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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.
The forgetting about the Comey letter and the anthony weiner peripheral scandal is really quite incredible. There can be a great deal of discussion about why Trump or Clinton got the first 98% of their vote totals. But it's worth remembering just how weird and unlikely it was that specific scandals happened at exactly the worst possible time for Clinton.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
In a way this is normal. People find it easy to remember grand sweeping narratives and easy to forget week by week minutia. For a lot of people Trump wasn't just supposed to lose, he was supposed to experience a hilariously crushing loss. So for many people, especially people who didn't pay attention during the race because they thought it was a preordained outcome, it's engaging to discuss how Trump (an unthinkable outsider) got so close to/exceeded Clinton (the Heir Apparent) in the first place.
You will be judged by normal people not on your accurate assessment of the truth of the matter, and appropriate weighting of the variables therein, but rather in how well your own opinion aligns with the worldview of the person you are talking with. Or, if you disagree with their worldview, how defensible your worldview is within their worldview. But bringing up how the Comey letter constitutes that random always possible weather event that could swing the election one way or another will win you points with neither side.
But things like the Comey letter seem to just be part of the cycle. The "September surprise" or whatever it's called. It happened again with Biden, just this time the FBI choice to help influence on behalf of the democrats instead of against them.
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