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Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

Interesting essay. But it starts with: The quantity of votes in favor of the Brexit and in favor of Trump surprised most of us.

It's only "most of us" if you live in a liberal echo chamber. E.g. the NY Times has done some recent naval gazing, but it would be fascinating to find out what percent of their employees voted for Trump. Fewer than 10%? Fewer than 1%? So, certainly, the result "surprised" them.

Meanwhile in the real world the popular vote breakdown was:

   Clinton 63,515,588
   Trump   61,917,320

That's about a 1% difference. I don't see how that translates to "surprised most of us"!

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This has nothing to do with "liberal echo chamber". Most opinion polls indicated that Clinton would win, and most people believed so. That's all there is to it.

> That's about a 1% difference. I don't see how that translates to "surprised most of us"!

You can't use the result of the elections to claim that the result was "expected"!

The stock market expected a Clinton win, and so did betting markets outside the US:

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/07/betting-sites-see-record-wage...

Arguably, at some point even Trump indicated that he believed Clinton would win, when he claimed the elections were "rigged".

You don't think maybe the elections really were rigged?

Here's a video where a computer programmer who worked on voting systems is questioned under oath, and he makes some pretty good arguments that elections are rigged. At least the ones where electronic voting machines are used.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcxGGnmRQAs&t=92s

I'll admit, I didn't bother researching, but I'd understood a lot of electronic voting machines were used in the election we just underwent.

The results of the election only slightly surprised me, but I've gone to great lengths to avoid ingesting media from mainstream sources. Outside the mainstream, Trump's popularity was quite a bit more obvious.

To be honest, I have no opinion on the rigging claim. I'm not a US citizen or resident and I don't know much about how y'all go about actually voting.

My point is that candidate B claimed the election would be rigged against him; it's not a stretch to assume he thought candidate A would probably win at that point.

Yes, the final election result wasn't terribly surprising given polling. Trump was reported to have a very nonzero chance of winning the electoral college all along (although there weren't many reports of him having a > 50% chance), and all polls had the popular vote being very close.

But what was surprising, all along, to people from all sorts of echo chambers (including, I think, Trump himself) was that Trump had this support in the first place. He was the goofball candidate in the primaries. Mitt Romney, the previous Republican nominee, called him a "phony" and a "fraud," and said, "He's playing the American public for suckers." Imagine McCain saying that about Romney, or Kerry about Obama! He dominated the news cycle for months with indiscretions and mistakes. He lost the debates, by any metric in which you care about actual policy discussed at the debates. Republicans were quite worried about him dooming the party. It was clear months before November that he was a realistic candidate who would win about half of the popular vote, but the fact that we got to that point was surprising.

It's entirely possibly that most people might be planning on voting for a candidate, but incorrectly believe that most other people were planning on voting for their opponent.

That's certainly quite possible.

But in the final weeks the US election had close polling. Clinton was leading Trump by less than 5% in most polls and was actually behind in a few of them (Matt Drudge always managed to find those polls to link to).

So it's hard to understand why people might have those beliefs in a relatively close election. Easier to understand if the election was predicted to be a blowout.

But blowouts don't happen that often. The most recent true blowout I experienced was Reagan vs Mondale in 1984. An electoral blowout, only Minnesota and DC voted for Mondale. But the popular vote was closer, roughly 59%/41%.

Why isn't anyone considering that within the margin of error, the polls were correct? Isn't the confidence interval +/- a few percentage points anyways??

Because most polls showed Hillary winning or winning by a landslide.

I think it surprised a lot of the world outside of America, too.

You have access to the NYT and not a cafe in the US Great Plains on a Saturday morning. Sadly the NYT doesn't bother to show up either.

This assumes many people voting knew beforehand that their chosen candidate would win/lose. Since they don't it's safe to say that all results are a surprise.

As pointed out, trump himself didn't expect to win.

Even Trump and his staff were surprised. They didn't expect to win, because of the poll results!

That echo chamber thing cuts both ways.

the people who voted for trump had no better idea what the result would be than anyone else.

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