Nevin's Data "Points"

If you have turned on a TV, walked by a radio, driven down a residential street, gotten an unsolicited text or answered a phone (or more likely let it go unanswered) in the past month, you will, of course, be aware that our nation will officially go to the polls today. I say “officially,” but of course, our nation has been “going” to the polls—or at least casting votes—for several weeks now. And while some states (and voters) have done so in elections past, a combination of factors means that the process of voting, like so much of our lives the past couple of years, is going to be “unprecedented,” both in terms of the breadth and volume of votes cast prior to election “day”—and perhaps on that day itself. And yes, it’s been a particularly nasty—one feels compelled to say “unprecedented”—election cycle. Now, we all carry on as though the nation has never, ever seen anything like this—but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it hasn’t …in our lifetimes. Students ...

If you have turned on a TV, walked by a radio, driven down a residential street, or answered a phone (or more likely let it go unanswered) in the past month, you will, of course, be aware that our nation will officially go to the polls today.  Of course, our nation has been “going” to the polls—or at least casting votes—for several weeks now. And while some states (and voters) have done so in elections past, a combination of factors (not the least, concerns about the current pandemic) means that the process of voting, like so much of our lives this year, is going to be “unprecedented,” both in terms of the breadth and volume of votes cast prior to election “day”—and perhaps on that day itself. And yes, it’s been a particularly nasty—one feels compelled to say “unprecedented”—election cycle.  In that regard, I recently came across this:  “Certainly, politics has never been a pretty business, but I doubt that I would get much argument in stating that this p...

The morning after last week’s mid-term elections, a plan sponsor friend of mine called me up and asked me what I thought it all meant. Still bleary-eyed from sitting up watching the returns pile in the night before, I immediately launched into what I felt was an insightful assessment of the mood of the electorate, the trends of various interest groups that had, at least according to exit polling, shifted allegiances since 2008, the influence of the Tea Party, and the historical context of the shifts. After patiently listening to me ramble for several minutes, he finally interjected—“I mean, what does this mean for retirement plans.” Well, IMHO, you can’t completely separate the two. By any measure, the results were historic; Democrats lost their so-called 60-vote “super majority” in the Senate and, more significantly, control of the House, and in numbers that outpaced 1994’s turnaround (though that election also gave Republicans control of the Senate). That will certainly slow, if no...