GZD 10/23/2024

The crucial down-ballot races to watch in the US election

When Americans head to the polls on Nov. 5, they’ll vote for more than just the next president. They’ll also decide key House, Senate, and gubernatorial races determining which party can enable or obstruct the future president’s policy agenda. Here are the races to watch.

In the Senate, Democrats are on the defensive, with Republicans only needing two new seats – or one seat plus the White House – to win control. Thirty-four seats are up for election, but the balance of power will likely be decided by just nine races: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas.

In Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Democratic incumbent, is fighting to keep his seat in the solidly red state against Trump-backed Bernie Moreno, who is currently up by 8 points in the polls. Republicans are also close to flipping Montana – where the Democratic incumbent is down by 16 points – and are ahead in Nebraska by 19 points. In Texas, incumbent Ted Cruz is ahead by just 5 points against Rep. Colin Allred.

Democrats are ahead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, but with razor-thin margins. At the most, they lead Nevada by 2 points and the rest of the states by 1 point or less.

Control of the House will likely be decided by 27 highly competitive races. Here, Republicans are on the defensive but could maintain control of the chamber by winning 12 of the 27 toss-up races. Key states to watch are California, where four Republicans will defend their seats in districts that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, and New York and New Jersey, where the two parties are duking it out for control of the suburbs.

There are 11 seats for governor up for grabs. In North Carolina, Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein is trying to maintain Democratic control of the Tar Heel State against Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who would be the state’s first Black governor if elected. New Hampshire and Washington are also holding competitive races.

While all eyes are focused on whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win control of the White House, we’ll also be watching these down-ballot races to see which party wins control of the legislature for the next two years.

Another BRIC in Vladimir Putin’s wall

For an “isolated” world leader with a global arrest warrant to his name, Vladimir Putin is throwing a pretty decent party this week. Russia is hosting a summit of the BRICS+, a loose grouping of Global “South” countries led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

Dozens of nations are set to attend, and Putin will even receive a personal visit from UN chief António Guterres.

The BRICS backstory: It began life in the 2000s as a Wall Street acronym for the four largest emerging market economies. Reality imitated research in 2006 when their governments actually formed the grouping as a basis for alternatives to Euro-Atlantic geopolitical clout.

South Africa joined in 2009. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and the UAE came along this year. Together, the BRICS account for about 30% of global GDP, slightly more than the G7.

What does it do? It’s a forum to loosely coordinate agendas among members. It has a small multilateral development bank but no binding treaties or security arrangements.

On the agenda this week: Members will sketch out alternatives to the overwhelmingly dollar-dominated global financial systems that give the US outsized power to shape, and sanction, other countries’ economies. Knocking the greenback off its perch as the most-trusted global currency is no easy task.

But the symbolism matters: Putin is showing the world that two years after invading Ukraine, he’s not all that “isolated” after all, and that there is a large – and growing – group of countries seeking alternatives to US and European power.

Blinken urges Netanyahu to ‘capitalize’ on Hamas leader’s death

The FBI on Tuesday announced it’s investigating a leak of US intelligence documents that offer details on Israel’s potential plans for retaliation against Iran over its missile attack earlier this month. The highly classified documents were shared on an Iran-linked Telegram account.

The leak puts the US in an awkward position as the intelligence pertains to spying on an ally. It’s not uncommon for governments to gather intel on allies, but such activities can still be embarrassing when revealed.

As the Biden administration scrambles to discover how the documents were leaked, it’s also pushing for a cease-fire in the Middle East amid Israel’s ongoing conflicts with Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel is reportedly considering an Egyptian plan for a two-week cease-fire with Hamas, which would see half a dozen hostages exchanged in the process. It’s possible a smaller agreement like this could gain momentum after months of failed international efforts to secure a lasting peace.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Tuesday and urged him to capitalize on the recent death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “by securing the release of all hostages and ending the conflict in Gaza in a way that provides lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

We’ll be watching to see if the US reveals more about the source of the leak and whether Israel shows any signs of accepting a cease-fire proposal.

Miscounts and murder mar Mozambique’s election

The resource-rich Southern African nation of 35 million is on a knife’s edge this week, awaiting official results of the Oct. 9 presidential and parliamentary elections.

So far, things are not looking good.

Preliminary results show the candidate of the long-ruling Frelimo party in the lead, but EU election observers say there were irregularities in the vote count. Supporters of opposition leader Venancio Mondlane clashed with riot police on the streets of Maputo, the capital, on Monday, after a weekend in which Mondlane’s lawyer and another prominent opposition figure were shot dead in a car. The two men had pledged hours earlier to officially challenge the legitimacy of the election at the constitutional court. Coincidence? Mondlane doesn’t think so: He has blamed the government for the murder.

Frelimo, in power for half a century, has been accused of vote rigging and human rights abuses in the past, and rights groups said the party had clamped down on dissent ahead of the vote.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank released their much-watched World Economic Outlook on Tuesday, projecting that the world economy will grow by 3.2% in 2025 as inflation cools to an average of 4.3%.

It provides a fairly rosy picture, and these two key institutions in emerging economic development are urging the governments they work with to seize the moment by loosening up interest rates and cutting down on debts and deficits. In other words: Inject more money into economies and use the resulting growth to balance national checkbooks.

That picture is based on some YUGE assumptions, though – first and foremost being policy continuity in the US. “Over coffee and in the halls of the Annual Meetings, everyone is talking about one thing,” says Eurasia Group’s Rob Kahn. “Trump.”

The World Economic Outlook hints at the problem, noting that “upgrades to the forecast for the United States [are] offsetting downgrades to those for other advanced economies” like China and the EU. If Trump carries out the major overhauls to US trade, industrial, and fiscal policy that he is promising, the assumptions that undergird global growth projections collapse, and the picture grows much darker, particularly for key middle-income economies.

“Trump’s policies would be inflationary, which creates headwinds for growth in the developing world,” Kahn explains. Countries like Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa — brimming with potential — could find themselves unable to effectively manage monetary policy and see their economies lose steam.

Representatives from vulnerable economies seem to know the risks they run in saying anything at the moment. In response to a question from GZERO about the risks of a Trump presidency for developing economies, Filipino Secretary of Finance Ralph Recto said Manila felt confident in its alliance with Washington and expected it could avoid the worst consequences through that strong relationship. Argentine Undersecretary for International Economic Affairs Candelaria Alvarez Moroni echoed Recto’s argument about political cover, while Nigerian Finance Minister Wale Edun said his country was a “bystander” to the US election.

We’ll see how their tunes might change at the Spring Meetings in Bangkok, four months into the new US administration.

1,100: About 1,100 inmates were released early in England and Wales on Tuesday as part of the government’s policy to free up prison space. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing public backlash over the decision. He said he “shares the public’s anger” over footage of criminals celebrating their early releases outside prisons, but noted that “If we had not acted, we would have faced a complete paralysis of the system.” The UK’s prisons are at capacity because of a combination of tougher sentences, rises in violent crime, and an increase of people in prison on remand.

5: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will not be attending the BRICS summit in person this week in Russia because he is recovering from a serious head injury following a fall at home over the weekend. According to his doctor, the fall caused “great” trauma to the back of his head, requiring five stitches for the injury and resulting in a “small brain hemorrhage” in the temporal-frontal region.

1,500: A senior official from the office of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said Tuesday that Seoul could consider providing defensive and lethal weapons to Ukraine in response to North Korea purportedly shipping 1,500 special forces personnel to Russia to assist in the war. The prospect underscores the potential for the divided Korean peninsula to become entangled in the conflict in Eastern Europe.

20: Peru’s former President Alejandro Toledo was convicted of taking bribes from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht and sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday. Toledo, a 78-year-old economist, is convicted of taking $35 million in bribes from Odebrecht in exchange for letting it build the road connecting Peru’s southern coast with an Amazonian area in western Brazil.

Read: “Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue,” by Sonia Purnell. Imagine being a young English woman with the respected ear of Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II. Then you go on to know, love, and frolic (often) and work with powerful men involved in nearly every pivotal geopolitical moment and scandal until your death five decades later. Was Harriman scandalous? You bet. A brilliant feminist? Jury’s still out. A cunning political operative? You decide. I loved this book, and I think you might too. — Tracy

Watch: “The Apprentice.”This Donald Trump biopic came out just weeks before Election Day. It’s an attempt to examine the forces and experiences that molded the former president as we know him today, particularly Roy Cohn, the influential lawyer who mentored Trump when he was younger. While some aspects of the movie are based on actual events, it’s still a fictional depiction of Trump at the end of the day. Trump has made it clear he’s not happy about the movie, calling the people who made it “HUMAN SCUM.” Though reviews are mixed, this film definitely has people talking, and I’d say it’s worth two hours of your time. — John