Wednesday, November 20, 2024

$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.

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Monday, November 18, 2024

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).
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Saturday, November 9, 2024

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.

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Monday, November 4, 2024

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.
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Sunday, November 3, 2024

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.

(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.
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Friday, November 1, 2024

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.

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

Yet IN THE SAME POLL, they had this response.

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.

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.
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