BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

I am one of the people that Hillary calls deplorable.

Now, if by "don't look like me" you mean jihadists, then I hope you are right.

A few random thoughts:

- The pollers didn't really get it wrong. As 538 notes, if you move 1% of the valid votes from Trump to Clinton (which is within the normal error margin of polls), Clinton would have won comfortably and the polls would have gotten all states bar NC right.
- The narrative that floods my facebook news feed is all kinds of generalizations of Americans, white Americans, old Americans, Working class Americans, American men. But within all these segments there is room for considerable disagreement. About half would vote for Trump and about half for Clinton, somewhat more in some segments than in others. Largely as expected. The differences between segments might in some ways be a bit bigger than usual. Anyway, a 1% deviation from the forecasts, while hugely significant in terms of political consequences, doesn't really justify a completely reversed narrative about the zeitgeist or of the mental health of Americans in general.
- For someone like me who never watches TV and very rarely clicks on a political video link on the internet, it feels incomprehensible that so many would consider Trump more trustworthy than Clinton. But maybe it is understandable considering that most voters will make there assessment largely based on TV. I have only seen Hillary a couple of times on video so it doesn't have that much influence on my opinion about her, but the little I have seen looks like fake smiles. The kind of facial expression that wouldn't pass a lie detector. If I place myself in the shoes of someone who suspects NYT of being about as biased as Fox News, and spends a lot more time watching politics on TV than reading about politics, then it is maybe not so surprising.

Are you? How do you know that you are in the "deporable" half of Trump's supporters rather than the other half? Are you racist? sexist? violent? anti-Muslim? a white-supremacist? anti-LGBT? Or have irrational hatred against any other such group? If not then I think we can safely say that you are not one of those that she was pointing to as within the BoD. That all Trump supporters automatically seem to think they were being called deplorable shows the fallacy of her campaign's thinking on this one. She was making a specific point, that the majority of those belonging to organisations that many folks find distasteful support Trump. Either you were not paying attention, do not bother to listen, have listened and are too stupid to understand, or you are within such a group. Which is it? If not the last then please drop the deplorable nonsense in future. Thanks.

People call us deplorables racist because we disagree with Obama. That's bull****. I disagree with Obama on policy - his skin color is irrelevant.

I think "The pollers didn't really get it wrong." is maybe technically right in some sense, but basically wrong. The polls weren't rigged, they reported what they were told, but this doesn't mean that they didn't get it wrong. This is different from, say, the World Series. After game 4, with Cleveland ahead 3 games to 1, no doubt the chances on a Cleveland win would have been rated as far higher than the 71% that 538 was giving Clinton on Tuesday morning. Chicago still won, but as the series evolved it was not settles whether Fowler would or would not hit a home run, it was only settles that he would try. The election is different. By the time of the late polls, most people had chosen how to vote. It seems unlikely that random changes of intent between, say, a Saturday poll and a Tuesday vote explains what happened. The voters had chosen who they would vote for, they did it, the polls failed to predict it. It is reasonable to refer to this as the polls getting it wrong. It need not mean that pollsters were stupid or incompetent, but I do think it means they got it wrong.

I understand, Trump has explained often enough, that business bankruptcies are part of the way you get rich in his business. I accept that, and he did get rich (even if not at his bragging level he is incomparably richer than I am) so that seems to work for him in his business.

ACA is DOA. Not only that, this will endear Trump to Tea Party Republicans and you’ll see more silly legislation next year. But ACA did not pan out as planned – there weren’t enough healthy folks joining and the penalty wasn’t enforced / got sidetracked by legislation. Premiums doubling was not an urban myth. Killing ACA will be a major victory, and it may stop the immediate need on other policy positions like the Wall.

Donald Trump says he's going to try to work for all Americans, and I have to hope that he means it. I know that Hillary Clinton was going to be indebted to the large banks and Wall Street, so that didn't seem like the right choice.

I am not so sure. It's easy to pass bills repealing Obamacare when you know the president is not going to sign it. It is easy to campaign against it. But do you really want to be the one responsible for 20 million Americans losing their health insurance?

Sure, why not? These 20 million are among the least affluent citizens, and the difficulty/impossibility of their being able to vote will increase with each subsequent election.

I have not looked at the models but don't they basically take the results of previous elections (per demographic per geography voting patterns) and apply changes in demographics per census data and changes in voting patterns per poll data (per demographic per geography)? In their analysis, Nicholas Confessore and Nate Cohn observe that 12 percent of the people who voted for Trump approved of Obama (did not say voted for Obama) and that millions of people who voted previously for Obama voted for Trump on Tuesday. Perhaps the models gave too much weight to the 2012 voting patterns and did not do enough to distinguish between the "change agenda" motivation for Obama voters and the "progressive agenda" motivation.

One of the problems pollsters had was that this election was really unlikely any in recent history.

Just one more because this trope really annoys, as it is completely contrary to any facts.

Why do you think the stocks of Goldmann Sachs and similar companies jumped up after Trump got elected, contrary to the overall market? Because Republicans want to deregulate Wall Street (repeal Dodd Frank etc.) while Hillary had stricter regulations.

http://www.vox.com/p...cial-regulation

What I find most interesting though is that it looks very much as if the Republican polling models were better tuned than those of the HC campaign. He was campaigning in what turned out to be the critical battleground come the last day whereas her team appear to have had no idea whatsoever that these states were even in play. Hopefully we will learn a little more over time about why this difference came about.

I don't know. I think Trump wants to be reelected, and I think he knows that the best way to improve his odds of getting reelected is to make people's lives better.

http://www.cracked.c...ne-talks-about/
I found that article interesting

If Donald Trump’s win were the Democratic Party’s only problem, the party’s leaders would be justified in affecting a certain amount of complacency. After all, in a year when fundamentals-based models predicted a narrow Republican victory, Clinton actually pulled out a majority of the popular vote. That makes the Democrats from 1992 to 2016 the only political party in American history to win the popular vote in six elections out of seven. It’s actually kind of impressive.

What’s less impressive is that at the sub-presidential level, the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that’s essentially a smoking pile of rubble.

Republicans control the House, and they control the Senate. District lines are drawn in such a way that the median House district is far more conservative than the median American voter — resulting in situations like 2012 where House Democrats secured more votes than House Republicans but the GOP retained a healthy majority. The Senate, too, is in effect naturally gerrymandered to favor Republicans. Two years from now the Democratic Party will need to fight to retain seats in very difficult states like North Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Indiana, and Missouri along with merely contestable ones in places like Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

In state government things are worse, if anything. The GOP now controls historical record number of governors’ mansions, including a majority of New England governorships. Tuesday’s election swapped around a few state legislative houses but left Democrats controlling a distinct minority. The same story applies further down ballot, where most elected attorneys general, insurance commissioners, secretaries of state, and so forth are Republicans.

One could perhaps overlook all of this if the Obama years had bequeathed the nation an enduring legacy along the lines of the New Deal or the Great Society. But to a striking extent, even as President Obama prepares to leave office with strong approval ratings, his policy legacy is extraordinarily vulnerable. And the odds that it will be essentially extinguished are high.

Due to a combination of bad luck and poor decisions, the story of the 21st-century Democratic Party looks to be overwhelmingly the story of failure.

The donkey will rise again

The point here is not that the Democratic Party has suffered some kind of knockout blow from which it will never return. Every bad electoral defeat is overinterpreted by some circle of pundits as signaling the death knell for one party or the other, and the loser always comes back.

Indeed, given the existing down-ballot weakness of the Democratic Party after the 2010 and 2014 midterms, Hillary Clinton’s loss does more to hasten Democrats’ resurrection than to delay it. A Republican president in office will tarnish the brand of blue-state Republican parties, making it easier for Democrats to regain ground in their own turf. At the same time, the absence of a high-profile national Democratic leader will make it easier for state parties in more conservative regions to build up independent identities.

But while Democrats shouldn’t be left for dead, it’s also the case that resurrection takes work and specific action. Party leaders who a week ago were confident they were leading the blue team to yet another presidential victory are going to look around and realize they didn’t just lose, they got essentially annihilated — even though the presidential election itself was close. They’re going to have to start doing something different. In particular, something that takes note of the fact that whether you think the constitutional system is fair or not (I don’t, personally), the existing setup simply doesn’t allow you to run up the score in California to compensate for weakness in the Midwest.

More broadly, the Obama-Clinton style of liberal incrementalism promised that while it wouldn’t deliver utopia, it would deliver wins and concrete results. And for a while, it did. But no strategy can guarantee an uninterrupted series of presidential election wins. And the withering of the down-ballot party paired with the failure to create entrenched policy accomplishments means much of Obama-era policymaking will have vanished without a trace within six months.

To make its comeback, what’s left of the Democratic Party establishment — not just its elected officials but the leaders of its aligned institutions and its major donors — need to recognize that a strategy they believed was working as recently as Tuesday afternoon has in fact failed quite badly.