Weekly Report from Peter Huessy and Montgomery County
on Veterans Day, 2024
The Quote of the Week: CNN, November 5, 2024:
“Kamala Harris Predicted to Win By Every Major Forecaster”
The Trifecta Has Been Won?
As of Friday afternoon, Democrats held 199 House seats, while Republicans held 212 House seats, 6 short of a majority. The GOP has won a number of high-profile swing seats, with Ryan Mackenzie defeating three-term incumbent Democrat Susan Wild in Pennsylvania and Don Bacon holding on to his toss-up seat in Nebraska, denying Democrats a top flip opportunity. There are 11 races where Republican candidates are leading but still have not been called in Washington, Arizona, California, (6), Nebraska, Iowa and Alaska. In Washington, there are 2 Republican candidates running that are 52%-48% right now so the R pick that seat up with any outcome. In Washington State, two candidates from the same party can both qualify for the general election if they are the top two vote getters in the primary.
Trump also increased his performance in 49 states in 2024 compared to 2020 except the State of Washington where he lost 1/10th of 1% of his previous vote.
All in all, election forecaster Decision Desk HQ projects (as of this afternoon) that Republicans will control 222 seats to Democrats' 213. Right now, Republicans hold 220 seats to Democrats' 212, with 3 vacant. Cook Political Report is also projecting a 'narrow Republican House majority.'"
So far, the House Republicans have flipped six seats and the Democrats have flipped five seats for a net gain of one for the Republican majority. A very good friend of the nuclear deterrent community is Don Bacon who has a 7000 vote lead in his Nebraska district in Omaha, home of the US Strategic Command,
As of Friday, there were 20 house seats where Dems have the majority but have not been called and 17 seats where the R have the majority but have not been called. If all remain as they now are the House would be 223-112, which would be a 11 vote majority in the House for Republicans and it would be a Trifecta for the R party and President Trump.
Nevada and Arizona have been called for Mr. Trump, and thus the former President won all 7 battleground states including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and thus 312 electoral votes, exceeding every Republican candidate since 1988 or the past 36 years or 9 elections. While Biden won the 7 battleground states by a total of 143,000 votes, Trump won the 7 battleground states by a whopping 750,000 votes which implies a near 1 million vote switch in these seven states. Overall, the former President received (so far) 73,500,000 votes which some remaining on the West Coast to be counted, very close to his 74,000,000 he received in 2020. VP Harris received so far around 70,000,000 votes or some 11 million less than Biden in 2020.
The Senate may well be 52-46-2 with King and Sanders independent but who will vote to organize under Democratic leadership. Senator Cruz won by a million votes but with a conservative third party getting one third of a million votes that largely would have gone to Cruz which then puts Cruz some 300,000 votes behind Trump’s margin of 1.7 million. Senate seats switched in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Montana. The margin in PA is .5% and the law requires a recount if less than .5%. The weasel Mark Elias and his buddies are seeking to force a recount---with all the mischief that could entail.
R Senate candidates in Michigan and Wisconsin lost by 20,000 each, a very small number and against incumbent Senators. R candidate McCormack is up by 30,000 votes in Pennsylvania with 98% of the vote counted against incumbent Senator Casey and that race has been called for McCormack, with four Senate seats flipped by the Republicans.
A leading candidate for Secretary of Defense would be Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, former Director of Central Intelligence, former member of the House of Representatives and a retired US Army Cavalry Officer. And a former colleague of mine at the Hudson Institute.
Trump won nearly 5 million more votes than VP Harris, vs trailing Biden by 7 million votes in 2020. The Texas Senate race was among the big Democratic failures. Despite his opponent spending record sums in the Lone Star State, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz cruised to a third term over Democrat Colin Allred.
Republicans took control of the Senate by defeating incumbents in Ohio and Montana and replacing them with pro-life challengers. Republican Bernie Moreno unseated veteran Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Republican Tim Sheehy easily vanquished Democrat Sen. Jon Tester in Montana.
Floridians also rejected a measure to legalize recreational marijuana. Credit Florida’s popular Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis with helping to defeat the pot and abortion referenda.
Voters in blue cities also turned against soft-on-crime prosecutors, among them George Gascon, the George Soros-backed Democrat in Los Angeles County
COVID REBOUND or BOOMERANG
Since the end of COVID, here is the list of incumbent governments that have been swept out of office by voters. United Kingdom, Italy, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, and – of course – the United States. Ruling parties in France, South Korea, Japan, and India have lost their governing majority and have had to form minority governments.
An Open Letter to Kamala Harris from a Democratic Woman- Kara Dansky, Washington Examiner
I urge everyone to read this letter from a progressive woman who wrote to Harris about why she was going to lose the election. It is a very good letter and something our party could learn from re how to speak with people on the other side of the political spectrum.
Could the USA Get Rid of the Income Tax?
This is an article “for fun.” It gives you the dimensions of what it would entail to get rid of the US income tax. Trump Wants to Abolish a Tax That Costs Americans $2.4T a Year
Peter St. Onge | November 02, 2024
Peter St. Onge is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from Professor Peter St. Onge.
It’s official: Donald Trump wants to abolish the income tax.
In a much-anticipated interview with Joe Rogan on his podcast, Trump said the country should return to the late 19th century when we had no income tax at all and funded the federal government with tariffs.
Now for months, the former president has been making it clear that he really doesn’t like the income tax, exempting tax on tips, Social Security, overtime pay, first responders, and even 18 million veterans.
I kept hoping he’d come out and just break up with the income tax once and for all. And he did.
So, what if we end the income tax, laying off all 93,654 IRS agents so you can keep every dollar you earn?
Will Washington have to run on bake sales?
Well, the income tax currently costs the American people $2.4 trillion a year.
Trump proposes to replace it with tariffs of 20% on everybody but China, who gets a special 60% tariff that might bring in $900 billion.
This would grow America’s economy like rocket fuel. I run through some numbers on the Substack but maybe a 20% increase in the economy near term, so about a $15,000 raise for the typical family.
Note that’s on top of the $18,000 of income tax you no longer have to pay.
Knock off $3,000 for tariffs and you get about $30,000 in additional income for the typical American family—nearly $3,000 per month.
It keeps getting better. Because going by low-tax countries today—or America before the income tax—we might double annual economic growth.
So, 5% growth would be the new normal. And your kids would be three times richer than you—as it used to work in America.
America would be by far the richest country in the world. Also, as it was before the income tax.
Of course, ditching the income tax would also mean the mother of federal budget holes. After all, replacing $2.4 trillion in income taxes with $900 billion in tariffs is a big hole.
Even if you add, say, an extra $500 billion in payroll and excise taxes from economic growth, you’ve still got a trillion dollars to cover.
Now we could let it run in deficit, letting the economy outgrow it. I mean, that’s what they do with everything else that doesn’t grow the economy.
But you could also cut a trillion dollars in federal spending.
How to do such a thing?
The other day, Elon Musk estimated he could cut $2 trillion in waste and fraudulent payments. Former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, responded, suggesting the military-industrial complex and the pharma-industrial complex.
Indeed, going by countries like Britain, perhaps $800 billion of the $900 billion we spend on the military is for protecting Americans—the border, Coast Guard, nukes.
As for pharma and the medical-industrial complex, if we simply copy countries like Singapore, we might save $2 trillion or more. And Americans wouldn’t go bankrupt getting knee surgery.
There’s the illegal aliens—$350 billion a year, minimum. And the $2 trillion-plus means tested poverty programs we spend on welfare, much of it to the able-bodied.
Sharpen some pencils and you get a trillion dollars easy.
So, you’re rich, the IRS is gone, and you get a nice, lean government.
So, what’s next?
The uniparty will fight this like a rabid dog. But if a president can sell it to American voters, Congress will go along out of sheer self-preservation.
Plus, the bake sales would be lit.
Read the rest with charts and all the gory details at profstonge.com.
Why Harris Struggled Down the Stretch
Sean Trende
The early ’10s were the height of the “data journalism” project. After the spread of the RealClearPolitics Averages and the rise of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, readers increasingly found themselves demanding analysis that was supported by numbers. Of course, the rise of Donald Trump in the mid-teens removed some of the mystique, but until then, data-driven journalists spent the decade launching increasingly vitriolic salvos at traditional reporters.
Perhaps no piece more enraged data journalists than a piece Peggy Noonan wrote suggesting that Barack Obama’s presidential struggles could be attributed to the fact that he had “lost his sentence.” While the particular piece seems to have been lost to the shifting sands of the Internet, the piece on which it was based seems to have survived.
The idea is that successful presidents have a single “sentence” that can characterize their presidency: an idea that boils things down. Noonan’s examples are Abraham Lincoln (“He preserved the Union and freed the slaves”) or FDR (“He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War”). Without even telling you who the president was, those sentences would immediately identify the man.
This actually brought down hoots of derision at political science conferences. Political scientists claimed that Obama’s problems weren’t due to losing his sentence, but rather to the softness of the economy and the slow economic growth.
There’s something to this. But I think Noonan’s piece gets at another political science concept that helps to explain why Kamala Harris struggled down the stretch. Read more
Inflation, Immigration, Jobs: The Issues That Got Trump Elected
Jonathan Draeger
On Tuesday, Donald Trump was elected by the largest popular vote margin of any Republican presidential candidate since 1988. Personality politics undoubtedly played a role in the outcome, but polls prior to the election also indicated that Trump led Harris on most of the critical issues facing Americans. Read more
With the election of Donald Trump, we may be able to go back to a sound energy policy. But don’t think it will be easy. The Climate Clowns are working hard and now want to raise the funding for carbonless energy from $100 billion a year to $1 trillion a year. An upcoming meeting in Azerbaijan of climate change and energy folks is going to agree to this new deal and they released the past ten year funding chart which I reprint here. $740 billion has been spent already.
