My daughter sent me this linked article. It’s interesting reading this the day after.
Michael Moore has made some notable movies, but I’ve never thought of him as any kind of truly serious political analyst. This essay of his from July 2016 (which I had not read before today) is bizarrely, frigheningly accurate as to almost exactly what was going to happen last night. He called it down to a “T” in the face in the face of overwhelming professional opinion to the contrary. Whether you are a Trump fanboy or not the fact that Moore could see so clearly into the machine 5 months before the election is astounding.
That is incredibly insightful for something written 4 months ago.
He predicted the rust belt would go for Trump. Nobody was predicting that.
My problem is he said that progressives were living in a bubble. I don’t think that is true, I think we just got accustomed to the idea that people’s voting habits could be predicted from polls. When 538 came out with their predictions before 2008, virtually every prediction was right.
And since science tends to move in one direction (constantly getting better and better) I think a lot of us just assumed the models of 2016 would be even more accurate and reliable than the models of 8 years ago. I did at least, I mean polling is based on math, and you’d assume an extra 8 years of R&D means we’d be even better at it. After all they had 8 additional years to test the models, look for flaws, compensate for issues, etc. What happened was polling science moved backwards and became less reliable.
So that is what got a lot of us. We looked at the polls showing Hillary with a 7-12 point lead, with Trump rarely getting more than 40-42% of the vote and we assumed that would be the outcome.
We weren’t like the republicans of 2012 who looked at the polls showing what would happen (Romney losing by a few points) so they made up ‘weighted polls’ to get the results they wanted. We thought the polls were trustworthy.
I don’t really think he is particularly insightful a lot of people did actually see this coming, it just didn’t seem that way because most Hillary/Democrat voters were living in a bubble and the ol’ canard about a “political echo chamber”. I heard things in the media and anecdotally from individuals working in the rust belt states about how there was going to be a huge revolt from members of the white working class well before this article was written.
Other than “honest,” sounds about right. He’s been pretty adamant over the years that if the major parties don’t do something to address this anger there will be a reaction. If the parties don’t give answers the people will get them from somewhere else, whether it’s talk radio or the darker recesses of the internet.
I think it’s taking it too far to say he “called it down to a ‘T’”. There are parts of it that are very much on point, particularly the parts about the lack of enthusiasm among some Democrats (although I think he unfairly ignores that there were people like my wife, and some other female friends, who really *were *enthusiastic about her).
But the kind of result he describes is not one where Trump loses the popular vote nationwide. It’s not one where 60,000 fewer votes in the right places (one-twentieth of one percent of all votes cast) would have shifted it to Hillary. And it’s definitely not the one where Trump gets a million fewer votes than Romney did in 2012, despite the fact that there are *ten *million more people in the country now than there were then.
So what really happened is that Republicans got an anemic but barely sufficient subset of their usual electorate out, and the Democrats had a huge dropoff in theirs. That’s not about a charismatic Trump attracting new white voters in the Rust Belt, or a conversion of Obama voters to Trump. It’s just about a shitload of Democrats staying home.
It’s looking like he might end up not needing it. Unless something happens in Michigan, he’ll be at 306 electoral votes. Without Florida he’d be at 277.
I hadn’t read this until today, but I do recall Michael Moore discussing this Trump wim prediction during a discussion on Real Time with Bill Maher back in July or maybe August.