Obamacare enrollment down from 9.2 million last year to 8.7 million this year

Apparently not everyone is so thrilled by the system.  Note that this also just provides further evidence about how poorly the government is at predicting enrollment in the system.  From the Washington Times:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services now says about 8.7 million people booked coverage on the federal website through Saturday, a drop from the roughly 8.8 million signups it reported last week, after the enrollment period officially closed on Dec. 15. 

The tally fell short of the 9.2 million who used HealthCare.gov last year, though Obamacare supporters cheered the numbers as a strong showing in the face of President Trump’s antipathy toward the law. 

Officials said the updated total for 2018 reflects the share of people who either canceled their plan selections at the last minute or dropped coverage after they were automatically enrolled for 2018. . . .

Newt Gingrich says that Republicans will win big at the polls this next November

If Newt is right, he has a chance to make a lot of money in the betting odds markets.

Newt Gingrich said Thursday that Democrats are headed for a major political upset in 2018, mostly due to the mainstream media’s dishonesty and the party’s inability to learn from its own mistakes. 

“The great political surprise of 2018 will be the size of the Republican victory,” the former Republican House Speaker wrote in a column for Fox News. “After members of the elite media have spent two years savaging President Trump, lying about Republican legislation, and reassuring themselves that Republican defeat was inevitable, the size of the GOP victory in 2018 will be an enormous shock.” 

Mr. Gingrich said the most glaring example of “fake news” is the media’s handling of the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which he said will be “the 2018 proving ground of media liberal bias and dishonesty.” 

“First, the media lied about the tax bill in an effort to convince most Americans their taxes would go up,” he wrote. “Then, the media took surveys of people who opposed the GOP bill based on the false information supplied by the media. Then, the media talked again and again about how unpopular the Republican plan was and how it was going to weaken Republican candidates in 2018. Then, the bill passed, and unsurprisingly, it turned out to be dramatically better for Americans than the elite media had described.” . . .

The rest of the article is available here. 

Democrat voter registration totals declining in key states

I have seen an earlier story on Colorado, but this story in the Washington Times suggests that the phenomenon is more widespread.  Is this because states are scrubbing the voter roles?  Is it because of the push to reduce vote fraud?  Is it changing allegiances?

. . . The same trend is playing out in Florida, Pennsylvania and other battleground states where Democrats should have been growing their numbers in the age of Mr. Trump, but instead are stumbling. 

They have lost 12,000 registered Democratic voters in Arizona since the presidential election, bringing the number down to 1.2 million. Republicans have lost just 1,000 voters and stand at nearly 1.4 million in the state. . . . 

In Pennsylvania, Democrats held a registration edge of about 800,000 over Republicans — 4 million to 3.2 million — as of Dec. 18. But the number of registered Democrats is down 4.5 percent, while Republicans have lost 2.4 percent. 

In Florida, Democrats hold a registration edge, but their ranks also have also dropped at a faster rate. 

As of Oct. 31, the number of registered Florida Democrats dropped 1.9 percent from last year to about 4.8 million. The number of registered Republican voters fell 0.6 percent, to about 4.6 million. 

Nevada Republicans, meanwhile, have shaved Democrats’ edge from 119,000 voters in October 2016 to about 98,000 as of Dec. 1. 

Former Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, Virginia Republican, said many registered Democrats are transient in nature and the changes might not necessarily be subtractions but shifts elsewhere. . . .

Democrats in North Carolina lost 3,829 registered voters from February to September. Republicans gained 9,241 and Libertarians gained 1,468, but unaffiliated voters grew by 47,099 registered voters, according to a report from the Civitas Institute, a right-leaning think tank in the state. 

In Nevada, Libertarians gained about 700 voters compared with last year, even as thousands of Democrats and Republicans dropped off the rolls. . . .