Cable News Gears up for Election Day & America's Homebuyers are Older Than Ever
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, election day is here. We'll run down what to expect as the votes start rolling in. Then, the presidential race isn't the only issue on the ballot in Florida today. Voters will also decide whether to legalize recreational marijuana. It's Tuesday, November 5th. Let's ride. ♪

Good morning and happy Election Day. Ever wonder why Americans vote on a random Tuesday in November and not, you know, a more convenient time? It's all to accommodate 19th century farmers who accounted for the majority of the labor force. In 1845, Congress passed a law that designated Election Day as the first Tuesday after the

Here we are.

a Tuesday in November. It always comes back to the farmers, but in modern times, there has been some pushback to putting Election Day on a random Tuesday, as you called it. First of all, less than 2% of Americans work in agriculture these days, but also people have promoted

proposed moving Election Day to a weekend or making Election Day a federal holiday to increase voter turnout because it's hard to sometimes get off work on a Tuesday. Also, in general, mail-in ballots in early voting have made Election Day more like Election Week. I've been seeing a lot of people rocking I Voted stickers already. So times are shifting, but for now, it still is Tuesday, November 5th.

Now, a word from today's sponsor, Yahoo Finance. Neil, Election Day, big day for the country, but also big day for your brokerage account. Yeah, the only thing that we know for certain is that the market does not like uncertainty. Sneaking a peek at how your portfolio is doing will

only go so far in helping you understand why your stocks might be reacting the way they are. It's in those moments where Yahoo Finance can be so helpful. Instead of just looking at if things are red or green, go a level deeper with their detailed research reports or up-to-date news stories. It's basically what we do every day on the show. Read a lot of stuff and make sense of it for you all. Yahoo Finance is almost like your own personal Neil and Toby when it comes to your finances.

It can never replace Neal's number, so don't you worry. If you want to stay in the loop today and all days, check out yahoofinance.com. Well, the political equivalent of the Olympics is here, but instead of switching between group stage rugby, pairs archery, and gymnastics, we'll be digesting voter tallies from the Philly suburbs, Milwaukee, and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. To help Americans make sense of the numbers coming in tonight, our TV news networks like CNN, Fox News, and

NBC, ABC, CBS, who for decades have been the go-to source for election coverage in the United States. They have been preparing years for today, which has historically ranked among the most viewed broadcasts of the year. And they're going all out. Expect panels overflowing with analysts, fancy data visualizations, reporters at polling stations, Steve Kornacki in front of his big board, but bigger and more tech-infused than ever before.

But if I had to describe the biggest change coming to election night broadcast this year, it's one word, transparency. Last month, a Gallup survey showed that trust in mass media reached a new low with misleading accusations of voter fraud flying around social media and the public not at all clear on the process of projecting winners. Network execs say they'll go above and beyond to show their work to viewers. Yeah, one way that they're doing that is putting a lot more power in your fingertips, in your pockets to follow the election. I mean,

The magic wall at CNN is no longer just on your TV with John King standing by. Now it is actually an unpaywalled feature within their app, so you can tap and explore each race, and you can feel like John King at home. You are right, though, that there is a lot more different tech being rolled out this election. One thing that I want to call out, too, is Peacock.

It's just doing this thing where they're turning everything into NFL red zone. They did it for the Olympics, which was awesome. They are now doing it for this election as well. You can switch between the breaking news. You can switch between the real-time results. Obviously, Kornacki came as well to see how he's rocking the khakis. So, yeah, there's just reinventing and rethinking the way that people can follow the election this time around. And a bunch of news outlets say they're going to put more boots on the ground. The AP...

is going to deploy roughly, I didn't believe this was real, but 4,000 reporters in precincts across the country to be their eyes and ears as all of the ballots are counted. There will be a bunch of other news outlets are also sending hundreds and thousands of reporters to various ballot stations. So you will be able to see the ballots being counted in this election more so than any other. And this is obviously a counterweight to a lot of the misinformation that's been spread around, around, around.

you know, voter fraud and things like that. Another thing you'll see a lot of lawyers. So already this race has been the most litigated in American history. We haven't even reached election day yet. So along with those panels of analysts, the talking heads that you'll see, they're going to bring in a lot of lawyers to help break down a lot of the legal matters that pop up

as they will over the course of election night. And as we're talking about these projections, who's going to win and why they win these states, how are they, how are these projections made? You know, like when that dramatic music plays, Wolf Blitzer says CNN has a projection to make. We can now call Florida for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win New York. These groups employ a team of election geeks that put tons and tons of data, both current and historical, into a model. And when that math equation reaches a certain confidence level that a candidate is going to win a race, they make a

call. Yeah, diving into that math piece a little bit, the way that the AP calls the race, for instance, is that they call it when there's no way for the trailing candidate to catch up. But these days, it's not just that they call the race, it's that they also show kind of the methodology and the process behind it. It used to be, even 10 years ago, the AP would make a race call and that was just accepted as a race call. There weren't a ton of

questions about it, but now they are kind of going behind the scenes, revealing their process a little bit to increase that confidence level in these election calls, especially as there is more kind of misinformation floating around these days. They can't just say that, hey, we've been 99% accurate in the past. Just trust us, bro. Now there's a lot more show their work out there these days.

That's probably why there are only three firms, really, that can do this. And Decision Desk HQ says that their proxy for when they'll call a race is that three of the 15 gurus on their team have a 99.9% confidence that a candidate is going to win a race based on their mathematical model. And whether people will even watch all this play out on TV is a key question. As you know, TV networks are losing out to the Internet as a place where people get their news.

And so it goes on Election Day, too. Websites publish up to the minute voting data. Political influencers are going to host live streams on their Twitch channels. And of course, Twitter is going to see a surge in interest. And there's evidence that just like other TV broadcasts, election coverage is seeing a big dip in viewership. In 2020, 57 million people tuned in during primetime to watch the votes get counted. That's almost 15 million fewer than in 2016.

All of these kind of news outlets are trying to grab attention in different ways. One way, for instance, the New York Times is trying to grab attention is with the needle. It's this meter that fluctuates as it measures kind of the probability that one presidential candidate will win. It's not necessarily where the race currently stands. It is the probability that one candidate will win at the current moment. But the needle could be in trouble this time around because New York Times Tech Guild announced Monday morning that is a

Officially undergoing an unfair labor practice strike. So just one day, obviously, before the presidential election. So there is a little bit of nerviness around if the site and the needle can handle the traffic without the tech workers kind of behind the scenes maintaining it. But you're right. It is an all out battle for eyeballs these days. Yeah, I mean, this is this strike is a big deal. It's the first such labor stoppage to coincide with the presidential election in 60 years. And you have New York Times saying,

very publicly seething that their tech workers would go on strike during election day, which is probably going to be the most trafficked day of the year for the New York Times website. There's so much data to collate. People are going to go there for results. And they, you know, management is like, you could have picked, could have picked the

any other 364 days of the year. But the Tech Guild is responding and saying, no, we want to make this painful for you because you have not met our demands. So we'll see whether the New York Times tech breaks over the course of today where they're going to get a ton of traffic.

The final thing to know about election night is there's a good chance we aren't going to know who was elected president tonight. With the surge in early and mail-in voting, some key states are going to take days to provide a full tally. Remember, four years ago, it took four days before President Biden was projected to eclipse the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election.

So just saying, be prepared not just for election night, but election week. Right. It is different across states to battleground states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Election workers are not allowed to begin processing mailed-in ballots until Election Day, which is why sometimes we'll see those elongated timelines. But you are right. Timeline is stretching these days. It is not just election night. You know, you know. Now it is going to more than likely take multiple days to declare a winner.

While Floridians turn out to vote today, they won't just be deciding on a presidential candidate, but also the future of marijuana in the Sunshine State. Amendment 3 is a ballot measure that aims to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults in the state. A yes vote opens marijuana up for personal, non-medical reasons, while a no vote would keep marijuana confined to medical use only. It's a vote that has brought out some major power players on both sides in a high-profile and expensive way.

Weed War. On the vote no side, you have Governor Ron DeSantis and billionaire Ken Griffin, who has been funding a campaign against the referendum in Florida. On the other side, you have Donald Trump, who said he plans to vote yes on Amendment 3. John Morgan, a powerful injury lawyer from Florida who calls himself unlawful

Pot Daddy, and obviously the entire cannabis industry. So far, DeSantis' side has been woefully outgunned, raising about $24 million, half of which came from new Florida resident Ken Griffin, which is a pittance compared to the $145 million raised

pumped into a pro-weed campaign by a single company, True Leave Cannabis. So Neil, we're calling this a weed war, but right now one side is getting outspent 9 to 1, so it's not looking like a very fair fight. No, but polls show that this is going to be close. Florida needs 60% of the voters to pass these ballot measures, and the polls show that it's right about at 60%. This is

not just a Florida story. This is a national story because if recreational marijuana is legalized in Florida, that means about 60% of the U S population would have access to recreational weed. 24 states have already legalized it. And Florida is a massive market, 23 million people, 140 million visit each year. So people who are pro cannabis legalizing it say Florida really is the tipping point where it could become a

legalized at a federal level because of just how many people, just how many people live there, just how many people visit there every single year. And if, you know, as Florida goes, so goes the country. And they're thinking that Florida could be that if they do pass, this could spur that wave of momentum to get this recognized at the federal level.

And you're right. Even though there is some discrepancy in spending, it is a pretty close measure right now. It does require that 60% threshold to pass. Recent poll by FAU and mainstream research showed that 56% of voters supported legalization, 34% opposed it, 6% were undecided. And that...

The support was obviously mostly coming from the 18 to 49-year-old bracket. So it is just another thing to look at because you're right, even though it is just Florida we're talking about, it does have national scale implications and could be the thing that tips it over to legalizing marijuana federally. And while we're on the subject, there are a bunch of

referendums across state ballots. Voters in 10 states are going to decide whether to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions, including Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and Nebraska. That would be the most significant expansion of abortion access since the Supreme Court overturned

Roe v. Wade. Affordable housing is on the ballot in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, New Orleans, and Rhode Island. And as we'll talk about later on the show, housing has been a huge issue in this election. Then finally, Alaska, Missouri, and California are going to vote on lifting the minimum wage. Speaking of housing, up next, some surprising stats about who is buying houses these days.

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A new report out yesterday highlights just how difficult it is to become a first-time homebuyer in this era of sky-high housing prices. Americans who bought homes for the first time between July 2023 and June 2024 were older and richer than ever before, according to a National Association of Realtors survey.

Don't remember Nick at night. You're probably been priced out of a starter home. The typical first time home buyer rose to 38 years old, a new record high for context. A typical first time home buyer was in their late 20s a generation ago. Meanwhile, the median household income of a first time home buyer rose to ninety seven thousand dollars.

up $26,000 in just two years, and a record high of 7% of first-time buyers tapped an inheritance to afford their down payment. The numbers point to a housing market that is increasingly out of reach for younger people looking to make the big rent-to-own shift that millennials call adulting. The NAR's deputy chief economist put it like this.

We're seeing a dichotomy in this real estate market where those first-time homebuyers are not just your traditional first-time buyers like schoolteachers or first responders really entering the market. The people who can get in are really a select few. And talk about a select few. In the last year, first-time buyers accounted for just 24% of all homebuyers, the lowest share on record.

You know, those memes comparing what you were doing when you were 28 to what your parents were doing when you were 28, it's actually playing out in real life. Cause I mean, you go back to the eighties. Now the median age of the first time buyer is a decade older than it was back then. So it is not just a joke. It really is. Everyone is getting older because you have to make more and more money to afford these things. And a lot of the, uh,

houses are just going to richer households. I mean, that stat that the median income of a first-time buyer jumped $26,000 to nearly $100,000 is just an insane thing in the span of just a few years that we're talking about. So housing market is getting older. You have to be richer and you probably aren't

seeing the same sort of home buyers that you saw even a few decades ago. Another trend I want to call out is the amount of homes owned by single women. So in 2022, single women owned 58% of the homes owned by unmarried Americans. Single men owned 42%. And this report is showing that the gap is only increasing. About 20% of homes were purchased by single women in that

time span last year compared with 8% of single men. So that is a very interesting trend to watch. Single women are much more likely to be homeowners than single men. You're seeing a lot more empty nesters. 73% of all buyers have no child under 18 at home this year, which is up from 70% last year. And the final trend, there's a lot more multi-generational living. We talked about this boom-mate trend of people living...

millennials living with boomers. That is actually happening. Multi-generational living has reached a record high of 17% in the last year, according to the survey. And part of the reason is that no one can really find a house because a lot of people are staying put for longer. Before the Great Recession, 2008, 2009, people stayed in their homes for an average of about six years. Now people are holding onto their homes for an average of

10 years. Part of the reason is that interest rates have just been super low. So we call it like the golden handcuffs. You don't want to exit a house with a great interest rate to buy a new house with a much higher mortgage rate. So that is some of the reason why the housing market is so clogged up and why you might be having an older roommate these days because people want more affordability. Older people are the ones with houses. They are empty nesters. So that is why the boom mate trend is on the rise as well.

Like those little magic grow capsules that expand when you put them in water, TVs are undergoing a jumbo transformation themselves. Gone are the days when 65-inch screens were considered above average. Today, it's all about flat screens the size of sofas.

a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. There have been over 38 million television sets sold with a width of at least 97 inches in the first nine months of the year. That is 10 times the amount sold over the same period last year, according to market research firm Circona. Why the huge spike? Well, like Tom Brady late in his career, TVs are getting better and less expensive.

If we go back even as recently as 2019, Samsung unveiled a 98-inch TV that cost $99,000. Now, the company has four versions of that size, starting at just $4,000. Overall, the average price for TVs that are 97 inches and up is just $3,113 this year, down from $6,662 last year. Neil, we're talking about TVs that are the same width

as a king size bed here, but sometimes bigger just really is better. How do people have space for this? That was the biggest question for me because I feel like you need a football field length from put your sofa down there for a hundred inch screen TV at the other end zone for it to be safe.

for you, but actually the recommended distance for a 98 inch TV is just six to 12 feet from the seating area. So maybe not impossible for people with bigger houses. The rule of thumb here is to multiply the diagonal length of the TV by 1.2 to determine the ideal viewing distance. That said, Best Buy has deployed their geek squad and

certain AR technology to make sure that you can fit these massive TVs through your door and up the stairs and whatever you need so it fits in your living space. But we are seeing a big emergence of massive TVs. I just want to point out, it still accounts for just 1.7% of all revenue from TV set sales during the first nine months of the year. So this is still a niche market. If you walk into a house and see somebody with a 100-inch TV, they are an outlier.

liar, but it does seem to be growing. Just directionally though, it is an interesting purchase cycle. Televisions, people usually only buy a TV every seven years or so, but when they do, they do typically choose bigger ones because you never want to go from what you were at to downsizing. Also, the pandemic accelerated this gigantism trend, if you want to call it, because as you're spending more time at home, people are like, might as well upgrade it. So screen size has actually increased by an average of

two inches in both 2021 and 2022 compared to the usual one inch increase in size. So I think that it speaks to another post-pandemic trend as well. Bigger TVs are better for hosting people. They are better for having a shared watching experience. So I do think, especially emerging from the pandemic, people are like,

Let's why are we even holding back here? Let's invite people over for the game. Let's invite people over for the movie night. And the best way to do that is with the biggest TV possible and the multi-screen viewing experience, too. I know YouTube TV lets you have, you know, basically quad box it so you can watch multiple things at once. So while the rest of us have our laptops opened to one thing and the TV on another with these big TVs, you can just get three or four TV shows going at once.

Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. We have a deal, folks. Striking Boeing workers voted to accept a new contract from the company, ending an eight-week long strike that had frozen production and cost the planemaker more than $100 million in revenue every day. After rejecting the previous three contracts offered by Boeing, workers decided this latest one was the best they would get.

It includes a 38% wage increase over four years and more retirement contributions. Toby, ending this strike was number one on new CEO Kelly Ortberg's to-do list. I mean, they finally did it. The workers did not get the reinstatement of the company's pension plan that they were after. They did get those increased 401k benefits. But also, you have to remember, too, that even though 59% of

voted yes. 41% did still vote no on this. So the kind of union leadership are saying, hey, we're going to press for even better terms in 2028. So maybe we'll be sitting in these chairs having a very similar conversation a little bit down the road.

Elon Musk's $1 million a day giveaway scheme in key swing states has been allowed to proceed by a Pennsylvania state judge after the Philadelphia DA sued to block the contest for being an illegal lottery. Oddly enough, the argument America PAC's lawyers made was that the free cash was not a prize, but was actually a payment for the recipients to act as spokespeople for the pro-Trump PAC.

So less of a lottery and more of a poorly framed compensation scheme for supporters of Elon's favored presidential candidate. Here's this hearing really hinged on the definition of chance and lottery and what what was meant by random. Because remember, Elon Musk said we're going to be awarding a million dollars randomly to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election. His lawyer walked that back and said, I would not have chosen randomly.

this to be, you know, to say the word randomly, but so ends the one of the more unique political initiatives that we've seen in modern decades. The world is remembering a music legend. Quincy Jones, the American musician and producer, died at the age of 91 in California this weekend. Jones is best known as the producer of Michael Jackson's album Fever.

thriller, but his career is full of incredible achievements. He worked closely with Frank Sinatra on Fly Me to the Moon, changing it from a waltz to a swing. He won 28 Grammy Awards, a Tony, an Emmy, and an honorary Oscar. And in perhaps the biggest symbol of his influence, he was the ringleader who rounded up 46 of America's top artists with massive egos to record We Are the World for Charity in 1985, an absolute musical giant.

There's this interview that Jones did a few years back with the publication Vulture, and I can't recommend it enough. It is truly wild, pretty uncensored as well. He talks about how Michael Jackson was pretty ruthless when it came to stealing songs. He thought that the Beatles were bad musicians, especially Ringo Starr. But you're right, his impact is hard to overstate. We Are The World, all his work with MJ, all his work with Frank Sinatra. He was also an executive producer on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, did soundtracks for Roots,

The guy's body of work is incredible, as it was wide-ranging, truly a titan of the music industry. Mark Zuckerberg's plans to get in on the nuclear-powered AI data center craze sweeping big tech has been thwarted by a rare species of bees.

Tired of seeing its rivals like Microsoft and Amazon spin up nuclear plants of their own to power their AI ambitions, Meta had planned to strike a deal with an existing operator to get into the nuclear game, but the rare bees proved to be a buzzkill, and now the project

Welcome to the infrastructure game, Zuck. Seriously, he's not built a lot of physical things besides maybe his VR headsets, but building a factory, you encounter a lot of environmental regulations that maybe you don't think about when you're building software. And we laugh, but this is...

a huge arms race to build these data centers. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all inked nuclear deals. They didn't have any B issues. So Zuck is probably seething right now saying, man, I really need to build this and trying to figure out another site for it. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for sending your morning with us and have a wonderful election day. For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. And if you're enjoying the pod, spread the love. Share Morning Brew Daily with a friend, family member, or

coworker who could use a dose of business news in the AM for even more specific inspiration. Toby has got you. I want you to share the pod with someone who is rocking an I voted sticker today as a thank you for fulfilling their civic duty. Send them in the morning brew daily episode as a reward.

Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Uchenna Waogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. Hair and Makeup took time off to vote, which we commend. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.