 next year there will be a presidential election where a Democrat will be facing Donald Trump and hopefully beating him. That's an uncontroversial thing to say in the Navarra media studio. And we are going to talk today especially about two candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The latest YouGov poll shows that Warren is basically flying ahead in the polls. She's on, well, flying ahead is maybe an overstatement, but the momentum is with her. So this is the latest YouGov poll. Warren is on 28%. Biden is on 25%. And Bernie Sanders is on 14%. Is this a surprise to you? Because I mean, I remember at the beginning of the year, everyone was commenting on why Warren isn't being taken seriously. She was, I think, in the single digits and it was all about Bernie versus Biden. What explains, I suppose, Warren's phenomenal rise in the polls? I mean, I think the simplest answer is that she's proven to be a good campaigner. And I think she's running a good campaign. I think I have a somewhat more partisan answer, which is I think the basic arc of the campaign up until the fall is being that the anti-Bernie forces broadly defined have kind of cycled through a number of different formulas they've tried. And so there was the attempt to make Beto O'Rourke into a national figure, I think we can say at this point, the very unsuccessful attempt. Didn't he come back a bit when he started swearing a bit more? I mean, he came back and he sort of tweeted like he's a fucking racist. And then everyone's like, yeah, Beto, maybe he's got character. Yeah, he's he's tried to pivot to making gun control his thing. And I mean, I think he's come back in terms of his visibility on Twitter, but not in the polls, I think. And then after him, you had you had Mayor Pete, who was another figure who really, I mean, I think even more than a rock no one had ever heard of him. And all of a sudden he was all over magazines and things like that. And he did have a brief surge. There was one point where I think he was pretty safely established just kind of the fourth, you know, fourth candidate. But that didn't last long either. Kamala Harris hasn't been doing well. And, you know, Biden has loomed over the whole thing. But I think his his his lead has kind of been slowly diminishing. There's not a lot of dynamism to his campaign. And they're having to sort of keep him out of events and stuff. And actually in this last quarter, his fundraising numbers were really bad. So it does look like the debate is shaping up to be or the contest is shaping up to be one between Sanders and Warren. And I think what Warren's been able to do, and again, I'll qualify this by saying it is a somewhat partisan reading because I have pretty strong views about this. I think what warrants. Okay, good. I mean, I think I think what Warren's been able to do is, you know, she's been able to embrace parts of Sanders agenda and kind of campaign on them in a way which is more politically palatable to the and more rhetorically palatable palatable to, you know, the professional managerial class constituency that I think has been, you know, dominant in the Democratic Party since the early 90s and to all of the kind of the newspapers and the sort of big outlets of liberal liberal opinion. And I think I think. So I think she's I think her success is in some ways an expression of a contradiction. There's clearly a demand for transformative change. But there's also there are a lot of people who are very hesitant about embracing, you know, a version of it that I think many people in the US left would find sufficiently radical. And so Warren has actually emerged as a kind of compromise candidate that all these other people sort of tried and failed to be. Does it show opposite this to you actually? Does it does it show a victory for the left that Elizabeth Warren is the compromise candidate? I mean, because there's a sort of negative way of looking at it, which is sort of like, you know, Bernie got outflanked by someone who is much less anti-establishment than him, someone who's much less willing to take on the vested interests in the United States. But the fact that she's a compromise candidate, that's pretty they've done all right, right? I think like, I think if if Warren had been the candidate in 2016, that would have felt like a massive victory for the left. I mean, I would have been over the moon if she'd have been the candidate in 2016. So yes, I think definitely. But I mean, you know, we've just talked a bit earlier about the Brexit Trump thing, how you think, you know, these sort of, you can't, the things that happen in the US are not necessarily analogous to here. But it does kind of remind me of Ed Miliband becoming leader in the sense that like, when when Gordon Brown stepped down, there was a sense that there needed to be some sort of compromise with the left. And but the left also recognized that there needed to be a candidate that was electable. And so you ended up with Ed Miliband, who was like a kind of neither left nor right were happy with him, because he was either too left wing for some or too right wing for others. And I so I think like, she sort of reminds me, Warren reminds me of Ed Miliband in that respect, in the sense that it's like a candidate that neither the sort of socialists left or the center are happy with, but both will accept for the other one and both are kind of resentful about because they feel like the candidate has been imposed on them by the other faction. And I think like, she's also reminiscent of Ed Miliband's leadership in the sense that like, she wants to introduce progressive policies through the traditional structures of Washington, which I think have shown themselves to be, you know, through the kind of tinkerings of people like Mitch McConnell have shown themselves to be insufficient for a truly like transformative politics. And I think that will be difficult for her. I think if she wins, if she wins the candidacy, that's like, great for the left. And I think, thank God it won't be Biden, who I think would be absolutely destroyed by Trump. I think she has a shot. I'm also very partisan on this, and I don't think that she has as good a shot as Bernie at winning the states that she needs to win. And I think, you know, her support is very college educated, sort of urban support. And I just don't, I think those are not the people who are needed to win for the next election. She needs to present something that will actually make democratic voters get off their sofas and go to a polling station and vote. And that was what Hillary Clinton failed to do. Let's go to a clip. So obviously, you've said that the debate, well, I mean, Biden's still not out of the race, but I mean, he does look like a fucking idiot every time he speaks on television. So I can't really see him getting the nomination. So it does seem to be like an ideological battle between Warren and Bernie. Bernie obviously now has to try a little bit harder to distinguish himself from the rest of the race. It was easy to say how he was different to Hillary Clinton. Now he's got to make a slightly more nuanced argument about why people should choose him over Elizabeth Warren. He was asked that question, I think earlier in the week. So we're going to go to that clip now. So let me ask you, you and Elizabeth Warren have pretty close to identical positions on the big issues. What do you say to those who say they would pick her because she's eight years younger than you. She didn't just come through this. You didn't just have a heart attack. And look, in the positions, you're pretty much the same. Well, look, everybody, every American has got to make his or her own choice about the candidate that they want. And Elizabeth Warren has been a friend of mine for some 25 years. And I think she is a very, very good senator. But there are differences between Elizabeth and myself. Elizabeth, I think, as you know, has said that she is a capitalist through her bones. I'm not. I am, I believe, the only candidate who's going to say to the ruling class of this country, the corporate elite, enough enough with your greed and with your corruption, we need real change in this country. What did you think about that answer? Do you think he's pitched it correctly? He's saying, you know, what's different about me? Elizabeth Warren is a capitalist through her bones? I'm not. So I saw, I saw, I think Baskar, who's your publisher, saying on Twitter that this is theoretically quite a good answer. But to be honest, it's a little bit abstract. I don't think there are that many voters in the United States who say, well, I want to vote for someone who's not a capitalist. It's kind of abstract, right? So he has to explain, this is what Baskar's saying, he has to explain why it's only Bernie Sanders who can give you proper Medicare and who can give you proper, I don't know, a wage increase. It's housing a big issue there, I don't know. I interviewed Joshua Green for my book, who is Steve Bannon's biographer. He said that Americans, like, I think he was quoting from another article, or he was either talking about his own reporting, but he said that Americans have gone from being angry at Wall Street, to being angry at the government, to being angry at elites in general. And I think, like, that's something that Steve Bannon understood and felt, actually. And so was able to sort of project that. And I think that he sort of helped Trump over the line with that. So I think you're right, I would agree with you that it's not necessarily true to say that American voters are like, I want someone who isn't a capitalist. That doesn't seem plausible to me, but they might want someone who's like, I'm going to take on the elites, you know, because a lot of bad shit has gone down in America in the last 10 years and no one has really been held to account for it. So I can, you know, I think that's plausible. I mean, Warren also does a version of small people populism, right? How much does she talk about taking one of these? I mean, I think she definitely rhetorically embraces that language. But I think she, I mean, I think she does it a bit less. And I also think that in practice, she does it a bit less. I've actually got a Twitter thread of hers here that I think is pretty illustrative of the differences between her and Sanders. And, you know, for a lot of people who don't agree with what I think is basically the Jacobin pro-Bernie consensus around this, they look at Sanders' program and then they look at Warren's program and they see that there's a lot of overlap. And I think for a lot of people, the discussion kind of stops there. They think that, I mean, I don't want to put words in people's mouth, but it's my sense that a lot of people think that the distinction between someone who says I'm a capitalist and someone who says I'm a socialist when they have some policy overlap is basically a semantic one, particularly for the reasons you said, right? How many voters think idiomatically in those terms? But I do think Sanders and Warren have very different conceptions of power and they have very different political strategies. And that comes out in the versions of populism that both of them embrace. So Elizabeth Warren has a piece of legislation, a plan, I should say, called the Accountable Capitalism Act. And it's got lots of good stuff in it. It requires workers to elect 40% of the board, requires boards and executives to sell stocks, requires 75% of execs and shareholders' approval for political expenditures. This is a lot of good stuff in there. And the 40% one's quite big. I don't think the labor party have even put a number on that high. Yeah, and I think Bernie's just put out proposal where it's a little bit higher. But I love this arms race. It's like, we'll give them 40%, I'll give them 50%. You've got to be careful though with the workers on boards because I don't know about in the US where union density is very low. But in this country, like workers on boards can sometimes be used by companies to sort of elbow out the union. And so I think that's one thing I prefer to with Sanders over Warren is that he has been using his support base to gather support for like, yeah. And he also wants to repeal the, I can't remember what the legislation is called, I don't want to say Taft legislation, but I might be wrong about that. I can't remember what it's called. But basically, it's like the American anti-union legislation that doesn't allow things like solidarity strikes. So for me, that is where he's more socialist. Sorry, I interrupted you. That's okay. Well, I mean, so they, but again, they both have, they both have, they're both pitching plans to make it easier to join a union and things like that. But, you know, Bernie is actually using his list to direct supporters to pick at lines and things like that. Elizabeth Warren, I don't think has talked as much about the strike wave that's been happening in the United States. So that's, that's another distinction. But I just want to talk a bit about here about this, this, this Twitter thread that Warren did about accountable capitalism because it starts off pretty good. She says, year after year, corporate profits soar for executives and shareholders, but workers' wages barely budge. I'm reintroducing my accountable capitalism act to empower workers and help fix this fundamental problem with our economy. So it's not exactly Eugene Debs, but it's pretty good stuff. Now, a few more tweets down this thread. She says, 181 CEOs signed a biz round table non-binding pledge to account for workers and consumers in their decisions. I'm urging companies, she, she lists them off, you know, to embrace these reforms. And she says, for most of America's history, when our companies did better, our workers did better, and America built a thriving middle class, the Accountable Capitalism Act will help realign our skewed market incentives so companies and workers can once do again well together. So this is a lot closer to a kind of language of liberal corporatism and one that, one that's aiming for, you know, kind of generously a kind of cross-class consensus. Whereas, you know, Sanders, if he was pitching, I mean, in many, in many respects, he's pitching these same proposals often a little more radical. But, but when he talks about them, he says things like, if there's going to be a class war in this country, it's time the working class started winning it. And again, a lot of commentators will look at this and they think that this is a real, this is a semantic distinction. And functionally, if they're, if they're running on similar agendas, there's no difference. And I disagree pretty strongly with that. And I mean, the other thing we might talk about, and I think you alluded to it, Michael is, is, or maybe it was you, Ellie, that the bases of support that both of them have at the moment are so different. Elizabeth Warren, I think, wins in every poll with people who make over $100,000 a year. You know, Bernie Sanders, I think it's in the single digits, the number of people who make that much who've donated his campaign. And the top three employers, by my last count of people donating to his campaign were, I think, Amazon, Walmart, and Starbucks. So these are people who are serving coffee. They're working behind counters. This this is the working class. And I think that a transformative policy agenda has a much better chance of succeeding if it's being carried out with, you know, the agency of those people, rather than as part of a something that is, you know, heavily based in the professional managerial class, which I think really needs to be that's a section of the democratic base that really needs to be antagonized if any of this stuff is ever going to have a chance of getting, of getting through Congress. Is there a chance that the polls are misleading us? So if you think about the fact that Elizabeth Warren's, I mean, we know this, that Elizabeth Warren's support base is more educated, more middle class, more, I suppose they're both urban, but different areas. There was that great map, which showed that where each of them were getting their donations from, and Bernie Sanders was getting the most donations in nearly every part of America, apart from a particular part of New York, which was Warren and a particular part of Washington, which was Buttigieg. And then I think Klobuchar from whatever her state was, Minnesota. Yeah. So the question was, if Bernie Sanders more working class support base means that there might be an electoral shock or an electoral surprise in the same way that I suppose we were talking about Brexit earlier, one reason why there was a big shock when Brexit one is because they're the type of people who are less likely to appear in opinion polls, but might turn out on the day. So could we see an upset and Bernie actually wins this one? I mean, I'd like to think so. I mean, I do think that there are, you know, despite his poll numbers not having moved too much, and despite Warren undeniably, I think surging ahead of both him and Biden, I mean, he has received more individual donations. I mean, he's breaking, he's breaking records. And as you alluded to, there's that map that just showed he's strong all over the country. He's getting money from, from everywhere. And I think his, his strategy is premised on pretty heavily on bringing people in to vote who've been really, who've been disengaged with the political process. I mean, voter turnout in the United States is terrible. And when you look at the, I wrote, I wrote an essay a few weeks ago about non-voters. And, you know, non-voters don't really fit the kind of caricature of, of just apathetic people who were switched off. I mean, they do tilt much lower income. And when you poll them on why they don't vote, they do say it's because I'm not, I'm not represented. There's nothing, there's nothing for me to vote for. And I think Sandra's strategy understands that and is very actively engaged in trying to bring lower income people and non-voters into the process. And when pollsters do these analyses, I mean, my understanding is a lot of their calculations are based on past trends, which demographics have turned up before and things like that. And so I think that Sanders may have support this not being captured in some of these polls. I'd certainly like to think so. I want to go to another clip. So this is a clip that went completely viral, I think, about a week ago. It was Elizabeth Warren in the, I think it was an LGBTQ town hall. There was actually, unfortunately, we haven't shown that clip, but there was a Joe Biden moment where he says, there's people in the bathhouses having orgies in San Francisco. I don't know, it's a very strange thing for this. Oh, did you remember the clip? I confess, I didn't see this. It must have happened once over here. I should have put it in the script. I'll tweet it after this show. It's very funny. In any case, Elizabeth Warren gave this response, which was where many people in Britain sort of I saw lots of people from the BBC sort of tweeting it saying, God, she's good. Like, yeah, she can win. And I kind of watched it and I wasn't that sure, but I'm interested to see what you both think about it. So can we get that clip of Elizabeth Warren, please? Let's say you're on the campaign trail and you're approached. You have a supporter approaches you and says, Senator, I am old fashioned and my faith teaches me that marriages between one man and one woman, what is your response? Well, I'm going to assume it's a guy who said that and I'm going to save them just marry one woman. I'll find one. I kind of thought it was a flop. I mean, it reminded me of Hillary Clinton's deplorable comment because it's sort of just like dismissing a vast wave of the American population, which is a kind of weird thing to do if you're running for president. Also, the fact that the question did that kind of accent, I thought was a little bit weird. But I do value success and the fact that it's been viewed 12 million times on YouTube, mainly by people sharing it, you know, saying this was such a great burn, has made me think maybe it was a good answer. I don't know. What do you think, Ellie? I'm scared that I'm going to get cancelled for saying this. Someone sent it to me being like, this is great. And I, my first thought was she's going to lose the election. And the reason that I thought that is because it's not because I think, like, I mean, obviously I don't think that any politician anywhere ever should ever express or pander to in any way, homophobic opinions. And obviously that that's not what I think. And I also don't think that, you know, the voters that Trump won over Clinton in, like, Rust Belt States are like, just de facto homophobic because they happen to be like blue color. Like that's also not what I'm saying. I'm just, my, my feeling, my anxiety about it is that it just seems a little bit smarty pants. It just seems a bit kind of like, well, I mean, I'm, you know, the fact that I'm saying this is quite astonishing, really. But like, it was just like the, the kind of inherent like manhating in it. Like, well, I'm going to assume it's a man that's got that shitty opinion. Like, to be honest, there are a lot of women who don't support gay men. Yeah. Also, like, when, when I'm like getting drunk with my female friends, like, I'm kind of, you say all sorts of things about homosexuals. Yeah. I mean, we, you promised you wouldn't bring that up. Like, you know, when I'm getting drunk with my female friends, like obviously we will like make a lot of salty comments about men, of course. But just like, I don't know. Like, I just sort of think if I was like a man living in one of those states and you have this kind of like, apparently like wealthy woman, sort of just being a little bit smarty pants about it and then like just dropping in that kind of manhating comment, like it's just a Harvard law professor saying, if you can get a woman, yeah, it's just a bit like, who are you appealing to? Like, I feel like you're going to appeal to people who already vote for you. Like, who, I mean, you know, like, I'm glad that she gave an, I would prefer her to give that answer than to give an answer that was like, well, I respect your homophobic opinion. But I just, it was just the attitude of it that I like, it reminded me of Hillary Clinton, this idea that like this kind of privileged, like wealthy, kind of upper middle class woman is like somehow, I don't know, like somehow kind of in some way part of the oppressed and the men of the oppressors. And that's what, what, like, is that what we're going to sell? Is that what like they're going to sell? And like, she is going to sell to people who live in former coal countries in America? I mean, yeah, it just made me kind of nervous. Luke, what did you think about the clip? And also, are you worried that Elizabeth Warren could do a Hillary Clinton campaign, Mark II? I mean, I have an alternate, but I think equally cynical reading of it, which is, comes from a fairly, perhaps dubious source, which is the Washington Free Beacon. That's the best kind of source. Yeah. And the headline here is CNN failed to disclose Warren Town Hall questioner was maxed out donor. So people can, people can look that up. Apparently, allegedly, Morgan Cox, the questioner has, has donated a lot to Elizabeth Warren. But I think for me, watching the clip again, I mean, it does, it does seem a little canned. I mean, perhaps, perhaps partisanship is clouding my, my judgment here. But, but yeah, I don't, I don't think, I don't think Warren is, I mean, she's, there are maybe people that want to compare to Hillary Clinton and I would, I would distance myself from, from that and that I mean, she's clearly, her politics are clearly, you know, significantly to the left of Hillary Clinton's, Hillary Clinton's politics, I think, were often very hard to, to nail down. Warren does have particular concerns that she's been very consistent on at least since she's been in, in politics in as long as she's been a Democrat. But, which isn't that long, which isn't that long, it's true. But I mean, yeah, Sanders has been campaigning for, for gay rights, was campaigning for gay rights when, when Warren was still a, still a Republican during the Reagan era. But perhaps that was a little below the belt. But, again, a caveat, usual caveats about partisanship, clouding my judgment. But I mean, I think there is a sense in which a clip like this does have a kind of Hillary Clinton campaign energy to, to it, to me, or not the clip itself, but the sort of viral quality of it and how it was received. I think that I'm, I'm obviously a lot more comfortable with the program that Warren's running on than the one Clinton was running on, which was, I think, pretty openly contemptuous, not just of the socialist left, but of the, of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I mean, I think it was very much a center right kind of campaign. But I think, given how kind of professional and managerial a lot of Warren's most enthusiastic support is, things like this, you know, the good things Warren is running on the side, things like this do have a slight vibe of, you know, the birth of another sort of middle-class personality cult, right? Getting excited about someone who, you know, because of their credentials, you know, this is a, I do think there are a lot of liberals who think, you know, we get a Harvard lawyer in here with, with the white papers and the plans, and that's how we can fix things kind of by, by fiat and by strength of kind of raw intelligence. And I think that, to say the least, is a, is not a good analysis of, of, of, how, how change has worked historically or how it could possibly work in America in, in 2019. I think she's like, got substance and that, that differentiates her from Clinton though. Some data that showed that Clinton spoke more about herself and less about policy than any other candidate for which like those records exist. Wow. That's amazing. Because it was all about, I'm the most qualified woman ever to be United States president, but she didn't have any policies. Whereas Warren's got a plan for everything. There's a paper that I will send you the link to if you want to tweet along and put like on the YouTube with the show, but like it, it's sort of, that's what it said. And the other thing that it mentioned as well actually is, as you were saying earlier that Bernie's donations from small donors is actually like unprecedented, unprecedented in 2016. So I think like, you know, Clinton's whole, like apparently one of the slogans they were thinking of coming they were thinking of using for Clinton before they settled on. I'm with her was hashtag it's her turn. So the Clinton's whole campaign was like, coordinate me. That was, that was her, that was her message to America. I deserve this, coordinate me. Whereas Warren has substance, you know, she's, she's talk, she's making arguments. She has policies. She has ideas. And, you know, and I think that gives her a better shot than Biden against Trump. And it certainly gives her a much better shot against Clinton. But you know, as you say, it is this kind of like middle class personality cult. That makes me really anxious, because there are a lot of Americans who feel very excluded by that who need to vote for this person, who didn't vote for Clinton, Democratic voters who didn't vote for Clinton, and they need to feel, they need to feel like it's worth them going and voting for this person.