I’m Philip Beevers, and I approve this message

Faithful reader, picture the scene: your brave correspondents have pitched themselves deep into the heart of everything American. Sure, they live in the most atypical part of the most atypical state, but this is still pretty darned American. We’ve enjoyed Halloween, we’ve survived the Superb Owl, but 2020 has something bigger and more American to offer than any of this: the Presidential election.

As someone who is a big fan of elections in the U.K., I’m looking forward to this. Of course, this election is unlike anything I’ve seen before. We start with the choice of candidates for the two main parties, done through a process of what are called primaries and caucuses, leading up to the party conventions in the Summer.

The idea that the general public would get involved in candidate choice is entirely different to how we do things in the U.K., but here, the candidates engage on months-long, cross-country campaigns in an attempt to gain their party’s nomination. That’s the phase we’re currently in, with the vote in Iowa this week the first step towards naming a candidate. The Democrat field is wide open, with about 10 candidates still in the race; the Republicans are’t really bothering with a process this time around, and are just going to go with Trump.

So really this first phase is about who is going to challenge Trump and whether they stand a chance of winning. What’s interesting is that different states have wildly different methods of running their primary, including allowing anyone from the general public to vote, so you can end up with Republican supporters voting to choose the Democratic candidate. This is a bit like members of the Tory party signing up to join Labour so they could vote for an unelectable Labour leader - this would never happen ;-).

H doing her best Peter Snow - explaining how it all works, with documents, charts and spreadsheets (yes, really). Swingometer notably absent.

As a result, the primary campaigns are massively public affairs, costing the front runners tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. So it’s no surprise that we have a number of candidates with vast personal fortunes that are essentially bankrolling their own campaigns. There’s a lot of TV advertising out there, but that doesn’t seem to reflect which candidates are most likely to win: it reflects who has the most cash.

So step forward Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg. You can’t go far without seeing a TV advert for one of these blokes, always ending with a presumably statutory announcement that says, “I’m XXX, and I approve this message”.

He's Mike Bloomberg, and he approved that message. Just like all the other messages he keeps stuffing down the telepipes.

Tom Steyer is a hedge fund billionaire who gave it all up 8 years ago and pledged to give away half his personal fortune to good causes. Seems like a nice enough bloke, apparently stands no chance (he registered almost no votes in Iowa). Mike Bloomberg is a late entrant to the race, and seems to be mostly motivated by a genuine hatred of Trump. Bloomberg of course has an insane personal fortune - tens of billions - from his financial market data and news empire, of which I know a thing or two. He’s also a former mayor of New York City. Despite spending what appears to be about a hundred million of his own cash on TV ads, he also appears to stand no chance. He comes across as an oddly uninspiring character, and despite positioning himself as Obama’s right hand man, he comes across as inauthentic to the Democrat supporters.

The surprise winner in Iowa was Pete Buttigieg, a very youthful candidate (he’s under 40) that, like almost all the other front runners, has no TV campaign at all. Frankly I’ve no idea who this guy is. Next in Iowa came the established names: second was Bernie Sanders. The Vermont veteran does have a TV campaign, and is about as left wing as you get over here. There’s something Churchillian about him - he’s a good orator, and always looks a bit beaten up. Anyway, he’s probably too left wing to beat Trump, unfortunately. Then came Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden. Biden seems too old and too nice; Warren could be an interesting challenger, but like Bernie, seems a bit too left wing.

So the bad news here is, there’s no obvious Trump-slayer in this field; no single candidate that has captured the public imagination in the way that a Bill Clinton or Obama did. But there’s a long way to go; it could all change between now and the election in November.