The Polls In Ohio Look A LOT Better For Mitt Romney Than The Media Is Telling You

On the traditional view that Ohio is THE critical state, this made me feel a LOT better about Romney’s chances in Ohio.

If you are a liberal, what can I say?  I hope this makes you feel sad:

Mittmentum: New Ohio Polls Better Than They Appear
By Josh Jordan
October 21, 2012 9:27 P.M.

Two new Ohio polls came out yesterday after my Ohio post, from from Gravis Marketing and PPP, both of which point to a razor-thin race in the most coveted swing state. A closer look at each poll shows just how much Romney has gained since the debates, and why he would be absolutely thrilled if these polls were accurate on Election Day.

The poll from Gravis Marketing shows Obama and Romney tied at 47 percent. But that’s as good as it gets for Obama. Among the most interesting tidbits from the poll:

Romney leads Obama by 19 percent among independents, 52–33, and holds 92 percent of his base compared to Obama’s 87 percent. Obama is underwater in job approval, 44–50, and independents disapprove of him overwhelmingly, 31–58. And the poll has a Democratic advantage of 9 percent, which is a 4 percent jump from 2008 — no one believes that Democrats can match their 2008 turnout advantage, let alone almost double it.

PPP (a Democratic firm) released their new poll yesterday showing Obama only up one point, 49 to 48. Just a week ago PPP had the race at 51–46 for Obama. But the four-point gain for Romney is even more impressive when you look at the poll’s findings:

This week’s poll has a Democrat sample advantage of 8 percent; last week’s advantage was 4. Romney gained four points on Obama in a week despite the sample’s having four percentage points more Democrats. Romney leads with independents by 7 percent, up from a 5 percent last week. Obama’s approval is underwater at 48–50, and independents disapprove of him by a 41–54 margin. Last week Obama was in positive approval ground at 50–48, and independents disapproved by a much smaller 45–50 margin. Romney’s favorability has gone from a minus-6 margin last week (45–51) to a plus-2 this week (49–47). Trust on the economy went from Obama plus-5 last week (51–46) to plus-4 in Romney’s direction this week (51–47). Independents jumped from Romney plus-5 last week to Romney plus-15 this week.

These two polls highlight what many saw in the second debate: Romney may have lost the overall debate, but he won handily on the issues of the economy, debt, and taxes. While Democrats were riding high this week after Obama narrowly won the face-off, Romney was quietly solidifying support from voters by commanding the issues that matter most. Based on these two polls, the only way Obama can win Ohio is if he finds a way to greatly surpass 2008 turnout with Democrats, which at the moment seems like an impossible task. If these polls hold, it won’t be long before the state Romney was declared dead in knocks down the last pillar of inevitability that Obama has left.

— Josh Jordan is a small-business market-research consultant. You can follow him on Twitter @Numbersmuncher.

It’s amazing that only a few weeks ago the (mostly liberal) talking heads said that Romney was dead in Ohio and should pull out.  Now Romney is surging ALL OVER THE COUNTRY and the liberal talking heads are saying Obama should pull out of Florida where again just a few weeks ago the polls said Obma had a six point lead.

Maybe if the polls give Obama a fifty point turnout advantage in their models Obama could look better.  Obama would have to do about twenty times better than he did in 2008 with Democrat turnout, but Chris Matthews is sure it’s possible for messiah given Obama’s power to make legs tingle.

Americans Decide They Don’t Want Another Great Depression, Turn To GOP In Greatest Numbers Since 1930

Hmmm, do we want to go back to FDR and keep the Great Depression running like a Merry Go Round, or do we want to get off that particular ride?

Apparently, Americans are deciding that they don’t want the next liberal demagogue who will keep the country in a perpetual state of suffering.

GOP Turnout Exceeding Democrats’ For First Time Since 1930
By Ed Carson
Wed., Sept. 08, 2010 3:59 PM ET
Tags: Elections – Republicans – Democrats

Republican primary turnout for statewide offices is outpacing the Democratic vote for the first time since 1930, according to election expert Curtis Gans of the American University.

* The share of Americans voting in GOP primaries hit 10.5%, up from 8.2% in the 2006 primaries and the highest since 1970.

* The share of Americans voting in Democratic primaries was a record low of 8.3%.

* Republican turnout in their statewide primaries exceeded Democratic turnout by over 4 million votes.

A wide variety of polls and individual primaries have pointed to a big Republican enthusiasm gap vs. gloomy Democrats, but this survey offers a comprehensive look at actual voting patterns. “If there is an analagous election, it could be that of 1994, where the Democrats lost massively,” the report says.

The full report is here (pdf).

And you can express it negatively, too:

Study: Democratic turnout for primaries lowest in 80 years

During the 1930s America had King Überüberliberal FDR (at least before Obama came along to strip him of the title), to go along with more Democrats than you could shake a stick at, running and ruining the country.

And no matter how badly FDR and the Democrats in Congress failed, or for how long they kept failing, Americans just kept re-electing them.

Here’s another article about those days:

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate
By Meg Sullivan
8/10/2004 12:23:12 PM

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

“President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services,” said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. “So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.”

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt’s policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt’s policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

“High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns,” Ohanian said. “As we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market’s self-correcting forces.”

The policies were contained in the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which exempted industries from antitrust prosecution if they agreed to enter into collective bargaining agreements that significantly raised wages. Because protection from antitrust prosecution all but ensured higher prices for goods and services, a wide range of industries took the bait, Cole and Ohanian found. By 1934 more than 500 industries, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of private, non-agricultural employment, had entered into the collective bargaining agreements called for under NIRA.

Cole and Ohanian calculate that NIRA and its aftermath account for 60 percent of the weak recovery. Without the policies, they contend that the Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of the year when they believe the slump actually ended: 1943.

Roosevelt’s role in lifting the nation out of the Great Depression has been so revered that Time magazine readers cited it in 1999 when naming him the 20th century’s second-most influential figure.

“This is exciting and valuable research,” said Robert E. Lucas Jr., the 1995 Nobel Laureate in economics, and the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. “The prevention and cure of depressions is a central mission of macroeconomics, and if we can’t understand what happened in the 1930s, how can we be sure it won’t happen again?”

NIRA’s role in prolonging the Depression has not been more closely scrutinized because the Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional within two years of its passage.

“Historians have assumed that the policies didn’t have an impact because they were too short-lived, but the proof is in the pudding,” Ohanian said. “We show that they really did artificially inflate wages and prices.”

Even after being deemed unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s anti-competition policies persisted — albeit under a different guise, the scholars found. Ohanian and Cole painstakingly documented the extent to which the Roosevelt administration looked the other way as industries once protected by NIRA continued to engage in price-fixing practices for four more years.

The number of antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice fell from an average of 12.5 cases per year during the 1920s to an average of 6.5 cases per year from 1935 to 1938, the scholars found. Collusion had become so widespread that one Department of Interior official complained of receiving identical bids from a protected industry (steel) on 257 different occasions between mid-1935 and mid-1936. The bids were not only identical but also 50 percent higher than foreign steel prices. Without competition, wholesale prices remained inflated, averaging 14 percent higher than they would have been without the troublesome practices, the UCLA economists calculate.

NIRA’s labor provisions, meanwhile, were strengthened in the National Relations Act, signed into law in 1935. As union membership doubled, so did labor’s bargaining power, rising from 14 million strike days in 1936 to about 28 million in 1937. By 1939 wages in protected industries remained 24 percent to 33 percent above where they should have been, based on 1929 figures, Cole and Ohanian calculate. Unemployment persisted. By 1939 the U.S. unemployment rate was 17.2 percent, down somewhat from its 1933 peak of 24.9 percent but still remarkably high. By comparison, in May 2003, the unemployment rate of 6.1 percent was the highest in nine years.

Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found.

“The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

-UCLA-

LSMS368

One of the greatest indictments of FDR’s legacy comes from FDR’s own Treasury Secretary and closest personal friend:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enought to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939, after those two terms in office, unemployment was at 20.7%.  Morganthau was an honest enough man to admit that his and FDR’s policies had utterly failed.  But generations of dishonest liberal propagandist journalists and historians merely ignored Morganthau’s honest and accurate admission and heralded the man who did more to drive America into socialism than anyone until one Barack Hussein Obama stepped onto the scene.

FDR’s failure to do anything but further destroy the American economy becomes critical because Obama has been widely viewed as the 2nd incarnation of FDR.

I mean, the SAME Time Magazine that thought FDR walked on water gave us this cover:

And we don’t want that guy.  He’s the LAST thing we should want.  Because we don’t want to linger in the great misery of the Great Depression for year after year.

And thank God more Americans are realizing the Obama-as-FDR fraud than at any time since FDR came along to lead America into unparalleled misery.