dcskipper

No candidate is likely to reach 50 percent threshold in the first round. The first few rounds will likely eliminate candidates with less than 1 or 2 percent of the vote. It is possible that batch elimination in Round 4 or 5 could push Cuomo over the threshold, but seems unlikely given the tightness of the race and how votes were redistributed by round in the last election:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/06/nyregion/nyc-mayoral-election-2025-ranked-choice-voting.html

I second-guessed the update I just made. (Please forgive me for admin / user errors: Still learning how this works! This was my first forecast update.)

To be clear, I see almost no chance that President Trump's Gallup approval is greater than 45% on August 1. I see his numbers continuing to slide at the margin—excepting an unforeseen Black Swan event—and never returning to the president's post-election peak (which was barely at or over 45%).

Updating this prediction marginally downward (i.e., towards higher certainty that approval will be below 45%) based upon the deployment of National Guard and Marines forces in LA. In aggregate, I think that this show of force will be a drag on the president's approval rating. And, it is likely to dominate the national news media cycles for the next couple weeks at least. (Indeed, we all still hopefully remember the summer of 2020: "the year of the Guard." The National Guard was deployed at the greatest pace in its history.)

Forecast updated per today's CPI release -- just 2.4 percent for May. 

I will note that this vindicates my preliminary analysis posted on Sunday (in advance of the BLS' CPI data release). 

I submit what essentially amounts to a “Lucy and the Football” argument here (i.e., fool me once, fool me twice…). This analysis rests largely on the recent (and not so recent) historical record, which is littered with examples of budget and deficit hawks swearing to hold the line—and then folding at the last minute. By contrast, there is no precedent of the House or Senate GOP telling President Trump ‘no’ on fiscal discipline when push comes to shove. Moderate members of the Senate GOP may be building towards defiance on tariffs or other issues viewed as central to the eroding the power of the purse (or separation of powers broadly). But shutting down the federal government over a pork-filled bill is not likely going to be the hill that moderate GOP senators choose to die on. If past is prologue, I judge that the votes will be cast based on cynical, raw political calculations—not sound policy—and that the mega bill will be sent to the White House by Speaker Johnson’s July 4th deadline.

HOWEVER, will it be passed by Tuesday, July 1? The House and Senate are planned to not be in session the week beginning 6/30—implying they would have to pass it by 6/27, the last day in session before the July 4th recess. But Congress traditionally tends to take these things down to the wire. I can fully imagine the final bill not coming to the floor until 7/1 or 7/2—just in time to let Congressional members and staffers return to their districts a day ahead of their July 4th recess. This factor—the narrow window between the resolution of the forecast on 7/1 and the deadline for passage on 7/4—introduces considerable additional uncertainty, in my mind. If the question asked about passage by 7/4, I would lean more towards 80% “yes”… But given Congress’ dysfunction and tendency to take negotiations down to the wire—and the fact that there are only 3 calendar weeks left to resolve a raft of current policy disputes—I lean more towards 60% “yes.” (Which is to say, I think they get it done before 7/4, but maybe not before 7/1.)

According to ACLED’s non-paywalled data, daily incidents of political violence (during active periods of fighting) have ranged from approximately 20 to 70 per day since the October 7, 2023 attacks (including battles, explosions/remote violence, violence against civilians and property damage). Extrapolating for 31 days in the month of August might imply an anticipated range of approximately 620 to 2170 incidents (approximately 1400 per month). In August 2024, the daily number ranged from 24 to 46 (and the monthly total equaled a little less than 1200). These estimates assume that there is no ceasefire in August 2025.

Inflation has remained stubbornly above the Fed’s 2% target rate since 2021. Ahead of next week’s (anticipated) May inflation rates data release, the general mood on Wall Street—according to open news media reports—appears to be that the inflation rate will remain too high for the Fed to consider a rate reduction just yet. Indeed, the Fed Chairman has repeatedly intimated as much as well. The collective wisdom seems to suggest that the Fed is not going to move to lower the central bank lending rate until late 2025 or early 2026. More specifically, the May 2025 inflation report may contain the first signs of the lagged effects of the Trump administration’s tariff policies working their way through the economy. To this end, as a key leading indicator of inflation, bond yields have been rising—reflecting inflationary concerns stemming from sharper-than-expected declines in imports (i.e., associated with tariffs / more dollars chasing fewer goods) and slowing economic growth. The dollar has also been plunging—a decline of about 9% since January, and 4.5% in April alone. If this trend continues, it is likely to add to inflationary pressures by making imported goods relatively more expensive. The continued resiliency of the U.S. jobs market and decent, recent annual wage growth rates (3.9% YOY in May) could also provide headwinds against inflation levels dropping below 2.3 percent in the near-term / next two months.

Looking at historical NOAA wildfire data from 2000 to 2024, the average number of acres burned in the United States in July has been about 1.6 million. August has similarly averaged about 1.7 million acres over this period. In 10 out 25 of these years, total acres burned was equal to or less than 1.3 million in the month of July (40%). Similarly, in 9 out of 25 years, the total was equal to or less than 1.3 million in the month of August (36%). Recent years have shown no obvious monthly trends towards increasingly more perilous Julys or Augusts—at least, not in any single given year. That is, there is high variance shown over this 25-year period; notwithstanding the long-term effects of climate change and the recent high profile wildfires in Hawaii and California, there’s little reason to expect that this variance is necessarily marching towards a more active wildfire year in this specific year. The 25-year frequency—somewhere around 3-to-4 out of 10—seems like a reasonable probability to hold in 2025.

In the first month of Q2 (April 2025), new vehicle registrations fell -1.2% year-on-year (YOY) overall, but BEV market share crept up to 15.3% (558,262 registrations in the first four months of the year)—“still far from where it was expected to be” (ACEA press release, 5/27/25). In the first quarter, BEVs increased 3.2% (from 12%). If this recording-breaking absolute growth rate were sustained in Q2, it would likely fall short of closing the 4.8% delta required to reach 20% market share—depending on what also happens to the denominator. That is, it seems more likely that BEVs will continue to increase market share in Q2, at least relative to diesel and petrol vehicles, if not hybrids, too (per ACEA data).

However, BEVs appear unlikely to fully close the remaining 4.7% gap in the last two months of Q2 data. Given the condensed timeline of this forecast scenario, any new emergent disruptive technologies (EDTs) also seem unlikely to singlehandedly send major demand signal shock waves through the EV consumer market; such breakthroughs would be expected to have a lagged effect before hitting car dealership showrooms (i.e., beyond the temporal scale of this scenario). More likely, any significant increases (or decreases) in demand signals would likely be related to either new fiscal policy initiatives (e.g., aggressive new government subsidies / tax benefits, etc.) or macroeconomic events (e.g., either removal of or lagged effects of tariffs, leading indicators of global recession onset or improvements in Q2, outbreak of an East-West crisis or conflict in the Pacific, etc.).