The political annexation of America’s swing state media

Plus: Jason Cowley’s New Statesman legacy, and how crypto bought the US election.

Fourteen years ago, I arrived for my first day at the New Statesman, just in time for the Christmas issue. Apart from a superb essay by Richard Dawkins on his love for the King James Bible, I can’t remember much about that edition – having come from the Daily Mail, the more thoughtful and distinctly less shouty New Statesman office was a culture shock that took some adjustment.

The Christmas issue soon became one of my favourites to work on: which festive scene could we work Kim Jong Un and David Cameron into this time? Was our brand more Bruegel or Muppet Christmas Carol? Would anyone recognise George Osborne in a Santa hat? Making a magazine is both a very serious endeavour and an inherently silly one. Since leaving the New Statesman five years ago, I’ve never had the occasion to say: “Hear me out – Tiny Tim Farron?” My life is poorer as a result. (I do remember that the editor was away, having jammily secured a commission from a paper to cover the Ashes in Australia.)

And now, here we are, at Jason Cowley’s final issue as editor. I’m one of many people across the media who got their big break under his editorship. As I’m writing this, the UK supreme court is hearing arguments about gender and self-identification, and I am also grateful to Jason for trusting me – and writers like Sarah Ditum, Victoria Smith and lately Hannah Barnes – to write about this uniquely incendiary topic despite frequent calls for our blacklisting.

Back in the mid 2010s, no one else in the British media seemed to have clocked that activists had far outrun popular opinion and the evidence base. Having a respected, centre-left publication like the NS take an interest in the issue from the start helped, I hope, prevent Britain from falling into the terrible polarisation that’s evident in the US. One of the Republicans’ most devastating election adverts – “Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you” – would not have worked as well here, because Keir Starmer rowed Labour back to the shores of sanity. The NS is a big part of that story.

Talking of which, nothing makes you appreciate the fundamentals of British politics more than covering an American election. I spent most of October in Pennsylvania, reporting for the Atlantic and exposing myself to the insane media diet of the American swing state resident.

The British mind almost can’t comprehend the amount of money sloshing about in US elections. Take the spending limits: in the UK, parties are allowed to spend £54,010 for each constituency they contest, which works out to £34m across the country. In the US, Kamala Harris managed to raise – and spend – more than $1bn in the three months she was a presidential candidate.

Where does this money go? The Harris campaign spent big on rallies, celebrity events and a well-staffed ground campaign. Both campaigns blitzed swing states with adverts, elbowing out the usual aggressive promotion of anti-obesity drugs and life insurance plans. I will never complain about having to sit through three minutes of a party political broadcast by the Lib Dems before Doctor Who ever again.

Elon Musk’s largesse might have garnered all the headlines, but the biggest corporate donor in the US election was the crypto industry, which saw the vote as a chance to boost candidates who will relax financial regulation. You could donate to Team Trump in Bitcoin, if you wanted, and in mid-September the candidate announced a nebulous crypto platform called World Liberty Financial, with his sons as “Web3 ambassadors”. Trump used to describe crypto as a “scam”, but now the guy behind such money-making ventures as Trump University has come around to the idea.

The spending power of the crypto industry is also behind another of the year’s big political stories – Trump’s tour of “bro podcasts” and live streams, encouraged by his teenage son Barron. Many of these podcasters have grown wealthy on crypto sponsorship, along with ads for nutritional supplements, nicotine pouches, energy drinks and “hard seltzers”. At the same time, America has relaxed the regulation of online gambling. The overall effect has been to create a ready-made lifestyle for young men, promoted by a media universe that funnels them towards risky financial ventures and questionable health products, while telling them at the same time not to trust authority – the same authority which, a cynic might say, would otherwise tell them not to take up vaping or online poker, or bet their entire student loan on Dogecoin “going to the moon”.

One line from Jason’s leaving announcement struck a chord: he wants “to dedicate more time to what I originally became a journalist to do – which is to write”. As someone who made that leap, I approve wholeheartedly. This year alone I have: visited schools in Long Island; seen Joe Rogan do stand-up in Austin; watched the balloon drop at the Democratic National Convention; and listened to Tim Walz give a speech on a farm surrounded by pumpkins. Thanks to social media, the world is a blizzard of half-baked opinions. The greatest privilege in journalism is to go to places, witness history – and write it down.