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Trump’s Data Team Saw a Different America
- kristianov 10y agoLessons learnt: smugness gets you nowhere.
- woofyman 10y agoExploiting people's fears gets you everywhere.
- snowwrestler 10y agoTrump is incredibly smug. And Hillary's campaign spent 90% of its effort drumming up fear about Trump. It's not so simple.
- snerbles 10y agoAlso drumming up fear about Trump supporters. Deplorable or not, consistently insulting large swathes of your voters is ill-advised.
- snowwrestler 10y agoTrump consistently insulted large swaths of voters. Again: it's not so simple.
- pcunite 10y agoMy opinion here, but I think what made the difference was the media insulting the people for Hillary (or Bernie). Trump's comments came from mostly him. It must have been that the populace took it differently?
- DefaultUserHN 10y ago>Trump consistently insulted large swaths of voters. Trump only insulted criminals who rape women and children trying to cross the border illegally (stats said 1 in 4 women were raped trying to cross the border).
- pcunite 10y agoIt was the constant media rhetoric that made me really question the true reality. So, I went to look for myself. Trump had an enormous number of people looking at him. I didn't know what they were thinking, but it was interesting. Hillary was having famous people speak for her but her numbers seemed to be tiny. Again, just from my perspective.
- dpark 10y ago> but her numbers seemed to be tiny. What does this mean? She won the popular vote, so her numbers were definitely not tiny. She also has 10.8 million Twitter followers, which is less than Trump but by no means tiny.
- kristianov 10y agoPlease stop dismissing other people's real concerns. The country is divided exactly because some are dismissing other's concerns. You are still doing it.
- npiazza83 10y agoA bad narrative beats no narrative.
- sp332 10y agoI really doubt it. They seemed as surprised as anybody.
- pcunite 10y agoI think the surprise (as stated by their campaign) was from overcoming voting fraud, not from popularity.
- 24gttghh 10y agoCitation please.
- pcunite 10y ago"The election is rigged" lol
- 24gttghh 10y agoThe process behind selecting the DNC candidate appears to have been unfairly shifted one direction, but are you suggesting the actual process of registering voters and counting ballots is rigged by a nationwide conspiracy of thousands of bi-partisan poll workers?
- dpark 10y agoNo, he's suggesting that Trump's repeated claims that the election is rigged is the reference for the claim that Trump's campaign was surprised that they managed to overcome the supposed voter fraud.
- rz2k 10y agoPcunite is suggesting that they thought they would win the election, but the instrument measuring the outcome would be corrupted by voter fraud. In other words they were surprised by the true outcome being the one that was recognized.
- pcunite 10y agoI was studying both candidates. Watching him and her online, the numbers (live connections) were crazy high for Trump ... like 70K+ for him. His twitter account had more followers, he had more Facebook likes. It looked like a total landslide to me (not a professional) based on national and public data. The news agencies were all acting like it was impossible. One was giving Trump a 10% chance of winning.
- sshumaker 10y agoThe fact is, the election was actually very close. If there was 1% more turnout Hillary would have won (flipping Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania). She won the popular vote after all. So while it's easy to make broad sweeping generalizations, the story is more complicated than that.
- pcunite 10y agoI'm trying to determine if this really occurred, but there is a report of Terry McAuliffe pardoning 60,000 felons in Virginia for votes. There are other reports of voter fraud. Your vote, as well as mine, were counted. But it seems that the loss was perhaps overwhelming and not as close. We need to get access to the voter databases for election accountability arithmetic. My understanding is this has not been released.
- snowwrestler 10y agoWhat really happened in VA is that McAuliffe restored the voting rights of people who had already served their time and were back in society. This is a power of the governor under VA law and therefore not voter fraud. It's also worth mentioning that the idea of restoring voting rights for people once they have served their time has bipartisan support--in part because so many people have served time for nonviolent marijuana possession convictions. Take a look at the election results to see how the country feels about marijuana possession these days.
- masonic 10y ago
- thisisdallas 10y agoI would just like to remind everyone of the words Obama spoke yesterday, "Now, everybody is sad when their side loses an election, but the day after we have to remember that we’re actually all on one team. This is an intramural scrimmage. We’re not Democrats first. We’re not Republicans first. We are Americans first. We’re patriots first. We all want what’s best for this country. That’s what I heard in Mr. Trump’s remarks last night. That’s what I heard when I spoke to him directly. And I was heartened by that. That’s what the country needs — a sense of unity, a sense of inclusion, a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of law, and respect for each other." Let's make sure our comments here are tolerant of others and devoid of hate at those we might not understand.
- zimpenfish 10y ago> a sense of inclusion Hard to take from a man who chose an virulent anti-LGBTQer as his VP running for a party with extensive anti-inclusionary policies as their platform. Edit: To correct VIP to VP.
- m52go 10y agoThen maybe it's our job to stand as a nation against their hate and show them we won't tolerate it. Forget The Man and remember yourself.
- ulfw 10y agoWhat does that even mean? "stand as a nation against their hate" Stand how? Mass demonstrations each time he speaks or wants to do policy? "Forget the man and remember yourself" remember myself? huh? What does that do?
- andrepd 10y agoAnd science denier, climate change denier, anti-vaxxer, religious zealot, etc.
- riyadparvez 10y ago"inclusion" is one of the feel-good words which does not mean anything in real-life. Since this word is mostly used by liberals, I would start with the protected classes, e.g., homosexuals, religious minorities. How do you include religious Muslims and homosexuals in the same group? Homosexuals are regularly being prosecuted in Muslim-majority countries. Many Muslims (devout or not) are outright hostile to homosexuals. Do you include religious Muslims or homosexuals? Please let me know if you know a concrete solution of this problem, I'm eager to hear that.
- binalpatel 10y agoThe interesting part of this is almost everyone was wrong in this (though when you're talking the realm of probability, it's hard to actually say they were wrong). In my statistics classes we often talk about bias and biased estimates, that you calculate something in such a way that it's systematically different than the true underlying population value. (I.E. if Trump's true likelihood of winning the presidency was X - we always resulted in estimates that were X minus some value below). Long story short - it's cool to see in the real world :). You can have the fanciest models and math, but if the underlying data and assumptions you're working with aren't representative of the population, then it's all for naught.
- awinder 10y agoThe raw numbers seem to disagree with portions of this analysis. Clinton is looking to have received 6M less votes than Obama in 2012, and 9M less than in 2008, while Trump matched Romney / McCain vote totals from the same periods. This wasn't some raucous turnout by voters who hadn't been voting, spurred by overtures by Trump. It was a refusal to turn out among traditionally democratic voters -- many in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where they were asked to vote for a politician who they could directly trace back to NAFTA and a significant inflection point in the stability of their homes, families, and towns.
- tdb7893 10y agoPlease forgive my ignorance but why was NAFTA so bad?
- TetOn 10y agoRight or wrong, Rust Belt residents see NAFTA as at the very least indicative if not the direct cause of the hulking, abandoned factories that form the rust in "Rust Belt."
- infinite8s 10y agoFree-trade is bad for those whose livelihoods are displaced with nothing to replace them with. Of course, free-trade is easy to blame, but the elephant in the room is that even if manufacturing came back to the US, most of it would be done by robots.
- tdb7893 10y agoYeah, my impression is that the manufacturing will be automated, the pay of the job will be low, or the prices will increase in most situations. I guess it remains to be seen whether it is worth it but it seems to me that at the very least the transition will be painful.
- nickthemagicman 10y agoNot to mention her sketch behavior and the DNC.
- dr_ 10y agoAs of this writing, Trump has drawn fewer votes than McCain in 2008 and substantially less than Romney in 2012. He even has less than Hillary. So I'm not sure I agree with this analysis about rural voters - at least not with respect to it being anything unique to this particular election. What seems more likely is that there was an enthusiasm gap for Hillary Clinton as a candidate. It's about the electoral college in the end, and a Democrat like Hillary, who lacks the charisma of Obama, was going to have to bring out minorities, young voters, and college educated voters in droves to win. She simply was not able to sufficiently do this. To win the rural vote back, the Democrats need a different kind of candidate, none of the ones that they have offered have been able to do this since 2000.
- dwiel 10y agoBernie Sanders did this but the encumbant democrats were able to stop him. The encumbant rebuplicans werent able to stop trump so he won. The people in these swing states voted for bernie in the primaries (in places where independants were allowed to participate). The DNC are to blame for being out of touch with the general population and forcing an unpopular candidate down our throats. Its no wonder nobody came out to vote for her.
- nojvek 10y agoThis 100%. It would have been a different show if it was bernie vs trump. In a way, it's the Democrats way of saying "to hell with DNC and corrupt super delegates". The problem with Hillary is that she was seen as a messenger of whoever funded her campaign. That included the ultra rich Arabs, multinational corps, etc. She wasn't authentic. On the other hand, trump was rich enough to not give a fuck and say things at the risk of alienating a large crowd. He really appealed at an emotional level. Hillary was a robot.
- infinite8s 10y agoJoe Biden is probably the only one who could have done it.
- curun1r 10y ago> was going to have to bring out minorities, young voters, and college educated voters in droves to win. One interesting thing that this election showed was that race and gender are two fundamentally different traits. In all the talk about diversity, we lump the two together far too often when gender is really a completely different beast. Minorities, and African-Americans specifically, overwhelmingly turned out and voted for Obama. Clinton didn't get nearly the same effect with women despite her opponent being an unabashed misogynist. It seems that race > religion > gender when it comes to voting identity.
- forkandwait 10y agoThis was a nice article, but can anybody reference a longer, more mathematical analysis? At least here they talk about weighting the polling results, but I would really like to know how, exactly.
- mark-r 10y agoThere are two parts to a polling prediction: predicting how each demographic is going to vote, and predicting how many of each group will show up to vote. I believe the weighting refers to the second part of the process. It appears that the groups more likely to vote for Hillary stayed home on Tuesday more than anybody predicted. There's an article I read within the last couple of days that goes into detail about the weighting process, but I couldn't find it again.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoThis is not a decent answer to your question, but maybe something can be learned from the analysis company's website. I guess they're pretty unlikely to give us much detail about their analysis models, secret sauce, proprietary approach, etc, but maybe there's something mildly interesting here: https://cambridgeanalytica.org/datamodels https://cambridgeanalytica.org/datamodels Cambridge Analytica claims to have a database of over 220 million Americans.
- lujim 10y agoWell on a positive note, it's now clear that not even the Clinton's or all their political allies can rig a US general election. Like or hate the result, the Electoral College, or the "uneducated" US voter, it seems like even if the system isn't 100% fair or perfect, at least it isn't easy to rig. (Democratic primary not so much though)
- benmw333 10y agoAgreed. The kind of money that was put up in this election... scary. Not to mention MSM. It will be interesting to see how that evolves over the next four years.
- hga 10y agoNot so scary when you see the results, or lack thereof. How many dollars did ¡Jeb! pay for each primary voter? Early on it was low-mid 4 figures, couldn't easily find a total. Did find something that claimed Trump spend 63% less for each electoral vote he earned. My thesis is that money only gets you a hearing. After that, it depends the most on whether people like what they're hearing from you.
- Neliquat 10y agoClosing by by blaming white voters? Really? Can we stop the race baiting?
- dwiel 10y agoIf you look at the democratic primary maps [1], you'll see that these white rural voters were actually more progressive than their counterparts in the cities. Look at the county maps for Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. The people in the cities there thought that Bernie was too progressive and so "unelectable" while these "backwards" racist rural voters actually voted for him. These are the people the DNC completely ignored. These are the people that Trump's team saw. They aren't all stupid racist hicks. They voted for Bernie. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Part...
- ryan606 10y agoI think one of the key takeaways from Tuesday: Trump won in spite of what was widely regarded as a NON-EXISTENT ground game. I did not vote for either Trump or Hillary, but I was pretty confident that Hillary would win due merely to the fact that she had a much much stronger campaign organization in swing states. Perhaps ground game, grassroots field offices, and voter databases don't matter as much as everyone thought they did prior to Tuesday.