Election Day Three Weeks Away & When Economically Illiterate People Report Things – Top 3 Takeaways – October 18th
- Election Day is just 3 weeks away and one of the biggest questions is whether we’re about to see a political wave. After a summer full of news which seemed to have the cycle trending blue – there's been a dramatic shift towards the right in recent weeks. History was already on the side of the GOP, as the president’s party typically loses congressional seats in midterm election cycles (93% of the time). Now as votes are pouring in across the country, including over 600,000 ballots which have already been voted in Florida, polls are showing increasingly competitive races in places we haven’t seen them decades in many cycles. In any wave election there are races which weren’t originally on the prognosticators radars which break in unexpected ways. Recent polls are starting to show competitive races in blue states all over the place. This includes states like New York where the RealClear Politics average now shows just a five-point lead for the incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul. If New York is potentially competitive this November, what isn’t? Most notable in gubernatorial races, is Oregon. Ronald Reagan was still president the last time they had a Republican governor. The Republican candidate in that race is pacing an average of a three-point lead. And here at home, Governor DeSantis is now projected with a 13-point win according to RealClear Politics. Were that to happen it’d be the...
- Largest win by any candidate in Florida’s Governor’s race in 32 years – when Lawton Chiles won by exactly 13% in 1990. All told the RealClear Politics Projections, which average all current polls and adjust them based on the error rate in previous election cycles, now shows Republicans gaining a net of two Governor’s races which would leave Republicans in charge of 30 states compared to 20 for Democrats. The RCP average shows Republicans picking up 26 seats in the House – 5 flips are needed to gain control. And perhaps most notable, the Senate. For months prognosticators and political pundits alike have suggested Democrats will retain control of the US Senate at the end of this cycle. The RCP average now suggests that not only are Republicans potentially positioned to gain the one net pickup necessary for control – but they’re potentially positioned to gain two with Republicans picking up seats in Georgia via an eventual runoff election and Nevada, while holding serve in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin. Now obviously any of these projections are worth what we’ve paid for them and until the votes are counted the truth won’t be known. But what’s increasingly clear is that the landscape looks the best it has for Republicans across the board in months with Election Day just three weeks away.
- Police Departments have been defunded. Despite ’defunding’ claim, police funding has increased in many US cities. That’s an ABC News Headline to an ABC News report. That’s also what happens when economically illiterate people report things. In the ABC News “Investigative report” they state: A new ABC News analysis of the budgets of more than 100 cities and counties found that 83% are spending at least 2% more on police in 2022 than in 2019. Of the 109 budgets analyzed, only eight agencies cut police funds by more than 2%, while 91 agencies increased law enforcement funding by at least 2%. ABC’s analysis of police budget data shows police spending has increased in some of the very cities frequently cited by conservative politicians and pundits as places where Democrats' defunding has fueled violent crime waves. The Los Angeles Police Department's budget is up by 9.4% since 2019. San Francisco’s police budget is up by 4% and Philadelphia’s is up by 3%. In Chicago, police spending is up 15%. The overall narrative in the report, reviewing the largest Democrat led cities and Democrat led counties, is that conservative assertions of defunding the police occurring is false because only nine of the 100 locales studied outright cut their budgets. Now here’s the thing and it is quite a thing. You might have noticed your dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to go. You might have realized or even accidentally heard that over the past year we reached a 41-year high for inflation and our current inflation rate remains at 40-year highs. The effect of ‘Bidenflation is that a dollar in 2019 is only worth 83.9 cents today. Yes, the net rate of inflation means you have to spend 16.1% more today to equal the same outcome as in 2019. In ABC’s BS report, not one example they used, not one showed funding levels today matching funding levels in 2019 adjusted for inflation. Literally every example in their report “debunking” the defunding of police, in fact illustrates the defunding of police in net dollars. Their reporting was so profoundly unsound, it’s the perfect example of what happens when economically illiterate people report things. And that’s the generous take on the report. The only other excuse would be that they knew what they were doing and were intellectually dishonest in the dissemination of information – with the expectation that the consumers of their news are dumb and wouldn’t know better. Their report in fact showed just how pervasive the defunding of police in inflation-adjusted dollars has been.