The votes are still being tabulated in many states, but it would appear the polls got much wrong. As did I. I intend to use this thread to diagnose what was missed and what I can learn from in the future.
I think it really came down to so many people feeling frustrated about being extorted to vote Clinton that in the end they couldn't do it. The fact that she was being anointed the winner gave people an escape valve so they don't have to live with voting for her on their conscience. 'Let other people sort it out.' And equally anointing her the winner also gave uneasy Trump voters an escape valve to vote for him. 'He's not going to win anyways, so let's vote against Clinton to give her the smallest mandate possible.'
Of course you would think that. You have your predictable Berniebro narrative that you fall back on every. Single. Time. Do you have any facts to back it up? No, you don't. You never do.
The fact that there is an alternate Berniebro narrative tells you all you need to know. Bernie happened whether people like it or not. But by all means let's rally around the Hillarybot narrative ... that's been working out pretty good so far. Russia, Comey, the media and stupid rednecks ...
You want facts? Hillary Clinton lost ... She lost ground with virtually every group. She lost ground with minorities. She lost ground with young people. White women did not break for her. The highly educated underperformed for her. Facts ...
I did and replied until you demanded facts ... While in another thread you post a fact free article that is just emotion based opinion ... a narrative.
Here's a more impassioned defense of the narrative I put forward from Morning Joe. It boils down to polls give media confidence, they anoint her president and people don't turn out for her because why would they if she already won? And why would they not turn out? Because they were never really thrilled to vote for her anyways. Because if you were thrilled, you'd go vote even if your guy was up 10 points.
Supported by what evidence? How do you know it was not some other factor, such as voter suppression laws? Or that they saw Johnson as a better option? Or they figured Trump was better than Clinton? Or some other reason. I will grant you some voters switched, but you seem to indicate a substantial amount...without defining what that substantial amount is. That only makes sense when you look at state by state voting, or even county by county (or even precinct by precinct). Clinton won the popular vote. As brummie said, and has many, many, many pundits and analysts said (including those within both campaigns), the polls were misleading/wrong. This thread is dedicated to talking about that...with actual data. And that data will likely not show up for weeks, months, and in some cases years. I have already heard several people say that this election will be the genesis for a lot of doctoral dissertations. Seriously, this is the bitter Berniebro viewpoint, which I don't think holds as much water as you seem think it does. Yes, as I just said, there were probably some voters that switched, but I don't think it was that many. As I posted in another thread, I want to see the answers to these 4 questions, which were supplemented by 2 from Dr. Wankler: 1 - How many new/unlikely voters actually voted for Trump? 2 - How many voters elected not to vote in the 2016 election? 3 - How many voters switched from Dem to Rep (or non-Dem) 4 - How many voters were effected by voter suppression laws? 5- How many voters stayed home/voted for Trump because of the Comey intervention? 6- How many voters stayed home/voted for Trump because of fake news about a new Clinton Foundation Investigation.
#1 : not sure. I can say about my state that I heard a Democratic analyst on the radio say that a significant number of voters they weren't aware of showed up to vote. No comprehensive tally, but he sounded like it was significantly more than they expected. #2 : http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout-2016/index.html 55% turnout which was lowest since '96. Pretty shocking considering how many more eligible voters there are now compared to '96. This piece of data seems to match the pre election favorability ratings of each candidate. The two least popular candidates in a long time. #3 : This map of counties that Trump flipped is pretty telling. https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...ts/map-the-obama-voters-who-helped-trump-win/ There obviously was some flipping. # 4 : Depends what you're asking ... Voter suppression laws in general or just the ones that came into effect this year. I think Wisconsin in particular has been mentioned as being affected by a new law. I've heard a number as high as 300,000 people unable to vote. Assuming that affected minorities more you could see a dent in Democratic vote ... maybe even tens of thousands. But most states did not have any significant new laws. But if you're asking about voter suppression laws in general, the impact is staggering. Some 10% of Floridians are banned from voting due to past criminal histories. They have some of the toughest disenfranchisement laws in the country and it's concentrated in minority communities. But that shouldn't affect polling because it's already baked into the models. As for #5 and # 6 I don't think you'll ever be able to quantify that. No real way to pinpoint such a specific issue. I don't think many people decided just on those issues alone ... A lot of that was overlapped with several other stories of Clinton corruption ... In the end it's more of an all of the above impact as opposed to one or two specific scandals.
That's possible, I guess, but political science tells us the reverse is what always happens. @soccernutter fwiw, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/...did-elect-Trump-Here-s-the-data-that-shows-it
Here's what Hillary thinks. (Based on internal polling.) http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/clinton-comey-letter-contributed-loss
"Just as we were back up on the upward trajectory, the second letter from Comey essentially doing what we knew it would — saying there was no there there — was a real motivator for Trump’s voters," Clinton said, according to the Post. As I posted elsewhere: I know someone who switched from Johnson to Trump because the second letter proved to him that Clinton was dirty, that she was manipulating the whole thing.
I hate to use the soccer analogy again, but focusing on Comey is like focusing on one controversial play and mostly glossing over the other 89 minutes where you could have won the game. You can replay that moment in your head over and over and ask yourself what if, but it doesn't do any good. But if one insists on boiling everything down to that one Comey letter, you have to take a step back and look at the big picture. Maybe next time the Democratic establishment should really stop and think very hard about the liabilities of going forward with a candidate that is under investigation. Remember that during the majority of the primaries we didn't even know for sure if the FBI was ready to drop it. We rolled the dice and hoped the story would die and it backfired. I still want Comey to make a statement under oath as to what happened, but at this point it's not going to do any good.
You're the one bringing Comey up, not me ... I agree that it's mostly irrelevant because there were polls that came out post Comey. The weekend after Comey the race seemed to slip into a near dead heat, but then many polls seemed to show the race trending back to Clinton by a couple of points. My state had her up 4 points at last poll and she barely escaped by a whisker. Something was wrong in those last polls ...
Brummie, if you don't know this comic, you should start reading. It is definitely PhD humor, and not everybody will get it.
I think I'm going to put this here. As the numbers come in, this chart that's been circulating looks increasingly wrong. Dead wrong: That was based on election night numbers, and those numbers are continuing to change -- by a lot -- as more ballots are counted. As the real numbers become clearer, it does not look like Democrats stayed home in 2016. It looks like Obama 2012 voters in specific midwest states flipped and became Trump voters in 2016. Clinton's Popular-Vote Lead Will Grow, and Grow, and Grow -- Andrew McGill, The Atlantic
Could it really be that simple? Remember two of the biggest themes in Obama's campaign in 2012 that was repeated over and over and over and over again. He saved the auto industry. And Mitt Romney was a venture capitalist who shipped jobs overseas. That was probably Obama's Midwest firewall in a nutshell. The question still remains ... why didn't this show up more clearly in polls?