Keep Kamala and carry on: Harris's smooth route

This episode examines Kamala Harris's swift political ascent after Joe Biden stepped down, positioning her as a prominent contender in the presidential race against Donald Trump.

1. Kamala Harris has been rapidly endorsed as the presumptive Democratic nominee after Joe Biden stepped aside.
2. Harris’s campaign has seen a significant influx of funds, demonstrating strong support within the party.
3. The Democratic Party has chosen a rapid nomination process over a competitive primary to maintain unity.
4. Harris’s strategy includes leveraging her prosecutorial background against Donald Trump’s legal troubles.
5. The episode highlights potential challenges and strategies for both Harris and the Democratic Party in the upcoming election.

1: Harris's Campaign Launch

Kamala Harris quickly launches her campaign following Joe Biden's resignation, instantly becoming a formidable contender for the presidency. Harris expresses admiration for Biden, enhancing her launch with his endorsement. Daniel Franklin: "Harris has swiftly secured enough delegate support and substantial funding."

2: Democratic Unity and Strategy

The Democratic Party rapidly coalesces around Harris, foregoing a competitive primary to present a united front against Donald Trump. Jason Palmer: "The party has quickly rallied behind Kamala Harris, minimizing internal competition."

3: Challenges and Opportunities

While Harris starts as the underdog in polls against Trump, the shift presents new strategic opportunities and challenges in redefining her public image and campaign focus. Daniel Franklin: "She has a significant opportunity to reintroduce herself to American voters."

1. Engage in informed voting: Research the platforms and past performance of candidates.
2. Participate in local politics: Understand how national figures influence local issues.
3. Encourage political discussions: Foster a culture of informed debate and discussion in your community.
4. Support democratic processes: Involve yourself in campaign volunteering to support preferred candidates.
5. Stay updated: Follow reputable news sources for continuous updates during the election cycle.

A day is a long time in American politics: Kamala Harris has reportedly already secured the votes to become Democrats’ presidential nominee, a pile of campaign cash and the Trump campaign’s attention. For insight into how China treats its startup scene, we count the dwindling number of newly born unicorns (10:03). And why Britain’s twee beach huts are so eye-wateringly expensive (15:40).

People

Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi

Companies

None

Books

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Asana Representative
Ready for a smarter way to work? With Asana, you can drive clarity and accountability at scale. Connect work to company wide goals so you always know what's on track and what's at risk, and maximize impact by automating workflows across your organization. Asana a smarter way to work? Try for free today@asana.com.

that's Asana.com.

Jason Palmer
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello, and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Over the past decade, China has defied the skeptics in producing innovative and highly successful private firms. Now the number of these so called unicorns is dwindling. Is politics or economics to blame? And one of the more colorful features often found on the british seaside are rows of narrow little huts, open only during the rare outbreaks of good beach weather. We ask why the prices for these pokey places have gone through the roof.

Jason Palmer
But first, at an event at the Democratic Party's headquarters in Delaware yesterday, America's vice president launched her campaign to become its president. Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we willing to fight for it?

Asana Representative
And when we fight, we will. God bless you all, and God bless you. Kamala Harris has swiftly mounted the proverbial stump after Joe Biden stepped aside, his hand forced by weeks of stumbling public performances and democratic hand wringing. And questions about Miss Harris chances in a race for the party's nomination have disappeared as quickly as have her potential rivals for it. Since the weekend, things have moved incredibly fast.

Jason Palmer
Daniel Franklin is a senior editor at the Economist. The Democratic Party has rallied around Kamala Harris, who is now the presumptive nominee for the party. She claims to have got the backing of enough delegates to be swiftly elected as the party's nominee, and she's raised enormous amounts of money. Money and injected a new energy into a campaign that was really struggling. And what has miss Harris herself had to say?

Daniel Franklin
Well, so far, not all that much. She's been extremely lavish and gracious in her praise for Joe Biden, which I think she has rightly had to do. We love Joe and Jill. We really do. They truly are like family to us, and we do.

Asana Representative
Everybody here does. It's mutual. That allows her then, to serve as a launchpad on the basis of the backing that he has given her. I want people to remember that what we have done has been incredible, and we get so much more. We're going to get done.

Joe Biden
And I want to say to the team, embrace her. She's the best. And then she's really started to turn, but just started to turn her attention to attacking Donald Trump. And you can already see some of the lines that the prosecutor, that she was starting to come out. This is really going to be the prosecutor against the convicted felon.

Asana Representative
I took on perpetrators of all kinds, predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type. And as for the record, fundraising, how has that come together so quickly? I think there was a huge amount of money waiting to flow towards a more credible candidate behind whom democrats could really rally other than Joe Biden. Funders had been holding back from President Biden as his problems were becoming ever clearer.

Daniel Franklin
So this has really removed the dam, and the money has duly flooded into Kamala Harris campaign. And it reflects, of course, a newfound energy and enthusiasm for the Democrats campaign and chances generally. I mean, it was impressive that Donald Trump raised $53 million after his conviction on numerous counts in New York, but Kamala Harris has way exceeded that since becoming the candidate. $81 million in a very short space of time. And I think that just shows that money is not going to be a problem for her campaign.

In fact, it's probably going to be an advantage. And do you think the sort of rapid coalescing of support, this flood of money, this sort of energy that you mentioned, are a sign that Ms. Harris can challenge, challenge Donald Trump more effectively than Mister Biden could have? Have the odds in the overall election changed here, do you think? Well, it's too soon to see that in reliable polling, but I think that the fact was that things were looking so grim for the Biden campaign.

And I think one of the reasons why he did eventually step down was the numbers were showing that there was really diminishing chances of him managing to defeat Donald Trump. With a new candidate, younger candidate already, the energy is palpable. It becomes a genuine contest. There's still a lot of ground to catch up. If you look at the polling that there is, she polls behind Donald Trump, but she has the opportunity, big opportunity, to, I think, reintroduce herself to american voters and to make this a very competitive race.

Jason Palmer
I mean, we're talking as if this is absolutely signed, sealed, delivered here. There is still an actual nomination to be made. Is it entirely zipped up? I think there's precious little doubt at the moment. I mean, there were people who argued strongly and quite persuasively that there should be a genuine competition here, that, if you like, of a new candidate was not the best solution, genuinely try to see who the better candidate might be and let that be part of the exciting process leading up to the convention and give a sense of the alternative choices that the Democrats now have.

Daniel Franklin
But that is not going to happen. It's very quickly become apparent that the really big figures in the Democratic Party have mostly rallied quickly behind Kamala Harris and not least Nancy Pelosi, who's really been putting the strings behind the scenes in order to persuade President Biden to drop out of the race. One after another, the potential challenges, the likely, mostly democratic governors who might have been the candidates to oppose Kamala Harris has said that they support her as the nominee and are not going to run themselves. So I think it's pretty much clear now that she is the presumptive nominee and there's no real mechanism going to be available to challenge that. So the party has decided to put speed and unity above a genuine competitive process.

Jason Palmer
But I suppose that does give the Trump campaign someone to focus on new angles of attack. Yes, it has two problems, really. One is exactly the one that you mentioned that the Trump campaign can, and in fact, is already saying that a party that claims to be defending democracy is itself showing that it doesn't really believe in democracy because it's just ignored the wishes of all the millions of voters who voted for Joe Biden as their candidate. The second issue is that maybe they haven't ended up with the best possible candidate to take on Donald Trump. A genuinely competitive process might have yielded a candidate with perhaps more qualities, fewer flaws than Kamala Harris, but I think it's too late for that.

Daniel Franklin
She is going to be the nominee. So what will the lines of attack then be for the Trump campaign against Miss Harris? They'll attack her as someone they think is dangerously liberal. They will claim they'll attack her record back in California. The high crime.

Trump, as you know, is always adept at attaching labels, at branding his opponents. And he's taken to calling Kamala Harris Lugh in Kamala Harris. You ever watch her laugh? She's crazy. You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh.

Joe Biden
No, she's crazy. She's nuts. She's not as crazy as Nancy Pelosi crazy. So drawing attention to her tendency to laugh quite a lot, not something you would necessarily think was a particular fault, but there you go. And I think one of her biggest vulnerabilities is going to be her record as vice president on the border, which is a huge issue in the campaign, one of the main points for Republicans, and that was something that she had been given specific responsibility for, the diplomacy around America's southern border.

Daniel Franklin
And of course, the record numbers of illegal migrants crossing that border is going to be something that you'll hear Republicans go on about again and again. So I suppose in a matter of days, everything has really moved so fast. You have a new race and new lines of attack from the republican party and a brand new energy behind the Democrats. The race is on. Daniel, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Jason Palmer
For loads more insight into how this election came about and how voters had ended up with a choice between two old white dudes. Let me draw your attention to our latest subscriber only series, boom or boom. It traces the history behind the enormous power that the baby boomer generation has accumulated and is still wielding over the rest of us. The first three episodes of Boom are already out, and non subscribers can listen to the first one for free. And they should.

Asana Representative
It's hard to reach your goals when your teams are pulled in too many directions. With Asana, the enterprise work, management, platform tasks and company wide goals are in one place. So your teams understand how their day to day work connects to those goals. Asana a smarter way to work? Try for free today@asana.com.

that's Asana.com.

Rosie Blore
The last time the intelligence was on Unicorn Watch, back in February, we reported from the venture capital rich slopes of Silicon Valley and found that the number of unicorns there was dwindling. But what about their chinese cousins?

Well, they seem to be suffering an even worse fate. The number of new billion dollar chinese startups. Yes, I'm afraid we are talking about that kind of unicorn is falling fast. China used to be home to many unicorns. In fact, up until around 2020, it used to create as many new unicorns each year as America.

Corbin Duncan writes about finance and economics. For the Economist, though so far this year, it's only created half as many as the US. And that says a lot more about how the government has handled its startup industry than it does about a global slowdown in unicorns. Corbin, just remind me what a unicorn is. So unicorn is a privately held company, which is worth more than $1 billion.

Ok, so tell us what's been going on. What's been wrong until now about how China has handled these startups. So for many years, chinese unicorns grew really quickly. But the party always approached this with some level of suspicion. They thought that all of these fancy new Internet apps which would ensure that you were able to hail a cab or get your meals a few minutes earlier, were not contributing to the real economy.

Corbin Duncan
And then tech giants began moving into the businesses which the state normally had control over. So we're talking about sectors like finance in 2020, 2021. China's president, Xi Jinping, labeled this sort of behavior a disorderly expansion of capital. It was a sort of growth that the chinese communist party did not want. To encourage when they were growing fast.

Rosie Blore
Was that just because the economy was growing fast, or was there something else that was going right? China's economy is growing very fast. These were the go go years where still there was a lot of foreign capital which was pouring in, and that foreign capital was really important to funding startups. Foreign capital was more risk tolerant, it was willing to lock up its money for longer periods of time, and that was really important to growing these startups. As China's economy grew very fast, the average chinese person became richer and had more money to spend on consumer products.

Corbin Duncan
And so that meant that there was a real market there that startup founders were looking to serve. So is it now the case that unicorns aren't being created or they're being created elsewhere? It's a bit of both. So there are fewer unicorns being created today, and those that are on track to reach unicorn status tend to actually leave to politically safer places like Singapore or America. I thought it was quite hard to take your money out of China, that's.

True, but changing your headquarters for your company is apparently not so difficult. I see. So is there any way that the chinese government can now tempt these entrepreneurs or their businesses back? The Chinese Communist Party has started paying a lot of attention to how it can try to improve the environment for new startups. And it's trying to to introduce more of its own cash to replace the lost foreign capital.

It's trying to tinker around the edges to improve the risk tolerance of its investors. But there are some inherent tensions with how the communist party approaches the private sector and the sort of certainty that startup founders need to be able to build their businesses. And do you think that anxiety is about the business environment or the personal environment for those founders or the heads of those companies? I think a lot of it has to do with the business environment. So it's very difficult, if you're a startup founder, to find the sort of capital that you need for the long term.

And if that capital comes from the state, it often has strings attached, and that means that you have government officials which want to see a certain amount of jobs created, they want capital invested in certain localities or certain types of technology. So it's very difficult to build a commercial business in China, focusing on profits with state money. And is there likely to be a further influx of foreign money for these startups? That's not likely to happen anytime soon. Higher interest rates in the US mean that a lot of us capital has returned home.

But also it's going to take a long time for foreign investors to trust that the business environment in China is safe for their money for the long term. Over the last decade, foreign investors backed two in every three startups in China. Today, that's more likely to be one in five. So what sorts of areas are the successful unicorns now emerging in? So those few unicorns that make it today in Xi Jinpings China tend to be engaged in innovation in hard tech sectors like semiconductors, green technology and space.

Rosie Blore
So not just hard tech, but hard tech that the government approves of then? That's exactly right. So when we've seen chinese officials at the third plenum, the recent meeting, all about economic reform and how to stimulate growth in the chinese economy, talking about proactive stimulus, your bet, it sounds like, is not on unicorns in a variety of sectors. The entrepreneurs and investors that I spoke to sounded pretty pessimistic. They think that the government has correctly identified the problems, but it's really not within its gift to fix them because of these inherent tensions and how it approaches the private sector.

Corbin Duncan
And it doesn't really look like the third plenum has been able to resolve those contradictions. What we know from looking at greener pastures elsewhere is that entrepreneurs and unicorns really thrive when they have reliable access to capital, stable business confidence and the freedom to experiment. And they're not going to find that in China. Corbyn, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you, Rosie.

Kamala Harris
Britain's seaside towns contribute more than their fair share of the country's iconography. Theres fairground piers and fish and chips in punch and Judy puppet shows.

Jason Palmer
Sam Colbert writes about Britain for the Economist.

Kamala Harris
But high on that list are beach huts.

Beach huts are these small wooden sheds, really, that are lined up on beaches up and down the british coast. They get used as storage spaces for beach chairs, as little changing rooms. A lot of them have kitchenettes where you can have a gas stove to make a pot of tea, or you can just sit in them and enjoy the sea view.

Typically they cost tens of thousands of pounds, but in some places they cost hundreds of thousands.

In Margate, the cost to rent one of these huts for the summer is about 1400 pounds. I was there on a recent Saturday and I was surprised to see that of the 150 or so huts that I could see on Westbrook Bayou, only a few were actually in use. The rest were padlocked up. The waiting list to rent one of these beach huts for the season is currently at an estimated seven years and right now it is closed to new applicants. So why spend so much money for a shack on the sand that you don't get much use out of?

Well, one of the reasons they're so expensive is that supply is restricted. Local councils limit the construction of new beach huts because they dont want to spoil the view for everyone else and these huts come onto the market fairly rarely. They get handed down from generation to generation within families and then families use these huts as a meeting place every summer. Theyre these sort of colorful sentinels on the border between land and sea and its the ultimate small room with a view once youre sat inside. Catherine Ferry is a historian who's written books on the seaside and on beach huts.

Catherine Ferry
Daily lives can be quite fractured. I think the neighborliness of the past is not necessarily something that everybody has anymore, but there were lots of families who had had these beach huts for a long time, maybe since childhood, and they've been handed down and so they knew everybody there and so I definitely met people on my travels who had had their beach hut longer than they'd had any house they'd ever lived in.

Kamala Harris
I spoke to some beach hut owners, though, who, when describing their huts, like to use words like quintessential and iconic, because they describe these huts as integral to the fabric of british history.

And in fact, it was in Margate that these huts, or at least the precursor to these huts, was said to be invented. Before the beach hut, there was something called the bathing machine, and the bathing machine was this big wooden box on wagon wheels that had a staircase coming out from the front door. This was in use in the victorian era and back then a horse would draw your bathing machine out to sea, a swimmer would enter from the back and get changed or stripped down to nothing, as was the case with men at that time. You would step out into the water under a pull down canvas hood and you would get to bathe in privacy. And this was perfect for the prudish victorian era.

That was also when a few dunks in cold seawater was thought to be medicinal. Eventually the wheels came off the bathing machines and they plopped down on the beach and became beach huts. They became especially popular starting around the 1930s. And this is when, for the first time, british mill workers were getting paid time off and the mills would shut down for the summer for repairs, and they would all head to the beach and use their huts. And for a while, this birthed a booming seaside holiday industry.

But then, in the 1970s, air travel to Europe became much cheaper. And in places like Spain, you have much more reliable sunshine. And so these seaside towns fell into decline. And still today, some of these towns are the poorest places in the country. But especially since the turn of the century, beach huts have gone the other way.

They've become more and more expensive getting up into these hundreds of thousands of pounds figures in some places. And those prices jumped up again during the Covid-19 pandemic. More people were going on staycations, more families were leaving big cities, moving into seaside towns where they'd have their house and their hut.

In the last couple of years, the prices have started to level in England, tighter rules are coming in to limit the ownership of second properties. Demand is dipping, but I don't think anyone expects that the market will fade completely. And maybe that's because, if nothing else, the beach hut offers this priceless moment that I think the british beachgoer is uniquely positioned to savor, which is when you're on the beach and you can watch someone scramble to their car when the skies open up as you sit and sip your tea dry and safe inside your tiny wooden refuge.

Jason Palmer
That's all for this episode of the intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

Asana Representative
Ready for a smarter way to work? With Asana, you can drive clarity and accountability at scale, connect work to company wide goals so you always know what's on track and what's at risk, and maximize impact by automating workflows across your organization. Asana a smarter way to work try for free today@Asana.com. that's Asana.com.