Polling Data Pointing to a Trump Landslide

Quick update on the election. First, if you haven't been around in awhile, I have been posting mainly at a Substack.

About three weeks ago, I made an election bet on Trump to win the popular vote. Here is my post-2016 post on the prior big election bet. Last week I YOLO'd the account on the bet. This is not a huge sum of money, but it's a high convinction bet and has me thinking a lot about the implications.

My default assumption is that a Trump landslide (it will be a huge landslide if he wins the popular vote) will turbocharge the stock market rally and set off a surge in the U.S. dollar. My view is the "smart money" isn't betting on a landslide. If they shift that way, we might see this rally unfold into the election. Normally, there is a dip ahead of the election that will bottom before the election actually takes place.

Why a landslide? From 5 days ago, look at the Biden and Clinton leads on this date versus Harris: Biden +9.7, Clinton +4.6, Harris +2.0 percent. Trump is also running about 4 percentage points ahead of Harris in almost all the swing states, such that he leads in most of them. In 2016 and 2020, Trump trailed in the swing states one month out. This, if history plays out as it did the past two cycles, and Trump further gains, he will win easily. I project 312 Electoral College votes. You can see my map at RealClearPolling. This is based on Trump adding a bit to his swing state totals. He actually doesn't need to gain as much as in 2016 or 2020, so if pollsters are doing a better job this time around, I think he wins.

A note on polling, which I made back in 2016. The polls have never been that bad as a whole. What happened in 2016 was "experts" interpreted poll numbers and drew very incorrect conclusions.

To wit, Republicans almost always rally late in elections because for whatever reason, more people who lean Republican will say they're independent than vice versa. That's the latest number pointing to a big Trump win that I saw yesterday. Pollsters can only go by what people tell them, and if people are shy-Republicans, the polls will always skew Democrat. Historically, Democrats have easy wins when running +8 in voter identificaiton polls. Republicans win when it's only Democrat +3. To repeat, Republicans win when the pollsters report Democrats are +3 in party identification. The current polls have Republicans at +1.

Finally, an anecdote. There are people called "low propensity voters" who don't hardly or ever show up to vote. These people do not care most of the time or all of the time. But sometimes they get motivated to vote. In Pennsylvania as of last week, there were already more than 300 votes from people who hadn't voted since 2004. It's a small number, but statistically significant. My hunch is people who haven't voted in 20 years are getting off their butts to vote Trump. Additionally, early voting by Democrats is down around the country from 2020. My hunch is the very high turnout number of 66 percent that year will head back towards the more normal level of around 60 percent.

In conclusion, all polling data points to a large Trump victory. It looks large enough that a "steal," if you believe that is possible, will have to be at a scale so large as to be blatantly obvious. Personally, I don't see anything like what happened in 2020 repeating. Going through the swing state vote data, the only state that seemed to buck the Trump rally trend was Georgia, which has been at the epicenter of claims of election fraud. As for polling, if pollsters have completely adjusted to 2016 and 2020 and are overstating Trump's support in response, then of course my interpretation will be proved wrong. If pollsters have improved a bit, but Trump still gains 1 to 2 percentage points instead of the usual 4 to 6 percentage points, then he might eke out a popular vote victory while winning an electoral college landslide. If he actually surged as much as he did in 2016 and 2020, he should win the popular vote by an easy margin.

Sign of the Top

How Stocks Became the Game That Record Numbers of Americans Are Playing

Flash-forward three years, and it’s abundantly clear: We’re living in a new age of finance. It’s never been easier to bet your money—anytime, anywhere—and meme-stock craziness is here to stay. A wave of technological advancements has coincided with new apps and platforms to create a thriving ecosystem where everyday people can trade stocks with the ease of swiping for dates on Tinder.

Clown World is ending soon.

Big One Incoming

The 3M/10Y bond yield inversion is the second longest ever. The longest yield curve inversion preceded 1929. Two other long ones preceded 1973-1974 and 2008, two of the worst bear markets after the Great Depression. The Other long one came ahead of the early 1980s back-to-back recessions, the worst recession since the Great Depression at that point. The current market has the qualities of the 2000 tech top mania speculation in tech and crypto, it has valuations on par with 1929 and 2000, along with curve inversion on par with markets that collapsed from valuations far lower. This might finally be the start of something that will dominate history books for a century.

沪深300 第一部

China M2 Drops Below Stall Speed in April

China's M2 growth rate slowed to 8 percent in spring 2018 and briefly (barely) had a 7-handle at one point leading into 2020.

Based Copper

Fourth Turning Has Arrived: Adios Western Ruling Class

EU elites promised a prosperous green future. This could be their undoing

What is embroiling Europe is deeper than a political crisis – it is approaching what can be called a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling elite. This can be thought of as a metaphysical event that precedes political upheaval, the latter being merely confirmation that such a crisis has taken place. Legitimacy is, of course, a rather nebulous concept, and it defies objective measurement.

Ruling classes throughout history have always advanced various claims about their own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. In tracing the contours of the current crisis, it’s important to establish what exactly the claims Europe's technocratic elite have put forth and how they are becoming increasingly difficult to believe.

Ostensibly, the EU’s ruling elite has staked out the green transition as its raison d’être. They claim to have the mandate, vision and competence to see it through and have set clear targets to measure their success.

It was a good run, but when you're destroying nuclear power plants and running 6 percent deficits to prop up your Potemkin economy and financial markets, the reaper is right around the corner.

Friday's Losers

A sampling of 76 stocks that cleared my loser screen on Friday.

Immigration Restriction On the Ballot in Switzerland

Swiss right-wing party hands in initiative to limit immigration

The Swiss People’s Party submitted 114,600 signatures to the federal chancellery in Bern on Wednesday. It demands that a new article on “sustainable population development” be added to the constitution.

According to the initiative, the population of permanent residents must not exceed ten million people before 2050. The government should then set a limit based on the birth rate. If 9.5 million people live in the country before 2050, the Federal Council and Parliament would have to act.

For example, temporarily admitted persons would then no longer be able to obtain a permanent residence permit. Family reunification is also to be restricted. International agreements with exemption or protection clauses would have to be renegotiated. If all this is not enough, the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons with the European Union would have to be cancelled.

FT Admits Govts Have Been Scamming Western Voters on Immigration

FT: The immigration smokescreen is beginning to lift

The EU collectively, which fears losing the global competition for high-productivity workers, is similarly trying to attract skilled non-EU migrants with a “talent pool” scheme aptly nicknamed “Tinder for jobs”. But a wave of fervently anti-immigration candidates are high in the polls ahead of the European parliamentary elections this year. If Trump is re-elected in 2024, his repulsive comments about undocumented immigrants poisoning America’s blood will also create expectations of a general clampdown.

Perhaps, particularly in the UK, the tough-on-refugees, soft-on-workers game is up. Audiences have worked out the trick and are heckling the conjuror. But if the alternative is taking the risk of actually being honest with voters, governments might think it’s worth trying the well-practised ruse once again.

It has never been about high skill immigration because they've been letting in wave after wave of welfare-using migrants. High skill labor doesn't go on welfare. The average immigrant into the West is using welfare at much higher rates than natives.

Santana Breakout

2024 Bear Market in One Chart

A bear market has this chart completing the symmetry.