Alabama to elect a pedophile

A third Alabama Senate poll released this week has Republican Roy Moore leading Democrat Doug Jones as his base appears to be solidifying as the distance grows since the initial allegations against Moore.
Louisiana-based JMC Analytics and Polling released its latest Senate poll on Wednesday morning with Moore holding a 5-point edge on Jones. Moore got 49 percent support to Jones' 44 percent.
"Sexual misconduct allegations against Moore have not materially impacted the race," the poll's summary said.
The polls released this week have also been consistent with two showing Moore with a 5-point lead and another reflecting a 6-point lead.

Small businessmen don't like GOP tax plan

A Public Policy Polling poll, released by Businesses for Responsible Tax Reform, a group opposed to the GOP tax bills, finds 51 percent of small businesses are against the plan. About one-third, 34 percent, support the GOP tax plan.
Slightly more than 50 percent of the small business owners surveyed think the GOP tax plan supports large corporations over small businesses.
A majority of small business owners also said the plan will benefit wealthy corporations the most.

Economists disapprove of GOP tax plan

Of the 42 economists polled, only one thought the Republican bill would boost the economy. The plurality said it wouldn’t, and the remainder were uncertain or didn’t answer.
The survey includes an optional space for respondents to add a comment, and a few of the comments are notable. “Of course not,” wrote the University of Chicago’s Austan Goolsbee, who served as chief economist for President Obama. “Does anyone care about actual evidence anymore?”
A number of the economists argued that tax policy simply isn’t as powerful a lever as Republicans want to believe. “Tax policy appears to have little effect at the margin on GDP growth in OECD countries,” wrote MIT’s David Autor, an eminent trade economist. “Doubt it will substantially change things either way,” wrote the University of Chicago’s Anil Kashyap. “Aside from the redistribution of wealth, hard to see this changing much,” wrote Richard Thaler, who just won the Nobel Prize in economics.
...The second question asked whether passage of the Republican tax bills would mean “the US debt-to-GDP ratio will be substantially higher a decade from now than under the status quo.” Here, too, the news was grim from Republicans. In this case, all but one economist agreed that the bills would blow up the deficit, and the outlier, Stanford's Liran Einav, turned out to have misread the question — he later clarified that he also agrees the bill would add to the debt.
“How could it be otherwise?” asked MIT’s Daron Acemoglu. “Cut taxes. Lose money. Repeat,” said Goolsbee. “This is at least is clear,” said Yale’s William Nordhaus: “No way the growth effects will be strong enough to offset the revenue losses.”

Millennials want a 3rd party

A strong majority of millennials — 71 percent — say the Republican and Democratic parties do such a poor job of representing the American people that a third major party is needed, according to the results of a new NBC News/GenForward poll.
Six in ten disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job, while 59 percent have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party and 42 percent have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. On the whole, millennials overwhelmingly do not think either party cares about people like them.
These views may help explain why a large majority of young adults — across racial subgroups, genders and partisan affiliations — say a third major party is needed.

Minorities and transgender

A majority (54%) of all Americans said that whether a person is a man or a woman is determined by “the sex they were assigned at birth,” while 44% said “it can be different.”
Among Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents, 80% said sex is determined by a person’s birth-sex.
Only 34% of all Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents said sex is determined at birth – but a majority (55%) of Black Democrats and 41% of Hispanic Democrats said birth determines sex.
Just 24% of White Democrats believe birth determines sex.
Likewise, while 68% of White Democrats say society “hasn’t gone far enough” in accepting people who are transgender, only 46% of Black Democrats and half (50%) of Hispanic Democrats agree.

Democratic advantage only happens if base is inspired

In a hypothetical national ballot, Democratic congressional candidates hold a robust 11-point lead over their GOP counterparts, 51-40 percent, among registered voters overall. But winnow down to those who say they voted in the last midterms and are certain to do so again and the contest snaps essentially to a dead heat, 48-46 percent.
For one thing, despite President Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity, almost as many Americans say they’ll vote in 2018 to show support for Trump as to show opposition to him, 22 versus 26 percent, with half saying he won’t be a factor. Indeed 57 percent of Republicans say they’ll vote to show support for Trump, while fewer Democrats, 46 percent, intend to send a message against him.
Just 27 percent of Americans express confidence in the Democrats in Congress “to make the right decisions for the country’s future,” matching the low set when the question last was asked January 2014, and a wide 16 points below its peak in 2009. The Democrats’ confidence rating is almost as poor as the Republicans’ in Congress (21 percent trust) and worse than Trump’s (34 percent).