For one thing, in a debate only half the house (roughly speaking) are likely to be his fans. Where’s the fun of speaking in public if you can’t feel they all adore you and are hanging on your every word? Nowhere, that’s where.
Trump does best when the people he’s attacking can’t respond. It’s been a long, long time since he was in a position where he had to let anyone talk back.
I keep on hearing about great debaters, but have yet to actually meet one except for Ross Perot. Perot is the only guy I’ve seen get a crowd on his side and substantially increase his poll standing as a result of debating.
No. You are wrong. I have followed Nate Silver and his peripatetic website closely since 2008, his podcast is a must-listen every week or more often, and he has clearly stated that the 70% number is for November. The number for if the election were held today is the “Nowcast”, where Drumpf’s chances are much lower.
Did you really not see the word “almost” that I put
right before the word “certainly”?
In any event, I will say it again: focusing on the horserace polls is missing the forest for the trees. Many candidates have had horse race deficits of this size. None of them had overwhelming numbers of women expressing very strong antipathy for the candidates, and a clear common sense reason as to why this would be so. Women are not stupid or flighty enough to change their minds on this, even if we thought Drumpf could suddenly start acting like a different person. And the same goes for minorities and college-educated white men.
And none of the polling even reflects the deficits in fundraising, the lack of staff, the fact that many experienced Republican operatives refuse to work for him, the quixotic targeting of states he can’t win, the refusal to try to emulate the sleek and efficient Democratic turnout data operation, or the fact that Hillary can lose most of the swing states and still win the election.
But sure, other than all that, Drumpf is doing great. He’s got her right where he wants her!
Trump will not debate Hillary. He’ll come up with an excuse, the lights are unflattering, the venue is wrong, the media are against him. And if, by some chance he does, he sure as fuck won’t do it twice. She’ll tie so many knots in his tail, he’ll qualify as macramé.
I wonder how the Log Cabin Republicans will be able to spin their support for that ticket.
But those 20,000 runs included increased uncertainty due to the possibility of differences between the poll results today and those in November. For example, he currently hasClinton up by 7 points in Minnesota. If the election were held tomorrow she would probably win by between 4 and 10 points. Only a massive problem with the polls would mean a victory for Trump in Minnesota if the election were held tomorrow. But the election is not being held tomorrow, and Nate realizes that this 7 point cushion may not hold up in the future, so he only gives her a 78% chance of winning the state. If this poll stays 7%, the bar will narrow and Clinton likelihood of victory will increase as the election gets closer.
Or to quote Nate himself from that page
[QUOTE= 538 election page]
Our model produces a distribution of outcomes for the national popular vote. The curves will get narrower as the election gets closer and our forecasts become more confident.
[/QUOTE]
In this article discussing his modelhe claims to have a Now Cast published, but I haven’t been able to find it.
[QUOTE=Nate Silver]
In addition to the polls-only and polls-plus forecasts, we’re also publishing something called a now-cast. The now-cast isn’t a forecast; it’s a hypothetical projection of what would happen if the election were held today. The now-cast is designed to be extremely aggressive about identifying trends in the polls, more aggressive than is optimal when forecasting an election several months out. (One of the big lessons of our model, in fact, is that you want to be fairly conservative about declaring turning points early in the race. Apparent shifts in the polls often reverse themselves.) As a result, the now-cast is subject to some fairly violent swings and will sometimes pick up more noise than signal. Still, it can provide for an interesting diagnostic of which candidate has momentum, however fleeting.
[/QUOTE]
I just found the Now-cast button and I stand corrected regarding the landslide. I still stand by my claims that his models take into account the fact that uncertainty over time, but it seems that Nate includes quite large error bars when translating this polls into winning likelihoods. But then he’s studied elections more than I have so I won’t try to second guess this.
Silver had a lot of the primary elections very wrong.
They’re already pretty pissed off about the GOP platform:
Yes, and he’s explained what he misread:
Also, for the record: he got the vast majority of the individual primaries right. Where he messed up was underestimating Trump’s chances to win the nomination. As he admits in the article:
I like Silver a lot; I think he’s quite brilliant. I also think that polls have gotten increasingly difficult to interpret, due to the issues in data collection, as well as the high negatives that both candidates have, and the possible unwillingness of some Trump voters to admit (even to a pollster) that that’s who they’re going to vote for.
I think that, if there is anyone capable of reading the November tea leaves properly, it’s going to be someone like Nate Silver; OTOH, I also think that there’s a non-trivial chance that even the best polls aren’t going to be right come election day.
I’ve heard a lot of people say this, but I found his defense of the numbers pretty persuasive. A lot of it comes down to probability. If, to simplify things, you take ten states where he thought Candidate X had a 60% chance of winning, and in four of those states Candidate Y won, most people will say “Silver got almost half of them wrong” even though this is the *optimal *result for his prediction. Whereas if Candidate X won all ten, people would say “Silver nailed it on all ten”, but if he’s honest he has to wonder if this result suggests that he gave Candidate Y too high a chance in some or all of those states.
No Mr. Trump, you are the one making false accusations designed to incite more division.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-propagator-of-race-hatred-and-violence
Is 31.7 lower than 30 now? Must be the new math.
Today’s Nowcast: Clinton 68.3, Trump 31.7.
Those numbers I wrote above are as posted on the 538 Nowcast on July 13, 2016, the day you wrote the post to which I replied. Buck Godot, please note this. That’s the prediction if the election were held now. It is not the prediction assuming uncertainty between now and November. I don’t know how you can’t find the Nowcast, it’s right there with the polls and polls-plus options.
No he didn’t. At least, not number-wise. He and his pundits wrote article after article “unskewing” the poll numbers. Probably because they could not believe what they were seeing. But the actual poll numbers held up pretty well.
This really needs to be highlighted. Donald Trump is making up lies about black people and Black Lives Matters in order to paint them as dangerous Others - just like Hitler did with the Jewish people. Donald Trump is holding himself out as the strong leader who can save America from the dangerous Others - just like Hitler did in the run up to World War 2.
Actually, while I believe that Donald really is a racist - I don’t believe he actually gives a shit about Black people or America. I think he’s just in it for the money. But it doesn’t matter what he actually believes in his heart of hearts.
What he’s doing is deliberately following Hitler’s playbook of demonizing some Outside group and promising that he’s the Authoritatian Figure who can save us.
This is facism. It’s racism. It’s scary as fuck. It is not politics as usual from the Republicans, even though the Republicans have been quietly embracing racism for decades. This is different and it needs to be stopped - by all of us. All the voters. All the press. All the officals and judges. This is on all of us to stand up and speak truth to power.
Actually, Miss Alabama called him a martyr:
http://www.whas11.com/news/nation/first-black-miss-ala-calls-dallas-police-shooter-a/271566752
As pointed in the pit, nutpicking, and outside any of the organizations making the protests.