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Ron DeSantis’ falling polls: Could crypto lose its candidate?

The politician faces harsh competition from pro-crypto candidates of all sorts, with his already shaky popularity in the polls declining.
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6 months ago

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The politician faces harsh competition from pro-crypto candidates of all sorts, with his already shaky popularity in the polls declining.

Miami Mayor Denis Suarez, who’s running for president of the United States, took a shot at his Republican counterpart in the presidential race, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 

Emphasizing his own support for crypto, Suarez said about DeSantis: “You gotta go beyond just saying that the central bank digital currencies are bad. Everybody agrees on that. That’s a very easy position.”

That incident tells a lot about the role crypto could have in the upcoming presidential race, but it says even more about DeSantis, who, until recently, was the most prominent “crypto candidate” in the field.

Now the politician faces harsh competition from other, vocally pro-crypto candidates, and his chances to become president or even win the Republican primaries are rapidly declining.

How DeSantis became a crypto darling

The Florida governor has been vocally supporting crypto since as early as 2021, when he proposed to allow businesses to pay state fees with cryptocurrencies in the 2022–2023 budgetary year. 

Even then, he had to compete with Suarez, who has been accepting his paychecks entirely in Bitcoin (BTC), while Miami under his mayorship became home to the “largest-ever” Bitcoin event and even got its own digital currency. In 2023, DeSantis began talking about crypto more often and his presidential ambitions. This March, he even dedicated a press conference to the potential project of an American central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Standing at a podium bearing the phrase “Big Brother’s Digital Dollar,” the politician urged Florida lawmakers and their “like-minded” counterparts to preventively prohibit the introduction of the digital dollar in their states. A CBDC is all about surveilling Americans and controlling their behavior, DeSantis added.

Later, he continued to criticize the CBDC and its potential issuer, the United States Federal Reserve, on Twitter (now called X). 

In May, DeSantis signed a bill restricting the use of CBDCs, including foreign ones, in the state. Once again, he emphasized the difference between CBDCs and private digital currencies: “I think they want to crowd out and eliminate other types of digital assets like cryptocurrency because they can’t control that, so they don’t like that.”

Later, DeSantis promised to lobby for the same prohibition if he becomes the president of the United States.

DeSantis vowed not only to ban CBDCs forever but to end President Joe Biden’s “war on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency” should he succeed him in the White House. However, he didn’t refer to any specific policies of the Biden administration, preferring to concentrate his attention on the Federal Reserve.

Recent: Making real-world blockchain solutions possible — Solana co-founder Raj Gokal

Back in May, when the list of candidates for the presidency was much shorter, DeSantis seemed to many to be the logical choice for Republicans in general and the crypto community in particular.

Of course, he wasn’t the perfect candidate for every innovation enthusiast, given his disdain for progressive social policies.

DeSantis gained fame as a fighter against sanctuary cities, LGBTQ+ rights, gun control and the Affordable Care Act. But for a while, those could have been seen at least as a realistic compromise, signifying the partisan divide over crypto.

However, in the last few months, everything has changed.

Presidential candidacy unravels

Epithets about DeSantis, like “circling the drain” and “falling apart,” started to appear in the media in the middle of July. By the end of last month, his campaign had to cut almost a third of its staff to stay afloat. 

DeSantis still remains the second Republican candidate after former President Donald Trump, according to polls. However, if at the beginning of July he was a clear second choice for 35% of Republican voters, by the middle of August, this rating plummeted to 23%.

The pundits agree DeSantis failed at his strategy of becoming a “Trump-not-Trump” candidate, engaging aggressively in the same cultural wars but with a promise of electability in the midst of criminal investigations of the former president’s alleged behavior.

As it soon became clear, DeSantis failed to attract the loyal base of Trump’s conservative voters, who still believe in their candidate, while at the same time scaring away more moderate Republicans, who hope to cast their votes for someone not obsessed with a struggle for schools’ curricula.

DeSantis engaged in a feud with Trump, claiming that the latter failed to fulfill his presidential promises during his term, even with regard to building his notorious wall with Mexico. In response, Trump called his fellow Republican “Rondesanctimonious” and advised him to get a “personality transplant.”

“When he tries to be as visceral as Trump, he just comes off as weird,” sums up David Bateman, a political scientist at Cornell.

Alternative candidates

The good news is that even if DeSantis fails, he’s not the only pro-crypto candidate. 

The Democrats have Robert Kennedy Jr., who publicly confessed to buying 2 BTC for each of his children. He also announced that he would begin accepting campaign donations in Bitcoin and make the currency exempt from capital gains taxes if elected president.

Kennedy even promised to back the U.S. dollar with Bitcoin in the event of his victory. But for all that, in late July, just 9% of Democrats had a favorable opinion of Kennedy, with words like “crazy,” “dangerous,” “insane,” “nutjob,” “conspiracy” and “crackpot” among the most popular to describe the candidate.

Perhaps still far from the obvious favorite, the youngest-ever Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, managed to raise the level of favorable opinions about him from 16% in April to 27.2% in August and stands third in the polls after Trump and DeSantis.

The candidate, called “very promising” by entrepreneur Elon Musk, pushed for a stronger crypto industry in the U.S. and also accepts BTC for campaign donations, even offering nonfungible tokens (NFTs) to qualifying donors.

One obvious problem is that Ramaswamy demonstrates no less eccentricity than Kennedy, comparing Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley to the Ku Klux Klan’s grand wizard (Pressley is Black) and rapping Eminem’s songs at events. The rapper has since asked Ramaswamy to stop.

“Speaking about Governor DeSantis, I think it will be surprising to some that, by some polling, he may have been the winner or a winner of a recent debate,” Martin Dobelle, co-founder and CEO of Engage — a platform for crypto donations to political campaigns — told Cointelegraph.

Indeed, according to polls conducted in the aftermath of the Republican candidates’ first debate, 29% of debate viewers considered DeSantis to be the best performer of the evening.

However, 26% of respondents named Ramaswamy as the champion of the debate. It should be noted that Donald Trump was absent from the debate.

Nevertheless, Dobelle doesn’t think that one person should be considered a “crypto candidate,” nor should a single party be named the pro-crypto party.

“Dragging financial technology into this polarized political climate is not going to be a constructive strategy,” he said. “Rather than putting its chips behind one candidate, party or another, crypto should be building bridges and meeting people where they are in terms of where and how to start conversations about policy.”

Magazine: How to protect your crypto in a volatile market: Bitcoin OGs and experts weigh in

Dave Weisberger, CEO of algorithmic trading platform CoinRoutes, believes that it’s not just candidates who can influence crypto regulation. He told Cointelegraph, “Even with the current Biden administration’s open hostility towards digital assets, they might change policy if the pollsters tell them to do so.”

Perhaps the major intrigue that remains is Donald Trump’s crypto card for 2024. A vocal Bitcoin critic during his presidential term, the politician was recently revealed to possess over $2.8 million in an Ethereum wallet, in addition to over $4.8 million from licensing fees tied to NFT collections using his image.

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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19 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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Mortgage rates fall as labor market normalizes

Jobless claims show an expanding economy. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

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1 day ago

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March 8, 2024

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Everyone was waiting to see if this week’s jobs report would send mortgage rates higher, which is what happened last month. Instead, the 10-year yield had a muted response after the headline number beat estimates, but we have negative job revisions from previous months. The Federal Reserve’s fear of wage growth spiraling out of control hasn’t materialized for over two years now and the unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%. For now, we can say the labor market isn’t tight anymore, but it’s also not breaking.

The key labor data line in this expansion is the weekly jobless claims report. Jobless claims show an expanding economy that has not lost jobs yet. We will only be in a recession once jobless claims exceed 323,000 on a four-week moving average.

From the Fed: In the week ended March 2, initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits were flat, at 217,000. The four-week moving average declined slightly by 750, to 212,250


Below is an explanation of how we got here with the labor market, which all started during COVID-19.

1. I wrote the COVID-19 recovery model on April 7, 2020, and retired it on Dec. 9, 2020. By that time, the upfront recovery phase was done, and I needed to model out when we would get the jobs lost back.

2. Early in the labor market recovery, when we saw weaker job reports, I doubled and tripled down on my assertion that job openings would get to 10 million in this recovery. Job openings rose as high as to 12 million and are currently over 9 million. Even with the massive miss on a job report in May 2021, I didn’t waver.

Currently, the jobs openings, quit percentage and hires data are below pre-COVID-19 levels, which means the labor market isn’t as tight as it once was, and this is why the employment cost index has been slowing data to move along the quits percentage.  

2-US_Job_Quits_Rate-1-2

3. I wrote that we should get back all the jobs lost to COVID-19 by September of 2022. At the time this would be a speedy labor market recovery, and it happened on schedule, too

Total employment data

4. This is the key one for right now: If COVID-19 hadn’t happened, we would have between 157 million and 159 million jobs today, which would have been in line with the job growth rate in February 2020. Today, we are at 157,808,000. This is important because job growth should be cooling down now. We are more in line with where the labor market should be when averaging 140K-165K monthly. So for now, the fact that we aren’t trending between 140K-165K means we still have a bit more recovery kick left before we get down to those levels. 




From BLS: Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 275,000 in February, and the unemployment rate increased to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, in government, in food services and drinking places, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing.

Here are the jobs that were created and lost in the previous month:

IMG_5092

In this jobs report, the unemployment rate for education levels looks like this:

  • Less than a high school diploma: 6.1%
  • High school graduate and no college: 4.2%
  • Some college or associate degree: 3.1%
  • Bachelor’s degree or higher: 2.2%
IMG_5093_320f22

Today’s report has continued the trend of the labor data beating my expectations, only because I am looking for the jobs data to slow down to a level of 140K-165K, which hasn’t happened yet. I wouldn’t categorize the labor market as being tight anymore because of the quits ratio and the hires data in the job openings report. This also shows itself in the employment cost index as well. These are key data lines for the Fed and the reason we are going to see three rate cuts this year.

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January…

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March 8, 2024

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Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In History: Record 1.2 Million Immigrant Jobs Added In One Month

Last month we though that the January jobs report was the "most ridiculous in recent history" but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush. 

What happened? Let's take a closer look.

On the surface, it was (almost) another blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected, or rather just one bank out of 76 expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in February the US unexpectedly added 275K jobs, with just one research analyst (from Dai-Ichi Research) expecting a higher number.

Some context: after last month's record 4-sigma beat, today's print was "only" 3 sigma higher than estimates. Needless to say, two multiple sigma beats in a row used to only happen in the USSR... and now in the US, apparently.

Before we go any further, a quick note on what last month we said was "the most ridiculous jobs report in recent history": it appears the BLS read our comments and decided to stop beclowing itself. It did that by slashing last month's ridiculous print by over a third, and revising what was originally reported as a massive 353K beat to just 229K,  a 124K revision, which was the biggest one-month negative revision in two years!

Of course, that does not mean that this month's jobs print won't be revised lower: it will be, and not just that month but every other month until the November election because that's the only tool left in the Biden admin's box: pretend the economic and jobs are strong, then revise them sharply lower the next month, something we pointed out first last summer and which has not failed to disappoint once.

To be fair, not every aspect of the jobs report was stellar (after all, the BLS had to give it some vague credibility). Take the unemployment rate, after flatlining between 3.4% and 3.8% for two years - and thus denying expectations from Sahm's Rule that a recession may have already started - in February the unemployment rate unexpectedly jumped to 3.9%, the highest since February 2022 (with Black unemployment spiking by 0.3% to 5.6%, an indicator which the Biden admin will quickly slam as widespread economic racism or something).

And then there were average hourly earnings, which after surging 0.6% MoM in January (since revised to 0.5%) and spooking markets that wage growth is so hot, the Fed will have no choice but to delay cuts, in February the number tumbled to just 0.1%, the lowest in two years...

... for one simple reason: last month's average wage surge had nothing to do with actual wages, and everything to do with the BLS estimate of hours worked (which is the denominator in the average wage calculation) which last month tumbled to just 34.1 (we were led to believe) the lowest since the covid pandemic...

... but has since been revised higher while the February print rose even more, to 34.3, hence why the latest average wage data was once again a product not of wages going up, but of how long Americans worked in any weekly period, in this case higher from 34.1 to 34.3, an increase which has a major impact on the average calculation.

While the above data points were examples of some latent weakness in the latest report, perhaps meant to give it a sheen of veracity, it was everything else in the report that was a problem starting with the BLS's latest choice of seasonal adjustments (after last month's wholesale revision), which have gone from merely laughable to full clownshow, as the following comparison between the monthly change in BLS and ADP payrolls shows. The trend is clear: the Biden admin numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP (which directly logs employment numbers at the company level and is far more accurate), shows an accelerating slowdown.

But it's more than just the Biden admin hanging its "success" on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge... such as the growing unprecedented divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) survey and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 275K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped for the third straight month (and 4 in the past 5), this time by 184K (from 161.152K to 160.968K).

This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has not budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.

There's more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of "new jobs" has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in February 2024, the US had 132.9 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that's great... until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 921K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.941 million).

Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the new jobs have been part-time jobs!

But wait there's even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!

The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!

Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 6 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers...

Source: St Louis Fed FRED Native Born and Foreign Born

... but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since June 2018!

This is a huge issue - especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the southwest border...

... and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened - i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.

Which is also why Biden's handlers will do everything in their power to insure there is no official recession before November... and why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get even more ridiculous.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2024 - 13:30

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