Donald Trump says vapers should back him because he “saved flavoured vaping in 2019” and he will do it again. Why has the centre left decided it doesn’t want vapers in its coalition?
For historical accuracy, Trump partially saved flavoured vaping from himself. It was his administration that announced a flavour ban in September 2019, only to walk bits of it back because his campaign team were worried that it might cost him votes.
In the process, flavoured pods were banned but flavoured disposables were not, leading to the market being flooded with flavoured disposables. In our interview with her, Lindsey Stroud of the Taxpayers Alliance – whose politics lean to the right as far as I can tell – told us that “Trump's not going to save vaping in America if he gets elected. Trump is the reason why the whole world is dealing with disposables”.
And it was the Trump administration that made it almost impossible to ship vapes by extending the PACT Act, increasing prices and cutting off consumers in rural areas.
The US legal situation is complicated and I will spare readers the fine detail of premarket approvals and so on; but in a nutshell, Trump did nothing to unwind the perilous legal limbo that American vapers face, and plenty to add to it.
I won’t go into the high politics of this, save to say that my views on Donald Trump are what you might expect from a member of the British (centre-left) Labour Party.
That said, there is some logic in users of safer nicotine products flocking to the populist right. It is probably true that vapers will be marginally better off (in the narrowest sense) under a Trump administration than they would under Harris (although huge tariffs on Chinese imports will make devices eye-wateringly expensive). That tells us something worrying about how many in the centre and on the left do politics writ large.
Vapers are routinely ignored or slandered, the usual charge being that they are somehow agents of the tobacco industry. Sure enough, no sooner had Trump made his announcement, the Centre for Tobacco Free Kids was denouncing him for pandering to big tobacco.
I’ve experienced this myself in a European context: members of my own political party refused to even talk to me when I began working in vaping (and for the record, I was not working for any tobacco companies).
They preferred to listen to “people like them”. That means worthy-sounding non-governmental organisations, most named after body parts, who had and still have a reflexive dislike of anything that resembled smoking, regardless of relative safety, economics or common sense.
Keir Starmer – the British Prime Minister, and like me from the Labour Party – thinks that populism centres on easy answers to complex problems. For what it’s worth, I agree.
But when it comes to harm reduction, the centre left prefers simple answers, parroting what its client NGOs tell them they should think without question, and accusing vapers of being tobacco industry stooges.
Populist right and centre right parties, on the other hand, have listened to and taken up vapers concerns. That has impacts at the ballot box which constitute an entirely self-inflicted wound for the centre left.
There wasn’t a vaping group advocating for the UK’s membership of the EU during the 2016 referendum, but there was a group of vapers – known as “Vapers for Britain” - advocating that the UK leave the EU, citing the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive as the cause. Was that the decisive factor in the referendum? Probably not, but it sure mobilised folks who would otherwise have voted remain to turn out for leave instead. According to a Populus survey, vapers voted for Brexit in greater numbers than the overall population.
That same year, Republican and Trump supporter Ron Johnson won re-election to the US Senate for Wisconsin – a key swing state in this year’s Presidential election - by a razor thin margin. Johnson was initially behind, but mobilised vapers with his support of harm reduction. Some vape shops even registered people to vote.
There are no votes in supporting tobacco control measures. People will tell pollsters that they support them, sure, but it won’t motivate anyone’s voting choice. Vapers faced with having their chosen quit-smoking aid taken off them by one party and not the other? Now that’s a voting block you can mobilize.
I’m not arguing that there should be no tobacco control restrictions because there are no votes in it. Smoking kills, and the restrictions on cigarettes are the right thing to do. If the same were true of vapes, pouches, or other safer nicotine products, then the centre left would be right in arguing for them to face stiff regulation regardless of the politics.
But that simply isn’t true. As far as I am aware, no one has died because they used a legal vaping product or nicotine pouch as intended. Why, then, has the centre left decided that they should be treated the same despite the lived experience of millions who had quit smoking?
There is a strong progressive case to be made for safer nicotine products. Smokers tend to be poorer, are more likely to be neurodiverse or LGBTQ+ or from an ethnic or religious minority: all groups that the centre left prides itself on wanting to protect. Quitting smoking is probably the single most effective way they can improve their health and their lives. Progressives should welcome that, not try and stop it.
