REPORT FROM THE US

Annelise Nielsen is Sky News Australia’s Washington Correspondent. As Australia emerged from the years of pandemic, with the targets of COP26 and the AUKUS agreement into the future, the question to ask was what is the focus in Washington DC? With mid-term elections in the US just a year away and the Biden presidency under pressures of its own making Annalise Nielson presented a Sydney Institute zoom meeting on Wednesday 10 November 2021 to give some perspectives. The text which follows is an edited transcript of that meeting.

REPORT FROM THE US

ANNELISE NIELSEN

It’s always a privilege to talk to people about the issues and material we work on every day. One of the real joys of the last year has been seeing how engaged people in Australia have been with the United States content. It is so important to Australia and our future that people want to know what’s happening here.

One of the great privileges of working for Sky News is we get to speak to viewers who are very switched on, and very clever. You always know that there’s something more to what’s happening than what we’re being told by those in power. One of the great joys we have is being able to analyse and dissect that and look at what’s really happening.

There has been no shortage of things to talk about over the last year, with what’s been happening in the United States. Over the last few weeks, we have done some pretty intensive coverage around the Virginia Governor’s election, and I felt like I spent half of the coverage just explaining why it was significant.

That’s not because people don’t grasp the significance of it, but because it seems a world away from what’s happening in Australia. There’s plenty happening there as well. But this was a very significant race. And it’s probably a good place to start, to show the significance of how the tides are changing in the USA. We know voters who live here are notoriously fickle. They change their minds quite quickly; they tend to move on quickly from things we might dwell on in Australia for longer, and that seems to include the pandemic.

The latest polling is very bad news for Joe Biden. He’s not doing well even compared to where Donald Trump was at the same time in his presidency, or Barack Obama. Biden’s approval ratings are worse. He should have had a lot more wings now. But what’s been really significant in the polling is that people are moving on from the pandemic; the Covid response seems to have faded away from being a front of mind issue for many people.

It’s either that they were never that concerned about the pandemic in the first place, or they were frustrated by the lockdown and are glad that’s eased off. If they were concerned, they’re vaccinated, and getting boosters. With kids now getting boosters, people are moving back from that pandemic mentality. It was quite telling in the Virginia Governor’s race that the Democrats ran on the Covid response.

The other aspect they hit hard was Donald Trump, and connecting Glen Youngkin (Republican candidate) to Donald Trump’s legacy. The fact that didn’t work speaks volumes about where America is heading. At the moment, there isn’t extensive coverage of Donald Trump. We do go to his rallies.  Not to all of them, but I pick the few ones I do attend. It is the very niche media that follows him or for the most part, the foreign media like me. Or the wire services in case something massive happens. Trump is not on social media, so people have forgotten what that continuous dripping of tweets from Donald Trump was like, not knowing when he was going to say something again. So, he’s not front of mind anymore.

The Democrats kept pushing the Trump factor and it simply hasn’t worked. The other really telling thing from the Republican race in Virginia was the focus on schools. That has been so important because it’s a real factor in people’s lives. Their kids haven’t been in school for a long period of time.

There’s been a flash point around masking about where you stand on that, on vaccinations, but also there is an underlying cultural war where people feel like they need to take a stance on these things. And that they’re being judged for their positions and put into a box by people they know or interact with. It has become a real issue about where you find your place in the world. And that’s after two years of feeling very isolated with the pandemic. So, they are the underlying issues we’re starting to see.

There’s been a lot of anger issues in the US, a real increase in assaults on aeroplanes. A lot of that comes down to masking. There’s been an increase in road rage reported; crime is up around the country. People are frustrated and that’s pent up.

All of that is why this governor’s race was so illuminating on so many different fronts. Those polls don’t lie. If people feel compelled to come out and vote about something, that’s when you do cast your ballot.

At the beginning of covering the Virginia gubernatorial race, I thought back to the coverage of the presidential race. There were so many more Glen Youngkin signs out than Terry McAuliffe signs. As I was driving through Virginia with a friend who happens to be Republican, he was saying, “I think we’ve got this, because look at all these signs.” I said, “From what I can tell, I think Glen Youngkin’s got it too, but I don’t want to make the same mistake when everyone said Trump’s going to win because look at all the signs that are out.”

Signs don’t vote, but signs are a very indicator of how hard someone’s working to win your vote. So, Glen Youngkin obviously did that. Donald Trump’s campaign worked harder, but the set of circumstances were that a lot of people voted for Joe Biden on the basis that he wasn’t Donald Trump. Biden didn’t have to work as hard; he made himself a small target and it worked. But that’s not going to work into the future, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be exciting enough voters to keep the Democrats safe in the midterms. That’s going to be the major factor for this presidency – whether Biden can get through enough legislation in the next year to really leave a lasting legacy.

Q&A/Discussion

Question: As you would be aware there’s been a lot of coverage of our Prime Minister’s visit to Rome and Glasgow, particularly in relation to the AUKUS security agreement, which also has an aspect in it of the proposed nuclear submarine. In relation to the argument between Australia and France as it reflected on President Macron and President Biden, was there much coverage of that in the United States or doesn’t the media care?

Annelise Nielsen: There’s been a remarkable amount of coverage around it. The original announcement took a few days to filter through. I’ve noticed that the US news cycle doesn’t burn through stories as quickly as we do in Australia. So, things will tend to get picked up as a major issue the next day, especially in politics, and cycle through for a few days. I didn’t anticipate just how significant a news story the actual announcement would be, especially as it came ahead of the Quad meeting. It became quite the significant story. Then the fallout with France came off the back of the coverage around the Afghanistan withdrawal which is universally acknowledged as being mishandled and chaotic. It’s only the real die-hard Democrats that say, “This is what it was going to be like, regardless, so that was unavoidable.” A lot of moderate voters say, “I agreed with getting out of Afghanistan, but it was handled poorly.”

The US has claimed to be the best at working with allies or saying, “we’re really good at consulting with them”. The Democrats campaigned on that with Joe Biden. So, to say they’re going to make a major security announcement and cause the French to come out with such fury was definitely a story. But it really hit home when the French withdrew their ambassador. A lot of that is to do with the fact that Secretary Antony Blinken from the State Department is quite a Francophile himself; he’s spent many years there, he speaks fluent French and he has a personal connection to France as well. So, he was quite personally aggrieved with how that all played out and he was quick to go to France to try and smooth the waters there. But the United State always had more leverage to continue the relationship than Australia did.

It was quite telling when President Biden dropped Australia in it and said it was handled clumsily, and that he was under the impression that it might have been handled better. That is as much to do with keeping the French happy, and saving face back home, because he’s facing a pretty tough time in the polls. Biden needs to be considered a statesman, and the one who can work with allies. He was the one that was having to go to Glasgow without any strong climate commitment despite coming in as a president that was going to change America’s relationship with climate. He re-joined the Paris Accord right away. But that’s about all he’s achieved in the meantime. Congress numbers aren’t in his favour. One of the side effects of that is that Australia is in a very vulnerable position now that we’ve signed up for this Accord. They won’t release the memorandum of understanding about what we’ve actually signed up for. They’re citing national security but it’s pretty iffy whether that’s accurate.

There’s undoubtedly something they could release in the meantime but they’re choosing not to, and there’s still 18 months of negotiation. We don’t have the French submarines, there’s discussion now about leasing submarines in the meantime, and then the potential for there to not even be enough capacity in the United States for them to bring on construction of additional submarines in a reasonable timeframe. They’ve said that’s not the case, and they can increase capacity, but that puts us in a very vulnerable position. We’re also quite disposable in all this. The Biden administration wasn’t going to wear that with the French for us to save face.

So, Australia thinks that we can ride it out; we probably can. But in the meantime, they have put in a huge amount of effort to keep the French happy. A lot of that’s to do with NATO and keeping their own trade agreements going because they have a lot to negotiate on that front. It’s going to be very difficult for Australia to find its footing again. It wasn’t just the policies or the interactions, it was the fact that Morrison didn’t wear it in a statesman-like way. That was the real charm of Donald Trump; he could go do whatever he wanted on an international stage and just shrug it off. But we looked like the kids with no friends to sit at lunch with. That’s a really hard thing to come back from on a world stage.

Question: Describe to us the situation in the Biden administration. As you know, an important agreement between the United States, Britain and Australia must have had significant support within the administration. You mentioned that Blinken, the Secretary of State, is a Francophile; I think you can probably put John Kerry into that category as well. But there must have been people at the Pentagon, in various security departments and in the White House, who saw this deal as important, vis a vis the United States and China and generally the United States’ involvement in the Pacific. You’ve also got a President who, being fair, probably doesn’t have the best memory and is not quite as on top of it as he might have been four or five years ago. Is the administration divided on this, or is the Blinken view prevailing over what was probably the Kurt Campbell view in relation to the Pacific? How do you read the administration here?

Annelise Nielsen: You hit on a few good points there; the first being China. This is the one thing everyone can agree on, and that’s across the aisle. Everyone is scared of China. The one thing that will get both sides of the aisle moving is saying this will counter their rise. It’s notable that the first piece of bipartisan legislation that passed through the Senate was about trade and shutting out China from key production – the main focus was on solar panels. But it was quite significant in that it got bipartisan support. It’s still stuck in the House, but it looks set to pass by the end of the year. When it comes to the administration, any objective observer can see that Joe Biden’s not at the same performance level that he was 5-10 years ago. People age, that happens. He was voted in and there’s not much you can do about it now. Everyone around him swears black and blue that he’s sharp as ever, he’s got a great memory, there’s nothing untoward. But anyone can see that he’s just grown old. The idea that the administration is driving things for the President and not the other way round is something they rail against. Whenever it comes up as a suggestion, they will say it’s Biden driving the show, and there is some evidence of that with how the Afghanistan withdrawal was handled.

The decisions that were made did seem like top-down decisions, especially with the fallout that followed The on-the-record statements from the Pentagon advised that it was the President’s decision to withdraw at that time and they had to fall in line. When it comes to elements within the administration, there is a hugely powerful push about anything climate change related. That comes from John Kerry being quite an influential figure in the administration. What we’ve seen with that influence is how they’re interacting with the Indo Pacific. You’ll notice, in legislation around the area, they insert climate change as much as they can. It’s something you cannot ignore. But there are some who are quite powerful in the administration who’ve got their eye on long term political life as well, potentially wanting themselves for the top job. In the polls Kamala Harris isn’t looking that fantastic either which makes for a wide-open prospect for many of them. Some individuals want to put their stamp on things and that is a very popular cause among the Democratic base.

Question: Your comment about relations with France reminded me of the famous George Patton comment that he’d rather have a German division in front of him than a French one behind him. What has been the political repercussions of the embarrassing failure of America in Glasgow to agree to end coal use by 2030?

Annelise Nielsen: It was interesting to watch the whole push to put Australia over a barrel about climate change targets. It’s been a huge point of contention since the Biden administration came in; they weren’t enthusiastic about dealing with Australia, they weren’t enthusiastic about dealing with Scott Morrison’s government when he’s the guy that’s known for holding up a piece of coal in parliament. Wherever you stand on the issue, we know where the Democrats stand on it and we have known where Mr Morrison stood on that as well. So, the idea that it’s a popular issue is really hard to argue. A lot of middle of the road voters are not all that concerned with climate change but they are concerned with electricity prices.

It hasn’t had huge media coverage coming back from the conference. President Biden spoke of climate change as important but then he came right back and spoke about infrastructure – bread and butter issues; about clean drinking water for people and something like $55 billion for new piping so there’s no lead in the water. It’s about fixing up the roads and then that becomes its own discussion around the social construct of different cities and how that influences different communities. So, climate change has completely died off. It’s certainly nothing anyone has brought up with me when I was out in Virginia talking to voters either.

Question: You mentioned electricity prices. I recently watched on one US television station that there’s been a very significant increase in petrol prices – 30 per cent since the election?

Annelise Nielsen: It depends where you live. There was a bit of a spike when there was a cyber attack on the oil pipeline along the East Coast; that cut off fuel for a few days. Then it became scarce. Prices have jumped around. Personally, with my own car, it’s gone from costing $30 to $50 Washington DC is not very indicative of the US cost of living, because there’s so many other factors that go into living here.

But, across the country, the cost of petrol is going up. It’s up on last year and it’s up on last month. That’s something you can’t argue with; the cost of living has gone up across the board. Groceries in particular – red meat has become very expensive and hard to find. A lot of supermarkets will have empty parts of the shelf where you’d normally find it. There are weird things happening with supply chains; going into a supermarket in Iowa, there’s no spices on the shelf because the spice delivery hadn’t arrived.

The problem is no one really knows what the problem is. They know that the ships are all in the harbour, full, and they’re having trouble offloading and there’s not enough truck drivers. They say, “If we had truck drivers over the age of 18 instead of having to be 21 to drive them, that would help.” But everything is so off kilter. The best economic minds have been saying it’s like a hose with too many kinks in it; every little thing is a bit wrong, and they just can’t seem to straighten it out. We’re coming up to a very retail intensive time in the US coming up to Thanksgiving – which is pretty much the only holiday that everyone celebrates aside from Christmas. Even baking is normally popular this time of year as the weather gets colder. You tend to go to family events and bring something, and it’s hard to find some of the ingredients. These are all real issues that are going to come to bite very soon, especially for a lot of people that have been out of work; there’s no more unemployment benefits. Housing has been off the wall with selling and buying, and now that seems to be slowing down as well.

Question: One of the real issues is the border. We know that the Vice-President concedes she hasn’t been at the border, but then has argued that she hadn’t been to Europe at the time either; I think she’s currently in Western Europe.

Annelise Nielsen: She’s in France actually, so we’re waiting to see how that pans out.

Question: How serious is the border question beyond those states close to the southern border? Is it impacting on the middle of America and the north of America?

Annelise Nielsen: That’s an interesting point. When I was in Iowa recently doing some stories around the Trump rally, I was interviewing quite a few people. I was asking what people thought was the biggest issue the government should be addressing. A lot of them were saying the border. Yet, we were thousands of miles away from the border. I was stunned and asked why the border crisis affected them. It does. It permeates throughout the country because many of the people that cross illegally move through the rural areas to work in processing factories and on farms. There was quite a high-profile murder in Iowa; a person who was there illegally murdered a young woman jogger. Drugs have also spiked, especially throughout the pandemic. It’s certainly trending up and people see that as trafficking over the border. So, it does become a real issue for people across the US especially when they have the lifestyle they enjoy, they have the same community they’ve grown up with and they’re not big on change at the best of times.

Then, when you have large groups of alien or unlawful people coming through which sets them off. Then, bad things happen and it gets worse. It’s an issue across the country; across the border, it’s a genuine crisis. We spent some time reporting there. I went, with a crew, to the southern border of Texas, and then into Mexico. It was a free for all. I was calling border force and I was stressed about trying to find people crossing illegally. They can’t really help you because they’re government agencies. The guy said, “Don’t worry, you’re going to see it.” We went to Del Rio. The first night we were there, we drove out to film the border wall. A couple of people ran across the road straight up to the police to hand themselves in to get processed and claim asylum. It was nonstop after that, and unbelievable.

Every time we drove along the road, someone would come out of the field. We were interviewing people who lived there, and they would say, “Every night, people come through our backyard.” They showed us their home security camera tapes and there were large numbers of them. Many of them who had lived there for a long time said, “We’ve never seen it like this before. We’ve always had people cross over but we’ve never seen it like this.” You’d talk to the migrants, and they’d say, “Joe Biden is in and he said we’re not going to get separated from our families.” It was just a small change in policy, and a change in rhetoric that incentivised so many people to come over. Then they just get released out into the populace. The other question of significance was that a lot of these people were coming with Covid. This became a real bargaining point for conservatives arguing with Democrats.

They weren’t necessarily that concerned about Covid in the first place, but the comparison was just too easy to make, to say, “How can you possibly care about the Covid pandemic, if you’re just letting people come in like this?” A lot of the testing being done on these migrants wasn’t being done by the government either; it was not-for-profits. It has become a perfect storm of issues all happening at the same time. Then Kamala Harris said there was no need for her to visit the border. It just added fuel to the fire. And, having been there, I think you do need to go and see what it’s like; see what these border communities are dealing with. A lot of people living along the border are immigrants that came over legally for farm visas. The US needs to recruit such people to work on farms, because they’re having trouble finding labour. They really should be doing that to undercut the illegal trade, but you’re not going to understand that if you don’t go and look at it yourself.

Question: Following up on that border discussion, what’s the story behind the proposed $450,000 per person for those who were illegal and put in detention. It seems incredible. If that happened in Australia, it would be the end of any government. How’s that going over?

Annelise Nielsen: That’s a policy decision where you do a bit of a double take at the headline and say, “That can’t be right.” Then you look at it and realise it is true. This isn’t from the administration directly, it’s from the Department of Justice looking at compensation for those who came over the border, were put into detention and separated from underage relatives. The argument from the Department of Justice is that the authorities breached international law and have to try and provide them with compensation. But if the department was not actively looking to do this, there’s no real mechanism for these people to do it themselves and the problem would probably just disappear and go away.

The problem is the department is actively prosecuting what they saw as a failing of the Trump administration. But it’s turned into an own goal. That’s an extraordinary figure; $450,000 is the maximum they were looking at. It blew up in one of the few press conferences we’ve seen with the President of late. The Fox News reporter asked, “How do you feel about that?” And the President said it was a garbage report. Then he had to walk that back because it wasn’t garbage, it was true. Now they’re looking at trying to find a much smaller figure for compensation, but they’re not walking away from the idea that they should be compensating these people. That, again, sends a pretty horrific message when you’re trying to stop people walking over the border.

Question: What is your view of the mainline media in the US, and their apparent general political partisanship for the Democratic Party?

Annelise Nielsen: The media here is very different from what you see in Australia. I found it quite confronting when I first got here because, especially in Australia, you’re constantly fed this idea that Fox News is so partisan. Then you get to the US and you realise that Fox News does a fantastic job; I love working there. CNN does exactly the same, and then some, with their own opinion programming and editorial focus. I found it quite unsettling at first. I didn’t quite like how everything was. But the longer I’ve been here, the more I like it because you know exactly where everyone’s coming from. No one is putting forward this idea that they’re not of a certain opinion, they’re just telling you, “This is what my opinion is.” Then they back it up.

I like that. It’s more of a system where you have a good debate. You let the opinion guys be the opinion guys, and the news guys be the news guys. That’s more like what we do at Sky; we don’t hide that our opinion hosts have opinions, we let them do it and we have a good debate and hopefully make interesting television. And I think we do. It does get characterised a bit but there is a definite liberal slant to a lot of it. It’s noticeable in the amount of good will towards the current administration, and some things that happen, if the exact same thing had happened with Donald Trump, it would have been the end of the world. Endless coverage and the equivalent here, we’ll give a bit of a mention, everyone moves on, especially the gaffs from President Biden which are not insignificant in number. So, that’s a good point to raise, it’s a very different environment here compared to Australia.

Question: Leading on from the previous question, what’s your take on the independent content creators, the really big ones; Joe Rogan, Tim Pool and some of the independent news networks such as Newsmax.

Annelise Neilsen: It’s always good to have a lot of competition. It’s good to have diversity in media. The competent players are able to compete. That’s why it’s good we have privately owned news companies like News Corp. I have to say, I don’t follow many of them closely, personally. I do meet a lot of their people on the road, and they’re quite nice. But I can’t say I’m too familiar with all their content. Yet I’m always up for a bit of a healthy competition.

Question: In your reports from the United States, particularly Virginia, you mention this debate about critical race theory. We would probably use a different term in Australia. Can you tell us how that became a fairly sudden issue, in that it affected a wide part of the electorate, whereas normally these matters are debates you might hear on Sky, Fox or the ABC. They’re probably not the sort of main thing that takes a role in the election campaign. How did it come to pass that critical race theory became so important, and even that people could remember the term, because it’s not at all a term that’s been around for long?

Annelise Neilsen: It’s awfully complicated. I’ve done a few interviews about it, but I’m working on a longer-term piece. It all comes back to schools. This is, again, why it’s taken off. People will deal with stuff in a workplace, but when you have to sit there and be told that your child is going to be taught something as fact, that’s when people will reach the end of their tether. It began with the murder of George Floyd. When that happened, it sparked a national conversation around race, not least because of the rioting that came with it. It dominated people’s lives for a month. But, for a lot of people, their response to that was a need to reframe how people talked about race in America. It was fertile ground to talk about that issue in the US. There are a lot of issues around race in America.

But the response came that it needed to be taught in schools. Then there was politicisation of things that aren’t normally politicised. For example, the curriculum, people want to work it into how you teach Maths such as Maths being a communist or socialist construct. I’m not even joking; it becomes an actual discussion around whether it’s an imperialist idea that you’re teaching that there’s only one way to do Maths. The discussion has engulfed school boards, and this is where people, at a grassroots level, especially Republicans, have been really strong with petitioning their local school boards about it, and trying to get their own people on the boards. That’s where Republicans do really well in elections. And when it comes to a presidential election, they’re organised, they know which people they’re talking to, because they’ve been dealing with them on the local school board, when they’re looking at voting for the local mayor; it works its way up.

Democrats tend to do a broad stroke, where they get one person at the top whom they want to be really inspiring, and then have this trickle-down effect. But we’ve seen school board meetings completely of control; there’s been a mass walk out of other states adhering to the school board association across the country, and so that’s been fractured. There are a lot of parents who were already considering pulling their kids out of public school over the last year because they were doing home learning or they were having to wear masks or were required to get a vaccine – that’s the discussion now. A lot of people have been pulling their kids out to either do home-schooling or put them in private schools and Catholic schools. They’ve managed to, on the whole, keep the schools open. The idea of critical race theory has become fundamental for so many people destroying that line, saying, “I can’t adhere to teaching this to my child” and that’s why it’s become such a national problem.

Question: Can you tell us how local school boards get chosen or elected?

Annelise Neilsen: People run for local school boards. They’ll put sandwich boards out on the street to vote for your local superintendent and those other positions. They’re hard-fought races a lot of the time and can be quite nasty. People take them very seriously.

Question: Can you tell us how “Joe Brandon” is going? Is he likely to get the republican nomination?

Annelise Nielsen: The first time I saw that was at the Trump rally in Iowa; someone had rented a big banner, and the whole ground was cheering. I had to google it. It does speak to – especially the community having distrust in mainstream media. It was a NASCAR journalist interviewing Brandon, after he won a race, and he must have done really well. As she was interviewing Brandon, the crowd started chanting “F— Joe Biden”. She heard that as “Let’s go Brandon”. So, she said to the driver, “The crowd’s really excited, they’re saying ‘let’s go Brandon’.” It went viral. A lot of that was the crowd that hates Joe Biden saying, “This is what the mainstream media does; it twists things to suit themselves.” Having been in that situation of reporting before a crowd, I absolutely give her the benefit of the doubt that she thought they were saying what she said she heard. It’s become an absolute catch cry, and it’s also politically correct. There have been a lot of “F— Joe Biden” signs that don’t get a lot of coverage because it’s too rude to put on TV, it’s too rude to post on a mainstream social media account. But she’s unwittingly created a new rally cry.

Question: You touched on Kamala Harris earlier. She appears to be in a death spiral; is that your assessment from there, or is that just the way it’s been reported here?

Annelise Nielsen: I first started covering the perception of Kamala Harris during the election campaign and it was when I was interviewing people of colour. I would ask, “What do you think of Kamala Harris potentially being Vice-President?” I was genuinely shocked how many of them were really turned off by Kamala Harris. When they’re on camera, they’d always say, “I don’t really know about her.” I thought, “How do you not know about her? She’s going to be the Vice-President, apparently.” Then, off camera, they’d say, “I don’t like her.” You would tease it out. A lot of it came back to when she was a prosecutor. She took a really hard-line stance trying to incarcerate the parents of kids who were truants. She said it was criminal to not take their kids to school. But there are so many issues of inequality that would stop a parent getting their kids to school every day that you would think the Democrats would be super sensitive to. Kamela’s approach turned off many people on her side. There’s been nothing to help recover that image in the meantime.

She’s done incredibly well being the first female Vice-President and that’s nothing you can ever take away from her. It’s the highest office any woman has reached in America. But the issue is how you translate that from people wanting to trust her as commander-in-chief. She completely disappeared during the Afghanistan withdrawal; the reporting was that she didn’t want any of that attached to her. I think it was a Politico report where she was heard saying, “I don’t want them to stick that shit on me.” The border stuff has been a bit of a disaster; she should have gone down there early, done a quick piece, get in, get out and then say you’ve done it. But she dragged it out and then made that awful comment, “Well, I haven’t been to Europe either.” Well, there’s no migrant crisis involving Europeans coming to America.

Kamela Harris hasn’t had a big win; she’s been doing this space stuff, that’s not a huge winner. It seems like they’re playing a really long game. They want to keep her out of all the bad publicity of the first year, then the honeymoon period fades away and they want to bring her back with a vengeance when it comes to the primaries. But she has a lot of competition. There’s a lot of people who know there’s no way we’re going to see Joe Biden run again. He’s said he’s going to run again but it seems like that’s just to keep away the conversation around who’s next. Otherwise, it makes no sense.

Question: It seems that the conventional wisdom is now that the Democrats are in a lot of trouble at the midterm elections, so what, if anything, are they actually going to try to pass through Congress before that?

Annelise Nielsen: This is the really funny thing. They are in trouble, objectively. If they get the same result that they got in Virginia, they’re going to lose control of Congress. Their response has been completely split between the moderates and the progressives. They’ve finally passed the infrastructure legislation, with the support of the Republicans in the Senate. Now they’re arguing about what’s going to happen if they don’t pass all of the progressive measures in the reconciliation process. That’s for really bold things that a lot of Americans are going to be put off about it. We’ve already seen them annoyed about universal prepay, paid leave, some of the more extreme climate elements and free community college across the country. That’s all still in there, and it’s still a complete mess about what’s in and out.

The Democrat progressives are saying that if they do not get the really bold policies through, they will not inspire people enough to vote in the midterms which seems to take for granted that all the moderate Democrats voted for Joe Biden just because he wasn’t Donald Trump. They’re still operating on the idea that people really liked Joe Biden – and a lot of people do like Joe Biden. But he didn’t get that record number because so many people loved him. He got that record number because so many people were just fed up with Donald Trump and got out to vote who don’t normally vote. They probably can’t count on that at the midterms. Things aren’t looking good, but a lot can change in a year. It would be foolhardy for the Republicans to take any of that for granted.

Question: You’ve reasonably dismissed the Vice-President as a potential candidate at the next election, and Biden will presumably be incapable of running. Who are the left’s potentials within the Democrats, and the not-so-left potentials in the Democrats?

Annelise Nielsen: I’d say we’re going to get some left of centre prospects coming out in the next Democrat primaries. There were so many options already smoked out in the last primaries that didn’t make it over the line, when they thought they had such a strong base going against Trump. There was this assumption in the Democrats that it didn’t matter who they ran, they would win. Then they got spooked and went back to the safest option possible. This time, they’re going to be so emboldened by being in power for so long, they’re probably going to push for someone unusual. I know it sounds crazy but I wouldn’t rule out John Kerry having another crack. Kamala Harris isn’t going to go down quietly. She’s definitely going to try to dominate the field again. Peter Buttigieg could try again. It’s hard to pick this because so much of the discussion has been around the Republicans. But I’d say they’re going to have a strong push to have a woman in there, and that will probably be the one that takes out Kamala in the process.

Question: Could it depend on whether Trump runs again?

Annelise Nielsen: I don’t think Trump will run again. I know he wants to run again, and he definitely seems in place to announce that he’s going to run again. A lot of that comes down to how he keeps his funding for his PAC going. One of the reasons he wouldn’t have announced it at this point is that it impacts the reporting requirements for the money he collects. My suspicion is the Republicans are going to be a little more organised about having their own person in place; they don’t want to get caught off guard again. They’ve been given a perfect blue print by Youngkin, about how to run a campaign embracing the Trump legacy but not requiring it.

Since the election, basically every Republican I’ve talked to has said they’ll vote for Trump again if they have to – a lot of them still like him – but it’s not do or die. I know Ron DeSantis has been thrown about quite a bit, but I don’t know if he would potentially make it. There’s a lot of appetite for a woman; Nikki Haley and Kristi Noem are names that come up often for the Republicans. We’ve seen Mike Pompeo doing a lot of work around Iowa already. I think Mike Pence is out; I’d be really surprised if he could turn that around, because the Trump base, while they would support someone else, they hate Pence for 6 January. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but it would have to take some serious rebranding. I want to spend a bit more time around Iowa because that’s where they all flex their muscles and there’s been a lot of them doing that.

Question: Could you take us back to the climate change issue; what would you say is the Republicans’ position on climate change? Given that they’re in opposition, they don’t have to talk about it too much. Are they flatly opposed to the Democrats’ position and where Biden is taking them, or do they have a more nuanced position?

Annelise Nielsen: They really don’t care that much; it doesn’t come out compared to the Democrats who are so evangelical about it. There’s an appetite for doing things to improve the environment. There’s a lot of people within the Republicans who do believe climate change is real, and they do think we should do more to fix it. But they’re very attuned to the idea that it shouldn’t come at a cost of living for everyday voters. That’s when they get really worked up – if it’s something that’s going to increase the price of electricity or come across as something like a carbon tax. It’s not even one of the top ten issues that they talk to voters about.

Question: Can you tell us a bit about yourself? I think you went to the US in 2020.

Annelise Nielsen: I went in January 2020 to cover the Iowa caucuses, then I went back in August to cover the election and never left.

Question: I’m not sure how many people – television and radio reporters – the ABC has in Washington DC; I think it must be over half a dozen.

Annelise Nielsen: They’ve got three on-air people, and I think one of them does radio as well. They have two cameramen, and three producers.

Question: How long is your term in the US?

Annelise Nielsen: Hopefully indefinitely; it’s at least three years. I hope I don’t do all this work and then get pulled back before the election. But you never know.

Question: What’s your background? Australian-American?

Annelise Nielsen: Yes; Dad’s American. He was born and raised in Chicago, so we still have a lot of family there. My sister lives here so we used to come back every year. That’s one of the reasons they sent me over; I have the great joy of being a dual citizen, which is fun until you have to start filing your taxes, but it’s been a huge godsend over the last year to help keep me here.

Question: Did you live in the United States before your current posting for a long time?

Annelise Nielsen: No, I only ever used to come here for weeks at a time. I spent three months here, in LA, after I graduated from university, but that was just doing bits and pieces.

Question: Do you have any suggestions for the states, or the seats, to watch for the midterms? Where might we see change?

Annelise Nielsen: This is interesting. Virginia has changed everything now. All of a sudden, CNN was running graphics saying, “We’d better watch Georgia”; “We’d better watch Arizona”. New Hampshire is the other state that we’re going to be keeping an eye on. Pennsylvania we all have to watch after what happened with the election count. Hopefully, they’ve sorted some of those issues out. The South isn’t as much of a given as it used to be; Florida is going to be another one to watch, because in this time they’ve completely lived as if the pandemic wasn’t happening. They shut down for a month in the beginning, and they’ve done quite well; they haven’t had as bad an experience as everyone predicted. In that time, they’ve weathered the pandemic well. If anything, they’re increasing the number of Hispanic immigrants that tend to vote Republican now.