Election 2016

[Koumei]

Jesus Christ is Frank actually advocating an armed revolution against the federal government?

I read it more as a prediction or concern, and not a suggestion. But I could see a scenario where some investigator for CIA/FBI/whatever read that and was worried enough to look into it, or a scenario where some dickhead on alt-right forums uses it in one of their "The Left are already working on armies, we need to mobilise" memes. So it's possibly worth going back and re-wording to specify that.

[tussock]

So, cabinet. Names include ...

Ben Carson for Secretary of Education (until dismantled). Because all of science is lies of the Devil designed to remove people from God. Also for Health and Human Services. Because god knows what's best for your women.

Myron Ebell for EPA transition (to nothing) head. Because the most important thing for the environment right now is that climate change is a hoax and CO2 is good for plants.

Sarah Palin for Secretary of the Interior. Drill, baby, drill. Unless Donald Jr wants it.

Rudy Gulianni for Attorney General. Because what America needs is more torture, and maybe some more stop-and-frisk and "papers, please".

Newt Gingrich for Secretary of State. Because all those alliances don't really mean anything you know, the UN and NATO and stuff, not worth the paper it's written on. Also, visiting websites that talk about ISIS and stuff should be a felony.

David Clarke for Homeland Security. A hicksville sheriff and far-right favourite known for his "blue lives matter" speech. So, you know, a dedicated white supremacist.

And then a bunch of oil company executives to run everything else.


He really is planning to export all the Mexicans. People talk about how much it'll cost, but he's just going to make everyone else pay for it by cutting off their federal funding if they don't do it for him. There'll be quotas and stuff. Adding people to terrorist lists for reading the wrong thing on the internet, including such wrong things as "black lives matter". That's what he's talking about. Torturing people on those lists until they confess, and stacking the Supreme Count with people who agree with all that.


Frank's not necessarily wrong. This election has exposed a massive cultural divide in the United States, and people having their hard-won rights suddenly removed from them is exactly the sort of thing that inspires revolutions in other countries, which are always violent to some degree. If he attacks Blacks and Hispanics and non-Christians and fucks the economy and people start getting sick from the pollution spike and reduced healthcare, and the system fucks over a clear majority of voters again come the mid-terms to keep the Republican lock on power and promising to double down on it all despite two years of protests ....

[Hiram McDaniels]

In non-doomed to fail armed insurrection of IT guys and baristas against the US military and the gun-toting right news: Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Harry Reid have all endorsed Keith Ellison as DNC chair.

Meanwhile Senator Ron Wyden D-OR introduced a bill to make mail-in voting legal across the country.*

*Best of luck there. The only hope is that enough Repubs in congress are unhappy with Trump or fearing political backlash. The GOP doesn't like anything that makes it easier for people to vote.

[phlapjackage]

Jesus Christ is Frank actually advocating an armed revolution against the federal government?

Jesus Christ do you know how to read? This is the second time you've fucked up and read something totally wrong in an ongoing conversation and then way overreacted about the thing you think you read but actually didn't.

[momothefiddler]

Yeah, no, I definitely read Frank's post as discussing why the Trump team is turning the knob down from "explicit rabid hate" to "waffling and dogwhistles", and his point seems to be that they realize that people are upset and they're trying to minimize the damage a potential armed insurrection would cause.

The actual likelihood of anything drastic is pretty low. A lot of us will whine and cry because of political setbacks and ideological losses, a lot of us will quietly die and our deaths will be used as statistics in some later political fight, there'll probably be a midterm backswing resulting in some level of congressional obstruction, Trump probably won't be successful enough with his base to win a second term, and eventually his nominated justices will die.

[Prak]

I read Frank's post more as idly entertaining the idea and doing some moral math, not an actual call to arms.

[Hiram McDaniels]

The President-Elect has an open application to join his administration. I know I'm applying, in case he ever needs anyone to piss in his cornflakes for him, or remind him that he's a bloated punchline, or toss cups full of cornstarch on his suit just before a press conference.

https://apply.ptt.gov/

I don't suppose anyone here would mind proofreading my resume?

https://sc.mogicons.com/share/middle-finger-131.jpg

[infected slut princess]

LOL!

Good job, Americans.

Hillary vs. Trump.

OMG LOL!

[Kaelik]

Without agreeing with a bunch of other dumb shit in the article (but definitely agreeing with every criticism of Stein and every idiot who voted for her):

http://www.newsweek.com/myths-cost-demo ... ion-521044

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

Could Sanders still have won? Well, Trump won, so anything is possible. But Sanders supporters puffing up their chests as they arrogantly declare Trump would have definitely lost against their candidate deserve to be ignored.

[infected slut princess]

LOL Bernie Sanders, what a fucking loser.
Kind of like Hillary.
What a joke!

LOL!

[PhoneLobster]

"Only the candidate we didn't want and who polled FAR better will be attacked during the election campaign we already had in which our preferred lower polling candidate lost!"

That is a pile of nothing but rationalization and poor justification for poor decision making.

What empirical data you had told you Sanders was your best chance. Any attention whatsoever to the narrative and the preferences of the grass roots told you Sanders was your best choice.

You (loosely as in the democratic party) chose Clinton. She lost. She got less votes than fucking Mitt Romney did. She potentially could even have lost against Mitt Romney. No one turned up to vote for her no one likes her, she has no base the neoliberals have no grass roots.

Sanders may not have won, but the advantage he had over Clinton when you made the decision was big, unlike her he did have an enthusiastic grass roots support base, he polled particularly well with demographics and states that were lost to Trump, he was baselessy criticized for being unpopular with demographics and regions where he actually performed well and Clinton ended up performing terribly, and he very well could have won, in fact all empirical evidence suggest he probably would have won.

[Username17]

What empirical data you had told you Sanders was your best chance.

No. Empirical data is that Hillary got more votes than Sanders. She also got more votes than Trump and her side got more votes for House and Senate.

This was not a blowout against us. Indeed, from the standpoint of the thing elections are supposed to be about - you know getting more votes, we won. What we were supposed to do was win by enough to beat the unbelievable amount of Republican fuckery required to translate "getting more votes" to "being represented in government." And that simply isn't about having someone who is in abstract more popular before anyone has run hundreds of millions of dollars of smear campaigns against them. It's about fighting against the actual fuckery, which in the court of courts the Hillary team did tolerably well. The actual fucking Federal Law Enforcement agency announcing that Hillary was a horrible human being who was going to be indicted for unspecified crimes any minute now at the last minute was literally more than 100% of the difference between the margin of victory we got and the margin of victory we needed to actually take control of the capitol building in this fucking anti-representative system.

In retrospect, having Hillary cop to having made a mistake on the emails thing was itself a mistake. What that was supposed to do was to kill the story and let everyone move on with their fucking lives. But that sort of asumed that the media wouldn't sit around with their thumbs up their asses talking about the emails like they were a fucking crime and doing it more than all discussions of policy combined over the course of the election. We are no longer in an era where a fake apology and a plea for understanding is the way to end a scandal. Apparently in today's world the correct response to any scandal of any severity from fake bullshit like "we heard people who didn't like you also disapproved of your email forwarding policies" all the way up to scary shit like "you are probably hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to foreign criminal syndicates" is to simply tell people to fuck off because the media is contractually obligated to report your laughable denial alongside the simple truth as if they had equal weight.

But none of that was actually important. The key issue is that there is a vast right wing conspiracy and it does not give up power easily. And it is willing to have the head of the fucking FBI lie on national television to drive down our polling numbers. If it hadn't been fake email bullshit it would have been something else. Remember that Hillary's big liabilities in this election are supposed to be:

• The "public perception" that she is dishonest - despite the fact that she is notable as one of the least dishonest politicians in modern American politics and her opponent literally tells a lie every three minutes he is allowed to speak.
• The "public perception" that she is secretive - despite the fact that she has literally released more information on herself than any other human being in history, never mind other candidates for high office. And that her opponent flagrantly flaunted decades of norms by bluntly refusing to release any tax returns at all.

And so on. We are living in a totally post-truth world. People believe things about Hillary Clinton that are simply and obviously the opposite of the truth. And just like when we nominated genuine war hero John Kerry and he lost because people were convinced that he was a coward who lied about his military service - anyone we nominate is going to be repeatedly hammered by blatant up-is-down lies.

No setting up the circular firing squad and claiming that the Democrats somehow screwed up the campaigning section of the campaign or should have nominated someone else or whatever the fuck is not helpful. That is not what happened. We didn't lose by losing too many votes. We lost by not fighting dirty enough. Comey should have been fired immediately back in July for conduct unbecoming. And he should have been charged with a crime then and there.

Even at the end, Obama tried too hard to take the high road, and now we have hundreds of hate crime attacks to show for it.

-Username17

[infected slut princess]

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

LOL. #rapedbydemocracy

[maglag]

Apparently in today's world the correct response to any scandal of any severity from fake bullshit like "we heard people who didn't like you also disapproved of your email forwarding policies" all the way up to scary shit like "you are probably hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to foreign criminal syndicates" is to simply tell people to fuck off because the media is contractually obligated to report your laughable denial alongside the simple truth as if they had equal weight.

Took you long enough to notice it, but hey, more progress!

We didn't lose by losing too many votes. We lost by not fighting dirty enough. Comey should have been fired immediately back in July for conduct unbecoming. And he should have been charged with a crime then and there.

Even at the end, Obama tried too hard to take the high road, and now we have hundreds of hate crime attacks to show for it.

Well, to be fair to Obama, trying to fight more dirty than the FBI itself is a pretty tall if not impossible order. Chances are that if he tried to fire Comey, then Obama's lovely wife and daughters would now be dead due to a "terrorist" attack or something worst.

Again, kinda hard to do what you want to do with guns pointed at the back of your head and your loved ones.

[Mask_De_H]

Are you honestly saying that the FBI would go beyond simple ratfuckery and actually assassinate government officials, because I don't know if that's more or less stupid a blatant fishing for replies than ISP returning from whatever anus he crawled up into.

[MGuy]

I like Bernie. I really do. Unfortunately not enough votes in the primaries. Banging on about how he was a better candidate maybe ( who knows?) doesn't matter because he lost the essential pre contest by such a large amount that even if the DNC didn't favor Hill it wouldn't have mattered. The only thing they could have done was put him on the ticket. That is really the only good missed opportunity they passed up as far as Bernie is concerned.

That being said being more dishonest would not have helped Hillary. Her past fuckups haunted her and her lack of personal charisma didn't allow her to smooth it over. She didn't seem honest and was unable to convince people that she is a different person from the person she seemed like for a good portion of her career. Being as honest as she could be now was really her only path because her constituents have people that actually fact check speaking to them. At the end of the day she could not get the same amount of people that came out for Obama. Now I do believe that the last email thing fucked with her numbers but looking at the difference between turnout for 2016 vs 2012 and 2008 makes me believe that the email thing wasn't as significant as the general negative reception she was receiving.

[Grek]

Sanders polled better vs. Trump (and indeed vs most Republican candidates) than Clinton, but I think that trusting polls from the last election would likely be a mistake, even in hindsight. Ultimately, I think it comes down to the fact that the media decided to spend six months talking credulously about Trump's insane promises while ignoring every non-Trump candidate as much as they felt they could get away with. Because Trump = Ratings. For the Democrats to have won, they would have had to get the media to shut up about Trump.

[MGuy]

Or talk more about Hillary. All you heard about Hillary, from pro and anti media was about her scandals. Hardly a thing about her policies.

[hyzmarca]

Sanders polled better vs. Trump (and indeed vs most Republican candidates) than Clinton, but I think that trusting polls from the last election would likely be a mistake, even in hindsight. Ultimately, I think it comes down to the fact that the media decided to spend six months talking credulously about Trump's insane promises while ignoring every non-Trump candidate as much as they felt they could get away with. Because Trump = Ratings. For the Democrats to have won, they would have had to get the media to shut up about Trump.

Or Hillary should have done some crazy ratings-grabbing stunts.

[DSMatticus]

What empirical data you had told you Sanders was your best chance.

I only saw this because Frank quoted it, but fun fact: this is still not true. The empirical data we had said nothing, because that type of data (general election polling taken almost a year in advance) has been shown to have zero predictive power. In fact, it's a simple (if amusingly unintuitive) fact of mathematics that Sanders performing better than Clinton in hypothetical general election polls is exactly as predictive of his defeat as it is predictive of his victory.

I know that sounds absurd at first glance, but let me phrase it another way: absent any other evidence, Sanders winning a coin flip against Trump would have been exactly as predictive of Sanders' electoral defeat as it would have been of his victory. That one's obvious, right? The result of the coinflip obviously doesn't correlate with the outcome of the presidential race, so absent any other information the probability of Sanders winning both the coinflip and the election is equal to the probability of Sanders winning the coinflip and losing the election. The coinflip has zero predictive power, so the predictions it makes are exactly as likely to be right as they are to be wrong.

Well, guess what else has zero predictive power? General election polling taken a year in advance, because people have been doing that for a long time and an analysis of the results shows that it does not correlate with the outcome of the race. General election polling that far out is no better than flipping a coin or gutting a bird and reading its entrails or checking your horoscope. It's not statistics; it's superstition.

[PhoneLobster]

Fuck you and your anti statistics bullshit DSM. That's not how polling works. It's not perfectly accurate but it's still fucking meaningful data you fucking moron. Anyone with an ounce of experience reading polls on elections would tell you that Hillary polled at a very stable average over an extended period back into the primaries and that level was NOT sufficient to guarantee victory precisely BECAUSE of the margins of error as a predictive tool.

A candidate going into an election polling five or ten percent more, and there is plenty of reason to believe Sanders would (continue) to fall into that margin, is a candidate that despite the inherit margins of error in these "predictions" would fall sufficiently outside that margin of error that any expert would tell you that their likelihood of winning the election was just somewhere short of fucking unassailable.

You just don't fucking know how to statistics. Or you don't want to know because you don't want to admit that the democrats took on unnecessary and significant risk and ultimately lost the election as a clear and fucking direct result.

[phlapjackage]

Well, guess what else has zero predictive power? General election polling taken a year in advance, because people have been doing that for a long time and an analysis of the results shows that it does not correlate with the outcome of the race. General election polling that far out is no better than flipping a coin or gutting a bird and reading its entrails or checking your horoscope. It's not statistics; it's superstition.

A candidate going into an election polling five or ten percent more, and there is plenty of reason to believe Sanders would (continue) to fall into that margin, is a candidate that despite the inherit margins of error in these "predictions" would fall sufficiently outside that margin of error that any expert would tell you that their likelihood of winning the election was just somewhere short of fucking unassailable.

I'd like to learn more about this ongoing discussion - can either of you back up the quoted sections with expert opinions from other sources?

[DSMatticus]

Fuck you and your anti statistics bullshit DSM. That's not how polling works. It's not perfectly accurate but it's still fucking meaningful data you fucking moron.

If you are going to talk about statistics, you are going to have to teach yourself the significance of correlation and predictive power. Evidence - such as polling - is useful when it can be shown to accurately predict something, not when PhoneLobster "feels" like it should predict something. And the fact is that general election polling taken that far in advance has almost no correlation with the eventual outcome and is not meaningfully predictive. Take the 1992 and 2000 elections; in each case, a candidate with a double-digit lead in year-out polling went on to lose the popular vote.

I'd like to learn more about this ongoing discussion - can either of you back up the quoted sections with expert opinions from other sources?

Here's 538 doing a bit on it, if you want. They used the term "weakly predictive," but frankly "weakly predictive" is one hell of an understatement.

If you want to be semi-rigorous about it, then here's November 8th, 2015 from Huffington Post's poll aggregator:
Clinton vs Trump: +2.8%
Sanders vs Trump: +2.4%

Wait what? A year before the election, Clinton was actually the better pick?! FUUU- okay I can salvage this. Roll that clock forward, baby. December 8th, 2015:
Clinton vs Trump: +4.5%
Sanders vs Trump: +4.8%

OH THANK GOD A .3 PPT LEAD. I DID IT. Okay, so of the 14 examples 538 has data for, are there any with a margin of error smaller than .3%? ... No. There are not. That means that the smallest error we've ever seen in such a poll is larger than the advantage Sanders has over Clinton. Fuck me, I just can't get this to work! Just one more try, January 8th 2016:
Clinton vs Trump: +2.9%
Sanders vs Trump: +6.0%

Oh thank god my cherrypicking finally paid off. I can work with this. Sanders has a 3.1ppt advantage over Clinton. That is larger than exactly two of the fourteen races for which we hypothetical data. It took me three tries, but I did it - I finally found an advantage large enough to not be completely wiped out by the smallest error ever observed in this kind of polling! Hurrah!

General election polling taken during the primaries is just fundamentally not that interesting. Things are going to happen to change the course of the race, and polling before any of that shit happens is going to end up being useless. There are genuinely examples of people dropping double digits in the polls because they came out of nowhere and it turned out that they could not survive basic media scrutiny. We are genuinely talking about a part of the race before the parties are running oppo against the other party's candidate.

[PhoneLobster]

Oh thank god my cherrypicking finally paid off.

Odd that you should cherry pick the rather old dates and polls you did rather than looking at say some fucking graphs of polling averages over the course of the primaries when the decisions were being made or anything useful.

Here are some interesting things from this graph and this graph at this random easy as ass to find source that gives you some actual relevant aggregate data.

Hillary was effectively declared nominee on June 6th.

At the time she polled a 2 point lead on Trump.

Sanders polled 10.6 vs trump on the day Hillary was declared presumptive nominee by the media based on primary counts blah blah.

Back at the beginning of the Primary at the Iowa caucuses, Hillary had a 3.5 lead on trump. On that day Sanders held an 8.7 point lead on trump.

On march 23rd, all too early, and unfortunately far above her average, Clinton peaked at 11.4 points over trump, Sanders was at 16.2 points vs trump.

March 28 Sanders peaks at 17.5 point lead on Trump. Clinton, only 11.2.

After June 6 Clinton never broke a 10 point lead on Trump again. She barely peaked over a 7, approximately 10 days after the Pussy Grabber video (the biggest political freebie since Cameron fucked a pigs head) and at the height of pussy grabber media hysteria. Before that she was struggling to break a 3 point lead. the amount indeed that she had pretty much returned to by election day.

The supposed one single surprise culprit no one could have expected difference over the time span of the FBI reopening bullshit? Something like 1 point.

So in the end why yes that WAS Sanders over 5 points ahead of Clinton vs Trump for the entire fucking primary. And after that Clinton couldn't manage to shift her numbers meaningfully, if anything they only trended slowly and gradually worse. The last poll she saw good enough to call a solid advantage was at the peak of the pussy grabber scandal and it was trending down hard already by the time the latest predictable and critically panned Revenge of the FBI movie sequel hit.

Interestingly they don't actually graph Sanders vs Trump directly against Clinton vs Trump, but they DO have this projected electoral map for sanders. Looks kinda different hey.

[Username17]

PL, do you seriously not know how elections work to that degree? People who are not running for office and aren't being attacked by their opponents poll higher than people who are. That's why, for example, in 2012 you had all that weird flavor of the week shit with various flash-in-the-pan candidates being noticed, polling at the top of the field, and then vanishing right after. Because people leaving out attacks against you gives you better polling numbers. That's how it works. That's how it has always worked.

When Hillary was obviously the winner, not only did she not run negative ads against Sanders because she was trying to unite the party, but Republican PACs were running pro-Sanders ads to try to strip support from her. Pointing at a period where Republicans were pretending to love Sanders for tactical reasons and claiming that Sanders would have gotten proportionate support from Republicans had he been the nominee is nothing short of delusional.

Very obviously, all of the Republicans who claimed to love Sanders while it was tactically expedient to do so would find reasons that he was unacceptable were he in any danger of getting actual power. Becuas that is very obvious.

-Username17