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Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history. Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict. Most poll

by culi 2y ago

Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history. Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict. Most polling had almost all the swing states as extremely close. The outcome was likely to swing in the same direction across all swing states so an EC blowout is likely

wakawaka28 2y ago
As I recall none of the big polls the mainstream media was pushing projected Trump to win. They even refused to call the election until the wee hours of the morning, when the results were pretty clear. Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate.
- culi 2y ago
  Major decisions desks (AP, Edison, and Fox News; plus a recent newcomer called DDHQ) have made about 3 incorrect calls in their entire history (they were house races, not senate or presidential calls). An incorrect call is a HUGE deal and they have an extremely high bar for certainty. Even for Obama, who's wins were basically a landslide compared to the past 3 elections, calls weren't made until around midnight. Historically it's even common for presidential candidates to concede even before decision desks have made an official call (another norm Trump has challenged). Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than pollsters and have no overlap. I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback Machine to verify your claim * NYTimes frontpage the day before the election says "turnout is a focus in a closely divided race" https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytimes.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytim... * Vox frontpage says "5 reasons Harris could win and 4 reasons Trump could" and "Should it really be this hard to beat Trump?" https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.c... * CNN frontpage does not include any particular characterization of chances https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.cnn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.c... A cursory look at other "mainstream" media sources will easily verify that the race was clearly represented as a very close tossup.
  - colonCapitalDee 2y ago
    > complains about mainstream media > has no idea what mainstream media says because only source of information is unreliable fringe news sources many such cases
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      I get information from everywhere. Don't project your ignorance of alternatives on me.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    [flagged]
- kleiba 2y ago
  > Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate. And who, in your opinion, executed this coordinated deception, and to what end?
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    The Democrat-leaning media is obviously the culprit I'm talking about, and they do it to try to win. While there is some Republican-leaning media, approximately 80% of the media leans toward Democrats.
- t-3 2y ago
  That's just not true. Even the New York Times had Trump projected to win on election day '24, before any state had finished polling.
asdf6969 2y ago
Why does it matter? If the system was different the whole campaign would have changed. Only the votes that matter actually matter. The rest is just speculation and you really have no idea what would happen to the popular vote if that’s what was important. He won!
- milesrout 2y ago
  Also the idea that people's votes don't count because they are in a "safe seat" is bananas. Of course it counts: they count it, and it goes towards the final result. It is like saying that the only purchase to really bankrupt you is the last one you made. No, of course not, it is the aggregate. The straw did not actually break the camel's back, and seven states do not decide the election. 271 electoral votes do! All 271+ of them.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - notTooFarGone 2y ago
    So how many seats is a vote worth in Iowa vs California? Is it the same? If Elections would be done via tokens and you had 10 and another person gets 60 to vote, would you say that is unfair?
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I think it's a bit more complicated than you make it sound. I live in California, so of course all my state's electoral votes went to Harris. I could have not bothered to vote, but the problem is that if everyone like me were to think the same way, those electoral votes could go to someone else. So yes, in a literal, technical sense, my vote counted. But in reality, my vote had little to do with the outcome, whereas the votes of someone in Pennsylvania or Arizona had everything to do with the outcome. Those seven states absolutely did decide the election. I do think that tallying the overall popular vote is a useful metric, even if the election's outcome doesn't depend on it, so I guess in that sense my vote "counted" as well.
  - lynx97 2y ago
flanked-evergl 2y ago
Using the popular vote in a system where the popular vote means nothing seems a bit odd. Why not use the candidate's hand sizes instead? It's just as arbitrary.
- kelnos 2y ago
  No, that's not just as arbitrary. Please don't make bad-faith arguments. The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate. The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office, and that's literally it. It just tells us who did better at influencing voters in a handful of states that actually matter in the idiotic electoral college system, putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters. That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has. In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did. It wasn't a blowout, he has no mandate. And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote. If candidates had to campaign in every state, to get every voter out that they can to support them, the final results would probably not look the same as what we go.
  - weberer 2y ago
    >putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters Are you referring to the final 538 electors who actually make the final vote? Most of them are bound to vote based on who their state voted for. Aside from some rare exceptions (like that WA elector that voted for Chief Spotted Eagle in 2016 as some sort of weird protest). Or are you trying to claim that only swing voters in swing states are responsible for the outcome of the election? Because that's a fallacy I've seen a lot of people make recently that I'm just going to start calling "the tiebreaker fallacy". If you have a panel of 101 voters where 50 people vote one way, 50 vote the other way, and one person is the tiebreaker, you can not make the claim that only the tiebreaker's vote counts. All 101 voters were part of the process. At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
    - coldpie 2y ago
xienze 2y ago
> Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history. You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 and the prevailing wisdom was that the EC was the _only_ thing giving Republican candidates a fighting chance in presidential elections (so much so that every election we hear much wailing and gnashing of teeth that the EC system should replaced by popular vote, and in fact there is an "electoral vote compact" that several states have entered into that pledges to give all electoral votes to the popular vote winner as a way to nullify the EC). For Trump, with his MANY issues, to win the _popular vote_ by 1.5% is monumental, and I guarantee you not a single model predicted that in any way whatsoever. You put a Nikki Haley up there and she would've won the popular vote by 5-10%, easily. Which would be astounding numbers for a Republican candidate in this day and age.
- Hasu 2y ago
  > You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004. There are several other factual errors in your comment that are ruinous for your conclusions.
  - xienze 2y ago
    My bad, you’re right. So instead of happening in 1/9 elections before this last one it’s 2/9. A dramatic difference indeed. What else is incorrect?

by culi 2y ago

wakawaka28 2y ago

As I recall none of the big polls the mainstream media was pushing projected Trump to win. They even refused to call the election until the wee hours of the morning, when the results were pretty clear. Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate.

culi 2y ago
Major decisions desks (AP, Edison, and Fox News; plus a recent newcomer called DDHQ) have made about 3 incorrect calls in their entire history (they were house races, not senate or presidential calls). An incorrect call is a HUGE deal and they have an extremely high bar for certainty. Even for Obama, who's wins were basically a landslide compared to the past 3 elections, calls weren't made until around midnight. Historically it's even common for presidential candidates to concede even before decision desks have made an official call (another norm Trump has challenged). Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than pollsters and have no overlap. I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback Machine to verify your claim * NYTimes frontpage the day before the election says "turnout is a focus in a closely divided race" https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytimes.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytim... * Vox frontpage says "5 reasons Harris could win and 4 reasons Trump could" and "Should it really be this hard to beat Trump?" https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.c... * CNN frontpage does not include any particular characterization of chances https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.cnn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.c... A cursory look at other "mainstream" media sources will easily verify that the race was clearly represented as a very close tossup.
- colonCapitalDee 2y ago
  > complains about mainstream media > has no idea what mainstream media says because only source of information is unreliable fringe news sources many such cases
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    I get information from everywhere. Don't project your ignorance of alternatives on me.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  [flagged]
kleiba 2y ago
> Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate. And who, in your opinion, executed this coordinated deception, and to what end?
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  The Democrat-leaning media is obviously the culprit I'm talking about, and they do it to try to win. While there is some Republican-leaning media, approximately 80% of the media leans toward Democrats.
t-3 2y ago
That's just not true. Even the New York Times had Trump projected to win on election day '24, before any state had finished polling.

asdf6969 2y ago

Why does it matter? If the system was different the whole campaign would have changed. Only the votes that matter actually matter. The rest is just speculation and you really have no idea what would happen to the popular vote if that’s what was important. He won!

milesrout 2y ago
Also the idea that people's votes don't count because they are in a "safe seat" is bananas. Of course it counts: they count it, and it goes towards the final result. It is like saying that the only purchase to really bankrupt you is the last one you made. No, of course not, it is the aggregate. The straw did not actually break the camel's back, and seven states do not decide the election. 271 electoral votes do! All 271+ of them.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- notTooFarGone 2y ago
  So how many seats is a vote worth in Iowa vs California? Is it the same? If Elections would be done via tokens and you had 10 and another person gets 60 to vote, would you say that is unfair?
- kelnos 2y ago
  I think it's a bit more complicated than you make it sound. I live in California, so of course all my state's electoral votes went to Harris. I could have not bothered to vote, but the problem is that if everyone like me were to think the same way, those electoral votes could go to someone else. So yes, in a literal, technical sense, my vote counted. But in reality, my vote had little to do with the outcome, whereas the votes of someone in Pennsylvania or Arizona had everything to do with the outcome. Those seven states absolutely did decide the election. I do think that tallying the overall popular vote is a useful metric, even if the election's outcome doesn't depend on it, so I guess in that sense my vote "counted" as well.
- lynx97 2y ago

flanked-evergl 2y ago

Using the popular vote in a system where the popular vote means nothing seems a bit odd. Why not use the candidate's hand sizes instead? It's just as arbitrary.

kelnos 2y ago
No, that's not just as arbitrary. Please don't make bad-faith arguments. The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate. The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office, and that's literally it. It just tells us who did better at influencing voters in a handful of states that actually matter in the idiotic electoral college system, putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters. That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has. In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did. It wasn't a blowout, he has no mandate. And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote. If candidates had to campaign in every state, to get every voter out that they can to support them, the final results would probably not look the same as what we go.
- weberer 2y ago
  >putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters Are you referring to the final 538 electors who actually make the final vote? Most of them are bound to vote based on who their state voted for. Aside from some rare exceptions (like that WA elector that voted for Chief Spotted Eagle in 2016 as some sort of weird protest). Or are you trying to claim that only swing voters in swing states are responsible for the outcome of the election? Because that's a fallacy I've seen a lot of people make recently that I'm just going to start calling "the tiebreaker fallacy". If you have a panel of 101 voters where 50 people vote one way, 50 vote the other way, and one person is the tiebreaker, you can not make the claim that only the tiebreaker's vote counts. All 101 voters were part of the process. At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
  - coldpie 2y ago

xienze 2y ago

> Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history. You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 and the prevailing wisdom was that the EC was the _only_ thing giving Republican candidates a fighting chance in presidential elections (so much so that every election we hear much wailing and gnashing of teeth that the EC system should replaced by popular vote, and in fact there is an "electoral vote compact" that several states have entered into that pledges to give all electoral votes to the popular vote winner as a way to nullify the EC). For Trump, with his MANY issues, to win the _popular vote_ by 1.5% is monumental, and I guarantee you not a single model predicted that in any way whatsoever. You put a Nikki Haley up there and she would've won the popular vote by 5-10%, easily. Which would be astounding numbers for a Republican candidate in this day and age.

Hasu 2y ago
> You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004. There are several other factual errors in your comment that are ruinous for your conclusions.
- xienze 2y ago
  My bad, you’re right. So instead of happening in 1/9 elections before this last one it’s 2/9. A dramatic difference indeed. What else is incorrect?