October surprise: Trump just blew a huge lead, and the Madison Square Garden rally started the drop, says top data scientist

Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 27. · Fortune · Angela Weiss—AFP via Getty Images

Shawn Tully
Updated Sat, November 2, 2024 

Donald Trump is suffering an historic descent in the campaign's final days, an ongoing freefall that's turning what looked like a walkaway for the former president into what's most likely a Kamala Harris victory. That's the view from Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University, whose proprietary model's proven right-on in past elections.

Trump's darkening prospects mark a dramatic reversal from the election's dynamic less than 13 days ago. During the first three weeks of October, Donald Trump staged a remarkable comeback, rebounding from a huge deficit to a commanding lead. With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, Trump appeared en route to a smashing victory.

Harris countered the Trump surge by pivoting from an attack on Trump's policies to spotlighting his "unstable" personality and the "obsession with revenge." That message failed to resonate with voters as Trump moved relentlessly upwards in the electoral vote count, as forecast by the Miller framework. By contrast, Trump was tapping a powerful undercurrent: The deeply unpopular Biden record, especially on the economy.

"The macro numbers on growth, and employment look good, and the Democrats keep touting them," says Miller. "But people don't care about GDP or the national jobless rate. They care that they're paying so much more for groceries than four years ago, that they can't afford to buy a first home because mortgage rates are so high, or afford a car loan to replace the beat-up model in the driveway, or that they have no savings and need to work two jobs to get by."


In other words, although Harris stresses that the stats look fine, people don't feel fine due to the dollar squeeze in their own lives. Plus, Americans are fretting more and more about this nation's involvement in foreign wars. The Biden administration's policy of sending arms to Israel for bolstering its forces in the war versus Iran, and to Ukraine for fortifying its campaign to defeat the the Russian invasion is deeply troubling to a large swath of the electorate—especially since it's unclear how long those conflicts, and hence our involvement, will last. Trump, on the other hand, has been striking a quasi-isolationist stance on the stump that seems to be finding favor on the trail.

Put simply, Americans are pissed at where Biden's led the U.S., and by extension, at Harris.

Time was so short, Miller concluded, that Harris was unlikely to significantly close the yawning divide by taking new policy positions, shifting her campaign rhetoric, or even upping her ground game. "My view was that only a major shock could change the course of the race," he says, "meaning an earthquake that hugely benefited Democratic ticket."
Story Continues

View Comments (720)
Terms and
Privacy Policy
Privacy Dashboard


The US is pumping more oil than ever, and it's complicating things for other crude-exporting countries



Scroll back up to restore default view.
Filip De Mott
Sat, November 2, 2024 at 2:30 PM MDT 2 min read




466

Anton Petrus/Getty Images

US crude production hit a new all-time monthly high in August.


This complicates things for OPEC+, which was planning to start increasing output in December.


Oil is down 20% from April highs, causing some exporters to be cautious about how much they're pumping.

The US is pumping a record amount of oil. But that may not be welcome news to other crude-producing nations.


Domestic output reached 13.4 million barrels a day in August, eclipsing all previous monthly records. According to US Energy Information Administration data, firms in Texas and New Mexico led the surge.

That level of production puts the US at odds with the plans of other oil-producing nations. OPEC+, an alliance led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, has said it plans to begin in December a sequence of monthly output increases. But given the decline in the price of crude oil — down 20% from an April high — continued record production from the US, and weakening demand, oil traders believe OPEC+ will delay its program for a second time.

It's the culmination of a multi-year period that saw OPEC+ members cut production to support higher market prices, only to be undercut by expanding production from non-OPEC exporters.

Looking into 2025, analysts speculate that global demand will continue sliding, especially given China's decelerating oil consumption. That's one reason the global oil surplus could swell to 1.2 million barrels per day next year, according to JPMorgan. Otherwise, expanding outflows from the US, Brazil, Guyana and Canada will also play a part.

"OPEC+ increasingly appears to be searching for El Dorado: an oil market where demand is strong enough that it can increase output and prices stay above $80 per barrel," wrote Bill Weatherburn, senior climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics. "We suspect that this won't be found in 2025 either as China's demand growth will remain soft and more oil supply from non-OPEC+ producers will enter the market."

The stock market gives this candidate a 70% chance to be the next U.S. president

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, and Donald Trump, the former president who is the Republican Party’s nominee in a third straight election, debated, just once, in September. - AFP via Getty Images

Mark Hulbert
Sat, November 2, 2024 

Vice President Kamala Harris’s chance of winning the U.S. presidential election is lower than it was two weeks ago, according to a model that uses the stock market’s year-to-date performance to predict the incumbent political party’s likelihood of victory.

Nevertheless, that model still predicts that Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, is likely to win the presidency on Tuesday — giving her a 70% probability of victory. The reason Harris’s likelihood of winning was lower on Nov. 1 than the 72% where it stood on Oct. 17, when I last wrote about this model, is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA has declined in the interim.

This stock-market prediction model is not complicated. It exploits the historical tendency for the incumbent political party’s chance of electoral victory to reflect the Dow’s year-to-date performance. The model’s track record is statistically highly significant — at the 99% level.

-

Take a look at the chart above. It plots the trendline that best fits the historical data back to 1900. Is the model foolproof? Of course not. And bear in mind that a 70% probability is not 100%. Furthermore, even if the model had a perfect track record, there’s no guarantee that the future will be like the past.

That said, my simple model does have a better track record than the majority of models Wall Street uses, many if not most of which have no statistical validity. The model makes theoretical sense: The stock market is forward-looking, so a rising market means that most investors are upbeat about the economy’s prospects in coming months. Numerous studies have found that people tend to vote their pocketbooks.

I got a lot of angry emails in response to my mid-October column, with many of you arguing that a Harris presidency would be disastrous for the economy. I myself have no idea. But I do know that, if those dire forecasts were correct, we would expect the stock market to plunge whenever Harris’s chances of winning go up. That hasn’t been the case, as I pointed out in a column earlier this week. The stock market on average has risen in the weeks since July in which the Harris contract at PredictIt.org rose