4 ms·

This is very untrue, even if we take nobody as a little overstatement, half of the election prediction models had him above 10% chance of winning (FiveThirtyEig

This is very untrue, even if we take nobody as a little overstatement, half of the election prediction models had him above 10% chance of winning (FiveThirtyEight had him at 29%, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html?_r=0#other-forecasts https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential...). WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, published in their blog "Cognoscenti" an article titled "Why Donald Trump will Win in November" in May of 2016 (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/05/06/election2016-trump-establishment-politics-tom-keane https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/05/06/election2016-tru...). I can't think of anything more representative of what people think of as the left leaning intellectual class than a Boston NPR blog with a Latin title. This idea that him winning in 2016 was inconceivable to media/intellectual circles is a bit of revisionist history.

free_rms 6y ago
Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros). A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Most of the mainstream media The mainstream media and the intellectual class have very little overlap.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    The intellectual class media I should say, then. NYT, Washington Post, etc.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  Note that no one denies Hillary was considered the favorite, I also mention the HuffPost model which was the most prominent to reflect a near certainty. Most news outlets, even conservative ones, reported on this notable predictive modeling effort. What there was, was a diversity of opinion and vigorous debate (sometimes devolving into sniping, sure), the thing that is supposed to be there. There wasn't a 50/50 split, but I don't remember a single publication I read at the time (all the classic left leaning intellectual rags) that didn't run pieces predicting a Trump victory.
- fiblye 6y ago
  The 99% number so often paraded as a sign of failure wasn't a 99% chance of being president. It was a 99% chance of winning the popular vote. That prediction was correct, and by a decently large margin. But losers often become president because of the electoral college (it's happened 5 times already), and losers will continue to benefit for years to come.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    It was a conditional probability of Trump winning a bunch of states he was behind in, naively projected as if they were independent. It turned out they all swung the same way, and those probabilities were not independent.

free_rms 6y ago

Eh. Most of the mainstream media ran headlines predicting 99% chance of a Hillary win and a few of them sniped at Nate Silver for giving Trump a 30% chance (stupid tech bros). A single contrarian take doesn't undermine that trend.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Most of the mainstream media The mainstream media and the intellectual class have very little overlap.
- free_rms 6y ago
  The intellectual class media I should say, then. NYT, Washington Post, etc.
jrumbut 6y ago
Note that no one denies Hillary was considered the favorite, I also mention the HuffPost model which was the most prominent to reflect a near certainty. Most news outlets, even conservative ones, reported on this notable predictive modeling effort. What there was, was a diversity of opinion and vigorous debate (sometimes devolving into sniping, sure), the thing that is supposed to be there. There wasn't a 50/50 split, but I don't remember a single publication I read at the time (all the classic left leaning intellectual rags) that didn't run pieces predicting a Trump victory.
fiblye 6y ago
The 99% number so often paraded as a sign of failure wasn't a 99% chance of being president. It was a 99% chance of winning the popular vote. That prediction was correct, and by a decently large margin. But losers often become president because of the electoral college (it's happened 5 times already), and losers will continue to benefit for years to come.
- free_rms 6y ago
  It was a conditional probability of Trump winning a bunch of states he was behind in, naively projected as if they were independent. It turned out they all swung the same way, and those probabilities were not independent.