Im-Politic: Abortion Really Did Prevent a Red Wave, Part II

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abortion, Arizona, Associated Press, democracy, Democrats, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, economy, Edison Research, exit polls, Fox News, Im-Politic, inflation, midterm elections, midterms 2022, National Opinion Research Center, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Republicans, Roe vs. Wade, Supreme Court

 As observed on Friday, U.S. midterm elections are really collections of state and local elections. So it’s crucially important to recognize that the exit polls on these races – including in the closely contested swing state races whose outcomes have been vital for determining control of Congress – show just as convincingly as the national poll results that mishandling the abortion issue was a huge mistake for Republicans.

In fact, as I first saw it weeks ago, even though large numbers of variables always influence all such votes, strong GOP support for the Supreme Court’s take-back of national abortion rights and for enacting sweeping bans in its wake, turned out to be a huge enough mistake to explain most of the Republican under-performance in swing states that as of this writing could cost them both the House and Senate.

As with the national level, the evidence for these propositions at the state level (the focus of this post) comes from two leading exit polls. We’ll start with the data from the survey conducted for the Associated Press (AP) and Fox News by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Corporation, mainly because it looked at more individual states than the sounding by Edison Research for other major news networks, and because it contains state-level figures on that odd quirk pointed out in yesterday’s post: the tendency of many more respondents to brand abortion as the single most important factor behind than designated it as the most important issue facing the country.

That distinction – which I still find head-scratching – seems to account for much of the failure of so many pollsters to pick up on the significance of abortion in the weeks and months before Election Day. Opinion researchers evidently assumed that the wide lead over racked up by the economy over abortion when voters were asked about their top concerns would translate into an election completely dominated by economic issues, and therefore big Republican gains. But it didn’t, and the greater-than-expected influence of abortion on the actual voting looks sufficient to have swung the swing states in the Democrats’ favor.

Let’s kick off with Nevada, since incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto’s (typically narrow) win over Republican Paul Laxalt has just assured Democrats continued control of the Senate. When AP/Fox asked voters views on “the most important issue facing the country,” they responded almost identically like the country as a whole, giving “the economy and jobs” a majority (52 percent) and answering abortion just nine percent of the time.

Yet when it came to identifying “the single imost important factor” behind their vote, inflation’s margin over abortion was a much smaller 54 percent to 25 percent.

Moreover, it’s clear that voters motivated mainly by abortion were opposed to the overturning of the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision. In the AP/Fox survey, Nevadans took a “pro-choice” over a “pro-life” stance by a landslide-like 69 percent to 31 percent. And of that 69 percent, nearly half were “angry” about the Roe-overturning Dobbs ruling.

Voters in neighboring Arizona, where another loss helped kill GOP chances of capturing the Senate, gave the AP/Fox pollsters similar answers. They named the economy the country’s most important issue by 45 percent to 15 percent. But they said that their own vote was determined chiefly by inflation over abortion by a slimmer 50 percent to 24 percent count.

In addition, 62 percent of Arizona voters favored legalizing abortion in all or most cases with only 38 percent supporting a ban in all or most instances. And 35 percent of them described their views about the high court’s Dobbs ruling rescinding abortion rights as angry.

But this pattern isn’t simply a Mountain State phenomenon. In Pennsylvania, Republicans thought they had a great chance to hold a Senate seat because of Democratic candidate John Fetterman’s health problems and supposedly far-left views.

There again, a majority (51 percent) of voters said the economy was the country’s most important issue, and only 12 percent named abortion. But inflation beat abortion as a the key vote motivator by just 50 percent to 24 percent.

And in the Keystone State, too, voters supporting legalizing abortion in all or most cases by 65 percent to 35 percent, with those professing to be angry about Roe’s demise totaling 35 percent.

In New Hampshire, Republicans thought they could flip the Senate seat held by incumbent Maggie Hassan. On the “most important issue facing the country” question, they chose the economy over abortion by 50 percent to 13 percent. Yet on the “single most important factor” shaping their vote, that lead shrank to 48 percent for inflation compared with 23 percent for abortion.

In New Hampshire, “pro-choice” views topped “pro-life” views by a yawning 73 percent to 27 percent, and nearly half of all voters (47 percent) declared themselves angry about the Dobbs decision.

The Edison survey, again, didn’t ask the “most important issue facing the country” question in its exit poll. But it, too, found much more prominence given to abortion, and more heated opposition to the strike-down of broad abortion rights, than was apparent from the pre-election surveys.

In Nevada, Edison found that 36 percent of voters named inflation the “most important issue to your vote” – not overwhelmingly ahead of the 28 percent naming abortion. Nevadans backed broad access to abortion by 66 percent to 29 percent, and fully 35 percent were angered by the Dobbs ruling.

According to Edison, Arizonans prioritized inflation over abortion by a slim 36 percent to 32 percent. Broad abortion legality out-polled broad illegality by 63 percent to 35 percent, and those angered by the Supreme Court’s latest abortion decision totaled an impressive 40 percent.

In Pennsylvania, Edison researchers found that abortion actually beat out inflation as voters’ biggest motivator by 37 percent to 28 percent. Pennsylvanians took “pro-choice” positions over “pro-life” positions by a wide 62 percent to 34 percent, and 39 percent expressed anger over the Dobbs ruling.

Finally, in New Hampshire, Edison reported that inflation edged abortion by just 36 percent to 35 percent as the biggest factor behind voter decisions. “Pro-choice” backers exceeded their “pro-life” counterparts by 68 percent to 29 percent, and those angry due to the overturning of Roe vs Wade numbered a considerable 42 percent.

Incidentally, another major surprise in both sets of exit polls was the importance respondents attached to “the future of democracy in this country,” as AP/Fox called it. In nearly all the states examined above, this issue registered in the low- or mid-40 percent range as “the single most important factor” behind individuals’ votes.

But it’s difficult to understand whether Democrats or Republicans benefited on net, because members of both parties have expressed significant but significantly different sets of anxieties about the subject.

The numerous factors influencing midterm election results include national issues, state and local issues, candidate personalities, voter turnout, and changing demographics. Moreover, the lines separating these issues are rarely blindingly bright, or even close.

But the surprisingly great salience showed by abortion issues in the post-election exit polls, in contrast to the findings of pre-election polls, tells me that my hunch about the political impact of the Dobbs decision was well-founded. As was the case with no other issue, its announcement (on June 24) gave the Democrats a mobilizing cause when they had absolutely nothng going for them before. That’s why this gift looks like the single development most responsible for turning the Red Wave into a Red Trickle – at most.

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Im-Politic: Fake News About a Fake Wall Street China Hawk

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2022 election, Bloomberg.com, Bridgewater Associates, China, David McCormick, finance, George W. Bush, human rights, Im-Politic, investment, Katherine Burton, Pennsylvania, Ray Dalio, Republicans, Sridhar Natarajan, U.S. Senate, Wall Street

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an article contain more sheer garbage per word than today’s Bloomberg.com account of a supposed dispute on dealing with China between two kingpins at the same big American hedge fund.

As the article explains, this ostensible disagreement began this past Tuesday when Ray Dalio, founder and Co-Chairman of Bridgewater Associates told a CNBC interviewer that China’s longtime practice of “disappearing” critics of its thug regime amounted to behaving “like a strict parent….That’s their approach.”

Dalio’s comments unleashed a torrent of outrage that was often as cynical as it’s become predictable these days. For with the exception of making isolated protests about especially egregious Chinese human rights violations (e.g., against the Muslim Uyghur minority), or backing piecemeal controls over cooperation with entities directly tied to the Chinese military, many of those who claim to be appalled by Dalio’s excuse-making for Beijing’s brutality wouldn’t dream of urging Bridgewater – or any American finance firm or other kind of business – to even slow its plans to expand its operations in China. 

In other words, they wouldn’t dream of systematically clamping down on practices that for decades have inevitably helped channel massive amounts of resources and knowhow from around the world into the People’s Republic to use as Beijing’s dictators see fit. And in the case of U.S. investment companies, which look to be just getting started in luring capital to China, these operations will just as inevitably improve the efficiency of China’s own financial system, which will just as surely help enrich it economically and strengthen it militarily.

The Dalio rebuke reported by Bloomberg was genuinely unpredictable, but no doubt even more cynical – for it came from Bridgewater’s own CEO, David McCormick. According to reporters Sridhar Natarajan and Katherine Burton, “on a company call,” McCormick “told staff he’s had lots of arguments about China over the years with Dalio and that he disagrees with the billionaire’s views….”

But of course, the “people with knowledge of the matter” who made certain that this alleged dissent would be made public passed along nothing about what McCormick’s problems with his colleagues’ views entailed. And apparently neither Natarajan nor Burton pressed for elaboration.

The authors did make clear that there was no indication that McCormick favored putting the kibosh on Bridgewater’s recent decision to launch a $1.3 billion investment fund in the People’s Republic, which they wrote would bring the Chinese assets under its management to more than $1.6 billion.

But there was no excuse for Natarajan, Burton, or their editors simply to parrot claims from McCormick’s friends and associates that the Bridgewater CEO is a China “hawk” who views the People’s Republic as “an existential threat to our country” – especially since these same persons are encouraging McCormick’s interest in running in Pennsylvania’s upcoming race to replace retiring Republic U.S. Senator Pat Toomey.

And how on earth could the Bloomberg team allow McCormick buddy Jim Schultz (bizarrely, “a former lawyer in the Trump administration”), to get away with pointing to McCormick’s service in former President George W. Bush’s Treasury Department as evidence that the Bridgewater CEO “has dealt with China in the past…knows how to talk to them, and…will be tough on China as a U.S. senator.”

Even loonier: “’The president of China complained about the decisions he was making about technology at the time,’ Schultz said.”

For anyone who knows anything about U.S.-China relations in the last few decades knows that no administration enabled China’s dangerous rise to dangerous superpower status with lenient trade and technology transfer policies more enthusiatically than W’s.

Natarajan and Burton correctly note that “A hawkish stance on China is all but essential in GOP politics if McCormick makes a run” and that since “Bridgewater has been expanding in China…McCormick would undoubtedly have to navigate China-bashing in the Rust Belt state….”

What they left out is that if the press coverage of this possible campaign is as brain-dead as theirs, McCormick’s challenge won’t be terribly difficult.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: De-Industrialization’s Toll in Pennsylvania

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budgets, China, demographics, Jobs, manufacturing, Pennsylvania, Pottstown, taxes, The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you’re having your doubts that the woes of U.S. manufacturing can translate directly into a weaker overall economy, shakier finances, and more hardship for individual Americans and their families, take a look at today’s New York Times feature on the decline of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Just as important, take a look at the Keystone State overall – whose troubles and closely related de-industrialization mirror those of Pottstown.

As reported by correspondent Thomas Edsall, this once-thriving community in the southeastern corner of the state, has since the 1970s seen the manufacturing that fueled its economy “collapse in the face of foreign competition.” Largely as a result, although its population has remained stable going back to 1950, its employment base has contracted by more than 23 percent during those decades. Nowadays, it suffers from a poverty rate that’s a staggering 27.7 percent.

But don’t get the idea that Pottstown is an island of misery in an otherwise prospering Keystone State. Research cited by Edsall claims that 27 of Pennsylvania’s cities are “financially distressed,” and that they contain 40 percent of the state’s population. Indeed, Pennsylvania is heading towards its second straight state budget crisis, as its leaders grapple with a deficit expected to hit $1.8 billion.

No doubt, Pennsylvania’s woes stem from many sources, but flagging manufacturing looks like it’s taken a big toll – along with misguided trade policies. Let’s see what’s happened since the end of 2001, when China was admitted into the World Trade Organization, thereby essentially became immune from U.S. (and other foreign) actions meant to retaliate against its protectionist practices, and began flooding American markets with job- and growth-killing exports.

Between 2002 and last year, manufacturing shrank slightly as a share of the U.S. economy in real terms from 11.98 percent to 11.93 percent. And especially important for the nation’s tax base and therefore financial health, just over 3.3 million manufacturing jobs – which pay above average wages – were eliminated (though not all because of Chinese competition). That came to 21.18 percent of the January, 2002 national manufacturing workforce.

Moreover, those manufacturing wages have gone practically nowhere when you adjust for inflation. We don’t have figures for white collar manufacturing employees going back to 2002, but the data for production workers and other non-supervisory workers shows that real wages rose less than one percent during that 13-year period!

From 2002 through 2015, Pennsylvania manufacturing fared even worse – shrinking in absolute terms by 13.40 percent, and declining from 16.50 percent of the state economy in constant dollars to 12.14 percent. On the employment front, the state lost 27.36 percent of its manufacturing jobs. I wasn’t able to find a time series for Pennsylvania’s inflation-adjusted manufacturing wages. But in pre-inflation terms, since 2007 (the earliest figures available) they’ve been rising more slowly for all manufacturing workers than manufacturing wages nation-wide, according to the Labor Department. This industrial contraction and its employment fallout certainly hasn’t made it any easier for Pennsylvania to pay for state services in a financially responsible way.  

Pennsylvania is often described as a state with special problems – especially a population that’s both old and aging faster than the nation’s as a whole, and high individual and corporate tax rates.  But there can’t be any doubt that the shrinkage of manufacturing, a source of disproportionate productivity gains and innovation, as well as high wages, has made its challenges far more formidable.  And it’s hard to imagine that the same doesn’t hold for the nation as a whole. 

 

  

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: How Not to Rate the States’ Economies – & Their Prospects

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California, demographics, domestic migrants, entitlement programs, Florida, Forbes, government workers, immigrants, inflation-adjusted growth, innovation, Medicare, Missouri, New York, New York City, Pennsylvania, population, private sector, productivity, retirees, seniors, Social Security, taxes, William Baldwin, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Thanks to Forbes magazine, it’s possible today to teach a useful lesson about the limits of statistics and the studies they’re based on – especially if those studies seem to be intended to prove a point rather than seek the truth.

The post in question, by former Forbes editor William Baldwin, looks like it makes a claim that’s not only important but irrefutable: U.S. states whose numbers of “takers” (government workers plus recipients of government transfer – welfare – and entitlements payments) greatly exceed the “makers” (private sector workers) are in “death spirals.” But states in the opposite situation have promising economic futures. In particular, employers are much likelier to create the private sector jobs crucial to continued healthy growth in the “maker” states.

It’s easy to understand Baldwin’s reasoning. The private sector undeniably is more innovative and productive than the public sector – two of the main ingredients of that healthy growth. And states with big populations of entitlements recipients (e.g., Medicare and Social Security) are almost by definition states with older populations – raising the question of who’s going to pay for all those benefits for non-working or even only semi-retired seniors. Case closed? Not exactly.

Interestingly, doubts start arising as soon as you eyeball the author’s chart. For example, he places California in the “death spiral” category. Since the Golden State represented 13.40 percent of the entire national economy as of 2014, it’s clearly a crucial example. But U.S. government figures also make clear that California enjoyed inflation-adjusted growth last year (2.80 percent) that was considerably faster than the national average (2.20 percent). That doesn’t sound like much of a death spiral to me. And in case you’re wondering whether 2014 was an outlier, California also out-grew the nation as a whole from 2011 to 2014 – by 7.81 percent to 6.26 percent.

Demographics don’t support Baldwin’s portrait of California, either. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (click here for the various relevant spreadsheets), between mid-2010 and mid-2015, the United States population as a whole as a whole grew by 12.661 million. Nearly 58 percent of the increase came from more babies being born than legal residents passing away, and the rest came from net migration from abroad.

California was responsible for nearly 15 percent of this increase – which means that the state punched above its weight demographically. In 2010, its share of the national population was only 12.07 percent. So it looks like there will be plenty of new Californians to pay for public services and retirement costs. And although many of the nearly 835,000 immigrants to come to the state during this period were illegals, many obviously were not.

The situation in another one of Baldwin’s death spiral states – New York – doesn’t look nearly so dire, either, on closer inspection. New York’s after-inflation economic growth between 2011 and 2014 wasn’t as fast as California’s. But at 6.79 percent, it still beat the national average.

New York also lost a little population from 2010 to 2015 (22,308 residents moved away). But births outnumbered deaths by 1.59 to 1, which is a bit better than the national average. And although just over 653,000 New Yorkers moved out of the state during that period, nearly 631,000 immigrants arrived. Of course, many have been illegal and low-wage. But many others have been foreign oligarchs who have rocketed the New York City real estate market into the stratosphere. In fact, the city’s property and income tax receipts for the fiscal year ending June 30 are so immense that its budget surplus is likely to approach $1 billion. So there’s no revenue shortage there.

Now let’s move to one of Baldwin’s more promising states: Florida. The Sunshine State has handily beaten the national average on 2011-2014 growth (7.07 percent) – although its performance has been affected by the depth of its housing-bust-fueled recession. On the surface, its population trends look good, too – as has historically been the case. In 2010, Floridians represented 6.09 percent of all Americans, but over the next give years, the state’s increase came to 11.58 percent of the national total.

Less good, however, were the internals – especially for Baldwin’s “death spiral” thesis. Florida’s population growth has been powered by immigrants and Americans from other states to a roughly equal extent. Surely wealthy foreigners have been well represented in immigrant ranks along with poorly paid illegals. But anyone who knows Florida knows that many of the domestic migrants have been retirees. That can’t bode well for the tax base.

Florida’s neighbor, Georgia, is another odd Baldwin success story. Its 2011-2014 growth trailed the U.S. average (at 5.32 percent). Yet its population growth (4.16 percent of the nation’s total) was greater than its 2010 share of the overall population (3.14 percent). It’s true that Georgia’s subpar population increase may eventually translate into stronger-than-average growth. But should that be considered a solid bet? Stranger still is the author’s positive assessments of Missouri and Pennsylvania, which have been under-performing both in terms of economic and population growth.

Of course, Baldwin has pegged many states right. But misses that are this big, especially for places like New York and California, make clear that the sources of healthy growth and bright economic futures are much more varied than entitlement spending, government workforce sizes, and even generational demographics. Lifestyle clearly plays a major role – what else explains California consistently defying predictions of economic doom triggered by alarm over high taxes, burdensome regulations, and the like? Along with New York and Washington state (another one of Baldwin’s losers, despite the attractions of Seattle), it’s long likely to remain a magnet for talent, as well as wealth (whether ill-gotten or not).

Although I’ve never met Baldwin, I do know that Forbes has long been one of the media world’s strongest champions of Darwinian free market thinking – and of course an equally ardent opponent to Big Government. So it looks reasonable to me that this ideology overwhelmed a more holistic view of economics and business – which his successors at Forbes might have realized just by looking out the windows of their Manhattan offices.