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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.
Championships are always overrated as emblems of accomplishment relative to 2nd place finishes, and to consistently making the playoffs after strong regular season performances. Think of it like the NFL, teams that win the Super Bowl are held as heroes, teams that lose Super Bowls are more or less erased from history, often derided more than teams that were much worse all season long. But if we're honest, once a team makes it to the big game, they're only ever one or two ACL tears from winning. The 2004 Eagles weren't nearly as good as the Patriots and lost in the Super Bowl, but two or three unlucky injuries to the Pats and the Eagles would have taken it in a walk and be remembered as this great historic team, rather than written off as "The Reid-McNabb Eagles were good but not great, never got over the line and really won anything."
What was interesting about Trump AND about Hillary at the moment in 2016 was the way they had dominated the primary process (Trump by knocking out a slate of talented contenders one after another, Hillary by being so dominant that only jokes and cranks ever tried to run against her) and forced their parties to acknowledge them as leaders. That indicated that both were forces that would need to be reckoned with for years, if not decades, to come. Their wins in the regular season should be taken as evidence they represent important power blocks, and whether they win or lose in the championship they were still both talented politicians who represented the will of many people.
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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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For retroactively changing worldviews, this I think is something very common in general life. My guess would be that people really think in narratives and stories. This is how humans make sense of the world, it is hard to keep track of myriads of possible worlds that could be spawned by butterfly flapping its wings somewhere in Amazon rainforest. One other area where I see it all the time is sports. You can have a great player who is MVP for five years and then if he bombs for a season you will see plethora of I knew he always sucked comments. Similarly people are also prone to overhype especially new players calling them GOAT after one season already having a narrative in their heads. In fact it often is these very same supposed fans who come hard on that player if he bombs, or even if he does something outside of the game that offends fans.
I remember one analysis of this fact mentioning that fans often project their own emotions and insecurities onto the player developing a strange parasocial relationship. If the player do well they have a kick of dopamine themselves, if the player does badly they can really get down. Inventing certain narratives especially those that externalize this pain can then serves as methods of dealing with cognitive dissonance for people. Inventing stories out of the whole cloth reduces inpredictability and thus anxiety and stress. Another one of those examples is centered around "Just World" fallacy - you have to have control over the world so if something bad happen it feels psychologically good to invent some reasons for that. Oh, she got harassed because she wore suggestive cloths/all men are pigs.
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Not necessarily. The same logic could hold if the odds were given as a million to one against, or more. At some point, when a predictor says that something is N-to-one unlikely to happen, and it happens anyway, you have to ask whether it's more likely that the N-to-one chance happened, or the predictor was overconfident and the odds were less than N-to-one against.
Exactly, especially with things like Nate Silver taking tremendous heat for suggesting a Trump win was barely within the margin of error (edit: instead of completely mathematically impossible). That makes it at least appear as though most media outlets saw the polls as propaganda and not reporting tools.
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That's fair. I think you are right that the MSM was probably off here in their estimates either because they underestimated Trump, they wanted desperately to believe that he had no chance, or they wanted to try to influence others in some way to fan the flames of a culture war. Maybe I didn't communicate it well in my post above, or maybe I should have left that one point out of my post. I meant it as a more general point, I guess. It's just a pet peeve of mine that people talk about election probabilities in this way that does not really make sense from a mathematical perspective.
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The media loves grand narratives. The 2016 election was close; a few % of voters switching in a few states would've been enough to flip it. In such a case you could expect to see narratives of equal intensity going in the opposite direction: how the Republican party had severely lost its way putting an obvious loser candidate like Trump on the ticket. Stuff like that. It's mostly clickbait.
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The fact that it was a close race still tells us something very important, even if we knew that before he was elected. Furthermore, we can't in the general case know what the actual probability of something is, or whether an event is subject to random chance fluctuations, or is predetermined. The only reliable way to observe probabilities is via the frequency of events over time. The fact that trump got elected at all tells us something very meaningful, even if he didn't get elected in a landslide. We should definitely reflect on what that is, and how we should alter our behaviour to reflect it.
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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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The media way underestimated trump's odds. It was never as low as 10%>. Even in 2020 we can see how the election became very close at one point during the night, until Biden's mysterious surge. The strength of the GOP, and especially Trump, has always been the swing states, compared to the left whose strength is in # number of votes and turnout.
This is not, and was not, mysterious. It was heavily predicted before the election (Reuters, CNN, NBC, Fox), the explanation (Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, mail-in ballots are counted later) was straightforward, and the only reason this is even a thing is that it was one in a series of Trump's attempts to avoid facing up to his loss.
Do you not remember the "Russians hacked the voting machines" after the 2016 result? There was one lady over at SSC/ACX who firmly believed this happened, even though she was otherwise sensible, and she was a Democrat voter/supporter. There have been conspiracy theories on both sides, so no throwing stones within a glass house.
I don't understand; do you think that the existence of people with bad ideas who voted blue means that we shouldn't point out when someone is reasoning badly? Do you think that I'm backing that particular conspiracy theory? (I'm not; I only faintly remember hearing it years ago.) Aren't we supposed to sharpen each other, as iron sharpens iron?
"Someone who you remind me of reasoned badly, so you shouldn't complain about me reasoning badly" is a poor approach.
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Indeed, it's perfectly natural that after various poll watchers in key areas were removed, Biden had a surge of unfalsifiable support coincidentally in tandem with a startling drop in ballot rejection rates. This was indeed heavily predicted.
The trouble is that while the result could be legit, it looked dodgy in certain areas. I had a quick look at Mariposa County, which was one of the results that looked dodgy - red the last election, suddenly flipped blue, when all the other counties were consistent in voting both times. Turned out that just a small swing in votes could flip it from red to blue because it was finely balanced. No need for any fraud, simply a small amount of voters changing their minds.
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Generally speaking, it would be a strange coincidence if the Biden campaign's malfeasance matched up so impressively well with the media's red-mirage predictions, and had the opposite effect you'd expect on the eventual results, which were much better for Trump than pre-election polling would indicate.
More specifically, this doesn't appear to have happened; the Trump campaign fundraised on that idea, but didn't appear willing to make the same bold claims in actual court.
I have less than zero interest in the legal ineptitude of Trump's legal team; Trump selects for loyalty, not competence, which is understandable but has predictable consequences. The various factors I've mentioned have long been confirmed, regardless of Team Trump's (in)ability to navigate hostile systems.
Okay, but why do you think that "poll watchers were removed", since the only claims to that effect came from incompetent Trump followers who then recanted?
They're not the only source. This has been debated for two years now, and the information is available; I'm genuinely not going to bother rearguing it with you here.
Fair enough but if that's so I'm going to choose not to be convinced by you.
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Humor us, this is the right place to do it after all.
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The common wisdom these days is that Clinton was a uniquely awful candidate so of course she lost; this is obviously wrong, Clinton was a very strong candidate, with access to immense funds, a social network of insiders at every level of politics and business, Clinton name recognition, and the full force of Girl Power and the media behind her. Similarly, the common wisdom now is that of course Biden won, he was a return to normalcy and proof that Trump was widely hated.
This ignores, of course, that Trump received the second largest number of votes of any candidate, ever, even if you accept the election was on the up and up, which I find to be a dubious proposition at best, and more than he did the first go around, and this was even with the media uniformly against him and the political machines of both parties loathing him with every fiber of their being.
The real takeaway is that the electorate is roughly but not perfectly split, and that elections come down to random fluctuations. Run Biden v. Trump again, and it's not at all unlikely Trump wins, especially if election laws are actually followed this time. Run Clinton v. Trump again, and it's entirely possible Clinton wins.
The nation is a house divided and it stands by inertia alone.
Not if they run their campaign the same way, which is pin all their hopes on Big Data, because Big Data got Obama elected (or so they thought) and therefore they alienate all the blue-collar white support by assuming they've got those votes in the bag and not bother turning up for the candidate to do the usual "smile, wave, let the crowd cheer for you, move on" visits. Also have venomous in-fighting at headquarters because everyone is so sure that Hillary is going to win, they are all back-stabbing for 'who will be closest to the Empress?' status. And because X is trying to do down Y, when the poor chumps out in the field ask for help or support or advice because uh guys, what we're seeing on the ground is not stacking up with the Big Data forecasts, they get snubbed, ignored, or if they do get X's attention, Y immediately tries to sabotage that.
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Clinton was a terrible candidate in large part because of a series of unforced and largely unpredicted errors like claiming she was Latin voters’ abuela and barking like a dog on national TV.
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Is there any reason you shouldn't generally expect this to keep happening with each election as the population grows? Naively I would expect the winner from every election to have received the largest number of votes of any candidate ever for the most part.
The population is not so much larger that Trump stomping Obama's numbers was a given, IMO. Yet he did!
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But was her message strong? I remember listening to Trump and Clinton give speeches a few days apart to the Midwestern/Rust Belt crowd (maybe Michigan in both cases?). Clinton came off as fake, speaking platitudes to an audience she's supposed to go through the motions with in between stops with the base she really cares about. Trump was more genuine, putting more work into sounding like he really was going to do something for those people. This was probably fed by my biases of having broken with the liberal side of the isle for the more libertarian no-man's-land a couple of years before. But, part of Clinton's campaign was to focus really hard on the areas she was going to win anyway - like the big cities in California - in order to drum up the popular vote, because they feared that Trump would get the popular vote otherwise while Clinton would win the electoral college. Clinton needed to win the popular vote, too, to avoid any electoral drama with Trump. She didn't put the effort into swing states or red states that she maybe should have, and who knows how that cost her.
Speaking of 2016, biases, and post hoc narratives to explain Clinton's loss and Trump's win, one of my favorite postmortems for the 2016 election was an experiment NYU did to see if sexism played a role in the outcome. Some professors got together, hired a couple of actors, and put on a gender swapped presidential debate reenactment to see if the audience - including several other NYU professors, all most likely Clinton supporters - had a different reaction. Many were surprised to find that she-Trump's message and delivery resonated more with them, while he-Clinton came off as cold and unlikable. I don't have time right now to do more than a hard skim, but I'm pretty sure this is the article detailing the whole thing.
Hillary seemed like the porn star who has been in the business for 30+ years, has sagging implants, plastic face, obnoxious moans, and is still wearing school girl uniforms. Trump was like a nymphomaniac doing their first porn scene and genuinely enjoying it.
While I am neither a Clinton supporter nor a SJW, I still find your oddly specific (on the Clinton part) comparison distasteful.
Don't you think that you might have been able to make the same point in a less inflammatory way?
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I don't believe Clinton's messaging was good, but I'm not a Democrat, and would be unlikely to find Democrat messaging powerful even in the best of circumstances. I agree Clinton was imperfect: her campaign choices were questionable, and the sheer disdain she radiated surely turned off portions of middle America, but nevertheless I assert she had a lot going for her.
I remember that performance, too. She-Trump was quite magnetic.
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Clinton had all the wrong assets -- connections, deep familiarity, a track record -- for voters in the mood for shaking things up. The party bet everything on it not being what pollsters call a "change election." (Yet she won the popular vote and could easily have won.)
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Sad, but definitely true. Unless we can unite somehow, I can't help but think that the current divisions in our society will literally destroy the country. I don't really know how to fix it, but it's pretty depressing to contemplate.
how are these divisions worse than those during the civil war? or reconstruction? or the gilded age? prohibition? this? Active, violent conflict between unions and bosses?
Divisions have been here for ages, and the current divisions seem much less bad than the past ones. All the trump and dems still do their jobs, and the economy still advances rapidly. it's not going anywhere!
In terms of racial and sectarian and ideological composition, the US was a much more homogenous nation back then, even during the active years of the Weather Underground. In the 19th century, even more so. Plus, enforced Christian monogamy and the creed of civic nationalism / American exceptionalism were still the norm, which had a huge stabilizing effect on society.
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I don't think they're worse. I do think they're just about as bad. We have had people literally shooting at each other over ideological divisions within the past couple of years. I genuinely think it wouldn't take that much to push the country into open civil war at this point, and that scares the heck out of me.
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The divisions are not worse than those during the Civil War, but that is only because the Civil War is as bad as it can get. Because then you have a civil war. Being better than the absolute worst possible does not mean you're good.
just for the sake of being a pedantic fuck, i find it hard to believe that the civil war is as bad as political division could get. Shermans march was pretty hardcore but it stopped when it could have done some victory laps just killin routed confederates.
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IMO a lot of folks view divisive politics very pessimistically. I'd compare that to telling a married couple having an argument that they're destined for divorce: maybe, but not always. To get on my soapbox, unity takes effort: it's work, and it often feels unfair, but it can be worth it.
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I do not believe there's a sincere desire in the masses to reconcile, nor do I believe there's a practical way to do so. The tribal divisions may once have been small and manageable; but, like a cancerous tumor, they have swollen to terrible splendor, and insinuated themselves into every facet of life great and small. We are not one people who disagree on some things; we are, at a minimum, two completely antagonistic populations forced to occupy the same space.
There cannot be one nation ruled by two tribes. We will divorce or we will come to blows, eventually. One will become two or two will become one.
Counterpoint: No, we're a mostly aligned blob of people who agree on most issues, and the impression that we're headed for a civil war is an artifact of being extremely online, where insane people of all stripes are disproportionately present and energetic.
We don't share the same cultural tastes. We don't share the same views of foreign or domestic policy. We don't share the same ideas on the sanctity of life, the appropriate way to handle crime, and the fundamental role of the government. We don't enjoy the same hobbies, we don't visit the same places, we don't watch the same news.
Sure, maybe everyone likes the latest Marvel movie, and agrees on vague platitudes like "good things are good" and "bad things are bad". Cut through the surface level and actually dig into the substance of issues, though, and I see nothing but irreconcilable division.
Make a falsifiable prediction with a date attached to it.
Before 2030 we will have a statistically significant increase in violent crime with political motives across the country. I'll even be nice and say we don't have to count the BLM riots, as if we did my prediction would already be realized.
This is where you give it away that you're just predicting that our status quo (of periodic political events accompanied by politically motivated crime) will continue. You said "There cannot be one nation ruled by two tribes. We will divorce or we will come to blows, eventually. One will become two or two will become one." You think a couple more political riots in the next decade is all that it takes to substantiate this apocalyptic vision? Come on, either tone down the rhetoric or make a prediction that justifies it.
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I agree and think this is the real mystery in today's culture war - how far will escalation continue?
In a way, civil war is incredibly unlikely for now because of the relative comfort and safety we have. However, I worry that this comfort allows the divisions plaguing us to keep simmering away and implicitly raises the stakes of any eventual conflict or divorce. We defer the conflict resolution at our peril. The evaporative cooling of a small scale civil war or something analogous like secession a decade ago, could have actually allowed a rapprochement.
I don't expect us to have a second Civil War. Organizing into armies and marching is a surefire way to have the power of the state come down on your head. What I am expecting within the decade is escalation to targeted terrorism, Troubles-style. The US does not have competing armies anymore, but it can easily have competing terrorists.
No, it cannot. The US has the state capacity to stop nearly all domestic terrorism, and it does... when it comes from the right. Except when the counterterrorism orgs create it themselves, of course.
There is no state capacity that can stop a dedicated individual terrorist. If you try to form up into groups and make complicated schemes, yes, of course, the FBI will infiltrate and lead you to getting yourself imprisoned -- but ultimately, no force on earth can stop a man from getting a gun and opening fire, driving his car into someone, whatever.
That sort of thing just disappears into the vast background of crime and crazies. It's not useful for anything.
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It seems to me that the victory can be an indictment of the mainstream media(which undersold the possibility of Trump winning) while not being an indictment of election models which gave Trump a 3/10 chance and the Trump victory is the sort of thing that we should expect to happen every once in a while.
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