MAGA MAN
Let's go Brandon!
That's right they got rid of trump
"I know you are but what am I." Lame.
Why Democrats Will Retain Control of the House and Senate next Year
- Thread starter signalmankenneth
- Start date
"I know you are but what am I." Lame.
The smirking chip ignores historical patterns that are much more accurate than analyzing events or future trends.
Although I agree the economy will improve that will not determine the election outcome. 2021 already saw major economic advances: 6.6 million new jobs is a new record. The 5.7% GDP is the highest it has been since the 1980s and a big improvement over the -3.5% in 2020.
cawacko
Well-known member
This article kind of addresses what you are talking about (and November is a ways away but this article hits on would could be driving voters).
Why This Economic Boom Can’t Lift America’s Spirits
Discontent is widespread in spite of job growth, wage gains and strong asset values. At the root of it: inflation and shortages.
Americans normally are happiest when the economy is growing rapidly. The unusual nature of today’s recovery has upended that pattern.
Last year was the best year for job growth on record. Workers are commanding solid wage gains. Booming home and stock-market values have lifted household wealth to records.
But the record job growth followed record job losses in 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns. Inflation at 7.5% is eating up those wage gains for many Americans. And the unsettling effects of the pandemic, such as product shortages, are still playing out.
That explains why consumers say they feel as bad as they did in the financial-crisis year of 2009, a recent Gallup poll showed. For the first time, Americans who say they are “not too happy” outnumber those who say they’re “very happy,” according to a survey from the nonprofit group NORC at the University of Chicago.
Unlike the country’s last big inflation bout in the 1970s and early 1980s, when price pressure built over a decade, this time a cost-of-living runup unfolded in months. It caught many off guard, from President Biden and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to the ordinary grocery shopper.
The latest phase of the pandemic has further eroded faith in leaders and institutions, leading to feelings of frustration, aimlessness and helplessness, polling shows, even among some who are doing well in today’s economy.
“I’m lucky because I have zero debt—I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have a car payment, I don’t owe a penny to the world right now,” said Paul Remick, who is a year into retirement in Kingston, N.Y. Despite that stability, he is among the many who are anxious about the economy’s future.
“You listen to these Fed guys—Powell right now. ‘Oh, we think we’ll get inflation under control this year.’ Fine, but do you really think these food companies are going to lower prices once the supply chain gets settled?” Mr. Remick asked. “Do you think eggs are going to go down? These prices are here to stay.”
The economic gloom could have important political implications. President Biden is counting on strong growth, propelled in part by a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 stimulus law and a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure package, to boost his popularity heading into this year’s midterm elections. His approval rating is down sharply—to 41.7% as of last Wednesday versus 52.7% last summer, according to a poll average by the website FiveThirtyEight—amid surging inflation and recent waves of the pandemic.
Perhaps most troubling for Democrats, confidence in the economy among independents, the voters most likely up for grabs, has fallen in February to its lowest since 2009, according to the University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment.
The public’s worries about inflation could increase the Fed’s inclination to raise interest rates this year, to keep expectations of further price rises from becoming self-fulfilling. Economists say when households anticipate inflation, they are more likely to behave in ways that stoke it, such as demanding raises.
As late as last March, the Fed was projecting inflation would only reach between 2% and 3% for 2021. When prices rose quickly in the summer, Fed officials and the Biden administration blamed temporary factors. But inflation hit 7.5% in January. The Ukraine crisis threatens to make it worse, by raising oil prices.
Prices also are rising faster than wages, which means people see their purchasing power slipping.
Mr. Remick in Kingston made a modest living over three decades as an administrative assistant for the county government before retiring a year ago. The 59-year-old has been plowing money into mutual funds and other investments since the 1980s and gotten a nice return, enough to allow him retire early while also collecting a modest pension.
His outlook has darkened since last summer. First, he had to wait four months for parts to fix his Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle. Then, he watched with bewilderment what was happening in his trips to the grocery store.
“I’m looking at the prices of food and they are skyrocketing,” Mr. Remick said. “Four months ago I could buy a dozen eggs for 88 cents. Now I go there—$1.60. They’ve almost doubled in four months.”
Mr. Remick also worries that the asset boom he has benefited from is destined to crash as the Fed raises interest rates to curb the price trend. Though stocks have struggled in recent weeks, they are still up sharply over the past year.
Inflation’s impact on moods wouldn’t surprise anyone who lived through it four decades ago. Americans then routinely cited inflation as the biggest or one of the biggest problems facing the country, in a time when gross domestic product was growing briskly, as it is now.
“GDP is a very abstract idea, whereas people can understand the concept of inflation and increasing prices,” said John Sides, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
While today’s inflation hasn’t hit double digits, as it did in 1974-75 and in 1979-81, with a peak of 14.6%, it is in some other respects more corrosive. It is accompanied—and, in part, caused—by shortages of goods such as computers, cars, and even soup and cereal. A July Gallup poll found that seven in 10 Americans had been unable to get a product or had faced delays in getting one.
Nazar Al-Jamie, a 62-year-old Navy veteran in Orange, Calif., owns an electrical contracting company that employs three others. He and his wife, a corporate executive, each earned in the six figures last year, splitting their time between Orange and a vacation home in a mountain town. Yet, asked to assess his outlook on the economy, Mr. Al-Jamie answers with one word: “Bad.”
In November he lost two clients—each would have brought him around $2,100 for the day in profits—because of shortages of electrical panels needed for the projects. When he visits a supply store for things like light fixtures, he says, he often can’t find enough.
He fears that high inflation and supply shortages are here to stay. And he worries about noneconomic things as well, such as crime and political polarization.
“Nobody in business likes uncertainty,” Mr. Al-Jamie said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to the supply chain. We don’t know what’s going to happen to inflation. We don’t know what’s going to happen with our sociopolitical stability in the United States.”
Before the pandemic, store shelves were typically 95% full, according to Information Resources Inc., a data-analytics firm that tracks supplies at retail. In the week ended Feb. 13, shelves were 89% full.
Shortages are most acute in things people buy frequently, such as food and beverages. Some are available but in fewer brands, forcing people to ditch their preferred ones, said Joan Driggs, an IRI vice president.
When consumers settle on a brand, they want to stick with it, Ms. Driggs said. For example, baby formula is an “emotional purchase” for many parents, she said: “If they don’t find the right size, if they don’t find the exact match that they bought last time, they get frustrated.”
Shortages reflect disruptions wrought by Covid-19, the persistence of which produces what some call pandemic fatigue.
Last March Mr. Biden, echoing the views of medical experts, predicted the pandemic would begin to fade by July 4. Life would gradually return to normal from there and allow the nation to begin to mark its “independence from the virus,” he said. Instead, the virus has roared back twice, as the Delta variant and then Omicron.
The University of Michigan poll shows consumer confidence improved last spring but dived in the summer as inflation picked up and Delta emerged, sending some people back into semi-lockdown. Confidence had barely begun to recover when Omicron knocked it back down.
Adrienne Arthur, a 44-year-old mother of two in Florence, Miss., owns a business designing jewelry. Before the pandemic, she sold at flea markets, shows and other gatherings. Then most of those events shut down. Nearly two years later, Ms. Arthur says, the coronavirus still leaves her struggling to find events where she can sell her jewelry.
“It will let up and then it will come back with something new,” she said. For now, her family relies largely on her husband’s income as a truck-fleet supervisor.
About three in four adults are “frustrated” and “tired” of the pandemic and believe most people will get Covid-19, according to a January poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than half of adults, 56%, said they were more worried about the economy now than they had been during prior surges.
A January poll from Monmouth University found 7 in 10 Americans agreeing with the statement “It’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.”
Pandemic fatigue has blurred the benefits of a U.S. economy that has rebounded faster from 2020’s drop than that of any other advanced nation. The unemployment rate, 4% in January, is approaching the 50-year low reached just before the virus arrived. GDP grew 5.5% last year, the most since 1984, although measured against a Covid-depressed 2020. Output was about 3.1% higher, adjusted for inflation, in the 2021 fourth quarter versus the fourth period in 2019, just before Covid-19 struck.
Workers are quitting jobs in droves, often for work with better pay or flexibility. Economists estimate households have over $2 trillion more in savings than they would absent the pandemic, owing to factors including government stimulus money and less spending on commuting, vacations, restaurants and such.
More than 2 in 3 Americans described their personal financial situations as excellent or good in a recent Quinnipiac University poll, yet nearly 8 in 10 described the economy as not so good or poor.
The damper on spirits from inflation and Covid appears to be magnified by the partisan lens through which many Americans see issues.
Peoples’ take on the economy is often intertwined with their view of the government, Vanderbilt’s Mr. Sides said. When something bad happens, elected leaders can get blamed even if they were uninvolved. A study involving the 2015 college football national championship game showed that when people’s favorite football team wins, their approval of the president rises, and when it loses, presidential approval falls.
Compounding these tendencies now is weakening trust in government. Voters’ confidence in the government’s economic policies recently fell to the lowest in nearly eight years, according to the University of Michigan poll.
Since the early 2000s, people’s political preferences have tended to influence their view of the economy more than before, Gallup findings show. The gap between Democrats’ and Republicans’ view of the economy widened during the Donald Trump presidency, University of Michigan data show.
During the first year of the pandemic, Mr. Trump’s last year in office, feelings about the economy fell sharply among both Democrats and Republicans, according to Gallup. After the Democratic Mr. Biden won, Republicans’ views on the economy dived again, while Democrats’ views picked up, Gallup data show.
Still, the slide in confidence crosses party lines. Ms. Arthur, the jewelry designer in Mississippi, is a lifelong Democrat who voted for Mr. Biden, but said she has lost confidence in him because of inflation. She said she considers him out of touch with the troubles that the pandemic and inflation have dealt to ordinary people, and is open to voting Republican in the midterms.
“The economy looks like we’re going to be at a standstill for a while,” Ms. Arthur said.
The moment reminds William Galston, a political scientist at Brookings Institution, of 1983, when he was issues director in the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale. That January, a Harris Poll showed the future Democratic nominee beating incumbent Ronald Reagan by 9 percentage points.
Twenty-two months later, Mr. Reagan won by 18 points. Mr. Galston attributes the reversal largely to the drop in inflation that year, along with rising wages and strong job growth.
“We haven’t been in a period of inflation politics for 40 years,” Mr. Galston said. “Inflation is not only an economic phenomenon, it’s also a psychological one in politics, because it is a psychological proxy for things being out of control. And reining in inflation is seen as a sign that leadership, whoever it is, is getting life back under control.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-th...americas-spirits-11645544670?mod=hp_lead_pos5
I agree with most of the article. However, the fact that the election is still 9 months away and subject to change is more applicable to presidential candidates than mid-terms. Trying to predict mid-term elections based on presidential approval scores, the economy, or any other factors us less accurate than simply going with history--the president's party loses seats. The more it gained in the presidential election the more it loses two years later.
A couple of exceptions are Bush in 2002 but that is due to 9-11. And Clinton in 1998 gained 4 seats, but, he lost 64 seats in 1994 and only gained 2 seats in 1996, so, 1998 was just bringing the parties more into balance. In presidential elections more people vote and the party of the winning presidential candidate usually gains seats. Two years later fewer people vote and the extra votes the president's party received are not there in mid-terms.
A Republican advantage is that they are more likely to vote than Democrats and voters who are angry (the party out of power) have more motivation. A Democratic advantage is that Democrats actually lost seats (13) in 2020 they don't have as many of those "extra" votes to lose as normal. Democrats have gained some seats with redistricting but 9 states have not yet completed that process.
https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/new-house-ratings-ct-ks-mn-and-wa/
Happy Presidents Day. It’s a good day to contemplate whether Joe Biden has a prayer of keeping a Democratic House and Senate next year. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think he does.
Yes, I know: Republicans are suppressing votes, Democrats are hopeless at messaging, Biden’s poll numbers are in the basement. But let me give you ten reasons why I think there’s a decent chance Democrats can maintain control of both the House and the Senate, and maybe even gain some seats.
First: It’s likely that job growth between now and November will remain strong (if the Fed doesn’t ruin everything by raising interest rates too high, too soon). We’re still 3.5 million jobs short of where we were in February 2020 — giving the economy lots of room to grow. Biden and the Democrats can take credit for putting the economy back on track.
Second: Inflation will begin edging downward, as supplies of goods increase and demand shifts back to services — removing the one big economic negative. If Omicron infections continue to drop, the decline in inflation could start as early as April.
Third: When the pandemic seems to be over — and there’s a good chance it will feel over by the spring — the nation will breathe a huge collective sigh of relief, and Biden can take credit for getting shots into the arms of 80 percent of Americans.
Fourth: If tensions continue or escalate with Russia over Ukraine – or, lord help us, Russia invades Ukraine – America will unite behind its Commander-in-Chief. Republicans and Democrats in Congress are already demonstrating a remarkable degree of unity over Russia. War is horrific, of course, but it tends to garner support for those in power (at least in its months).
Fifth: Democrats will almost certainly pass Build Back Better in some form this spring. It won’t be nearly as ambitious as the original, but probably enough to generate some visible benefits for families. Republicans will, of course, oppose it, which means even more help for Democrats in November. To pay for Build Back Better, Democrats will increase taxes on corporations and the super-rich (even Joe Manchin is in favor of doing this). Republicans will surely fight these measures to protect rich corporations. Another big plus for Democrats.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread...ain-control-of-the-house-and-senate-next-year
Stringfellow Hawk
Member
Democrats will lose both badly for one simple reason. By the time working families with 2 or more children fill up the cars and buy groceries and other needs, they are spending upwards of 700 to 1000 per week, and it all started when Biden took office. Older adults remember Jimmy Carter and we also remember how badly Reagan wiped the floor with him.