Trump’s Data Team Saw a Different America
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
We all want what’s best for this country. That’s what I heard in Mr. Trump’s remarks last night. That’s what I heard when I spoke to him directly. And I was heartened by that. That’s what the country needs — a sense of unity, a sense of inclusion, a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of law, and respect for each other."
Let's make sure our comments here are tolerant of others and devoid of hate at those we might not understand.
Hard to take from a man who chose an virulent anti-LGBTQer as his VP running for a party with extensive anti-inclusionary policies as their platform.
Edit: To correct VIP to VP.
Forget The Man and remember yourself.
"stand as a nation against their hate" Stand how? Mass demonstrations each time he speaks or wants to do policy?
"Forget the man and remember yourself" remember myself? huh? What does that do?
If it helps, you can take "inclusion" to mean "has the same rights" - ie. Muslims, LGBTQ, women, etc. all have the same rights.
Being inclusive and tolerant of intolerance works up to the point when the intolerant group is large enough to wield political power.
> We manage it in the UK without everything collapsing (thus far.)
This may turn out to be awfully prescient.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/may/07/muslims-britain-f... has the "100% against" figure but is from 2009 and not entirely relevant at this point.
Either way, they're both included into UK society.
However, when it comes to government, you don't have the option to be anything but inclusive. Anything less leads to unrest and ultimately revolt as the silent oppressed find escape valves.
This election cycle is proof that true inclusion is paramount. Not the Politically Correct inclusion Democrats are so fond of, but true inclusion, true representation.
As someone who grew up in northern Virginia I'm really wondering about the answer to that question. Try coming out as homosexual in one of the many Democrat-voting Asian and Middle Eastern households around here. Try saying you're going to marry a black man or woman. Try mentioning (as a brown person) that your wife is a white American and see how many comments you can get about why it is better to marry a girl from your own country.
But it's so hard to do that when there's so much that I find morally and ethically reprehensible about the president-elect and the public statements him and many of his supporters have made.
The dialogue between the two "opposing sides" has so completely broken down that "othering" is in full effect - there is no concept of what the "other side" wants, just third-party digestion of what someone thinks it wants.
I'm not a Trump or Clinton supporter, although I'm biased for Trump and against Clinton, so I'll gladly take the first step.
I've listened to some of Trump's speeches, and some of Clinton's speeches. I've also had a little bit of exposure to Obama's speeches, which I really liked. From my experience, Clinton's campaign has always had an undercurrent of contempt for opposing voters. I've looked around and seen other people have this belief - https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/45paoo/why_would_...
Clinton even went so far as to label half of Trump's supporters as "deplorables....racist,sexist,homophobic..". Here's a discussion of that comment I've read - https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Hillary-Clinton-call-half-of-D...
Madeleine Albright, when talking at a Clinton rally, said "there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/06/madeleine-al...
Gloria Steinem suggested that female Bernie voters are doing it "for the boys" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/06/bernie-sande...
You may have heard about "Bernie Bros" from the time Bernie was still a threat to her candidacy.
It's not just attachments to her campaign, the media has been relentlessly supporting Clinton in labeling Trump supporters(or even anyone opposing Clinton) as racist and sexist. It doesn't stop with the media, it's her supporters as well, here's an example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd4wXAUFAow
One of the possible explanations of Trump's surprising victory is the social stigma of voting for him - http://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/13075/why-were-p... This worries me greatly, as a very zealous proponent of free speech - I wouldn't want a significant contingent of voters, enough to sway a whole election, to feel like they cannot voice their opinions publicly, even if I disagree with them.
Considering all that, why do you think Clinton's campaign holds a moral high ground over Trump's? Why should I not be worried about this undercurrent of contempt for anyone politically opposed to her?
You left out by far the worst part of that, she said we were "not America", that we were "irredeemable".
Your devil's advocate offer doesn't strike me as relevant, you're trying to build some common ground or the like, right? Well, there's no common ground to be found when one side wholeheartedly believes you, and by you I mean in particular myself and my family, aren't even worth trying to reeducate, aren't even capable of that, are, to quote Merriam Webster "not able to be saved, helped, or made better"
Just what future to you think we have in our opponents' Utopia?
Anyway, near your close you say "This worries me greatly, as a very zealous proponent of free speech - I wouldn't want a significant contingent of voters, enough to sway a whole election, to feel like they cannot voice their opinions publicly, even if I disagree with them."
Is it really true you believe this isn't already the case? If you habituate HN, did you fail to notice the strong calls to purge Peter Theil from Facebook's board and Y Combinator's partners?
At the other end of the economic classes, all the violence and vandalism against Trump supporters, which thanks to Project Veritas we know was in part directed and paid for Clinton's campaign? That takes "contempt" to a higher (or is that lower?) level than your thorough citations of mere words.
Because it isn't running on a platform of exclusion.
So to answer the question regarding moral high ground: Do I think Clinton also ran an immoral or unethical campaign? Absolutely. You've noted how her supporters have also engaged in those actions by socially stigmatizing free speech.
I'd argue that social stigmatization of speech is allowed, as is the speech itself. Free speech goes both ways, does it not?
But you're right, I would personally still want to listen to people I disagree with, just as we are discussing differences in opinion right now.
And at the end of the day, I don't support Clinton. Precisely because I just didn't feel like I could rationalize that stigmatization for other people's points of view just to reaffirm my own.
Here's the thing though: Did Clinton actively support violence? Racism? I'd argue that she did indeed support sexism, so I can't argue for or against that. I think that Trump reinforces supporter beliefs that racism is okay, that violence towards others that do not agree with him is okay. He has friends like Steve Bannon, that had a domestic violence dispute, that ran a hate-filled website. I can't deny that Bannon's probably a very smart individual, but morally I'm not sure I can support that.
And we're seeing the repercussions of Trump's rhetoric, at least here in the Midwest and South. I'm from a southern state, and live near a public university. As a person of color, I've had people in trucks with confederate flags tell me whilst driving past that Trump will deport me, even though I was born here. Students are being killed for their religious beliefs (thankfully not in my town). All it's doing, as far as I can tell, is bringing fear, uncertainty, and doubt in many people's lives.
I was young when 9/11 happened. And nobody told me what was going on, so I only knew the bits and pieces I would see on the news. What I gained out of it, I'm ashamed to say, was an irrational fear of men with turbans, and women with hijabs. I'd have nightmares of it. I'd be afraid when going to houses of family friends who were Sikh, some of the most peaceful people you'd know, solely because the men in the family wore turbans. Of course, now I know that those are irrational, and have since made my peace with it.
Today, I find myself feeling the same irrational fears of my youth, but instead towards the white southern folk that I probably grew up with. I look at them and wonder, will that person stop me or make fun of me because of the way I look?
I know that you probably don't agree with racism and sexism, just as I know that many of Trump's supporters probably also do not. But there are definitely people in that camp that Trump is not outright calling out. And I really wish he did.
Finally, I did a google search to see if anyone had compiled any links to demonstrate what I've noticed in trump and his supporters. I found a bunch of links compiled in the subreddit /r/EnoughTrumpSpam, so I understand if they aren't exactly the best sources for how I feel about Trump. https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughTrumpSpam/comments/4uabwt/fin...
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/2/donald-trump-...
and then got a lot of flak for it in Utah in christian newspapers and media for it. Maybe he'll keep Pence in check, who knows...
Hillary being extremely "pro-LGBT" is also taken too much for granted. In one instance Hillary's crowd during the nightclub shooting was perceived to have thrown the gay community under the bus when they suppressed the news about it, because it might have had an "Islamic terrorist" component to it, so it would have hurt her slightly in her rhetoric. Many people have not forgot that.
People noticed she took large donations from the Saudis and Qatar and other places like that. I know a some women who voted for him, certainly noticed that part.
EDIT (another thing I thought of): During the process I was really fascinated with the media, new forms of media, popular media, etc. As part of that I was looking at how news spread on Reddit among Hillary and Trump supporters. One thing that was unexpected is that Trump's supporters included people from all walks of life: young, old, gays, transgender, Hispanic, Black, other minorities and they all were rather civil and respectful, they got along, all having fun with their frog mascot and whatnot. On the Hillary's side, there was a lot of hatred, condescension, as soon as someone mentioned anything critical about her, immediate downvotes and labels like "sexist" thrown around. It looked rather unhealthy. That militant attitude might come from the right place, but I can't imagine it being healthy, and I wonder if it cost her the election.
You found Trump supporters on Reddit to be civil and respectful?!
I should have qualified it with "more than I expected". I just expected a lot worse, and at the same time expected a lot more from Hillary's crowd.
Also I meant they got along with each other and I didn't see the expected "gay bashing" or racial slurs and so on. Those are things someone coming from the left and liberal side might assume. Especially since there is anonymity online, there is absolutely no reason for them to hold those things back.
As for Hillary's side, it was sad to see how using that same anonymity, the ugly, intolerant, condescending and frankly childish behavior showing.
That does not say much. If your expectation of Clinton supporters being civil and respectful is higher than that of Trump's, it is quite natural that you'd be "surprised". You need to have the same yardstick for both camps.
All said and done, it is one matter being condescending and totally another manner to promote hate.
That's a fair point, agree with that.
I have seen vicious racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny on different subs during the election. The kind of comments that came through and words used were not even comparable to the other side.
Hilary did not get behind gay marriage until 2013: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/....
Fricking Rudy Giuliani is a better icon for gay rights. Guiliani and Clinton came out in support of gay marriage about the same time (2013 and 2015, both before Obergefell), but Clinton did so to stay relevant with per party and Guiliani did so against the mainstream of his party.
He has no conception of togetherness, of sacrificing one's own goals for the good of the larger group. He's part of the gang that's shit on the Constitution, obstructed government for their own petty reasons and have no issue with legislating to punish people that didn't vote for them.
Sadly the Democrats will try to take the high road, give in on terrible laws just to make it appear that we're not obstructing in hopes of - I don't even know what.
Everyone is singing the praises of the Republicans for seeing the real America except for the fact that the real America is a scared, selfish bunch of folks. If Trump had ANY ACTUAL CRED then I would feel less sad. Everyone is acting as if Trump can actually do something - there is zero evidence of that other than he can lie like no one's business.
What seems more likely is that there was an enthusiasm gap for Hillary Clinton as a candidate. It's about the electoral college in the end, and a Democrat like Hillary, who lacks the charisma of Obama, was going to have to bring out minorities, young voters, and college educated voters in droves to win. She simply was not able to sufficiently do this.
To win the rural vote back, the Democrats need a different kind of candidate, none of the ones that they have offered have been able to do this since 2000.
In a way, it's the Democrats way of saying "to hell with DNC and corrupt super delegates".
The problem with Hillary is that she was seen as a messenger of whoever funded her campaign. That included the ultra rich Arabs, multinational corps, etc. She wasn't authentic.
On the other hand, trump was rich enough to not give a fuck and say things at the risk of alienating a large crowd.
He really appealed at an emotional level. Hillary was a robot.
One interesting thing that this election showed was that race and gender are two fundamentally different traits. In all the talk about diversity, we lump the two together far too often when gender is really a completely different beast. Minorities, and African-Americans specifically, overwhelmingly turned out and voted for Obama. Clinton didn't get nearly the same effect with women despite her opponent being an unabashed misogynist. It seems that race > religion > gender when it comes to voting identity.
My thesis is that money only gets you a hearing. After that, it depends the most on whether people like what they're hearing from you.
In my statistics classes we often talk about bias and biased estimates, that you calculate something in such a way that it's systematically different than the true underlying population value. (I.E. if Trump's true likelihood of winning the presidency was X - we always resulted in estimates that were X minus some value below).
Long story short - it's cool to see in the real world :). You can have the fanciest models and math, but if the underlying data and assumptions you're working with aren't representative of the population, then it's all for naught.
Look at the county maps for Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. The people in the cities there thought that Bernie was too progressive and so "unelectable" while these "backwards" racist rural voters actually voted for him.
These are the people the DNC completely ignored. These are the people that Trump's team saw. They aren't all stupid racist hicks. They voted for Bernie.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Part...
lol
It's not so simple.
Deplorable or not, consistently insulting large swathes of your voters is ill-advised.
Again: it's not so simple.
It must have been that the populace took it differently?
Trump only insulted criminals who rape women and children trying to cross the border illegally (stats said 1 in 4 women were raped trying to cross the border).
What does this mean? She won the popular vote, so her numbers were definitely not tiny.
She also has 10.8 million Twitter followers, which is less than Trump but by no means tiny.
At least here they talk about weighting the polling results, but I would really like to know how, exactly.
There's an article I read within the last couple of days that goes into detail about the weighting process, but I couldn't find it again.
I guess they're pretty unlikely to give us much detail about their analysis models, secret sauce, proprietary approach, etc, but maybe there's something mildly interesting here:
https://cambridgeanalytica.org/datamodels
Cambridge Analytica claims to have a database of over 220 million Americans.
There are other reports of voter fraud.
Your vote, as well as mine, were counted. But it seems that the loss was perhaps overwhelming and not as close. We need to get access to the voter databases for election accountability arithmetic. My understanding is this has not been released.
It's also worth mentioning that the idea of restoring voting rights for people once they have served their time has bipartisan support--in part because so many people have served time for nonviolent marijuana possession convictions. Take a look at the election results to see how the country feels about marijuana possession these days.
This is a power of the governor
The truly disturbing idea is that voting rights are removed in the first place.
It saddens me that a media source twisted McAuliffe's restoring of voting rights into "pardoned 60,000 felons in Virginia for votes".
Also it was 13,000 ... not 60,000.
* Virginia is 1 of 4 states who's state constitution takes away the right of felons to vote. I'm going to be a bad person and just assume this was part of Jim Crow era laws to make sure less African Americans could vote, but I have not researched the subject.
* Before 2013, if you committed a non violent felony in Virginia and had fulfilled all parts of your sentence, including serving time and probation and fines and restitution, two years later you could apply for a certificate giving you the right to register to vote.
* In 2013, Virginia governor McDonnell issued an executive order that got rid of the two year waiting period. I've read this affected about 100,000 potential voters.
* In 2016, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe issued an executive order that made the restoration of the ability to register to vote automatic, no certificate needed. His order covered violent and non violent felons. It didn't change the fact that the governor could just individually restore the ability to register to vote to someone who had completed their sentence. It just made it easy and automatic.
* Due to some screwup somewhere his order somehow restored the voting rights for several child molestors still in prison, and a few serial killers who had serial killed in Virginia but were serving a sentence in a different state. I guess. I'm not sure how that worked. I can't imagine a child molestor in prison trying to register to vote.
* The Virginia state supreme court overturned the governor's order.
* In Aug 2016, McAuliffe vowed to individually restore the rights of each individual ex-felon by hand, but by using an automatic signing machine. He claimed he had signed 13,000 so far, and said he could conceivably cover 200,000 more people.
There are some voter advocacy groups who think you should have the right to register to vote after you've completed your sentence, regardless of fines imposed on you by the state.
I took some of the above info from the Washington Post ( NOT THE WASHINGTON TIMES )
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/mcaul...
Other countries have polling places in their prisons, let alone allowing ex-convicts to vote. If there's one demographic that should be allowed their say on what society feels is legal and illegal, it's those who society has chosen to punish. Otherwise, you create the possibility of a tyranny of a minority which comprises the majority of the electorate.
So is liberty, and so is life, and we deprive convicts of those rights too.
> If there's one demographic that should be allowed their say on what society feels is legal and illegal, it's those who society has chosen to punish.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur: why should those who have chosen to violate the social compact have a voice in it?
> Otherwise, you create the possibility of a tyranny of a minority which comprises the majority of the electorate.
That's also a non-sequitur: if they are disenfranchised, they're no longer part of the electorate.
As of this moment, that's not true: Mrs. Clinton received 48% of the popular vote. That's more than Mr. Trump, but that's not a majority.
The fact that CNN interpreted the data poorly doesn't mean the data was bad. FiveThirtyEight stated repeatedly that Clinton's lead was not insurmountable and the a typical polling error could easily flip it to Trump.
She ended up with a 1-2% preference
The same thing happens every presidential cycle. Counts come in much slower for populous states with large volumes of absentee, provisional, and mail-in ballots. Clinton is going to win these votes by something like a 2:1 margin.
[0] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-bots-democracy-usa-el...
Observing that social media accounts have X followers does not constitute 'investigating the numbers', even in the most casual of senses.
> It looked like a total landslide to me based on national and public data.
But it wasn't a total landslide, so your understanding of the data was not accurate. Will you accept that, or will your bubble filter just reject it since Trump won?
This is a conversation. Disagreeing with you doesn't make it something else.
The media was not talking about what was staring me in the face. I'm not a journalist. I don't know what it meant, but to me, I thought, "wow, a landslide is coming".
Can I have an opinion?
You thought it was going to be a landslide because you only exposed yourself to--or only believed--information that reinforced that opinion.
Now that you know it wasn't a landslide, will you go back and look at where your opinion diverged from reality? Or will you just think "I was right after all" simply because Trump won?
You are correct, I am in shock that it was not a landslide because of what I thought I was seeing at the time.
I'm in technology (I assume you are too) so I went about doing simple data sampling online. I did not care what my local state was doing, I wanted national data. Something that would hopefully give me real insight. What I found (in my non-professional way) was that Trump had an overwhelmingly large number of people interested in him from both live events as well as more static events. The people present seemed more excited as well. She also had more negative online information available about her.
From that, I developed a theory that Trump would win in a landslide.
Thank you for the conversation.