Election Day 2016

[Jamar Howard 4 President]

I can hardly put into words how much it annoys the logical side of me that a poll predicting Trump to win nationally by 3.2%, and that ended up being off by over 5%, is somehow being praised for doing a good job. The national results literally fell outside the LA Times margin of error! If you could ever have an example of being right for all the wrong reasons, and lucking out, and taking credit that is undeserved, my goodness, this is it.

[WstateU]

Without analysis, I find this map fascinating…

[wu_shizzle]

Without analysis, I find this map fascinating…

This is even more enlightening:



The Democrats are a regional party.

[pinstripers]

According to Kid Rock, the Red is the USA and the blue is Dumb****istan.

[Kung Wu]

The Democrats are a regional party.

Hmm. Looks to me like the United States has a blue penis and anus. Yes. California IS the anus of the U.S. I never noticed that before.

[SB Shock]

I can hardly put into words how much it annoys the logical side of me that a poll predicting Trump to win nationally by 3.2%, and that ended up being off by over 5%, is somehow being praised for doing a good job. The national results literally fell outside the LA Times margin of error! If you could ever have an example of being right for all the wrong reasons, and lucking out, and taking credit that is undeserved, my goodness, this is it.

I'm sure it does - this poll has annoyed a lot of people as they were saying any poll that could show Trump winning must be trash (including you). I have followed this poll for awhile and was intrigued by it since everything in the mainstream was screaming "Hillary going to win in a landslide". But this poll used a different methodology and weighting that made it unique.

1. It was trying to find and characterize the "undercover Trump voter" in it weighting.
2. It tracked the same respondents for the life of the election - which provided stability.
3. It had a different (and more complex weighting) - most polls are binary, not this one.

One of the interesting things in this poll was that although people said they were going to vote Trump - they felt that regardless Hillary would win.

The fundamental mistake people make with this poll is they think they are trying to mimic some national popular vote margin - this poll is first a research tool to look how to use data (census data) and alternative polling techniques to predict a winner of the presidential election. The researchers said up front - they don't believe their system is perfect and they try and learn where the strengths and weakness are and make it better for the next election.

[Jamar Howard 4 President]

The fundamental mistake people make with this poll is they think they are trying to mimic some national popular vote margin

Wait, you are saying that when they said Trump was ahead by 3.2%, they didn't actually mean Trump was ahead by 3.2%? I understand the concept of scewing data to try to account for misc factors and make your final results more accurate, but where in the world are you getting the idea that their goal wasn't to have their actual numbers (+3.2%) be accurate?

[SB Shock]

Wait, you are saying that when they said Trump was ahead by 3.2%, they didn't actually mean Trump was ahead by 3.2%? I understand the concept of scewing data to try to account for misc factors and make your final results more accurate, but where in the world are you getting the idea that their goal wasn't to have their actual numbers (+3.2%) be accurate?

When you look at polling data you have to look behind the numbers and see what their biases are, what type of questions they are asking, how they are weighting things. From everything I have read they were not trying to answer the question of who was going to win the "popular vote" but who was going to "win the election". When outside people took their data and re-weighted - they would conclude Hillary was going to win a landslide.

In this specific case all you can conclude is Trump was ahead +3.2% in the group of respondents that they have been tracking for the entirety of time of the tracking poll. That was a strength, but also a limitation of this particular tracking poll - they were stuck with population/weighting that it was working with through the "Understanding America Study".

[jdshock]

The FBI now agrees with the CIA that Russia was involved with the DNC hacks. Trump and Putin both deny it.

[WuDrWu]

The FBI now agrees with the CIA that Russia was involved with the DNC hacks. Trump and Putin both deny it.

I'm just curious......are you seriously suggesting Donald Trump worked with Putin to hack into emails to try and sway the election?

And that somehow he knew there would be damning information on those emails that might somehow affect the election? Information, that by the way, has not been refuted. I am fairly certain it is real.

So real facts about the Dems swayed the election.....that's the issue? I'm generally curious.

[jdshock]

I'm just curious......are you seriously suggesting Donald Trump worked with Putin to hack into emails to try and sway the election?

I think it's probably unlikely Trump worked with Putin, but what do I know? It seems like Putin wanted Trump to win, for whatever reason. That could be because he was worried about pressure Clinton might put on Russia or the promise of a sanction-free Trump presidency, who knows. Trump was really weird about his relationship with Putin during the campaign.

And, frankly, I'm not sure which is worse. Trump pulling a fast one on all of us by working with Putin or Putin pulling a fast one on all of us by himself and now Trump ignoring it. At least in the first scenario there is cooperation of some sort.

And that somehow he knew there would be damning information on those emails that might somehow affect the election? Information, that by the way, has not been refuted. I am fairly certain it is real.

So real facts about the Dems swayed the election.....that's the issue? I'm generally curious.

You make it sound like we had an equal opportunity to fully investigate the emails of both sides. The problem with releasing the private information of one side and not the other is that it gives the false impression that the one side is completely innocent. We have no way to know.

And I was incredibly disheartened by many of the things in the emails. I think some was obviously exaggerated (pizza-gate?) and some was taken out of context (things people posted on here about Clinton hating ordinary Americans, etc.) but some of it was actually bad.

But none of that matters anymore. The election is over. Trump needs to quit pretending like there isn't a consensus on this. The consensus is in: Russia hacked the DNC to influence an American election. That isn't something that can just be ignored.

Which part do you disagree with? Do you not think Russia was involved? Do you think Russia was involved but it was justified because of what they found? Or do you think it wasn't justified but it was no big deal?

[CBB_Fan]

I'm just curious......are you seriously suggesting Donald Trump worked with Putin to hack into emails to try and sway the election?

And that somehow he knew there would be damning information on those emails that might somehow affect the election? Information, that by the way, has not been refuted. I am fairly certain it is real.

So real facts about the Dems swayed the election.....that's the issue? I'm generally curious.

Q?: A.

Did Donald Trump work with Putin? Nothing has suggested Donald Trump's personal involvement in the hacks, but Putin likely gave the go-ahead personally. Donald asked Russia to hack the DNC, but that isn't criminal proof. However, Donald Trump has surrounded himself with pro-Russia people and dramatically shifted Republican policy on Russia; his only contribution to the RNC platform was the pro-Russia stuff. If you want direct proof of someone connected to Trump acting illegally to aid Russia, look no further than Paul Manafort his ex-campaign manager. So while there is no proven fire, there is smoke that says Russia was acting to aid Donald

Did Donald Trump know about the damning information in the email? No, he did not. However, people in his campaign DID know about the Comey letter ahead of time. Specifically, Rudy Guiliani boasted that he knew the FBI planned to review more emails about a week before the Comey letter. Republicans in the FBI deliberately stalled and coordinated the message so that scandal would break too soon to the election to be refuted; even if the new emails showed nothing it wouldn't be found out immediately and the story would be "FBI reopens email case" and hurt Clinton.

So the issue is that real facts about the Dems swayed the election? Democrats would say that the contents of email aren't the issue, but rather the fact that Russia worked to benefit the Republicans in specific and the Republicans don't seem to care because it benefited them. They would also say that the timing of the Comey letter was political and a violation of the Hatch Act, and that Russia might be holding on the Republican information to use as blackmail; the information they didn't leak could be just as bad or worse. Some even speculate that Donald Trump's inexplicable love of Russia might come from a honeypot trap or blackmail, though that is pure conspiracy theory.

[MoValley John]

FB_IMG_1481838233617.jpg

[Jamar Howard 4 President]

To be fair, it looks like the Dems have indeed identified the majority of the causes.

Also, to be fair, they have clearly missed the single biggest one. Good grief Hillary was an awful candidate.

[SHOCKvalue]

Just trying to follow along here with the left's narrative: So we are to be enraged that Russia might have helped to uncover emails that contained... wait for it... the truth?

So the reason we should be mad is not that there's not dirty laundry in the first place, but that said dirty laundry got exposed?

Perhaps that's over-simplified, but it seems kind of hilarious at face value.