Kamala’s Big Pivot w/Bret Baier & Florida’s Property Insurance Market Survived Milton – Top 3 Takeaways – October 17th, 2024
- The Big Pivot. Yesterday, in the afternoon, preceding the Fox News-Kamala Harris interview with Bret Baier, one of the top searches on Google was “Is Bret Baier a Democrat”. That's likely due to a few reasons. First, it’s unlikely many people searching for info on Kamala Harris tune into Fox News on the regular. Second, because until the past week, you couldn’t find a Kamala Harris interview with just about anyone, because she wasn’t doing them with anyone. But then, apparently realizing that her effort to run a 2020 Biden-styled basement 2.0 campaign wasn’t working she switched gears. And so, she switched to the safe venues. Her interview list over the past week included hard hitting interviews with Stephen Colbert, Howard Stern and a person so vein that he literally refers to himself as a god (with a capital G no less) and who during the interview referred to Donald Trump as a fascist so that Kamala Harris could respond. Good times. And as for the one supposed real interview that she did do – the 60 Minutes hit... CBS has been busted for having edited the interview to make her look better and they continue to refuse to release the transcript of the full interview, let alone the unedited interview. So, what does that say (about CBS’s credibility as a legit news organization or about Kamala’s performance)? But while Kamala’s campaign strategy has recently pivoted to include access for friendly venues, what hadn’t pivoted was the polling. The multi-week trend showing Donald Trump moving ahead in five of the six key swing states. So yesterday, in an effort to turn the trend around, she made her biggest pivot yet in accepting an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News. Now, for those who aren’t familiar, Bret Baier isn’t Democrat, but he also isn’t a Republican. He is a lead Fox News anchor, but he isn’t inclined to toe any party line. As he was quick to note following the 2020 election when election integrity questions were swirling, quoting Bret, There is NO evidence of fraud. None. What Bret is, is a legit journalist. An endangered species in today’s media landscape. Unlike the CBS News interview, Bret said the 30-minute interview would be played from the first word to the last without any editing. So...
- For those truly seeking to learn more about Kamala Harris this was and is probably the most important interview she will do. It was a big pivot for her campaign. And how did it go? Well, almost certainly not the way she or her campaign would have wanted it to go. Bret Baier didn’t mess around with his line of questioning and wasn’t afraid to jump in, in the time limited interview, to attempt to get answers that she was elusive in providing...which was literally all of them. Some may describe it as having been confrontational. Whatever it was, it was yet again instructive for how there was effectively nothing constructive articulated from her in the form of meaningful policy positions on the real issues of the day. When pressed out of the gate on the border and illegal immigration, she called it a topic of discussion that people want to rightly have and then blamed Trump for opposing the border bill that was only proposed earlier this year after the Biden-Harris administration had created a crisis with a record number of illegal immigrants having entered the country. That was it from her on the border. When she was pressed on the economy and inflation, she once again brought up Trump. There were no specifics on her plan. The one thing that did make news coming out of the interview was her effort to distance herself from the current administration that she’s apart of when she said...My presidency will not be a continuation of Biden’s – which speaks to what appears to be a growing rift between the current president and vice president (as Biden has regularly tied Harris to his decisions as of late). But what was clear, was that she once again wasn’t able to clearly tell voters who she is, what she stands for and how she would address the issues of the day. And if Bret Baier was too much for her to handle, how do you think things would go with say Xi Jing Ping, Vladimir Putin, Little Rocket Man and the Mullahs in Iran? I'm not sure Kamala’s big pivot worked the way she wanted it too. Though kudos for going to a venue that’s slightly more substantive on the real issues we face than The View.
- Florida’s insurance market dodged another major bullet... Or hurricane and numerous tornadoes as the case happened to be. If you’re one of the hundreds of victims who suffered damage from one of the many tornadoes spawned by Hurricane Milton, you most certainly didn’t dodge a bullet. By my count, as damage assessment continues to roll in, there are over 1,000 homes and businesses that suffered damage throughout the Palm Beaches and Treasure Coast, some catastrophe, due to the record tornadic activity that took place last week highlighted by two EF3 that touched down in our communities. However, if you were unscathed from the hurricane and subsequent tornadoes you still might have been wondering if you really would remain unscathed by the time your next property insurance renewal comes around. The answer, for the second time in nearly as many weeks, is yes. As insurance claims are rising, and dollar amounts associated with them are being totaled, what’s clear is that what’s happened in Florida, even with the impact of three hurricanes, including two majors this year, isn’t going to derail the progress the property insurance market has made since we began to turn the corner on the crisis that had taken over the market preceding the legislative reforms of the prior couple of years. While Hurricane Helene turned out to be one of the most devastating hurricanes in American history, that was largely due to what happened outside of Florida and with flooding, not wind. It’s Florida’s wind mitigation policies that have been the crux of Florida’s property insurance crisis. For perspective, Hurricane Helene’s total insurance loss has been estimated to be $48 billion (with the total cost to recover, independent of insured losses, pegged at over $100 billion). By way of comparison, as sad as it was to see Cedar Key decimated by the storm, our state’s insured losses were only $1.2 billion, or not even 3% of the total loss. What’s the scorecard for Milton shaping up to be? Right now, there are about 152,000 claims related to Milton statewide with an estimated insured loss of $1.9 billion. Now, greater than $3 billion in losses for Florida’s property insurance market certainly isn’t nothing. It no doubt is a big deal. But the Florida property insurance market is more than prepared for losses of that size during the course of a hurricane season. By way of comparison, 2022’s Hurricane Ian, which was the storm that put the exclamation point on Florida’s property insurance crisis, led to losses of $21 billion, or close to seven times, what the losses associated with Helene and Milton are shaping up to be. The affordability challenges have been so real and the concerns so great that even while we were still in the middle of hurricane coverage last week, I was fielding questions from concerned listeners wondering what the impact on property insurance policies might be. It’s still early, but the answer appears to be essentially nothing. In Florida’s property insurance market, no news is good news and according to Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation there’s continued stabilization and progress that is being made even in the face of the claims associated with the two major hurricanes.