I just watched a this David Packman video and wonder what Straight Dopers think of this.
Exit polls are done in a completely different way than pre-election polls, and are historically much more accurate. According to Exit polls Hillary won in swing states that would have handed her the election. Some are saying election was flat out stolen from Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump lost North Carolina in exit polls 2, but won by 3.8 in votes, that is a 5.8. discrepancy, which is well outside of the margin of error in election polls. Pennsylvania Trump lost by 4.4 but won by 1.1 that’s a 5.5 discrepancy. Wisconsin, Florida— Trump also lost in the exit poll, but won in the vote count. According to Exit polls Hillary won in swing states that would have handed her the election.
I’m open to the idea if they can get evidence, but I don’t understand math enough to know for sure. I do know that voter suppression and Russian interference were major issues in this election cycle.
However my counterpoint is that Hillary did far worse in virtually every midwest or northeast state than Obama did in 2012. In Rhode Island she won by a 15 point margin but Obama won by a 28 point margin in 2012. The results from virtually all the northeastern states and midwest states say the same thing. So I guess my point is that why would a state like Pennsylvania had their net margin move 6 points to the right. Obama won by 5 in 2012, Hillary lost by 1 in 2016. So a 6 point move. But neighboring New York state also had a 7 point move, going from a 28 point margin for Obama to a 21 point margin for Clinton. Basically, most of the midwestern and northeastern states saw their net margins move 6-12 points to the right. In swing states that moved them from blue to red, but in solidly blue states nobody noticed. New Hampshire moving 6 points to the right made it too close to call. Vermont moving 10 points to the right wasn’t noticed. Hillary won VT by 26 points, Obama won by 36 in 2012.
I was under the impression that rigging a national election was very difficult, because elections were all very localized. I don’t think there is some master database of electronic votes you can hack into, but I really have no idea.
I don’t poo-poo this idea out of hand. This has been a very fucked up election cycle and arguably both the Russians and FBI interfered to get their candidate elected.
If you think the popular/electoral split just happened, that’s fine.
You’d seriously have to start looking into theoretical models to find a way to win the popular vote by so much more, yet still lose in the electoral college.
It’s exceedingly simple to do so: you run up huge margins in a some states, and lose by small margins in others. This is the nature of running elections (whether presidential or parliamentary) by geographic districts.
538 had some useful material the other day on even bigger discrepancies between ‘number of votes’ and ‘number of seats’ in the past: one of the most glaring examples in the past was the South African election in 1953 where the more right wing party got only 45% of the vote compared with 54% for their opponent, but still won the election because of the way the districts were drawn.
Nate Silver was predicting a 11% chance of Trump winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote (although the actual outcome that we’ve seen is much more unlikely than that, since Trump won the EC by a large margin).
Didn’t you say Soros was going to bribe the electors to put Hillary in anyway? Rigging the election in Trump’s favor seems a little counterproductive to that end.
Not really that large a margin…Basically, if Pennsylvania & Florida, both of which he won by ~1.2 or 1.3%, had gone the other way then Hillary would have won. The EC margin is somewhat irrelevant when you have a winner-take all system and these populous states where the popular vote margin is so close.
As for the OP: I did watch that Packman video early today but color me skeptical. It seems like there are a lot of reasons why the exit polls could have been off. Two examples that I could think of: (1) Incorrect weighting of the electorate…e.g., they presumably chose the precincts they polled in to mimic the electorate but they could have been significantly off in that. (2) Trump voters being more likely than Clinton voters to say “fuck off” to the pollsters. Presumably, a more detailed looked at the data could see whether these other possibilities could account for the result.
So, I would be interested in hearing a better investigation of why there were these large discrepancies between the exit polls and the results in those states but I remain skeptical of explanation of election fraud…and also how it could have been carried out. (And, like elbows, I would suspect the Russians before the Trump campaign given how utterly unprepared they seem to have been for him to win.)
Saying “exit polls are historically much more accurate” than pre-election polls doesn’t seem to have any basis in reality. One might even describe that line as “a pile of bullshit” but I’m perfectly happy to be proven wrong by a cite that doesn’t require me to watch a video.
This is anecdotal, but I know several statisticians including a couple who work in Democratic politics, and none of them think exit polls are particularly reliable. (Exit polls, for example, overstated the number of Black people who voted for Romney: it was closer to 1% than to the 5% or whatever that exit polls suggested).
Since Trump’s election I’ve seen quite a few on the left take a sudden interest in federalism, secession and gun ownership. Now they’re worried about electoral fraud, which before 11/8/2016 was simply an excuse for mean ol’ Republicans to keep non-white males from voting if the hysterics which passes for debate on this board can be trusted. You’ll be calling for tax cuts if things stay on this trajectory.
The left has always been interested in federalism. The interest in gun ownership is a result of Trump voters making a big deal about how the concerns of women and minorities don’t matter anymore. And the California secessionists are idiots, like the Texans before them.
But Republicans are still interested in false equivalence, I see.
On the bright side, at least you guys can finally relax and stop pretending to care things like transparency, corruption and of course the deficit which will magically cease to matter on January 20, 2017. On the other hand, you’ll have to go dig up the “opposing the president is treason” narrative again. It’s only been eight years since it got shelved, so it’s just a little dusty.
Unlike those fine decent Trump supporters who declared it rigged long beforehand as polls were against them and threatened to exercise their Second Amendment rights if Trump lost?
Sure, the left are the sore losers, but what the hell are Trump’s supporters?
Ah, ‘the left.’ Good to know that one guy with a video, and a handful of posters in this thread, are ‘the left.’
Obviously this is just anecdata, but in my bouncing around various lefty blogs over the past eight days, Trump’s win is regarded as a catastrophe, but until opening this thread, I’m not sure I’ve come across any comments at all that suggest he didn’t actually win. The ‘denial’ stage of grief seems to have taken the form of ‘I can’t bear to think about it today’ rather than ‘it didn’t happen.’
There are certainly a handful of lefties who’d like to try to overturn the result by persuading Trump electors to switch their votes, but (a) they largely recognize that Trump won the states that it’s been determined that he’s won, and (b) even that notion only has a small following, AFAICT.
The sort of fraud that I worry about potentially occurring is not the kind that can be solved by voter ID laws. There is no evidence that the type of fraud that could be prevented by voter ID laws is a real issue and lots of evidence that those imposing these laws have but one goal, which is to discourage or disenfranchize voters who would primarily not vote Republican.
What RTFirefly said. If things had gone the other way, I highly doubt that conspiracy theories like the one proposed in this OP would be only way out on the fringe with most of Trump’s supporters quickly coming in to express their extreme skepticism.
