269. Question Time: Orban in person, Biden's fragility, and the subtle art of focus groups

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0:50Welcome to the Restus Politics Question Time with me, Mr. Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, we've got a very nice question here from Riannan, who's an American. Says she loves the Restus Politics US with Scaram, McChae and Cate Kay. But she feels that because of them, she worries that we've not been talking as much about America as we normally do. I think that's probably because we've got our own elections going on now, but she's got a fair point. She wants to know what our current take is on the American elections. Okay, well, I'd love to hear from you, but very quickly just a bit of an explainer from me.

1:23The opinion polls in America are absolutely astonishing. First thing is that it's a knife edge. And this is a sort of thing that's been happening over the last few years in American politics. The Republicans, the Democrats are getting closer and closer. If you go back in time, go back 50, 60, 70 years. There are often periods where one party would have the presidency for many terms. And you'd often have a situation in which they would dominate the Senate or Congress, you would get 60 Senate seats, 59 Senate seats. We're now in a world in which, particularly over the last 30 years, the president often loses control of the Senate in Congress.

2:07And where even if a party wins the Senate, they're celebrating if they're up at sort of 51 to 49. So it's an on -and -eye edge. Second thing is that Biden is presiding over a Democratic party, which is changing very, very dramatically. It's very much a party of the cities and the Republicans are very much a party now outside the metropolitan areas, rural areas. Biden is also, for the first time, unlike any previous Democratic president, doing a bit better, holding on to certain groups like older white men. Now, why is that strange? That's strange because normally, look at Britain, look at Europe, you'd expect older white men to be voting right wing and to be going over towards Trump.

3:00In a complete inversion of our expectations, Trump is now picking up a surprising number of Hispanic voters, and African American voters, and particularly picking up young voters. So there's a very interesting phenomenon going on, which is that Trump has almost certainly taken a lot of the seats, a lot of the states in the South, all the way from Florida across to Arizona, which used to be swing states, now look partly from Hispanic voters, so they're going to go over to Trump. That means the election is going to come down basically to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and in those three states, the question will be turnout.

3:41If Biden wins comfortably, it will be because some of these voter groups, for example, young black men, who say they want to vote Trump will not turn out. That will lead to a comfortable Biden victory in those states. If on the other hand, he can mobilize them and mobilizing them is weird because he doesn't have a ground machine. The Republicans never had a ground machine for mobilizing young black voters into Detroit because traditionally they always voted left if they voted at all. Anyway, he doesn't build a ground machine, he's doing it all on social media, but he is by far the best known figure in American politics.

4:17He's on everybody's social media every day, and the question is, is that going to lead to turnout? Anyway, over to you. Since we interviewed Anthony Scaramucci on leading quite a long time ago now, I have quoted him to people so many times because he gave that very compelling analysis to why he thought Trump couldn't win. I noticed this week on the rest his politics US, I sensed a bit of doubt in him for the first time. He was still saying, ah, I think Joe will do in the end, but he sounded more doubtful. I think he was worried about the the debate was going. I wonder if this question from William Hogg might be behind some of the some of the reasoning.

4:54William Hogg, I'm no fan of Trump, I think the man lacks some more or compass, but why is it that you both don't seem to give enough attention to Biden's physical state? It's striking that he often resembles my late grandfather in latter part of his life when he was suffering from Alzheimer's. Often seems unaware of his surroundings, what's going around him. There was a clip of Maloney at the G7 where Biden did look like he was just wandering off and Maloney went sort of grabbed his arm and pulled him back. I think Biden, look, he is old. There's no doubt about that. I've told you before about this thing with the way that he walks is actually an old kind of knee injury as much as, you know, the unsteady in the Sonny's feet.

5:32But and you've said, you've said to be fair to you, you've said for a long time, you thought that this age thing for Biden and energy was going to become a big deal. But if you just think about last week, he had to be in America governing, doing some pretty big things and all sorts of different issues. He then had to go overseas. He then went back to and Cateché and Scare and which he talked about this other rather movingly. Go back to kind of be with his son Hunter when he was in trouble in court, then get back on the plane and go to the G7. Where I notwithstanding the moment where he walked away, I thought he looked okay.

6:10But there's no doubt the ages is an issue that you're right that the Democrats have always been pretty good at the get out of the mobilization. I suspect the Republicans will have a better operation on the ground this time than they did last time Trump for it. Trump has set up surprisingly few campaign headquarters. I mean, it is very, very weird how little ground operation he has and how little ground operation he had when he won in 2016. The biggest you though that seems to matter for Trump voters at the margins are the key swing voters that they need. In the background, of course, are all these big kind of cultural things, a cultural war going on between the two sides on many issues.

6:48So a very large number of Trump voters when you ask them say that they feel that the world is basically prejudiced against white men. So they feel that there's racism against white people, they feel that there's sexism against men. So there's a lot of that in the background. And of course, on the Democratic side, a lot of people voting because they're very, very angry about the Supreme Court's decision on abortion. But the people that are going to make the difference at the moment look like they're people who are voting on Costa living. And that's where you can see in focus groups, young black men saying, look, I don't like Trump.

7:25I agree he's a racist. I agree he treats women badly. But to be honest, I felt better off in my pocket when he was in office than I do now. And this is a couple of things that's very difficult. Obviously, you and I are passionately anti -Donald Trump. You know, we're not open on this. But we also have an obligation to try to be open about problems here. And I often get attacked for this by my friends in the US who say, how dare you say that people are feeling Costa living pain, how dare you say Biden's too old, because that's playing into Trump's hands. But the truth is it cannot make sense for the Democrats to now think that they can campaign on the economy.

8:04Because it doesn't work to say to people, this is a Rishi Sunak's mistake too, to say to people, you may feel worse off, but let me point to some macroeconomic indicator that shows that inflation is down or the economy is growing or employment is up. It doesn't work. I mean, if you feel you're paying more for your groceries, you're paying more for gas, it doesn't matter the politician. But Biden does have a pretty powerful economic storage hotel. I don't think he should give up on that. But I think where you're right is that he needs perhaps to be speaking more to the actual reality of people's feelings about the state of their life.

8:37And that's definitely true of Sunak. I mean, that's the thing he doesn't get at all. Well, so my question I guess has to few is should he not, given that most of the polls suggest that if you ask people who's better on the economy, Trump wins by quite a long margin, he needs to move the argument on to why Trump is a fundamental threat to democracy. Yeah. Well, and also because of that, a fundamental threat to American standard of living, Americans place in the world, etc. Now, I think there's something in that similar question, Lord Bird, I didn't know that John Bird was in the House of Lords.

9:10Founder of the big issue, I'm sure you're a regular reader, I am, as founder of the big issue, I wanted to ask with 50 % of people who have cardiac illnesses suffering from food poverty, according to the BMA, do you think here, Starmel will make his dismantling of poverty central to his administration? Well, I hope so. But I've said before that I don't think that poverty is central to the debate at the moment as it should be. You know, if you go back to the manifesto launch and you and I both read the manifesto in full, you would definitely know that Labour wants to tackle poverty, but I don't think you could say that it was central to the way that they were projecting the manifesto.

9:51It's not, and I think it's a great pity, and there was an interview which I'm, which we're streeting gave, which, you know, got a bit of play on social media where he was asked, you know, why he was being supportive of pensioners and not young people in poverty, and he gave what sounded, maybe he regrets it, but like a pretty right wing answer. What did he say? He said, if I was, I'd go out and get a job, and it was a little bit like when I was infusing him and trying to talk about prisoners, and I think I raised the homeless, he said that he would prefer the money going into education and health.

10:29And I can understand that, but I think Labour's missing a huge opportunity to be a party that represents better values, hope, and that they could do it in a way that didn't damage them in the election, might even help them. Let's imagine you're appealing to somebody like me who's the kind of old sort of center left conservative. I would want to feel that I was voting for a party that said it's disgraceful and disgusting that there are people living in such extreme poverty in Britain, that there are this number of homeless that prisoners are treated in such a horrible way. These are things which are quite cheap to address.

11:10And an incoming Labour Administration should be able to put that at the centre of its moral mission and project. It wouldn't cost that much money, and I think it would sit very well with traditional Labour values. I think some of those things would cost a lot of money, but I agree with you, and also when we talked to Bridget Phillips on a leading this week, she rightly pointed out that Sure Star, which I think was one of our most successful policies, I'd forgotten this, but she was right, we proposed that and implemented it in government, not as a kind of, so we said vaguely in the manifesto, we will try to tackle child poverty, and then the programme followed.

11:47But I just feel that it goes back to the point I made on the main podcast about apathy as well and turnout. I think that if people feel they're not central to the election debate that they hear and follow, and bearing in mind, as we said yesterday, that lots of people are just ducking out of the debate completely, then it makes them less likely to go out and vote. And so I think that people who are living in poverty have to be given some hope that the next government is going to put them centre stage in terms of its priorities. It's interesting, it's an argument that would appeal to the rightist, when it's the left.

12:17When we interviewed Alex Chork, who suggested the Secretary Conservative Justice Secretary on leading, he produced something which I think he called the Visiting French Minister test, which is, would I be proud to show a visiting French minister? And the answer is you would not be proud to show them the homelessness on the streets of London. You would not be proud to show them the type of poverty people living in. I mean, part of being a serious economy, a serious country, a beacon to the world, an example of what a most vulnerable marginalised the poorest best. Alex, a question from Joe Waldoch.

12:53You both told us what your father's did for living, but the question was about parents. So what about your mothers? And before I get on to that, I noticed that in a tribute to your father, maybe because it was father's day yesterday, you finally decided to put on your northern vet shirt, which we don't often see. In fact, you're often you're mocking me and I'm wearing a sort of version of the same thing. What is it, Alex, that finally has led you to embrace your father's dress sense on the rest of politics? You're right. It is definitely a northern vet shirt. I'll tell you what it is. I, as you know, whenever I travel, I never, ever, ever, ever put luggage in the hold.

13:27Yes. I went to Australia for several weeks with a suit carrier and a wheelie, a short, small wheelie bag. So what I do with shirts, if I'm going away for more than a few days, I wear, I take shirts that are less likely to crease in a suit carrier that's going on. So this material is just better for not, but I'm glad that you saw some deep paternal. Can I just push the deep paternal one more time? I know I'm not your therapist, but when we were talking about it, just, just offline, not not being in a few, but just chatting. You said you remembered your father being sort of spat it with cow poo and coming in and his chepcher and you haven't decided to live a life as a rural vet handling large animals.

14:10You've chosen to live a life more absorbed with ideas and newspapers and you live in a city. Tell me about that. Why did having a father who was there struggling with unwieldy cows and getting spat out with cow poo not lead you to think what I want to do is embrace the remote rural existence? Well, I do notice, Roy, and I think our feminist listeners will notice these. You've taken a question about mothers to talk about fathers. I'll answer this before I then talk about my mother and what she did with her life. I think the answer is that I was absolutely useless at science. I used to love going out with my dad and his rounds.

14:47I did. I used to love that, particularly when we lived in New Yorkshire because it was so beautiful. He was a big farm animal. He was Harvey Smith's vet, the famous show jumper. We used to love going to see him and he liked being out on the big farms. I worked on a farm most of the every summer holiday I worked on. And did you like it? I loved it. I loved it. The only thing that really did put me off is that I got then and I still get terrible hay fever. The hay season is absolutely horrific. No, I loved it. I loved it. And I would love to have been a vet in some ways, but I was very, very good at school, apart from at physics, chemistry, and biology, the three things that you need.

15:27Now, on my mother, I don't know about your mother, my mother, when she got married to my dad and when my brother Donald came along, she just decided that was going to be her rolling life. She did what the Paul Dakers of this world thinks that all women should do is she basically became a full -time wife and mother and we're hopefully all the better for that. But in terms of what she had done, she grew up on a farm, my uncle's farm where I used to work, she was born in that farm. And this is an remote part of Scotland, is that right? It's in Earshire, a place called Moscow. near Kolmana. And with this little river, this little stream going through, which they call the River Volga.

16:08And so she was born there, grew up there, worked on the farm quite a lot. Only time that she ever kind of left there was to go and work. She works in London hotel, kind of cleaning, and all that sort of stuff and what have you. But then when she got married to my dad, and also being a vet's wife, there is a part of you that has to be working on the practice as well. So that was my mum. What was your mum? So my mother was a GP's daughter, father was a doctor. She went to Oxford in the 1950s. My mother's down staying with me in London at moment. I hope she is now old enough to not be embarrassed to hear.

16:48She's now 88 years old. We walked probably about three miles yesterday through the streets of London with my 88 year old mother and my two little children. So thank goodness touching wood all over the place. She's in very good form. But she went to Oxford. She worked for television whales. She jumped in a land rover and drove from London to Kuala Lumpur in the late 1950s. For television whales? We have worked for television whales. What should we do for television whales? She produces her and the way she describes it is those were the glory days of television. She was travelling first class on the train up and down to whales.

17:25She loved the Welsh producers very interesting Welsh language. Then she moved to Kuala Lumpur. She became an advertising executive in Malaysia. Then she taught at the University of Malaysia to agricultural economics, relating almost to your dad. Met my father came back to London and then we moved back to Malaysia and then Hong Kong where again she was different forms of academic. She ended up being the head of Hong Kong University Business School. Blimey, she's got a much longer adult CV than my mum. Yeah. In a way you wouldn't really believe it if you met her. She's also incredibly interested in clothes and shoes.

18:06She's very laid back. She loves doing her tapestry and reading trashy novels on the sofa. She's also somebody I don't know. She's a sort of counter example to the way that we're told to live our lives. She's somebody who took absolutely no exercise at any point in her entire existence. And consequently age of 88 is really fit and well. No, she's amazingly fit for 88. No doubt about that. And I think her argument is she didn't wear her knees out unlike Joe Biden by doing whatever he was doing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, all right. Quick break and then we'll have more questions.

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19:52Now here's a question. I love this question. Thank you, Louis Hoskin. Why do political journalists think that Voxpops are useful? They nearly always interview people in a high street in the middle of the day. It never's released to a completely unrepresented sample, mostly old people who bang on about immigrants. Why do they do it? I love hearing the voice of the people when I'm out and about. But I hate Voxpops on the television. I absolutely hate them. Presumably as to their anxious that too much of the commentary sounds like it's a bunch of fancy people living in a little bubble in London, sharing their kind of liberal views and they're hoping somehow that they're going to get another voice into the conversation.

20:35Let's be honest, the media analysis of this campaign so far, Nigel Farage has been the third most -covered political figure. This is the leader of a party with zero MPs. My beef with Voxpops is that essentially they present them as, let we went to Stafford to find out what you think. Well, three people on a high street doesn't represent you, which is the totality of the country. And they're right. They say, listen, they go and they probably talk to 20 people and they have to get one person who says there's some one person who says there, it's utterly formulaic, it's absolutely pointless and I wish they'd stop them.

21:15Getting people in a studio or covering a focus group different, but Voxpops, 20 seconds to say, I think, Rishi Sooner is a twat. I think they're all the same. I'm not voting for any of them. It's utterly pointless. Please, please stop it. Very good. I like the idea of the focus group actually. Listen, just to how you used focus groups when you were in government. Oh, yeah. People strayed the phrase around, but what is the focus group and why do politicians use it? Well, in a campaign, what you do with the focus group, essentially, you recruit people, you might say, so at the moment, if I was running a focus group, what would I be interested in?

21:52How do I get somebody kind of a bit like you, wants to find reasons to vote Labour, but is holding back? Why are a lot of young people saying, I'm not voting Labour, I'm going to green or live them. So you send people out in the street, you find eight or nine people in the target group that you're thinking about. You get them in a room, you tell them that they are, you're going to talk about politics, you then warm them up. I mean, Philip Gold, who was my closest friend and he used to love doing focus groups. He was genuinely somebody who loved talking to people about politics. And he would always warm them up and say, what have you been doing today?

22:30Have you got any kids? What's your favourite football team? What's your favourite teleprogramme? Just get people chatting and it's amazing how very quickly people are all talking. And then you throw in the thing, we're going to talk about politics tonight and then you usually get, oh, good. But then you start to say, you know, what do you think? What have you noticed about the campaign? And it's very rare. I, I laterally became a bit too well -known, so I would get recognised. And so I used to have to then go and watch them through too. You think it would sit behind a two -way mirror and watch them.

23:01And, but I always got something out of it. I always got something out of it. There's something interesting here, isn't it, because it's about the fact that the really valuable stuff doesn't come from the 22nd or 45th snap shot, doesn't come from the poll. I think you're off from bits, a bit of a opinion polls. It's as though real truth emerges quite slowly through giving people space and time to debate, explore ideas, maybe change their opinion a bit, develop, and you're getting, I guess, into the nuance, there's aren't you. So it's the sort of third or fourth question. People start by saying they're all the same.

23:36Yeah. I think the other thing you can do is you can see which arguments work with people to persuade them. And often you can see that those arguments don't necessarily come from you hosting this or Philip Gould hosting it. They come from people talking across each other and talking to each other. But I'll give you an example. I mentioned on the main podcast, these four young lad's I met on the train coming out of the game in Berlin. And there was one of them, he started off, he really was just sort of taking the Mickey and he was quite funny, telling me he's a hero, he's marine lapen, and you know, stop the boat, stop the boat, stop the boat, see you're turning it all into sort of football chants and...

24:11We'll see a little drunk by any chance, I said. He might have had a few, he wasn't very drunk, he wasn't very drunk, he might have had a couple of beers, he wasn't very drunk, he was actually quite funny. Anyway, I then engaged in a proper, it was about half our journey. So it was like a focus group. It was four guys, four young guys who were, they really weren't stupid, they kind of knew, they knew about stuff, they knew who all the big characters were, they taught him that one point of one point, I said, I reckon the tourist should have stuck with DC, still have stuck with big DC, you know, as David Cameron.