Earlier this year, I thought the Brexit vote would lose. I educated myself, spoke to all sides, made my decision, and voted accordingly. Brexit won. I didn’t account for voter apathy.
Last week I was expecting a Clinton landslide. I read widely, spoke to people in both camps, and decided accordingly. And Trump won. Four times I commented on the apparent arrogance of Doper Democrats:
And that, I think, is my go-to for right now. Notice that bit about having read widely. Reading was my primary tool. And what I was reading was biased.
I will obviously cogitate further, but my take-way for you is this: if I predict an electoral result, bet on the opposite!
At least you were wrong based on actual data. The data itself may have been wrong, but at least you weren’t saying it was because of rally sizes or seeing lots of signs for your candidate.
Like you, I was wrong on Brexit and wrong on the election. (And so were the betting markets, spectacularly wrong: at midnight after the Brexit vote, Leave was 10/1 against. Last night, at around 12.45am GMT, as the Florida results were starting to trickle in, Trump was 9/1 against.)
I think the problem is that there are lots and lots of invisible people. I only know two people who voted Leave, and yet according to the published results, 47.6% of voters even in my local district did so.
People don’t interact enough outside their bubbles, and it works both ways. The people making the bulk of the commentary, or at least the commentary I read (and, it seems, the people betting on political markets) seem to be overwhelmingly of the more liberal persuasion.
Yes… the SJW agenda has made an enemy of the white male (and if you’re a poor white male it’s especially insulting and disenfranchising - you grow up being told how privileged you are because of how you were born, and yet somehow that isn’t reflected in your present reality at all). There’s this huge contingency of people (and yeah, a lot of them are poor, young, white males) who feel that PC culture wants to scrub them out of existence, as payment for the sins of their ancestors.
And if they even dare bring this concern up in any way, they are instantly and thoroughly shouted down, mocked, and accused of being racist and/or misogynistic. You aren’t allowed to be proud of who you are. You’re supposed to be ashamed. And they’re sick of hearing it. The Trump supporters have heard it so much they stopped caring, and even embraced the labels of being “racist” or “sexist”, even if they’re really not. Because if someone is just going to automatically assume that about you, why bother arguing with them?
If the goal is really true equality, the liberal rhetoric needs to change. It needs to stop making an enemy of white and/or male and/or straight people, who have no more control over how they were born than anyone else, and have never oppressed anyone in their lives. Condescending to them, calling them ‘deplorables’ etc., is what loses them to you and your ideologies forever.
Back in June, I had been following the Brexit referendum pretty closely but on the morning when the results were announced, I didn’t listen to the radio as I usually do when I wake up. I went to work pretty much convinced that there would be no Brexit. I turned on my work computer, opened Firefox and bbc.com greeted me with : “UK votes to leave the EU”. I was stunned.
Exactly the same thing happened today. I didn’t listen to the news on my way out, got to work, didn’t turn on my computer for a while because there were some boxes I needed to open first, then I remembered the US Elections and Trump’s face was on the bbc.com front page.
Remind me not to check that site when the results for the French Presidential Election are announced next year…
