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Notes -
Just before Trump was elected, Scott wrote a great piece called Tuesday shouldn't change the narrative. In it he talks about how the race between Trump and Hillary was very close, close enough that random fluctuations in opinion or random events like the weather could be the deciding factor in the race. He argues that people shouldn't change their worldview based on whatever the outcome is. I believe I see so many people falling into this trap though. It didn't take long after Trump won for people on all sides to start talking as if it was always inevitable, like "Trump won because he inspired people more and riled up his base, Clinton was an uninspiring candidate playing too safe" or "Trump's victory was inevitable because of the deep history of racism in the country", etc. I feel like (though I'm not sure I can think of examples off the top of my head) even Scott might fall into this trap a little bit.
People even took the victory as an indictment of MSM, since most sources said that Trump had something like a 1% chance of winning. I believe this is illogical, though, because even if he did have a 1% chance of winning, it could have been that 1% chance that caused him to win. It's not like whoever has the highest percent chance at the time of the election is declared the winner.
I'm just curious to hear people's thoughts on this, both about this pattern of thought of erroneously retroactively changing worldviews or thinking events were inevitable, as well as about the 2016 election. I think that Scott's article has a good lesson, and it'd do most people good to try to remember it more, before taking the events which have transpired as an indication that only those events could have ever transpired.
Fundamentals models that attempt to predict the 2-party share of the popular vote based on "fundamentals" that are independent of the specific candidates (eg: the fact that one party had been in office for 8 years; economic indicators; whether the country was at war, etc) were very accurate. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/abs/recap-of-the-2016-election-forecasts/47D0EEDD5030B5F152AEB9B92A94DCE1. They average 50.6% for the Democratic candidate (actual result: 48.2/(48.2+46.1) = 51.1). From that I infer that Clinton did about as well as a generic Dem candidate would have.
As for performance in swing states, here are some comparisons of the pct changes from 2012 to 2016:
PA Dem - 4.5; Rep +1.6
MI Dem -7.2; Rep + 2.6
WI Dem -6.3; Rep + 1.3
FL Dem - 2.2; Rep -0.1
In all of those states, Trump failed to attract the vote of most of those who decided to switch from supporting the Dem candidate. And, of course, the pct of support for third parties in 2016 was indeed unusually high. From that I infer that there is no evidence that Trump was unusually appealing to swing votes, and that Trump performed worse in those states than would a generic Rep candidate, the direct opposite of what the media narrative holds.
Edit: So, I tried to follow the formatting help re inserting a link, but it did not work. Does anyone know how do to that properly?
Square brackets first with text, then regular parentheses with your link following immediately, no space between the end square bracket and the opening paren. It's just Markdown formatting, if you look that up.
Thx!
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