A Demographic Edge for Hillary Clinton in 2016
Are the GOP’s 2016 presidential hopes dying out?
No matter how many GOP candidates enter the 2016 presidential sweepstakes, it will be an uphill climb for any Republican to secure the White House. That’s not simply because Democratic voters outpace Republicans by a four-point edge, according to Gallup. It’s because the GOP is dying — literally —according to an analysis published Sunday in Politico.
Seems 2.75 million Republican voters will be dead by the time the 2016 election rolls around, Daniel J. McGraw claims in what he calls his “back-of-the-napkin” math. By comparison, roughly 2.3 million Obama supporters will have died by the time the 2016 election rolls around. McGraw is right, of course, that Republicans tend to be older than Democrats, and that the surge of millennials (about 78 million) tends to vote Democratic. They’re young, energetic, tilt left on social issues like gay marriage and believe women are underrepresented in the boardroom as well as the White House.
Republicans could still connect with millennial voters on economic issues, but on the whole, the demographic trends will only make it harder for the GOP’s eventual nominee.
Related: How the Clinton Scandals Can Bring Down the Democrats
McGraw’s estimates can only go so far, though. They can’t fully account for state-by-state differences that could tilt the Electoral College, and they don’t factor in specific candidates and how they might appeal to various age groups, or not. Can a youthful Marco Rubio, for example, find a way to draw younger voters? Will Hillary Clinton trip over her political baggage, packed in part by her husband?
In the end, regardless of who is nominated by the GOP, the election will rest on the 43 percent of Americans who identify themselves as independents. Including independents, Democrats had a three-point edge as of last year. But if McGraw is right, that edge could widen before long.
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
