My guest is Bruce Stokes.

Bruce Stoke is a visiting senior fellow at the GMF, the German Marshall Fund.

Welcome to the podcast, Bruce.

Thank you for inviting me.

Welcome back, I should say. We did one of these a while back, but let's get back to this conversation we left a few years ago.

So we're going to start by talking obviously about the US presidential elections and then segue into your take on the current state or the potential development

of transatlantic relations. So first of all, on the presidential elections, we in Europe,

we love following presidential elections and we kind of think we understand how U.S. politics

works, but I'm not totally sure we do. Could you tell me something

which seems so obvious, but maybe not that obvious, why is this focus on the so-called swing

states? Does that mean that the other states which are not swing states are totally irrelevant to the

result? Well, first off, to our listeners, I'd like to apologize on behalf of Americans. We get to vote

and you get to live with the consequences. And as you say, we have this, what I would call a

cockamamie system that was devised in 1789 for a variety of reasons to potentially limit the power of the president,

but I would say more importantly, it was designed or demanded by the southern slave states

because they knew that Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and New York were growing faster than they were, population-wise.

Right.

And that they feared that eventually they'd be outvoted in any future government, and that maybe that future government would get rid of slavery.

So they put these breaks in the system.

So in the U.S., we do not elect the president by popular ballot, popular vote. Each state

has as many electors in the electoral college as they have representatives in Congress,

so it's two senators and many members of the House of Representatives, they have, which is by population.

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