By Robert Romano

Former President Donald Trump easily won the New Hampshire primary against rival former South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley with a record number of votes for the contest, 166,000 and counting with 92 percent of precincts reporting, and the third highest percentage total, 54.6 percent, for a Republican in a competitive primary after Richard Nixon’s 78 percent in 1968 and Dwight Eisenhower’s 56 percent in 1952.

The margin, Trump’s 54.6 percent to Haley’s 43.3 percent, was an 11-point rout leaving little doubt about Trump’s dominant position in the race, continuing to display all the elements of the incumbency advantage even though he is not in the White House.

In so doing, Trump became the first Republican in such a competitive primary to sweep both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary since Iowa was added to the GOP mix in 1976. Now, only Nevada (where Haley will not be competing) and South Carolina remain of the early states, the latter where Trump has led 100 percent of the polls, currently by an average of 30 points.

On that note, once again, the polls were right once again as they correct in Iowa, where in New Hampshire Trump had led 95 percent of the polls taken, averaging about 55.8 percent headed into the contest. Haley did well, too, overperforming her 36.5 percent showing in the polls, although to be fair, half the polls in the average had Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who ended his campaign before the primary, still in the race.

Looking forward, for Haley, South Carolina appears to be her last stand. If she cannot win the state she represented in the governor’s mansion, then she cannot win. Only Bill Clinton in 1992 and Joe Biden in 2020 have come back from losses in Iowa and New Hampshire to win their party’s nomination in modern history, both catapulting their campaigns with wins in South Carolina. No Republican has ever done it.

All that fuels the Haley campaign at this point is happy talk and wishful thinking, if not the tens of millions of Republican establishment dollars flowing through the campaign and D.C. consultancy coffers.

As for Trump, the consecutive, decisive results in Iowa and New Hampshire certainly appear to vindicate his decision to run again for president after narrowly losing to President Joe Biden in 2020. For more than a year, Trump has dominated the GOP race in both national and statewide polls.

Given the malicious prosecution of Trump since 2016 truly if all facts are considered by D.C. establishment and Democratic prosecutors, causing a rally to the leader effect among Republican and independent voters, the bids to challenge Trump in the primary have stood out as attempts to hedge against his prosecution and conviction, offering tacit acceptance of legally targeting political opponents, rather than locking arms and saying hell no.

The failure of the Republican institution to unite forcefully against the inquisition of Trump poses an existential not just to him or the Republican party, but to the nation’s two-party system and the Constitution.

Even now, Haley’s persistence in continuing moves forward both the farce that she stands much of a chance and provides an outlet for that rein of terror, first against Trump, but soon any Republican that challenges D.C. norms of open borders, “free” trade and endless wars.

A key difference between the two candidates was the issue that put Trump under federal investigation in the first place, his opposition to U.S. intervention in Ukraine, intervention which, naturally, Haley supports.

In June 2023, Haley called the war in Ukraine “one we have to win,” while Trump has likened the region to a dangerous powder keg and warned against escalation there could lead to the nuclear hellfire of World War III, and instead advocating a diplomatic resolution.

That war — the predictable, avoidable and yet inevitable war — now enters its eleventh year, dating back to the 2014 U.S. overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych and Russia’s resulting annexation of Crimea. The choice for voters is clear, Trump wants to negotiate peace, and Haley doesn’t. She’s more pro-intervention than President Joe Biden even, who at least must manage the realities and limits of U.S. power, similarly warning against World War III even while making it more likely with his Haleyan pledges to “win,” while Haley gets to play pretend in the game of brinksmanship.

For now, mutually assured destruction keeps us from the gates of hell and Armageddon, as it has since the Cold War. Only wise leadership can see our way through, and only one person will able to provide it after November, whoever happens to win the election.

In the meantime, attention will now surely shift the Supreme Court’s imminent ruling on attempts by Trump’s political opponents to remove him from the ballot in Colorado, Maine (and presumably everywhere else) under bullshit Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 grounds of insurrection even though he has never been convicted of insurrection, and the only institution to ever charge him with that, the House in its 2021 impeachment of him, ultimately found him not guilty in the trial by the Senate.

The Supreme Court case itself comes into acute focus as the 57th primary after the states, territories and D.C., the one that will matter perhaps the most, where an unelected panel of justices will decide if it is they, or the American people, who will decide who gets to be the Republican nominee this summer and ultimately the president in November, a faulty ruling on which could shatter the consent of the governed.

The stakes could not be much higher in 2024, but recent history has had a way of continuing to raise them as forces continue to mount against Trump’s ascendancy.

So far, Trump is well on his way to securing the GOP nomination very early in this process, with a better than fair chance of sweeping the primaries, which would be another first for a Republican in a competitive primary, but when it comes to a former president, there might not be any true competition. As Trump would say, it's not whether you win or lose, it's whether you win. Time will tell. Stay tuned.

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/01/trump-sweeps-new-hampshire-iowa-first-republican-in-competitive-primary-to-achieve-feat-haley-on-last-legs/

By Manzanita Miller 

Ever since Obama’s second reelection in 2012, Black Americans have been slowly drifting away from Democrats due to the party’s abandonment of the working class. That process has rapidly accelerated under the Biden Administration, and Democrats are now sounding the alarm bells about a loss of African American support for Biden.

Michigan – where Biden won 92% of Black voters in 2020 – is at the center of this shift. Polling shows warning signs of the state flipping back to the GOP with the help of economically frustrated Black voters who are on the brink of abandoning Biden.

With a sputtering economy, wage-crushing inflation, an affordable housing crisis, and a porous border, Biden’s numbers have crashed significantly since 2020, and his loss of support from Black voters is a key factor. Michigan-specific polling shows Biden could lose as much as twenty percentage points or more of support from the Black community compared to 2020.

Outside polling reveals that younger Blacks are particularly critical of Biden’s handling of the economy, and much less receptive to the Democratic Party’s claims to be an advocate for the working class.

Nationally, Biden has lost around twenty-five percentage-points with Black voters compared to 2020. A January poll from Suffolk University found that just 63% of Black Americans plan to vote for Biden this election – a twenty-four percentage point decline compared to 2020, when Biden won Black voters 87% to 13%. 

Looking specifically at Michigan, the New York Times found only 69% of Black voters plan to support Biden, a twenty-three percentage point drop compared to 2020 when Biden won 92% of their vote. Trump is shown earning 17% of Black Michigan voters, after winning a mere 7% in 2020, indicating a ten-percentage-point shift is within reach for Trump.

These numbers have top strategists in Michigan sounding the alarm bells. Democratic strategist Adrian Hemond warned Democrats last December in a Wall Street Journal statement that Biden is in trouble in the state.

"The level of concern is growing, and it should be," Hemond told the Wall Street Journal. "The problem is not policy. The problem is the man." 

The latest Detroit News poll from Michigan shows Trump ahead of Biden by eight percentage points after losing the state to Biden by 2.78% in 2020. 

The poll also found that just 17% of Michigan voters say Biden deserves another term compared to 33% who say Trump deserves another chance. According to Richard Czuba, founder of Glengariff Group which conducted the poll, this number is a record low for any major political in modern times.

"If I were a Democrat in Michigan, I would be breaking the emergency fire alarms in the White House and demanding to know what the plan is for Michigan," Czuba told Detroit News. "Because these numbers are very bad for any incumbent of any party."

Biden’s support across a range of metrics has crumpled in Michigan, with just 29% of Michigan voters having a favorable view of his job as president compared to 58% who hold an unfavorable view according to the Detroit News poll.

Economic issues and immigration are the glaring issues at the center of Biden’s dwindling support, with the largest share of Michigan voters (16%) saying jobs and the economy is their number one issue, followed by immigration (9%) and inflation (7%). 

Polling from the American Enterprise Institute’s survey for American life in September found that younger Black voters are particularly critical of Biden’s handling of the economy, and much less likely than older Blacks to believe the Democratic Party’s claim to watch out for the working class.

That survey found there is a twenty-percentage point difference between the share of older Blacks and younger blacks who approve of Biden, with 78% of older Blacks compared to just 58% of younger Blacks saying they approve of the president. 

The poll also found only 36% of younger Blacks compared to 72% of older Blacks believe Biden has accomplished “a great deal of good” – a thirty-six percentage-point difference.

Younger Blacks (61%) are also nearly twenty points less likely than older Blacks (80%) to say the Democratic Party looks out for the working class.

Biden faces an uphill battle in Michigan, and his poor standing among the Black community is a key factor that cannot be ignored. If Biden is unable to turn these numbers around, he risks losing as many as twenty percentage points – or more – of a coalition Democrats have banked on in every modern election to date.

Manzanita Miller is an associate analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/01/biden-could-lose-over-twenty-points-with-black-voters-in-michigan-if-democrats-arent-careful/

 

John Carney: Excessive Government Spending Is Fueling Inflation

By John Carney

The Pandemic Stimulus Never Really Died

The Federal Reserve’s plans to cut interest rates this year have run into a powerful headwind: excessive government spending.

Even though the official stimulus measures adopted during and after the pandemic have largely been retired, spending by the federal government is still extremely elevated relative to historical trends. If spending had returned to the prepandemic trend, the federal government would be spending around $5.8 trillion a year. Instead, we were on an annual pace of more than $7 trillion in the third quarter of 2023 (the latest quarterly data available).

The chart above also reveals something that is very important: spending is no longer declining. After falling in 2021 from the mammoth levels of the previous years, spending hit a bottom and now is climbing higher. So, the economy is adjusting to a new level of federal spending.

According to calculations done by Joe Lavorgna at SMBC Nikko Securities America, there has been a record-large $3.3 trillion in cumulative excess federal spending since 2021.

Top of Form

A chart of total government spending tells an even more striking story. Government outlays have been rising rapidly and well above trend.

Government Spending Is Inflationary

When the government sector spends money, it is largely spent into the private sector. That is, the effect of government spending is to increase demand for private sector goods and services. Since most of the services and goods produced by the government are not substitutes for those produced by the private sector, the effect is to increase private sector demand without directly increasing private sector goods.

In short, government spending creates inflationary pressure.

This is not controversial. When the economy is slumping and private sector demand is falling, standard textbook Keynesian economics recommends increasing government spending in order to stimulate demand and fight off deflation. This is what we did during the pandemic.

Continuing to spend at very high levels when the economic emergency has passed creates an undesirable fiscal impulse that drives up demand and inflation.

“The previous Administration with the help of the Congress shepherded through the CARES Act providing an income support program designed to keep people on shuttered businesses’ payrolls. This helped achieve a rapid V-shaped recovery that began in early Q2 2020. However, federal spending persisted long afterwards even as the economy remained on the mend,” Lavorgna wrote in a recent note to his bank’s clients.

There is a treacherous self-perpetuating aspect of fiscal impulse-driven inflation. The increase in prices of goods and services requires higher levels of nominal spending because the government must raise wages to compete with private sector employers, and it must pay more for goods and services it purchases from the private sector. Some of the increase in spending is required by statutory law mandating cost of living adjustments, and some of it is required by the law of the market, which dictates that the government must bid against the private sector when it is making purchases.

Too Much Growth in Government Payrolls

Government spending is also one of the primary factors keeping the labor market tight. Here is a chart of the employment level of the federal government. What you can see is a massive increase that began in the second half of 2022 and has continued unabated.

It is difficult to tell exactly where these federal workers are employed. We can look at high-level payroll numbers for some parts of government, but finding the functions they are performing is more difficult A good job for Congress would be to discover the sources of this expansion.

What are all these new government employees doing? How many of them are employed in pursuing leftwing policy agendas, such as processing border crossers, enforcing Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) mandates, and doling out climate change subsidies?

Those on the government payrolls are not producing goods and services purchased by consumers. But they are themselves consumers of the goods and services produced by the private sector. So, they add inflationary pressure to the economy and stimulate things like retail spending and consumer expenditures.

The increase in government employment is actually worse than that. It is decreasing the productive capacity of the private sector because it is taking workers that would otherwise be employed in producing goods and services that could be purchased by consumers. This is not a problem when the economy has lots of under-utilized capacity—for example, when unemployment is high—but it is a big problem when the economy is operating at or near potential.

The Federal Reserve’s efforts to rebalance supply and demand is being offset by the government’s excessive spending. This means that a recession is unlikely in the year to come, but it also means that inflation is likely to prove stickier than expected.

To view online: https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2024/01/23/breitbart-business-digest-excessive-government-spending-is-fueling-inflation/