Just a reminder that the average absentee ballot rejection rate in twenty-three states in 2020 was 0.73% vs 1.46% in 2016, which is 100% suspect

 FiveThirtyEight here.

That's because we're hanging up on the pollsters, if we answer at all

 SILVER: Polls Still Do Not Show Republican Bounceback...

49ers for the win: Five Thirty Eight is not very good at this, said Hillary had a 71.4% chance of winning on 11/8/2016

Elizabeth Warren wants to cancel your health insurance culture AND your income tax culture and replace them with socialism

[T]his time, a wholesale government takeover of health insurance would actually be a step toward socialism, which is still viewed more negatively than positively by Americans overall. “You don’t win with a message of socialism in a swing state like Florida,” said Bill Nelson, a former Florida senator and Biden surrogate.

More here.

ICYMI Democrat Eric Swalwell is a complete moron

Who posts a poll like this showing yourself to be completely out of step with the voters on your signature issue? Have you no peeps, man?

This ding dong is tied for 20th in the Democrat race for president, for crying out loud.

 

How big is the T part of the LGBT population wanting to pee in your bathroom?

The LGBT part of the population is 3.8%, or 12.2 million.

Some say the T part is only 700,000.

Others maybe 1.6 million.

It's odd the trannies are causing such a stir while the big balance of the others is getting a pass.

Maybe Trump's got that right after all. 

P. J. O'Rourke was more right about John Kasich than he knows

According to careful vote counting by FiveThirtyEight, "Kasich could lay off winner-take-all states where only Cruz has a chance to beat Trump: Wisconsin, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota" in a last ditch strategy with Cruz to divide and conquer Donald Trump's march to 1,237. "Kasich and Cruz’s choice is simple: wage war on Trump on two separate fronts, or lose."

But Kasich is having none of it, in keeping with his previous refusal to work with Marco Rubio in Rubio's quest to keep Florida out of Donald Trump's column. John Kasich is "all in" to the convention, convinced he's the party's savior from the so-called outsiders Trump and Cruz. Kasich already has four events planned in Wisconsin between now and April 1 leading up to the primary there on April 5.

The reason? He is convinced he's a better candidate everywhere than is Cruz, but especially in the Midwest, insisting he wants the presidency and is not interested in "a parlor game of who gets this or who gets that". And as Rush Limbaugh has observed, John Kasich takes himself way too seriously. The man is delusional.

"We don't want to work with those people [Democrats]. We want to defeat them politically, and here comes Kasich! It's all about him. That whole thing, saying that he would be way open to choosing a Democrat? Kasich is taking the occasion here to try to sell himself as something unique and special."

Of course Kasich's not unique and special. The party's problem is that it's given us such Republicans too many times before, candidates whose vision of politics is nothing more than white flag bipartisanship. John McCain was infamous for it in 2008, and his lackey Lindsey Graham also puked out that line this time around, before ignominiously crashing and burning.

It's conventional wisdom out there that Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party as we know it. But the truth is closer to what P. J. observed last fall, that it has simply killed itself.

John Kasich is just the Republicans' two word suicide note.

Blue state Republicans contribute a majority of convention delegates but only 37% of the primary vote

Which is why Republican presidential nominees tend to be more moderate than rank and file Republicans.

From the story here:

"Blue-state Republicans have already propelled moderates in the 2016 money chase. According to Federal Election Commission filings, donors in the 18 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that have voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992 have accounted for 45 percent of Rubio’s total itemized contributions, 45 percent of Bush’s, 53 percent of Fiorina’s and 85 percent of Chris Christie’s. By contrast, they’ve provided just 20 percent of Cruz’s contributions and 36 percent of Carson’s. For comparison, blue-state Republicans cast just 37 percent of all votes in the 2012 GOP primaries. But their real mojo lurks in the delegate chase. ... there are 1,247 delegates at stake in Obama-won states, compared with just 1,166 in Romney states."

FiveThirtyEight Economists Assert But Don't Demonstrate Distributional Characteristics Of Great Recession Spending Pullback

I refer to "Why the Housing Bubble Tanked the Economy And the Tech Bubble Didn’t" by AMIR SUFI and ATIF MIAN, here, where they basically blame the spending pullback of the Great Recession on the poorest, most indebted homeowners:

"The poor cut spending much more for the same dollar decline in wealth. This fact is one of the most robust findings in all of macroeconomics, ... It also makes intuitive sense."

Their forthcoming book may show this, but this article surely doesn't.

They present data which tell us about homeowners' housing as a share of their net worth by quintiles, their mortgages as a share of their home values by quintiles, and about the net worth of richest and poorest homeowners. These are useful distributional observations which, unfortunately, in the case of spending are missing in the presentation! You'd think they would be present in a story which attacks traditional economists like Ben Bernanke for ignoring distributional data sets. Ah, yeah.

Apart from whether showing the distributional characteristics of the spending pullback is even possible, I wonder if it makes any sense that the poorest homeowners could cut their spending enough to account for the sums involved, which is what traditional economists wonder. Weren't they the ones primarily represented in the 5.6 million who lost their homes to foreclosure in the first place?

Using November 2007 real retail and food service sales as the baseline ($179.37 billion), the cumulative month to month shortfall from that to November 2012 came to $663.09 billion. Yes, it took five full years for real retail to recover. But the peak to trough decline in real GDP from 4Q2007 to 2Q2009 alone, on the other hand, was $639.2 billion, not even half way through the great retail depression. Retail spending shows only part of the picture.

Which is why it's wrong to imply, as the authors do, that the decline in spending, supposedly linked to the poorest homeowners, explains the Great Recession. It only explains about a third of it, but just how much of that can be blamed on the poorest homeowners remains a mystery.