The fun never stops in Wisconsin elections, does it?

24 hours ago, I bet a lot of us weren't thinking we'd be seeing this reality.

Decision Desk HQ projects David Crowley wins the WI Governor Democratic Primary #DecisionMade: 2:20 AM EDT

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— Decision Desk HQ (@decisiondeskhq.bsky.social) August 12, 2026 at 1:21 AM

Well ain't that a fun surprise? A few thoughts.

1. While I wasn't expecting a Crowley win, it did feel like things were tightening. In my neighborhood on the West Side of Madison, I noticed a number of Crowley signs show up in the last week, and sure enough, Crowley won my ward over Hong convincingly. A lot of Dem voters got the message that Crowley was the only candidate that could defeat Hong, and met the assignment.

2. If Fran Hong stays off of national TV, she probably wins yesterday. Hong had taken the frontrunner role by meeting Wisconsin voters and giving online content to Wisconsin voters. Why she decided to go Hollywood before she was the nominee is beyond me, and sure enough, the national media concentrated on stupid comments in old tweets instead of the issues and interests that put Hong in the lead. Fran also did not respond well to those non-troveries, which sent the message that she was not ready for the Big Job, and it scared a number of Dem voters who were/are terrified of an election-denying lowlife like Tom Tiffany being Governor ahead of the 2028 elections.

3. Here were my thoughts on turnout last weekend, as I compared it to the much-smaller amount of votes in the 2018 Dem Guv primary.

I would anticipate quite a bit more than 538,000 votes being cast for the Dem Guv primary on Tuesday. Most of that is due to there being no seriously contested statewide primary for the GOP, so casual voters will go for where the heat is in this election, which is on the Dem side (yes, there may be a few dweeby GOPs who may try to vote in the Dem primary to advance Hong. But their numbers are small and they should be careful for what they wish for).

My very unscientific guess is that it means around 700,000+ votes would be on the Dem side, and maybe more like 750,000, given that voting-age population has grown a bit in the 8 years since then. The overwhelming majority of those votes will be on Election Day, since the Wisconsin Elections Commission says there have been a little over 265,000 votes cast so far overall (and that includes all parties).

I ended up being a bit short on that. Total Dem votes in the Guv election looks to be just over 792,000, which is almost 50% more than the votes cast in Gov Evers' win in August 2018. And Crowley and Hong both exceeded Evers' 2018 winning total by more than 86,000 votes, and well above the 275,000 "win total" that I thought was needed yesterday.

In fact, the combined total of Crowley and Hong votes ended up nearly 160,000 votes above the winning total that Tom Tiffany had on the Republican side, despite Tiffany pulling 95% of the GOP votes in a virtually cleared field. And there were more than 300,000 additional votes cast in the Dem Guv race than the GOP's, once again showing that in Wisconsin primaries, voters will check out the more interesting and contested race.

4. The places that Hong and Crowley did well in were telling. Take a look at this map of last night's results.

Crowley won almost all counties in the Southeastern part of the state, and also won most rural counties. Hong won the 3 BOW Counties in the Fox Valley, won Dane County, and won most counties that had UW campuses.

And if you know which people live where in Dane County, you can see the Socioeconomic differences in this map. Much like the other one, areas won by Crowley are purple, and Hong's winning areas are green, with the darker shades showing a bigger margin of victory.

Hong did better in the hippie/college areas near downtown and along the Isthmus, as well as in more blue-collar urban parts of the metro area. Crowley did better in more affluent and more suburban areas of the county, and did well among Dems in the rural townships. And from what I can tell in the Milwaukee-area results, a similar pattern was there, although Crowley also seems to have done well in majority-Black areas of MKE.

5. I have no doubt Dems will reunify and all be working together to defeat Tiffany and knock the GOP out of power in all levels of state government this November. State Rep Hong knows firsthand how tyrannical the WisGOPs have been in the Capitol, and she is dedicated to doing her part to end it, despite this tough defeat.

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— Francesca Hong 홍윤정 (@francescahongwi.bsky.social) August 12, 2026 at 11:14 AM

Crowley should give Fran a prominent and visible role over the next 83 days of this campaign. And she has earned some kind of spot in Crowley's Administration, should he win and she want the gig (it would also be a nice pay bump from the $50K Hong pulls as a State Legislator, and health care benefits).

Yes, Hong's supporters are down right now, and feel the nomination they deserved was taken from them by the Dem establishment (you can see them all over social media). They have a right to be upset, after all the work Hong and they have put in to get to the position they were at. While Hong is impressively keeping her eyes on the big prize, it's understandable that fans and supporters will not want to hit the streets to support someone who snuck in at the last moment and won what Hong supporters thought was there. But by Sept. 1, it's time for those people to also see the big picture, stop election-denying forced-birther Tom Tiffany and other WisGOPs from having any power, and then push Crowley and other Dems to put in the improvements that are needed in this state.

6. Primary polls are nothing more than outlines of the state of play, not the "voice of God". Particularly when voters like most of the candidates in the race and are trying to tactically choose which is the best one to advance. Which adds to my final point.

6a. We need ranked choice voting in Wisconsin. Someone should not win a primary when a majority of voters either cast votes for people who later dropped out of the race, or they cannot stand the candidate that takes the plurality. And Wisconsin's "first past the post" system led to a lot of agonizing by voters like me in trying to figure out what was the best vote to cast that increased the chances of getting result I wanted. It shouldn't be that way, especially in primaries. The choices would have been much easier to make if I knew that I could vote for multiple candidates I liked, and make it much less likely that my decision wouldn't be a worthless endeavor, and allow an unacceptable outcome that could be catastrophic.

Dems should run on election reforms like ranked-choice voting, the pre-Election Day processing of absentee ballots, and allowing for communities like Milwaukee that have Central Count locations of absentee ballots be able to report their results as each ward is completed instead of have this stupid thing where everything has to be done before any absentee ballot results are reported. All would avoid a lot of the mess-ups and stresses that we dealt with in this Dem Guv primary.

7. WisGOPs did NOT want this outcome. They are now wrong-footed with an awful candidate heading up their side of the ballot in Tom Tiffany. And they may try the same "dangerous socialist other" BS with Crowley that they would have done against Hong, but that won't work with anyone that decides elections. Especially when Crowley won the primary by being attached to popular, moderate-coding Governor Evers. Meanwhile, Tiffany is tied at the...to Trumpian idiocy, lawlessness, and failure.

Crazy stuff, man. But I am feeling much better about November's prospects than I was at this time last night. LET'S GET IT.

Profits and productivity rise in America, while workers get less and consumers pay more

It may have gotten lost due to the release of the July jobs report on Friday, but the day before, productivity numbers were released for Q2 2026, and that measure keeps on rising.

Nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased 1.4 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, as output increased 1.7 percent and hours worked increased 0.3 percent. (All quarterly percent changes in this release are seasonally adjusted annualized rates.) From the same quarter a year ago, nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased 2.2 percent in the second quarter of 2026.

Unit labor costs in the nonfarm business sector increased 1.3 percent in the second quarter of 2026, reflecting a 2.7-percent increase in hourly compensation and a 1.4-percent increase in productivity. Unit labor costs increased 1.4 percent over the last four quarters.

But I’ll remind you that these are unit labor costs before inflation, and the same report says prices rose at an annualized rate of nearly 6% for Q2. When you look at it that way, workers were taking home less, and it was relatively cheap for companies to make products. So guess who takes the gains?

BLS calculates unit labor costs as the ratio of hourly compensation to labor productivity. Increases in hourly compensation tend to increase unit labor costs and increases in productivity tend to reduce them. Real hourly compensation, which takes into account consumer prices, decreased 3.1 percent in the second quarter of 2026, and decreased 0.1 percent over the last four quarters. The labor share, which is the percentage of output that accrues to workers in the form of compensation, was 52.9 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the lowest level in the series which begins in the first quarter of 1947.

Now combine that with what we saw in the July jobs report, which not only showed fewer jobs for that month, and May and June being revised lower by 103,000, but also had year-over-year wage growth drop to a 5-year low.

This is a continuation of a trend where businesses have been squeezing more output without having to add as many workers in recent years, as the BLS illustrates with these charts.

Later this month, the Bureau of Economic Analysis will release their first look at corporate profits for the inflation-wracked April-June period. If the productivity and jobs numbers are indicative, I bet those profit numbers will show a big increase from Q1, and accelerate what has already been an impressive (obscene?) runup in those numbers since 2020.

We don't often ID these higher profits as Robin Hood in reverse, where rich owners take the gains from workers, give smaller raises, and get all the benefits of higher prices. And that's before we even mention the tariff refunds that businesses are now getting, without those businesses reducing prices for everyday workers and consumers.

Nice "economy", isn't it?

Oil, interest rates and Trump/GOP borrowing all going up in the US

Remember about a week ago when oil markets were plummeting and the Trump Administration was saying a peace deal with Iran was on the way? I'm talking about the most recent time, not the 15 other times we’ve heard Peace is At Hand in the last few months.

Well, that hope is over. Again. And oil is back on the rise....now with a new lack of availability!

Oil prices jumped on Monday as hopes for a Washington-Tehran deal over the Strait of Hormuz faded and the US's Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell below 300 million barrels, hovering at its lowest level since the 1980s.

The SPR fell by 6.1 million barrels in August, reaching its lowest point since 1983, with inventories at 298.7 million barrels, according to data from the Department of Energy.

The US, like other countries, has been releasing stored crude to make up for supply disruptions sparked by the war in the Middle East, with the Trump administration ordering the release of 172 million barrels in March to steady global markets.

Oil ended up rising nearly $4 a barrel on Monday, finishing above $82 a barrel for the first time since the end of July. I'll add that the draw of 6.1 million barrels only covers the first week of the month, from Saturday, August 1 through Friday, August 7, and is the largest one-week drawdown in more than a month.

Know what else is back on the rise? Long-term bond yields, which touched 4.7% for the 10-year bond for US Treasuries on Monday and 5.25% for the 30-year bond. Check out the trend since bombs started falling on Iran at the end of February.

As much as Fed Chair and Trump confidant Kevin Warsh may want to avoid rate hikes for the benchmark Fed Funds rate, the US bond market is raising rates via their open market trades.

As an effect of the rising rates, we’ve seen expenses to pay off that US debt rise more in Federal Fiscal Year 2026 exceed the increases in either Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. That number comes from the Congressional Budget Office’s budget review for July, which came out on Monday.

Spending for Social Security benefits rose by $70 billion (or 5 percent) because of increases in average benefits and in the number of beneficiaries. That increase would have been greater but for a significant set of onetime retroactive payments that began in March 2025 and stemmed from the Social Security Fairness Act of 2023, which was enacted in January 2025.

■ Medicare outlays increased by $66 billion (or 8 percent) because of increased enrollment and higher payment rates for services.

■ Medicaid outlays increased by $45 billion (or 8 percent) largely because of rising costs per enrollee….

■ Outlays for net interest on the public debt rose by $117 billion (or 14 percent) because the debt was larger than it was in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2025 and because of higher long-term interest rates. Declines in short-term rates partially mitigated the overall rise in interest payments.

Auctions of new debt are slated to be coming at a faster clip in the coming months, as the US Treasury has now upped its estimate of borrowing needed for the July to September quarter, with nearly ¾ of a trillion dollars now projected to be pushed out.

During the July–September 2026 quarter, Treasury expects to borrow $739 billion in privately-held net marketable debt, assuming an end-of-September cash balance of $950 billion. The borrowing estimate is $68 billion higher than announced in May 2026, primarily due to lower projected net cash flows, partially offset by the higher-than-assumed beginning-of-quarter cash balance. Excluding the higher-than-assumed beginning-of-quarter cash balance, the current quarter borrowing estimate is $87 billion higher than announced in May.

That is a sizable increase in volume of borrowing compared to the 4th quarter of 2025 ($550 billion) and 1st three months of 2026 ($577 billion).

Another item that worth noting from the Treasury’s announcement is that they should stay steady in how much debt they are sending out at one time, with the exception of less borrowing in September as a large amount of taxes are paid, and more needed starting in the month after that.

Based on current forecasts, Treasury expects to maintain current auction sizes in benchmark bills in the coming weeks and anticipates potentially issuing a short-dated CMB to meet its cash management needs around the end of August. Given projections for receipts associated with the mid-September corporate and non-withheld tax date, Treasury expects to implement reductions to shorter-dated bill auction sizes during the month of September. In October, Treasury anticipates increasing auction sizes across the bill curve based on expected seasonal fiscal outflows. As always, Treasury will continue to evaluate near-term borrowing needs and assess additional adjustments to bill auction sizes as appropriate.

Another batch of 10-year and 30-year bonds will have their auctions this week, and that will be something that many look to in order to see if this Summer's rise in longer term rates will continue, and with it, higher costs in a county that is nearly at $40 trillion in overall debt.

Doesn't seem like any of this oil, interest rate or debt news is going in the right direction, does it?

A few turnout points ahead of Tuesday's primary

As someone who is both deeply interested in Tuesday's primary and as someone who is working the polls that day, I was curious to find out how many people might actually be voting in this thing. So I went back to the 2018 August vote, which was also when there was a contested race for Governor for the Democrats.

Overall, there was just under 995,000 votes cast in August 2018, but there was also a contested US Senate primary for the GOP (do you remember when Leah Vukmir was a rising star in WisGOP World? Until Tammy Baldwin beat her by double digits that Fall and she went away). Since you can't vote for more than one party in the primary, there was a split in who voted for who, and there were only 538,857 votes cast on the Dem side.

Tony Evers won comfortably with more than twice as many votes as the next candidate, but he barely exceeded 225,000 votes. So it's not very high numbers we are dealing with in these things. And not surprisingly, the places where the Dem votes came from in 2018 is more toward heavily-blue Milwaukee and Dane Counties, while the suburban WOW Counties in Southeastern Wisconsin and the Fox Valley's BOW Counties don't loom as large as they do in November.

But let's also point out that while Milwaukee and Dane Counties made up nearly 40% of the votes in 2018's Governor primary, there still was more than 60% cast in the other 70 Wisconsin counties, and even outstate counties will make up a significant portion of the electorate.

I would anticipate quite a bit more than 538,000 votes being cast for the Dem Guv primary on Tuesday. Most of that is due to there being no seriously contested statewide primary for the GOP, so casual voters will go for where the heat is in this election, which is on the Dem side (yes, there may be a few dweeby GOPs who may try to vote in the Dem primary to advance Hong. But their numbers are small and they should be careful for what they wish for).

My very unscientific guess is that it means around 700,000+ votes would beon the Dem side, and maybe more like 750,000, given that voting-age population has grown a bit in the 8 years since then. The overwhelming majority of those votes will be on Election Day, since the Wisconsin Elections Commission says there have been a little over 265,000 votes cast so far overall (and that includes all parties).

But even though there will be many more votes cast in 2026's Dem primary, I'm not sure the Dems' Guv winner will have all that much more than Evers' 2018 total of 225,000+. Dems have 7 candidates on the ballot, even though 3 of those candidates have suspended their campaigns, and I think it's conceivable that 8-10% of the votes go to those 3 candidates that left the race, especially since the Elections Commission said "no backsies" for people who already sent in their ballots.

That math was also part of the reason I was going around and around on who to vote for (I eventually settled on Crowley and voted for him yesterday), because I do think Hong has a solid base around 35%, with the other 65% up in the air for all the Dem candidates including Fran. If the goal is to keep Hong from winning, there will likely have to be at least 2/3 of those other 65% to consolidate around one candidate. And given the 8-10% of votes for the candidates that are already out, it may be more like 3/4 of the up-for-grabs non-Hong votes at this point.

We'll see if it happens. And we'll see where the turnout is coming from, especially since there seems to be a significant difference between younger and older voters - something Crowley said may go in his favor, since older people are more likely vote in primaries. Which feels like a bit of hopium there, but who honestly knows at this point?

US job and wage growth falls back to earth in July

For the past couple of months, the US economy had been largely holding up despite still-gloomy consumer sentiment snd higher prices. Part of that was due to a jobs market that had shown signs of strength in 2026, with 3 out of the first 4 months of the year having gains of 150,000 jobs or more, and new unemployment claims being at or near their lowest amounts in 57 years.

Then the July jobs report came out on Friday, and suddenly the employment situation doesn't seem so great in the US.

The July jobs report delivered a nasty surprise: Instead of adding jobs as economists expected, the U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs. Even worse, May and June payrolls were revised down by a combined 103,000 jobs, revealing a much weaker labor market than previously reported.

— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) August 7, 2026 at 1:19 PM

Oops? Maybe not so good. And we are back to an average of less than 50,000 jobs being added per month, much like we were for most of 2025.

But hey, at least the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1%, that's good, right? Not if you read the actual jobs report.

Both the labor force participation rate, at 61.4 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 58.9 percent, changed little in July. Since January, the labor force participation rate declined by 0.7 percentage point, and the employment-population ratio decreased by 0.5 percentage point.

The labor force (-264,000) and the number of people listed as employed (-87,000) went down in July, and it continues a slide in both measures that we've been seeing since Trump 2.0 kicked into gear in Spring 2025.

In addition to the stagnating overall numbers for jobs, wage growth also flatlined in July.

In July, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls, at $37.62, were little changed (+2 cents). Over the year, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.2 percent. In July, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees, at $32.40, were little changed (+4 cents).

Even worse is that the previous two months had average hourly earnings revised down, with May being 2 cents an hour lower, and June being reduced by 4 cents an hour. Which means that average hourly earnings went lower than what was reported last month.

It also gives a clear contrast to the times of inflation of 2022, where wages were rising by 2-3 times as much as they are in Summer 2026. We're back to what wage growth was in 2017, but with inflation 1-2% higher today than it was then.

We find out this week what inflation ended up being for July, and we know gas prices stopped falling that month and creeped back up. And given how bad the jobs market and wage situation got worse last month, I can't think that consumer sentiment for August gets better. And our deteriorating savings rates will get even lower, unless consumer spending nosedives.

The stock market may be bubbly at this time, but the Real Economy for America may have started to slump. We'll have to see what the data that comes out this week and next to see if July is the start of something worse, or a bump in the road.

After a lot of thought, it's Crowley

Math is math, and while I am all in for no matter who wins on Tuesday, because Tiffany as Governor would set this state back another decade and turn the 2028 election into the worst one we've ever seen here, Crowley is the best combo remaining of "can still win the primary" and also "win in November by a solid amount and would help downticket". I blame Kara Spencer for all this mess (look her up), and her boss Sara Rodriguez for not doing more to catch the funding problems before they blew up at a late hour. Onto Great Taste Weekend we go. Have a good one and maybe see ya there (I did see Dan Shafer there a couple of years back).

Consumers spend big in Q2, but incomes did not rise with prices. That can't hold

We got a two-fer of major economic data on Thursday. This included the first look at real GDP for the 2nd quarter of 2026, and the economic growth topline was.... not great.

Economic growth was weaker than expected in the second quarter though underlying drivers were mostly solid. At the same time, inflation in June held well above the Federal Reserve’s goal and complicated the central bank’s policy path, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

Gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services, increased just 1.5% for the April-through June period, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis numbers adjusted for seasonality and inflation.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a growth rate of 1.8%, following the 2.1% increase in the first quarter.

Sounds bad, especially given that worker producitivty has been growing stronger than 1.5% in recent quarters, but then you dig inside the numbers, and you see consumption bouncing back in the US for Q2, and business investment staying strong. And the main reason the overall GDP number was disappointing was because of a large increase in imports and a decline in inventories.

I've often used a stat I call "Core Private GDP", which takes out the contributions to GDP from trade, government and inventories, all of which are volatile and not necessarily a reflection of the day-to-day economy. If you look at it that way, Core Private GDP growth more than doubled in Q2 2026.

It's all the more remarkable when you realize that the same GDP report says prices in its gross domestice purchases index was up by an annual rate of 5.7% in Q2, so core GDP was up by over 9% before inflation. You read that, and it sounds like we are in boom times and money should be flowing everywhere.

But that's not really true, as that same Thursday's income and spending report showed. In fact, the increase in Employee Compensation for those three months was lower than any of the last 4 quarters of the Joe Biden presidency (a time when many felt they could not keep up with rising prices), and lower growth than what we saw in Q1 2026.

The largest source of increased aggregate income for the second quarter came through non-work sources such as interest and dividend income, and owners' income. That includes billions in payments in May to farmers to make up for losses due to natural disasters in 2023 and 2024.

So if people aren't seeing getting much more money from their jobs, why has been consumption been so strong in the face of higher inflation? Because Americans aren't saving anything, as the national savings rate declined again in June, down to 2.7%. The only time it has been lower in the last 5 years was during the peak months of inflation in the Spring and Summer of 2022.

But if you think our savings rate will rebound as the Summer winds down, I'll note one major difference between August 2026 and August 2022. 4 years ago, gas prices were coming down from their Ukraine War-induced spike, while in 2026, they've been back on the rise for most of the last month.

If you think spending ourselves broke in the face of rising prices is a bad thing, one way that can be stopped is by making it more lucrative to save. And that's done by having the Fed raise interest rates and other methods to slow down price increases and the economy in general. The Fed passed on raising its Fed Funds rate last week, but the bond market has been acting on its own to make it more expensive to borrow.

The Clampdown is coming, and may well already be underway (consumer spending slowed in June). The question is who and what gets clamped on as a result.