American whiners generally rate their own healthcare positively but not the country's

 Gallup, here.

People are in a bad mood about it since 2020 because of what happened during the pandemic with lock-downs, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates, and because the expanded emergency coverage from that year has expired with the expiration of the emergency in 2023.

But 71% still think their own healthcare quality is pretty good, compared with 44% saying the same thing about the quality for the country as a whole.

There's always been that disconnect.

And generally speaking, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from this about pre-Obamacare and post-Obamacare experiences because of it. But 62% rated the quality of healthcare in the country highly in both 2012 and 2010, the year Obamacare was passed. That's now down 18 points to 44%. 71% now rate the quality of their own healthcare highly, down 11 points since 2012 from 82%.

I suspect we'll be living with the after effects of the pandemic debacle for a while longer.

 

Gee, why did "the government" become such a big issue in July lol?

 

Sometimes it's not the economy stupid: Headline employment under Obama didn't recover until May 2014, but he got re-elected in 2012 anyway

 Six years and four months went by: Jan 2008-May 2014.

And economic confidence actually declined from -11 in 2012 to -10 in 2014 when it did!

It's one of the craziest things in US political history, comparable to FDR getting re-elected throughout the Great Depression, which his economic experimentation only made worse.

By October 2012, 72% said the effects of the Great Recession were still the most important problem, compared to 43% today in October 2024, but it didn't matter that Obama wasn't solving it. He beat Romney anyway.

Is this one of those sometimes?

The same phenomenon may be happening today, but in reverse.

Harris stands to lose despite economic indicators which are chugging along in her favor, or at least not falling apart, to which those 43% seem oblivious.

Civilian employment in July and September 2024 remains near the November 2023 peak. Core inflation is still too high at 2.7%, but it isn't in the 5s anymore like it was for four straight quarters. Congress has thrown the book at the economy since 2Q2020, with nominal GDP growing at an astounding 9.84% compound annual rate because of pandemic spending. That's been a double-edged sword, however, exploding the national debt, inflation, and interest rates.

But economic confidence is Obama-like negative, and has been since it crashed during the pandemic in April 2020 to -32 from its highest level in 20 years under Trump just two months before, in February 2020 at +41.

Trump didn't shut down the economy in 2020, but governors sure did. It was a stark demonstration of just how quickly the wrong leadership can make everything go to hell in a hand basket overnight. The people today aren't wrong to lack confidence.

Ominously for incumbent VP Harris, Gallup thinks 2024 is most analogous to 1992, when Americans booted the incumbent Bush 41 even though the recession had ended more than a year before in 1991.

Majority of Americans Feel Worse Off Than Four Years Ago

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More than half of Americans (52%) say they and their family are worse off today than they were four years ago, while 39% say they are better off and 8% volunteer that they are about the same. The 2024 response is most similar to 1992 among presidential election years in which Gallup has asked the question. ...

With a majority of Americans feeling they are not better off than four years ago, economic confidence remaining low, and less than half of Americans saying now is a good time to find a quality job, the economy will be an important consideration at the ballot box this year. As inflation persists and economic concerns dominate voters' minds, the upcoming election may hinge on which candidate can best address these pressing issues.

 

FBI quietly revises 2022 violent crime data without explanation after gaslighting the country for a year: 2.1% decline becomes 4.5% increase, DOJ report shows 55.4% increase in violent crime under Biden-Harris

 The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults. The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. ... 

It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers. ...

The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021. There were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed? ...

While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the NCVS numbers [from the U.S. Department of Justice] show that total violent crime has risen by 55.4%. Rapes are up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during Biden’s term. Since the NCVS started, the largest previous increase over three years was 27% in 2006, so the increase under Biden was slightly more than twice as large. ... 

At the beginning of this year, the media was running headlines like National Public Radio’s: “Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it.” “At some point in 2022 … there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” NPR claimed. But now the FBI has itself admitted its violent crime numbers were way off. ...

A Gallup survey late last year found that 92% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats thought crime was increasing. A February Rasmussen Reports survey found that, by a 4.7-to-1 margin, likely voters say violent crime in the U.S. is getting worse (61%), not better (13%). A Gallup poll found in March that “crime and violence” was Americans’ second biggest concern, after inflation. But the media and politicians used the inaccurate FBI data to try to convince people that they were wrong.

Read the full story here.

Gallup poll not good for the incumbents Biden-Harris: Economy ranked most important as in 2008 when the voters dumped the incumbent Republicans represented by John McCain

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The economy ranks as the most important of 22 issues that U.S. registered voters say will influence their choice for president. It is the only issue on which a majority of voters, 52%, say the candidates’ positions on it are an “extremely important” influence on their vote. Another 38% of voters rate the economy as “very important,” which means the issue could be a significant factor to nine in 10 voters. ...

The current 52% of voters rating the economy as an “extremely important” influence on their vote for president is the highest since October 2008 during the Great Recession, when 55% of voters said the same.

More. 

It's not 2008, obviously, where everyone feared a catastrophe with banks failing left and right, homes going into foreclosure, and stocks tanking, but the perception of the economy as lousy today because of high inflation is remarkably high as it was in 2008 as indicated by this poll.

Everyone forgets that the vast majority of the job losses came after Obama was elected in 2008, not before, which took a record number of years to recover, setting the stage for Donald Trump. And pandemic fear drove the election cycle in 2020 and not the economy because of the gargantuan bailouts of the people.

Kicker:

Voters view Donald Trump as better able than Kamala Harris to handle the economy, 54% versus 45%.

Gallup: The political environment suggests the election is Trump’s and Republicans’ to lose

 The political environment suggests the election is Trump’s and Republicans’ to lose. Nearly every indicator of the election context is favorable to the Republican Party, and those that aren’t are essentially tied rather than showing a Democratic advantage. Nevertheless, the two major party presidential candidates have similar favorable ratings in Gallup’s September poll, echoing presidential preference polls that suggest a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Harris.

Here.

What a hoot, man: 46% of U.S. EV owners claimed they were likely to switch back to internal combustion engine vehicles, well above the 29% global average

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to the McKinsey data on current EV owners, a recent Gallup poll found fewer non-EV owners in the U.S. saying they might consider an EV purchase, down from 43% in 2023 to 35% in 2024. The percentage of American adults who do not intend to buy an EV went up from 41% to 48% year over year.

More. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/25/ev-owners-want-to-buy-gas-cars-again.html ✔

Gallup: For the first time in nearly two decades, a majority of Americans want immigration levels to the U.S. reduced rather than kept at their present level or increased

 Here:

Significantly more U.S. adults than a year ago, 55% versus 41%, would like to see immigration to the U.S. decreased. This is the first time since 2005 that a majority of Americans have wanted there to be less immigration, and today’s figure is the largest percentage holding that view since a 58% reading in 2001. The record high was 65%, recorded in 1993 and 1995. ...

The shifts in attitudes have come after monthly illegal border crossings reached record levels late last year. ... Gallup’s monthly measure of the most important problem facing the country finds immigration consistently ranking among the top issues this year. ...

A slim majority of 53% favors expanding the construction of walls along the U.S. border, the first time a majority has been in favor of that policy.

Immigration Named Top U.S. Problem for Third Straight Month

 Gallup:

Immigration has been the most politically polarizing issue mentioned in past 24 years

 

Speaking of 13 quarters of Joe Biden inflation

 Biden's 13th-Quarter Approval Average Lowest Historically

Averages 38.7% job approval

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Joe Biden averaged 38.7% job approval during his recently completed 13^th quarter in office, which began on Jan. 20 and ended April 19. None of the other nine presidents elected to their first term since Dwight Eisenhower had a lower 13^th-quarter average than Biden. ... From a broader historical perspective, Biden’s most recent quarterly average ranks 277^th out of 314 presidential quarters in Gallup records dating to 1945. That puts it in the bottom 12% of all presidential quarters.

Boston Globe editorial board downplays illegal immigration threat, misrepresents Gallup survey which said immigration is Americans' top unprompted concern

 From the Gallup survey:

 

For the second straight month, immigration leads Americans’ unprompted answers about what most ails the nation, with inflation also figuring prominently. ...

Immigration Is Americans’ Top Unprompted Concern

Gallup also measures Americans’ views of national concerns monthly by asking them to name, unprompted, what they believe is the most important problem facing the country today. This question format is asked before the list of issue concerns in the survey and yields a slightly different conclusion, finding immigration ranking ahead of inflation. Overall, 28% of Americans, the same as in February and the most for any issue, name immigration as the top problem. That essentially ties the 27% reading from July 2019 as the highest since Gallup started compiling mentions of immigration in 1981.

 

But here's the Boston Globe:

Late last month, the venerable Gallup company released a survey listing the most pressing concerns in the United States. Predictably topping the list were inflation and crime, followed by hunger and homelessness, the economy broadly, and the high cost of health care. Farther back were things like illegal immigration, drug use, and the environment.

 

When Gallup asks Americans to rank their concerns about a list of problems, immigration is placed seventh in the list. By the time your average person gets to number seven, he's already forgotten what he said about one, two, three, four, and five.

But you can see from that list what really concerns most people: their weight.

Take the combined "worrying a great deal" and "a fair amount" about any of the fourteen problems and you will see that NUMERO UNO is . . . hunger and homelessness at 80%.

Yet homelessness affected fewer than 600,000 people in 2022.

And hunger? Hunger is now about "food insecurity", not starving. My fat cat is food insecure if I fail to keep her food bowl full. Two-thirds of adults are overweight, 40% of whom are obese, and there's a weight-loss-drug mania out there.

No, Americans are worried about the obscenely high cost of housing and that they'll end up on the street begging for the food Joe Biden's inflation made unaffordable if they lose their jobs, which is highly likely with 10 million illegals he let in competing for their positions.

But yeah, worry about nuclear war with The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

Andrew Sullivan, the Cicero of the republic of gay, finally observes that the empire of transqueer means to abolish him . . . and biological sex for everyone

From his essay here:

 

[Judith] Butler and the TQ+ movement are trapped by their logic into being homophobic: they have to deny that gay men can exist at all, because men cannot exist at all, unless they include women in the definition of man. 

 

That’s why the Trevor Project, the massively-funded TQ+ organization, now tells troubled young gay kids that a gay man is defined as someone who has sex with biological women as well as with men. A gay man is not attracted to the same “sex” but to the same “gender” and that now includes biological women. Trevor has abolished homosexuality! ...

 

In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex — and by far the biggest group in the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity — indeed merged it into its opposite. ...

 

queer theory’s core pioneers — Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, and Patrick Califia — all once defended adults fucking kids. Foucault defended sex with infants. This is not extraneous to queer theory; it is intrinsic to it. The point of queer theory is that there are no limiting principles. Defending the integrity, dignity and safety of children makes you un-queer. It’s a label I will gladly wear. ...

 

The truth is: we have come a long way in understanding and respecting the unique human experience of being transgender. In the US, trans people are protected by the gold standard of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They are everywhere in our popular culture. An entire generation has even been told that being trans is the most glamorous thing you could possibly be. But none of this is sufficient for the transqueers. What they want is an abolition of biological sex for everyone; the end of men and of women as separate categories; the sex reassignment of children on demand; the destruction of the nuclear family; an end to the Hippocratic Oath; the abolition of homosexuality; the presence of male bodies in women’s showers, prisons and shelter; the creation of fantastical post-everything genders and pronouns; and the criminalization of anyone who would ever question this cultural revolution. 

 

Revolutions always come for their most ardent supporters eventually.

 

Think Leon Trotsky, Thomas Paine, and now Andrew Sullivan. 

You can always tell a millennial, because they can't spell it

 

Straight men still call all the shots, they're just more perverted now

 The percentage of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer adults in the U.S. continues to increase, reaching an all-time high of 7.6% in 2023, according to a new Gallup report. Broken down by gender, the survey of 12,000 people 18 and older across the country found that women were nearly twice as likely as men to identify as LGBTQ.

“Almost 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+, most as bisexual,” Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told NBC News. “That’s where a lot of the growth seems to be happening.” ...

The group most likely to identify as LGBTQ, by far, was Generation Z women (ages 18 to 26), 28.5% of whom identified as LGBTQ in the survey. The lion’s share of them, of all Gen Z women surveyed, 20.7%, identified as bisexual, followed by 5.4% who identified as lesbians. Gen Z women were nearly three times more likely than Gen Z men to identify as LGBTQ. ... 

Bisexuals made up the highest percentage of LGBTQ respondents, at 57.3% — or 4.4% of all adults surveyed. ...

 “It’s important how much the LGBTQ community is bisexual, and that’s definitely something we see among the younger generations,” Jones said.

More here.

Progressives and liberals are in a panic over Ron DeSantis because he's tapping into a huge shift in public support for law and order and against LGBT

 Gallup shows the huge shifts in 2023 from 2022.

Support for the death penalty is up 5-points nationally. Support for LGBT is down 7-points. Those are massive changes.

And on most of the issues tracked, which are barometers of libertinism in the United States, support is also down, from birth control to fornication, to teenage sex and divorce.

Win or lose, DeSantis represents the backlash against the left which is sweeping the country.

 

Gallup: 7.1% now say they are LGBT, on the growth of bisexuality among younger women

The story did not discuss the high popularity with men of two girls in bed.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The percentage of U.S. adults who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual has increased to a new high of 7.1%, which is double the percentage from 2012, when Gallup first measured it. ...

More than half of LGBT Americans, 57%, indicate they are bisexual. That percentage translates to 4.0% of all U.S. adults. ...

Bisexual is the most common LGBT status among Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X ...

Women are much more likely than men to say they are bisexual.

More.

"Alcohol drinking was at its highest point between 1976 and 1978"

 That's because peak Baby Boom from 1957 turned 20 in 1977.

More young thirsty mouths, relatively speaking.

Gallup.

As leftward media bias soars, so does Democrats' trust in media!

 What a cohencidence!

Republicans' trust has not recovered since [2016], while Democrats' has risen sharply. In fact, Democrats' trust over the past four years has been among the highest Gallup has measured for any party in the past two decades. This year, the result is a record 63-percentage-point gap in trust among the political party groups.

While majorities of Democrats have consistently expressed confidence in the media since 1997, this has not been true of independents since 2004. Republicans' last majority-level reading for trust in the media was in 1998.

More from Gallup.

Donald Trump has transformed the GOP into a pro-same sex marriage party, which kinda explains the Jan 6 insurrection

Which is kinda mentally ill.

I mean, come on, the tip of the spear was Ashli Babbitt, who had an unusual personal life, reminiscent of Katie Hill.

The percentage supporting same sex marriage has jumped 15 points since 2016, with a clear majority of 55% of the GOP now supporting same sex marriage.

To quote Andrew Cuomo, America was never really that great. Until now that is.

Gallup.

 

Despite non-stop recruitment propaganda, the LGBT share of the US population rises to only 5.6%, and most of that is bi, and most of that is female

5.6% of US adults are LGBT, up from 4.5% in 2017.

3.1% of Americans identify as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.

Gallup.

The rise in Americans saying they are bisexual is driven by women:

[O]ver 3% of US adults say they are bisexual (a sexual identity in which someone is attracted to people of their gender or other genders). This is up from just over 1% in 2008. (The GSS allowed individuals to self-classify as “heterosexual or straight,” “gay, lesbian, homosexual,” “bisexual,” or “don’t know.”) An analysis of the GSS data by the sociologists D’Lane Compton and Tristan Bridges shows that the change has been almost entirely due to an increase in the number of bisexual women . . ..