DOOM, or The Official 2016 US Election Thread

[Leo]

It's hard to tell as a non-American but I feel like Trump's accent and bearing doesn't really 'code' as upper class. He comes across more like a working-class guy who's made himself rich. And he can make YOU rich too!

valid point. trump was born in the outer borough of queens and, to paraphrase, you can take the boy out of queens but you can't take queens out of the boy. he goes against what elites view as traditional senses of tastefulness and dignified behavior, always been seen here as a vulgarian outsider by manhattan elites and old-money people, and he's always had a chip on his shoulder about it.

brietbart nation takes a top role in the white house (literally), can't get much more vulgar than that!

 

[droid]

How is Israel going to spin this?

On the one hand, Trump has pledged to move the US embassy to jerusalem, a decades long strategic-political aim.

On the other hand, he's appointing actual neo-nazis to his cabinet and we will no doubt see widespread persecution of Jews by his government and his supporters.

The messianic orthodox must be loving this.

 

[vimothy]

Interview with Thomas Frank (author of What's the Matter with Kansas?): http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayed...emocrats-betrayed-the-working-class-1.3847670

 

[droid]

Meaning?

Meaning you are selectively choosing data to support your assumptions.

The 'pre-eminent US analyst', assuming you mean Nate Silver, gave Clinton a 71.4% chance (and not '1 in 3' - which suggests a precision that is clearly not warranted). He deserves credit for being less bullish and perhaps more honest about the limitations of his models than most. He was also an outlier. For example, the Huffington Post's model gave Clinton 'a 98.2 percent chance of winning the presidency', stating that 'Donald Trump has essentially no path to an Electoral College victory'. In the UK, the Independent ran the following headline a few days before the votes were cast: 'Can Donald Trump win the election? Here’s the mathematical reason why it’s impossible for him to become President'.

3/10 rather 1/3. Glad you cleared that up

Im not denying Huff post and many others made predictions with an insane level of certainty, and thats a good point, well made, but TBF, 538 may have been an outlier, but they were also, without doubt THE most influential and popular analysts. Silver mentions in their latest podcast (worth a listen on this very topic actually), that it seemed as if their predictions were directly affecting the markets. Theirs was the only analysis I was paying attention to anyway.

 

[vimothy]

Which data am I selectively choosing? I linked to a graph that shows the distribution of forecast probabilities of a Clinton win. They overwhelmingly favour Clinton. 538 is the outlier. (That Silver's prediction of a 71.4% chance of a Clinton victory constitutes an outlier - according to Silver they even "took weeks of abuse from people who thought we overrated Trump’s chances" - tells you a lot about the trend.)

3/10 rather 1/3. Glad you cleared that up

It's not the difference between 3/10 and 1/3, but the false precision suggested by 71.4% (as a couple of people have already mentioned). Why 71 and not 70? Where has the decimal point come from? What does this probability actually mean?

 

[droid]

538 is an outlier statistically, but is by far the most respected, and AFAIK widely read analysis site in the US.

I am slightly confused there though. Initially you were talking about polls. Now you're talking about predictions and models. As Ive pointed out, the polls were generally within the margin of error and seeing as most predictions are essentially punditry it is no surprise that they reflect bias.

 

[Leo]

It's not the difference between 3/10 and 1/3, but the false precision suggested by 71.4% (as a couple of people have already mentioned). Why 71 and not 70? Where has the decimal point come from? What does this probability actually mean?

that always bugged me about pitchfork, too.

 

[Mr. Tea]

In the UK, the Independent ran the following headline a few days before the votes were cast: 'Can Donald Trump win the election? Here’s the mathematical reason why it’s impossible for him to become President'.

Haha, yeah the Indy made a right arse of itself with that one.

 

[droid]

Very good interview with Varoufakis in the NS:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politic...onald-trump-s-awful-victory-left-must-be-more

What does Trump’s success mean for Brexit Britain?

A Trump presidency will put pay to the Brexiteers' belief that removing the UK from the European Union will allow it to forge new trade links with the US and China. Trump is likely to create antagonisms in both trade and economic cooperation with China [among his policy pledges were a 45% tariff on imports from China and a repudiation of the Trans Pacific Partnership]. Any hopes Theresa May might have had of forging a free trade agreement to compensate for the loss of the EU customs union has gone down drain as Trump is against free trade agreements. Britain must end this sick joke of a special relationship, which was only ever window dressing after the Suez Crisis in 1956.

 

[Leo]

538's polls percentage could be considered ballpark reasonable, as long as polls are accurate. what always makes me chuckle is their polls-plus percentage, which in theory takes into account trends based on how things historically happen on election day or some such shit. wtf does that mean? their secret sauce voodoo hoodoo futurecast non-scientific predictive total guesswork is what it is.

 

[baboon2004]

Haha, yeah the Indy made a right arse of itself with that one.

more so because the writer failed to draw the obvious conclusion from his own shrewd observation: "National polling is meaningless when it comes to Election Day, because as Al Gore discovered in 2000, the winner of the presidential election is not the candidate who receives the most votes."

not all his fault though, as the actual article he wrote concludes: "Despite what the public polls suggest, and even with her latest email scandal, the election is Clinton’s to lose, and it appears mathematically unlikely that she will." Not only the Right that relies upon bold, unsubstantiated headlines, alas.

 

[Benny Bunter]

It doesn't seem that cut-and-dried though, given that working class women have voted overwhelmingly for an upper class man. Internalised misogyny definitely has a place here

Definitely; why else would women vote for such a blatant misogynist? The world outside traditional marriage, baby-making and religion is painted as a dangerous, violent and chaotic place for women (of all economic classes) by the right, so you can't really blame them for thinking its safer for them to support patriarchal values because, in a way, it is safer in a world defined by men.

Been reading Andrea Dworkin's 'Right-wing Women' recently and, even though that book came out in the early 80s, a lot of it still rings true, like this:

"Every accommodation that women make to [male] domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dangerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms".

 

[...]

Happy Fascists

 

[Benny Bunter]

Benny - yeah, I thought that, she doesn't suggest that these ideas about manliness and a woman's role should be changed. It's an interesting/depressing quandary for liberals, that their progressive values are probably not shared by a great proportion of the electorate.

Liberals always seem to be shocked that everyone doesn't think like they do. They favour these small progressions that supposedly inch society towards their vision, but can never produce any meaningful systemic change. Same with race.

 

[vimothy]

Most people just refer to "the polls" and don't worry about it:

• Yes, the election polls were wrong. Here's why, Mona Chalabi, Guardian
• The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why, Carl Bialik and Harry Enten, 538
• How wrong were the polls in predicting the US election and why did they fail to see Trump's win?, Ashley Kirk Patrick Scott, Telegraph
• What Went Wrong With the 2016 Polls?, Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic
• Why the Polls Were Wrong, Michael Pollard, USA Today

 

[vimothy]

And even in the strict sense, polls are models too. Plenty of opportunities for human judgement and error to creep in.

Here is 538's summary of what the polls got wrong:

The polls missed Donald Trump’s election. Individual polls missed, at the state level and nationally (though national polls weren’t far off). So did aggregated polls. So did poll-based forecasts such as ours. And so did exit polls.

The miss wasn’t unprecedented or even, these days, all that unusual. Polls have missed recent elections in the U.S. and abroad by margins at least as big. Every poll, and every prediction based on it, is probabilistic in nature: There’s always a chance the leader loses. And Clinton probably didn’t even lose the national popular vote; she just didn’t win it by as much as polls suggested. But Tuesday’s miss was an important one because Clinton appeared to lead by a margin small enough that it might just have been polling error. That turned out to be mostly true — true enough for her to lose in the Electoral College, and for Democrats to fall far short of taking control of the Senate.

They go into some detail about various kinds of polling error that generated the large disparity between prediction and results last week:

We wrote before the election that a polling error of 2 to 3 percentage points is normal these days... [L]et’s step back and look at the different kinds of polling error. All of them are important because all of them were present in this result.

Every poll has error, some from statistical noise and some from factors more difficult to quantify, such as nonresponse bias.

Poll-based forecasts such as ours attempt to reduce error by combining many different polls and accounting for their quality and lean... It’s possible for polls to be wrong in many states but not in the same direction. These errors could then cancel each other out — or not matter at all, if they’re smaller than a candidate’s winning margin.

But, more often, state polls and the forecasts based on them miss in the same direction. That’s a more systematic polling error, indicating that pollsters were struggling with the same challenges no matter where they were polling or their particular methodology. That also shows up in the plentiful national polls, which we use to adjust our state polls.

Errors of all of those types added up to Tuesday’s result. Individual polls were wrong. Aggregated, they missed in individual states, including in many swing states. National polls were off in the same direction: Polls overstated Clinton’s lead over Trump...

While the errors were nationwide, they were spread unevenly. The more whites without college degrees were in a state, the more Trump outperformed his FiveThirtyEight polls-only adjusted polling average, suggesting the polls underestimated his support with that group. And the bigger the lead we forecast for Trump, the more he outperformed his polls. In the average state won by Trump, the polls missed by an average of 7.4 percentage points (in either direction); in Clinton states, they missed by an average of 3.7 points. It’s typical for polls to miss in states that aren’t close, though. The most important concentration of polling errors was regional: Polls understated Trump’s margin by 4 points or more in a group of Midwestern states that he was expected to mostly lose but mostly won: Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

 

[IdleRich]

The 'pre-eminent US analyst', assuming you mean Nate Silver, gave Clinton a 71.4% chance (and not '1 in 3' - which suggests a precision that is clearly not warranted). He deserves credit for being less bullish and perhaps more honest about the limitations of his models than most. He was also an outlier. For example, the Huffington Post's model gave Clinton 'a 98.2 percent chance of winning the presidency', stating that 'Donald Trump has essentially no path to an Electoral College victory'. In the UK, the Independent ran the following headline a few days before the votes were cast: 'Can Donald Trump win the election? Here’s the mathematical reason why it’s impossible for him to become President'.

It reminds me of that bit in Waiting for Guffman where there is a magic-circle which always has the same weather inside it "Dry and overcast with a 30 per cent chance of rain".
There is a philosophical problem with probability - if there was a 98% chance of Hillary winning and she didn't win then is it that the stated probability was incorrect or was it correct but the 2% chance came off? How can you check this?

 

[firefinga]

Liberals always seem to be shocked that everyone doesn't think like they do. They favour these small progressions that supposedly inch society towards their vision, but can never produce any meaningful systemic change. Same with race.

Liberals often come across as patronizing and over-zealous on issues the "common man/woman" sees as exotic, at best.

 

[luka]

Happy Fascists

Is this real? I didn't enjoy reading it very much.

 

[...]

Very real.