Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip
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andin, in reply to
U.S. democracy is a sham.
Nah there’s been a mass outbreak of slumbering perambulation whilst giving the appearance of being in full control of one’s faculties.
Ya get that -
Rich Lock, in reply to
Its tough to realise Trump did this with far less money and organisation than Hillary had.
I read a story a few weeks ago that estimated he had had around 2 billion-with-a-b dollars-worth of free tv exposure, from being able to pick up a phone and waltz onto fox for a quick chat with hanitty or whoever.
He didn't need to spend the money when there are certain elements of the media actively pushing him.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
He didn’t need to spend the money when there are certain elements of the media actively pushing him.
How long before Trump starts going Erdogan on media outlets that dare to cross his path?
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Well. That was unfortunate. Apparently a near-plurality of USians would like their country to go die in a fire now, thanks, OK, bye.
He's not the first bloke like this to be elected in recent years, just the one put in the most powerful position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
Seems he will make for very interesting days, will President Trump. What with his rather constant insistence that people will have to listen to him once he's President, in that he will not have to listen to anyone, because he is so smart, and anyone disagreeing is just out to get him, which is basically terrorism once he's the President. And so many people needing locked up before he even got there, like his political opponents.
But man, when he turns off the people's shiny new healthcare, and shuts down abortion, and locks up all the minorities even more, and installs trade tariffs and makes prices go up, and guts environmental regulation like it's the 1960's again and river fires are good family fun, and blocks all the renewable power initiatives because it's a scam by China you know, and cuts back on immunisation programs, ... fucking hell.
Like, people's life expectancy back then was pretty shit. He's going to kill a lot of people, in the USA, let alone anywhere he decides to nuke.
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I can't really make up my mind about the ramifications of a Trump Presidency yet. But I'm nowhere near as surprised by it as I think most others are who really wanted Trump to lose. This is not because of some deep analysis of the underlying drivers that caused Americans to vote for Trump. It's purely because I've been watching the numbers closely, particularly on 538, and at no point have they indicated a shoo-in in the last few months. And the fundamental thing you have to understand about probability is that sometimes things don't follow expectation. Particularly a weak expectation, which is all we had by yesterday morning.
I chose not to look at the polls themselves at all. They're incomprehensible in such large numbers, and you get into all the silly arguments about which ones to trust, who is biased, etc. To get a better picture, you've got to aggregate them. You've got to explore the extent to which they are correlated in different states, and you have to model how they translate into electoral outcomes in a statistically robust way. I can't and won't do that, particularly not since 538 already does it very well.
And one thing that struck me all along was how close the race continued to be.
When the sexism scandals took off, those probabilities went steadily down for a while, but then tapered off at around the 10% mark. If the election were held right then I'd have felt much more confident. But interestingly, as time kept marching, the numbers didn't continue to drop, which I'd expect if a robust level of a 6 point margin was something that it stopped out at. Underneath, clearly, the support was rising. Then it began to steeply rise on the FBI interference. By the time the probability was sitting on 35% again, my feeling was that it was anyone's game. That's what I'd be feeling if it was the last few minutes of an All Black test with them one point ahead and the French suddenly get the ball.
Silver did a good job of explaining why his aggregations gave higher chances to Trump than the other ones out there. Every bit of that made sense to me. Particularly the correlation between the errors in the states.
It's a big mistake to think that the polling in the states are statistically independent events, and thus errors should even out across the large number of states, and thus a 3 point lead is unassailable in aggregate, despite being quite uncertain if you're only taking a single state into account with such a high number of undecideds. When a poll is getting it wrong, it's also known that the other polls are more likely to be as well.
So I don't see a huge methodology fail, except in so far as people can't learn to trust that when you're doing these aggregations, you really need to start trusting what the simulations are telling you, you can't possibly work this stuff out analytically, by hand. I had no interest in all this calculation of "pathways to victory" counts. Monte Carlo simulations work that shit out for themselves.
Yes, in the end, the polls were still wrong in their predictions. But the variance was so high in that predictions, that it's not really that surprising that the unexpected outcome happened. This is purely looking at the numbers themselves without any notions of what should have happened or how people should be seeing Trump.
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On how people are seeing Trump, I have to say I really don’t rate my chances of doing it without numbers. I wouldn’t vote for Trump because he’s a clown, and I tend to agree with what Obama said last year, that the presidency is a serious job, and should be treated that way. I can’t say anything about Clinton particularly appealed to me, and under those circumstances it’s a bit hard to articulate why one should vote for her, other than the purely negative reason of keeping Trump out of power.
But how I feel about either of those points doesn’t help me understand where the visceral dislike of Clinton comes from, nor what the attraction of Trump is. He’s simply a mystery to me, the way that my enjoyment of watching MMA probably is to others. It’s just not my bag to watch his act, which makes a farcical show of the serious business of running a business, in the way that professional wrestling does of actual competitive fighting, and in the way his entire campaign has of the very serious business of running the most powerful country in the world. Presumably this is how he will run a war, or his foreign policy, like he’s in the professional wrestling as Mr Boss Man or something. As happened during the Apprentice, his post-production staff will have to work out how to spin why he fired someone so that it sounds rational, and it won’t wash with me in any way.
But clearly he’s built some kind of narrative that’s appealing to a large audience. He’s not even the first actor in the White House doing it, the cowboy actor did it first. Which direction it will now take is anyone’s guess, just like his show, on which he would fire the better person on a whim sometimes, just to show that he could.
What is that narrative? Ultimately the clearest thing, about the only thing you could say for sure, is that there’s going to be change. More importantly, I think Clinton was cast very clearly as the opposite, the status quo. She certainly never convinced me that anything would be different on her watch. Hell, it’s even the same actual person who was in the White House when I was younger. And her husband too. To me, it was fucking madness to have chosen someone who had already been there. How can you possibly convince people who lived through your last tenure, and then kicked your crowd out in favour of Dubya, that you’re going to be anything more than business as usual?
And clearly, business as usual is not what the Trump supporters wanted. Whether they will actually get it anyway remains to be seen. I don’t see professional wrestling having gone through any important structural revolutions in all the years I’ve seen it, despite the actors changing. Trump’s play acting is not going to be strong enough to make the enormously powerful institutions in the USA change how they operate, that will be down to the Republican machine, and is there any real reason to think they’re any different than they’ve ever been?
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izogi, in reply to
Well. That was unfortunate. Apparently a near-plurality of USians would like their country to go die in a fire now, thanks, OK, bye.
It’s easy to just blame and joke about US voters or the media, which I’ve seen lots of over this already, but I’d worry that that’s also the attitude which resulted in this coming about.
For some time now, the ruling political establishment of the USA has been increasingly out of touch with real problems in its own country. It’s taken its privilege for granted by assuming that no matter how bad or neglectful you are to the masses, and no matter how few people are inspired to vote through lack of choice, there can’t be any significant change. One of two options must be elected. Most of the masses will vote tribally or be eliminated under the system by those who do, and the only requirement is to get to the top of either pack and to appear less bad than the only alternative in a few pockets of population where tribalism is less reliable.
I don’t see Trump as an answer to voters’ real problems, but it’s not as if Hillary Clinton was either. He’s different, though. Hopefully this is the extent of the revolution that the US people are looking for and destruction is minimised, and hopefully over time the establishment will wake up and change itself to actually consider people’s problems seriously. I guess we’ll see in coming months and years.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Oh well, Michelle Obama will save America in 2020.
Or Julia Louis-Dreyfus, recognisable TV faces seem to work...
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Damn, looks like we quietly slipped into the Philip K Dick universe overnight – and there has been a disturbance in the time/space continuum!
Stuff thinks it is Armistice Day (Nov 11) already!!
(according to their dateline anyway...) -
How does Trump even begin to satisfy the white working class voters who elected him? There's nothing in his economic policies - or those of Paul Ryan - except perhaps massive govt spending on infrastructure. And there's a lot that will directly hurt them.
Trump could become immensely unpopular very quickly. The obvious ways he could turn include scapegoating (his first reaction) circuses (in the Roman tradition of massive distractions) or a war.
Interesting times. -
Seems like Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but not the electoral system, and numbers voting overall were down. So Trump was only elected by a minority of the voting public, which means they have the power to vote him out again. Particularly young voters.
I predict he will be encouraged by his minders to stick to the autocue for the near future. He will be carefully scripted.
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This morning I caught Stephen Colbert's singing off, which I thought was a nice summing up of the state of politics and people in the US.
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How does Trump even begin to satisfy the white working class voters who elected him?
He doesn't have to. He's created a first world Cargo Cult and all he has to do is keep telling his supporters that things are better, and they will feel better and that will be enough.
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David Hood, in reply to
How does Trump even begin to satisfy the white working class voters who elected him?
The white voters that elected him. Don't single out the working class.
College educated white voters voted 49% Trump 45% Clinton (though Clinton get more votes among college educated white women).
The Telegraph has what I think is quite a good graphic, showing that rural votes (in the swing states) made a huge difference,
My feeling is that as civic participation decreases, it means that the voting population is harder for pollsters to model, as one off events can result in bigger changes in turnout among voting blocks, so past elections are less predictive.
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You stats geeks, know, don't you, that there are multiple source of errors:
- there's sampling error => I have a bag of fair coins and 60% come up heads -> that depends on the sample size and is known.
- then you've got systematic errors => some of the coins have two heads -> that's the unknown.When people say a poll has a 4% error margin, that's usually sampling error. You add on to that errors because the group of people they polled wasn't representative, the people lied, the adjustments for that (based on previous experience) were wrong, etc. That number is unknown - it could be anything at all.
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izogi, in reply to
How does Trump even begin to satisfy the white working class voters who elected him?
I'm sure the reasons are as diverse as the US, but there's a really insightful web series posted by Van Jones in the last few days leading up to the election. He went to Gettysburg and talked to (mostly) Trump supporters to find out more about their real problems and why they were supporting him.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3: -
David Hood, in reply to
How do we know that?
Exit polling- so it is those people willing to answer surveys outside where they have voted.
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Rob Stowell, in reply to
He’s created a first world Cargo Cult and all he has to do is keep telling his supporters that things are better, and they will feel better and that will be enough.
There’s some truth in what you say. This has been the triumph of emotion – rage, grievance and fear – and maybe some sense of triumph will be enough. I don’t think so though. Rage and grievance and fear will also need to be fed :(
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Trump vs 'the media' could be the next big sideshow. Outside of Hannity on Fox, there's been remarkable unanimity from newspapers and major media organisations that Trump is unfit to be president.
Some might come around, but it's likely the war of words will ramp up, as Hillary fades away as a focus of media attention leaving Trump's legal problems, business affairs, sexual behaviour and personal foibles in the spotlight.
He's advocated changing the libel laws and loves to threaten legal action. There appear to be plenty of major media outlets who are ready for that scrap. How Mr ThinSkin will react is anyone's guess, but I'd bet on the shortest political honeymoon in history. -
The prong of Trump and the GOP's game that may fade from memory as the Clintons leave the spotlight is the decades long strategy of demonising Hillary. Mountains of mud were thrown, and thrown again, and stuck, even as investigation showed them to be completely unfounded.
She wasn't a great candidate for a range of reasons. But she was a terrific lightning rod for hate and fear and conspiracy. You can be a weak candidate and not hated. She was widely hated, and not just by GOP misogynists.
I'm still astonished how many people avowedly sympathetic to 'the left' despised her so deeply. This has to be a major factor - ensuring lowered voter turn-out and twisting white male voting. -
Bart Janssen, in reply to
Trump represents, in the words of one writer, everything they were taught to fear about democracy
It's kind of hard to argue with them, Brexit, Trump and even here we've seen the failure of democracy. The idea that the population can make good choices relies on them being informed and willing to make the effort to understand the implications of their choices - it's pretty clear the public are not informed and really don't care.
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Rob Stowell, in reply to
it’s pretty clear the public are not informed and really don’t care.
I think it's instructive to flip from seeing this in terms of knowledge and information, to seeing it in terms of emotion and emotional satisfaction. We like to see ourselves as rational animals, but we are experts at rationalising our emotions after we've behaved on them.
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mark taslov, in reply to
Narcissistic_personality_disorder
The second time you’ve done that in 4 posts. Don’t ‘diagnose’ Donald Trump, it’s not helpful.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
I think it’s instructive to flip from seeing this in terms of knowledge and information, to seeing it in terms of emotion and emotional satisfaction.
Yeah I am kinda saying that. Essentially what we are seeing is that many (most) people vote based on emotion - they then find facts that support that emotion and reject facts that refute that emotion.
But I'm also saying that given that state, democracy does not work. Democracy relies on people actually looking at and understanding the facts before they make their choice and what we are seeing is that people don't actually behave that way.
I'm not saying whether people are wrong or right to behave that way but given the observation that they do then you'd have to accept that a political system that assumed they behave differently won't work as intended.
What the Chinese have said is that because people behave that way they'll reject democracy as an option.
Personally what I'd prefer is that we keep democracy but teach people, in something like a civics course in school, why they need to approach their voting choices more slowly/thoroughly/thoughfully. They remain free to vote however they wish but become less likely to vote based on emotion first and data second.
Or you can just appoint me dictator for life, I promise to be benevolent :).
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Don’t ‘diagnose’ Donald Trump, it’s not helpful.
Obviously. Maybe if there'd been more memes calling Trump a fat ugly nutter, then Bubba T Flubba down in Shitsville, FL wouldn't have voted for him. But you know, Trump won't hurt the rich people or indeed New Zealanders who are most fastidious about these things.
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