Just another in a series of illegitimate Republican “victories”
1968- Nixon sabotages LBJ’s peace negotiations with North Vietnam, prolonging the unpopular war and narrowly beating the establishment Humphrey.
1972- A re-election that should not have happened due to the fraudulent 1968 election.
1980- Reagan sabotages Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran, mullahs think they will get a better deal with Reagan and hold on to them past the election and even just past inauguration.
1984- A re-election that should not have happened due to the fraudulent 1980 election.
1988- Bush would have been nothing more than a failed vice presidential candidate but for the fraudulent 1980 election.
2000- A bad ballot design and a corrupt Supreme Court hand Bush the presidency.
2004- A re-election that should not have happened due to the fraudulent 2000election, plus the effect of the Swift Boat Liars For Bush.
2012- The FBI intervenes to sabotage Hillary’s campaign.
See, it’s all Trumps fault again for telling voters they shouldn’t accept the results of the election because it was rigged. He should have known the Democrats would take his advice.
Only thing about it, is that if you were going to do it, that would be the smart plan. Doesn’t have to be massive fraud, just a few select areas in a few crucial places. Might be just a coincidence that the best fraud plan matches the actual results so closely. Fucked if I know…
I’m not sure that it has to be some big (or even little) conspiracy - there was a decades-long smear campaign against one of the candidates and the other got points and attention for being blustery in a way modern American election campaigns lacked, and even though the first candidate was clearly more qualified than the second, it was a close result.
Uncovering some kind of widespread election fraud or interference is a nice fantasy but without irrefutable evidence it isn’t going to go anywhere, and of course stinks of bitter irony after (rightfully) mocking Trump for making essentially identical claims prior to the election. The bigger story is perfectly legal voter suppression which may have influenced the outcome to an extent that flipped key states, but the time to challenge that was when laws were being changed, and the supposedly pro-Clinton ‘liberal mainstream media’ virtually ignored the issue. It literally got more press from comedic personalities like Seth Meyers and John Oliver than any respected news outlet or political analysis, which should be fundamentally galling to anyone who relies on media to be informed about crucial issues.
However, reality is that both major party candidates entered the election with net negative public opinion. One candidate capitalized on this negativity by saying the most outrageous things possible to keep his image and simplistic, easily digestible message front and center while ducking every single detail question about policy or implementation, while the other assumed that the existing political base which elected the previous Democratic president would also support her by default and played an almost robotic recitation-of-facts-based approach in an election where the facts literally did not matter to key voting blocks. There was high volatility and clear signs that the never very wide difference in polls was narrowing even before the October Surprise reopening of the Clinton email server scandal, and the small resulting differences are well within polling margins of error. Exit polls, as the FiveThirtyEight article discusses, are not particularly representative of voters in general even if you assume that the responses that exit pollsters receive are honest and representative of each polling station.
As much as I would love to have evidence to challenge this election, not only because I am disgusted by the resulting selection and have grave concerns for the future of the nation in the short and long term but also because what it says about the nation that almost half of the people who bothered to vote where persuaded to vote for an abusive, profane, boastfully molesting huckster who has literally acknowledged that his main tenant of business is to scam and bully investors and partners, the reality is that under the existing election law Donald Trump won this election. If there is real evidence of illegal influence or manipulation I would be overjoyed to see it applied in vigorous challenge, but contesting the election based upon circumstantial evidence of irregularities from polling which has already given an erroneous (if not explicitly wrong) impression of the odds in the election is tantamount to a post hoc attack on the institutions of the electoral process and the quasi-democracy behind it, and while I have continuing doubts on the ultimate viability of democracy, I don’t have a good replacement to recommend for it.
Sure, exit polls don’t have exactly the same set of issues that pre-election polls do. For instance, with exit polls, you don’t have to worry about likely voter models at all, which removes one major source of uncertainty. But there are some issues which are common to both. One hypothesis for the discrepancy between polls and results, for instance, is that people were lying to the pollsters, and saying that they weren’t going to vote for Trump, but did anyway. And one would expect that discrepancy to show up in polls of any sort.
Now, we should still look for evidence that the election was rigged. If, for instance, the numbers deviate significantly from Benford’s Law, then that (combined with the poll discrepancies) would be a warning sign. But if we look for evidence of rigging and don’t find it, then that’s that, and we can’t really fight more on that front. And the poll discrepancies have so many other potential explanations that, by themselves, they’re basically worthless as evidence.
Excuse me madam voter, I’d like to ask you a couple questions about voting: Did you vote for Hillary Clinton, former Senator and Secretary of State, or for Donald Trump who gropes women, doesn’t pay his bills, and makes fun of handicapped people?
What’s painfully obvious is that the poll numbers, and the polling organizations providing them, have repeatedly been wrong when it comes to verifiable result. The polls suggested that Hillary was ahead. The polls suggested that Trump was losing. The polls were wrong.
But new polls suggest that there are still people who believe that biased, faulty, incorrect, and horseshit polling numbers are correct (this time?).
I predicted before the election that exit polling would not match actual results, in that Trump would fare better in the election than in the exit polls. I don’t know exactly how the exit polls are conducted, but my impression is that it could take away some of the anonymity of the voting booth. If so, I thought there would be a lot of “secret” Trump voters who wouldn’t admit that they’d voted for him.
No, that is not is not true as has been repeatedly pointed out. What the polls showed was that both candidates had negative approval ratings throughout the entire campaign and were never far apart in terms of estimated vote, with estimates overlapping in margin of error for both popular and Electoral College vote throughout the entire election, and converging in the days before the election to being within 1-2% in many key states. While there was likely a small systemic bias in polling (whether due to lack of truly representative polling, voter uncertainty, or an unwillingness to be honest about voting for a particular candidate) the actual result was that Clinton did win the popular vote overall within the expected uncertainty and lost key states with differences of 1-2%. The closeness of the election, the essential volatility of the election (driven by net negative voter perception to both candidates), and the inability of polls to capture the late-breaking implication of renewed scandal to a high degree of confidence gave a result that was not statistically discernible with good confidence, hence the better than 1 out of 4 chance that some models gave for a Trump win, which is statistically significant.
What was wrong were the pundits that assumed that Trump would end up underperforming his polls and/or that Clinton would get the votes from the blocks who voted for Obama and would get a traditionally expected turnout. This interpretation bias gave greater confidence in a Clinton election than the poll results actually justified, largely because they just couldn’t imagine that people are angry and frightened enough to ignore the sketchy policies and outright offensiveness of a mercurial demagogue with no government experience and a history of unethical and borderline business dealings.
Trying to make a circumstantial case for voter fraud based only on exit polls, or indeed, anything short of actually voter interference or direct manipulation of voting results, is not a politically or legally viable path. But that doesn’t mean that the poll data or statistical analysis is “wrong”; just that the results were too close to draw the definitive conclusions that some pundits espoused.
Well, maybe. Lotta folks out there think everybody should have an equal opportunity to participate, that it is our duty as Americans to ensure that. People that think that it isn’t right that some people wait for hours to vote, while others just skate. People who want to change that.
There’s a political party that opposes that, consistently. Wanna guess which one? Go ahead, take a wild stab at it!
Stranger, if you want to get a headstart on your next post, doorhinge’s response to you is going to be:
“(post shortened)
Bottom line is the polls were wrong about ol’ Hillary winning and the Lame Stream Media ate it up”