More proof the US economy was in a very strong place before Trump was elected

Right before the holiday, we got a look back at what was going on with the US economy as voters went to the polls for the last election. And despite what some voters claim to have been feeling, things were in a really good spot overall.

First of all, the revisions to Q3 GDP came in, and reiterated that economic growth was strong through last September.

Per the Bloomberg table below summarizing the release of the revised data: America’s solid GDP growth of 2.8% was powered by a 3.5% expansion in consumption. #economy #growth

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— Mohamed A. El-Erian (@elerianm.bsky.social) November 27, 2024 at 8:17 AM

And another report for October's data indicated that consumer spending continued last month.

U.S. consumer spending increased slightly more than expected in October, suggesting the economy retained much of its solid growth momentum early in the fourth quarter, but progress on lowering inflation appears to have stalled in recent months....

Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity, rose 0.4% last month after an upwardly revised 0.6% advance in September, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast consumer spending would gain 0.3% after a previously reported 0.5% increase in September.

Adjusted for inflation, consumer spending edged up 0.1%, consistent with a roughly 2.5% annualized growth rate this quarter. Spending rose at a 3.5% rate in the July-September quarter, accounting for the economy's 2.8% growth pace.

The Atlanta Fed is forecasting gross domestic product increasing at a 2.7% rate in the fourth quarter.

Inflation-adjusted consumer spending growth has stayed consistent since inflation started getting under control in early 2023, and has grown in 9 of the 10 months for 2024.

Included in that increase was a solid increase in food services and accomodations, which seems to have shaken off a slump in the first half of 2024 to reach new psot-COVID peaks in October.

On the income side, there was a solid 0.6% increase for October and a 0.7% increase in disposable income, more than double the rate of inflation. That rebound is a welcome sign, as newly revised data in the same report indicated that wage and salary growth had flattened in early 2024 before coming back in recent months. And that flattening happened after an earlier revision showed wages had grown faster at the end of 2023.

We got evidence earlier in the year that strong job growth in early 2024 was merely "meh", so that adds up, and indicates that not only had the economy moderated in early 2024, but that the Federal Reserve was indeed too slow to lower interest rates from their 23-year highs.

However, we also have evidence that things have picked back up in the second half of 2024. And I couldn't help but notice this set of headlines from CBS Marketwatch yesterday.

Do NOT allow Trumpers to memory-hole the reality that the US economy was in a very good place at the time he got elected for a second time. Especially since I strongly suspect things won't be that good this time next year.

Free Bucky, and free up more funds to keep the rest of the UW System running

As a new state budget cycle gets underway, you can bet a topic of discussion will involve the funding and future of the UW System. Even as our state has $4 billion in extra funds in its bank account, many UW campuses have suffered in recent years, including the closing of 6 2-year campuses by the start of the next school year, and 4-year campuses such as Oshkosh, Platteville, and Milwaukee having staff layoffs.

Ahead of the new legislative session, there was a Study Committee set up to go over ideas about what should happen with the UW System, to get ideas out front and flesh out measures before any bills get introduced.

To start, let's go over how the UW System gets it's funding today, courtesy of this memo from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

I'll note that one of the big reasons for that decline in state funding % is a sizable increase in gifts and federal contracts, while GPR (mostly state tax dollar funding) hasn't increased by nearly as much. None of these numbers are adjusted for inflation over the 40 years, by the way.

This is while UW System enrollment is slightly less than it was 40 years ago.

So lots of areas to start from when trying to figure out which way to go with the future of the UW System. And among the suggestions of this UW Study Committee is that it may be time to allow Bucky to go out on his own.

The first proposed recommendation was separating UW-Madison from the twelve UW System campuses.

The proposal would create a new Board of Regents to oversee UW-Madison, while maintaining the separate Board of Regents to oversee the other comprehensive universities. Two separate state appropriations to provide general purpose revenue (GPR) funding specific to UW-Madison and for the other comprehensive universities in the UW System are also included in the proposal.

Robert Venable, President and CEO of Miami Corporation Management, said that a Board of Regents that could “focus just on the comprehensive is actually more important in helping deal with those existential issues. Madison is not facing existential issues.”

That's correct, Mr. Venable. Madison has many more sources of revenue than the other UW schools do, because Madison has a higher donor base, many more research grants, and a large number of self-supporting entities.

We got an illustration in late November how things are different in Madison in the form of a move up in the national rankings for research spending.

The state flagship ranked No. 6 in research spending among more than 900 institutions, according to the latest figures released Nov. 25 by the National Science Foundation.

UW-Madison's research ranking has been a sore spot on campus since 2016, when the university fell out of the top five for the first time in nearly 45 years....

UW-Madison spent more than $1.7 billion in the 2023 fiscal year, a 14% increase from the previous year. Nearly half of the money comes from federal awards grants from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

“UW-Madison has been a research powerhouse for generations,” UW–Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said in a statement. The rise in ranking and increased spending is "further evidence of our deep commitment to bringing incredible UW–Madison expertise across disciplines to the grand challenges of our time and to translating our discoveries to improve lives at home in Wisconsin and beyond.”

A whole lot of that System-wide increase in gifts and federal contracts comes from UW-Madison through initatives such as the Carbone Cancer Center, and donations like the $175 million the Morgridges were able to raise and leverage in 2021 for a new Madison School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences. Madison also continues to see increasing enrollment (reaching nearly 52,000 this year!), and more than half of those students are from out of state and paying higher tuition, increasing the amount of money available through the tuition funding stream.

This is not the case at the other UW campuses, where more than 3/4 of the students come from Wisconsin, and another 8% of the students at those schools come from Minnesota and pay near in-state rates due to the reciprocity agreement between the two states. In addition, the other UW campuses have generally seen declines in ernollment in the last decade while the number of students in Madison has grown by more than 20%.

Change in student headcount
Fall 2014
UW-Madison 42,865
All other UW campuses 138,114

Fall 2024
UW-Madison 51,791
All other UW campuses 112,640

Those UW campuses also do not have anything resembling the amount of research focus and donor base that Madison has. So those other UW campuses need state funding a lot more than Madison does, and those schools are a key source of access to higher education, skill-growing and jobs in areas of the state that otherwise might not have a lot of that going on.

An admission that Madison has a different purpose than the rest of the UW System isn't arrogance or elitism, and neither is it a bad thing to admit that its enrollment trends are heading up while the rest of the System is not. These are facts, and we should still have the state chip in to make sure Madison's tuition is affordable for in-state students and remains an acheivable place where graduates of Wisconsin high schools can pursue higher education (in fact, maybe that's where a whole lot of Madison's state funding should go to under this separate GPR fund).

At the same time, Madison doesn't need to be put in the same pool of state aid as the other UW schools, because Madison ends up being part of an Systemwide allocation that ends up lowering the amount of state aids the non-Madison campuses (who instruct 2/3 of the students in the System) get. This also requires separate leadership that deals with Madison's unique circumstance, and doesn't try to force-feed the other UW campuses into a Madison-type research-and-donor funding system when the other campuses do not have anything close to the outside resources to be able to do what Madison does.

Can Trump and the tech bros cut spending like they claim? The math doesn't add up

You may have heard that Trump's tech bro donors/insiders are going to put together a "council of superiors" to right-size the federal government. No matter how much that right-sizing connects to reality.

Friendly reminder: The USG spends $290 billion on personnel. If you fired EVERYONE who worked for the federal government, you’d save 5% of the budget. You know where most of it goes? Defense and back to us in Social Security and Medicare.

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— Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 9:08 PM

So let's look at the actual numbers involves. To start, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently updated its rundown of the Federal budget process, and where the dollars go to. This is an excellent resource for understanding the numbers in our $6.9 trillion federal budget, and to understand beyond the numbers on the page.

From there, let's see former White House economic advisor and Harvard Professor Jeffrey Frankel break down how much in budget cuts we are actually talking about, and what would have to be cut to get there.

So how much does the Trump Administration propose to cut now? Republicans often say they want to slash federal spending, but without cutting the mandatory programs, so-called entitlement spending — Social Security, Medicare, and other health-care. This exclusion forecloses any serious effort to balance the budget. Major entitlement programs accounted for half of all federal spending in 2023, or 61 % of spending if farm-price support and other income-support programs are included. This mandatory spending will only continue to rise in the future, as retired people make up an increasing share of the population.

Moreover, interest payments, which are running at 13 % of total spending, are not optional. Cutting those would mean defaulting on the national debt. Republicans don’t want to do that. (At least, most of them don’t want to do that. Trump has reveled in his ability to default on debts, having declared business bankruptcy six times.) Indeed, the interest bill is likely to continue rising, as debt is rolled over at interest rates well above the rock-bottom rates of 5 or 10 years ago.

What is left is discretionary spending. It is about 25% of total spending. But most Republicans don’t want to cut defense, which is roughly half of discretionary spending and so 12 % of total spending.

So let's bounce to the remainder of discretionary spending to see what could be taken out. Frankel says that if you ban all funding the US Department of Education, foreign aid, and transportation oversight, you get to somewhere around $500 billion a year. This would screw up a lot of state and local services, and likely lead to recession by itself.

But Frankel notes that it also means that more has to be cut to get to the goal of $2 trillion in federal spending cuts that Elon Musk claims he can find.

...[L]et's also zero out the National Parks and everything else that the Interior Department does, the National Weather Service and everything else the Commerce Department does, and so on. In fact, let’s imagine that we somehow eliminate all of the 14 % of spending that is non-defense discretionary. That would still not be enough to achieve the mirage of $ 2 trillion in savings that Musk claims he could achieve, equaling 31 % of total spending or 7 % of GDP, let alone to pay for Trump’s tax cuts and balance the budget. No matter how broadly one defines waste, fraud and abuse, there is simply not enough money to be saved.

Instead, what will happen under Trump’s tax cuts is a day of reckoning, not too many years into the future, when financial markets come to appreciate the unsustainability of the debt. At that time, Social Security and other entitlement spending will be cut sharply, more sharply than if it were done today or if taxes were not cut further today.

I can't see that working out well for the overwhelming majority of Americans. But then again, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and the rest of these right-wing "business leaders" haven't had to care about people with real jobs, or that they had real consequences for failure in years.

So I have a better idea. Why not just tax the rich and corporate like it's the 1990s, or the 1970s? We could have all the supports we want and need, and have an economy that has a much better chance of sustainability and long-term opportunity, which to me is real freedom.

And we'd better see DC Dems hammer that point constantly. Republicans want to force unneeded injury and distress onto large numbers of Americans, instead of asking our already absurdly-rich and powerful oligarchs to pay a few more dollars of the funds that they have already taken from a lot of everyday Americans. This is class war, and we cannot accept what the rich, connected and corporate claim is best for the rest of us.

So how did Trump flip Wisconsin? Look to the sticks

Yes, the presidential election was depressing enough that it wasn't something I was going to care to dig into much in the last 2 weeks. But I've also been dealing with some health stuff that a 50-year-old non-smoker shouldn't be dealing with, so other priorities crashed in.

But I've been able to look at the numbers more in recent times. While Trump gained around 1.5% in margin vs 2020 (going from losing by 0.7% to winning by 0.8%), the Harris-Walz campaign kept even with the Biden 2020 results in a lot of key parts of the state, if not exceeded them.

For example, Harris beat Biden's vote totals and percentages in the non-Milwaukee parts of Milwaukee County. Harris fell about 1% short in percentage in the heavily blue City of Milwaukee and Dane County, but Harris still won those 2 places by a combined total of more than 328,000.

In the WOW Counties adjacent to Milwaukee, Harris addeed another 0.7% in vote share than Biden did (38.5% Harris, 37.8% Biden), and she basically did the same as Biden in the Fox Valley's BOW Counties (Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago).

As part of a deep dive that the Wisconsin State Journal did on bellweather Sauk County (which was the only one in the state that flipped from Biden to Trump in 2024), I keep going back to this passage.

In a typical presidential election, two or three people will come in to vote and register on Election Day in the town of Greenfield, said Susan Knower, chair of the Sauk County Democratic Party. This year, she said, close to 50 same-day registrants — mostly young white men — cast ballots in Greenfield alone.

Working a registration table at the Baraboo Gun Show in late September, Sauk County GOP chair Jerry Helmer said he registered a dozen men in their early 20s who had never voted before.

Given that new voter registrations are tracked and documented, especially sameday registrations, doesn't it seem worthwhile to check those names and follow-up to see what drove all these bros to sign up on Election Day, and where these people are living? I'd say so.

I mocked this ahead of the election, but that story from the Town of Greenfield and the reduced losses for Trump on UW campuses, indicates that the "bro strategy" for the GOP paid off in this election.

But Trump needed to gain somewhere if he was to reverse his loss in 2020 here. The first indication was in the Southeastern corner of the state, where Trump continued to gain in Racine and Kenosha Counties, which were solid blue as recently as the second Obama election in 2012. It has eroded for Dems since then, with Harris not even reaching Mandela Barnes' vote percentage in Racine and Kenosha, and doing 1% worse than Biden there.

But it was really outstate where Trump won Wisconsin. Not just in holding Kamala Harris to less than 41% of the overall estimated vote from the 62 lowest-populated Wisconsin counties, but also because of approximately 76,000 additional voters than oustate had 4 years ago - levels well above where it was in 2008, 2012, and 2016.

Which again makes me want to find out how the Trump campaign and their allies found all these voters in areas that haven't had much population growth over the last 4 years (especially when compared to Dane County, or the BOW and WOW Counties). It's either a very successful campaign that Dems better learn from, or it's something else worth asking about.

I want to go back to that Sauk County article in the State Journal, which points out that Tammy Baldwin won Sauk County in her race with Eric Hovde, and that Karen DeSnto flipped a Sauk County-based Assembly seat along with Sarah Keyeski unseating GOP Sen. Joan Ballweg in the State Senate. And as Sauk County Dem Chair Susan Knower explained, it's often as somple as being a familiar face that reassures voters.

“These are our local people, our neighbors, and we were able to really show people that we are fighting for them,” Knower said. “But we don’t have enough of a platform to counter what’s happening with the party nationally.”

Joscelyn Jackson, a lifelong Democrat and Sauk County resident, agreed that community values transcend party lines in Sauk County. Simple name ID and Sauk County street cred likely encouraged ticket-splitting and moved the needle toward down-ballot Democrats.

“Tammy Baldwin is someone we all know, someone we’re familiar with,” Jackson said. “Same with Karen DeSanto. She’s a local person, she’s always been a part of this community, probably for my entire life.”

This is why you can't rely on DC Dems to do anything besides provide money and staffing in these parts, because when it comes to having a connection to the everyday Wisconsinite, a lot of the Coastal Dems only know the issues and concerns of their little group. And why they came to support the Democratic Party may be a lot different than why people in outstate Wisconsin would (or would not) support the Dems.

In addition, Dems lack a large-scale, ongoing propaganda machine via regular and social media that GOPs use to drive complaints and non-issues into people's heads, and it became hard to convince low-info and casual voters that Dems would do enough to change the losing hand that exists in a lot of non-urbanized Wisconsin communities. Add in a nice side order of bro-ism, sexism and racism that never got forcefully mocked and/or put-down by the Harris-Walz campaign, and you get enough things to allow Trump to slip away with a win of less than 30,000 votes here.

But I got a feeling that a lot of the people who foolishly thought Trump/GOP had any solution to their real economic concerns are going to be looking around in 12-24 months, and realizing that not a damn thing ahas been one bout it, and that things are likely worse. Especially if the GOPs start cutting key economic supports like SNAP and Medcaid, and the price of eggs and other goods doesn't go down, but goes up further.

It just sucks that bad things have to happen to a whole lot of innocent people in the process in order to fix the foolish votes of 49.6% of Wisconsinites and Americans on November 5. But maybe this will tell Dems that they need to stop blindly defending a DC political System that doesn't work for the overshelming majority of us, and vocally and aggressively stand for DOING SOMETHING TO FIX IT. And they will likely be charged to expose and clean up the widespread corruption and oligarchy that Trump 2.0 already promises to be, which also will be something that costs the other 99% of us in a lot of ways.

$4 billion left over in Wisconsin for next budget. But big needs drain it down fast

November 20 after a general election year is a big day for those who watch the Wisconsin Budget, because it's the day that the state's Department of Administration gives its first estimates of the next budget picture. This not only has estimates of revenues from the DOA for this fiscal year and both years of the 2025-27 biennium (which will be replaced by estimates by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau in a couple of months). Then it gets compared to the 2-year spending requests by all state agencies.

I'll remind you that in Fiscal Year 2024, we started with more than $7 billion in the state's General Fund bank account, and $2.4 billion of that was reduced as the huge surplus was used to pay for a lot of one-time expenditures. In FY 2025, the General Fund balance is estimated to only drop by $622 million, to just below $4 billion, but then the gap grows again, as the increase in budget requests for 2025-27 far outpace the relatively small increase in revenues.

A large part of that jump is the $4 billion in increased spending requested by Wisconsin Schools Superintendent Jill Underly, much of which will go toward tripling the coverage of special education funding, and allowing an additional $1 billion of funding for the classroom and related everyday expenditures. It also could hopefully reduce the huge number of school referenda that have been happening throughout the state.

But just because the money is requested, it doesn't mean that either Governor Evers or the State Legislature will allow it to go through. And if these numbers hold, there has to be at least some changes, because we are projected to end up nearly $800 million in the hole if all spending went through as requested.

And given the austerity talk that's coming from TrumpWorld, there could well be a risk in an economic downturn and changes in program funding that might lead to a need to set aside some of these extra funds until we figure out just how different and outright bad that things might be in 2025.

Wisconsin's jobs market was great on Election Day 2024. Don't let people forget it.

Things were in a strong place in the Wisconsin jobs market ahead of the 2024 elections.

Preliminary employment estimates for October 2024 showed Wisconsin’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained at 2.9 percent, which is 1.2 percentage points below the national unemployment rate of 4.1 percent. In addition, the state’s labor force participation rate increased to 65.7 percent in October while the national rate ticked down to 62.6 percent.

Place of Residence Data: Wisconsin’s unemployment rate was 2.9 percent in October, 1.2 percentage points below the national rate of 4.1 percent. Wisconsin’s labor force increased by 8,400 over the month and 7,300 over the year. The number of people employed increased by 8,500 over the month and 23,900 over the year to a record-high 3,068,000 employed.

Place of Work Data: Total nonfarm jobs increased by 1,400 over the month and 27,400 over the year to 3,043,800 jobs.

It was the third straight month of private sector job growth in Wisconsin, and continues a steady, positive trend that we've seen since the effects of the Biden/Dem stimulus and inflation both started to wear off in early 2023.

Interestingly, while September's job totals went down by 2,400, private sector jobs went up by 1,300. That seems to be largely because state government jobs had its final normalization after being distorted over the previous three months due to starts of the UW System school year and (likely) Fall DNR jobs continuing through October 12. This means that even though seasonally-adjusted jobs may be no different than July, there have actually been nearly more 18,000 people working for Wisconsin state government agencies over those 3 months.

Much of that positive revision in private sector jobs came from 800 additional jobs in manufacturing, bringing September's gain to 2,600. It also means that Wisconsin has gained back the 7,300 manfuacturing jobs lost between September 2022 and September 2023.

On the household side of the survey, Wisconsin has the lowest amount of unemployed people and its lowest unemployment rate since May 2023, around the time that the Federal Reserve ended its tightening cycle, which raised the Federal Funds rates to a multi-decade high.

But an even better sign is the big (seasonally adjusted) jump in the number of Wisconsinites in the labor force, and the fact that those new entrants found jobs.

So let's remember how good the jobs market was in Wisconsin when Donald Trump was elected by enough Americans to return to the White House, and won the state by less than 1%. The Biden-Harris years were largely good ones here, especially after the rate of inflation leveled off in early 2023, and let's check back to see how things compare in November 2026 and in 2028 (assuming we can vote fairly here at that time).

Post-election presidential numbers in Wisconsin. Looks like the bros showed up.

Sure, percentages and margin of victory are the main thing people observe, but I couldn’t help but notice this reality when it came to the total votes.

That’s right, Kamala Harris got over 37,000 additional votes from Wisconsinites than Joe Biden did in 2020. That surprised me when I first looked at it. But it didn’t win our state because Trump found 87,500 more votes than he got in 2020.

Which begs the question as to where those votes came from. A great resource is a map that has been produced by Marquette professor John Johnson. This map not only shows the overall outcome of Wisconsin’s votes in the presidential and Senate races, but also ID’s the shift in votes from the presidential election in 2020 to the one in 2024.

I was especially interested in this ward-level map because I wanted to see if the exit poll findings about Latinos turning towards Trump (aka, the guy who has promised mass deportations) actually happened here. And if you look at where the votes shifted in Milwaukee, that certainly seems to be the case.

See that red on the near south side of Milwaukee? Those areas are majority Latino, and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel also noticed that trend.

In Milwaukee's predominantly Hispanic voting wards (where over 70% of adults are Hispanic), Harris picked up about 7,600 votes, or nearly 72% of the votes cast in those wards, according to unofficial results. Trump won nearly 2,800 votes in those wards, or about 26% of the vote.

Harris received hundreds fewer votes than Biden did in those wards four years ago, around 800 less, according to Johnson's data. Meanwhile, Trump gained about 500 more votes in those wards.

And given that Trump/GOP only needed to pick up less than 1% to flip the state, and in a race that was decided by less than 30,000 votes, anything like this shift in Latino-majority parts of Milwaukee matter.

Another big help for Trump in Wisconsin is that he made progress on college campuses throughout the state.

...[College students] turned out Tuesday, and the overwhelming majority still voted blue. But a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis of election results in campus-heavy wards show the Democratic margin of victory shrank, playing at least some contributing role in why Trump won Wisconsin by about a point.

In Eau Claire, Trump netted 29% of the vote from Ward 20, which serves a number of university dorms. That's up from the 21% of votes Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels got in 2022 and the 12% of votes Republican state Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly received in 2023.

In Milwaukee, Trump's share of the vote roughly doubled in four wards serving Marquette University students. In Madison, his margins increased by as many as 10 points among some wards on and near UW-Madison.

And in La Crosse, Trump flipped one of the wards serving voters who live in the UW-La Crosse dorms or nearby campus rental properties that voted blue in the past two elections. He ran just a few points behind in the other campus-heavy ward, still getting about 47% of the vote.

I worked a polling place in Madison that was overwhelmingly UW students, and I did notice a lot more dudes in the voting population than I saw at an on-campus site in the April 2023 Supreme Court election. Based on the GOP shift in the ward I worked in and at UW campuses statewide, it seems that Trump/GOP’s strategy of targeting young bros apparently worked.

College bros also may have allowed Derrick Van Orden to slip by Rebecca Cooke in Congress, as UW-La Crosse, UW-Eau Claire, UW-Platteville, UW-Stevens Point and UW-Stout are all in that district. That red, on-campus shift might well have accounted for much if not all of Van Orden’s 11,000-vote margin of victory. I hope they regret that when a GOP House helps to wreck aid to higher education and they pay higher taxes as lower-wage workers when they’re starting out in their post-college careers.

Although the bigger damage might be when a lot of 20-something women won’t date their self-absorbed, Trumpy asses after they find out who they voted for (and the damage that resulted from their broey-ness). As a straight white guy who was in college in the mid-90s, I get the allure of being "anti-PC", and feeling singled out when my privilege is named. But at some point, me and others grow up and start realizing that other people have experiences beyond yours, and you try to learn something from it. And at least we had good alternative music in the '80s and '90s, unlike the bros of today.

It also looks like the Bucky bro vote held down the margins in Dane County. I was thinking that population growth alone would allow Dems would win Dane by nearly 195,000, with a goal of a 200,000-vote win for Harris. And while Kamala added to Biden's margins in the state's fastest-growing county, it wasn't as much as I and other Dems hoped.

Dane County
2020
Biden 260,185, Trump 78,800 (+181,385)

2024 Harris 273,954, Trump 85,449 (+188,505)

It's odd that getting outvoted more than 2-1 for additional votes can be considered a "win" for Trump/GOP. But given how blue Dane County is, it was.

My final thoughts are that I'd like to know where all of these extra voters showed up in the state. It wasn't just on college campuses, but vote totals were generally up throughout the state (other than Milwaukee, which is its own concern). And given that enough of those new and added voters backed Trump, I'd like to know what they think is going to happen under Trump that made him a better option than the strong economy and stable government that we had under Biden-Harris.

If we have fair elections in 2026, I would bet we will have some serious buyer's remorse from these Trump bros, and others in Wisconsin that decided it was OK to put THAT back in charge.

A few numbers and vote totals to know about and keep in mind for Wisconsin's results tomorrow night

I wanted to throw in a few variables to look for as Wisconsin's election returns come in tomorrow night. The first is to remind you about where Wisconsin's votes come from. A little over 50% of the state's votes come from 10 counties.

1. Milwaukee County
2. The WOW Counties near next to Milwaukee (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington)
3. The BOW Counties in northeast Wisconsin (Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago)
4. Dane County
5. Racine and Kenosha Counties

The other 62 counties in the state account for slightly less than 50% of the votes. I also separate the suburbs of Milwaukee County from the City of Milwaukee, due to the large numbers of votes in Milwaukee County, and because of the different vote patterns in then City vs the burbs.

You can see that over time, the City of Milwaukee has gone from more than 9% of the state's voter turnout in the 2008 and 2012 elections (when Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee) to as little as 6.67% of the statewide vote in the 2022 elections. That's generally been replaced by a higher share from the WOW Counties, and Dane County. A dozen years ago, that would be something that might benefit Republicans statewide, as Democrats pulled around 70% of the votes from Dane County, and GOPs tended to draw around 70% of the votes in the WOW Counties.

But that hasn't been true after the rise of Donald Trump. On the Dem side, Dane County has not only accounted for a larger share of votes, but even more of those votes go to Democrats. Barack Obama got 71% of Dane County's votes in 2012, but Tony Evers got more than 78.5% of Dane's votes in 2022. In addition, the City of Milwaukee has stayed overwhelmingly Dem, and the rest of Milwaukee County has gone from a 50-50 split to nearly 60% voting for Dems.

On the flip side, the GOP advantage in the WOW Counties has shrunk to just over 60-40. And while Dems lost a lot from Obama's 2012 totals in the BOW Counties in 2016, they've gained most of that back, and have gotten over 45% of the vote in those 3 counties in every close statewide race since then.

So I would say that holding the GOP under 60% in the WOW Counties and Dems getting at least 46-47% in the BOW Counties would make Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin major favorites to win statewide.

With these gains in vote share in Dane County and lesser margins in those 6 larger GOP-leaning counties in the state happening, how haven't Dems continued to get comfortable 7-point wins like Obama got in 2012? Because Trump/GOPs have gained votes in the rest of the state. In 2012, Obama actually beat Romney for total votes in the other 62 counties in the state, but Trump dominated these places in 2016 to sneak out a win of less than 1%, and even though Joe Biden won back a bit of that in 2020, both he and Tony Evers didn't come close to Obama's numbers even as they were winning statewide. And Mandela Barnes fell short in 2022 because he couldn't get 42% of the vote outstate.

It's hard to believe in the Trump era, but there used be a Blue Wall for Democrats within the state in Western Wisconsin, and particularly Southwest Wisconsin. Look at how many counties in the western half of the state are blue in this map, indicating that they voted for Barack Obama in 2012.

Now compare to Joe Biden’s results in 2020.

It would be a very good sign for Dems if we see more of those counties in the western side of the state turn blue. Not only for Harris and Baldwin, but also for Rebecca Cooke’s chances against Small-D Van Orden in the 3rd Congressional District, and for several state Assembly and Senate seats that are up for grabs in that area.

Even with the dropoff, there are some larger-population counties on that “rest of Wisconsin” list that still consistently vote for Democrats. For example, Evers pulled in the neighborhood of 58% in Eau Claire, La Crosse and Rock counties in 2022, between 57 and 58% in the 3 main counties that border Lake Superior, and 53.5% in Stevens Point-centered Portage County. Any erosion there is going to be hard to make up elsewhere, but if Harris and/or Baldwin is winning 60% in those places, that spells “statewide blowout” for Dems, and a likely flip for the State Assembly.

On the other side, there are sizable red counties that also seem to give strong indicators of how things are going. Marathon, Manitowoc, Sheboygan, Chippewa, and Wood Counties all had Ron Johnson get 60% or more of their votes in 2022, but GOP governor candidate Tim Michels didn’t reach 60% in any of those counties, and often was around 57-58%. Not getting blown out in red, mid-size counties would seem to be an important item for statewide Dems, and also for Assembly candidates in new toss-up districts in Sheboygan, Wausau, and the Chippewa Valley.

Lastly, I think the totals in Racine and Kenosha are worth watching. Obama won both of those counties in 2012, but Clinton, Biden, Mandela Barnes, and even Evers have lost both of them since then. Harris and Baldwin don’t necessarily need to win either of these counties, but getting the Dem share back to 48% or more would be a big help.

There are plenty of other ways to break it down, but I think using the metrics of both vote total and "% of Dem vs GOP" are ways to understand how the election is shaping up. And it very well may be the case that by tracking these things, you'll know who's going to win in Wisconsin even before Milwaukee and other "central count" locations complete counting absentee ballots late tomorrow night.

Wild weather, strikes lead to a flat Oct jobs report. But nothing to get too worried about.

Right before Election Day, we got one last US jobs report. And it was the lowest we've seen since Donald Trump was president.

JUST IN: The US economy gained only 12,000 jobs in October. That’s the smallest since December 2020. It’s due to some strikes (Boeing, anmong others) and the brutal impact of Hurricanes Milton and Helene.

Unemployment rate: 4.1% (same as September)

**Manufacturing lost -44,000… pic.twitter.com/DnebQDpDbx

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) November 1, 2024

(Actually unemployment went from 4.05% to 4.145%, but as you'll see, a lot of that is weather-related).

OH GOD, IT'S RECESSION ON THE HORIZON, AND..... no, it's not. To me, all it does is return us back to a flattening of job growth that we've seen for much of the last year. We're still growing, but definitely acting like an economy that's maxed out at just over 4% unemployment.

As the Washington Post's Heather Long alludes to, let's remember that these surveys were done in the 2nd week of October, when significant weather and labor situations were going on.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton likely reduced employment last month by about 70,000 in the Southeast, Oxford Economics estimated. Goldman Sachs expected a smaller impact of 40,000 to 50,000 jobs. Hurricane Helene hit Florida's Gulf Coast on Sept. 26, well before the Labor Department conducted its jobs survey, the agency noted, but Milton struck during the week of the survey....

Meanwhile, an ongoing Boeing strike – along with smaller walkouts at Textron, an aerospace parts maker, and Hilton Hotels – likely suppressed payrolls by about 40,000, according to research firm Nomura.

All told, the storms and strikes probably shaved job gains by about 100,000, forecasters estimated.

There’s little doubt the hurricanes and strikes affected the paltry jobs tally. About 512,000 people said they were unable to work because of weather, compared to a historical average of 32,000, said economist Bradley Saunders of Capital Economics. And just 47% of companies surveyed responded, a 33-year low.

So there is a lot to shake out in November's job report, both in how growth "recovers" as people return to work after the strikes and the hurricane zone, and in the revisions that may occur as more companies report their data.

However, even as the 40,000 strikers return to work, let's not leave out that manufacturing employment has been in decline for over a year. That's especially true if we account for the benchamrked job numbers, which is something else that points to a need for the Federal Reserve to continue lowering interest rates in their meeting this week, and for the near future.

No, the paltry job numbers of October are more a fluke than any sign of an economic downturn, and indeed, we've seen unemployment claims fall back in the weeks since then to 5-month lows. But it's also not something to completely blow off, and it counteracts the thoughts that September's strong numbers may have portended another economic boom.

It's just solid growth, as you might expect from an economy with 4.1% unemployment, and I'll take that trajectory at this point.

If you believe MU Law Poll, the race in close in Wis. But it doesn't seem like 2024's reality

As we get into the last week of this election cycle and numerous polls are thrown into the atmosphere, and our media uncritically reports those numbers to come up with the "state of play", this article from Vanderbilt University political scientist Josh Clinton rang true to me. He notes that "poll results depend on pollster choices as much as voters’ decisions."

We need to remember that pollsters don't just take every response and produce a number, but also take demographic data and create an electorate that they think will match who casts the votes. And that is something that is harder than ever when fewer people pick up phone calls from weird numbers. One example that Josh Clinton uses is how pollsters guess as to how partisan the electorate is.

For partisanship, pollsters often rely on benchmarks such as the Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Research Sample, which suggests that the country is evenly split – 33% Democrat, 32% Republican, and 35% independent – or Gallup’s tracking survey, which suggests that 28% are Democrats, 31% are Republicans and 41% are independents. If I adjust the raw data by both the demographics of the 2020 electorate and these party identification benchmarks, Harris’ margin is greatly reduced relative to the raw data and demographics alone:

By the way, right after Clinton wrote this article, Gallup gave an update on its tracking survey, and it now says 32% Dem, 29% Republican, and 37% Independent. Needless to say, if a poll's makeup went from R+3 to D+3, it would likely result in a 5-6 point swing in the polls. But I bet most pollsters haven't made a change like that to their models this week.

Clinton also mentions that pollsters need to decide how likely it is that someone will vote, and how much should an enthusiasm gap play into that analysis.

This poll asked respondents to rate their likelihood of voting on a 1-10 scale, where 1 means they definitely will not vote and 10 means they definitely will. Here is what happens if I weight the sample so that each respondent counts “more” if they reported a higher number on that scale.

First, because Democrats are slightly more enthusiastic than Republicans who are themselves slightly more enthusiastic than independents in this data, adding the likely voter weight moves the margin ever so slightly towards Harris:

Pollsters also need to look at age and gender, especially in an election like this one, where there is likely to be a wide variation between various demographic groups. A similar choice needs to be made about new voters, both in identifying if they are registered voters, and in adding in how much of the electorate should be those voters.

Which takes us to this week's Marquette Law School Poll of Wisconsin, the alleged "gold standard" for this state. I made a wistful prediction about what they'd say an hour before the poll came out.

Not entirely sure what @MULawPoll says in an hour - if they are honest or want to go along with the herd - but I can bet their electorate will be R+3 in a state where Dems have won almost every statewide race for 8 years.

Just keep it in mind.@MaggieDaunShow #wiunion #wisen

— JakeEdwards (@JakeMadtown) October 30, 2024

Oh, but I was wrong. MU slanted their poll even harder toward the GOP.

The partisan makeup of the Wisconsin sample is 36% Republican, 31% Democratic, and 34% independent. Since January 2020, the long-term partisan balance has been 31% Republican and 29% Democratic, with 40% independent. #mulawpoll

— MULawPoll (@MULawPoll) October 30, 2024

Yet IN THE SAME POLL, they had this response.

75% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans say they are very enthusiastic about voting. Enthusiasm among Democrats increased from 71% in late September, with little change for Republicans (67% in Sept.). #mulawpoll

— MULawPoll (@MULawPoll) October 30, 2024

So Democrats have more enthusiasm than Republicans in Wisconsin, and the Democrats got more enthusiastic from September's poll, while Republicans did not. Yet the MU Law Poll's electorate got MORE Republican from the already-off R+3 in September? How does that work?

The reason I am angry at this is that it is a conscious choice by Charles Franklin and company to make the electorate more Republican. Likewise, the gender breakdown of the poll is 50.1% women, 49.9% men. And indeed in 2020, the gender breakdown in adjusted exit polls was 50-50 in Wisconsin (while being 52-48 nationwide, which is...interesting), and that seems to be where a R +5 assumption could come from for the state's electorate. But in 2022 (after the GOP's election denials on January 6th and after the Dobbs decision outlawed abortion in Wisconsin), the exit polls had a Wisconsin electorate that was 53-47 women, and dead even between Democrats and Republicans.

It makes you wonder why Marquette decided to revert to these 2020 numbers and ignore what happened 2 years ago, or ignore anything that's happened since then. There's a 33-point gender gap for the presidential race in the Marquette Poll between men and women (Trump +15 with men, Harris +18 with women). If we even split the difference between 2020 and 2022, and made it 51.5-48.5 women, that would add 1 point to Harris' lead. If we made the electorate R +2.5 instead of R+5, that adds 2 points to Harris' lead. And we'd have a race that would be a 3-4 point lead for Harris instead of 1, which would not make the race seem like a toss-up to the press.

Which leads to this excellent article from earlier this month by Denny Carter in the Bad Faith Times, where he reminds us to "watch the game", and not the polls or the pundits.

Peel your eyes away from the computer screen showing a two-point swing toward Trump among men in Michigan with some college education who were born under a full moon between October and December and you might encounter a different reality – one in which one candidate is behaving like the favorite and the other is thrashing around like me when I get a calf cramp in the middle of the night.

One candidate, after securing and firing up the base with some of the best campaigning of my lifetime, seems to have pivoted toward undecided voters and possibly some Republicans who are so repulsed by Trump and his open embrace of fascism that they might consider the unthinkable: Casting a vote for a Democrat (I don’t love Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney but I can report the normies love the shit out of it). We get snippets of data showing a big old chunk of voters in swing states say they support Trump’s policies but can’t stand his demeanor, and are therefore undecided or wasting their vote on a third-party candidate.....

We have one candidate selling gold watches and cryptocurrency and sneakers and shit I’m sure I haven’t even seen in a last-ditch effort to squeeze the grift dry, to drain his frothing congregation of every last dime before the whole thing collapses on itself. The other candidate is doing her job as vice president while hustling to create a Coalition of Normies that can deliver the final blow to this particular form of the fascist menace.

One candidate has packed stadiums full of cheering throngs; the other is conducting a gaslighting campaign about his sparse rallies, saying the people filing out of the venue in the middle of the rally aren't actually leaving the rally. But they are, because they are Americans, and they're bored in Season Nine of this fascist clown show.

Which of these candidates seems to be in command? Don’t ask the computer. Be honest with yourself about what you see. Watch the damn game.

RIGHT. Go look at the crowds at the dueling rallies in Milwaukee tonight, look at how the candidates are acting, and that might tell you more than the absurd amount of polls that have been published about this race.

PS - Now we have confirmation from the New York Times' Nate ("I'm a Polling Expert, Because That's the Job Description") Cohn that many organizations are intentionally suppressing great polls for Kamala Harris, and for a very lame reason.

From Nate Cohn’s new article on polling accuracy.

Basically, pollsters are terrified of being wrong again, so they’re flat-out ignoring “very blue” results.

“As a result, pollsters are more willing to take steps to produce more Republican-leaning results.” pic.twitter.com/K4lBEvu12o

— Angry Staffer 🌻 (@Angry_Staffer) November 1, 2024

OH REALLY? So we see the outliers that help Trump, but we don't see the outliers in favor of Harris? Well then we're making our predictions on incomplete data, aren't we?

Let's not pretend it's in the bag, and a lot of work is left to do (after all, Dems need to win by 4-5 statewide in Wisconsin to flip the State Assembly, and Rebecca Cooke needs to beat Small-D Van Orden). But I have a suspicion that things are better than the toss-up that the polls and the pundits would indicate.