Election 2016

[PhoneLobster]

So then sanders was not being attacked during the primaries?

Clinton wasn't going to be attacked during the election?

Clinton's long history of being attacked was in your bizzaro world a positive rather than a negative because??? no fucking reason you idiots just swallowed that joke like it was a real argument.

The extensive ground work of prior attacks AND the YEAR long lead up off the emails prior to even the primaries wasn't republican political effort you could have completely negated by just not picking Clinton?

You think in an election where the candidate constantly painted as the crazy outsider by the establishment won, solidly, and in part because of that depiction that Sanders would have lost votes because he was susceptible to being painted as a crazy outsider?

The fact is the polls were fucking clear and dumb ass chumps like you fell for establishment spin that hey, the numbers weren't really fucking numbers, and Hillary would get a free ride compared to Sanders!

The further fact is the ONLY factor Sanders would have faced (you know, other than no decades long smear history and no emails scandal years in the making) that Hillary didn't, and that we cannot measure or accurately guess at, is that the Democratic party establishment would ALSO have attacked him, but then, the equivalent to the limited degree that it did happen, worked out pretty well on the republican side for Trump and the margin of Sanders lead was very possibly big enough to absorb even that even if it WAS a net negative.

You still can't face the fact that you made the wrong choice and you had the evidence at the time to have known better. First the polled advantage isn't acknowledged, when that doesn't work then its dismissed as not perfectly predictive when that's stupid then, polls have to be meaningless for just one party involved just because loyalists of the other party say so. You aren't being rational, you are desperately scrabbling for excuses, ANY excuses, trying to find something, anything that can stick, and failing.

You picked cynical and status quo rather than optimistic and progressive and it was such a painful choice you cannot admit it was the wrong one and all evidence you made the hard, bad AND stupid choice is lies just because you say so.

[phlapjackage]

Thanks for the info and outside sources

[DSMatticus]

March 28 Sanders peaks at 17.5 point lead on Trump. Clinton, only 11.2.

Ooh, a 17.5 point lead on Trump in March? That's almost as impressive as George H.W. Bush's 19 point lead on Clinton from... March, 1992. It's not nearly as impressive Michael Dukakis's 17 point lead on George H.W. Bush from July, 1988 - an entire four months closer to the election.

Sorry, but rolling the clock forward from late 2015 to early (or even mid) 2016 doesn't really make general election polling any more accurate. The candidates are selected in the early summer, and that's when the general election campaigns start in earnest, candidates face increased external scrutiny, and oppo research makes its way to the media. Dukakis walked out of the Democratic convention with a 17 point lead and then a month and a half later he was behind almost 10 ppt and would never recover, ultimately losing the election by 7 ppt. That's a swing of 24 percentage points. 24 percentage points is not polling error in the traditional sense - it's not a failure of pollsters to capture the opinion of the voting public. It represents actual changes in the actual course of the race, almost like the primaries and the general election are categorically different phenomenon (who would have thought). It's not the Dukakis would have lost by 24 ppt had the election been held in late July; it's that Dukakis genuinely managed to lose a double-digit lead between late July and November. Because it turns out that early polling is ultimately not predictive of a candidate's actual performance.

Fuck, I can find polls showing that Ben Carson was an unstoppable juggernaut who would have torn off Sanders dick and then beat Hillary with it. Does anybody really think "he's a Republican, but Black" is a winning electoral strategy now that we literally just watched Donald Trump ride Republican sentiments of white nationalism - the exact fucking opposite of Ben Carson - to the White House? The polls said so at some point before the primaries were over, so it must be true!

[PhoneLobster]

It didn't make it different to actually talk about the data you should have been using to make your "cold calculated politically realistic" choice actually during the primaries hey? Then why did you dishonestly cherry pick stupidly early dates to try and dramatically minimize the polling lead?

Oh that's right because despite not being a perfect predictor it remains important and actually meaningful data, especially at large margins, even at large margins not perfect, but still at that point, important and far more meaningful than it is at small margins. And once the actual numbers are revealed with the actual margins involved your attempts to dismiss them as insignificant and meaningless are rather obviously fucking stupid.

Much as now when you find yourself forced to cherry pick so far that you must extend your cherry picking selection to the worst examples you can find anywhere and anywhen.

Doesn't matter if the narrative I put forward on what scandals hit Hillary where and how fucking predictable they were and how little she got out of Trumps constant fuck ups and when manages to perfectly fit the polling data and election results far better than your lame claims, YOU have to run away crying to talk about Dukakis because otherwise you look too much like an idiot.

[MGuy]

Just want to point out, again, how Sanders lost the primaries. Completely.

[Username17]

Just want to point out, again, how Sanders lost the primaries. Completely.

Yeah, but that's just in reality. That's not the alternate reality where Sanders had a lot more followers and won the primary and the Republicans still inexplicably spent all their efforts convincing millions of Americans that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted by the FBI despite her not being nominated. That is the alternate reality that Phone Lobster is ranting about. And while we can dismiss this alternate history as being completely ridiculous, it's hard to deny that with that many bizarre changes to our history that the election would have looked very different.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

I picked "stupid early" dates because that is hilariously when this year's candidates started bragging about hypothetical general election matchups. The 538 article I linked is in context of Ben Carson bragging about his matchups against Clinton (and Sanders), and so the author chose poll dates from around the time Ben Carson started bragging - but guess what, things don't get better if you roll the clock forward a couple months. In fact, Dukakis was down 12 ppt (error: 5 ppt) in March before he was up 17 ppt (error: 24 ppt) in July. Yes, that year the error quintupled over the timeframe you happen to be discussing because it produces the most favorable results for Sanders.

Meanwhile, from September onward polling consistently had Dukakis down by ~5-10 ppt - or you know, the exact amount he lost by plus-or-minus the standard 2-3 ppt margin of error on polling. And I mean consistently - 1988 is an election that the polling basically nailed, and yet in July Dukakis was up by 17 ppt and that ended up not meaning a single god damn thing. It's almost like general election polling done during the primaries turns out to just not be very fucking accurate.

The fact is that the people who make a living doing this shit don't take general election polling seriously until a couple weeks after the last convention - so sometime in July or August. Until then, the expected error is larger - often significantly - than the margin of victory, which means the election is considerably more likely to be determined by the way the poll's error breaks than what the poll actually predicts, making the polls worth less than toilet paper because printer paper chafes like hell.

[Mechalich]

Regardless of polling counterfactuals, the 'Sanders would have won' meme is useless for any purpose beyond trying to sound superior in political arguments - which is stupid. Sanders was not the nominee. He did not run against Trump, and Trump is now the President-elect.

Examination of the Sanders candidacy is useful only for the purpose of considering future elections. It is useful to democrats to identify areas where Sanders may have had stronger support and enthusiasm than Hillary did and to try and identify specific reasons why that support might have been higher in the hopes of drafting those supporters in 2018 and 2020. That's going to be a tricky thing to do, since the massive polling failure of 2016 seems to be that millions of Americans are willing to vote for Trump privately but were unwilling to admit to supporting him publicly and thus its going to be hard to get good data.

[Kaelik]

since the massive polling failure of 2016 seems to be that millions of Americans are willing to vote for Trump privately but were unwilling to admit to supporting him publicly and thus its going to be hard to get good data.

That's not the polling failure. The polling failure was that people didn't show up to vote for Clinton (and to be clear, the polling failure had Clinton up 3-6, and she's now up 1-3, which is still within the margin of error). Trump got the same votes Romney did. Some different people voted Johnson instead of him, some other people voted for him that didn't vote before, but not any significant deviation from what the polls predicted. The polls generally predicted that all the republicans would be asshole republicans, and they were. This wasn't a surprise turnout for Trump.

[DSMatticus]

Examination of the Sanders candidacy is useful only for the purpose of considering future elections. It is useful to democrats to identify areas where Sanders may have had stronger support and enthusiasm than Hillary did and to try and identify specific reasons why that support might have been higher in the hopes of drafting those supporters in 2018 and 2020.

Hillary Clinton's weakness is really a lesson about how large propaganda machines can, unsurprisingly, control national media narratives. And also about how partisan law enforcement can and will selectively throw elections to candidates of their preference South American banana republic style. There is simply no way to square Obama's approval rating among millennials and Hillary's comparable underperformance with the same group. All of the policy issues people cite as undesirable about Hillary are Obama's babies, and all of Obama's actual leftwing positions were largely from Hillary's primary campaign against him, but the demographics which had trouble mustering enthusiasm for Hillary are the same ones which are giving Obama his currently high approval rating. That's incoherent, and the only real explanation is emails, emails, emails, Clinton Foundation, did you know Hillary Clinton raped and murdered a young girl in 1990? Fox News genuinely has enough control of public discourse that they can convince members of the Democratic party's leftmost wing to hate who conservatives wants them to hate, and convince enough of them to help flip elections at that.

That's going to be a tricky thing to do, since the massive polling failure of 2016 seems to be that millions of Americans are willing to vote for Trump privately but were unwilling to admit to supporting him publicly and thus its going to be hard to get good data.

You cannot really call 2016 a massive polling failure. Polling aggregates in the last week showed a 3-4 ppt lead for Clinton. Polls have an expected margin of error of 2-3 ppt, and not to mention tons of shit happened in the last week and polls tend to lag. In the grand scheme of things, this election can barely be called a polling miss - this was within the range of error we expect from polling.

Trump got the same votes Romney did.

Did I ever post my "if Trump wins, it will be with less votes than Romney did" prediction here? I can't remember where I ended up saying it.

It was considerably more prophetic than I wanted to be.

[Kaelik]

Fox News genuinely has enough control of public discourse that they can convince members of the Democratic party's leftmost wing to hate who conservatives wants them to hate, and convince enough of them to help flip elections at that..

It's really wrong to cast it as Fox News. The NYT ran more stories about emails then they did critical stories of Trump total. The seeded every story with nonsense weasel words about how emails "cast shadows over Clinton's campaign" but never once even accurately stated how incredibly fucked up for example, Trump's refusal to put out tax returns was, much less how he lied about it for a year.

Right this second, these are the mainstream news titles talking about a Racist White Supremacist being basically the co Chief-of-Staff in the Trump administration:



It's time to admit that the news is broken, and is in the tank for whichever candidate lies more, and therefore the actual news media fought tooth and nail for Trump all election. (And will again for Republicans in 2018, and 2020 by continuing the same soft sell normalization and both siderisms.)

[DSMatticus]

When I say Fox News has significant control over public discourse, I do not mean through direct viewership (though there's that too). I mean the fact that there is a massive rightwing propaganda machine that the media treats as a "peer" drags the entirety of national news coverage to the right. If Fox News did not exist and rightwing crazies did not have a platform from which to spew complete bullshit to a massive audience, I do not think nearly as many centrist news organizations would feel the need to pretend that that sort of complete bullshit was legitimate reporting as part of their eternal both sides crusade. It's not principally different from the concept of an Overton window. Fox News changes the kind of shit that comes out of centrist assholes merely by existing.

But yes, the media is broken.

[PhoneLobster]

Just want to point out, again, how Sanders lost the primaries. Completely.

Indeed, and that was a bad decision. Not necessarily the one that lost the election, just you know, very probably according to what data we have.

But importantly when it favors Clinton the argument is always "but popularity during primaries is different!" but when it's convenient to forget that... "behold the judgement of the primary surely it is the same as the general!".

When it favors Clinton polls mean things. When it disfavors Clinton "Polls are meaningless!".

When it favors Clinton "Years of smear campaign are BAKED IN she is immune to attack!" when a scape goat for failure is needed "a last minute baseless smear is entirely at fault and completely unexpected, no one could have predicted!"

When it favors Clinton SHE is "the mostest left wing candidate for sure" when it doesn't it is Sanders who is "the crazy left wing one".

You don't get to have the argument both ways on every single point.

[Occluded Sun]

I'm still amazed that anyone can use 'progressive' non-ironically.

A hundred fifty years ago, 'progress' consisted of forcing aboriginal children into special schools and punishing them for speaking their own languages, slaughtering the last of the buffalo, and proselytizing Christianity everywhere.

Do you really think that people even fifty years into the future are going to agree with you about 'progressiveness'?

[Kaelik]

Do you really think that people even fifty years into the future are going to agree with you about 'progressiveness'?

I am 1000000% sure that unlike you, they will agree with me that keeping black people as slaves was and is bad. And unlike you, they won't be advocating for a return to literal chattel slavery for minorities.

[infected slut princess]

Hillary underperformed with everyone because no one likes her except lonely spinsters and virgins like Kaelik, whereas Obama is a cool dude so he got 7 million or so more votes than her.

Trump got fewer overall votes than Romney, notably fewer white votes, but did relatively better among various groups including blacks, hispanics, and poor people.

Lesson: Hillary is a retarded bitch and Trump is a bitchy retard. Retards beat bitches.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016 ... polls.html

[Maj]

Fox News genuinely has enough control of public discourse that they can convince members of the Democratic party's leftmost wing to hate who conservatives wants them to hate, and convince enough of them to help flip elections at that..

It's really wrong to cast it as Fox News. The NYT ran more stories about emails then they did critical stories of Trump total. The seeded every story with nonsense weasel words about how emails "cast shadows over Clinton's campaign" but never once even accurately stated how incredibly fucked up for example, Trump's refusal to put out tax returns was, much less how he lied about it for a year.

Right this second, these are the mainstream news titles talking about a Racist White Supremacist being basically the co Chief-of-Staff in the Trump administration:

(image removed for brevity)

It's time to admit that the news is broken, and is in the tank for whichever candidate lies more, and therefore the actual news media fought tooth and nail for Trump all election. (And will again for Republicans in 2018, and 2020 by continuing the same soft sell normalization and both siderisms.)

My favorite quote this election season, courtesy of CBS CEO, Les Moonves, on the subject of Trump's airtime: "It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS."

The Fourth Estate is dead, as far as I'm concerned.

[Parthenon]

Anyway, moving on, does everyone remember that mini-scandal about an FBI agent offering to declare that an email did not contain classified information in exchange for some favors? The existence of that scandal immediately made me doubt all of the FBI's findings. See, the FBI made it sound like their process was to turn over emails that might contain classified information to the relevant agencies and let those agencies make the final determination - the FBI's judgment about what was and wasn't classified did not factor in. The fact that there was an FBI agent in a position to make that offer means that was all bullshit and FBI agents were making calls about what information was and was not classified all along - the same FBI agents who would later go to the press to leak either misleading or outright false anti-Clinton propaganda to the media.

I don't remember that at all. Can you remind me of that please, preferably with a link?

[DrPraetor]

PL, do you seriously not know how elections work to that degree? People who are not running for office and aren't being attacked by their opponents poll higher than people who are. That's why, for example, in 2012 you had all that weird flavor of the week shit with various flash-in-the-pan candidates being noticed, polling at the top of the field, and then vanishing right after. Because people leaving out attacks against you gives you better polling numbers. That's how it works. That's how it has always worked.

Yes and no. Having negative approval ratings also makes you much more vulnerable to attacks, as we just saw.
The FBI stuff was nothing, it hurt Clinton, not because there was anything to it, but because she was unpopular. Now Sanders popularity would've gone down as the nominee, but attack ads against Sanders would've have been less effective, from a higher base of support, then the attacks against Clinton.
Furthermore, given the structure of the coalitions involved, he probably would have won. Now it's a chaotic system - Bloomberg would have run as an independent, in a Trump-Sanders contest, for example, so the effects are highly unpredictable.

claiming that Sanders would have gotten proportionate support from Republicans had he been the nominee is nothing short of delusional.

There is not, and never was, any real evidence for this. There were sporadic reports of tactical primary voting, but the overall results (in MI and elsewhere) were consistent with such factors as demographics, education and income, which were highly predictive of the vote in the general election as well.

Your belief that sanders votes in MI were "ratfucking", or that Republicans were strategically lying to pollsters, is a paranoid delusion with neither historical precedent, nor anything but scattered anecdotal evidence.

He was polling much better - more importantly, his personal approval rating was much higher. Based on the ample evidence (from Congressional campaigns), he would be expected to have done better in the general (and doing any tiny bit better would've led to victory). Hindsight is 20/20, but this isn't ambiguous.

None of this is a guarantee that he would've won, but your gymnastics around the objective facts - that he was more popular than Clinton, and polled better than Clinton in the general election - at every stage of the campaign including right after he won New Hampshire - are based on some presumed narrative about how attack ads would've worked, which also isn't consistent with the evidence.

From Congressional contests, attacks are effective in mobilizing hostility towards an opponent with low personal approval numbers (which Clinton has, whenever she attempts to run for President). Sanders had high approval numbers, so did Bill Clinton; Dukakis' personal approval rating was not high, although nowhere near as bad as HRCs. That sample size was small, the sample size of Congressional races is large but shows the same thing.

Just want to point out, again, how Sanders lost the primaries. Completely.

That's true, and DNC shennanigans were much smaller than I would've expected; Sanders did not have the support of the Democratic primary electorate. But, this tells us that the coalition that the Dem primary electorate represents is presently not large enough to win the presidency. Therefore, the democratic party needed to expand it's coalition to include Sanders demographic support.

That is, if he *had* been the nominee, he'd be expected to have won.

Examination of the Sanders candidacy is useful only for the purpose of considering future elections. It is useful to democrats to identify areas where Sanders may have had stronger support and enthusiasm than Hillary did and to try and identify specific reasons why that support might have been higher in the hopes of drafting those supporters in 2018 and 2020. That's going to be a tricky thing to do, since the massive polling failure of 2016 seems to be that millions of Americans are willing to vote for Trump privately but were unwilling to admit to supporting him publicly and thus its going to be hard to get good data.

It's also useful in terms of resting control of the party from Clinton's faction. Let's forget Sanders for a moment - the HRC wing of the party cleared the field of candidates like Joe Biden - who would've demolished Trump.
Wall-street friendly Democrats can't support a coalition that will win at the Presidential level. Wall-street is not going to give up their control of the democratic party apparatus willingly.

[tussock]

DrPraetor. Hi.

You're suggesting that attacks on unpopular candidates are more successful.

Are you aware of correlation not being the same thing as causation?

That regional economic trends and demographics are strongly predictive of election outcomes, and that incumbents are favoured unless the economy has gone to shit and then they are not. That the popularity of following candidates largely swings on being not the guy who ran the economy into the ground, and attacks against people who are from the same party as the guy who was in charge when the local economy fell in the toilet are going to be against unpopular people.

You know, which would make them correlated, but not causatively so.

Not that people actually vote in elections where their vote will make things better, but when the rust belt voted Trump this time and didn't vote Clinton, it says a lot more about the economic recovery of the rust belt since the crash Obama inherited than it does about the personal magnetism of Clinton.

Who was, in fact, very inspirational, as shown by massive polling jumps in her favour every time she got to talk a while on television in the debates. And winning the democratic primary after those voters got to listen to her.


edit:

“After exchange [with] Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay away. They’re angry, arrogant, screaming ‘you LOST!’ Will be ugly.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... iser-purge

Transition team refusing to work with whitehouse or basically anyone who is insufficiently sycophantic. Already pimping the family business because obviously having the Presidency will help it along.

[erik]

That is, if he *had* been the nominee, he'd be expected to have won.

That is completely uninsightful bullshit. Hillary was expected to have won if she was the nomineee too. Nobody fuckin knows how it would play out. Sanders says he doesn't know if he would have won, and he was expecting Clinton to win.

[Mechalich]

That's true, and DNC shennanigans were much smaller than I would've expected; Sanders did not have the support of the Democratic primary electorate. But, this tells us that the coalition that the Dem primary electorate represents is presently not large enough to win the presidency. Therefore, the democratic party needed to expand it's coalition to include Sanders demographic support.

That is, if he *had* been the nominee, he'd be expected to have won.

Trump's margin of victory is razor-fucking-thin. This needs to be stressed. It comes down to ~200,000 or less people per state in like five states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida). The margin of decision was therefore less than a million votes out of 122+ million votes cast. That's not a signal, it's noise. If you run the election 10 times, Clinton wins some of those times (I'd give Trump a 7-3 edge).

The democratic coalition as presently constituted wasn't large enough to win in this specific circumstance on this specific day with these specific candidates. Considering that there were strong structural headwinds against the democrats simply because they've held the Presidency for 8 years and a huge portion of American voters simply vote 'change' for the sake of it, it's really not appropriate to make sweeping statements about the party as presently constituted.

The key post-election examination is to determine precisely why Hillary lost the three Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin where she was polling consistent ahead outside of the margin of error until the very final moments. Maybe it was Comey's October Surprise, or potentially ther was some other reason why the undecided broke so heavily toward the challenger (and away from Johnson, whose support collapsed in the stretch). It's probably a combination of several reasons and its going to take time and some real research beyond just interpreting exit polls to figure out.

It's also useful in terms of resting control of the party from Clinton's faction. Let's forget Sanders for a moment - the HRC wing of the party cleared the field of candidates like Joe Biden - who would've demolished Trump.

The argument that Biden would have swept the election is just as specious as arguing for Sanders. By all accounts Biden's choice not to run was grounded in deeply personal reasons, not because he was scarred of the Clinton machine, and he belongs to the same wing of the party Clinton does. There's absolutely no way to know what would have happened to Biden after fifteen-ish months on the campaign trail, nor is there any evidence that Biden or Sanders would have done any better at preventing Trump from trolling the media than Clinton did.

You know what the strongest argument for Biden or Sanders over Clinton actually is: that both are men. And that sucks. That is not the approach to take going forward, even if it would be the easier road.

[MGuy]

The strongest argument for Sanders over Clinton is that he was considered trustworthy and she was not. I've no doubt that there were a bunch of people who voted against Hillary because she has a vagina but I'd wager a lot if money that the most if not all people who would vote against her because of that would've voted Republican anyway. Losing the sexist vote isn't as big of a deal as losing the many independent and youthful votes that Obama had. Emails, potential war, being pro business and generally untrustworthy are the things Hillary burned for. Sanders had the change, a relatively simple messages, and was considered Anti establishment and trustworthy by people, including myself.

I voted Hillary because that was the obvious, if undesirable choice. A sizeable number of people ended up like I claimed I would be after Sanders lost, feeling disenfranchised and saying ' fuck it I might as well stay home'. Because of the state I live in my vote didn't end up meaning a whole lot and the only reason I rolled my ass out of bed to do it was because too many of the people I know were convinced that Hillary was just as bad a choice as Trump and Holy Shit that scared me. I found myself fucking putting in the good word for Hillary in a meager attempt to dispel all the misinformation and dumb rebellious voting many of them were going to do. I don't know if Bernie could have won but I do know he was not hated by his own side like Hillary apparently was.

[Kaelik]

“After exchange [with] Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay away. They’re angry, arrogant, screaming ‘you LOST!’ Will be ugly.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... iser-purge

Transition team refusing to work with whitehouse or basically anyone who is insufficiently sycophantic. Already pimping the family business because obviously having the Presidency will help it along.

They are currently in the middle of purging anyone who was even remotely related to Christie, because in 2005 Christie prosecuted Ivanka's Husband's Father.

Good governance at work. I officially revoke on this day all my "Trump probably won't be worse than any other Republican" predictions.

The key post-election examination is to determine precisely why Hillary lost the three Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin where she was polling consistent ahead outside of the margin of error until the very final moments.

Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes. Milwaukee had 50,000 ballots thrown away because they didn't have ID, to say nothing of people who just didn't show up. Estimated 300k people didn't meet voter ID laws. When asked about Wisconsin Walker said "We will win it now, because we have the voter ID law."

Chances are very very very good that the correct answer to "Why didn't Clinton win this state she was polling for winning?" is "Because Republicans made it illegal for black people to vote." For most states you could ask that about.

[Kaelik]

Did you know that calling a black woman an "ape" is controversial? I didn't. I thought it was uncontroversially terrible and racist and fucking awful, but according to NBC, ABC, CNN ect., it's merely "controversial."