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There are half a million elected offices in the United States, and the presidency is just one of them. This week on "The Downballot," co-hosts David Nir and David Beard revisit why they started the show in the first place: to cast a spotlight on those other 499,999 races. If you're a progressive feeling understandably depressed and/or scared right now, it's more important than ever to remember we can still have a huge impact further down the ticket—and there's lots of reason to think that, whatever happens with the race for the White House, Democrats can score major victories elsewhere. And the more seats we win, the firmer our bulwark against fascism.
Indeed, two of America's most important allies showed us just that over the past week. The Davids recap monumental elections in the United Kingdom and France that saw voters across the spectrum reject the far right. The results, though, look very different. The U.K. just ushered in a massive majority for the center-left Labour Party for the first time in 14 years, while France's parliament is now split between three major blocs that themselves have internal divisions. What comes next is anyone's guess, but we can at least say that extremism and xenophobia failed to carry the day.
Hello and welcome, I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. "The Downballot" is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. You can subscribe to "The Downballot" wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
Well, it's certainly been an eventful time in politics, both here and abroad.
It really has, and if you are a progressive who is feeling depressed, scared or just wary about the future, we are going to talk about the many, many opportunities that we have to enact positive change in this country, regardless of what happens in November at the top of the ticket. There are a lot of reasons not to give up hope, and that is going to be the centerpiece of our discussion to open this week's show. And then we are going to head across the pond to discuss some much brighter electoral news from two extremely important countries that are both major allies of the US.
France and the UK both held elections and both saw the far right get utterly trampled. As always, we have a lot to talk about, so let's get rolling.
There's obviously a topic in politics in the United States that has been on everyone's mind for the last couple of weeks. And it's a topic that we simply aren't going to discuss here on "The Downballot". But I wanted to talk about why we're not talking about it.
It has been kind of strange because we are now in July of an even-numbered year with a presidential election on the ballot. And yet that presidential race has managed to almost completely blot out the sun when it comes to downballot elections. Obviously presidential races always take up the lion's share of attention, but I've never seen something like this happen when we're this close to an election day.
And when we have so many important close races that are gonna be on the ballot, that are going to determine how power is distributed in this country. But I want to emphasize, this is why we started this program in the first place. This is why we called it "The Downballot".
This is why Daily Kos elections has done the work that it's done for two decades now. Just because the presidential race is taking up all of the oxygen doesn't mean that these races still aren't going forward. In fact, they are more important than ever.
And it's all the more important to remember that there are so many other elections to focus on. And if you are trying to rally the troops, if you are trying to make sure your base doesn't just get completely depressed and sit on their hands and stay at home in November, then you got to push the importance of these downballot races. And we keep seeing polling, for instance, in a lot of these Senate races, including some of the most difficult in the reddest states, that show Democrats really competitive.
We have seen so many signs over and over that there might actually be a divergence between our fortunes at the top of the ticket and further down. Obviously, we've talked about special elections to death, and those showed Democrats doing quite well. We have seen incredible grassroots fundraising enthusiasm for so, so many candidates.
We've talked about that too. Folks like John Tester and Sherrod Brown are raising insane sums of money, but not just them. Also folks in races that are much further down the ballot.
So really, it behooves us as progressives and as Democrats not to get completely hung up on one single race when there's so much else to fight for and so much evidence that those fights are by no means over. I will never forget 2022. I was very depressed heading into election day.
I really thought that there was a strong chance Democrats were gonna get clobbered, that we would face the usual midterm curse and that democracy was really going to wane after that. When we had all of these crazy election deniers, for instance, running for secretary of state and a whole lot of swing states. And that election completely threw us all for a loop.
It was one of the most buoying experiences I have ever had. I took so much strength from that. And I also took a lot of humility from that.
I was wrong about what democratic chances were. Ever since, I have felt way less certain about what I know and what I can predict about elections. But I gotta say, at the same time, you can't just chicken little.
You can't just conclude that because one race is going poorly, everything else will as well. We have to stay focused on all of these downballot races. I want to remind folks, it's an astounding number.
There are, in the United States, 500,000 elected officials, half a million elected offices. That's probably way too many, but the reality is that's what we've got. And they're not all on the ballot in November, but a hell of a lot of them will be.
And those are the ones we have to focus on, we have to keep in mind, and we can't let just one single race, as important as it is, override the other 499,999.
Yeah, and I want to pick up your point about uncertainty, because I think everyone's feeling very uncertain, very concerned, understandably. And the reality is it's not in either of our control, whether or not Joe Biden stays in the race and is the nominee and goes to November, or not, it's not probably in any of our listeners' control, unless we have some very influential listeners I don't know about. The reality is we're all just going to live with other people's decisions in that area.
And so that is just uncertainty, and we have to live with that. But that doesn't mean that there aren't things that people can do, all the regular things in terms of money and volunteering and all of that stuff. But also there's a lot of other races where all of that's not going on.
And like you said, the presidential race is getting an enormous, enormous amount of coverage. That makes sense if you're a newspaper, if you're a regular news show, of course you're going to cover the presidential, you're going to cover it to death. It's an extremely, extremely important election.
But let's for a moment imagine the very realistic scenario that Donald Trump wins in November. Then what's also extremely, extremely important is who controls Congress. And I'll tell you right now that if Trump wins, control of the Senate is extremely, extremely uphill because of the nature of which seats are up and the fact that you would lose the vice presidential tiebreaker.
But looking at the House, that's a different story. All 435 seats are up. It's a very competitive playing field.
So while maybe not the most likely outcome, it's entirely possible that Trump could win the presidency, Republicans could win the Senate or take control of it via the vice presidential tiebreaker. But Democrats managed to pick up the very small number of seats they need to hold the House. And that's the difference between Republicans and Trump being able to pass whatever laws they want, reconciliation or not, I doubt Donald Trump is going to sit there and be like, oh well, I guess all my priorities are filibustered, oh well.
Whether or not Democrats will be able to say, no, you're not going to pass these laws, you are not going to be able to take complete control of the federal government, because we know they have control of the Supreme Court, or not. And that makes the House extremely important. It makes those 30 to 40 races extremely important.
We've seen candidates can win seats that Trump won in 2020. There are obviously plenty of seats that Biden won in 2020 that whoever wins them in 2024, Democrats at the House level can certainly hold and take back those seats. So the House is extremely winnable, regardless of what's going on at the top of the ticket.
And that's something that, you know, if you don't want to be thinking 100% of the time about the presidential race, is a great place to put your time, focus and energy. The same is true with a lot of state legislative races. You know, we've seen what Democrats have done in states like Michigan and Minnesota with the trifecta.
Those trifectas are up and at risk in this election, and those are extremely important races, ones that we'll definitely be continuing to talk about. So there's a ton of things to focus on and work towards and spend your time on that isn't doom spiraling the presidential race, because I understand the temptation. I've succumbed to it for certain periods of time in the past two weeks myself, but it's not helpful.
And if there's something you can do, by all means do it. But otherwise, there's a ton of other races and elections going on that need focus and attention. I want to make one last point, which is I think I could certainly imagine some people are responding to this to be like, oh, well, if Donald Trump wins, he's going to usher in fascism, and none of these elections are going to matter.
And I'm not going to say there's a 0% chance of that. I'm not going to dismiss that concern given what we've seen. But I also think you can't sort of doom yourself to that proactively.
If Donald Trump wins in November, what we need is as many Democrats in office as possible to fight back against the Republican Party and Trumpism and fascism. We don't need to give that up in July and be like, well, if Donald Trump wins, it's all over. It's not all over.
We fought through one Trump presidency. If we end up having to fight through a second Trump presidency, then that's the task at hand, and we're going to want every ally we can. So we need every Democrat possible to win in November to win, regardless of what's going on at the presidential level.
Yeah, Beard, I think you make such an excellent point there about not prematurely capitulating. You just can't do that. You have to fight to your last breath, and we got a lot of breath left.
We got a lot of fight left in us, and there are just so many opportunities for folks to get involved. A huge reason why I was drawn to downballot elections in the first place is precisely because one individual or small groups of individuals can have an outsized impact in a way that you simply can't have at the presidential level. Whether you're donating or volunteering or knocking doors or phone banking or simply telling your network and spreading the good word and raising awareness about these kinds of races, you can really do a lot with that.
And that is a very important form of power. And it's one that sadly progressives have really ignored for far too long. Now, I think things have gotten way, way better on that front.
I know that they have. We saw that particularly in the Trump era, this new focus on downballot elections. It's been one of the most heartening things in my life, but we can still go so much further.
And conservatives understand that this is where power is built, that you build it at the lower levels, that you build it in the States, you build up a bench, you take control wherever you can. Even when the races are unsexy and unglamorous, they have done a brilliant job with it. I have to hand it to them.
They really have. And it's only now, really, in the last six, eight years, that we have been fighting back at that level. And it's so, so, so important.
And we can't forget it. And if you want to build up a bulwark against this rising tide of fascism, focus on the downballot. That's all I have to say.
It can take any shape or form. You can have an impact. You will have an impact.
And you will find it rewarding.
And one last point I want to make about the House and also the Senate to a lesser degree is like we've seen, obviously, the betting money has moved towards Trump over the past couple of weeks. Who knows if that will remain the situation through November or not, but clearly that's what sort of the broad expectation has moved towards. But as a result, we've seen in the past that people sometimes will vote for divided government and they may vote expecting a certain presidential result.
We saw in 2016, I think a lot of people expected Hillary Clinton to win, and so in some cases voted more Republican downballot as a check on her. Unexpectedly, she did not win. It's very possible to imagine that some people who don't like Donald Trump, but expect him to win the presidential election might consider voting for Democratic candidates for the House and Senate as a check on Donald Trump.
That could be something we could see in these competitive House races. We could even see it in say Ohio or Montana where people are more willing to vote for Brown or Tester as a result of thinking Trump is more likely to be in the Oval Office. Obviously, that's a little bit speculative, but it's just to say that there's a lot of uncertainty around individual outcomes, and we shouldn't just be like, oh no, all is lost.
Electing John Tester or Sherrod Brown is really important regardless of the presidential.
I know things feel grim at the moment. I know things might feel hopeless, but there are really a lot of reasons for hope, a lot of reasons to stay involved, to stay in the game. I absolutely am not giving up.
I don't have it in me. I'm not built that way. I will fight to the absolute bitter end, and I hope that all of you will as well.
There has been recently some very good news on the electoral front overseas. While we have seen the far right gain in power in many, many countries, including our own, in two major countries, two of the United States' most important allies, Britain and France, we saw voters firmly put their foot down and say no to that movement of xenophobia and extremism and fascism. And we are going to recap those two elections right after the break.
So we just wrapped up a crazy period overseas where France held the first round of its legislative elections on a Sunday. Then on Thursday, the 4th of July in the United States, the UK held its general election for parliament. And then the Sunday immediately after that, France held its second round of its legislative elections.
And the results were pretty amazing on both sides of the channel. So Beard, why don't you start us off with the United Kingdom?
Yeah, so this was the election that we were expecting somewhat. We knew that this election would be taking place in 2024. It got called for the summer of 2024.
They have about six week campaign in the UK, which is slightly longer than France's like two to three week campaign season. But the result was largely what people expected from the top lines, which is a Labour landslide. There are also some really interesting undercurrents that we'll get into, but Labour obviously is the centre left party in the UK.
They won 411 seats out of a total of 650 seats that were up. The Tories, the centre right party in the UK who had been governing the country for 14 years, they cratered, they only won 121 seats, one of the worst showings in their history. Now, to put that in context, the Tories won 365 seats in 2019.
So that means that they lost over 240 seats. And the Labour Party had 202 seats in 2019. So going up to 411 means that they won over 200 seats, which is nearly a third of the entire parliament, which is just a crazy amount of seats.
Imagine over 100 seats in our House of Representatives, changing hands from the Democrats to the Republicans or vice versa. That's the sort of shift that we saw. Now, the Liberal Democrats, which is sort of the third party in the United Kingdom, that's sort of center, center left, occasionally center right, depending on the issue.
They won 72 seats, which was a massive, massive increase from their last election. They had won only 11 seats in 2019. So they, I don't know what the word is for seven times, almost their seats, it's more than quintuple, but they did that.
Septuple?
Septupled, maybe?
Septuple, yeah.
Yeah, so they went up massively. And then the Scottish National Party, who had actually had more seats than the Liberal Democrats before, they had won 48 seats in 2019, despite only contesting seats in Scotland. They went all the way down to nine seats as Labour took a bunch of the Scottish seats in this big victory.
Now, Labour only won 34% of the vote, which is not a ton more than their 2019 drubbing, where they got 32% of the vote. So their vote percentage only went up 2%, which was a bit surprising. The polling was putting them in the upper 30s, maybe around 40%.
But their vote was a lot more efficient this time around than it was five years ago. They did worse in a lot of safe Labour seats where they had massive majorities. They actually lost votes in a bunch of those seats and they did much better in competitive seats.
So this is one of the quirks of a first past the post system like we have here and like they have in the UK. All you have to do is win seats by a vote. If you win a bunch of seats by a vote, that's a lot better than losing a bunch of seats by a vote even if your total vote figures don't change that much.
But there's also reasons why Labour's vote didn't go up as much as people expected. One thing is that there was a lot of tactical voting where there was a big emphasis on kicking the Tories out understandably after they had been governing for 14 years and they were extremely unpopular. So there were seats where the Liberal Democrats were sort of the leading opponent to the Tories.
And in that case, the Labour vote sort of cratered as people voted for Liberal Democrats who maybe would have voted Labour in a vacuum if they were just asked, who would you vote for? They would want to vote for Labour. But in their seat, the two candidates who might win were the Tories or the Liberal Democrats.
So they voted in that case for the Liberal Democrats. That was also true in competitive Labour-Tory seats where we saw people who might otherwise vote for Liberal Democrats, you know, went to Labour because the emphasis was on kicking the Tories out. That even happened in a couple of seats where the Green Party, who we'll talk about in a little bit, won a couple of competitive seats against the Tories, where the emphasis was so great on kicking out the Tories that Labour and Liberal Dem voters voted for the Green candidate who was seen as the most likely candidate to win those couple of seats.
Now, there was no formal alliance, right, between any of these three centre-left to left parties, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. So, how does this all play out? Are voters just really tuned in and they have a strong sense of which candidate from which of those three parties actually has the best chance in their own district?
Yeah, it's interesting. There wasn't any sort of formal alliance and there were a handful of seats where two of those parties were going up against each other where the Tories weren't really a factor. There were a few Labour, Liberal, Democrat, what they call marginals, which just means competitive seats.
There were a few seats like that between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. And there was one seat where the Green Party took a Labour seat, actually defeated a cabinet minister, a shadow cabinet minister. Obviously at that point, they weren't in government of Labourers in a seat where the Greens defeated them.
But generally, it's just the idea that voters are looking to see who's the most likely candidate to defeat the Tories. And the parties are also doing that. So while there wasn't a formal alliance, if there's a seat where the Tories had gotten 50% of the vote in 2019, and the Liberal Democrats had gotten 20% of the vote, and Labour had gotten 15% of the vote, and then some other parties, that might be a seat where Liberal Democrats are like, we're gonna invest a lot in this seat.
We're gonna go all in, we're gonna try to win it. And Labour's gonna A, know that the Liberal Democrats are doing that. They're like, oh, they're investing a lot here.
And know that they have a bunch of other target seats, because it was really a situation where almost the entire Conservative Party was a target. There weren't very many seats that weren't being targeted by at least one of those parties. So it was a situation where there was so much to go around that the Liberal Democrats could have their targets, Labour could have their targets, the Greens could have a couple of their targets without really getting in each other's way.
So this won't always be the case, but in this election, it worked out really, really well for these three parties to be targeting different seats and to be really efficient with their votes, which led to this terrible, terrible outcome for the Tories. And the Greens won four seats, I didn't mention that, which may not sound like a lot, but it's really, really difficult to break through in first past the post systems, because you have to go from having zero seats to winning a seat. You can't just get 10% of the vote across the country and be like, that's so impressive.
You have to actually break through and win the most votes in one of the seats to win a seat. So Greens had had one seat for a while. And so going from one to four is a real accomplishment for that party.
And definitely we'll put them on track to try to compete in more seats going forward.
So we saw some extremely impressive, heads-up tactical voting on the left. What the hell happened on the right? Because clearly they did not pull off the same kind of thing.
Yeah, so not only did the right not have efficient tactical voting like the left did, they sort of had the opposite where they did not cooperate at all, and they essentially collapsed. Now, normally the Tories are the dominant figure of the center-right. And we've seen in recent years, different far-right parties pop up in England.
Most prominently, UKIP, which was the UK Independence Party, which was pushing Brexit, which we all know passed in a referendum and eventually happened. There have been other various parties like that. The current form of it is called Reform UK.
That's the new far-right party of the past few years in the UK. Now, they ran a number of candidates in 2019. They didn't do very well, but that was also against Boris Johnson, who was probably the Tories' best sort of defense against the far-right.
He appealed to a lot of the voters who like what the far-right provides. Boris Johnson appealed to them, and he was pushing Brexit very hard. So they didn't do very well in 2019.
The opposite case was true in 2024. Now, Reform UK won five seats, which, as we talked about with the Greens, is very impressive for them. They didn't win any seats in 2019.
So to go from winning zero seats in 2019 to winning five seats in 2024 is really impressive. And they won 14% of the vote, which, like we talked about, doesn't matter in the first pass of the post system, but it's still both an impressive and somewhat terrifying figure. Now, Nigel Farage, who many in America may have heard of at this point because he's palled around with Donald Trump a fair amount.
He's been a prominent far-right figure in the UK for a long time. He's run for a parliament seat eight times now. He finally won on his eighth try.
He was the leader of Reform UK. He's really the charismatic figure, the Trumpist figure now that Johnson is out of the picture in the UK and probably contributed a lot to their success. But as a result, there were a lot of seats where Reform UK won 10, 15% of the vote and the Tories lost in some cases, very, very large majorities where you think these seats have to be safe.
They have such a large majority. How are they losing this seat? But they lost that in part due to defections to Labour or the Liberal Democrats, but in part due to defections to the Reform UK Party.
And there's no better example than Liz Truss, who you may have heard about for her short-lived Prime Ministership in the UK. She was a disastrous Prime Minister who lasted just over a month. She had one of the safest seats in the UK for a Tory MP.
She had what's called a 26,000 vote margin, which means she had won in 2019 by more than 26,000 votes. But she managed to lose that seat by just over 600 votes to a Labour candidate due to the splintering of the center-right right-wing vote. There was her, there was a reform UK candidate who did very well, and there was also an independent Conservative candidate who used to be in the Conservatives, ran as an Independent as sort of a more moderate choice for people who would otherwise vote Tory who were very unhappy with obviously what Liz Truss did as Prime Minister.
So she lost that seat. Now, it's very, very likely that the Tories will win seats like that back. They're just safe seats.
Think of like a South Carolina three or like an Alabama one. These are safe Republican seats. In this case, they're safe Tory seats that sort of a unique confluence of events led them to be one, but still Labour has a massive majority.
So even if you lose some of those, what you consider normally safe Tory seats, they're very well set up to defend their majority down the road.
Beard, you mentioned that 14% share of the national vote that Reform UK got. That was actually higher than the Liberal Democrats. They got 12% of the vote, but the Lib Dems won 72 seats and Reform won just five.
And now I know for Reform, a new party like this, those five are a lot, but I think that really speaks to how efficiently the anti-Tory votes were distributed and just how disastrously Reform clawed into the Conservative Party's share.
Yeah, and while the Liberal Democrats are a countrywide party, they run candidates in England, Scotland and Wales, like the Tories and Labour do. They have pockets of strength historically, where they've been competitive for a long time, even if they weren't winning those seats. So that allows them to really rack up the seats in those areas where they're strong, and then not worry about those seats where Labour is dominant or things like that.
So it really shows the power of being a regional party in a first-past-the-post system. You can really punch above your weight, versus if your votes are distributed all across the country. One last thing I wanna briefly mention, that was a bit of a surprise on the election night, Labour lost four normally safe seats in heavily Muslim areas to independent candidates who were protesting the party's stance on Gaza.
These are seats that I would expect Labour to win back down the road, but it certainly showed that in these heavily Muslim areas, there was real anger about the sort of middle road that the Labour Party tried to navigate on the issue, and voters were willing to punish them by voting for these independent candidates. Obviously, that's something to keep an eye on in heavily Muslim areas in the US. Obviously, we don't have as populated a Muslim population in the US as the UK does, but it's certainly something that people did not expect going into election night that came through loud and clear.
One last thought, Beard. We saw some interesting polling after the election that asked voters who their second choice party would have been. And when you ask Tory voters this question and you ask reform voters this question, they're all over the place.
It's not like 80% of reform voters are like, well, if I couldn't vote reform, I vote for Tory or vice versa. Now, undoubtedly that will change over the next four to five years that we can expect this Labour government to last. Before there is another election, but it seems very inauspicious for the chances of the right uniting itself and not facing this kind of terrible, inefficient split once again.
Yeah, I think definitely if Reform UK didn't exist, the Tories would have won more seats than they did as a result of Reform UK taking some of their vote. But you can't just combine those two vote totals and be like, oh, all the conservatives have to do in the UK is unite and they'll win. That wasn't the case.
There were a ton of Reform UK voters who were very unhappy with the Tories and wanted to vote them out. But because they had a different outlet, other than having to stay home or vote for Labour or something, they went and voted for Reform UK. But that doesn't mean that the Tories can just count on those votes going forward or they need to merge or something like that.
There was significant anti-Tories sentiment among wide, wide swaths of the UK going into this election. And there was no circumstances where they were going to not lose.
So we're going to switch gears and talk about France, which in kind of a parallel situation saw a very wide swath from the middle to the far left unite to defeat the right.
Yeah, there was definitely a lot of tactical voting like we just talked about in the UK, in France as well, which led to a big surprise. Now, while in the UK, Labour had been leading in the polls for well over a year, and they were widely expected to win a majority whenever that election was called, the far right had been leading the polls in France. And when this election was called unexpectedly, there was a lot of fear that the far right was going to win the most seats in the legislature and potentially even take a majority and be able to appoint a far-right prime minister.
But because the left-wing alliance and the centrist alliance worked together by and large, it wasn't perfect, but they worked together, they were able to stave this off and they were able to push back against the far right and actually push them all the way into third place in terms of seats one. Now there's 577 seats in the French assembly. The left-wing alliance won 180 seats.
They actually placed first, which I don't think anybody expected going into the second-round run-offs on Sunday. The centrist alliance won 159 seats and took second place. And the far right alliance, which everyone pretty much expected to win the most seats, even if it was looking like they were gonna fall short of a majority going into Sunday, only won 142 seats.
Now that's still a significant increase from the far right's recent results. In the last French election in 2022, the far right won 89 seats. So 142 is a big jump, but compared to the projections where people are expecting them to get close to 200 seats, maybe even up towards 250 seats, it was a massive, massive surprise at how few seats they actually won.
Now, the far right led after the first round in a ton of seats, which is part of why people were expecting them to do so well. But due to France's unusual system where they have these runoffs, but sometimes three candidates or even four candidates can qualify for the runoff if they reach a certain number of votes, there were a lot of situations where there was a far-right candidate, there was a centrist candidate and there was a left-wing candidate who all advanced to the runoff and the right-wing candidate sort of led narrowly. So maybe they were on 35, 40% of the vote and the left-wing candidate and the centrist candidate both advanced to the runoff, but they were behind the right-wing candidate.
And so what you would expect to happen is if all of those three candidates campaigned and tried to win the runoff, is the right-wing candidate would probably win that runoff again with just 35 or 40% of the vote. But the French election system allows candidates to drop out and not be in that runoff. And so traditionally, what candidates have done against the far right is whoever's in third place, be it the left-wing alliance or the centrist alliance, they would drop out and basically encourage their voters to vote for the second place candidate or whoever is running against the far right candidate to keep the far right out of power.
Now, the left-wing alliance immediately pushed for this and did this with their candidates. As soon as the first round was over, they saw seats where they were the third-place candidate. Their candidates withdrew, endorsed the centrist candidates, pushed their voters to vote for the centrist candidate and not the far right.
The centrist alliance did eventually, but it was a little strange. They were sort of wishy-washy for the first couple of days. There was a lot of pressure on them to drop out in places where they got third place.
Eventually, a number of the leading party figures came out and supported this, and most of their candidates, not all, but most of their candidates who were in third place did drop out. There were even reports that Macron, the president of France who called this election, called some of his centrist candidates who had come in third place and encouraged them not to drop out. No, he didn't come out and say anything publicly like this, but that's what some reports said, which was pretty strange when you're trying to keep the far right out of power in this case.
But overwhelmingly, this did happen by the deadline. And in most of the cases where there were these three candidates, the third-place candidate dropped out. The anti-far-right alliance was able to unify in most of these seats.
And that's how the left alliance and the centrist alliance was able to do as well as they did and were able to push the far right into third place in terms of number of seats.
Unlike in the UK though, where Labour has this overwhelming majority and will almost certainly have no problem getting at least the most popular pieces of its agenda passed into law, we now have this very strange situation, which is unprecedented in post-war French history of this trifurcated parliament. And there's no real clear sense of who is gonna lead the country going forward.
Yeah, legislative elections in France often happen right after a presidential election in recent years. So whoever wins the presidency tends to then win a majority in the legislature because the elections are so close together and folks tend to want to give the elected president a chance. So this is really a pretty unique situation.
Now, if you just take the left-wing alliance and the centrist alliance and you were to combine them together in some sort of coalition, they would have a majority in the legislature. But there's a couple of problems with that. First of all, Macron, who's of course the president and leads the centrist alliance, it's not clear that he wants to do that.
He's been pretty anti-left-wing as he's been governing, even though that's sort of where he got to start. He got to start as a minister in one of the center-left party's governments. The other problem is that one of the parties in the left-wing alliance is led by, I guess the best way to describe it is sort of a left-wing firebrand, Jean-Luc Melenchon, who ran for president, became a leading figure on the French left, and is really despised by a lot of the more center parts of France.
He's often seen among centrist in France as almost as bad as the far right. They sort of tend to, as centrists like to do, do this middle ground where they're like, well, the far right is terrible, but also Jean-Luc Melenchon and his party is terrible. So to walk that back and to go into coalition with his party might be pretty difficult.
He of course has been very strident. He said that the Left Wing Alliance's campaign plan should be enacted in its entirety immediately because they got first place in terms of number of seats. That's obviously not going to happen either.
I think the most likely outcome is to scrabble together sort of a centrist plus center-left Alliance. If you take all of the Left Wing Alliance minus Melenchon's party, and you take all of the centrist Alliance, and you take the other independent Left Wing candidates and the independent centrist candidates, and you take them all together, you get just a bare majority. Now, how long that would hold up, I don't know, but I think that's the majority that is least objectionable to people, that has a chance of actually governing for a little while.
We'll see if that happens. We'll see if the Left Wing is willing to do that outside of Melenchon, because this is so broad. It's including the French communists, I'm including in this group.
So we'll see if that's what happens, but it's really, really unclear who's going to be governing France going forward.
Yeah, so like we were mentioning earlier, Keir Starmer, who is the UK's new prime minister, he gets a solid four to five years. But Daniel Nachanian, who was our guest recently on "The Downballot" and went deep into the French elections with us, he pointed out something interesting, which is that in France, you can't call another snap election for a year. So whether they muddle through or actually find some kind of workable coalition, the French have to deal with this situation for one more year at least.
Yeah, so it should be interesting political times in France for the near future. So definitely something worth watching.
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