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Baby Boomers from the FDR Truman era 1950-1965 were offset by the Generation X of the Reagan period 1965-1980. Each generation was making its political affiliation as Democrat or Republican based on its most impressionable years of life. Then come the Millenials till 1996 and Generation Z, who tired of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were wary of war, and had seen banking deregulation and laissez fairre lead to the financial crisis of 2008. The younger generations now enter as voters in 2024 and 2028 as Democrats. So big is the gap for Generation Z that it is the highest for all generations 20% Republican to 36% Democrats. This is from the General Social Survey by the University of Chicago every year since 1972.

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Arizona remains a state where the Republican and Democratic parties are very close. As Senator Krysten Sinema a Democrat, supported the Republican filibuster that required 60 votes for major legislation and thwarted some of president Biden's legislation to help workers and families in the US. Having alienated some Democrats she is now running for the Senate as an Independent. Her likely opponent from the Republican party is Kari Lake. Arizona is split three ways evenly for Republicans, Independents and Democrats. The question for Sinema says a Republican strategist is whether there are enough independents and soft Republicans who will vote for Sinema. Rep. Ruben Gallego is running for Democrats, Kari Lake for Republicans. Another question is whether Kari Lake's association with Mr. Trump could hurt Republicans in Arizona. Synema faces a difficult three way race as Democrats see her flagging support on key initiatives of the president as a serious problem.

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Two articles of impeachment are passed on U.S. president Trump in the House of Representatives by Democrats, with all Republicans opposed. The party votes make this a political affair, with all Democrats favoring impeachment and all Republicans favoring stopping this process. Its harder in the Senate as all Republicans in the Senate are almost certain to vote against impeachment and the Senate Republican majority making impeachment a political exercize of one party.

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Once again the unemployment statistics lie- women's unemployment at 5.7% in 2014 does not reflect the real story. The number of women employed in 2014 is 55.2%, worse than in Oct. 2010. Many women looking for work give up and drop out of the work force, these women have not vanished, they are simply not being counted in the frequently quoted unemployment statistic. This spells bad news for Democrats in the midterm 2014 elections- today the households making less than 30,000 are almost evenly split on whether they vote Republican or Democratic 43% to 46%, according to polls by Pew Research Center, compared to the 2012 presidential election figures of 35% to 63%. Interestingly the reverse is true for voters with incomes over $100,000 where voters are about evenly split for Republican or Democratic choices for Congress. In 2012 presidential elections the Republicans had a 10 percentage point lead for this income group. Democratic advisors Carville and Greenberg advise not even mentioning the word "recovery" for the U.S. midterm 2014 Congressional elections. About 6.7 million people had multiple jobs in 2010, the figure now is 7 million. About 2.62 million people say they had part time jobs because they could not find full time work in April 2014 up from 2.57 million in Oct. 2010. A separate piece in the WSJ May 20, 2014, shows 10 million U.S. households under water on mortgages and another 10 million households having less than 20% equity in their homes in 2014....

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Jimmy Lai is one of the prominent Hong Kong businessmen who have actively spoken up for universal suffrage without screening of candidates by the government, instead of sitting by on the sidelines. He says he is not talking to the student leaders, and it is upto the young generation to take the initiative as it is about their future. At age 12 Lai was smuggled into Hong Kong by parents in Guangdong province in 1960, making him one of the older generation who has lived through the many changes in Hong Kong- from the British period, through the years of turmoil on the mainland in the seventies, the transition period and transfer to China under the Basic Law. He worked in factories instead of going to school, and later started his own clothing chain Giordano, followed by a move into media publishing. He is the publisher of the Apple daily and Next magazine publications which support the pro-democracy student movement. Lai says the roots of student protest are in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a cherished part of Chinese history because it led to the awakening of China, sparked the interest in breaking away from the past leading to modernization, lasting for 2 decades till the Japanese invasion and Communist control. Lai says the protest movement is more mature than the movement in China at Tiananmen in June 1989. Another factor that makes this different is that the protest in Hong Kong does not chart out an indefinite future for China just when it is embarking on the path to modernization, the situation facing a cautious Deng in 1989 who experienced the chaos of the sixties and seventies. The movement in Hong Kong is about reinstating what is felt to be in the spirit of the Basic Law- universal suffrage in its true spirit and intent without prescreening candidates for 2017- it is a limited objective and does not risk the modernization drive, more likely to enhance it by keeping dialogue with the outside world open as China looks for new ideas to tackle many prblems left behind from the industrialization period of 1990-2014. ...

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Leaks of conversations Mr. Trump had with leaders of Mexico and Australia early in the Trump administration resulted in the effort to protect sensitive discussions on a separate high security server. This is now the subject of inquiry in the impeachment inquiry by Democrats in the House of Representatives into president Trump's discussion with Ukrainian president Zelensky. The impeachment inquiry stems from the call with the Ukrainian president in which Democrats say Trump asked Ukraine to look into corruption at a company in which Democrat Joe Biden's son was a board member, and storing this information on a top security server.

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WSJ tells the story about Biden being slow to act in 2021 and 2022 to close the Southern Border, without telling the complete story and all the facts. Biden did close the Border in 2024 by executive order- when Trump blocked passage of Republican Lankford's legislation in Feb 2024 supported by Biden to close the southern Border. No mention is made that Biden was faced with a once in a century pandemic, winning the fight for vaccines over skepticism, and on Feb. 22 2022 Putin launching an attack on Kiev, Ukraine, and negotiating to get the crumbling infrastructure of the US rebuilt, funds for CHIPS and Science. On top of this the Venezuelan economy completely collapsed leading to an unanticipated migrant surge. Only FDR and Lincoln faced so many huge challenges and tackled them one by one. Without these facts the result can be to stall the biggest boom in manufacturing under president Biden/Harris that America has experienced since the space race in the 1960's. ...

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor rejects the McConnell plan for raising the debt ceiling. Senate Minority Leader McConnell says on a conservative talk show- "all of a sudden we have co-ownership of a bad economy. That is very bad positioning going into an election." McConnell's plan is to shift the responsibility for raising the debt ceiling to President Obama, by separating debt reduction talks from debt ceiling talks. Cantor believes its best to push on with cutting back spending. Obama's response was to offer $1.7 trillion in spending cuts, at which point he expected Republicans to support tax increases, telling Cantor in negotiations "enough is enough." The McConnell plan is supported by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republicans in the Senate. The details of the plan are being are being worked out, with one strategy being to add to it the $1.5 trillion in spending cuts identified in bipartisan talks with Vice President Biden. Both sides are looking at this jockeying for advantage for the 2012 election. At one point in the talks with Cantor, Mr Obama is reported to have told him- "Eric, don't call my bluff. You know I'm going to take this to the American people." Cantor for his part, wants to limit the duration of the debt ceiling increase so that it would be a short term extension and would come up for a vote before the 2012 presidential election....

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Republicans are divided in Texas in 2023 which could turn it over to Democrats. One forgets that Texas is the state that a Democrat LBJ Lyndon Baines Johnson was from and his base of support, first vice president under John Kennedy and then elected president. LBJ signed legislation for amending Social Security to create Medicare and Medicaid. He also passed Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning segregation and in 1965 enfranchised black voters. The WSJ in this editorial sees the divisions between Republicans in the House and the Senate over the impeachment of Attorney General Paxton as signs that Texas has one party dominance for too long. It says this could turn the state to a Democrat majority in 2024 as it was under LBJ in 1960, who helped create programs revered by all Americans.

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Thomas Frank describes how things went wrong in America by drawing the contrast between Martha's Vineyard and Decatur, Illinois. In 1946 he says a typical executive's salary was only 2 times that of a worker at a Caterpillar plant in Decatur, Illinois. By 2016 this had changed to where the top executive at Caterpillar was making over 400 times the wage of a typical worker at a Caterpillar plant. Democratic politicians he said had moved away from their working class base towards places like Martha's Vineyard. For Republicans the embrace of tax cutting, the deficit, and cuts in education and healthcare, entitlements, to the exclusion of everything else in a recession environment led to the rise of Trump and the rejection of stands on these issues- including amazingly the embrace of a $5.3 trillion increase in the deficit under the Trump plan estimated by economists and a recession after a temporary boost.  Inserted into this were the culture wars, immigration, with the change to mass deportation as a solution to immigration problems. ...

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Democrat Gretchen Whitmer wins the race for Governor in Michigan with a double digit lead. Democrats also win the state house and Senate. This report in Politico looks at Whitmer and how she has helped change Michigan since the days of Trump's win in 2016. For Whitmer it is about delivering on good roads, infrastructure, investments in electric car production, and protecting women's rights. Michigan is on track to have fixed more than 16,000 lane miles of roads and 1200 bridges, according to her office.  

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Congress has an obligation to fund the Transportation Security Administration that screens passengers at airports. TSA falls under Department of Homeland Security DHS. Democrats and Republicans are at loggerheads on immigration issues and are holding up funding for DHS and TSA agency. For 1 month now TSA officers at airports have not received their paychecks. About 25%- 40% have called in sick at some major airports slowing down security lines in rush hours of the morning. Congress goes into recess March 27th and if no funding has been passed by then the situation could get a lot worse, with many passengers missing flights, flights taking off without passengers.

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Janet Mills, 2 term governor, 78 years, fails to have poll lead over Plattner with local Maine bred identity in the 2026 Democratic primary. It says a lot about the voter attitudes in 2026 which want to steer forward not backwards. Janet Mills ran ads on Plattner but did not get the lead, leading to her withdrawal from the primary. Republican Susan Collins looks hard to dislodge from this seat. Republicans in Louisiana on the heels of the SCOTUS decision against gerrymandered electoral districts want to redraw the electoral districts so that Democrats are left out of the state Congressional delegation entirely.

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The leading Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Elizabeth Warren, says she is eager to work with DJT, Tim Scott and Republicans in Congress to make life affordable for working families and to rebuild the middle class. She says Republicans and Democrats have thir reasons for th housing shortages and hgih costs of housing, and both are right. Republicans pointing to the supply shortage and Democrats pointing to the price fixing and corporate landlords.

On DJT proposing to cap credit card interest rates at 10% Warren says she will work with Republicans to make it happen.

Warren cites personal experience as reason she is at her job. Her dad lost his job and almost lost his home. This is why in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis caused by banks engaging in speculation she says she became Senator and why she is fighting to make life affordable for all Americans.

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Over the last ten years average growth in real per capita income has averaged 1.6%, with declines only in two years of the last twenty years, 2008 with the global financial crisis, and in 1991 a year before President George H.W. Bush lost the election to Clinton. A forecast by Mark Zandl of Moody's Economy.com shows real disposable income per capita is expected to increase by 0.4% by the end of the third quarter of 2010 from a year earlier. This will show up in consumer spending and will weaken the recovery. It is also likely to be reflected in elections in the latter part of 2010.

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Hedge funds Greenwich Financial and Braddock Financial have told banks they will take legal action if loans are renegotiated in ways that hurt the funds. Many hedge funds hold mortgage securities.

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Would a generic Democrat do better? Mr. Biden's weakness is with less engaged voters says this analysis of a Times Siena poll showing less support in battleground states. One queer aspect of this poll is that Kamala Harris does slightly better because she does better with non white voters. Mr. Biden does well with white voters retaining all of his support achieved in the 2020 election with white voters. Another queer aspect of this poll is that a so called generic Democrat would win by large margins of over 5% in most of the battleground states over Mr. Trump, in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Another queer aspect of the poll is that Michigan has all three- the Governor's position, the State Assembly and other positions in the hands of Democrats who have performed well in the state.