on his priorities. He also remade the judiciary, appointing six of the state Supreme Court’s seven justices and nearly 200 other judges. Lawmakers did not always welcome his demands, but the governor was quick to veto their projects or back challengers when they crossed him. “DeSantis is the 800- pound gorilla in Florida,” says Nick Iarossi, a strategist who worked on the governor’s campaigns. “No one wants to be on his bad side.” During Mr DeSantis’s tenure Florida’s GDP growth has outpaced the national average (see chart). This year the state’s $1.8trn economy became the world’s 14th-largest, surpassing that of Australia and Mexico. Big firms such as Citadel and Palantir moved their headquarters to Florida. Mr DeSantis has an approval rating of just over 50%—higher than Mr Trump’s in the state. Mr Donalds is nothing like Mr DeSantis. A congressman raised by a single mother in Brooklyn, he was arrested for possessing marijuana as a teenager. His life turned a corner, he says, after he committed himself to Jesus in the car park of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. He had a career in banking, then was elected to Congress. When insurgent House Republicans moved to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker in 2023, they rallied around the affable Mr Donalds, elevating him as a national MAGA figure. Mr Trump is a fan. “RUN, BYRON, RUN!”, he wrote on social media last year.
Although Mr DeSantis quipped that Mr Donalds “hasn’t been a part of any of the victories that we’ve had here over the left”, the congressman only has nice words in return. “He’s done a phenomenal job,” he told voters in early August. On policy, he says, there is no daylight between them. His only public break with Mr DeSantis came over revisions to Florida’s African- American history curriculum, which asserted that slaves “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit”—a claim Mr Donalds, a rare black Republican, called “wrong”. The next governor will have to focus more on costs than culture. Since 2020 Florida’s home prices and insurance premiums have surged by 50% and 75% respectively, faster than in most other states. Incomes have risen by only 30%. That is creating a crunch for ordinary people. Population growth is dramatically slowing. Mr Donalds says “affordability” is his top priority. Governors across the country say the same. If Mr Donalds can show them how, his effect on Florida could surpass even that of Mr DeSantis. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/08/10/florida-was-a-swing-state-now- its-maga-land
What Britain can teach Democrats about the ultra-Left How to stop extremists from making a party unelectable Aug 13th 2026 Neil Kinnock is best known in America as the man whose oratory Joe Biden plagiarised. In 1987 Mr Biden was so taken by the British Labour Party leader’s line about being the first of his family “in a thousand generations” to attend college that he borrowed it. At first, with due credit. Then, on television, without. The ensuing furore helped sink Mr Biden’s first run for the presidency. Yet Lord Kinnock, as he is now known, is not just the man who condemned Mr Biden to another 21 gruelling years in the Senate. He also helped make Britain’s main centre-left party electable again, by purging hard-left
extremists who had infiltrated it. His story is one the Democratic Party could usefully study. It, too, is struggling with infiltrators: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a populist-left group that is on a roll. The DSA stumbled this week when Francesca Hong, who once called for abolishing the police, narrowly lost the Democratic nomination to be Wisconsin’s next governor. But candidates backed by the DSA are winning enough primaries, and making enough noise, to delight Republicans. The parallel with Britain in the 1980s is striking. Back then Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative prime minister, was enraging the left by curbing unions and privatising state-owned industries. (Maggie, unlike MAGA, believed in free markets.) Labour was desperate to unseat her, but first had to convince voters it was trustworthy. This was made harder by Militant, a Marxist group that practised “entryism”: rather than running for office under their own banner, its cadres entered a larger party and sought to turn it far to the left—just as the DSA does with the Democrats. Militant was more extreme than the DSA—and more secretive. In public, it offered simple slogans: shorter hours, higher wages, nationalise the 200 biggest private companies, and so on. But this public platform was, following Leon Trotsky’s formula, merely a step towards its true, secret agenda: leading a revolution, like the one in Russia before Stalin went too far. Militant’s leaders were, to put it mildly, out of touch with the median voter. Pat Wall, a Militant-backed Labour candidate in Bradford, called for the overthrow of the state and predicted a “civil war” with “terrible death and destruction and bloodshed”. Unsurprisingly, Militant’s secret agenda did not remain secret. Britain in the 1980s had a gloriously muckraking press and a ruling party that played hardball, as a non-cricketing nation might put it. A Sunday Times reporter tacitly recorded Wall’s “civil war” comments; the Tories gleefully quoted them in campaign ads. The sense that Labour was being taken over by scary Marxists helped keep the party out of power for 18 years. In the one big city
that Militant ended up running, Liverpool, it brought lawlessness, fiscal ruin and endless scandal. There are differences between Britain then and America now. The DSA is not plotting a violent revolution. It is obsessed with opposing Israel, whereas Militant thought every global conflict could be soothed with socialism. The DSA is passionate about gay rights; Militant thought homosexuality was “a problem which will disappear under socialism”, in the paraphrase of Michael Crick, author of “Militant”, a fine book on the movement. What the two episodes have in common, though, is a small group with unpopular and potentially disastrous policies determined to foist them on a bigger party. For the DSA, the key insight has been that not many people vote in primaries, so a well-organised entryist group needs to win over only an impassioned few to capture a Democratic nomination. For Militant, the method was to foster a cultlike devotion among its followers while denying to outsiders that its party-within-a-party existed at all. (Its top leaders claimed to be merely editors of Militant, a newspaper.) Its foot soldiers would join a local Labour chapter without revealing their true loyalty, and attend every meeting, no matter how boring. They would create a faction with other leftists and win control of it by showing up. They would repeat this process until they controlled the whole chapter. “They always appeared to give primacy to securing power within the party rather than for the party,” recalls Lord Kinnock. In October 1985, at a Labour conference, Lord Kinnock denounced the ultra-left’s “impossible promises” and “rigid dogma” and the “grotesque chaos” of Militant-run Liverpool. On television, he called Militant “a maggot in the body of the Labour Party”, and braved a hostile mob of its supporters screaming “scab” at him—the harshest insult in the lefty lexicon, denoting a class traitor who crosses a picket line. He set about expelling Militant members from Labour—no easy task when they hid their affiliation. Fainthearts accused him of conducting a witch- hunt. Nonsense, he retorted, Labour’s constitution clearly barred its party- within-a-party tactics. He had to persuade people, he remembers, that “even the broadest churches had walls and if they didn’t they ended up as heaps of
rubble.” He succeeded, eventually. He was never prime minister, but he paved the way for Tony Blair and 13 years of Labour rule from 1997. The Democrats cannot simply plagiarise the Kinnock model. Their party is less centralised; its leaders cannot stop radicals from competing in primaries. But they could heed what Labour learned in its wilderness years: that utopias are not real, that gradualism is not betrayal and that the electorate are not “incidental onlookers”. A left-wing party must constantly prove “that its idealism is not lunacy”, as R.H. Tawney, a historian, once put it. The alternative in Britain in the 1980s was a principled Conservative government with no effective opposition. In America today, Lord Kinnock fears, it could be “prolonged, unimpeded Trumpism”. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/08/13/what-britain-can-teach- democrats-about-the-ultra-left
Inside Venezuela’s high-stakes political negotiations Donald Trump’s bullying of Canada is endless Brazil is at last managing to build its own warships A big earthquake reveals two very different Colombias
Inside Venezuela’s high-stakes political negotiations Maria Corina Machado’s absence does not mean they will fail Aug 13th 2026 “It’s disrespectful, it’s obscene, it’s spitting in their faces.” That is how Jorge Rodríguez, the president of Venezuela’s rubber-stamp National Assembly, described the idea of discussing institutional reforms just weeks after two big earthquakes struck the country. He should have asked the victims. “Any change that removes power from the current government in any way is positive,” says Francis Riascos, camped by the rubble and hoping to find his brother’s body. Nor did Mr Rodríguez convince Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, who has wielded enormous influence in Venezuela since special forces seized the dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. Three days after Mr