The State of Play 1 Day Away from Election Day – Top 3 Takeaways – November 4th, 2024
- Are you better off than you were four years ago? We're only one day away from Election Day which likely comes as a relief to just about everyone including the candidates. But while the end of this cycle is now in sight, what the past four years likely hasn’t been for you is relieving. The fact of the matter is you likely are worse off than four years ago. Most Americans are. While I’m still not sure why during the debates the former and perhaps future president of the United States didn’t ask Ronald Reagan’s most famous question, Are you better off than you were four years ago? ... Trump did put the question to voters as part of his closing campaign pitch starting last week with the Madison Square Garden speech. When pollsters put the question to voters last week – most voters answered that they were better off than four years ago with only 40% saying they’re better off today. Occasionally perception and reality are on different pages, but what this reflects is one’s overall reality. As I’ve always said you can lie to people about what policy will do and those who’re inclined to believe it will, but you can’t lie to people about what is or isn’t in their wallets because they know. So, about that. Friday’s government jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was equal parts a farce and telling. What was farcical? While the headline number of only 12,000 jobs added during the month was the lowest for any given month since December 2020, at the peak of the pandemic...
- The real adjusted number for the month was negative 100,000 jobs making it the worst report since COVID-era lockdowns were forcing people out of work. Last month, after the government jobs report, I said this in predicting that the real net number of jobs added during the month was approximately 111,000 fewer: Government revisions have been absurd. All that ever gets reported in non-financial news media is the initial number each month and then it's on to the next. That’s a huge disservice, in part because the BLS has routinely been providing a huge disservice with their initial reporting. Not only are the BLS’s monthly jobs numbers revised monthly, but they’re so unreliable they’re revised annually. It made news in August when the BLS acknowledged that they’d overstated the previous year’s jobs gains by 818,000 jobs over the prior 12 months ending in March. That was an incredible indictment of the agency’s credibility in providing jobs data. Every month had already been revised three times, to theoretically correct the initial reporting, and yet several months later the government came back and said, oh yeah, we were still off by 818,000 jobs or an average of 68,000 per month? That’s complete absurdity. Right on cue the negative jobs revision was 112,000 jobs for the month – almost exactly what I stated the original number should have been. Why does this matter? It continues to illustrate the disconnect between the government’s economic reporting – which continues to be mostly glowing (last month's poor report is being blamed on temporary factors like Hurricanes Helene, Milton and the Boeing strike) juxtaposed with the fact that just as only 40% of Americans say they’re better off than four years ago, only 40% of Americans approve of the current state of the economy. Your wallet isn’t lying to you...the Biden-Harris administration and their non-credible government reporting agencies have been. Using Friday’s report, since the Biden-Harris Administration took over, until today, the average inflation adjusted income is 6% lower. So yes, the odds are your wallet is 6% worse off than it was four years ago. Just imagine taking a 6% pay cut for four years? Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine it. It’s the average reality. As always there are two sides to stories and one side to facts. That’s the economic reality and that’s independent of the 914% increase in crime attributed to illegal immigrants under this administration. So, about the election.
- The early votes tell a MAGA story. Four years ago, heading into Election Day, Democrats had a 14.3% lead in partisan voter turnout across the country in the 20 states (including Florida) with partisan reporting. As of today, the Democrat lead in voter turnout in those states is down to 1.7%. In Florida, Republicans are performing 12.4% better in turnout with votes cast prior to Election Day compared to four years ago. Among swing states with direct reporting data, Republicans are performing 11-points better in Arizona, 6.5-points better in North Carolina, 8.1-points better in Nevada and 18-points better in the most pivotal swing state in the country this cycle, in Pennsylvania. That’s a clean sweep in turnout improvement by Republicans, and by wide margins. It’s a strong sign as we’re only one day away from Election Day. So is this. According to vote modeling company TargetSmart... Republicans carried a 7.2% turnout deficit into Election Day in 2020. As of right now the deficit is estimated to be 2.8% nationally for a 4.4% GOP improvement. Also, notably, as I referenced on Friday... Gallup’s latest findings about who intends to vote on Election Day... According to Gallup, among likely partisan voters, Democrats indicated they are 16% more likely than Republicans to vote before the election compared to voting on Election Day. That’s exactly the same margin between the two parties that Gallup sampled four years ago. What that means is that there remains a reason to believe that Republicans will once again hold the advantage in Election Day turnout over Democrats as well. How independent voters break will tell an important part of the story... I’ll account for that critical part of the story on tomorrow’s Election Day show.