Well, that explains that

 

35 people who didn't get the memo braved -18F to vote for Chris Crispy Creme yesterday in Iowa, even though he had already dropped out

 The 108k who turned out under those conditions are a legitimate index of the proportional enthusiasm which exists.

Vivek got fewer than 9k votes and promptly, and properly, dropped out.

Change my mind.

 

When Chris Christie said he was in it for the long haul, he meant two, maybe three months lol

 Chris Christie is set to drop out of the 2024 presidential race

 

 

Chris Christie, on the other hand, has gone to 141 Bruce Springsteen concerts

 Christie: DeSantis Is A "TV Tough Guy," "He's A Guy From Tallahassee With Cowboy Boots"

Good, maybe he'll lose some weight

 

Chris Christie: I'm Going To Follow Trump Around The Country If He Refuses To Show Up At Debates

Chris Christie credits Fed interest rate policy for denting government-spending-induced inflation but misses the role of collapsing energy prices

 Chris Christie is a smart guy with many of the right ideas about government spending, taxes, inflation, energy, and the environment.

But it's a real stretch to think that the timid interest rate increases of the Fed are responsible for this year's so-far moderating inflation indicators when it's falling energy prices since the winter which deserve the real credit. Christie himself admits that outrageous government spending hasn't been curbed at all.

His is a simple binary view which, while conventional and correct as far as it goes, doesn't get to the heart of the current matter. 

Low energy prices have always been and remain key to a successful economy, and it was the spike in natural gas cost inputs because of the Russia-Ukraine war which accelerated inflation globally, not just in the US.

Fed chair Jerome Powell was correct in June of 2021 to believe that inflation would be transitory for "weak supply" reasons, but the Fed rate increases didn't actually commence until the start of the war in Ukraine, which compounded those reasons with the cutoff of European natural gas supplies.

But since the winter the natural gas price is down 73% from peak, coal is down 70%, and gasoline is down too, but a comparatively modest 24%. 

Americans consumed in 2022 the energy equivalent of 26.9 billion kWh/day of natural gas, 13 billion kWh/day of gasoline, and 7.9 billion kWh/day of coal.

Natural gas is twice as important as gasoline in the overall American energy picture, primarily for heating, and as a substitute for coal in electricity generation.

Natural gas produced 4.6 billion kWh/day of electricity in 2022, the top source of electricity, vs. coal at 2.3 billion kWh/day and nuclear at 2.1 billion kWh/day.

Chris Christie is right though. We must "uncap" US oil and gas production and be energy independent.

Europe's natural gas storage, by the way, is presently 93% full as the war in Ukraine drags on. They are ready.

The US used 88.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day in 2022. We presently have about 35 days in storage.

Crude oil consumption in 2022 was about 20.3 million barrels per day. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is down to about 17 days of supply, from about 35 in 2011.

 

Watch CNBC’s full interview with GOP Presidential Candidate Chris Christie

Christie lets Fed off the hook for inflation, blames Trump and Biden for overspending

 

 

Guess who's the choice of Drudge's new liberal audience lol?

 

Rival Republicans (and a Democrat gay mayor too busy babysitting to do his Biden job) LOL, polling 2.4% and too low to count

 UPDATE: DESANTIS UNDER FIRE FOR 'HOMOPHOBIC' AD...

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was criticized Sunday by two rival Republican presidential candidates and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for a video taking aim at former President Trump's previous support for the LGBTQ community. ...  former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ...  former Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), who joined the Republican presidential primary race last month . . ..

 

 

Ann Coulter: The media are trying to convince Trump that if he abandons the wall, he’ll be a statesman . . .

Bush 41 accepted the Profiles in Courage award from Democrats for abandoning his Read My Lips No New Taxes pledge, many years later of course, proof that the voters were right to turn out the bum in 1992 for his betrayal.

Will Trump follow in his footsteps?

Coulter: Please, No More ‘Border Security’:

Nearly every Republican presidential candidate tried to con voters with these meaningless catchphrases about “border security.”

Here are The Des Moines Register’s summaries of some of the candidates’ positions on immigration a few weeks before the 2016 Iowa caucus:

Jeb Bush: “has called for enhanced border security.”

Marco Rubio: “proposes … improved security on the border.”

John Kasich: “believes border security should be strengthened.”

Chris Christie: “urges … using technology to improve border surveillance …”

Rand Paul: “would secure the border immediately.”

Carly Fiorina: “would secure the border, which she says requires only money and manpower.”

They all lost.

The guy who won: “Trump has said many illegal immigrants are rapists and are bringing drugs and crime to the United States. He has called for building a wall along the southern border, and has said he would make Mexico pay for it. He said he would immediately terminate President Barack Obama’s ‘illegal executive order on immigration.'”

Trump got more votes than any other Republican in the history of presidential primaries. No one was falling for “border security” then, and they aren’t now.

But instead of doing what he said and building a wall, Trump has hired people who don’t even grasp that the point is to make it unattractive to break into our country.

The new governors of Virginia and New Jersey will be Democrats

Real Clear has called both races even though just 5% of the vote is in in New Jersey.

New Jersey is a flip, having been governed by Republican Chris Christie.

Virginia stays Democrat. Ed Gillespie loses another one, having run unsuccessfully for the US Senate previously and now for governor.

RNC fundraising in July 2016 is down 61% from July 2012: Donors exhausted about $750 million on 16 losers in the primaries

OpenSecrets has the RNC story here.

Stupid liberals blame this fundraising debacle on Trump when Republicans have only themselves to blame for throwing tons of good money after bad during the primaries, exhausting the donors. If the dopes at Politicus had just opened up OpenSecrets they'd have seen how.

Jeb! Bush burned through $152 million as of August 22nd, and won bupkis.

Lyin' Ted Cruz? $155 million spent.

Little Marco? $164 million (he's over $2 million in the hole, which is the real reason why he flip-flopped and decided to run for the Senate again).

John Kasich spent $40 million (and he's nearly $6 million in the hole, which is exactly what he deserves).

Chris Christie spent nearly $32 million.

Ben Carson, you won't believe it, spent nearly $79 million.

Scott Walker: almost $33 million.

Carly Fiorina: almost $26 million.

Rand Paul spent over $21 million.

Mike Huckabee spent $10.5 million and he's still $275,000 in the hole. 

Lindsey Grahamnesty: over $10 million.

Bobby Jindal blew nearly $6 million.

Rick Perry: over $17 million, also in the red by $111,000.

And Rick Santorum spent $2.5 million and he's in the red $412,000.

Pataki and Gilmore bring up the rear with relatively smaller sums.

Donald Trump has spent over $97 million and yet has over $40 million in the bank.

It's clear from the fundraising that there were only four or five real contenders here, not seventeen: Bush, Rubio, Cruz, Trump and Carson. And after four riveting televised debates before Thanksgiving 2015 polling showed the same thing, and arguably Bush no longer belonged up there. The RNC should have put its foot down at that point and cut the debate stage to four: You pull 10 points in the polls or you're out.

Things might have turned out very differently. Instead we had to listen to Kasich, Christie, Fiorina and Paul divert attention away from an in depth examination of the issues dividing the candidates attracting over 70% of Republican eyeballs. The candidate might have been better for it today, and the party more unified and flush.

Florida's Rick Scott joins three other governors endorsing Trump

Noted here:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is calling on the Republican Party to come together and support Donald Trump. ... Trump has earned the endorsements of current governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Paul LePage of Maine, and Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona.

Gov. Chris Christie's endorsement of Donald Trump pisses off fake conservative Jennifer Rubin, impresses Newt Gingrich

From the story here:

The decision drew a sharply worded critique from Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin, who quickly penned a rebuke of “Christie’s despicable endorsement.”

Other GOP figures described the endorsement as a big move coming ahead of Super Tuesday next week, when Trump seems poised to increase his delegate lead.

“This is a huge step for Trump and will impact Super Tuesday [big] time,” 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said on Twitter. 

“This Chris Christie endorsement of Trump is real signal to GOP establishment that they had better begin thinking about Trump as the future.”

In the South Carolina GOP primary the polling averaged a miss of 16.1% v 14.2% in New Hampshire

The Real Clear Politics poll average predicted the lineup of the outcome in South Carolina, but the percentage of the vote received was off on average by 16.1%, with the polls getting it most wrong about Jeb Bush who underperformed predictions by 37.2%. The polling was most accurate for Trump, who outperformed the predicted result by only 2.2%.

Trump 31.8% v 32.5% actual = outperformed polling by 2.2%

Rubio 18.8% v 22.5% actual = outperformed polling by 16.4%

Cruz 18.5% v 22.3% actual = outperformed polling by 17%

Bush 10.7% v 7.8% actual = underperformed polling by 37.2%

Kasich 9.0% v 7.6% actual = underperformed polling by 18.4%

Carson 6.8% v 7.2% actual = outperformed polling by 5.6%

Average variance of actual result from polling in South Carolina = 16.1%, 13% worse than in New Hampshire. On the other hand, polling in New Hampshire did not predict the lineup of the result as it did in South Carolina, except for Trump who came in first and Chris Christie who came in sixth as predicted by the polls there.

It looks like the polling in South Carolina for establishment candidates Bush and Kasich has been especially expressive of wishful thinking, since both have fallen far short of expectations.

It was bad enough that Bush has already dropped out, and rather ignominiously. A falloff in donations to Bush has been said to be an important reason why he decided to quit at this still early stage, which just goes to show what a spendthrift the richest guy in the campaign next to Trump has been. He would have been a bad president for government spending too.

Emerson poll, touted as most accurate in Iowa by brain surgeons Limbaugh and Hannity, was 33% more inaccurate in New Hampshire than average

The Real Clear Politics poll average on the day of the Republican New Hampshire Primary was off on average by 14.2% compared to the actual results.

But the Emerson poll was worse, off 18.9%, which was 33.1% more off the mark than the average miss.

Emerson underestimated Trump by 12.2%, Kasich by 17.7%, Cruz by 6% and Christie by 18.9%. It overestimated Rubio by 13.2%, and Little Jebbie by a whopping 45.5%. Average miss: 18.9%.

Republican New Hampshire Primary polling was off on average by 14%

Final New Hampshire result v Real Clear Politics poll average:

Trump 35. 3 v 31.2, underestimated 11.6%

Kasich 15.8 v 13.5, underestimated 14.6%

Cruz 11.7 v 11.8, overestimated 0.9%

Bush 11.0 v 11.5, overestimated 4.5%

Rubio 10.6 v 14.0, overestimated 32.1%

Christie 7.4 v 5.8, underestimated 21.6%

Average miss: 14.2%

Chris Christie dropped out of the race today, notably on friendly terms with Donald Trump

Reported here:

“I think that Chris did an amazing job in terms of the debate, as a prosecutor, and he’s a friend of mine,” Donald Trump said Wednesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “And he actually called me last night, and we had a long talk, and he’s a little disappointed because he really did do a great job, he did an amazing job during that debate,” he added.

As usual Rush Limbaugh gets it wrong, this time on the Emerson poll in Iowa and in New Hampshire

Here today:

There's an Emerson poll.  The Emerson poll has... What does the Emerson have?  Emerson poll has a shock. Find the Emerson poll.  Emerson poll.  Bush in second place and Rubio slipping to fourth, and everybody says, "Emerson poll? What the hell is the Emerson poll?"  It's a student poll.  Okay, so why does it matter?  Well, because they called Iowa.  Yeah.  Emerson was the only polling outfit that said Trump was not gonna win Iowa.  It had Trump and Cruz finishing in a tie.

No. And No.

Emerson had the Iowa race tightening to nearly even, but Trump was still +1 in the Emerson. Three major polls showed Trump reversing Cruz' lead, and all the polls after the first Emerson poll showed Trump winning. Even the Des Moines Register got it wrong. And of course Rush never mentions Cruz' cheating in Iowa against Carson and how the math involved mentioned by Karl Rove easily could have made the difference to Trump winning instead of Cruz.

And in New Hampshire, as we pointed out yesterday, Bush was second in the Emerson over a week ago but has DROPPED 2 points. Even Hannity is repeating similar drivel today about the Emerson poll. Bush in second according to the Emerson poll isn't news.

And there ends this episode of Dumb and Dumber.  

Iowa polling

Do you think National Review's candidate is Marco Rubio or what?

Headlines about Marco so far today at The Corner are 50% of the fourteen since the debate began last night at 8:00 PM (the other 50% are mostly about Hillary):

"Rubio Better Buckle His Chin Strap" 

"Rubio vs. Christie and Bush on Life" 

"Rubio's Tough Night"

"On Marco Rubio and Chris Christie's Brutal Exchange" 

"Christie Bests Rubio in GOP debate while Cruz and Trump Coast" 

"How Much of a Stumble?" 

"What a Bad Debate Night Means for Marco Rubio". 

Trump and Cruz basically unchanged in latest FOX poll, Christie and Kasich up a little at the expense of Rubio and Carson