You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news.
15 minutes
In August, Priorities USA Action, the super PAC backing Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency, has aired advertisements at the rate of one ad every 15 minutes in Florida and one every 17 minutes in Ohio. [The Center For Public Integrity]
163 percent
Increase in the number of cases of syphilis in London since 2010. The disease is spreading rapidly. [The Guardian]
671 percent
Pay increase for Heather Bresch over the past 9 years. Bresch is the CEO of Mylan, the pharmaceutical company that’s in the news for hiking the price of several drugs including the EpiPen. Given that people with certain allergies need EpiPens in order to not die in agony of anaphylactic shock, people are understandably miffed at Mylan for raising the price from $56.64 in 2007 to $317.82 today. [The Guardian]
3,964
Number of copies of Donald Trump’s book “Crippled America” that the Trump campaign bought from a New York Barnes & Noble on May 10. The purchases juiced the sales to the point that the tome was on the Nielsen bestseller list. This is not precisely kosher: If Trump profited from the sales, that could be a violation of federal campaign finance law. [The Daily Beast]
436,484 voters
Much has been made of an increase in Republican Party registrations and a potential buoying effect it could have on the Trump campaign. Registration for Democrats has dropped since 2012 in a number of key swing states, but a close look at voter registration figures led my colleague David Wasserman to conclude that those losses haven’t generally translated into gains for the GOP. Florida, for example, has added 436,484 voters since 2012, but nonwhites — who tend not to support Donald Trump — account for 76 percent of the new voters. [FiveThirtyEight]
40 trillion kilometers
Good news everyone: Scientists found a new planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system at 40 trillion kilometers away. Sure, we will all almost definitely be dead by the time we manage to send something there, but still it’s pretty neat. [BBC]
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