And people laughed, they actually did pretty good. And he got more votes than he did in 2016 and the Senate isn’t going to flip.
Where is he getting his information from that appears to be way much more accurate than the polling the Democrats depended on? How can the Democrats learn from his teams techniques and methods? It wasn’t just dumb luck on his side and it wasn’t false confidence either.
He just says things. Especially things like “I” or “My side” will win. Once in a great while he gets it generally pointing in the vicinity of approaching correct.
Well, how was he more accurate? The Republicans AREN’T going to take the house; the Democrats will end up with 221 seats or so, just enough to keep it. They are going to get more seats than the polls predicted, but they are going to get fewer than Trump predicted.
Trump also predicted he’d win the election, but he didn’t.
He predicted that Mexico would pay for a wall. There’s no wall, and Mexico never paid. He predicted that he would replace Obamacare with something better.
That has yet to be seen, but yet no one else thought it would be so close but him. Like it or not he knows something the Democrats just don’t get. He did the same thing in his 2016 prediction. Shame us once shame on you. Shame us twice, shame on us. This guy has bested the polls twice and some are still calling it dumb luck. Learn something from this or see two years of stagnation again while they take the House in 22 is all I am saying.
What Trump has said is unimportant, and we do not hear his words.
Then we are setting ourselves up for failure. We are winning a battle but losing the war. To just ignore what he says or what he actually seems to know is to ignore 70 million americans who voted for him.
Oh and his side packed the Supreme Court. Another battle the Dems lost and now cannot recover from.
You need to consider the source. Trump’s entire ethos has been some form of positive ideation, where if you believe hard enough it becomes true. Every action he does can and should be viewed with that lens and, accordingly, dismissed.
If you’re concerned about that sort of thing, worry less about Trump himself and worry more about the environment that made Trump possible. Like, for instance, a rejection of intellectualism and a casual dismissal of uncomfortable truth.
Which President hasn’t predicted that his party will defy the polls and march to victory?
Thats it, but Trump had a feel for that. The polls did not. What do the pollsters need to learn?
Oh snap! --Spock
He does have access to tons of information, and their ground game is significantly better than what the Dems are doing now.
As a still registered Republican I got hard copy mailings, e-mails, texts and phone calls on both cell and landline numbers. They were eager to get me an absentee ballot, tell me where my closest polling location was, where dropboxes were located, and dozens of additional “helpful” tactics.
But they also sent me (patently false but) frightening communications designed to scare me silly of any Democratic candidate being even a council member. Outlandish and false claims that gave one pause even when you were sure they were utter bullshit. (I did more fact checking than I want to admit.) They also learned and changed their pitch depending upon what worked in my demographic. The money solicitations were different for me and my fellow Republican female family members. (They all got shred the same but they had different messaging targeted to the individual.) They even reached out to my dead mother for a time (until I assume they compared their contact list with the county morgue). It was persistent, and it was persuasive if one never looked a legitimate news source like my neighbors and family.
I tell you all this because I watched a long interview with Rick Wilson some time ago and he spoke about the data bases he helped create for the GOP with all kinds of specific preferences and personal information included. At the time I dismissed it, but when I would receive something one day and my mother’s estate would receive a similar but slightly tweaked version the next day I started to believe.
.
It is not hard to guess what those hard copy mails said and it was very persuasive and warned of absurd things happening “down the road”. Socialism was the least of it, after a term or two religious freedom was on the chopping block (just look at how they love to kill innocent unborn babies right now in AMERICA!). They will take your guns, so their criminal gangs can roam the streets of every city and force their liberal agenda upon you. Suburbs will be full to capacity with gay couples and people of color who want to rub your face in their ‘culture’ and indoctrinate your children into accepting it as normal. Pages of the shit (I can’t remember all of it but any empty nesters and especially any widow or widower living alone would be scared. Any believer would have to be concerned (especially if you already felt marginalized).
Even as a long time Republican I am disgusted by their tactics. To go further, I appreciate what The Lincoln Project did to unseat Trump, but they are the most lowlife, lowest common denominator, fear mongering trolls in modern politics (that I am aware of). They set out to manipulate and herd voters in a direction rather than inform them. In my opinion, that was when this country was great; when we respected voters enough to inform them and let them decide issues and positions for themselves rather than use their own quirks to manipulate them into a certain policy or stand. Voters were expected to think for themselves and ideas were judged on their merits, not on who introduced them. Voters were asked to be informed on all sides of an argument – not taught how to defend the one side you are most familiar with.
Yeah, but he doesn’t read, and he gets bored very easily.
You say Trump had a feel for that, and I politely disagree with your assessment. I’m going to say “coincidence”, honestly.
Take a moment to read up on Normal Vincent Peale. He was a preacher who wrote “The Power of Positive Thinking,” and had deep ties to the Trump family. You can draw a pretty straight line from Trump’s idiot tweets to a page in that book or a word from Peale’s lips. So everything Trump did was the best, the “bigliest,” the “yugest,” and any other superlative you care to lavish on his deeds. It had to be. Peale wouldn’t have had it any other way.
If you find yourself extra-short on time (but I think if you want to understand Trump, you need to understand Peale), then the executive summary is that Peale pushed this notion that if you believe something hard enough, you affect reality itself and your wishes become true.
So I don’t say that Trump had a feel for anything, at all. Other than wishing he would be the World’s Greatest Prezdent.
The audience was primed for it, though. There’s a lot of analysis on how Fox peddles performative mistruth as entertainment in the guise of news. Trying to encompass my thoughts on that is going to turn a message board response into an essay, so I’m going to leave it. I’ll just say, “The audience was primed.”
As for the pollsters, well, it’s statistical analysis at best, and wild guessing at worst. A pollster with a good methodology can list their probability of error, and a bad one can’t. If you don’t see a margin of error, you’re wasting your time. HOWEVER, it doesn’t make for good media and crunchy math isn’t interesting to the general populace.
The fault kind of also lies in the system itself, in my opinion. Close elections are decided by a handful of swing states, and those swing states are in turn decided by a handful of undecided voters. You can’t very well sample them all to get an idea of how the campaign is going, because nobody has that time or money. You have to sample a cross-section, a slice if you will.
So to predict how the overall election is going to go, you’re basically taking a slice of a slice of a slice. Factoring in how, say, Georgia is going to go involves so much statistical guesswork** you may as well just read chicken entrails. The handful of voters in Georgia can be the butterfly whose fluttering wings can cause tornadoes.
Trying to model the US election is a challenge of heroic proportions, with pretty wild margins of error, where the results of the popular vote are near-as-matters useless. You’ll need to crack that mathematical nut if you want better predictions of the results. I don’t have a solution for that.
That said, I think you may also be overstating the value of polls. I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with them, but if you don’t like how the public perceives them, that’s a PR problem. If you don’t like them yourself, I hope my explanations will help you appreciate that they’re basically mathematical wild-A. guesses and should be considered, but not viewed as absolute truths.
** That’s hyperbole.
I concede the point!
(but the campaign workers who do use the stuff might have spoken in front of him, and not that he understood it – but he remembered the gist. He is good at remembering things: person, woman, [I am not going to pull up the Chris Wallace interview hear the rest of the list, but you get the joke])
If Donald Trump had lost this election by 90 percentage points, he would have been saying the same things. He does have data scientists and data analysts working for him (Biden does as well and Obama was one of the first to utilize their findings broadly), but there is no evidence that he personally took any of their findings to heart. He was going to claim that the house and senate were going to get redder and that he would win the presidency no matter what any analysis claimed. Right now, out of the three calls, he has zero out of two called correctly. We’ll know if he’s batting .000 or .333 on January 5th. Those who predicted a blue landslide are either batting .667 or 1.000 from an accuracy standpoint, but failed from a precision standpoint.
As for what can be done about polling, truly random sampling is still the best method of getting accurate results short of surveying the entire population. The problem is that truly random sampling is almost impossible unless you have enough resources to actually visit people in person at their homes, and continue to follow up until they both are available and willing to talk to you, which is impossible unless you have an authoritarian regime with an actual truth serum. If you could pull that off, it is still not perfect, as not everyone has a mailing address. I do think it’s safe to say that those without an address are not likely to heavily skew voting results, so probably good enough. As far as I know, there are zero pollsters using this method today. If I call mobile phones, I get skewed results. If I call landlines, I get skewed results. If I use email addresses, I get skewed results. I can attempt to weight those results, but I don’t have a lot of data to prove if I did it correctly. One failed experiment doesn’t guarantee success in the next one.
The only answer that works is stratified sampling with a solid understanding of the necessary subpopulations to get accurate outcomes. The problem is that no one, including Trump’s team, seems to have a handle on what that subpopulation breakdown means. We also have very few events to test on, so even if you use historical results and attempt to fit your past polls to a given set of subpopulations, things change so quickly that it might be outdated. People with landlines ten years ago look completely different from people with landlines today. If we held daily elections and everyone participated, we’d nail this down pretty quickly. We don’t, so we won’t.
Since I fully expect some responses to claim that we already do stratified sampling over subpopulations, that is absolutely true and has nothing to do with my argument. My argument is that we are missing subpopulations and we don’t know what features they all consist of. We can’t stratify what we don’t know.
Good thing it was “woman” and not “girl” or “daughter” or he would have really fucked it up.
So true, but we have to tread carefully. Desert_Dog and I got a warning for making an Ivanka Trump joke in this forum. It is in the how will you spend election night thread I believe.
I don’t see a rule against jokes in this forum, but perhaps my post will be seen as a hijack, which is indeed against the rules. Either way, I’ll leave it up and take my lumps from the moderation if it is warranted.
No, no,we haven’t crossed a line yet – I just wanted to mention it before we start responding to each other and DO cross any line. Trump makes it so easy to make fun of him and his attraction to Ivanka, I guess feeding that particular theme is not taking the high road – but so tempting. In the other thread it had an explicit sexual denotation, at the most we have hinted at it here.