I’ve heard a lot of talk the past couple of days about how everyone, especially the media, failed in their election predictions. The polls were wrong, the pundits were wrong! Here’s a Rolling Stone article on the subject, focusing more on the failure of long-term predictions. But in the short term?
This puzzles me a bit because the polls were tightening a week or so prior to the election. Enough that it was noticeable and worrisome to me. And guess what - I woke up Wednesday morning to find Trump won. My reaction was, “Aw, crap!” but not disbelief.
On Tuesday we all knew Trump would have to take just about every battleground state to win. It was unlikely in the same way the Cubs winning the World Series in game 7 was unlikely, but it wasn’t unthinkable.
I never watch network television, so maybe it felt different to people watching live coverage on Tuesday. Since they have to fill a huge amount,of air time the networks have to just keep talking even if they’re not saying anything important. But I feel like it’s wrong to blame the media and polling. This outcome was unlikely, but I think the shock people describe is more from hating the idea of Trump as president. Believe me - I sympathize, but it’s not like we didn’t have some warning in the last week that this could happen.
**Because Donald Trump is utterly unqualified to be the President of the United States, and the American people were generally thought intelligent enough to see that.
Yes. I was gobsmacked. I’m not into politics, but I do vote and I follow the election results coverage every four years. As each state turned out for Trump, I kept getting a sinking feeling and found myself yelling “NOOOO!” like Darth Vader in Episode III. Then I started booing my TV. I don’t usually get that worked up.
Agreed, but my point is there was warning. I remarked to some friends on Tuesday, “Trump would need to take every important state. If he loses just one - Ohio, Florida or a couple others it’s over. So it’s unlikely, but let’s not get cocky the way Romney was in 2012. He and his people had convinced themselves they had it in the bag.”
Not trying to set myself up as having foreseen this. Just saying that the polls, at least those I glanced at on the Google News aggregator, showed a tightening race in the final week. We should regard this result as disappointing and disheartening, but not without warning.
I wouldn’t say I was stunned like never before, but I’ll admit to being fairly surprised that a plurality of Americans were so willing to overlook his many, many personal flaws and complete lack of relevant experience.
No, it wasn’t. Nate Silver’s model had a Trump win as a distinct possibility all along, even at the very lowest points a Trump win was still a 1/10 possibility. That might seem like a slim chance, but I know I certainly wouldn’t get on a roller coaster that had crashed in 1 out of 10 simulations.
Now quite a few posters here were very vocal about the closeness of the race being a media creation, and human nature is to hope, and find the destruction of hope surprising irregardless of hope, but personally my reaction to the result was more: “No, that really sucks!” than “No, that can’t possibly be true because of the polls!”
Obviously you weren’t paying attention during the election of 2004. George W. Bush, with the way he bungled up everything from Iraq to Enron to stem cell research, a man who publicly said “I don’t care where Osama bin Laden is,” and who had proven time and again how incapable he was of leading a cub scout troop, let alone a powerful nation, was clearly the most unfit choice our nation had ever seen. AND PEOPLE RE-ELECTED HIM ANYWAY.
In the wise words of Agent K: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” This election result does not surprise me at all.
Two things that you evidently somehow missed–
(1) LOTS of people voted early, about 7-10 days before Election Day, while Clinton still had a bigger lead. (2) There was some evidence by Monday, the day before Election Day, that Clinton was slowly beginning to widen her lead again.
Nate Silver was the most pessimistic about Clinton’s chances of all the major pundits. And he gave her 2:1 odds of winning.
When I looked at the poll numbers on various sites the day before and of the election, I noticed that almost all of Clinton’s positive numbers in battleground states were well within the margin of error. If you’re polling +2% with a 3% margin of error, that means you’re really somewhere between -1 and +5. That’s assuming the poll was conducted fairly, as is not necessarily true for all polls.
No, not surprising. Only 16 years ago, half of the electorate thought voting for an aimless, halfwit, Texan chimp would be a great idea. It was a disaster, and this second illegitimate president of the century will be even worse.
Conservatism is a disease, a mental illness. Who can forget the sight of all those bed-wetting pussies at the convention? Poor babies needed lots of binkys and adult diapers (waaaah, we’re afraid of everything), but they found their savior in a corrupt retard who can’t even handle male pattern baldness. Hallelujah.
And we all know what comes next. After the Oompa Loompa completely fucks things up, in four or eight years the nation will turn to a democrat to clean up the mess. Just like Clinton after Reagan and Obama after Bush. So now we watch the infants at play until the adults are allowed back in the room.
The538 discussionmakes it clear that it was misuse of the polling numbers or the lack of numeracy to understand that is behind the idea of polling great mistake.
The reasons wern’t. I had been saying for months how this was shaping up into a “Scott Brown situation”. But I had no idea it would pass a tipping point.
It was not just this. It was how he systematically alienated huge segments of the population: his attack on the Hispanic judge on the Trump University case, the attack on the parents of the dead war veteran, how it’s all right to grab a woman’s pussy…
But you are certainly in a better position that your opponent, who is between +1 and -5.
I understand the difference between NS’s model which predicted a higher Trump chance, and the other ones is that NS modelled correlation between states. Other modellers would say, “Yes, in each of these six states the closeness of the polls means there is a chance he could win, but flipping every one of them is unlikely”, while NS would say, “if he flips one of this it is indicative of a situation where others are likely to flip as well”.
Also, people continue to underestimate the role that charisma plays in electing a president. It’s by far the most important thing in determining the outcome. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say:
The more charismatic candidate almost always wins, regardless of party, policy, promises, or anything else.*
Certainly since the TV era there have been only maybe a handful of exceptions (Nixon I’ve heard? Not sure, as it was before my time). But at least in recent memory…
Bill Clinton: down-home, saxophone-playing southern boy was far more charismatic than old man Bush the First and old man Bob Dole.
Dubya: despite being an idiot, was easily more charismatic than Al Fucking Gore (blech!) and John Fucking Kerry (and this lesson really, really should have warned/informed people more on how the present election would go).
Then, in '08, it seemed that Democrats had finally learned their lesson about running unlikable, uncharismatic drones and finally came up with somebody cool, funny, and hip. Obama has a very likable personality, and that carried him to victory against McCain and Romney.
And now in '16 we get… fucking Hillary. Weird, awkward, unlikable, robot Hillary. Versus TV star Donald Trump, who is easily more charismatic than she, despite all his shortcomings. It’s like we forgot the lessons of Dubya completely over the last 8 years and forgot that we can’t run awkward uncharismatic robots and still expect to win.
Yeah, there will always be a significant block of voters who actually vote based on policy, and vote for the candidate/party that is most aligned with their values. But there is also a pretty big swing segment of the population, and those people make their decision almost entirely based on charisma/personality of the candidates, and nothing else. This factor cannot be dismissed or downplayed.
*this is also why Bernie would have won where Hillary failed. Bernie has a force of personality, and is actually likable.