I just remembered something – way back around February, I think it was – maybe even earlier than that – we had a thread about fiddling with a website where you could see who wins (R or D) by taking each group (college-educated whites, non-college-educated whites, all blacks, all Hispanics, and all Asians), starting with their 2012 numbers for two variables – “D vs. R,” and “TURNOUT” – then you’d shift each parameter (say, based on your 2016 predictions), and see which party/candidate would win.
I remember being surprised at how easily I could generate a Trump/Republican victory. It really surprised me. Just a little less black turnout and D-lean; just a little more less-educated white turnout and R-lean; and boom! Just what happened, in the end.
Everyone assumed there would be enough new Hispanic turnout and/or D-lean to make up the difference, but of course that didn’t happen. I know this has been analyzed in other threads (and other fora besides the Dope), but it deserves more attention still. I guess it’s part of the not-quite-purpleness of places like Arizona. I though it might put Hillary over the top in North Carolina, but obviously it didn’t. Not to mention Florida.
I should add that it wasn’t just the Hispanics’ fault. A Trump victory could also be generated, with that website gizmo, by only increasing educated white turnout and/or D-leaning tiny bit over 2012, rather than increasing it a bit more than a tiny bit (but still modestly).
This, too, turned out to be part of the real event.
Since I understand basic math, you are literally incorrect. Thank the screwed up electoral college for that little fact. I’ve already said that had my vote mattered I’d have cast it for her. I said it months ago. Make it mandatory and Id also have voted of course and she’d have had my vote.
That she didn’t get my vote voluntarily isn’t a problem with me, it’s with her and the system we have adopted. I went through all my new human paperwork and none of it said I had to vote an unappealing candidate while others got to vote for the candidate of their choice. Can you tell me by what justification I would have to sacrifice like this? I already know that my vote counts less than others now you’re telling me my opinion is meaningless as well and my only value is as a rubber stamp for a party that currently does not suit me. A party I chose to indentify with because it had suited me. Bullshit.
I came in here to let you know how you lost voters but you don’t want to hear it. Since the election was lost not by more republican voters rather less democratic voters I thought it’d be helpfell to remind people that some of us were sending a warning that went unheeded.
You’d rather again, place blame on me. Hopefully the party acts otherwise because not voting was pretty damned easy and you’re not winning my vote back by trying to shame me. Now I’m not a betting man but if I was I’d bet a lot of the abstainers felt the same way and aren’t going to be welcome to being marginalized any more even when the party loses.
So, I’ve given my election post mortem so I’m done. I’ve already been scolded twice on here now and countless times earlier and it’s getting boring. For an enlightened message boards y’all really love to beat dead horses. I mean damn, not even any variance at all in your arguments. Just, I helped elect Trump which again, lets make my one vote count as 10,000,000 votes. This would have flipped my state surely but Trump would have won the election anyway.
Thanks to the current system my vote doesn’t mean squat; I live in the wrong state. The biggest driver I had telling me to vote was to possibly flip my state but again, meaningless. The system is weighted so that those whose beliefs oppose mine are currently more valuable voters. I’ll play in a rigged system but I won’t feel the slightest bit bad about abstaining when it’s the better option as it was this time nor will I feel a bit badly about the results of an election that I really had no way to influence anyway.
You’d at least have had a more reasonable argument saying this to a voter in Pennsylvania but you’d still be wrong. As it is you’re laughably wrong but I understand it in our ‘place blame anywhere but on ourselves’ society we live in. I even understand it on the emotional level. None of that makes it true.
You *cannot *evade responsibility for the consequences of your decisions. You made a decision, you acted upon it, it had consequences which you well knew would result from it. Now you own it.
Trump was able to mobilize a lot of mad single straight men, who often are ignored & forgotten in favor of LGBTQ. The right is puritanical, and the left only cares about men who fall under the umbrella of LGBTQ. A lot of these guys view Trump as the ultimate playboy & seemed to think he would legalize prostitution or import foreign women while deporting illegal men, thus improving the gender ratio in America, which isn’t good for straight men.
Most straight men outside of some social justice types regardless of race probably went for Trump, but the alt-right completely did, and they are quite the force these days.
The alt-right is oftentimes found overlapping with the “red pill” community. These are the men who viewed Trump as their messiah. They showed up to the polls in droves where it mattered.
Even with the 800K + popular votes thanks to larger states such as California & NY with lots of minorities, these men still prevailed thanks to the electoral system.
The basket of deplorables comment didn’t cost Clinton any votes. What she said was that racists are deplorable. Anyone who’s offended by that is actively looking for something to be offended by, and if she hadn’t made that comment, they’d have found some other inoffensive comment to take offense at.
And while Trump certainly has charisma, it’s a very different sort of charisma than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Reagan had. All three of those former presidents were very good at getting people to like them. Trump, however, is very good at getting people to hate him. It’s counterintuitive that that sort of charisma would also work for winning an election, but apparently it’s true.
The only consequences I’ve faces is that you conveniently have someone else to blame rather than figure out how to fix the problems that cost you the election . Of course I accept the consequences of that or I would not have publicly posted it in this thread.
I hate to say it but your attempts to make me feel something that I don’t feel failed. I spent far more time contemplating my actions and have already considered your logic and found it wanting.
I do believe this. I have no right to complain about the results of the election and so far anyway, I’ve been true to that. I’m all kind of disappointed by the results of the election but that’s as far as I’ll go. The country ( literally ) decided. I happened to be in no position to influence or change thqt but I didn’t try so again, no complaining from me.
I have to side with Disgruntled Penguin on this one.
He said his (non-)vote didn’t matter. If your state, based upon past results, will send its Electoral College votes to Candidate A, then it doesn’t matter if you vote for Candidate A, Candidate B, Candidate C through n, or don’t vote at all. Disgruntled Penguin’s state’s EC votes went to Clinton. It would not have mattered if he’d voted because Clinton was going to get the EC votes in any case.
Suppose I still lived in California. There’s no way California’s 55 EC votes would to go anyone but Clinton. I could vote for Trump, Stein, Sanders, or someone else, and that would not change the outcome. I live in Washington, and I knew Washington’s 12 EC votes would go to Clinton. It doesn’t matter if I voted for Sanders, because it would not have changed the outcome.
Basically, if you know your state will cast its EC votes for the person you would have voted for if the outcome was not known, you’re safe making a protest vote, or abstaining from voting. If you’re in a state where every vote matters, because the outcome isn’t ‘safe’, then you bear the burden of responsibility for your actions.
There are a lot of people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin who thought Clinton had their states wrapped up, too. You can’t take it for granted the way our excuse-making friend here did.
53% of the overall male vote went for Trump, anchored upon 63% of white males. But around 80% of black men and over 60% of Hispanic men voted for Clinton. So even when you adjust for, say, 10% LGBTQ, only “most” straight white men voted for Trump.
And really, “outside of some social justice types”? Please.
Silver’s inaccuracy doesn’t discredit him. Almost all of the polling data that were available showed Clinton with a lead, and when you combine that with other factors like economics and historical voting records in specific states, you can be at least somewhat sure of a result. Even so, Silver accounted for the fact that there was a lot of shifting of sentiment within the electorate and that he could be wrong. To me, at least acknowledging that your numbers could be off is a testament to his credibility.
What’s discrediting is when you have volumes of dating showing that there is indeed a lot of uncertainty in the race and then you proceed to claim that one candidate has a 99% chance of winning. Not only that, but said statistician doubles down in the face of changing poll numbers, because of a belief that poll numbers oscillate between two end points. “It’s all in the data.” Sam Wang might be a brilliant statistician, but he’s not a truly analytical thinker in the broader sense. He’s disqualified himself from ever having an opinion about political polling ever again. Silver was probably about as balanced as you could get. He remains relevant.
Let me get this straight, you’re saying that you believed the media failed in their election predictions, the polls were wrong, and the pundits were wrong. You are then puzzled because the polls (which you believed were wrong) had indicated that the race was tightening?
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that you join the growing number of people who no longer trust the polls, pundits, and LSM. You do not have to let “those” people tell you what to think. You do not have to listen to their spin.
Think for yourself. Let the pollsters, pundits, LSM win back your trust, if they can.
Silver’s inaccuracy doesn’t help his credibility. Silver can claim that 538 was less wrong than its peers, but that isn’t much of an endorsement.
538 choses to use the results from other polling agencies as the basis of 538’s speculations/guesstimations/predictions. The majority of those polling agencies were wrong/inaccurate/blew it. 538 didn’t have a chance of correctly predicting the race.
Pennsylvania is considered a swing state and I’d already said you’d have a better point addressing someone from there. Still would be wrong though. Voting is a choice and a candidate has to earn that vote. At least they have to earn mine. Sucks that doesn’t work for you but that’s how it goes.
Also, I’m not sure how I’m making an excuse. I don’t feel bad for my choice and so I don’t feel I need to make any excuse. I get that you don’t like my reasoning but trust me, it wasn’t offered to make you do so. It was offered as an example of the reality that’s out there and had been brought up pre election so no real justification needed. I’m not seeking agreement or justification by posting it…
I feel that your labeling what I say as an excuse is because you feel such behavior would require one. I’m making it clear that i do not feel that it does. The difference is not semantics.
Now, you may be using the old “those that are not with us are against us” argument but it’d be hard to win over voters that way I’d imagine. I hope the party doesn’t adopt this theory. They just lost an election that way.
I think you should re-read my OP in its entirety. Youve either misunderstood me, or are projecting your own views on mine somehow. And your use of “LSM” does you no credit - it reminds me of people who think saying “Democrat party” is clever and witty.
As in economics or geo-politics, predicting the future in political races is an inexact science, probably as much art as science at this point. Economists, for instance, look at data and predict where an economy is going, but they’re making projections based on quantifiable data that are known. What they cannot account for is what is not known, or what has yet to show up on the radar. And speaking of radars, even the best ones in the highest of high-tech modern aircraft can’t always predict when a super-cell thunderstorm pops up out of nowhere as they’re flying through the Caribbean. The point is, the data is finite but the possibilities for future data are not, which makes calculating probabilities rather difficult even with the best models.
Nate Silver was, by far, the most accurate pulse taker in the race that I know of. I don’t evaluate him strictly on the results but also how he hedged and explained his positions. He did the best job given the data that he had. Are there others who had a gut feeling that he was wrong and made better predictions? Sure, that happens. But what I’m saying is that if you were to put Gut Feeler up against Nate Silver, I would put my money on Silver’s predictions, and more often than not, that would be a safe bet.
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Silver’s inaccuracy doesn’t help his credibility. Silver can claim that 538 was less wrong than its peers, but that isn’t much of an endorsement.
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538 wasn’t wrong, though. Again, I don’t think people are grasping the idea of probability.
Look, I’ve got a deck of cards here. I’m going to give it a fair shuffle, and then draw one card. Would you please tell me if it’ll be higher than a 10? (Aces high.) Thanks in advance.
Nate Silver claimed he expected Hillary to get 270 EC votes, give or take a state. Did Hillary get 270 EC votes? No? Then Silver’s 538 was wrong.
I’m sure Nate Silver is a wonderful person, loves dogs, children, and his grand parents. However, 538 still choses to use the results of outside polling agencies as the basis of his predictions. And the results provided by those outside (non-538) polling agencies were wrong.
I’ve got a better idea. Let’s get 10 people to shuffle their own deck of cards, draw one card, and post the results. We can then use the results posted by those 10 outside card-drawing agencies to predict the outcome of your higher than 10 challenge, 538-style.