US Midterms: winds of fury

Welcome to the final episode of the assessment in this series.

Today's question.

Conditional on Democrats holding a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives on the 3rd of January, 2027, will a law be enacted by the 31st of March, 2027 that provides full year, so FY 2027, regular appropriations for the Department of Defense, or to some, the Department of War.

The AI models suggest this is unlikely but not ruled out.

Roughly a one in three chance that four-year appropriations pass by the end of March with a continuing resolution as the base case.

This is the first conditional question we have run.

It assumes something that has not happened, Democrats winning the House in November, and asks what follows from it.

That lets us reason about a world before it arrives, and it separates the part we cannot forecast from the part we want to think about.

It also carries a cost.

If Republicans hold the House, the question voids and nobody is scored.

And the wording assumes that the party holding the House is what decides whether the Pentagon gets a full year bill.

It may not be.

That assumption is what I want to put to my guests.

The forecast you're about to hear came from the world's leading AI models.

Each reasoned through the base case and independently aggregated into a single view.

And it came back at 30%, so unlikely.

With me to explore the question are Dana Allen, Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy at the IISS and Editor of Survival, and Michael Scheer, Chief UK Correspondent for The New York Times, and for many years its White House correspondent.

Welcome to you both.

Dana, let's start with the assumption rather than the number.

You have spent 30 years writing about how Congress shapes American foreign policy.

Is the House majority the right thing to condition on here, or should we be conditioning on the Senate, or on whether this president will sign an appropriations bill at all?