gehringer_2

It's always fun to look back and speculate. If Ford wins that election does he have any better handle on the economy? Does he make a different appointment to the Fed than William Miller, one who starts the battle against inflation sooner? If he does he gets re-elected in 1980, no Ronald Reagan, and who knows where we all would be? And where does the right wing go if the Ford wing of the GOP keeps them shut out for another cycle or two? The stakes of an election may not seem high at all at the time, but you never know!

I was reminiscing the other day about elections like 1976, when I was not going to be particularly unhappy in the morning whichever guy won. Good times.....

40-60 is generally the most conservative part of a person's lifetime - mostly for economic reasons. They have gotten settled and feel the most at risk of losing ground: to taxes, or being forced to share the value of their productivity 'unjustly' with anyone else, or having the value of their property at risk by changes in housing patterns, etc. It's the age of maximum social/political rigidity and that is where the X'er are. Given Trump's proposals to break a lot of economic china, this could actually work against him with Gen X

In the end I'll be surprised if there is any sampling method that is going to be that much better, The reason being that in a US election survey, fundamental assumptions of statistics are already violated before you even start and it's just getting worse as time goes by.

I like Paul Krugman's metaphor about this - he says people should visualize the Federal Government as an insurance company with an army.

I can understand Cohn's problem. I've read a number of his columns this cycle and no doubt the nearer we get to Tuesday, the more he is despairing of polling having any validity in this cycle, but that's a hard thing to come to terms with when your value as an analyst depends on having something worth analyzing.

Edvinsson and Seider already look like they've been playing together for a whole season.

If it's real, it will be because your average mid-western farmer probably knows a lot more macroeconomics than your average MSM political reporter.

LOL - so if these are both good polls we aggregate them and get Trump +2. Which as you point out, is still a disastrous number for Trump.

Not to count chickens - but It would be a hoot if the error in polling turned out to be that the rural farm vote turns against Trump - probably the one thing no one expected or would believe even if they were seeing it.

I think the irony is that in most sports playing not to lose is a strategy that works best for teams good enough they probably don't need to do it. In hockey if you are good enough to play solid lock down defense to protect a lead your D game is probably good enough you could just play your normal game and it won't matter. If you are a crappy team and lay back, often as not you just find yourself overwhelmed by the pressure.

DJIA doesn't like downers. It will be interesting to see how long NVidia can maintain it's position. It's a volatile industry where the possibility of getting leap-froged is always at hand. Plus it's not hard to imagine the total market for AI processors hitting an abrupt plateau once the initial build out phase is over. We shall see. I took my profits on NVidia a while ago. Certainly missed some of the run by cashing out when I did but it's too rich for my blood at this point.

this. They know they will be the first target of the inevitable retaliation. We haven't talked much about it but that is a factor that could play big in MN, WI, but also Ohio as well.

I think it's possible that if Trump loses things may start to even out a little. The center left is already pushing back against the lefty left at places like Universities and if Trump takes them to a second defeat we will probably see the center right push back against the righty right. Maybe.

that would be an 11% ->D swing since 2020.

Mitch Albom school of journalism. 😉

I suppose because in his mind, if he was only hit by a bit of flying glass, then Comperatore's death might have become a bigger story than he would be.

If you can afford or have room to have an extra vehicle. The crew cab is probably the primary family vehicle in households that have one and that's the same reason they get fancy, just like people go top of the line with a good percentage of other vehicle types on the market. Maybe especially in the case of the pick-up because if mom and the kids are going to ride in it, Dad's going to have get a nice one......(or at least that's his excuse!)

Now if you live near the coast in the Australian New Territories all 12 months, you better have yourself a snorkel equipped Toyota land cruiser. Otherwise probably not so much....

Pickups at home took off when they stopped building RWD station wagons and starting selling crew cabs. If you live in suburbia and do any of your own home maintenance/rehab, they are about the only thing left you can carry 4' wide construction material in. Many early SUVs had 48" hatches, but now you are down to pretty much Tahoes and pickups. Minivans served the purpose for a while after the station wagon disappeared but everyone hated them. Pickups are also about the only vehicle left you can tow with - so boat, ski-doo, snowmobile ownership is going to put you in a pickup as well. I still have a old wreck of a large SUV or I might have one.

Farm equipment gets pretty large, but would it have blocked anybody's (i.e the shooter's) view from the roof? I guess if you put close enough to the stage...in which case Trump probably would have told them to move it!

SB has a point. The Fed is a reactive operator and one of the things they react to is what the government is doing in fiscal policy. For example, Ben Bernanke was completely up front about the fact that the Fed started doing QE because they felt that government fiscal policy after the crash was too restrictive to prevent deflation, and in testimony to Congress told them that fiscal stimulus would be more effective and reach a broader segment of the population but if that Congress wouldn't act (and they didn't) the Fed was going to do QE even if the benefits accrued more narrowly to the capital class than fiscal stimulus would have (and it did). Conversely, when governments around the world started pumping out fiscal stimulus to keep things afloat when Covid hit, that was a large factor in creating the inflation that led the Fed to raise interest rates and start doing QT to pull back on money supply. So there is linkage, but it's indirect. The Federal government is the 800# gorilla in the economy so what it does will always affect what the Fed does. You just don't necessarily know how the Fed will react, only that they are taking fiscal policy as an input to what they do.

This. I grew up around a clique of supremely competent women who were my mother's friends, many of whom were in the work force doing the work to keep the nation going while their their men were off at war, who while not necessarily unhappy, still all knew exactly how much more they could have been given the opportunity to do more than raise their children after the war ended, many of whom were the leading edge of the movement of women back into the workforce in the 60s-70s.

The lack of investigative results is suspicious but not necessarily of staging - just as likely the SS doing CYA. There is no question that the Trump camp put out false information about the degree of his wound. Penny sized tears in cartilage do not heal without a trace in 30 days. And of course the problem with dishonesty in one aspect is that it only casts doubt on all the others so Trump has only himself to blame if he is doubted.

John McWhorter (NYT) had a different take on this yesterday. One view, which I tend to share, is that Trump is getting more outrageous because his personality is beginning to deconstruct as the result of neurological decline. McWhorter's theory is that he is fine but is bored to tears with campaigning (but must keep at it to hope to stay out of jail) and can only get rush he needs from the crowd by being more and more outrageous - sort of like the comic that keeps pushing to the limit until they go over - a la Michael Richards or something. I won't argue that isn't is a possibility, but it seems like a complex answer to what appears to be much simpler.