Well, this season’s pledge drive is over at neo-neocon (although donations are accepted at any time!), and I want to give a huge and heartfelt thank-you to everyone who donated. You really can’t imagine how grateful and touched I am by your generosity, which helps keep this blog going.
Ah yes. Here we go again.
My suggestions this year are simplicity itself.
(1) Try to avoid the topic entirely.
(2) If a liberal brings it up, just use a pleasant tone and say something like, “I think the best thing to do is to wait and see, and give Trump a chance (you could add “like I did when Obama came into office,” but that has the danger of sparking an angry retort from the listener, so you might do well to desist from adding it).
(3) If you’re on the right but had spoken out against Trump during the campaign, and a fervent Trump supporter starts ragging you about how you were wrong to not support him, just use a pleasant tone and say, “I think the best thing to do is to wait and see, and give Trump a chance—and I’m really really glad Hillary didn’t get elected.”
Then dig into that pumpkin pie. You can’t talk with a full mouth.
I’ve already written about how the polls, particularly the national polls, weren’t all that bad this year. But I’m going to add just a bit more.
As of this writing, Clinton is ahead in the popular vote by about 2 million. This amounts to a 1.5% margin, and it could get even larger. It’s not relevant in terms of the election, because the Electoral College still determines the winner. But it is relevant in terms of the national polls, which only deal with the popular vote, and the average of which (according to the person I consider the best poll analyst, Nate Silver, writing two days before the election) predicted a 1.9 margin for Clinton.
Not so far off at all. In fact, quite close.
What this illustrates is several things:
(1) Polls change many times during the campaign year. You can see how much they changed during the 2016 campaign year in a chart here, with the lead changing several times over the twelve months before the election. Clinton was more consistently ahead, though, and was ahead right before the election—and she won the popular vote.
(2) Although national polls seem quite accurate in predicting the winner of the popular vote (especially the closer it gets to Election Day), they are not especially useful in a race that’s at all close, because the Electoral College is the determining factor.
Another important element in this election (and in the difficulty predicting the outcome) was late-deciding voters. Let’s have some figures for how those “undecideds” broke:
Some of the polls were wrong to a degree, yes, but there was also something at work in the final days of the election: People who decided late broke strongly for Donald Trump in the states that mattered, according to exit polls. And without this apparent late surge, Hillary Clinton would be our president-elect ”” not Trump.
In fact, if you look at the four closest states where Clinton lost ”” or, in the case of Michigan, where she’s expected to lose ”” exit polls show late-deciding voters in each of them went strongly for Trump in the final days. In Florida and Pennsylvania, late-deciders favored Trump by 17 points. In Michigan, they went for Trump by 11 points. In Wisconsin, they broke for Trump by a whopping 29 points, 59-30…
And these weren’t small groups of voters. The number of undecided and third-party-supporting voters who were still free agents in the final week was as many as 1 in 8 voters nationally — an uncharacteristically high number for the eve of an election. (As Nate Silver noted, it was just 3 percent in 2012.)
In Florida, 11 percent said they decided in the final week. In Pennsylvania, it was 15 percent. And in Michigan and Wisconsin ”” states where Trump made a late push ”” fully 20 percent of voters said they arrived at their choice in the last seven days.
That’s a lot of people breaking for Trump, and in battleground states it helped turned the tide.
I find these things interesting, and what’s more the subject of polling is bound to come up in the next election (next election? Ugh!) As always, polling is flawed. But not necessarily as flawed as people think.
But what I’m really looking forward to at this point is putting this tedious, stressful election (and its polls) behind me, and hoping that the future is much brighter.
Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be great?
…that thinks the election might have been rigged, and is suggesting a recount in several close states.
I will go out on a limb and say I don’t think it’s going to happen, in part because so much time has passed since the election. But the myth of the election stolen from Hillary Clinton will go on to have a long, long life of its own.
In other news today, Trump is reported to have appointed Nikki Haley as UN ambassador, despite her lack of foreign policy experience and her merely-lukewarm support of him. But the Secretary of State job remains open, with several hot contenders, including supposed leaders Giuliani and Romney.
Mike Huckabee, one of Trump’s early supporters, says that appointing Romney to that job would be an insult to Trump’s supporters, and Newt Gingrich, another Trump promoter, was not a happy camper either, saying:
I can think of 20 other people who would be more naturally compatible with the Trump vision of foreign policy”…
My guess is that one of them would be Newt Gingrich, although Gingrich was modest enough not to list himself:
Gingrich said that Trump would have to consider whether Romney would be a secretary of state “in the John Kerry tradition” and whether the 2012 Republican presidential nominee would “represent the kind of tough-minded, America-first policies that Trump has campaigned on.”
Gingrich added that his preferred choices for secretary of state over Romney included former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina.
So, what’s all this anti-Romney talk from Huckabee and Gingrich? Are they speaking only for themselves, or are they saying this at Trump’s behest? And if the latter, what’s the underlying message? That Romney won’t be chosen? Or that Trump is his own man?:
However, the former Speaker [Gingrich] added that if Trump nominated Romney to be America’s top diplomat, “I’m going to support him. But President-elect Trump deserves to have the team he wants.”
I very much doubt Trump would choose Bolton, who is seemingly more hardline and interventionist than Trump. Giuliani is a strong possibility, and would be pleasing to Trump’s supporters because he’s been a Trump loyalist. But isn’t Trump trying to reach out to non-loyalists in the interest of uniting the country? Romney would be perfect for that. And wouldn’t Romney be a lot more likely to sail through his Senate confirmation that Giuliani, who has some possible conflicts of interest?
[ADDENDUM: Nate Silver says the “hacked” claim from the Hillary camp “doesn’t check out”:
We’ve looked into the claim ”” or at least, our best guess of what’s being claimed based on what has been reported ”” and statistically, it doesn’t check out.
There’s no clear evidence that the voting method used in a county ”” by machine or by paper ”” had an effect on the vote. Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof, and we can’t find any. But it’s not even clear the group of computer scientists and election lawyers are making these claims.]
Seem to be the best of friends now.
The whole interview is well worth reading, as a glimpse into Trump’s mindset at the moment (he’s looking into this and that), and his ability to work the room. For example:
TRUMP: And by the way, if you see something or get something where you feel that I’m wrong, and you have some info ”” I would love to hear it. You can call me, Arthur can call me, I would love to hear. The only one who can’t call me is Maureen [Dowd, opinion columnist]. She treats me too rough.
I don’t know what happened to Maureen! She was so good, Gail [Collins, opinion columnist]. For years she was so good.
[cross talk]
SULZBERGER: As we all say about Maureen, it’s not your fault, it’s just your turn.
[laughter]
This one puzzled me at first:
I am glad to be a visitant of this sodding site.
Until I looked it up. I believe it’s British.
Is anyone surprised at this newest iteration of the kinder, gentler Trump?:
President-elect Donald Trump won’t subject Hillary Clinton to a criminal inquiry ”” instead, he’ll help her heal, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.
“I think when the president-elect who’s also the head of your party ”¦ tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Kellyanne Conway told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who first reported that the president-elect would not pursue his campaign pledge to “lock up” Clinton, his Democratic opponent.
“Look, I think, he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” Conway, who is now on the Trump transition team, said in her interview.
I also think that Trump is probably correct if he calculates that the vast majority of his supporters will forgive him for not pushing the prosecution of Clinton. They are too happy right now about his victory, and the prospects for the future.
At least the Trump administration is admitting Trump lied during the campaign (although they don’t use the l-word). I suppose, if you want to look at it in a good light, that admission of the obvious is somewhat refreshing, compared to denying it.
As for me, I already knew that Trump lies a lot. Most of you—even many of his supporters—were well aware of it, too. The real question is what was he lying about, and when is he telling the truth. It never seemed to me as though he was serious about pursuing Clinton, and I suspect that at least a certain proportion of his supporters just felt it was a fun game to shout “Lock her up!” during the campaign, a kind of cheerleading hyperbole before the Big Game.
I don’t like this business of lying—but hey, I’m not a politician. At least, since Trump was elected, he seems to be jettisoning some of his worst posturing and adopting a more reasonable tone. So he’s been discarding many of the things I wasn’t in favor of, and adopting some I was. Of course, we don’t know if this more reasonable Trump tone is just another pose by a poseur extraordinaire. But time will tell, as action (or inaction, or contrary action) follows words.
[NOTE: Could there be some relation between not prosecuting Clinton and news like this?]
I confess that I haven’t had time to read this presentation from 2014 by Steve Bannon, which was sent me by a reader. But I thought it might be good to mention it, since it at least gives us some information about what Steve Bannon says while in public. Since he’s the big mystery man, it might be of interest.
By now you probably have read the stories about how Trump called a meeting with the press, only to give them a dressing down. If you don’t care much—well, the press certainly does.
Just as an example, see this from David Remnick of the New Yorker:
The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump””the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory””should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.
First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use “nicer” pictures?
For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage…
This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.
The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”
Another participant at the meeting said that Trump’s behavior was “totally inappropriate” and “fucking outrageous.” …
“I have to tell you, I am emotionally fucking pissed,” another participant said. “How can this not influence coverage? I am being totally honest with you. Toward the end of the campaign, it got to a point where I thought that the coverage was all about [Trump’s] flaws and problems. And that’s legit. But, I thought, O.K., let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. After the meeting today, though””and I am being human with you here””I think, Fuck him! I know I am being emotional about it. And I know I will get over it in a couple of days after Thanksgiving. But I really am offended. This was unprecedented. Outrageous!”
I keep waiting for the punch line.
Seriously, who sounds more like blustering blowhards, Trump or the quoted press (quoted by the sympathetic Remnick)? Who sounds more unforgiving, vain, and distracted, Trump or the quoted press? Who sounds more full of invective and resentment, Trump or the quoted press? Who sounds more outrageous and out of line (not to mention biased), Trump or the quoted press?
And who outside of the press thinks the press was fair to Trump after his nomination? It was pretty clear during his campaign that—after the first month or two of their unfavorable coverage didn’t hurt him, and it became apparent he wasn’t just a joke but had a chance for the nomination—that they were essentially fattening him up for the kill (in the metaphoric sense), promoting him till he was nominated and then portraying him unfavorably afterward so that their favored one, Hillary, could beat him.
It didn’t work out quite that way.
You wouldn’t put me in the category of “Trump fan,” and yet it’s clear to me that the press lies about him with some regularity. I’ve been chronicling press bias on a host of issues for many many years; it’s nothing new and nothing unexpected.
I think the more interesting question right now is why Trump called the meeting in the first place only to excoriate them during it. So I’ve prepared a little survey for you, with a choice of answers:
(1) He didn’t excoriate them; the press lied about how he behaved in order to smear him.
(2) He didn’t plan to criticize them so strongly, but he’s emotionally impulsive and lost control of himself.
(3) He purposely did it because he was angry with them, but thought they’d keep it off the record, as he’d requested of them.
(4) He purposely did it because he thought it would intimidate them into covering him more fairly in the future.
(5) He purposely did it and knew it would be leaked, because he wanted to play to the majority of Americans who happen to agree with him that the press is a bunch of no-good liars.
(6) He purposely did it and knew it would be leaked, because he figured it would cause the public to discount future bad press for Trump as a spiteful and retaliative backlash on the part of the press.
(7) He purposely did it and he knew that articles such as Remnick’s, quoting the over-the-top nearly-hysterical reaction of the press, would be written, and that those articles would end up reflecting poorly on the press. In other words, he set a trap for the press, and they fell right into it.
(8) None of the above.
You can choose more than one answer.
I know what I think, but I’ll tell you later.
I’m not so very interested in an incident that seems to be absorbing people so heavily this days, in which an actor in the Broadway show “Hamilton” made a condescending speech from the stage around curtain call time suggesting that Mike Pence—who was in the audience—should respect diversity, yada yada yada.
Everyone else seems to be highly interested in it, though, so I’ll say my piece.
No, this wasn’t about “an actor deign[ing] to speak respectfully about his concerns and the concerns (as he saw them) of non-white Americans to an elected official.” If actor Brandon Victor Dixon had met Pence at a party and spoken of those concerns, or run into him on the street or at a rally or even in the theater lobby or at the stage door: great, fine, no problem. Speak of any concern you want. Freedom of speech, yay!
If Dixon had said it on his Facebook page—likewise, fine. Or written a Letter to the Editor that was published in the Times—great, more power to him. Or even written a play with that theme and performed it—no problem.
The issue for me is that he did this in his role as actor on the stage in an altogether different play, albeit an actor taking a bow, and blindsided Pence who was sitting in the audience (a captive audience, you might say) as the theater’s paying guest.
Inappropriate and wrong. And that would be true no matter what the political persuasion of the actor and the elected official. I’d say exactly the same thing if the actor had been on the right and the politician were Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
The talented creator of “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, tweeted out how proud he was of Dixon for “leading with love.” Miranda added, “And proud to remind you that ALL are welcome at the theater.” Gee, even our terrible VP-elect? Are ALL welcome to attend without being lectured to from the stage about how they should run their affairs, before they’ve even taken office? It makes me wonder what the word “welcome” means.
I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?
Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced?…
Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.
All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left…
… two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left””and they’re getting worse.
The first threat is confirmation bias, the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices…
Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics…
…the second great threat from the Left…[is]… its long tradition of mixing science and politics. To conservatives, the fundamental problem with the Left is what Friedrich Hayek called the fatal conceit: the delusion that experts are wise enough to redesign society.
The article is long, but please read the whole thing. If you’re into sending friends links to articles, it might be one to send to those on your list who think the right is the group that is impeding the objectivity and progress of science.
Yes, polls. Again. Why am I still talking about them?
Well, I see a lot of statements on the subject, here and elsewhere, that are just plain incorrect. That’s not new, either; it’s been going on as long as I remember. And not just concerning the recent election (the one I’ll mainly be discussing here); about past ones, too. So I think it’s good to point out a few salient facts—and then everyone can keep on arguing about the value of polls, the methodology of polls, and the intentions of pollsters.
To begin with, it’s necessary to understand that polling is inherently difficult to get right. That makes it flawed as a predictor (as I often say) but not totally flawed by any means. And besides, it’s the best predictor we’ve got. Crowds don’t matter, nor do yard signs (as I explained here, and as Romney discovered in 2012).
But if one pollster keeps getting it wrong when all the other pollsters get it right, that pollster isn’t going to last long, or if they last for a while they won’t have a good reputation. Pollsters’ most financially productive money-making activities—internal polling for candidates, and market research for businesses—depend on maintaining their reputation for accuracy, so they are interested in getting it right. There are also organizations that rank pollsters for accuracy over time, so among people who hire pollsters (for example, for market research, which is lucrative), the pollsters’ reputations are known.
But what if most of the pollsters get it wrong? Or did they?
I have yet to understand why so many people seem to think that the polls were so very, outlandishly wrong this year (except at the state level in a couple of states, particularly Wisconsin; but state polls are known to be much more difficult to do in terms of sampling, and are often somewhat outdated by the time the election rolls around). Why do I say the national polls were not so far off? Take a look at what the polls were actually saying the day before the election, rather than what you think you remember about what they were saying.
Remember also, when you look at this article (written one day before the election), that Hillary Clinton (so far, anyway) has won the popular vote by 1.27%. So any poll that showed her winning the popular vote by around that figure would have been remarkably accurate:
With just one day to go until the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s support is at 46.8% while Donald Trump’s is at 44.3%.
When analysts refer to the Democrat’s 2.5 percentage point lead, they are talking about the difference between those two figures in polling averages.
It’s an important number but it’s also probably an inaccurate one. That’s because polling averages do not capture fully a few factors that will affect the final outcome.
So, the average of polls right before the election was only off from the actual result by 1.23%, and they got the popular vote winner (which is what national polls measure) right. That’s really pretty close.
The article goes on to state some of those factors that are not reflected in the polls but which affect the final outcome—early voters, turnout, margin of error, and vote distribution and the Electoral College (this turned out to be a very large factor which determined Trump as the winner). The article also mentions an unusual amount of uncertainty for this particular election. It doesn’t mention the undecideds, but we have learned since the election that they broke disproportionately for Trump, and this may indeed have made the difference between his winning and losing.
So I actually don’t see that the polls were especially inaccurate.
Take a look at what Nate Silver was saying two days before the election (Silver isn’t a pollster, but he analyzes polls and makes predictions based on them, and he has a pretty good track record):
In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” the FiveThirtyEight chief claimed Clinton is a “2-to-1 favorite,” but noted that recent polls show Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump with a slight edge in electoral college-heavy states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina.
“The electoral college math is actually less solid for Clinton than it was for Obama four years ago, where four years ago we had Obama ahead 320-some electoral votes. Clinton has about 270,” Silver said.
“So she’s one state away from potentially losing the electoral college. You’d rather be in her shoes than Donald Trump’s, but it’s not a terribly safe position.”
Finally, take a look at Nate Silver’s list of polls taken right before the election, from an article written two days before the election. Fourteen polls are listed. Two show Trump leading (by +1, and by +8). One shows a tie. Four more show Clinton leading by either 1% or 2%—and since it turns out she actually won the popular vote by 1.27% (at the time of this writing), I’d say those particular polls were highly accurate, the most accurate of all. That means that seven out of fourteen polls either got the winner right (Trump) or got the actual vote right or extremely close to right. That sounds accurate to me for six of the polls, which is approximately half (one of those that got the winner right was very inaccurate, so I’m not adding that to the “accurate” list, although it was right about the Trump win).
What’s more, three more of the polls measured Clinton at +3 in the popular vote. That turned out to be only 1.73% off. Not too shabby, either. That leaves two polls that said Clinton +4, and two that said Clinton +5. So the majority (9 polls) got it right or came quite close. And the LA Times poll, one of the two that got the winner right, was also the most inaccurate poll, because it showed Trump ahead by +8, which was actually 9.27 points off, whereas many of the polls that got the winner wrong actually were quite accurate about the popular vote.
Polling is flawed, as I’ve said almost every time I write about it. It’s just a guide. In races that aren’t close, it can be a very good guide. In close races (and this was definitely a close race) polls are iffy. But, contradictory to many people’s recollections, most of the polls this year right before the election predicted a close race. And if most also predicted a Clinton victory in the popular vote—well, they turned out to have been correct about that, too.
Here’s what Silver wrote two days before the election, and remember again that in the actual election Clinton seems to have won by about 1.27% (and that figure could actually rise over time, and has been steadily doing so):
On average across the 14 polls, Clinton’s lead is 1.9 percentage points…Or you can take the median instead of the average, which is also 2.5 points. Use only polls rated A-minus or higher? Her lead is 2.6 points. Use live-telephone polls only? It’s 2.3 points. Use only polls used to determine eligibility for the presidential debates? That gets you to 3.5 points. Use only the very recent surveys, which conducted all of their interviews in November? Her lead averages 2.3 points in those.
Not so very far off. And after reading the following from that same November 6th article by Silver, you may agree with me that Silver (who works with the poll figures as a whole, analyzing and commenting on them) was surprisingly accurate:
How about polls of swing states in particular? Right now, the tipping-point state in our forecast ”” the state that would provide the decisive 270th electoral vote if the polls got things exactly right ”” is New Hampshire. There, Clinton leads by only 1.7 percentage points in our adjusted polling average, as several recent polls show Trump tied or slightly ahead, along with others that still give Clinton the lead. Thus, Clinton’s doing a little bit worse in the tipping-point state than she is overall ”” a sign that she might win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College.
In case you’re unaware of what happened in New Hampshire, Clinton won—47.62% to Trump’s 47.25%, a margin of 2687 votes out of a total of 694,307 cast. So the polls in New Hampshire seem to have been pretty good; they predicted both a very close race (true) and the eventual winner in that state.
I was very impressed with Nate Silver’s predictions in 2012, and I remain impressed. And the polls weren’t so shabby, either.