Hello! So, the Powerball rolled over again, meaning our chart from Friday is already out of date. We're exploring forming a syndicate to buy all the tickets — if there's no newsletter on Wednesday, we pulled it off. Today we're exploring:
Tomorrow America heads to the polls. All 435 House seats and 35 of the 100 Senate seats are on the ballot, two years on from the 2020 election which saw more than two-thirds of voters turnout to vote — the highest number in 120 years.
Turn up, turn up
Although midterms have always seen lower turnout rates than presidential elections, usually trailing by around 16%, the chasm opened up to its widest point in 2014 when just 37% of those eligible turned out to vote in the midterms, compared to 58% who had voted in the 2012 presidential race just 2 years earlier.
The most-recent midterms, however, were a little better-attended. Roughly half of the eligible electorate got out to vote in 2018, and turnout for this year is expected to be even higher. More people are also voting early, perhaps a remnant of behaviors from the pandemic, with ~41% of registered voters planning to vote early this year, up from ~34% in the 2018 midterms.
For Biden, the midterms will be a reckoning of how his presidency is faring. Poll data collated by fivethirtyeight shows Biden’s approval rating has struggled to regain ground since the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan, with domestic economic issues now taking center stage in races across the country.
Smells like bad business
If you ever thought that building giant, used-vehicle vending machines would be a great business model, we have some bad news for you. Carvana, the online used-car dealership, saw its shares plummet 39% in trading on Friday after they announced slowing sales.
Driven down
Despite riding the hottest used-car market in recent history, Carvana has yet to prove that its business model really works.
Revenues grew at lightspeed to more than $3bn a quarter, but as the economy has turned, so too has Carvana’s fortune, with modestly falling sales translating into rapidly mounting losses. Inspection centers across the country, heavy advertising spend and the cost of picking up and delivering cars have made the economics of each Carvana sale razor-thin. Offering loans and other fees has helped, but ultimately hasn't been enough to get the company into the black.
Arguably most worrying for investors is that the company reported having just $316m of cash on its balance sheet. With quarterly losses at a similar level, investors have dumped the shares, and the 34 glass vending machine monoliths increasingly look like white elephants.
Once hailed by some as the ‘Amazon of car dealers’, Carvana’s crash has been — on a relative basis — perhaps the most aggressive of any company in the last few years. The shares have fallen some 97% from their peak, reportedly wiping ~$18bn from the combined wealth of the father-son partnership who are at the wheel.
TikTok’s top for teens
TikTok has tightened its grip on the attention spans of teenagers. That was the conclusion from a new survey from Piper Sandler, which revealed that 38% of teens selected the short-form video app as their favorite social platform.
For you?
TikTok’s famed algorithm, at times unnervingly all-knowing, has long been pointed to as the reason behind its immense popularity and addictive nature. Its ‘For You’ page serves up, depending on your taste, a tailor-made concoction of cat clips, dance routines, food and fashion content.
That algorithm is clearly working for TikTok, as they extended their lead over Snapchat and Instagram, voted top by 30% and 20% of teens, respectively. Facebook and Twitter remain prohibitively “uncool”, with just 2% of teens naming them as their faves.
Interestingly, as those teens become adults, they increasingly turn to TikTok for more substantive content too — Pew Research estimates that roughly one-quarter of American adults under 30 are now regularly getting news from the Chinese company.
From here, it’s hard to imagine what would derail TikTok on its path to global domination. A ban by the US government is perhaps the biggest risk to TikTok, something that an increasing number of officials are now calling for, as concerns about Chinese state influence grow louder.
• Slavoj Zizek and Werner Herzog literally talk forever through this AI-generated discussion.
• Workers at a Home Depot in Philadelphia have voted overwhelmingly against forming a union, 165-to-51, failing to replicate the more successful unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon.
• A “magnificent” 500-year-old tree has been named UK Tree of the Year.
• What are the most popular days to work from home?
• Visualizing how the president's party has performed in the midterms over the past 80 years.
Off the charts: Which rapidly growing hobby were we charting about back in June? [Answer below].
