THE LEAD

Congress
took the month off to canvass the opinions of their constituents, returning September
9. What they heard about gun control and
impeachment could define the coming weeks.
Joe
Biden continues to lead the Democratic field, both nationally and in the four “early”
states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Four lesser candidates dropped out, leaving
20 in the race, 10 of whom qualified for the third round of debates on
September 12, on just one stage on one night this time around.
THE MONTH
It is not often that one concludes that Donald Trump is
vexed. But it is hard to avoid that
conclusion after an erratic August in which Trump flip-flopped like a fish on
the two big issues of the month, China and gun violence. You may be familiar with the “VIX,” the
Chicago Board Options Exchange’s measure of stock market’s expected volatility.
If Trump had his own VIX index of
personal volatility, it would have been off the charts. Despite attempts to position his confounding
statements as “smart negotiating” to keep his foes “off-balance,” he has indeed
appeared to be both bothered and bewildered about the best path forward,
particularly on China.
It has never been quite clear what Trump has been up to in
China, in terms of strategy. Obviously,
China, the second largest economy in the world, has been a currency manipulator
and technology thief, and deserving of a comeuppance of some sort. But of what sort has bedeviled U.S. presidents
for some time. To the extent that Trump
was choosing amongst strategies, which is highly unlikely, he has chosen a
perilous one – the “trade war.” Why the
first-term president, a re-election underdog, thought he could outlast a
counterpart with a Job For Life, emanating from a culture famous for the “long
play,” is beyond logic. Particularly
since China, a foe on trade, is a potential ally that Trump needs in his battle
to wrest nuclear capability from North Korea.
Whatever the strategy, Trump and the talks are not in a
good place now, with large tariffs already in place and each side threatening
new ones later this year, and no talks scheduled. Trump seems to be anteing up his one good
reelection chip – the state of the U.S. economy – and betting he can make
Premier Xi buckle before Election Day 2020.
Given China’s uncooperative stance to date, that seems mighty unlikely.
And thus Trump seems to be caught between the realities of
the faltering “strategy” on the one hand, with the genuine fear of looking weak
if he capitulates and comes home with nothing except his tail dragging behind
him on the other. After announcing a
massive new round of sanctions on September 1, he rather quickly delayed them
until December – hardly an inspiring stand.
And, at the G7, after musing aloud about second guessing his approach,
the White House walked the regrets back and re-positioned the comments as
Trump wishing he had imposed even stiffer
tariffs.
The markets do not appear to buy Trump’s argument that his
volatility is a good negotiating posture.
Markets hate volatility. On August 23, the Dow dropped 623 points in
the immediate aftermath of a sharp Trump tweet “ordering” U.S. companies to
find alternatives to China. Overall the
aforementioned VIX has exceeded a level of 20 (and is currently at 18) more
times in Trump’s two years than in Obama’s eight years. And this in spite of a stable U.S. economy
with low unemployment.
The shootings in El Paso and Dayton at the beginning of
August, and Odessa at the end, thrust the gun control issue back into the
national consciousness, and with it Democratic-led calls yet again for strong gun
control legislation. This is a terrible
issue for the GOP; their standard call to focus exclusively on the mental
health side of the equation is falling on many deaf ears at this point. With every shooting, American become more
educated on exactly how awash our country is in firearms, compared to other
nations – nations that also have mental health issues in their citizenry, but
nowhere near the epidemic of mass killings.
Trump and Mitch McConnell both paid lip service to
universal background checks, the measure that enjoys the most overwhelming
support among all Americans, whatever the party. (Plenty of other measures have majority
support as well, including gun licensing.) But Trump has also stated, rather bluntly,
that our current background checks go too far, and of late seems to oppose any
significant legislative efforts to limit the supply of guns. (It might be noted that Texas itself, the
victim of two of the three assaults, recently passed a spate of laws to loosen gun controls in their state, and
their Governor, the ambitious Greg Abbott, continues to spout the mental health
tune.)
Perhaps one gun rights advocate, Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun
Rights, which opposes new gun restrictions, said it best: “I
don’t think the president even knows what he is doing on this.”
Congress's break allowed lawmakers to head home and hear from their constituents, about gun control, impeachment and whatever else may be on the minds of those back home. For those in swing districts in particular, these are crucial interactions, and could define the congressional agenda in the coming months. There are now 130 Democrats and one independent calling for an impeachment inquiry, a number that continues to grow.
Congress's break allowed lawmakers to head home and hear from their constituents, about gun control, impeachment and whatever else may be on the minds of those back home. For those in swing districts in particular, these are crucial interactions, and could define the congressional agenda in the coming months. There are now 130 Democrats and one independent calling for an impeachment inquiry, a number that continues to grow.
Trump’s performance at the
G-7, during which he backflipped on China, skipped a crucial meeting on climate
change, and pushed for Putin’s Russia to be readmitted to the G-7, simply
reinforced the notion that the U.S. president is no longer the “leader of the
free world.” In fact, under Trump, the
U.S. has actively dissociated itself from our strongest allies, a longstanding
pattern of the Trump presidency. To
which one can only conclude that the world cannot possibly be safer from the
ravages of global terrorism and economic instability than it was in the Obama
years.
Also in the month Trump did
his usual share of red-meat loving, constitution-bending actions against “The
Squad,” stating that they should not be allowed to visit Israel because of
their policy stances on Palestine. He
also took more direct action against immigrants, including legal ones (taking
steps to limit their access to social programs, such as food stamps), and
weakened the Endangered Species Act.
And the month
also featured the usual array of sheer Trump madness. Trump nominated Representative John
Ratcliffe, who had appallingly little intelligence experience, to replace Dan
Coates as Director, National Intelligence, simply because Ratcliffe was rather
combative when Robert Mueller was on the stand (Trump had to withdraw the pick
in the face of bi-partisan backlash). He
decided it would be a good idea to buy Greenland (and when Denmark’s Prime Minister
objected, he called her “nasty.”) He
mused repeatedly that nuclear weapons could be used to blast hurricanes to bits
(think: nuclear fallout spewed over thousands of square miles). He raged against Puerto Rico while Hurricane
Dorian bore down on it, while soberly supported Florida when the maps pointed
to a landing there. We could add a
sentence that summarized what these various rants reflect in Trump’s
personality, but it has all been said before and is so painfully obvious there
is no particular reason to reprise the refrain.
The Democrats continued their
plodding process to find the candidate who can beat Trump, and appear to be
caught in a despairing box: the
candidate who beats Trump most consistently in head-to-head polling (the
ultimate “electability” test), Joe Biden, is almost serially devoid of
inspiration (and has a UPS truckload of baggage), yet the other four contending
candidates, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg,
while plenty inspiring (in their own ways) are clearly less electable. The best that can be said about the Democrats
in August is that at least the field is beginning to winnow, from 25 to 20 at
this point, as the detritus of candidates have started to realize that 1%
support is not a “wave” (unless it is a “wave goodbye”). Only ten candidates earned the right to be on
the stage for the September 12 debates, so perhaps more of the “next ten” will
follow suit soon, as they should.
TRUMP APPROVAL RATING
We simply report, as we have with mind-numbing regularity,
that Trump’s approval rating remained at 43%, now for the fourth straight
month, falling within the 40-45% range for the 20th consecutive month.
TRUMP MONTHLY APPROVAL RATING
|
||||||||||||||
2017
|
2018
|
2019
|
||||||||||||
Jan
|
Jun
|
Dec
|
Jan
|
Jun
|
Dec
|
Jan
|
Feb
|
Mar
|
Apr
|
May
|
Jun
|
Jul
|
Aug
|
|
Approve
|
45
|
40
|
39
|
41
|
42
|
43
|
42
|
41
|
42
|
42
|
43
|
43
|
43
|
43
|
Disapprove
|
44
|
55
|
56
|
55
|
53
|
53
|
54
|
55
|
54
|
54
|
54
|
54
|
54
|
53
|
Net
|
1
|
-15
|
-17
|
-13
|
-10
|
-10
|
-12
|
-14
|
-11
|
-12
|
-11
|
-12
|
-11
|
-10
|
TRUMPOMETER
The Trumpometer did not change in the month, remaining at
+12. The +12 Trumpometer reading means
that, on average, our five economic measures are +13% higher than they were at
the time of Trump’s Inauguration, per the chart below (and with more
explanation of methodology below).
The Dow dropped a bit in a volatile month, and the revised
Q2 GDP also was slightly lower than the previous estimate. Consumer confidence also nudged down. But these slightly negative trends were
offset by a solid drop in gas prices.
There was no change in the unemployment rate, thus all changes netted
out and the overall Trumpometer was unchanged.
The “Trumpometer” was designed to allow an objective answer
to the economically-driven question of the 1980 Reagan campaign: “Are you better off than you were four years
ago?” The Trumpometer now stands at +12,
which means that Donald Trump can definitively claim that the answer to that
question is “yes.” (Whether he deserves
credit for that score is another matter.)
TRUMPOMETER
|
End
Clinton 1/20/2001
|
End
Bush 1/20/2009
|
End
Obama 1/20/2017 (Base = 0)
|
Trump 7/31/2019
|
Trump 8/31/2019
|
% Chg. Vs. Inaug. (+ = Better)
|
Trumpometer
|
25
|
-53
|
0
|
12
|
12
|
13%
|
Unemployment Rate
|
4.2
|
7.8
|
4.7
|
3.7
|
3.7
|
21%
|
Consumer Confidence
|
129
|
38
|
114
|
136
|
135
|
19%
|
Price of Gas
|
1.27
|
1.84
|
2.44
|
2.80
|
2.66
|
-9%
|
Dow Jones
|
10,588
|
8,281
|
19,732
|
26,864
|
26,403
|
34%
|
GDP
|
4.5
|
-6.2
|
2.1
|
2.1
|
2.0
|
-5%
|
If you would like to be on the Born
To Run The Numbers email list notifying you of each new post, please write us
at borntorunthenumbers@gmail.com.
Notes
on methodology:
BTRTN calculates our
monthly approval ratings using an average of the four pollsters who conduct
daily or weekly approval rating polls: Gallup Rasmussen, Reuters/Ipsos and You
Gov/Economist. This provides consistent and accurate trending information and
does not muddy the waters by including infrequent pollsters. The outcome tends to mirror the RCP average
but, we believe, our method gives more precise trending.
For
the generic ballot (which is not polled in this post-election time period), we
take an average of the only two pollsters who conduct weekly generic ballot
polls, Reuters/Ipsos
and You Gov/Economist, again for trending consistency.
The Trumpometer aggregates a set of
economic indicators and compares the resulting index to that same set of
aggregated indicators at the time of the Trump Inaugural on January 20, 2017,
on an average percentage change basis... The basic idea is to demonstrate
whether the country is better off economically now versus when Trump took
office. The indicators are the unemployment rate, the Dow-Jones
Industrial Average, the Consumer Confidence Index, the price of gasoline, and
the GDP.
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