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Welcome to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Maybe Morris. This week we look at the potential of making birth control pills available without a prescription, the future of ghost kitchens might just disappear. And we'll look at conservation, climate change and how communities are finding solutions. We begin, though, with political strategies. I'm Rondy Santis, and I'm running for president to lead our
great American comeback. Florida Governor Ronda Santis has officially announced his candidacy for president, but we are going to look not on a national scale, but at a more local level. Because even in Florida, where the governor has announced his Republican run for the White House against GOP favorite Donald Trump, Republicans lost the mayoral race in Jacksonville in northern Florida. The GOP also lost the mayoral race in Colorado Springs,
another traditional Republican stronghold. So now only two out of thirty two of the largest US cities will have Republican mayors. Have Republicans just given up on local politics in favor of the national stage. Bloomberg opinion columnist Jonathan Bernstein covers politics and policy, and he joins me, Now, Jonathan, what was your first thought when you saw that Republicans lost the mayoral races in Colorado and in Florida, areas that are traditionally pretty deep red.
Yeah, you know, it's sort of there's a couple things you can say. One of them, which is just a sort of right now, is that despite Joe Biden's low approval ratings, Democrats are doing very well in elections and that's sort of continuing into special elections and these off year elections this year. But there's also a longer term story about this, which has to do with that Republicans have given up on being competitive in cities, and they've gone up on caring about cities and the people and
issues and interests that are urban. And it's it's sort of astonishing that Republicans now, after losing these two only two of the large two of the thirty two largest United States cities, only fourteen of the seventy largest will have Republican mayors.
That is astonishing those numbers in particular. Now, is it because urban areas simply aren't as important to the national political conversation anymore?
Exactly? You know, there's a lot of stories about how Republicans used you know, the thing about this that people might not know is that if you go back to the middle of the twentieth century, there were a lot of Republican cities. Los Angeles was a Republican city, Detroit was a Republican city, you know, in the nineteen four in nineteen fifties. There's a complex, complicated story of how
Democrats took the lead in cities. But there's also a institutional and rules based reason why Republicans felt have been willing to just give up on this, and it has to do with the electoral college. At one point in the middle of the twentieth century, the big cities were crucial to the electoral college, and states such as New York and Illinois were big swing states and so you had to compete there. That's changed a lot over the years, and now in the last election, only two top ten
cities were in swing states, only Philadelphia and Phoenix. So you can sort of not compete in the cities and still be competitive for presidential elections.
Republicans are doing this, though, but not Democrats. Can Republicans afford to ignorge cities where Democrats are focusing.
At some point there may be some tipic point where it actually costs them. But so that For example, in Texas, where Republicans used to hold or be competitive for mayor seats in the big cities, now all the big cities have Democratic mayors. That's part of why Texas could eventually become a much more competitive state. Because Republicans don't have
anything to say to people who live in cities. They don't have any policies, they don't have anything really that you know, Republicans increasingly caring about rural areas, which are over emphasized in presidential elections and are really over emphasized, over rewarded in US Senate elections, just don't have, you know, is there an urban policy that Republicans have not? Really?
Now, let's talk little bit more about the electoral college, because I grew up a political junkie, and that was where you won the delegates. That's where you won the electoral colleges in the cities that's how it used to work. What is the X factor? What changed?
You know, a lot of it. There's a whole bunch of different pieces to it. One is that there are just are fewer swing states than there used to be. And as far as I know, and some political scientists have look at this, and I don't think they've ever concluded anything except that it's sort of coincidence. It just happens that there was a period of time where a whole bunch of states were very closely contested and now
less so. And there were times in the past, you know, we had a period of time where the entire South was not competitive in presidential elections. So if you go back sort of one hundred and fifty years, there were very few states there were competitive, and then the course of the twentieth century we wound up having a whole bunch of competitive states, including a whole bunch of big competitive states. And the electoral college tends to reward states
in numbers. Let me sort of go back in basic numbers. People will say, well, the electoral college rewards small states because the formula for the electoral college is the number of House seats and the number of Senate seats you have, so that you know, if you have ten House districts, you get twelve electoral votes for your ten House seats plus two senators. And because the Senate is each state has the same weight, so the Wyoming has the same
two senators that California has, that over rewards Wyoming. But in fact, you notice very very few presidential candidates campaigning in Wyoming because it has three electoral votes and who cares. And even a fairly close electoral college state like say New Hampshire or Maine, that's a small state, you don't get a whole lot of attention from presidential candidates because the states that really are advantaged by their ears through
college are big, close states. So you know, Florida and Ohio in relatively recent elections got a huge amount of attention. Now that those are a little less competitive, you know, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Minnesota, all pretty big states are the ones that get the attention. But it happens that, you know, with the exception of Philadelphia, most of those don't have big cities in them, and that seems to be sort of just coincidence of how
the votes happen to stack up. It's not like by design or you know, a deliberate attempt by anybody to make it turn out that way, But it just happens that we don't have a whole lot of big cities in the competitive states.
I'm curious about the concept of tribalism entrenched electorate. You know, if people are on a side, that is the side they are on, you are not going to change their mind. Is this a factor to some.
Extent, Yes, we have. We do have more partisan voting these days than there was fifty sixty years ago, and so it means that, you know, if you have a group that's votes strongly for one party, it doesn't really pay the other party to bother with that group because they're so strongly entrance. That's always sort of been part of how politics works anyway. It's a little stronger now, so there's less split ticket voting. Part of what happened in these cities recently and the mayor elections could be
a reaction to national trends. Whereas at one point, you know, people who are upset with Donald Trump vote for the Democrat from mayor. That didn't use to be true nearly to that extent.
Where is this headed what are the consequences that are going to come from this?
Well, I think that it's you know, it has had the consequences that Republicans do not have. Republicans don't have policies that appeal to broad to the broad country. They have increasingly talked only to themselves and tried to rally their own supporters. I think to some extent, partisan polarization
makes that true for both parties. But the particulars of the electoral college and what gets rewarded and what doesn't make it even easier for Republicans to feel that, well, we're not going to win cities anyway, so let's give up on well, let's give up on Black Americans because they live in cities, so we don't need them.
It just seems like that would create more tribalism, more entrenched, not open. The big tent concept seems to be gone.
Exactly that it tends to reinforce the already the tendency to begin with for partisanship, and it just reinforces it. And especially again especially for Republicans, because Democrats, because rural voters are so over valued in the Senate, Democrats can't just say, yeah, we were doing badly among rural voters. Forget about it. You know, we'll just lose them. And you know, you hear that in the rhetoric both parties use.
You never get Democrats or never is too strong. Always you rarely get Democrats who would, you know, bash rural areas in general or bash rural states. And it's not uncommon at all for Republicans to just criticize you know, New York City or big Cities, or California or you know, other states that they have no chance in because the way that electoral Senate and centives work, Democrats are not willing to totally give up on rural voters in the way that Republicans have given up on urban voters.
Bloomberg Opinion colonist Jonathan Bernstein covers politics and policy, and coming up, we'll look at the debate over one birth control pill and whether it might soon be sold over the counter without a prescription. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion Podcast. Catch us Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts, you're.
Listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. In South Carolina, senators passed a bill banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The governor says he'll sign it, but women in the South Carolina Senate have spoken out against it across party lines, including Independent Senator Mia McLeod.
It's so disheartening to think that forty one men in this body can make decisions for women and girls that will impact women and girls across our state for generations to come.
And it's not just South Carolina. More states are considering similar bands. Meanwhile, access to contraception can be harder than necessary, But now a panel of independent advisors to the Food and Drug Administration have unanimously voted in favor of approving over the counter availability for a birth control pill called O pill. The panel has made its recommendation and now it's up to the FDA. We get more now with Lisa Jarvis, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who covers biotech, healthcare,
and the pharmaceutical industry. Okay, Lisa, how would this work? And over the counter birth control pill? Would you need a physical exam. Would you need to be under a doctor's care? How does this work?
Yeah?
I think the idea is that we have decades of safety data on birth control, and in particular this type of birth control, which is a progestin only pill. And you know, most women might get a cursory twenty minute visit with a doctor and they have a prescription that's refilled without follow up visits, and it's perfectly safe to do that without the doctor's visit. It would lower a lot of barriers to access and so and we have a lot of experience with it to know that it would be safe.
Why has it taken us so long to get here?
Oh my goodness. In nineteen ninety three there was an editorial and a major medical journal asking for over the counter birth control. I mean, I think there's just a lot of hesitancy, probably for political reasons, but you know, we're really at a place where the urgency is there. Women have fewer options for how they addressed an unwanted pregnancy, and so the stakes are really high, and so I think there's been a lot of pressure. The FDA has
punted this. It was supposed to be reviewed back in November, and so now here we are and advisors unanimously. It was to me very interesting to hear their comments said this needs to happen.
What were some of their comments, you know, some.
Of the criticisms of the data that was presented in the two days that advisors meant to talk about this from the FDA were around what their women could adhere to taking the pill, which the directions are very simple, take one pill at the same time every day. We know that in the real world adherence you know, when
you get it prescribed by a doctor, isn't great. And we know that in the trial that they ran to show that people could do this, the reason that they didn't adhere was largely because they couldn't get back to a clinical trial site to get their pills renewed. So, you know, kind of gets at the heart of the problem. If you could go to your corner CBS and fill in that gap, you would really be in a lot better place.
So is that the strongest pushback that this might be facing. The one argument that would be louder than the others, or would have more traction than the others, is that consistency and being able to do this on a regular basis for the patient, for the woman, she may not be able to pull that off.
It's one of three arguments that got the most attention during the two day meeting. The other one was around whether women could correctly decide if the pill was appropriate for and safe for them. There's just what, well, really, there's just one group that would have a risk of this particular kind of pill, and that is women who have a history of breast cancer. It would be contraindicated. It could help your potentially help the cancer come back.
But you know, the thing is, there was very good data I thought presented on that because you know, most women who undergo breast cancer treatment are above the age where they would be then bearing children. The ones who aren't typically get an IUD. Beyond that, if you're like in a situation where you might be in the small percentage of people who'd be interested in hormonal birth control pills, there's a very clear label on the box that says do not take if you have a history of breast cancer.
So I think, you know, overwhelmingly the gynecologists who were reviewing this for FDA said, you know, most of those women are seeing their doctors on a regular basis and will be told do not do this, you know, and so the public health benefit really outweighs the very small risk of someone making that mistake.
I have to say as a breast cancer survivor my oncologist, like the third thing she said after explaining treatment was oh, and birth control pills are in your past. This will not happen for you, though you'll never take those again. She could not have been more clear.
Thank you for saying that, because I think that point was not sufficiently appreciated in the meeting, even though people were saying it. It kind of you know, people the oncologists who were presenting kept saying over and over again, this is the thing we talked to patients about. They're under regular care anyways, and we will repeat it to them so.
They watch you like a hawk. Lisa, something that you had said that caught my ear was, you know, the question of would women know enough about their own bodies or about their own health care to be able to make the decision to buy this pill on their own without a doctor's prescription. Now, as a woman, my first response is you know, to burst into flame and side,
who do you think you are? But you know, because women do actually are sentient beings and do have in mind of their own However, did you get that sense when you were listening to these arguments made? Were they they weren't being insulting, they were being concerned? Like, what was the sense in the room?
Yeah?
I mean, I think most of the concern was around adolescents and teens, you know, in excess or people who have low literacy, and whether they would understand how to appropriately read the directions on the box. And the concern was less that it would pose a danger, but that if you didn't take it appropriately you were still at risk of a pregnancy, or that teens in particular might confuse this with Plan B, you know, and not use
it correctly. I think the trials showed they enrolled a lot of people in those groups and showed that they did a good job and probably about the same as they do when they're under a doctor's care. And we know a lot of teams take birth control for a variety of reasons, not just to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, but to deal with act near you know, other you know, kind of reproductive health issues.
So how would an over the counter availability for a birth control pill change the landscape. I mean, how earth shattering would that be.
I think it would be a big deal. I mean, part of the most compelling testimony I thought in the two days was from college age women who talked about you know, I'm very educated, but when I moved to a new state for college, I had trouble getting my birth control because you have to find a new doctor. You can't just transfer a prescription. You might not have
a ride to a provider to get that prescription. I think there's just a lot of barriers for a lot of women, whether you're in an urban setting or a rural setting, and it would just lower those Is.
This a clap back to the rollback of abortion access? Is that what's spurring this on?
I mean, it had been in the works before that. I think there's a new urgency around it, for sure. I mean, certainly the stakes have never been higher. And by the way, even if you live in a state where you have access to abortion, pregnancy itself is a risky proposition these days that I've written in the you know recently about the rise of maternal mortality rates. So really, we want to have women empowered to make good choices
about their reproductive health. And this gives them one more but of course especially important in those states where they no longer have abortion access.
When the FDA receives a recommendation from an independent panel like this one, does it usually take a long time to be able to come to a decision, to put it to a vote, and then get the drug to market.
The FDA usually has a date by which they have to make this decision. In this case, it's unclear how long it will take, and they don't, by the way, have to follow the advice of their advisors, which was why I wrote this column sort of saying you should follow their advice. They typically do, but we have many instances of times when they haven't, especially in areas where it's some controversy or political controversy. And in particular, the FDA has been to me overly cautious on things around
women's health. We know that they've put a lot of restrictions on medication abortion, for example, despite safety data. So you know, hopefully this is available by next year, I hope.
Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg opinion columnist covering biotech, healthcare, and the pharmaceutical industry. Now coming up, we're going to take a look at ghost kitchens, how they came to be, and why they're disappearing. This is Bloomberg.
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This is Bloomberg Opinion. I maybe Morris zoom meetings, hand sanitizer, flexible workdays, QR codes. These are pandemic habits a lot of us have embraced. Even in this post pandemic era. These habits have staying power, but not so much for ghost kitchens. Those are restaurants that only offer delivery. Let's
learn more with Bloomberg Opinion columnist Laticia Miranda. She covers consumer goods and the retail industry and joins me, now, could you explain what a ghost kitchen is and how that came about?
Yeah? So, ghost kitchens also known as virtual or cloud kitchens, They are a group of kitchens that are built in warehouses. Usually there's some kind of a company like cloud kitchens that owns the warehouse and then invites or sells kind of a bunch of kitchen stations to different restaurants so
they can cook their own food. And then from a consumer perspective, you'd probably interact with the ghost kitchen when you're you're ordering on Uber Eats or grub Hub, and you know you order from Jane or Joe's sandwiches, it could come out of one of these ghost kitchens or virtual kitchens, which is just sort of a kitchen station along with other ones.
And what I learned when I was reading your column on the Bloomberg terminal is I always assumed these ghost kitchens were just sort of mom and pop independent restaurants, you know, just different individual places that are really trying to survive during the pandemic, so they created this sort of ghost kitchen where you order online and then it's delivered.
I didn't realize that these could also be national chains like Wendy's jumping on this trend and it becoming such an enormous part of our and I hate to put it this way, but a part of our pandemic experience.
Yes, a struggling kind of restaurants. Fast food chains jumped onto this trend, and because it's typically a lower cost way to deliver food. And it also what some restaurants started to do was they started to sell under different names. So, for example, Chuck E Cheese kind of came under some scrutiny for doing this where they had UH they were running a ghost kitchen called past Qualis that some people thought, uh was kind of a local pizza spot, but turned out to be uh run out of Chuck E Cheese's
own kitchen. So yes, it is a bit confusing about who is who. And a lot of chains jumped onto this because it was a way to keep costs low and keep deliveries going out the door, but also a way to kind of maximize revenues.
So it sounds like it was popular. Did it seem to have staying power when it was first started and as got some traction, I think a lot.
Of restaurants saw a lot of promise because the costs are lower, it takes a smaller staff to run, and you know, it feels like forever ago. But during the pandemic when there were you know, kind of restaurants were closing doors because of mass mandate policies or because of different study ordinances around the pandemic to try to keep it from spreading. A lot of restaurants were struggling with figuring out how to jump onto the food delivery business.
So this was kind of a way for large chains, which were struggling as much as the smaller businesses, to figure out how to keep how to keep the lights on even while people weren't coming.
In to dine.
What is the advantage for a business to have a ghost kitchen versus the advantage for a business to have people coming into the door as patrons.
I mean, arguably, I think the ghost kitchen caught made a lot of sense when people were either afraid or weren't able to eat in person, and we didn't have
sort of our normal, you know, working from the office habits. Now, though people are coming back into restaurants, they're going back to the drive through with the fast food chain, and so that a lot of companies are seeing that it's a lot more profitable to go back to kind of that traditional dining experience, that traditional drive through experience, rather than invest in a ghost kitchen that only offers delivery where you know Whereas Now, because people are coming back
to restaurants, you can have them dine in and you can offer delivery. So you're kind of maximizing the value of that real estate space.
I just thought they would have had more staying power, just as you described latistias out of convenience for customers and a less expensive, you know, less overhead for the restaurant owner, and didn't work out that way.
What happened, Yeah, I mean I think there was a big issue too around transparency. The ghost kitchen concept is new, and like with a lot of business models that are new, it's difficult for regulators to figure out how to think about them, how to enforce labor codes and health codes. So that was something that definitely ghost kitchens got in trouble for early on, where you know, health and inspectors would come into a ghost kitchen see violations and then
weren't sure about who's responsible for them. Is it, you know, the restaurant that runs that kitchen station, or is it the ghost kitchen operator. So that kind of created a lot of issues. And then, like I mentioned, on the consumer front, a lot of consumers didn't actually know who they were ordering from when they were online, and then we're surprised when you know, a pizza that's a lot like a Chuck E cheese pizza shows up at their house, but maybe they paid more for it because you know,
Chuck E Cheese is selling it at a premium. So I think that it created a lot of issues up front that you know, kind of I guess set it up for it to not really survive in this sort of new era.
Is this sort of part of the need to get out that pent up demand we've been hearing about people are just aching to leave their homes and go be social again.
Yeah, I think that definitely has a lot to do with it. People prefer to, you know, I think that people missed going to restaurants and getting out and seeing people.
I think also as far as the rise again of the drive through, I think people are getting back to their kind of normal pre pandemic routines going into the office, maybe going to the gym, you know, kind of being out and about, and you know, going through a drive through or stopping by a restaurant seems a lot easier than you know before when we were just stuck at
home and food delivery was really the only option. So I think it's both people missing being with people and then also just it's actually sometimes more convenient to have to go pick up something from a restaurant or run through the drive through.
Do you think there would be a future for ghost kitchens. Do you think there's a possible market there that maybe somebody could come in and work through all the legal ees and figure out the way to make this work. It sounds like it could have potential.
I think so.
I think it's not I think with a lot of you know, Silicon Valley concepts, I think that the promise was a lot bigger than what this concept could actually accomplish right now. It does make a lot of sense for smaller businesses that are, you know, trying to get off the ground, because it is cheaper to just run a ghost kitchen than to go and find real estate, find a place that already has kitchen built in, find staff,
do all your own marketing. So I think that there is a way to apply it some of these other some of these ghost kitchens, including a company called Reef that had signed a partnership with Wendy's to roll out their ghost kitchens that didn't actually end up working out. Wendy's is closing all of those, but now they're also pivoting to UH to do the technology behind food halls.
At at airports.
So when you go to an airport, there's a ton of different restaurants, and what REEF is doing is they're building the technology behind that so as a you know, consumer, or are somebody waiting at the airport, you can just order from through their platform and get your stuff delivered to your table or wherever you're sitting. It's similar to kind of what you already see in airports. But I think that that kind of application makes a lot of sense for a ghost kitchen that's kind of looking to pivot.
But then yes, I think there there's also a possibility for smaller restaurants to continue using these opportunities.
Leticia Miranda is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who covers consumer goods and the retail industry. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. African lions have vanished from ninety four percent of their historical range, and there are fewer than twenty five thousand left in the wild. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists them as vulnerable to extinction.
Laura Williams is Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change, and she joins me now This is a big pro that leads to a bigger issue. First, I want to ask where do we assign blame for the dwindling lion population.
It's a mix of reasons, but one big one is human wildlife conflict. So if lions don't have enough prey, then they will often resort to livestock, and then locals, in retaliation, because they've lost a source of food and a source of income, will often retaliate by killing the lions. And that's been that's been a huge problem for lions across Africa.
What does that then portend for the rest of us? How is that a signal that there is a problem?
I guess it shows us that climate change is increasing the pressures on humans and wildlife. And when we, you know, try and find solutions, we've got to put humans, you know, at the center of that as well as the wildlife, you know. I think what's positive is that, you know, through a lot of project all over the world, not just with lions, is that you know, what's good for humans is often actually really good for wildlife too.
You can have both.
Now, how are communities getting involved in helping in the problem?
Sure?
So I was I was really lucky to be able to speak to this amazing woman called Shivani Bala, and she has started an organization in Kenya called Oaso Lions in you know, the lion population in that landscape has grown from eleven in two thousand and eight to you know, about fifty in twenty twenty two, so it's a huge increase and the lions are stable. And I think what was really noticeable is that rather than working against or apart from those who were killing the lions, as you
might imagine, she was working closely with them. She works with a group of people called the you know, the Zamburu people, and one of the warriors who would often actually you know, they hated lions, but he came up with the idea for a program called Warrior Watch where the Zambua warriors, who have this traditional role in protecting the community, they go out and they track the lions. And then by tracking the lions, they're able to tell the herders where to stay away from, you know, to
keep their livestock out of harm's way. And that means that the line population is safe, the live stock is safe, and attitudes the lions have really improved over the course of this program.
Are you finding in your research that more of these community centered projects are starting to crop up now as people find more solutions.
Yeah, you know.
So every year this charity in London awards money to conservationists all over the world, and I got to speed to some of them, and you know, they're putting community at the heart, you know, of their work, like everywhere.
So I spoke to somebody running a project in Managesta, and you know, part of that is not only education, but giving people sustainable livelihoods so that they can lift themselves out of poverty and also work to protect you know, the forests and the animals within those forests that are so valuable.
Are the projects that you are watching, those that have been cropping up that have the community as the center. Do they have a future? Are they sustainable? Do they have traction?
Yeah?
I absolutely think they do. Lots of people that are getting support from charities like the Whitley Fund for Nature, and I think as we enter this source of period where we're focusing and taking these issues more seriously, you know, lots of you know, new ways of creating funding for these projects are cropping up, and so what I really hope is that you know these new financing tools focus on those projects that are doing the most for humans
and sustainable development, as well as the wildlife and the environment.
That we need.
Laura Williams is Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and that does it for this week's Bloomberg Opinion. We are produced by Eric Molow, and you can find all of these columns on the Bloomberg terminal. We're available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up. I'm Mimmy Morris. This is Bloomberg