This is the Guardian. Today, what to expect from a year where both America and the U. K will vote in hugely important elections. Well, it’s 2024. Happy New year. I hope you’ve had a chance to rest and recharge, because you’re going to need it. For the first time in more than 30 years, national elections in the UK and presidential elections in the US are likely to unfold in the same year. They might even be the same month on their own. Both are huge events that can dominate the news for months, that can have global ramifications. But when they coincide in an era of polarized voters, foreign interference, super realistic AI disinformation, brace yourself, things could get very messy. From the Guardian, I’m Michael Sarfi. Today in Focus 2024, a very big election year. Jonathan Friedland, you’re a Guardian columnist and the host of our brilliant sister podcast, Politics Weekly us. Can you begin by laying out what are we looking at this year? Well, 2024 is already on the schedule for an american presidential election. It is always the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It means you could tell the date now for an election in 100 years time. And we know an american presidential election of enormous significance is coming in November of this year because it is very likely to be a rematch of the incumbent president, Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump. And it’s pretty clear that Donald Trump has plans for his second term that will make the first term look like a clearing of the throat. We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country. He is talking about avoiding what he sees as the mistakes of his first term, where he allowed others to restrain him, and instead is promising. What if it was anywhere else in the world we would describe as an authoritarian power grab, and even serious places are referring to it as a kind of march towards dictatorship. We love this guy. He says, you’re not going to be a dictator. Are said no other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator. That sounds to me like that’s the US election. God help us. What about the UK? What do we have coming down the pike? So we don’t know the date of a british general election in the way that we do in America. And the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, could go for an election even a year from now, in January 2025. Most people don’t think he’ll do that and instead go sometime in 2024 and this too is a really momentous election in the sense that it will give a chance to, and many expect will deliver on the end of what will have been 14 years of conservative led rule. And british politics does tend to go in these quite big cycles. You had 18 years of Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher and John Major. You then had 13 years of labor under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. We’ve since had what will be 14 years of conservative rule under and here you have to take a deep breath. David Cameron we have some deep and pressing problems. Theresa May following the referendum, we face a time of great national change. Boris Johnson the time has come to act, to take decisions, to give strong leadership and to change this country for the better. Liz Truss I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy. Rishi Sunak I will make it my utmost priority to bring our party and our country together. And we’ve all seen what that era has entailed in terms of political instability and chaos with the Brexit era, but also before then with austerity and the running down of major public services. So this does feel like and all the polls suggest it is going to be one of those pivot years and they don’t come round in the british calendar all that often. Which is why 2024 is shaping up to be a big and significant year. And how likely are these two elections, us UK to overlap? They could normally british prime ministers do not like to go to elections in the autumn. There is a sort of unhappy record of governments losing elections when they go in the autumn. Almost superstitious tales apply about voters don’t like canvases knocking on their door when it’s dark and it’s dark in October or November. Cold weather was always thought to deter Labour voters because they were less likely to have cars. Interesting. Some of these bits of old conventional wisdom may have faded. Rain was always seen to be better for the Conservatives than for labor and Labor’s big watershed landslides. The two were in the summer and they won again in 2005, again in a summer election that was slightly upended by Boris Johnson’s decision to go in midwinter in December of 2019 and win a thumping majority. But I think Sunat will be nervous about an autumn election. I think if it were to happen, it would probably be October rather than November. Other people are talking about May or June, which would be more conventional. But when you get governments who feel they are running out of luck and time, they often do then decide to also run out the clock in the hope that something will come up. You could imagine Sunak doing something similar. I think he would hold back from January 25 because it would mean campaigning through Christmas. That would make you extremely unpopular. So I think autumn is plausible. But if he’s looking at the weather and past precedent, he’d want to go in summer and just cross his fingers. I do love the idea that in this pivot year, the trajectory of our democracy could depend on whether it rains that day or not. But if the US and UK elections do overlap, I mean, would that be new? Has that ever happened before? The closest I can find, certainly in relatively recent memory, is the 1964 UK general election. This is after 13 years of one party. This is an entirely new set of men, new ideas, a new style of government, to borrow an american phrase, which was held on the 15 October 1964, which would have been, by my guess, two to three weeks before the US presidential election, which gave a mandate to Lyndon Johnson. Mr. Johnson carried his case to the people, ignoring pleas from his staff and the secret service. He tries to shake every hand that reaches for his. There would have been leaflets going through the doors in Louisiana and Liverpool in that autumn. The other one that comes to mind is 1992, where I covered both elections. And they were really very close because it was the spring UK general election in 92, I have no doubt that the conservative party and the conservative government will have five more years of work in office. Thank you for being here today. Thank you. And around the same time, Bill Clinton in the United States was wrapping up the nomination to be the Democrat who would then beat George Bush, the elder George W Bush’s father, in that autumn. Today we celebrate the mystery of american renewal. So, 92 was a big election year in both countries, and again, there was overlap in the shape of those campaigns and even between the two campaign teams. In a way, I was going to ask, I mean, when these two elections do coincide, do you see an interaction? Does their sort of gravitational pull impact on each other? I think it does. It’s almost always one way traffic. Usually it’s the Brits who are influenced by what goes on in the United States. And 1964 is a great example of that. Although the election, in some ways, that was really influencing the UK election of 64 was the american presidential election of 1960, it was the Kennedy era that massively influenced the campaign that was fought in Britain in 64. It wasn’t that Harold Wilson was trying to cop be Lyndon Johnson, who was the occupant of the White House when Harold Wilson, Labour leader, was trying to become prime minister. Rather, he had his eye on John F. Kennedy, the A very charismatic president who had been assassinated less than a year before that UK general election. The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of our time. This was before I was born, but I remember my father talking about the excitement around Wilson, the notion that he was going to be the British Kennedy. And Wilson really cultivated that. He made a point of saying that he represented a novelty because he had been born that century. Wilson was saying, the Americans have done it. They’ve passed the baton on to a new generation. That was the language of Kennedy and I, Harold Wilson, am going to be the same. I’m going to be that new generation. To the point where he visited the United States in 1963 leading up to that 64 election, and went on one of the big american tv shows, Meet the Press, amazingly still on air. If the Labor Party comes into power in Britain in the next election, as many political observers are predicting, Mr. Wilson will be the prime minister. Now we’re ready for the first question. Lawrence E. Spivak, permanent member of the Meet the press and borrowed from the rhetoric of JFK to say he too was pushing towards that new frontier, except in Britain rather than the United States. If these two elections do clash, if they do feed off each other, what’s that likely to look like this year? Besides sort of campaign slogans and motifs and themes? It’s often personnel and techniques. Again, it tends to be one way where american political consultants who’ve done well in the United States come over and share their wisdom with british political parties. The other way that we’re likely to see echoes, I think, are not on the conservative side. I cannot see Rishi Sunak going very far to emulate sort of Donald Trump in a british general election, although you do see some people on the right of the Tory party flirting with Trumpism, no doubt about that. I mean, he could get himself indicted on a few charges. Maybe it would help. Maybe it would help Rishi Sunak, given the effect it’s had for Donald Trump. No, rather, it was going to be on the other side of the party divide. And that is the messaging from Keir Starmer. You talk to british labor people, they are very admiring of Joe Biden’s presidential record. I use those words because obviously they’re not going to try and emulate Joe Biden’s demeanor on the stump in which he is faltering and very much looks his age. So the best way to get something done, if it holds near and dear to you that you like to be able to anyway. But the idea of a record of bread and butter achievement in jobs investment, particularly aimed at sort of green technology. There are a lot of Labour people who think, shame about the messenger, but love the message. Then they will be looking to the Biden reelection campaign themes a lot as they shape their message for this year’s election. Elections now come with concerns about sabotage, about foreign influence, increasingly the use of AI to produce deepfakes to mislead people. Do you think the fact that these two elections coincide also heightens the risk for both of them? Yeah, I think there probably is a risk. We know there are foreign actors who eye these elections very closely, russia famously, but there are others, and there will be perhaps some effort to, who knows, spread some disinformation that works in both places. With AI, there’s all kinds of things you can do, and you could imagine disinformation with fake video. If you can think of it, there’s people around who will be working right now to do it. And there’s this convention on both sides of the pond where british politicians don’t comment on american politics in a partisan way and vice versa, though obviously there have been exceptions on both sides. Do you think that becomes a harder convention to uphold when both countries are going to the polls? Because you can just imagine Kirstarmer being asked what he thinks of some outrageous comment Donald Trump has said, and he missteps slightly, says something awkward or inflammatory, and it rebounds all the way back into the US. Yes, I think that is a danger. And my guess is that Stalmer will be very aware of that. I mean, you can imagine Joe Biden will play a very straight bat when asked about Sunak and Starmer, I’m sure, because he’s been around a long time, and those norms, those conventions mean something to him. Trump, remember, the only thing that matters is whether the person involved has been nice about him. And so when he’s asked about some hideous dictator with an awful human rights record, he will say, well, he always says very nice things about me, as if that ends the matter. It’s good to have a good relationship with Putin and Xi and all these people. They have lots of nuclear weapons, and Kim and Jong un, I had a good relationship with. He’s a tough, smart guy, and he will know anything that Kirstarmer has said about him and he will take against him, regardless of the conventions. To hell with those. So I could imagine a situation in which Starmer falls over himself to be very qualified and careful and polite. But the problem they have, of course, is that the Internet never forgets. And so there will be a track record of remarks either by Kerma himself or by Labour from benches. Labour people have many, many reasons why they really, really don’t want Trump to win. But that will be one of them. Once the campaigns do get underway in earnest, what do you think the battleground issues will be in both, and will there be much overlap in those? The economy, I think, will be central in both because it always is. There’s two other issues which are absolutely related. So in America, a huge issue is going to be around the personalities of these two people. Can we really go back to Donald Trump, given all the psychodrama there was in the Trump era? That will be a huge part of the democratic campaign. And in Britain, the analog issue will be, they’ve been there too long, it’s time for a change. And all of the chaos of, again, of the last period, of Liz Truss, of Boris Johnson, of partygate, enough will be their message. And in a way, Biden’s message will also be sort of enough. You had enough last time of Trump. Let’s not go back to him. Both countries are now pretty routinely described as polarized. There’s a sense that voters on the right and left are pretty rusted on. Not much is going to change the way that they vote. But both countries do also have this set of people who nobody quite knows who they’re going to vote for. They’re the ones that both sides are fighting over. Do you think in both countries we’re talking about a similar set of people, these undecideds? That’s a really interesting question, what the profile is of undecideds. There is one thing, I suppose, which would be common to both, and that is the notion these are likely to be people economically in the middle, but they’re feeling the squeeze. They’re struggling with inflation, for example. That said, there are obviously huge differences, and the cultures of the countries are so different, which is one reason why often that transatlantic trade in political know how and even political personnel often does go wrong. But, yeah, I think you probably could have a go at sketching out the independent voter or the undecided voter in both countries, and they would have things in common even if they weren’t identical. You coming up, will this year mark the retreat of far right nationalism or its greatest triumph? Johnny, the approach of the republican party to this election seems to be to sort of lean into the extremism and chaos of Trump, whether because that’s what the party establishment wants or because that’s the sort of will that Trump has imposed on them. Do you see echoes in the strategy that the Tories are adopting ahead of the election, not of having a leader who may end up in jail, but just the willingness to flirt with ideas that might have been seen as radical even far right a decade ago? Yeah, I think in both cases, they have become prisoners in some ways of their activists, not their voters, or even really in some ways their members, but their activists. In the United States, that capture is enshrined in the primary system, where it is to party supporters, but often only the activists who actually go out and vote, who decide who the nominee is. And this is why Trump has this enormous advantage. Those activists. Are not swayed by the things that sway regular people. Their politics are just way further away from the centre than a good chunk of the electorate are. Ditto in Britain. Party politicians who are ambitious don’t need to curry favor with voters because they sit in safe seats or solid states in the United States. And therefore, the only people who they really need to climb up the greasy pole are their own activists. And so you see that where all these republican candidates who are officially challenging Donald Trump dare not say anything too critical of Trump, because they’ll antagonize the hardcore party base, not the country where Trump remains unpopular, but the party base. Similarly, in Britain, if you’re in the conservative party, the more like Sue Ella Bravoman you are, the more you will endear yourself to the kind of people who turn up to party association meetings, and the more out of step you’ll become with the voters in the country. The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming. So that capture by party activists is common to both. I think it’s more extreme, it’s more far gone in the american case, but it exists in both. One other parallel here, between these two elections that I think it’s worth remarking on is that we live in this era of crises, of widespread disillusionment with politics, with the system, in both countries. And yet in both places, the center left is sticking with moderation, holding fast to the norms of the system, while the right is seeking to different degrees to blow it up and feed that public frustration. And I wonder if you think this year, in that way, is a kind of democratic experiment, one that could blow up in the faces of either side in the UK or the US. Something really important is at stake in 2024, and that, in a way, is a transatlantic referendum on nationalist populism. Donald Trump, obviously, is the epitome of nationalist populism, but the conservative party have flirted with that in really quite major ways in most of the last decade, certainly in the Brexit period, Sunak has not decided whether he’s all in on that. 1 minute he’s echoing Suella Bravman, the next minute she’s out of his cabinet for the second time. Suella Bravman has lost her job as home secretary. It is almost done that before, I think we think it is unprecedented. So it’s harder to read with him on the centre left, as you say, there is a gamble to stand up for, in a way, quite old fashioned. And I would even say conservative with a small c norms. I mean, Joe Biden and Kirstarmer are both quite conservative figures. They believe in the way things are done and they believe in conventions and respect and civility and democratic norms and rule of law and all those things that are seen now and often pilloried by the populist right as the establishment or the elite or the blob and so on. If Biden and Starmer are in power in the White House and in number ten this time next year, that will signal a huge defeat and possibly trigger a retreat for nationalist populism. Other populists the world over will look at that and they’ll think this has run its course. I think the Republicans themselves will get the message. We’ve tried it and it’s failed. They will say if, however Trump succeeds and if somehow Starmer is kept out of number ten, well, people will then draw the conclusion that this is really the movement of the 21st century. You’ve talked about the economy as being a decisive factor, perhaps the age of one or both candidates in the US. But I wonder if you think that events might also play a role. We’re talking as the war in Gaza continues. I mean, do you think that these bigger external shocks, the things that seem so important to us now, may play a role when people go to vote, potentially in both countries in October or November, those shocks risk playing a bigger role in the United States, just simply because the US is a bigger player. What it does matters more. I don’t imagine there are many voters in Britain who believe that the british prime minister could have made all the difference in the war between Israel and Hamas. But american voters really can legitimately feel that, because the american president is so influential over what happens there. And Joe Biden really put himself out on a limb. He went strong early in supporting Israel. The United States stands with Israel. We will not ever fail to have their back. And held the line by opposing calls for a ceasefire, antagonizing younger voters and arab american voters, maybe even as well. Not the same, but muslim american voters, to the point where you look at a state like Michigan, a must win state for the Democrats, very large arab american community, that could make all the difference in Britain. We’ve got some Labour Party activists who will be really angry with Kirstarmer’s refusal to back those international calls for a ceasefire. While I understand calls for a ceasefire at this stage, I do not believe that it is the correct position now. And it’s possible that some of those voters, young people again perhaps don’t vote. It won’t have that huge forward thrust that it has in America, because I don’t think many will think that Starmer is the one to blame for what goes on, whereas there are Americans who will absolutely say that about Joe Biden. But as you say, events are unpredictable. There could be something else that we’re not even thinking about that can change things all over again. I mean, that is true. Nobody knows what the world’s going to look like by October or November. But when you lay out what you think will be the decisive issues, do you get a kind of gut instinct on who might win in both of these countries? And, yes, I’m asking you to predict this. Well, tempting though that invitation is, I’m one of those people who really did learn my lesson in 2016. I don’t see how anybody could make a prediction, particularly in the american case. And that is because, and I think it’s underplayed how unbelievably close it was. Ron Brownstein, brilliant political demographer, says that it comes down out of four states, not even six or five that we used to talk about. It really is down to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia. And we know from last time, famously, that phone call where Trump said, find me 11,000 votes. I only need 11,000 votes, fellas. I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. That’s all it was to turn things around in Georgia. You just think of some of these third party candidates, obscure figures, some of them, they could grab 2000 votes here, 5000 votes there. That could be enough. I don’t know how anybody could predict that. The british one, I’m not going to make a prediction, but it’s superficially looks much easier to call the polling, well, it’s neck and neck in the United States. It’s huge. The lead for labor in the UK. And you also just do look at some of these analyses which say this isn’t just going to be a win for labor, it could be an absolute crushing landslide that might even dwarf 97. Instinctively, I can’t quite see those kind of numbers that are being talked about. Majority of 350 or something. That seems at the wilder end. But like I say, I have foresworn predictions, tempting though they sometimes are. Okay, so you won’t predict the result, but what about the tone of the campaigns? Do you have any sense of what we, political consumers, ordinary people, will be facing over the next few months? I think it’s going to be extremely vicious in the US when you have a candidate in the Donald Trump who is vowing his words. I will be your retribution. In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution. Not going to let this know. I think it’s going to be dark and toxic there in the UK. It’s interesting because presuming Rishi Sunak stays as leader, and I say that just because you never want to bet against the conservatives capacity for self destruction and regicide, you just have two people there who aren’t themselves instinctively. MudSlinging types. I think the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, the Tories under Boris Johnson in 2019 were prepared to go a bit lower. I don’t think they are quite that type. But look, there will be people around them, operatives who will want to use deniable messaging on social media platforms and so on. And there was actually an example from labor that was pretty much a low blow, which was. Was a message that said something like, Rishi Sunak doesn’t believe in strong punishment for child abusers, do you agree? Which relied on quite a stretch of the factual record to get to that. And Labour never backed down from it. And, yeah, we stand by this. If Rishi Sunak really wanted to stop child sex offenders from staying out of jail, he could do something about it, but he is not doing anything about it. And the other thing to say about Starmer is he’s more ruthless than you know. He doesn’t convey huge mechismo, but talk to people who’ve played five or five football with him, they’ll tell you he is a bruising, ruthless figure who is very, very, very determined to win. And maybe that will mean he will be prepared to greenlight some below radar messages that others would have thought that he might not have had it in him to do. I think perhaps he does have it in know, don’t count out, in some ways, both of them, because Sunak will be desperate as well. And even if he gets used to losing, he won’t want to be the man to suffer the greatest political defeat in UK history, which some are forecasting. Given all that, he won’t hold back. No. And he may not get another go after this one. Johnny. For people who are sick of politics, sick of elections, the bad news is it’s actually a year of many of them all around the world. There’s an election in South Africa, in Indonesia, in Russia. I know who I have my money on there. And also one in India, which is the biggest election on earth. One statistic is that countries making up 50% of the world’s gdp will be going to the polls this year. So potentially, it’s a year in which the world looks very different by the end. I think you’re right to say the world could look very different, and I think that’s true even if there were only one election, if the US election goes the way it could, a second Trump presidency, given the warnings how explicit he is about what he wants to do, the meaning of that for the world should not be know. He would not hesitate to cut off Ukraine, give a green light thereby to China to invade Taiwan. If people are concerned about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza because Biden hasn’t restrained Israel enough, don’t hold your breath with Donald Trump because he will be more of the same. So I think the stakes are really high. It’s a cliche now. Every american presidential candidate always says the coming election is the most important of his or her lifetime. I think it’s not a stretch about 2024. People should brace themselves. It’s a really important year. I mean, the only thing worse than a year full of elections is, I guess, a year with none of them. Yeah, exactly. The 50% of the world you’ve talked about, it doesn’t include Russia, but a lot of those places make up the democratic world. We’ve got to be grateful for that because that is not an expanding set. Countries with democratic elections. And also remember, a category of country where there have democratic elections, and yet there are attempts to shrink the democratic space and not necessarily to heed the democratic verdict. That, after all, is the project of Donald Trump. He wanted to ignore the election result of November 2020. If he is returned to power. What is to say that the, to put it very dramatically, the next election isn’t the last election? So just add that to the list of reasons why 2024 really matters. Well, Johnny, on that note, happy new year and thank you for talking to us. Happy New Year, Michael. That was Jonathan Friedland, who hosts politics Weekly Us, which you can find wherever you listen to today in focus. In the weeks ahead, the show will be recording live from the US as republicans begin voting in their party’s presidential primaries, which are shaping up to be a coronation for Donald Trump if he can stay on the ballots and out of jail. Johnny’s show is politics weekly us. Subscribe to it in your podcast app. And that is it for Today Day. This episode was produced by Ned Carter Miles and Sammy Kent. Sound design was by Rudy Zagadlo. The executive producer was Phil Maynard. And we’re back with you tomorrow.