With 13 days left until the November 8 midterms, polling data suggest the cavalry is coming. Of course, polls don’t matter: Only votes do.
Like most people, I’m a polling skeptic, but it is noteworthy that market-based polls suggest GOP Senate pick-ups in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia. That could give the GOP a 52-48 Senate. Arizona is also very close, as is New Hampshire.
I’m particularly interested in content and message: It’s still inflation and the economy for the Senate races.
Up in New Hampshire, for example, electricity rates are soaring, blackouts are threatened, and natural gas and home heating oil is short. What is Senator Hassan’s solution? Sell more out of the SPR, and also use the home heating reserve. That is the wrong answer: That’s a Biden answer.
People don’t believe in Biden answers anymore. The president is incapable of telling the truth about the economy, or the energy situation. How is it that the entire Democratic Party, really, seems like it will not recognize the power, efficiency, and importance of the American oil and gas business?
It’s like the progressives are suffering from this thick blanket of amnesia that we even have a fossil fuel industry. That industry is capable of solving problems — like high prices, and fuel shortages. It employs 11 million people. It affects literally hundreds of everyday necessities in our lives. It may be the single most important, urgent answer to the crisis of stagflation.
Today, Vice President Harris with a straight face held a press conference and attacked diesel-powered school buses, blaming them for our children’s education underperformance. Really, Mrs. Vice President? That’s the issue? Not your opposition to parental involvement? Or your subservience to the teachers unions, critical race theory, and gender and sexual ID mandates? Blaming the diesel buses that have taken American children to school for decades and decades when test scores were higher, and when children knew how to read and do arithmetic? Did I get that right?
This is one small reason why the cavalry is coming. Common sense Americans have had enough. They’ve had it up to here.
I’ve also noticed that some Democratic advisers are now counseling candidates to emphasize the economy. Well, welcome aboard, kids. Your man, President Biden, who all these Democratic Senate candidates have voted with, took a booming economy with barely any inflation and turned it into a recessionary bust with 40-year-high inflation. This is not an easy thing to do. Real wages have fallen 18 consecutive months on a yearly basis. Grocery prices have jumped 13 percent for families since the Biden inauguration.
The president himself calls the economy “strong as hell,” which he’s entitled to say in a free country, but he is not entitled to make up his own facts. That he keeps on with his fraudulent falsehoods itself has become a campaign issue — because the voters have lost confidence in it, and his ability to solve the problem.
They want checks, and balances. Mr. Biden says he’s never blocked oil and gas production, but of course we know that’s dead wrong. Mr. Biden says Republicans will add $3 trillion to the deficit, but of course the entire GOP message is to rescind Mr. Biden’s $5 trillion of new borrowing and debt.
You know what? I came across some old files from the Biden FY 2023 budget proposal, which itself had a $5 trillion-plus spending increase price ticket. On top of that, he proposed 36 tax increases on individuals and businesses totaling $2.5 trillion, including 11 separate tax hikes on the oil and gas industry.
This is from last March, when energy prices had been sky-rocketing for well over a year. It would’ve been the biggest tax hike since the 1940s, according to some analysts. Is that the answer to crisis stagflation? I don’t think so. Nobody else does, either.
Again, let me be the first to admit that polls really don’t matter — only votes do. So, I don't know the outcome of this election yet, but the trends are very clear. People want inflation to go down, not up. And they want the economy to go up, not down. And no one's running around banging diesel school buses as the reason for poor education performance.
Let’s go a step further: Underneath the specifics, there is a sense among working people that they do not want their country to be transformed into some radical, woke, progressive experiment. And if there was ever any doubt — 18 or 20 months later, that experiment has failed dismally.
People have lost confidence in President Biden and I think they will vote for checks and balances in order to change the direction of the sinking ship. That’s why the cavalry’s coming.
From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.
Larry Kudlow was the Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump from 2018-2021. His Fox Business show "Kudlow" airs at 4 p.m &. and his radio show airs on 770 ABC from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
