Quixote1818
Quixote1818's JournalAnother Recession Sign to Ignore at Your Peril - WSJ
A worrying signal from the ISM Manufacturing Survey follows an inversion of the yield curve, and it no longer makes sense to keep explaining such signs away
By Aaron Back
Sept. 3, 2019 1:03 pm ET
Signs of a possible recession keep stacking up. At some point it no longer makes sense to keep explaining them away.
The latest grim omen came Tuesday as the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index fell to 49.1 in August from 51.2 in July, signaling a likely contraction in manufacturing activity.
More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-recession-sign-to-ignore-at-your-peril-11567530230
538: How To Handle An Outlier Poll
Snip:
What should you do about these seeming outliers? If you’re a pollster, you should follow Monmouth’s lead and publish them!! In fact, printing the occasional expectations-defying result is a sign that a pollster is doing good and honest work. Plus, sometimes those “outliers” turn out to be right. Ann Selzer’s final poll of Iowa’s U.S. Senate race in 2014, which showed Republican Joni Ernst ahead by 7 percentage points over her Democratic opponent, might have looked like an outlier at the time, but it was the only one that came close to approximating her 8.5-point margin of victory there. The small handful of polls that showed Donald Trump leading in Pennsylvania in 2016 look pretty good too, even though most Pennsylanvia polls had Hillary Clinton leading.
In the long run, failure to publish results that pollsters presume to be outliers can yield far more embarrassment for the industry than the occasional funky-looking set of topline numbers. Suppressing outliers is a form of herding, a practice in which pollsters are influenced by other polls and strive to keep results within a narrow consensus. Herding makes polling averages less accurate, and it makes polling less objective. And more often than you’d think, it winds up being a case of the blind leading the blind. One recent example comes from Australia, where despite the Labor Party holding only a narrow and tenuous lead, pollsters declined to publish polls showing the conservatives narrowly ahead instead. The conservatives went on to a modest win, yielding a national controversy about polling that could have been avoided if the pollsters had trusted their numbers instead of the conventional wisdom.
More: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-handle-an-outlier-poll/
538: Joe Biden Has An Iowa Problem, Not An Enthusiasm Problem
Warren is now predicted to win Iowa and NH which will give her a lot of momentum and a lot of Sanders voters switching over to her. What happens after those two states will very interesting.
AUG. 26, 2019, AT 5:46 AM
Joe Biden Has An Iowa Problem, Not An Enthusiasm Problem
By Nate Silver
Filed under 2020 Election
If you’ve been following our coverage of the Democratic primary, you’ll know that I don’t think much of media really understands Joe Biden’s popularity among Democrats. That doesn’t mean that Biden is destined to win the primary. In fact, I’d regard him as an underdog relative to the field — that is, I think he has a less than 50 percent chance of getting the nomination — partly for reasons I’ll outline later on in this column. But there have already been several occasions when despite widespread predictions of Biden’s demise, the former vice president rebounded or held steady in the polls.
Furthermore — not totally unlike Donald Trump four years ago — Biden’s support comes mostly from the type of Democrats who are sometimes relatively invisible in media coverage of the campaigns, such as black Democrats and older Democrats without college degrees. That’s another reason to be skeptical about claims that Biden isn’t as popular as polls seem to imply. They sometimes reflect narratives that are filtered through journalists’ college-educated social environments — or conditioned by conversations on social media — with all the implicit biases those can introduce.
So this article about Biden in The New York Times, which alleged a disconnect between the polls and conditions on the ground In Iowa, was a little dismaying for me. Here’s a representative snippet:
But less than two weeks before Labor Day, when presidential campaigns traditionally kick into high gear, there are signs of a disconnect between his relatively rosy poll numbers and excitement for his campaign on the ground here [in Iowa], in the state that begins the presidential nominating process.
The thing is, I actually think the Times is onto something here! But it’s something you can see in the polls. And it’s something that probably has a lot to do with Iowa, where the article was datelined from — and where there are relatively few voters from among the groups that are most enthusiastic about Biden.
More: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/joe-biden-has-an-iowa-problem-not-an-enthusiasm-problem/
Lou Dobbs Warns Trump: Your Base "Is Expecting A Wall" By November 2020
Warning, watching Lou Dobbs can be hazardous to your mood but the subject matter is interesting, especially them talking about Warren pulling away a lot of his voters with her very effective campaign.
Video at link:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/08/13/lou_dobbs_warns_trump_your_base_is_expecting_a_wall.html
It's looking like Elizabeth Warren is the 2020 Democratic candidate to beat
If she wins in Iowa and NH she will run away with it.
Business Insider
Former Vice President Joe Biden has been the frontrunner of the Democratic primary race to this point, but he's at risk of losing his spot at the top to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the progressive firebrand senator.
Warren is the only candidate in the Democratic field whose support and favorability has surged over time while Biden's has decreased, even among groups that disproportionately support him.
Biden's support in Morning Consult's weekly Democratic primary survey has fallen by three percentage points since mid-March while Warren's has doubled in the same timeframe.
In Monmouth University polling alone, Warren's net favorability has increased by six percentage points since May while Biden's has decreased by a full 19 percentage points.
And while many pundits have questioned Warren's "likability" since her first run for office in 2012, she currently has the highest net favorability rating out of the entire Democratic field at +54.
More: https://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-becoming-candidate-to-beat-2019-8
In Trump country, a group of coal miners rebel over lost jobs, missed paychecks
Washington Post
By Tim Craig August 31
CUMBERLAND, Ky. — Sitting in lawn chairs plopped in the middle of train tracks, two coal miners smoked and chewed tobacco to pass the time. There’s been little else to do here for the past four weeks, except wave at motorists who honk in support of these homegrown heroes waging a national struggle over workers’ rights.
Since Chris Rowe and Chris Sexton were laid off from their mining jobs this summer along with 300 co-workers, they have been camped out here in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, blocking a train car full of coal from going to market. Their protest is against coal company Blackjewel, which halted operations in July without settling its final salary obligations to Rowe, Sexton and an estimated 1,800 other workers across the country. But it’s also become a declaration against corporate bankruptcy laws that they say deprioritize workers’ interests.
“The same situation may have happened to others, but we are the ones making a stand,” said Rowe, 35, who was laid off days after he purchased his first house. “We mined the coal and broke our backs to get that coal, so that coal belongs to us until they pay for it.”
More: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-trump-country-a-group-of-coal-miners-rebel-over-lost-jobs-missed-paychecks/2019/08/31/52ee4fbc-cb2e-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3_dcqhGFxOvAg8snMrtiR3_xaZdIFnt-KAMbOZextS74xlF3sDgIO8Y3M
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