midterms

The midterm map says America will turn right

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

The pioneering 20th-century Kenyan aviator Beryl Markham put it well in explaining the intellectual usefulness of maps: “A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not … I am the earth in the palm of your hand’.” And for all the fog obscuring the outcome of the 2022 US midterm elections, we have a clear map to guide us to the outcome if we simply decide to use it.

There is a lot we can already glean. First, historically, the party out of power two years after a new president is sworn in almost always does well, as “buyers’ remorse” sets in regarding the new administration. The simple fact is that there have been only four midterm elections out of 38 since 1870 in which the party holding the White House either gained seats in the House of Representatives or had a net loss of five seats or fewer — the very limited number that would cost the Democrats their current majority. This historical navigation point alone means the House is likely to shift to Republican control.

Second, the phrase most associated with the legendary former Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill — “All politics is local” — has been proved almost entirely wrong over the past generation; in fact, it’s national, not local. The single biggest determinant of House outcomes is the sitting president’s approval ratings. Again, as we have said before, a president with an overall approval rating above 60 percent can dictate to Congress his wishes; one with an approval rating below 40 percent is trying to squash rumors that he is dead.

According to RealClearPolitics’ most recent polling, the hapless Joe Biden is limping along at 43 percent, a number that does not augur well for Democratic hopes in the House. Adding these two navigation points together on our intellectual map, look for the Democrats to lose between 25 and 35 seats in the House, and for the Republicans to take control.

Third, while House races have become nationalized over the past generation, Senate races remain stubbornly idiosyncratic, with outcomes instead based on both the specific character of the candidates and the nature of the state itself. With a third of all Senate seats up for election in 2022, the Democrats also have the luck of the draw this time around. They are not defending any Senate seats in states carried by Donald Trump in 2020. Further, the Republicans must defend 20 seats, limiting their chances to make large gains, while this cycle the Democrats are defending only 14 seats. For these highly specific reasons, Democratic losses in the Senate will be fewer than in the House.

However, fourth, the primary issues the campaign has been fought on — the intellectual terrain of the political contest — have greatly favored the Republicans. November’s latest CNN poll finds the economy the overwhelming issue for most voters, with a majority 51 percent saying it is the most important policy area affecting them. Abortion — after the Supreme Court struck down Roe vs Wade and returned decision-making on this contentious social issue to the states — comes a distant second at just 15 percent.

A September NBC poll confirms our navigational data point, listing the top four issues as the Economy, the cost of living, abortion, and crime. Republicans have a decisive 23-point advantage over Democrats in terms of handling crime and 19 percent on the economy.

Voters overwhelmingly blame the Biden administration for the worst surge of inflation in over 40 years, after it ruinously spent trillions of dollars on social programs even as the economy quickly returned to pre-pandemic levels. Too much money chasing too few goods has been the largest factor leading to the price spike, in which adjustable mortgage rates topped 7 percent and the price of staples such as beef and gas skyrocketed. Grocery prices overall have increased by an uncomfortable 13 percent since Biden’s inauguration.

The economy, the cost-of-living crisis and the surge in inflation are voters’ greatest concerns, and the White House is who they blame. RealClearPolitics June polling shows a dominant 64 percent of those surveyed disapprove of how the president is handling the economy. This is simply killing Democratic chances to retain the 50-50 Senate.

Fifth, we know the states to watch on election night. Ohio, North Carolina, and Wisconsin are all narrowly trending Republican; buck that trend in any of these and the Democrats have a real chance to hold the upper chamber. However, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Pennsylvania have all been narrowly trending Democratic. A loss in any of these and it is going to be a long night for Joe Biden’s party. Control of the Senate may once again come down to Georgia, as it did in 2020. There, if any candidate fails to obtain 50 percent of the vote, there will be a run-off in a month’s time to determine the seat, and quite possibly the Senate majority.

Given our intellectual map, however, the midterm outcome is surprisingly clear. My firm’s final prediction is for the Republican Party to take the House by 25-35 seats, and the Senate more narrowly by a one to three-seat margin. The GOP is going to be back.

This piece was originally published in Arab news.

Why Biden’s mid-term ‘comeback’ is just wishful thinking

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

Climate analyst Bjorn Lomborg put it perfectly when he said: “Wishful thinking is not sound public policy.”The vast majority of political risk mistakes are made for this one simple reason; most analysts confuse what they would like to happen with what is likely to happen.

This is a primary analytical lesson the in-the-tank leftist mainstream American media have yet to learn. Functioning as little more than the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party — while arrogantly professing to represent some sort of objective truth (i.e. all sane people agree with them) — the popularly derided press continually confuse what they would like to happen with the facts dancing in front of their eyes. This explains their excitement at Joe Biden’s political “comeback,” and what it means for the revival of Democratic hopes in the November mid-term election.

The standard media argument, backing up their favored Democratic Party, goes something like this: “The overturning of Roe vs. Wade is unpopular, as a majority of Americans support abortion rights, which plays to the White House’s advantage. The president has things moving again with finally passing a watered-down version of his grab-bag progressive spending bill, allocating $740 billion for climate change projects and to lower medical costs. The forgiveness of billions of dollars of student loan debts is immensely popular, particularly among young millennials who will now vote for the Democrats in droves. The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago has exposed arch-enemy Donald Trump once again as a menace to society at large. All of this will allow us (er, I mean the Democrats) to overcome the historical odds and actually win the mid-terms.”

Let us pick this pathetic excuse for political risk analysis apart, line by line. First, it is true that protecting abortion rights of some kind (though not as expansively as Democrats advocate) is popular in the US. However, few people vote as a result of this issue. Abortion rights is about the fifth most important motivational issue for voters, nowhere near in the league of the dominant cost-of-living crisis as a concern. So, at best, this favors the White House only at the margins.

Second, in this time of rampant 8.5 percent inflation in July, hovering near a multidecade high, Biden’s stubborn insistence on ruinously spending money doesn’t just seem partisan, it seems dangerous. By a long way, voters are most concerned about inflation and the economy, and how the Federal Reserve and the Biden White House incompetently let the inflation genie out of the bottle, two generations after Fed chair Paul Volcker and Ronald Reagan tamed the savage beast. Instead, Biden first belittled the problem, then said inflation would be transitory, then said why don’t we focus on job creation numbers instead? Wrong, wrong, and wrong. The country blames the White House for the scourge of inflation simply because the economic illiterates in the administration have continued to spend money like drunken sailors, all reality to the contrary.

Third, the utterly unfair (I personally paid back a treasure trove of loans by working hard and am utterly mortified at being made of fool of by a White House shamefully looking to buy votes) student loan “forgiveness” policy is obviously mis-named. The loans don’t simply disappear like a magic trick, leftist fantasies to the contrary. No, they form part of the general government debt, to be paid down in taxes by non-college graduates and those of us who already paid their loans — while the millennials, whose work ethic collectively is appalling, take another “experiential holiday.” This desperate effort to buy the young’s electoral loyalty is unlikely to work, because statistically they tend to be too lazy to vote in decisive numbers, and the rest of us are furious at the unfairness of this latest progressive ploy.

Fourth, while it appears Trump has (yet again) behaved badly over keeping classified government documents, he is hardly alone. Former presidents are often at war with the government over which documents are theirs and which belong to the country. Former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger went so far as to stuff some unflattering documents in his pants and socks (you simply cannot make this stuff up) only to be found out as he attempted to slink away from the National Archives. And don’t get me started on the nauseatingly privileged treatment Hillary Clinton was given by the FBI over her illegal home-brew server. In these other cases, the FBI did not storm the homes of the guilty, as they did with Trump and Mar-a-Lago. Ironically, this double standard actually bolsters Trump’s standing, as his charge that there is one set of rules for Democrats and another for Republicans sadly looks all too true.

For all these reasons, don’t buy the hype about the Biden “comeback.” My firm, which called the 2020 outcome perfectly (down to the tie in the Senate) has the GOP still likely to take the House by 20-30 seats with the Senate still too close to call (today we have it at 50-50). When wishful thinking replaces genuine thinking, you get stories such as these.

This piece was originally published in Arab News.

Nothing can save Democrats from midterm drubbing

/ John Hulsman Enterprises / Leave a comment

July 2022 was the moment when the American mainstream media finally became completely unhinged, wholly untethered from reality, being exposed as nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

The tipping point came over the media urging the American people not to believe what their lying eyes were seeing. US gross domestic product numbers showed a 0.9 percent drop in growth for the second quarter of 2022; as this was the second consecutive quarter of negative growth, this meant that America was in recession.

But the mainstream media was having none of this, as such a poor economic outcome would shift Democratic prospects in the upcoming midterm elections from dire to apocalyptic. So, instead, despite many earlier clips existing of the very same reporters saying throughout their careers that two quarters of negative growth amounted to “the R word,” they blandly echoed the out-of-touch White House in arguing that somehow, this time, the two negative quarters did not amount to a recession, but something else. Of course, this fooled no one, merely proving that the leftist mainstream media has given up any pretense to objective reporting. All of this would be funny if it were not so depressingly Orwellian.

But the media was far from done. Instead of dwelling on the reality of the US being in recession, it wanted us to focus on “Joe Biden’s big political comeback.” For, this past week, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the pivotal swing vote in the evenly divided Senate, finally agreed to vote with the rest of his colleagues in passing the White House’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is essentially a watered-down version of the earlier $1.75 trillion Build Back Better bill, a grab-bag of progressive programs.

The new bill aims to raise $739 billion in revenue, even as it adds spending of $433 billion over the next 10 years. The new revenue will come from a 15 percent corporate tax rate (not the greatest idea in a recession) and increasing the much-feared Internal Revenue Service funding by $80 billion in order to shake down the taxpayers for an estimated $124 billion. In turn, the White House will use the new money to pick winners and losers in terms of green industries — a corporatist boondoggle at which governments throughout the social democratic West have historically proven themselves to be absolutely awful at managing.

From the mainstream media’s cheerleading point of view, this amounts to a huge win for Biden’s floundering administration — a political comeback has begun and just in time. It never seems to dawn on the commentariat that taxing businesses is not a magic answer to raising more revenue; instead, they are retarding the very growth sources that the country presently desperately needs. Also, the big state/big spending model that the new bill is part of is precisely why the beast of inflation has loosed its chains and is now devouring the Western public’s standard of living across the board. If fiscal profligacy is the ultimate problem, more fiscal profligacy cannot be the answer.

And despite the mainstream media never being burdened by self-awareness (with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, totally wrong about the rise of inflation in the first place, telling CNN, in true Marie Antionette style, that the people he is talking to are “doing pretty well” economically), the American people know better. The math is simply the math.

Beyond the recession, inflation hit a 40-year high of 9.1 percent in June, proving to be not as “transitory” as the White House had earlier assured us it would be. A June Newsmakers poll found that a dominant 76 percent of registered voters are very concerned by inflation’s rise, with 72 percent saying it amounts to the country’s largest problem (a whopping 62 points higher in concern than COVID-19).

Despite Biden changing his tune over inflation many times — including calling it transitory before blaming it on Vladimir Putin and then greedy energy companies — the American public has made up its mind. In the same Newsmakers poll, a plurality of 42 percent say Biden is the person most to blame for inflation getting out of hand. This tracks with a July RealClearPolitics poll that found that only 33 percent approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, while a decisive 64 percent disapprove.

It is little wonder that, as he is blamed for causing the biggest problem America is presently saddled with, Biden’s approval numbers — the single most important factor in the past generation in determining the outcome of midterm elections — are subterranean. The present RealClearPolitics average of polls finds the president with only a 40 percent rating, while 56 percent disapprove of his performance. Even worse, a July CNN poll found that a decisive 75 percent of Democratic-leaning voters want someone other than Biden to run in 2024, up dramatically from only 45 percent in February.

Ignore the present desperate cheerleading; wish fulfillment must not take the place of genuine, facts-driven political risk. Biden and the Democrats are set to lose the House by a hefty margin of about 30 seats. No amount of whistling past the graveyard can wish away the ghost of inflation.

This post was originally published in Arab News.