I don’t know if I can quantify this, its more just a gut feeling. Does anyone else feel that despite everything Trump is going to win the election after all? I’ve had this sneaky suspicion for a while that after all that’s said and done we are headed for a Trump win. Kind of like if you were about to get into a car wreck and you feel like everything is in slow motion, but you can’t do anything to stop it. With only days left in the election, it seems like the polls are getting closer and closer in favor of Trump, and a lot the polls I’ve read have sampled Democrats and women at higher rates which would put Trump even higher than they show. Now with not much more than a week before the election we’ve got the FBI investigation apparently underway and announced on the news everywhere. Everyone made jokes when he declared his presidency but he has survived against all odds and beaten all the predictions about crashing and burning.
It’s not impossible, so if you want to prepare yourself for the worst and allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised, go right ahead. But ultimately, while the polls have drifted back and forth, Clinton has essentially always been ahead. If anything has been consistent, that has–and it would basically take a miracle for that to change so dramatically in the last couple of weeks.
Sam Wang and Nate Silver have been “at war” when it comes to how to interpret the polls. Wang says there’s almost no volatility, and the positioning has been locked in since the debates. Silver’s plots show a lot more variability, and you can see the difference in their predictions: Silver with ~20% Trump winning and Wang with 3%. Who to believe? Hard to say, but my instincts are with Wang. Silver has the greater interest in drumming up the horse race story, but if you simply believe the polls are noisy, you end up with a much simpler explanation for the results: the outliers are expected statistical variation and there just hasn’t been much difference with the core margin.
Even if you side with Wang, Trump could still pull off a win, but it hardly seems likely, especially with the early results seeming to favor Clinton. It’s almost reaching the point where further news couldn’t make a difference at all.
I think the margin of error in polling is much, much higher than at any time since modern polling began.
There are going to be a lot of people either voting for the first time ever or voting for the first time in a while.
Pollsters like to find “likely voters” to poll. Their criteria rules out too many people who are going to vote this year.
Pollsters are finding it harder and harder to get a representative sample.
There is also a possibility that some people might not want to reveal to a pollster who they are voting for (esp. if there are others in the room).
And on and on.
I don’t trust the polls this year. In particular, I’d rate the chances of Trump winning FL pretty good. It’s going to be quite scary getting thru this.
Republican victory has been inching up since its 9% low and is now shown at 13% by David Rothschild’s site. At Betfair, the GOP chance for the White House is shown at 23%.
There is a psychological question when looking at these numbers. Is 13% small? Is 23% small? Many Americans who don’t work with numbers think 13% is a tiny chance, close to zero. But people who work with numbers know these numbers are large. 13% chance a bond will default? Your investment manager will look for a better investment unless the bond is selling at a huge discount. 13% chance opponent will win his Queen and defeat your bridge contract? A good player will look for a safety play. 13% chance of a bomb on your airplane? Here I think even an innumerate person would scream “Stop the plane! I want to get off.”
Predictwise’s estimate of a Democratic-controlled Senate has fallen from 79% back to 69%. A Democratic House is now down to 10%, almost as low as it’s ever been. Even if Ms. Clinton squeaks out a victory she’ll be a lame-duck from the start — white male ignorance will be reveling in the power it demonstrated and the House will begin impeachment proceedings the day after Inauguration.
Even if there are fifty ‘D’ Senators, they won’t have the gumption to rescind the filibuster rules, despite that that’s the first thing the R’s would do if the situation were reversed.
Sometimes I think turning the country over to a Brownback or a Pence and letting the country wallow in fetid hypocrisies for 4 years might be the best chance to cure our political ignorance.
However a Trump regency would pose apocalyptic danger.
With any luck, he will. And I’m saying luck from the point of view of our society.
It astounds me no end that after eight disastrous years of Obama, people think Hillary should be President. Leaving her felonies and habitual lying out of the mix, she would be four more years of the same disastrous bullshit, and I’m not sure the country would be able to survive it.
No; he just never was electable any more than a Ross Perot or Pat Paulsen. Some of us believed that from the beginning which is why we wanted him as the Republican candidate more than anything else in the world - so much so that I, and others I know, switched parties just to vote for him in the Primaries. You can love Clinton as much as you want to but in general terms she was a modern version of George McGovern. What was needed was a Republican long-shot or outsider with a high self-destruct factor and Trump was the perfect storm for that. The only hope for Trump was Bernie - one outsider against another and it comes closer to a coin-flip.
I’d read that a lot more than average Hispanics and immigrants have registered to vote, but I’ve not heard that Trump had gotten more people to register to vote. And that despite the impression you’d get from his rallies, a lot of his supporters are from people who have voted before.
There seem to be more people than usual early voting, but I don’t know if that means that there is going to be higher voter turnout, or just people wanting to get it over with.
IMO Trump remains unlikely to prevail. Too many negatives. Meanwhile…
I’m very sorry that your life has been a disaster the past eight years, if that’s the case, but mine hasn’t, and I don’t know anyone during this period for whom any disasters that may have occurred to them could be laid at the feet of the President. For example, a lot of people I know in the oil and gas industry (where I work) have been laid off over the past two years due to low oil prices, but the President doesn’t control the price of oil, nor should he.
For another example: it’s not the President’s fault my sister contracted a highly aggressive form of breast cancer a year and a half ago, but the provisions of the Affordable Care Act have helped prevent her and her companion from slipping into poverty as she went through a long course of painful, debilitating (and extremely expensive) treatment.
So, how about stepping up to the plate? What are these ‘disasters’ of which you speak?
Considering how surprising a Trump win would be, Trump would never have mentioned the possibility of the election being rigged if he thought he had a chance.
I tend to agree more with Silver in this argument. He had an article on his site to explain the reason he is placing Trump at 20%. One reason is a high number of undecided voters, who he is placing at 15% in this election as opposed to 5% in the last presidential election at around the same time. An undecided voter in this election is not someone who can’t decide between Clinton or Trump, but someone who wants to vote for his party but hasn’t decided yet if he can vote for the candidate.
I think there are more conservatives who are not sure if they can vote for Trump than there are liberals who are not sure if they can vote for Clinton. Clinton is a traditional candidate and we know from prior elections that liberals will vote for her. Trump is the wild card here. If undecided conservative voters eventually decide they can vote for Trump, then I would expect to see him do better than his polls on election day.
Trump needs to win three states that are leaning towards Clinton right now - Florida, Nevada, and North Carolina - and then one more state that is solidly in favor of Clinton. A difficult task, but not an impossible one. A 20% chance sounds more correct to describe this hurdle than a 3% chance.
Right now, I don’t think Trump can overcome this hurdle mainly because of Clinton’s ground game advantage, especially in the swing states I mentioned that Trump has to win. Of course, if there is a major bombshell as a result of the FBI investigation, then Clinton can go down a few points in the polls and lose the swing states. Remember that she is only up by 2 points in Florida, Nevada, and North Carolina. Of course Trump needs one more state after those three, and Clinton is up by more than 5 points everywhere else.
If you’ll permit a foreigner’s perspective and an extremely anecdotal and unscientific one., I spent some time in the US in August and September. Most of it in New York State and Massachusetts, not likely places for a Trump triumph. I saw plenty of Trump signs, I saw ONE Hillary sign. Driving from NYC to Niagara, in the state where Hillary was a Senator for 8 years, nothing, zip, nada.
I met several Trump supporters, and they did not conform to the stereotype, they were educated, professionals, one was a Doctor who was married to a gasp muslim.
So, yeah I have a sneaky suspicion that Trump might win. I think his support is understated.
