Trump Election: Orange is the new black

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Some people are shocked, some are not. Normally, we try to learn from the ones that aren't.

NOTE: This was written the morning the election results came in


Just like 1968, 1980, 2000, whenever the Republican wins, it's a huge shock that no one on the left could have foreseen. Mainly because they live in an echochamber that's out of touch with the rest of the country, and doing +11% oversampled polls to tell themselves what they want to hear leaves them shocked... at their ability to delude themselves. So they're blindsided that the public isn't happy with them, and things like Obama, Obamacare, Demorats in general, liberal sanctimony grows old, and thus a corrupt lying felon that runs on "4 more years", had one heck of a headwind from the get go.

Now some will blame Comey, Wikileaks, Russia, how dumb red-staters are, and everything they can to avoid introspection and learning that maybe their own condescending arrogance, along with the self-delusion and denial of the coastal echo-chamber, comes at a cost.

The worst Democrats presidential candidate of my lifetime, just lost to the worst Republican one. And if you look at why (who gave Trump the Presidency), it was because of minorities, Democrats, the youth and the poor, that were tired of the DNC rhetoric. The Republicans, rich, and retirees voted LESS for Trump than for Romney.

When Obama won, I said, "good... every generation needs their Jimmy Carter", it teaches the current generation what they need to know (while the older voters don't change that much). They learn that Presidents aren't dictators, and can't fix as much as you think they can, and that big government doesn't create utopia or even make things better. Their opportunities dry up, youth unemployment and taxes both go up. Experience is what you get, when you don't get what you wanted. They got Obama, and didn't get what they wanted or were promised.

The young were disenfranchised by Obama's promises, and failures, and picked change over the status quo over perpetual progressive hegemony. Obama's failures gave Trump the victory, as Trump may do for the next Democrat. But don't expect to hear much of that today or for the next few months, the Democrats are incapable of introspection or there would be far fewer of them.

The Polls lied?

Nope. Everyone didn't get the polls wrong. Trump knew to campaign in Wisconsin, the media was shocked he won it. So that tells us that not everyone was blind-sided.

I guarantee if you look around, there were many polls that were predicting exactly this[1], they just weren't the ones people (the left and media) were listening to. And averaging in bad samples is like making a crap sandwich, no matter how good the bread is, it is not making up for the filling.

Nate Silver

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Nate Silver, hero of the left, is trying to prove P.T. Barnum (or Abe Lincoln) quote correct, "You can fool some of the people all of the time; you can fool all of the people some of the time, or you can fool all of the democrats all of the time". Or something like that. I have nothing against the guy. I'm just skeptical of the deification of all soothsayers.

Those who thought Saint Nate Silver was never wrong, because he got close on outcomes with Obama (and ignore that he mis-predicted all the why's Obama would win), had their bubbles burst. Nate predicted Trump wouldn't be the republican candidate, and an easy Hillary win.

Debate

I got into a big debate with a friend weeks before the election. He thought he understood math/science, but was just demonstrating Dunning-Krueger. I was trying to point out the following, and they were condescending, not listening, and kept claiming that I was deluding myself by considering the following:

  1. Aggregate polls (averaging in many polls) only gives you a better result, if the data is good. If the sources you're averaging in are wrong (making the same mistakes), then you're adding noise, not signal. You need a diversity in kinds of polls, and assumptions: if they're all doing the same thing, you're magnifying the error (bias).
  2. Polls are stale (lagging indicators), not predictors. (It takes time to collect/process them). Poll averaging makes this worse (as you're adding in more historic data and less current).
  3. Polls are only valid if people tell the truth -- but the more hostile the media is towards one candidate or group, the fewer people will respond or tell the truth. And the media was off the charts hostile towards Trump and fans of Hillary.
  4. Models for turn-out only work, until they don't. They're good at predicting the past, often lousy at the present and future (assuming any black swans or changes in sentiment/motivation or who will turn out, in the new election -- like often happens).

Result

So what happened is:

  • the mainstream media polls were oversampling democrats by up to +11%
  • they were assuming nothing had changed since 2008 or 2012, and they predicted turn-outs based on a different set of circumstances than reality. (Self delusion).
  • The Trump rally's turn-outs were huge, showing voter enthusiasm. Hillary's were anemic.
  • The models were based on stale data (how people turned out for the LAST election), not based on current sentiment.

Now I didn't know if their error rate was going to be enough for a win/loss, but I knew it was likely to be a lot closer than they were predicting... and I said as much, to many folks. Why? Because we've seen this shit-show before. Many times. (Read a history book).

Dems often polls 5-10 points higher leading up to elections than they do the day of elections. Even Obama was much closer than the polls predicted, just his extraordinary minority/youth turn out still pulled him a win by a squeaker.

Pendulum Swings

What I've said all along is that:

  • Democrats haven't won a transition election in the last 100 years
  • they never passed the baton from one Democrat President to another
    • JFK-Johnson doesn't count, because JFK caught a bullet, making Johnson the incumbent (and not a transition)
    • And FDR-Truman was because it was during war and FDR died in office, so same as JFK.
  • Going from an inept polarizer, to the least likable candidate the Democrats put up since Wallace, didn't seem like it was going to be the exception.

The pendulum (of public support) normally swings to a liberal President, who way over-promises and way under-delivers (like Obama, Johnson, Carter, etc), and then the public gets frustrated by that, and wants a change -- and it swings back to the other party (who also under-delivers, but in different ways). And back. Duh.

As long as the public is miseducated enough to think the President has a lot of power, and as long as politicians over-promise (mismanage expectations), this will keep happening.

Obama effect

The left thought this time it might be different, based on their self-delusion into thinking that Obama was a great President. But for most, he wasn't.

Obama promised to stop the rise of the oceans, be a post-partisan uniter (end red America and blue America), that he'd be an "all-of-the-above" candidate on energy, to fix race relations, that he'd never put a mandate in a healthcare bill but would magically fix healthcare by fixing the wrong problems, he'd get us out of foreign wars by giving our enemies whatever they wanted (and laying down our arms would make them do the same), that he'd be the most open candidate eva and start by keeping secrets, and that he'd cut spending and deficits. He delivered the opposite of all of those things.

The groups Obama appealed to: blacks, minorities, the poor, are the ones that handed this election to Trump -- because Obamanomics had left them worse off than when they started. And Democrats elitism with Hillary, and her many racists/sexist comments weren't much better than Trumps. These groups hate dishonesty, and Trump is selling bullshit (or exaggerations) to your face -- while Hillary was a two-faced liar and crook, and they saw through that. Hillary underperformed in every demographic that Obama carried -- but we knew that was going to happen, just like it did in 2000, 1980, and 1968. Just like they do every decade, when a Republican wins in a shocking/stunning surprise.

Exit Polls

While the bigots will blame the old racist and rich elitism of republicans, the polls/facts tell us the opposite. [2]

How did Trump perform with various groups? :

  • party: +5% with Democrats, -4 with Republicans (+1 independents)
    Trump didn't win because of Republicans, Trump won because of democrats!
  • race: +1% with whites, but +7%, +8%, +11% with blacks, latinos and asians (in that order)
    It wasn't angry whites, it was minorities that put Trump in
  • gender: +5% better with men, -1% with women
    so Women didn't hate him, men just liked him
    • In fact, Trump got 62% of White Women to vote for him. It was Black Women’s 92% against that makes the 42% aggregate look lower than it was. While college white women did vote for him less than non-college educate ones — it turns out college educated women of color were significantly more likely to vote for him than non-college educated ones.
  • age: it wasn't old white guys: Trump did better with the young +5% (18-29) and middle aged +5% (45-64) and worse with old -4% (65+) and 30-somethings (-1%)
  • religion: Trump did 2-18% better with every religious group (including atheists), except Jews (-8%)
  • education: +10% with some college or below, -8% with grads/post-grads
  • income: +16% with poor (<$30K), +6% with low-mid ($30-50K), -2% high mid ($50-90K), -9% upper (>100K) - so the one thing the analysts did get correct is that it was his performance with the working poor (and Democrats losing that demographic) that hurt them the most.
  • direction: +5% with those who think we're on the right track, -27% with those that think we're on the wrong track? -- this is surprising.
  • Married: worse with married folks (-4%), better with single folks (+10%)
  • Gays: -10% with gays, +1 with straights - based on demographic breakdown that's a net win for Trump

So Trump won because of his popularity with minorities (and that probably skewed his education numbers down), the democrats that crossed over, his appeal to populism and single and youth, over Hillary's appeals to elitism. He did NOT lose the women vote (in any significant numbers), but he was more popular with non-college indoctrinated grads.

The left told themselves the lies that:
  • raising people's healthcare costs by hundreds of percent wouldn't have an impact
  • that being the most drone bombingest Nobel peace prize winner in history, wouldn't have a cost
  • that fomenting racial dissent with his support of BLM (Black Lives Matter, and New Black Panthers) wouldn't be noticed
  • that giving Iran ransoms and hurting our credibility and influence around the world (the rise of Russia, Isis, back-in-Iraq, Afghanistan's decay, etc) wouldn't matter
  • that being unable to say "Radical Islamic Terrorism" was sensitive
  • that putting coal miners out of work, and trying to drive up energy costs wouldn't be noticed by the poor
  • that misrepresenting the other side in every speech, or calling the other side sexist/racist/deplorable (in the name of tolerance), wouldn't grate on people.
The mainstream Press and coastal provincials that don't visit or talk to fly-over country folks might be able to delude themselves about the tone of the nation, but that doesn't change reality, just their perceptions of it. Their Biracial-Jimmy-Carter-Clone (Obama) did NOT stop the rise of the oceans, and he certainly wasn't the great uniter he promised he'd be, his attacks on energy, increases in taxes and healthcare costs, unwillingness to admit a single failure, and condescending attitude towards anyone that disagreed with him or the party, was weighing on this election. That taint of failure was a headwind for any democrat that was going to be hard to overcome. And picking an establishment, "more of the same" corrupt lying crook, wasn't the right plan.


Conclusion

The Democrats can prove they're good sportsman, and lead by example -- act with the grace and dignity they'd demand of the other side if Hillary had won. Or they can have bitter temper tantrums, riots and call everyone else bad names. We'll see how this plays out.

Of course it's also time for the losers to put their money where their mouths are, and the following folks to leave the country like they promised. Don't let the door hit you on the way out: Bryan Cranston, Samuel Jackson, Lena Dunham, Neve Campbell, Cher, Raven-Symone, Miley Cyrus, Barbara Streisand, Ne-Yo, Amy Schumer, Jon Stewart, Chelsea Handler, Whoopi Goldberg, Keegan-Michael Key, George Lopez, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Al Sharpton.[3] Or they could each apologize to the people for their melodrama, bias, and hate, now that they've had to eat crow, or lose their audience.

The media that was completely biased towards Trump and his supporters, better figure out quick how much of their audience they had alienated with their hyper-partisan bias. And start treating the other side with respect -- or they can continue to watch their ratings decline by doubling down on their hate/bias. They don't have to agree with the Trump supporters, but you at least have to agree that we can disagree without everyone else being a bigoted homophobic woman-hating racist. Alienating half your audience with caustic attacks can increase your ratings in the short term (with the rest), but in the long term? You'll probably never get them back.

It all starts with, "I'm sorry", "congratulations", and start acting how you'd expect the losers to treat you, if you had won. But I expect we'll get the opposite, and that will only strengthen Trump's support.


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📚 References

Post Mortem

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Trump
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2016.11.09