What the Midterms taught us about America and the BBC

Two days before the American Midterm Elections I wrote, “The only reason the Democrats have any chance is because of the abortion issue. Will that outweigh the economy, crime, immigration, the Trump factor, the ‘sleepy Joe’ factor and the culture wars?”

We now know the answer. Abortion didn’t outweigh the issues that Republicans thought would bring them a “Red Wave”, but it did motivate many women voters to turn out and support them Democrats and that was enough to spoil the Republican’s party. At the time of writing (Wednesday evening) the Republicans have a slimmer than expected lead for the Senate (49/48, with four seats yet to declare) and for the House of Representatives (204/187, with 44 seats to declare). This result is much less decisive than the defeat Obama suffered in 2010, when the Republicans gained 63 seats, or Trump suffered in 2018, when the Democrats gained 41 seats. So far the Republicans have actually lost the only Senate seat to change hands (Pennsylvania). It is clear that Biden has done considerably better in his Midterms than Obama or Trump.

We haven’t yet got all the results in and may not get the Georgia Senate result till a re-run next month which could decide who controls the Senate. But we do have some preliminary answers to some key questions which the Midterms were expected to answer.

First, is the Republican Party run by Trump now? According to an NBC poll just before the elections, 62% of Republicans polled said they were supporters of the Republican Party and only 30% said they were primarily supporters of Trump. This seems to have been confirmed by the Midterms. Trump’s support clearly helped some candidates but not others. His much-awaited announcement next Tuesday may have to be rewritten. Certainly, a lot of that puffed-up ego will have been deflated. Another factor is his age. He will be 78 and overweight by the time the 2024 elections come round. Donald (Ron) De Santis, currently his chief rival, will be in his mid-40s. Nikki Haley, smarter than either of them will be 50. How many Republicans will want to serve under Trump for four minutes before they get kicked out or threatened with the mob as Pence was?

Second, perhaps more intriguingly, will President Biden run again in 2024. Many in the media argue that if Trump runs again, Biden will want another go on the grounds that he has beaten Trump once and no one else can. But first, Trump might not win the nomination, even if his fast food diet hasn’t taken its toll, and second, who knows who will emerge in the next two years (though we now know that it won’t be the two-time loser Beto O’Rourke)?

The crucial problem with Biden, curiously ignored by most right-thinking media pundits, is what Nigel Jones, writing recently in The Spectator, called “The Biden elephant in the room.” “Let us face an unpleasant fact that many seem curiously reluctant to report or discuss,” Jones begins. “President Joe Biden appears to be suffering from severe and worsening cognitive decline which often makes his public appearances an embarrassing debacle.” He turns eighty later this month and will be 82 by the time the 2024 election comes round. It is hard to imagine that he will be in any fit state to take on even Trump, let alone another Republican leader about half his age.

There are two reasons this is so rarely talked about. First, it seems in very bad taste. Second, there is no alternative. Kamala Harris hasn’t even been mentioned on any of the TV programmes or social media posts I saw on election night. Not once. Yet she should be the obvious replacement. Young (more than twenty years younger than Biden), feisty, a woman of colour, who should win the crucial Black vote in 2024. So why has she vanished? And this takes us back to the problem only Biden could apparently solve in 2020. There is no one else. There were plenty of smart Democrats with serious experience in 2020, but few thought any of them could take on Trump and which of them would the people who run the Democratic Party trust to beat De Santis or some other Republican populist?

That’s why, incredibly, people still talk about Biden running in 2024 as if this is a sane proposition. As Jones writes in the best piece anyone’s written about Biden recently, “Since his election, these ‘gaffes’ seem to have accelerated at an alarming rate. Among the myriad mistakes, misspeaks, and sheer inexplicable gibberish caught on camera are multiple examples of him calling his deputy ‘President Harris’ and shaking hands with the air when people aren’t there. He’s also been filmed being unable to find his way off a stage, getting lost on the White House lawn, reading out instructions on his cue cards and falling fast asleep in the middle of a meeting with Israel’s [then] Prime Minister.” More recently, he couldn’t get remotely near pronouncing Rishi Sunak’s name properly. Biden is not only a lame duck President: he’s a lame duck with increasingly apparent cognitive impairment.

The only organisation in even more of a mess than the Democrats is the BBC. The BBC’s coverage of the Midterms was uneven, to put it kindly. The good news was that they at last reunited Katty Kay and Katty Kay, their dream team when it comes to American politics. But this merely exposed the B team, a bunch of uninteresting and not very smart reporters stuck in noisy bars around various key states.

More seriously, it exposed the Sarah Smith problem. For six years she was the BBC’s first Scotland editor and then, a year ago, it was announced that she would succeed Jon Sopel as the BBC’s North America editor. The reasoning seemed clear enough. It was time for a woman. We’d had Justin Webb, Mark Mardell and Jon Sopel, all fine, experienced journalists, but they were all men. It was decided that a female North America editor was long overdue for the same reason it was felt that it was time for a woman to present Question Time (Fiona Bruce), to be the BBC’s new political editor (Laura Kuenssberg) and to succeed Andrew Marr on the Sunday morning slot (Sophie Raworth and then Laura Kuenssberg again).

There’s only one problem. Smith isn’t very good, which is why the election night programme didn’t know what to do with her. Katty Kay is lively, funny and smart and she knows American politics inside out. She also has a terrific rapport with Christian Fraser. So the BBC built their TV coverage around Fraser and Kay and brought in Smith for some very awkward five minute sessions at the end of the panel where she just didn’t fit in at all.

The BBC has an odd problem when it comes to American politics. They take it very seriously because they know viewers care more about Obama, Trump and even Biden than any European presidents. But except for Fraser and Kay (who now only works occasionally for the BBC) they haven’t got any good presenters who know about America or about American politics. They let Nick Bryant go back to Australia, they let Jon Sopel leave the BBC altogether, Mark Mardell has retired because of ill health and Justin Webb seems to have been banished to BBC Radio.

This is why the BBC coverage couldn’t ask obvious questions, such as what’s wrong with Joe Biden? What’s happened to Kamala Harris? And who will run in 2024? This is not a minor problem and like most of the big problems at BBC News, it needs to be dealt with. But there is no one at BBC News or indeed at the BBC at all who seems capable of solving it.

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