeping measures to turn it back. And China's government is so powerful that it's very well placed to carry out these kinds of measures against local resistance. And that might be a lesson for other very polluted rivers too. But if we could do this without causing all the social damage, then that would be a lesson too here. And it's also worth mentioning that ideally you don't want to let rivers reach this kind of state. And of course, it was under Communist Party rule that the axe got as bad as it did.

18:34Gabriel, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

18:56Postcards are cheap, smutty, and sometimes saucy. And they are therefore often assumed to be silly, but their effects have been very serious indeed. They have changed the world.

19:14It was March 1942. Britain was readying itself to fight the Nazis in Europe. Britons knew that they would have to fight them on the beaches and on the landing grounds. The only problem was that they had very little idea what those beaches and landing grounds actually looked like. And so that spring, the head of British Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, took to the BBC airwaves with a public plea. This is the national programme from London. Send your photos and postcards, he said. These might look like holiday frivolity to you, but experts may see a lot more.

19:52people sent them in in droves 10 000 had been expected 10 million were received and then british intelligence started to sort them under the names omaha and sword and juno the preparations for what would become known as d-day had begun all along the coasts of great britain that spring the training went on Navy and Coast Guard landing barges practiced landing operations day and night

20:27Letters of all kinds are in trouble 20 years ago, the Royal Mail, Britain's postal service sent 20 billion letters a year By 2025, that number was 6.6 billion and they expect it to fall still further Postcards are doing worse again Only 8 % of British adults now send postcards according to the charity English Heritage. The first postcard was sent in 1840. A British novelist called Theodore Hook sent a card through the post to himself in London. This card featured a picture and a lame joke. This card set the standard for what would become a great holiday industry. The advantages of these postcards was clear.

21:11They lifted a physical burden from postal services. A single leaf of card was far lighter and cheaper to transport than the threefold thickness of a letter in an envelope. In a Manchester side street, a boy is writing a postcard. And they lifted a literary burden from the writer. Like teenagers turning to text, Victorians relished the limits imposed on their prose. Dear auntie, thank you very much for your letter. It must be nice to be in the country. Soon, hundreds of billions were in circulation. Britons, with their empire, were particularly keen. As one historian puts it, postcards were the first worldwide social network.

21:51The boy gets to the postbox just in time for the quarter to three collection.

22:03Postcards changed the way the world was seen. Their visual style, those palm trees, sunsets, saturated colour, is as recognisable as a Greek vase. And, like a Greek vase, they were parodied. Well, how do these cards sell? Well, they sell very well, actually. Which types go better? The dirty ones better than the clean ones. Do people ever complain to you about the dirty ones? Oh, no, never. They don't mind them? If they don't want them, they buy a view. Cheap and cheerful, postcards gave tourists an invaluable sense of place and gave intellectuals an even more invaluable sense of superiority. Would you like them?

22:39I've got a very funny sense of humour. I think it's all according to the person you send it to. The author George Orwell noted Comic Postcard's appearance of overpowering vulgarity and their general hideousness. But then Orwell didn't have to live in a world with Instagram influencers.

23:01It's hard to look at the era of the postcard and not feel a bit nostalgic. I'll write my final one. As the old phrase goes, Wish you were here.

23:23That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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