The Downballot: UK snap election!

We're heading across the pond for this week's episode of "The Downballot" after the UK just announced it would hold snap elections—on July 4, no less. Co-host David Beard gives us Yanks a full run-down, including how the elections will work, what the polls are predicting, and what Labour plans to do if it finally ends 14 years of Conservative rule. We also take detours into Scotland and Rwanda (believe it or not) and bear down on a small far-right party that could cost the Tories dearly.

But don't worry, we haven't forgotten about the Stars and Stripes! We also recap some of Tuesday's top election results, including one Democratic primary in Oregon that has D.C. Democrats breathing a sigh of relief. And we circle back to several big stories that we've covered recently, including a huge triumph for Missouri Democrats in the fight to protect direct democracy and restore abortion rights.

Subscribe to "The Downballot" wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. New episodes come out every Thursday morning!

David Beard: Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.

David Nir: 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.

Beard: What are we talking about on this week's episode?

Nir: Well, we are catching up on Tuesday's elections, including the race for the state Supreme Court in Georgia and some primaries out in Oregon. We also are circling back for some updates on several big stories we've covered recently, including Democrats making a valiant and successful stand in Missouri, redistricting news from Louisiana, a big Supreme Court ruling, and the final results from the race for mayor of Anchorage, more good news there. Then for our deep dive, we are going to be crossing the pond to preview the new elections that were just called in the United Kingdom. David Beard puts on his foreign correspondent's cap and runs down everything you need to know about these major elections that are going to be taking place this summer. It's a jam-packed episode, so let's get rolling.

Beard: So Tuesday's elections went almost entirely as expected, and if you're subscribed to our Morning Digest newsletter, you saw our recaps of all of them on Wednesday morning. But there are a couple that we wanted to dig into a little more here on the podcast,

Nir: And if you haven't yet, that's dailykos.com/morningdigest. It's free and comes out every weekday morning at 8:00 AM Eastern. So let's get down to it. We talked a lot about the race for the Georgia Supreme Court and unfortunately, conservative Justice Andrew Pinson defeated former Democratic Congressman John Barrow by a 55-45 margin. Now, obviously this was a disappointing result for progressives, but it's really hard to read anything into the results for November.

For one, the ballot didn't list any candidates by any sort of partisan affiliation. You had to know them by name to know which candidate was more in line with your views, and in a race like for the Wisconsin Supreme Court where the ballot was similar in that respect, there was so much money spent that everyone knew who the candidates were last year.

This time that just simply wasn't the case, but there was one piece of information that the ballot did have, and I think this is probably the most important factor. It listed Pinson as the incumbent. It actually had the word incumbent right below his name, and that's just a huge advantage, especially when as I was just saying, you have a race with low name recognition on all sides.

Beard: I think another factor here is that Georgia is not used to having these competitive Supreme Court races like a lot of the other states that we talk about are used to having those types of races. North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin: those are the states we've talked a lot about their Supreme Court races. A lot of money gets spent on those and a lot of voters know that their votes decide who controls the Supreme Courts in their states. And there isn't that history of that in Georgia — in addition to, obviously, as you mentioned, the incumbent marking. In a low information race like this where a lot of voters are going to go in and they're not going to know much if anything about it, that's such a huge signal to voters. That is a really hard road to overcome.

Nir: Absolutely, and the other thing is that the map was just bizarre, totally, totally bizarre. You're probably never really going to see an election night map in Georgia in a contested race look like this. I'll give a couple of examples. Pinson, the conservative incumbent, won Clayton County, which is just outside of Atlanta by a 51-49 margin. This is completely nuts. Clayton is a majority Black county that Joe Biden… he didn't just win it in 2020; he won it by 70 points. He got, like, 85% of the vote in Clayton County. So this tells you that Black turnout throughout the state was very likely low because we see this phenomenon repeated in other counties with large Black populations.

At the same time, Barrow won Jenkins County. This is a tiny rural county in southeastern Georgia. He won it by four points. Trump carried this county by 26 points. The reason why Barrow won Jenkins County and a few other small counties like it in the same area is that it used to be contained inside his old congressional district. Interestingly, he hadn't been on the ballot specifically for that district since 2014 when he lost his last race for the House, but obviously it shows you that name recognition can die hard and he still had a local base of support in an area that otherwise had gone super, super red. So I really wouldn't want to look at those numbers and say, "Oh, well Barrow lost by 10 points, that's bad news for Democrats in what had been a very swingy state." You really just can't do that.

Beard: Yeah, I think there's plenty of reasons why this doesn't track. As you said, the strange thing is if you take away metro Atlanta, Barrow probably would have done well enough [to win] outside of the metro Atlanta area if he'd gotten Biden-esque numbers in metro Atlanta, which of course he didn't. But it's just a very unusual situation due to a lot of the circumstances that we talked about. Obviously, going into Georgia, the polling hasn't been amazing for Democrats and particularly for Biden, so we'll see where that goes, but I don't think this should lead to anything for November.

Nir: The one other race from Tuesday night that we really wanted to dig into was a primary out in Oregon. Beard, why don't you catch us up on what went down in the 5th?

Beard: Yeah. Oregon's 5th District is a very competitive House district currently held by a Republican. There was a Democratic primary and the D.C. establishment is pretty happy with how it turned out. State Representative Janelle Bynum blew out the 2022 Democratic nominee who lost the race, Jamie McLeod-Skinner. Bynum was up 69-31 as of Wednesday afternoon when we're recording this and the AP had already called the race even though there are still a lot of votes out because Oregon is a primarily vote-by-mail state, and so ballots are continuing to come in that have been postmarked by Election Day. So obviously that may change a little bit, but obviously when you're up 69-31, it doesn't really matter how the late mail ballots break. Now, two years ago, McLeod-Skinner unseated one of the Blue Dog Democrats, Representative Kurt Schrader in the primary but then lost pretty narrowly to the Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer 52-48 in the fall. So now, Bynum is going to go up against Chavez-DeRemer and try to make sure she's just a one-term Republican.

Nir: And the DCCC weighed in on this primary. It really is just about the only primary this year where it did so aside from Top Two races in California, and you only do that if you're really not high on one candidate's chances and you think there's a materially better alternative. And so, they spent a bunch of money trying to help Bynum get past McLeod-Skinner, and it's really tempting. I saw a lot of this kind of commentary on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning on Twitter to view this race through some kind of national lens to filter everything through a progressive versus moderate framework and that McLeod-Skinner was just too lefty for the Democratic establishment who wanted a more moderate candidate like Bynum.

It is true that McLeod-Skinner articulated positions that generally put her to the left of Janelle Bynum, but that framework leaves out a lot of really critical context that I think matters much, much more. For starters, Bynum had already defeated Chavez-DeRemer, not once but twice in back-to-back races for her state House seat in 2016 and 2018. But more than that, there were some really disturbing reports, multiple reports about McLeod-Skinner allegedly abusing her staff both for her campaign and also when she had been a municipal official before that. According to one of these reports, her driver told a senior staffer, "I'm scared she's going to hit me."

Abusive behavior like this is something that transcends partisan lines. You can't claim, oh, they're misrepresenting my position on healthcare. You can deny it, which McLeod-Skinner has done, but at least on the Democratic side, it's hard to find someone who will want to defend you, and it's the kind of topic that is just ready-made for attack ads. In fact, another outside group, not the DCCC, but a Super PAC that clearly wanted Bynum, ran ads attacking McLeod-Skinner over these reports. Really easy to copy and paste that into a general election ad.

Beard: Yeah, and I think more broadly what we're seeing, which we've seen a lot, is that Democratic primary voters get pretty educated on the candidates. They see who they think is going to be a good candidate — short of, you run into these very odd situations where somebody is way outside the Democratic mainstream, and of course that hurts them — but, by and large, Democratic primary voters vote for the person who they think has the best chance to win in these competitive seats. And we saw that again, I think it's pretty clear that Bynum has the better chance to win this seat in November, and overwhelmingly Democratic primary voters in this seat wanted to go with her for that.

Nir: Yeah, it's so, so, so different from Republican primaries. Republican primary voters overwhelmingly reject any notions of electability and it's definitely something that Democrats care about. I will say I don't think Democrats have to compromise a lot to find these more electable candidates. Ultimately, there probably wouldn't be that big of a difference in terms of voting records between these two women had either of them gotten to Congress. In Republican primaries though, if you are in any way a dissident from the pure down-the-line MAGA worldview, that is seen by primary voters as just completely unacceptable, and Democrats really don't have anything resembling that in terms of a dividing line.

Beard: Yeah, and not to toot our own horn too much, but I really do think that by and large people get into Democratic and progressive politics to make people's lives better, and there's a ton of disagreement about how and how fast and in what ways. But because there is that underlying baseline that we want to make sure more people have healthcare, when it comes down to it and there's the opportunity to do that, Democrats come together and be like, "Hey, let's pass this bill that can actually do that even if I'm not happy with how or the degree or how many people are being affected by it, this is an improvement, so we're going to all go and pass it."

And we saw that with how Nancy Pelosi was able to guide a very narrow House majority and do a lot of things. And then when the Republicans got a similarly narrow House majority, they completely exploded because they didn't have that underlying ideal pushing them forward.

Nir: So we also wanted to update you on a bunch of stories we've covered lately. We want to close the loop on a few of them. In Missouri, Democrats — amazing news — scored a total victory; the tiny Democratic caucus in the state senate completely made the GOP bend the knee.

Last week, we had state Senator Lauren Arthur on the show, it was such a fascinating discussion. It was right after Republicans had backed down in the face of a Democratic filibuster. Democrats were filibustering a GOP attempt to add so-called ballot candy to a constitutional amendment that would make future amendments harder to pass, specifically aimed at targeting an abortion rights ballot measure that is likely to be on the ballot this fall. That "candy" included totally empty measures designed to con conservative voters into curtailing their own rights; stuff like banning non-citizens from voting, which is already illegal.

Well, the legislative session wrapped up on Friday and Republicans were unable to put any amendment designed to make future amendments harder on the ballot at all with or without candy. They just totally gave up. So this means that the abortion amendment, which looks very likely to qualify for the ballot, will only need a simple majority to pass this fall. Obviously, there's a ton of work to be done. There is going to be another very expensive fight ahead. Missouri is considerably redder than Ohio, so we saw Ohio pass a similar amendment last year. I would expect the vote to be a lot closer in Missouri.

But our hats really are off to the nine Democrats in the state senate who had to talk for 50 hours straight and got almost no sleep in order to get Republicans to back off. It shows you that even in super red states, even in states where there really is no hope of flipping a legislature, it is so important to still be able to elect Democrats who can carry on fights like this.

Beard: And as we saw in Ohio, it's possible to defeat a bad ballot measure and then pass the good one and go through that process. But it will be a lot more simple and straightforward for Missouri to just have the one ballot initiative that they can advocate for. They don't have to divide funds to try to defeat the other ballot initiative first. So this is definitely a big win and makes the path to passing that abortion rights amendment much more straightforward.

Another update we wanted to give you in Louisiana, literally while we were recording the show last week, the Supreme Court stayed a ruling that had barred Louisiana from using its new congressional map that features two majority Black districts. So as a result of that stay from the Supreme Court, the state will use that new map which lawmakers had passed due to previous successful litigation by Black voters and civil rights groups under the Voting Rights Act.

Now, the upshot to this is as we expected, Democrats are all but certain to win this new-look 6th district, but the real question is what is Representative Garret Graves going to do? He's the current representative for the 6th District, but not anything like the one that's going to be voting in November. He was the Republican that was targeted by Republicans in the legislature and Governor Jeff Landry because he got on Landry's bad side last year in the governor's race. And of course, in Louisiana, your enemies aren't always the other party; it's the people who made you mad.

Now, Graves has insisted all along that he was going to run for re-election no matter what; he said so again after the Supreme Court ruling. So he's either going to run in the 6th, which is basically a suicide mission given how Democratic it is, or conceivably he could primary Representative Julia Letlow in the neighboring 5th district.

Letlow, of course, has been endorsed by a lot of Republican leadership. She's very well-liked there, so I think that would also be really an uphill battle. Now, it would've made a lot more sense geographically if the 5th district had been the one that had been a Black majority district instead of the strange way that the Republicans ended up passing the map. But Letlow is the only woman in the state's congressional delegation, as I mentioned; she's pretty well-liked, so they made a choice to protect her, to go after Graves, and now Graves is really the one who's left out in the cold.

Nir: Yeah, Speaker Mike Johnson, who of course is also from Louisiana, made clear exactly how much the GOP establishment wants to protect Letlow. He issued an endorsement the other day of both Letlow and Graves. How wonderful, isn't that so nice? Except he specifically endorsed Letlow for the 5th District and endorsed Graves for the 6th District. I mean, that is so dickish to say, "Oh, hey, I'm totally supporting you in this run for a district that Biden won by 20 points that was specifically designed so that Black voters could elect their preferred candidate."

Guess what? That type of preferred candidate is not a white conservative Republican like Garrett Graves. I have no idea what he's going to do. Certainly "The Downballot" strongly encourages him to run against Letlow in the 5th District. As always, when we give Republicans advice, it is completely in utter good faith. We have no ulterior motives whatsoever. We think the two of you should just hash it out among voters and really let the voters of the 5th district decide, Garret.

Beard: Yeah, for sure. And then, however that goes, I really think the 2027 Louisiana Governor's race is calling to Garret Graves. I think he needs to go nuclear on Jeff Landry. Let's get it as dirty as we can.

Nir: So a couple more quick updates on some recent stories in Vermont. Unfortunately, former Governor Howard Dean has said no to a comeback bid. He said that polls had shown him down 10 points to Republican Governor Phil Scott, who recently finally confirmed that he would run for a 5th two-year term. Dean's announcement, his return to the political stage or potential return had gotten a lot of people excited including us here on "The Downballot."

And honestly, 10 points back doesn't seem that bad at all to me. Scott won by almost 50 points in 2022, so I think Dean could have closed that gap, but he would've had to run a negative campaign filled with attack ads and he's 75 years old. I totally understand why he wouldn't want to embark on that kind of journey.

Unfortunately, it looks like Scott is going to skate again this year. There's really only a few days left before the filing deadline. Hopefully, though, this will be his last go-round. Five terms, yeah, they're only 2 years, but 10 years as governor is quite a lot and he certainly has no real future in the Republican Party. Maybe he'll pull a Larry Hogan and try to run for Senate. I don't know, he's 65 now, but hopefully, Democrats will be able to reclaim the governorship in '26.

And one last story just heading back up to Anchorage, Alaska where Democratic-backed independent Suzanne LaFrance has now declared victory in the race for mayor. The officially nonpartisan general election took place last week, but it was only earlier this week that we got confirmation that there weren't enough ballots left uncounted for Republican Mayor Dave Bronson to make up the gap. LaFrance is up by about seven points as of Wednesday afternoon. LaFrance is now the first woman to win an election to run Alaska's largest city, but she'll have to do this all over again just three years from now. Not two, not four: three. Anchorage is just about the only major city in America that elects its leaders to three-year terms. I am sure there is probably some deep historical civic reason why they do it this way, but Alaska does a lot of things differently. In any event, congratulations to Suzanne LaFrance.

Beard: I'll just note that the only other place I know where three-year terms is really common is Australia, which holds its general election in what tends to be three-year cycles. So I don't know if there's a connection there, but a fun fact.

Nir: Well, that is a pretty perfect note to end on because, for our deep dive this week, we are going to be discussing a new election that was just called in another Commonwealth country, the mother of the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom. David Beard and I are going to be giving you the complete rundown on the general election coming up, believe it or not, on July 4th across the pond. Stay with us after the break.

Nir: We are going to take a brief break from U.S. elections to discuss big news that broke on Wednesday afternoon when British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called elections, general elections for the UK's Parliament for July 4th.

Now, Beard, this was already nine years ago, I can hardly believe it, but I first brought you into the Daily Kos Elections fold because there were very interesting elections happening in the U.K. around that time, general elections — Brexit, et cetera — and we wanted to think about expanding our coverage in that area. But I have to admit, U.K. elections are not my specialty and I put out a call for folks in comments to say, "Hey, is there anyone who is capable of writing about this intelligently and with knowledge?" And you answered the call, Beard, and you became our foreign correspondent based in D.C., of course. And you have followed British elections very, very closely for many, many years now. So I thought it would make sense for me to interview you about Sunak's new election call.

Beard: Yeah, and the funny thing was the 2015 elections led to an unusually busy time in U.K. electoral politics because they had their regular election in 2015. They had the Brexit vote in 2016. They had a snap election in 2017, much earlier than normal. They had another snap election in 2019, much earlier than normal. So there were those four elections in five years. I was like, "Wow, I'm covering so much U.K. stuff." And then, there hasn't been a general election since 2019, so it's exciting to get back into it.

Nir: So let's start right there. Unlike in the United States, in the U.K. as in many parliamentary countries, elections don't necessarily happen on a fixed date. So walk us through Wednesday's announcements and specifically the timing of when this election is supposed to take place.

Beard: Sure. So the announcement was that the Prime Minister had gone to the King and requested that he dissolve Parliament and call for a new election. Now, you have to go to the King and ask him because it's the King's role to do this. It's very ceremonial. Obviously in the way that the U.K. works, the King, whatever his responsibilities, are all done by convention. So there was no option for the King to be like, "Nah, I'm going to not call the election." So it's really in the power of the Prime Minister to decide when this election is.

Now, Parliaments can run for up to five years. The election could have been as late as January 2025, which would've let parliament run all the way to December 2024, five years after the last general election, and then you get a certain number of weeks for the actual campaign to take place. So it's actually like five years and a month between elections.

But it was pretty widely expected that Sunak was not going to do that and wait all the way until December or January of this year because winter campaigning is not fun for anybody. It's hard to knock on the doors. Of course, there's Christmas and New Year's and the holidays. So there was an expectation that the election would either be in the summer or the fall of 2024.

Now, by calling this election, that means that all 650 single-member districts across the U.K. — so that includes England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland — would hold an election. So 650 elections, sort of like how our US House does it, where there are 435 separate elections across the country, and then they all come together. And of course, if a party has a majority, they're the ones who have won the election and get to move forward governing the country.

Nir: And just as a refresher, these are all first pass the post-elections very much like in the United States. There's no proportional representation that you often see in parliamentary countries.

Beard: Yeah, the main difference that you'll see in the U.K. is that there are more parties who may get substantial amounts of the vote than in the U.S. But otherwise, in terms of how the election itself works, everybody goes in; you go to your district, you vote for one of the candidates on your ballot for your London parliamentary district or wherever you live, and then the person with the most votes in your district becomes your member of Parliament, and they just do that 650 times throughout the country. So there is no sort of moving of votes around or making it fit the popular vote or anything like that.

Nir: We've got the mechanics out of the way. Give us a table setter of the state of U.K. politics leading up to Sunak's announcement on Wednesday.

Beard: Yeah, I think the U.K., the biggest issue that's been going on is that the country has been struggling economically in the wake of both Brexit and the pandemic. They've obviously struggled with inflation like much of the world has similar to the way that the U.S. has, probably a little bit worse, but they've also struggled with a lack of economic growth that the U.S. has mostly been able to avoid. And that combination has been really tough on people in the U.K. One report from a think tank in the U.K. has said that this will be the first Parliament in modern history to see an overall drop in living standards in the United Kingdom during that five-year term of Parliament.

They've also got an ongoing immigration controversy that's pretty similar to ours except the main way that they have this immigration is folks with small boats crossing the English Channel from France to the southern shores of the United Kingdom. The Tories have spent years trying to enact this plan to ship these immigrants to Rwanda while their asylum claims are going through, but it would have Rwanda actually take them and have them live there for potentially years while their claims are being processed.

The plan has been approved. So it's now law, but it hasn't been enacted. Like, no actual flights to Rwanda have taken place with immigrants, which is why I think maybe Rishi Sunak thinks this is a good time to have the election because he gets to tout it without any of the obvious incoming complications and problems that this plan is going to cause.

Nir: So this is a little bit like the US's remain in Mexico policy, which of course is deeply enmeshed in controversy, except for the fact that Rwanda is extremely far away.

Beard: Yes, it is like it in some ways, but not like it in the way that you're not just like, "Hey, you came from Mexico and we're just going to tell you you have to stay in Mexico instead of crossing the border." It is, "Here you are. You went across the English Channel on this very dangerous crossing in a small boat to get to the UK and generally apply for asylum, and we're going to put you on a plane and fly you to Rwanda, probably not where you're from, potentially not from even Africa, that you could be other immigrants from Europe or from Asia, this is from all over the place and you're just supposed to stay in Rwanda indefinitely until your claims are resolved."

So obviously, there's a lot of opposition. There's been a lot of lawsuits. There have been questions about the European Convention on Human Rights and whether or not that applies. So the idea is that it's supposed to start later this summer. Whether or not it ever does, who knows?

Nir: I don't want to get too sidetracked, but how did Rwanda wind up in the mix here?

Beard: My understanding is that the U.K. was willing to basically pay a country to sign up and do this, and Rwanda was like, "Hey, if you will pay for all this, we'll take a bunch of money and then house some people if we're making money off of it." I don't know a ton about how those original contacts got made, but my understanding is the primary reason is not out of the goodness of the Rwandan government's heart, but they're being paid by the U.K. government to do this.

Nir: Now there's also a political backdrop here too —that is, you can't say separate and apart from the issues with the economy, but kind of layered on top of the economy.

Beard: Yes. So, of course, if we go back to 2019, Boris Johnson had called that snap election. The Tories did very well, and then COVID happened. Like most countries, there was an increase in the popularity of the government in the wake of this sort of crisis that everyone was dealing with in the first part of 2020. And then from there, the Tories have just seen their popularity circle the drain as controversy after controversy has taken place.

Boris Johnson's violations of the lockdowns that the UK had was an ongoing controversy. Liz Truss replaced Johnson but was only Prime Minister for a matter of weeks as she introduced this radical economic scheme that caused the markets to go haywire, and really looked like it might drive England towards a financial crisis until she stepped down. Of course, she was replaced by Sunak, who managed to stabilize things. But by that point, I think a lot of the damage was already done for the party.

Nir: So let's talk about polls and predictions. This is the stuff that I know that "Downballot" listeners and DKE fans love to hear about. So why don't we talk about first the two major parties? Obviously, that's Labour and the Conservative Party, aka the Tories, and how it's looking like they're going to perform in this election. But as you mentioned, Beard, UK elections differ considerably from US elections because there are many more parties on the ballot that often get a sizable share of the vote. There's four other parties that we want to talk about, but let's get started with the big boys.

Beard: So in short, it's expected to be a very, very good election for Labour and a very, very bad election for the Tories. Obviously, as you mentioned, there are other parties, so they're going to affect certain races and we're going to talk about them, but like in the US, when the vote share changes enough in one party's favor, a lot of other things go out the window. And if you're going to win so many more votes than the other side, you're just going to have a great election no matter what. Now, the current polling average shows Labour on 44% and the Tories on 23% of the vote. So when you have a 20-plus lead in the polls, you're going to have a really good election night if that holds up through the course of the campaign.

Nir: So 44% of the vote, and a 20-point lead over the Tories obviously that looks really big, but 44% is of course not a majority of the votes. Would that 44% — if that were to hold for Labour — would they be likely to get a majority of the 650-member House of Commons?

Beard: Yes. If this result holds, they would almost certainly have a majority. They would have a comfortable majority, potentially an overwhelming majority. We'll get into that in a little bit. If you just take a straight transition from 2019, you would think Labour would need something like an 8 or 10-point lead in the polls to get a majority if you're just straight translating every single result by the percentage change in the vote from 2019 to 2024.

Nir: What they call a uniform swing, right?

Beard: Yeah. But from the polling and the analysis that people have done, they believe that because the Labour vote gains have been very efficient in that they're gaining votes in these target conservative seats, they actually only need to win the election by about six points over the Tories in order to likely have a majority. Obviously, if it's exactly six, you start to get very close-edged, but about six points is the number that they need to shoot for, and they're currently up 21, so they have a lot of room to fall and still feel like they're going to have a majority.

Nir: You mentioned the last election 2019 when the Tories turned in a very good performance, but since then Labour has really turned things around from a very low point. So what's changed for them?

Beard: Yeah, we talked some about all the things that have gone wrong for the Tories in the last five years, but a number of things have gone right for Labour in the past five years as well, beyond just being the opposition when the government does bad things; that obviously takes you a long way but it doesn't take you the whole way. So Keir Starmer is the leader and potential next prime minister for the Labour Party. He replaced Jeremy Corbyn who led the party in 2017 when they had an okay election result, even though they didn't win, and 2019 when they had a pretty poor election result.

He had moved the party pretty far to the left. Starmer has moved the party back towards the center-left and really focused on presenting the Labour Party as a safe pair of hands for voters to entrust the country to in the wake of these 14 years of Tory rule that I think the average voter in the U.K. now feels like has not gone very well.

They've done really well in local elections for the past few years. They've done really well in some of the by-elections in recent years, some of the largest vote swings in U.K. history, and the U.K. has been doing by-elections for a long time. So we're talking like 25%-plus point swings in these by-elections where Labour has won seats that would've otherwise been considered safe Tory seats in any number of previous elections.

Nir: So by-elections, that is what we would call a special election, which of course is something we'd love to follow here at Daily Kos Elections.

Beard: Yeah. So they call special elections by-elections over in the U.K., and if you had a by-election tracker, the way that we use the special election tracker to judge how much of a swing has been happening, the by-election tracker would, if anything, be slightly larger than the swing in the polls. It has been just wild swings in favor of Labour and against the Tories in these elections. One or two, I don't remember how many have actually been between the Liberal Democrats and the Tories, but they've seen similarly large swings against the Tories. That's really what's been consistent, is people are sick of the Tories.

Nir: So you mentioned the Liberal Democrats. That is one of the other parties in the UK that we want to discuss in terms of their fortunes in the coming elections. So why don't we roll through them?

Beard: Sure. So the Liberal Democrats, they're polling at about 10%. That tends to be where they poll, give or take a few percent, pretty regularly, but they are hoping to take advantage of Tory unpopularity in a number of seats where the Labour Party isn't very strong and doesn't really have a history of contesting those seats. That tends to be in the south of England, in more rural areas outside of London; that's where there's a lot of Liberal Democrat strength.

Compared to other parties, the Liberal Democrats are good at concentrating their focus on a small number of seats that they feel like they can be competitive in. And so, even though they're polling about 10%, if you were to get 10% across the country and there's a party like that we'll talk about in a minute, that doesn't actually net you any seats because the way the first pass the post system works, getting 10% in every seat doesn't get you anything. And so, the Liberal Democrats are able to concentrate in places where they have local strength, run really good campaigns, and they're able to win some seats. They're probably not going to win 10% of seats as to translate exactly their percentage of the vote, but they could win a healthy number of seats off of the Tories. In 2019, they won 11 seats. So you could imagine them going up to something like 40 or 50 seats, which would be a really good night for them and is certainly possible depending on how poorly the Tories do.

Nir: Speaking of the number of seats, we didn't actually mention that yet. How many seats do the Conservatives have right now versus Labour?

Beard: Sure. So in 2019, they won 365 seats out of 650. There've been a number of defections and a number of by-elections, so their practical majority is actually lower than that, but they won 365 seats in 2019. So I think that's the best basis to work off of, and Labour won 202 seats in that election. So if you're going just off the 2019 number, Labour needs to overcome a 163-seat deficit just to become the largest party. That would be about 82 seats just to become the largest party in a swing from the Tories to Labour. And then to actually have a majority, they need to win about 120 seats in total off of their 2019 baseline of 202 seats.

Nir: And 326 seats in the 650-member chamber, that does it for you?

Beard: Yeah, if you have 326 seats, you have a numerical majority. There are a few details where you can actually do it with slightly less, but we won't get into that. 326 is a great number to shoot for.

Nir: So one thing we haven't actually mentioned is really the ideology of these parties. It's always very tempting to try to map the Tories onto the Republicans and Labour onto Democrats, and I think that doesn't really work. Maybe it does a little bit, but it is certainly true that, of course, Labour is the center-left party, the Tories are the conservative party, and the Lib Dems, we don't have anything like that in the U.S. So how do you explain them?

Beard: Yeah, I think the liberal Democrats would be sort of if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and Mitt Romney and his more current era got together and it was like, "Hey, what if we were a party and we were mostly centered around local services in our states and complaining about the other two parties," is sort of how I would describe the Liberal Democrats — which, no offense, to anybody who has worked for or votes for the Liberal Democrats, I don't think they're a bad party by any means. I think they're mostly centrist. If you had to put them on the line, you might take them a little bit to the center-left over the center-right, but mostly centrist. They tend to appeal to middle-class college graduates, that group. And then, also being the opposition to the Tories in more rural southern England is their main baseline, but it is a little bit of a mishmash in between the two parties.

Nir: Now, we have some other parties to talk about that I think really have almost no analog in US politics.

Beard: Yeah. So I'll hit real quick the other England parties, because as I mentioned, this election is taking place in England, but also in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. So in England, there's also the Reform UK party, which is a reinvented UK Independence party, which was the party that was pushing for Brexit back a number of years ago, and they're basically made up of people who think the Tories aren't right-wing enough. Think of the House Freedom Caucus really as the closest comparison to something in the U.S.

They've been polling in the double digits right at about 10, 11%. But unlike the Liberal Democrats, they don't have any concentrated basis of support anywhere in the country. They really are a party that would poll somewhere between 5 and 15% depending on the type of district all across the country. And as we mentioned, when you do that all across the country, you end up with zero seats. So the main thing that Reform UK is going to do, depending on how many seats they stand in, is likely to take votes from the Tories and make an already bad night worse for them. They could maybe win a seat or two and a fluke, but largely they're just going to take unhappy, right-wing voters away from the Tories.

Nir: I mean, that's essentially what we dream of all the time here in the United States: some race where a third-party independent true MAGA constitutional conservative takes ten points away from the Republican and the Democrat wins with a plurality. So I absolutely love that for Rishi Sunak, but there are also still some more parties that I think we need to talk about.

Beard: One last England party is the Greens, which has done well in some local elections. They're polling at about 5 or 6%, but I would expect in the vast majority of districts, their votes to largely go to either Labour or Lib Dems, depending on who's seen as the most competitive with the Tories. Those certainly get some votes, and there's a handful of districts where they're competitive, but generally against Labour where it's like a Labour versus Green party fight in city centers of progressive cities. But I don't expect them to take from Labour in the way that Reform is going to take from the Tories. So that's England.

The other big party that we need to talk about is the Scottish National Party, which of course only runs candidates in Scotland. Now, the Scottish National Party has been doing very, very well in Scotland for a number of years, but they have had a very bad couple of years. They've had about as bad a couple of years as the Tories have had in England. I'm not going to go into all of the controversies and travails of the Scottish National Party but suffice it to say they won 48 out of 59 Scottish seats in 2019. And Labour mostly, and to a lesser degree, the Lib Dems are going after most of those seats. In a worst-case scenario, you could imagine the SNP losing 40 of those seats to Labour and the Lib Dems. That's how badly they're polling.

Nir: All right, I feel like we've covered the election itself in depth, but what happens next? Let's say Labour does win. They win a comfortable majority, there's no doubt about who controls Parliament following the election. What are their plans?

Beard: Yeah, so one of the positive things about the U.K. system is that if you win a majority like we think Labour is likely to do, there aren't very many constraints. Nobody's going to filibuster the Labour program into oblivion like some people like to do in the U.S. So they've proposed six first steps. Obviously, they've got a lot of plans like any major political party, but their first steps include sticking to tough spending rules in order to deliver economic stability, similar to how the Democrats like to pay for all of the things that they pass, and they don't just add willy-nilly to the deficit the way that the Republicans like to with their tax cuts. The Labour Party is being committed to being very fiscally responsible. That was one of the criticisms of the late Labour government of the 2000s. So they've really pushed back against that.

But beyond that first point, they want to set up what's called Great British Energy, which would be a publicly owned clean power energy company. They want to cut the NHS waiting lists. Now, the NHS is the National Health Service in the U.K. Healthcare is nationalized, so it's all run by the government, and their goal is to cut down a lot of the waiting lists that have really gotten out of control in the UK.

They want to increase border security and specifically go after gangs that transport immigrants via these dangerous small boats rather than focus on getting these people to Rwanda. They want to go after the gangs who run these programs instead. They want to provide more neighborhood police officers and they want to recruit 6,500 teachers to add more staff to public schools.

Now, I know that's a pretty sort of middle-of-the-road list, and this is clearly a list that's been poll-tested and is looking very much towards the center of the electorate. I think beyond that, you would definitely expect an expansion of workers' rights. It is the Labour Party after all, a reversal of a lot of the Tory measures that have been passed in recent years to reign in unions. And then, when thinking more internationally, I'd expect the Labour Party to be a lot more cooperative with Ireland around a lot of the Northern Ireland situation and the border and all of those controversies with the EU and other European countries in general. And further afield, I wouldn't expect any major changes on the foreign policy front, be it Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, China, or elsewhere.

Nir: It can't be that simple though that you have a majority in a parliamentary country and you just pass everything you like and problem solved, because otherwise you wouldn't totally fall apart the way that the Tories have. I mean, it seems as Democrats in the U.S., of course, we just so desperately wish that we could have a situation where, like you were alluding, we aren't stymied by the filibuster where we aren't held up by just a couple of extreme moderates. So even if Labour does get a huge majority, what are some of the obstacles or pitfalls that they might face?

Beard: Yeah, and I think the biggest obstacle that comes up when you have a government like this where it's just you have a majority, and if a majority passes things, it becomes law, is that you've got a bunch of people that don't always have the same opinion about things. And we've seen this in the Tories over the past few years where there's been a real divide between what's called the One Nation Tories, which is the more moderate group within the Tory party. Think of David Cameron as a classic One Nation Tory who was very urbane and internationally focused and didn't want to be a populist versus the Boris Johnson wing of the party, very populist right-wing, focusing on those working-class white men that have gone from Labour to Tory in recent years.

So the differences within the wings of the party can make it very difficult to pass things that not everybody agrees on. That's why the longer a government goes, the less and less they get done. So I would expect the first couple of years of a Labour government to be pretty efficient and effective because there's a lot of pent-up policy that Labour wants to pass that has a lot of wide agreement that can then happen now that they have power, assuming of course that they win, in the way that Tories got to do after winning in 2010 in Coalition with the Liberal Democrats and then winning their own majority in 2015. They got to do a lot of things.

But then the longer you go, the more you're left with the issues that divide your party and not the issues that unify your party, and the harder it is to pass legislation. And that's really where the Tories have been for the past few years. They're so divided and they're so riven by these controversies that it makes it really hard to pass things even though they only need a majority to be able to pass most laws.

Nir: That was absolutely fascinating, Beard. I love learning about this kind of thing from you. Obviously, the election season in the UK is very, very short. We're only talking less than two months, really only about six weeks or so. So we will have our answers quite soon, and I'm sure we will be checking back in on those results.

Beard: Yes, I'm looking forward to it. I'm a little disappointed that it's July 4th, because I'll be on vacation, to actually follow the results, but I'll definitely still be checking in.

Nir: I have to imagine that at least on this side of the Atlantic, there are all kinds of jokes being made about the particular date chosen for this race.

Beard: Oh, yes. If you go on Twitter, there are still plenty of July 4th, another loss for the Tories, similar to their loss in America, type jokes all over the place.

Nir: Well, let us hope there is indeed another one.

Beard: That's all from us this week. "The Downballot" comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to "The Downballot" and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor, Drew Roderick, and we'll be back next week with a new episode.