Election 2016 (Page 50)

He's our BT information minister

What's funny is I could easily say the same about you.  The only thing you guys have is your RCP averages, oh and Nate Silver who was horribly wrong in 2014 and has so far failed to predict anything Trump this year.  But, I'm the "information minister"?

I've made my case numerous times as to what's wrong with the polls and you guys just blindly believe them because you've been conditioned to believe everything your government and media tells you without question.  You may be too far gone, but I promise I will not give up. 

So here's my serious question.

How do you reconcile the ABCNews poll that plummeted 12 points in less than a week with no change in the underlying people supporting the candidates?
It's a perfect example of what I've been saying all along of a poll "re-weighting" their turnout that WAS in fantasyland and moved it back to the left edge of reality which is exactly what I've been predicting all along.  Yet, I'm wrong, and you're right because you have complete confidence in the old 12 point poll and complete confidence in the new +1 poll right.

Obviously we can disagree on the motives of why they would do such a thing, but to deny that it's happening seems very strange to me.

Believe it or not I don't completely poopoo his models.  If anything he's at the mercy of the polls that are out there and this year has been pretty whacky in poll disparity.  He will likely be accurate again because all the polls are tightening up and coming back to reality.  So when he swings it to a Trump win with X amount of states he will likely continue to claim a great record for his day before final prediction.  Yet, for 6 months plus he's been way out in Hillary land with the polls that were out in Hillary land.  For a short time (pre P video) he even had Trump in the lead.
That's why I get so frustrated when you guys treat his predictions as so accurate because of his history when they're nowhere even close to where the race will be come election day.  It's a great data point and I think it's a great tool for looking at the trend of the election, but it's a horrible tool for predicting the final election outside of the day before prediction IMHO.

That being said, I believe he is going to have a really tough go this time around because the poll averages won't be able to properly reflect the events that are occuring at the end of this race.  There is going to be a swing towards Trump after Weinergate, which we can probably agree on.  It's just a matter of how much.  If it's 1 point, 2 points, 5 points, 10 points whatever, those won't show up until later this week or even early next week in the "latest" polls.  The overall averages with pre-weinergate responses will likely be very different then the final polls.  Many of the non-swing states likely won't even have any new polls.

OK, to bring a smile to your face I present our new foster dog I picked up this afternoon.  He's a 6 month old Pit/Great Dane mix with a broken leg.
He was a stray, but I'm going to do my best to convert him to the Trump camp. 

I think we're all, to some degree, in bubbles of our own states.  Most people in your area probably find it baffling how anyone could vote for Hillary (or against Trump as the case may be).  But there's a large segment of the country that has the opposite view.  At the end of the day, the electoral map favors the Democrats right now.  So when you make claims like Trump winning in a landslide... it is implausible at best.  His win condition in reality, is breaking that 40% ceiling in a few competitive states (Pennsylvania, Florida, etc - you know the drill).  Well, unless the electoral college does something completely unprecedented, which I'm not ruling out.  Then all bets are off.

I know this will sound weird but I'm actually a little bummed about the Weinergate.  I was really looking forward to seeing if I was right or not on the poll skewing.  lol
Even if Trump wins in a landslide it will be hard to tell if they were on or not because the Weiner effect could just as easily be the cause.

We have a lot of news cycles until Tuesday, but we'll have to post our electoral maps and predictions Monday and see how we do.  

Just out of curiosity, what do you consider a landslide?  I tend to think winning with over 300 electoral votes, but there might be a more "proper" number to make it a true landslide.  I always hear people use the "mandate" term as well where the winner has to win decidedly in order to claim a mandate and push their agenda.

I forget the total number, but we fostered almost 40 dogs/pups last year.  Pitbulls, Border Collies, Rottwiellers, more pittbulls, some st bernard mixes, more pitbulls, lol.   We have a soft spot for Pittbulls, they're such a misunderstood breed.
This one is crazy because he acts like a two month old puppy, but he weighs 60 lbs. already.  Darn moose

There's been a lot of Huma stuff going around lately.  She obviously has Saudi ties and has some questionable interactions in her past but I see no reason to not let her have access to our countries most classified information.  /sarc

Another fun fact.  Podesta's brother Tony runs a lobbying firm that gets paid $140,000/mo. by Saudi Arabia.  He must be really connected to get that kind of money.  Oh wait...

Also, Podesta owned 75,000 shares of a Putin backed company and then gave them to his daughter who still owns them.

Oh yeah, and Hillary sent 20% of the United States Uranium supply to Russia and they gave tens of millions to the foundation. 

But I think we should definitely ignore all this stuff and just talk about Trumps manufactured Russian ties.

I find political polling fundementally flawed, and think it's merely something generated by media outlets to provide them with dynamic fodder to feed the 24-hour news cycle. It's a flawed science given the strict rules, and changes in demographics.

You perceive that democrats unquestioningly believe anything they read/hear. Meanwhile, you sit in your bunker, paranoid that the muslims are ramming your gates in trucks laden with explosives, pasting links to editorial blogs written by someone with zero journalistic credentials.

Seems un poco (that's rapist Mexican for "a little") hypocritical.

7 days, 12 hours, and 29 minutes to go.

X

Wow, su increíble! Gracias por la lección de español. No tenía ni idea.

(we had nothing else to do in the bunker so we all learned Spanish)

wasnt referring to dems, was referring to the anti Trumpers on BT and I say a lot of things but I'm pretty sure I've never said anything about muslims ramming my bunker gates with explosives. 

I cant wait to see your reaction when Trump wins.  

I live in the city. In my neighborhood there's maybe two or three Hillary signs, not a single Trump sign. But I've seen the love you county folk have for Trump.   Actually, I kind of appreciate it. Makes it easy to vote for Johnson when I know Trump is 100% winning Missouri. If we were a swing state, I might actually have to vote Hillary then go home and try to wash off the dirty feeling. 

I get that the city is a little liberal bubble. When I talk about the hatred of Trump, I'm more referring to the national favorable/unfavorable polls. People just don't like either candidate. They both have their die-hard supporters, and Trump's core base is much, much bigger than Hillary's. But Tony keeps saying that because Hillary doesn't have the same enthusiasm from Democrats that Obama had, she'll have a much smaller turnout. I disagree. The Dems hatred for Trump will drive them to the polls. And all those Republicans who were so upset about Trump winning the nomination will still go vote for him because of their hatred for Hillary. Nobody is sitting home this year because both parties nominated a despicable person. And everyone knows that the other party's deplorable is way more damaging to the future of the country than their party's deplorable.

You can't honestly believe this. Before Hillary or Trump even won their party's nominations, Democrats were up about 250-150 in the electoral college. That's just the way the current system is stacked against the GOP.  To suggest that Hillary is done is laughable. There are so many paths for her to win. She gets Florida it's over. She gets Ohio it's over. She gets North Carolina it's over. Trump (or any Republican candidate) has to sweep just about everywhere just to make up for the headstart Democrats are given.

Trump can certainly win. Hell, I'm starting to think he might actually pull it off, which is something I never thought possible over the past year. I won't be surprised with either outcome next week.  I get you're excited about your guy, but to say the election is already over? No. Just no. You're ignoring the polls (which show a race way too close to call) and the inherent bias of the electoral college system.

It's a more fundamental difference than that.  Living in closer proximity gives you more need for "shared burdens" -- mass transit, that sort of thing.

The west coast has a LOT of liberal tech people who make a lot of money and pay a lot of taxes.

To your last statement, redistricting sort of slows that down for presidential elections and the House.  And the Senate seats are not driven by population density at all.  So individual voting power is diluted when you live in a high population center.  Someone in a rural area - their vote is worth much more.

I predict the African American turnout will be anywhere from 15-25% lower this election than is was the last two.  If you want to talk about a group of people who REALLY think both candidates are bad.....there you go.  They just don't see either candidate as favorable for them.  They see Trump as a racist, but at this point they know damn well what Bill Clinton's policies did for/to them.

We obviously won't know the real turnout numbers until after the election, but I've seen several articles stating that the African American early voting numbers are down from 2012.
Weak early voter turnout among African-Americans hurts Clinton in Florida

Early Voting Data Shows African American Turnout Dropping (I know several of you guys don't like Brietbart, but he had some good graphs for comparison)

Another interesting piece is Trump draws a significant amount of support from blue collar Democrats which Romney and McCain didn't really draw upon.

Granted, this is all speculation for both of us, but I do try to look at some of the data as well to see if it confirms my "bias".  So far I haven't seen anything to convince me that Trump isn't getting a record turnout and Hillary isn't getting a meh turnout.