2014 Midterms

Ok, I am a Republican. A liberal one, but still a Republican.  First of all I  didn't trust the Media and I didn't trust the Media's Polling.  Some of the Polling Firms I was throwing out like Survey/USA and sometimes Rasmussen.  I can show that certain Polling Firms lean further to the left then mean average.  Ok, Rasmussen's poll data on Presidential Approval Rating was way off from companies like Gallup, but their State Senate Polls weren't as bad.

So I flew by my own assumptions:

1. The Media Organisations were for the Democrats and their polling was trying to  manipulate the Electorate instead of inform them.  They were party activists instead of being reporters.

2. They were not estimating turnout correctly. I took the conservative assumption that were off by 5%.  So I adjusted the Democrat numbers down by 2.5% and upped the Republican numbers equally.

3. The Media was using too long of a range of polls.  A Poll taken a month ago was no longer valid, in my opinion.

4. I also thought the Electorate was very angry and election would have a very close correlation to 1978!

So I wrote a little app that used my assumtions and did some calculations.  It's crude but gave me some very good estimates.

This run was ran Tuesday morning, just before the election:

So my program estimated a pickup  for the Republicans of 10 Senators, not bad. I think I did better then the Pundits.  But I kept my mouth shut living in a multi-party family.  Also, my assumptions were incorrect in 2012.

As far as the economy goes, it will not improve until ACA is removed.  My proof is not perfect, it is statistical.  If you take all of the recesions in American history and take an average and standard deviation of their length, you get something like:

Average:  21.5 months
StdDev:    15.75

So, virtually all recessions should be over in (21.5) + (3 * 15.75) = 68.75 months.
That is just under 6 years.  If you don't understand why this is valid, it is because when you have a normal Distribution curve about 68% of all data will occur Plus or minus 1 Standard Deviation of the Mean (Average), 95% of all data will occur plus or minus two Standard Deviations of mean.  And 99.97% of all data will occur within three Standard Deviations of Mean!

Professional Economists do use this and their published results are actually a little more conservative, with a slightly smaller mean and slightly smaller standard deviation.  Which makes my argument just that much stronger.

So why are we still in a recession???  I know we technically we are not in one, but we arn't in a recovery either.  Unemployment is still too high and the only ones doing well, are the top couple of percent.  This is not normal.  The answer is the cost of the ACA is adding about $15,000 dollars to the employers cost for a full time employee per year.  When small business persons run their numbers through their spreadsheets they can't make it work and therefore, they don't risk their money and there is no business expansion.

I would also argue that if the Democratic Party wants to be viable again, they need to drop the ACA.  If they have to over ride a Presidential veto, do it and do it quickly.  If you let the clock run out and the Republicans end up doing it after the 2016 elections they will get all of the credit for an improving economy.