Zuckerberg hires former Clinton pollster | Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg hires former Clinton pollster

politico.com

29 pointselsewhen45 comments

Am I the only one who thinks this speculation on Zuck running for pres is all nonsense? There's been a revolving door between Dem staff and elite tech industry positions since Obama. No one thought Larry Page or Sergey Brin was going into politics then. He's a young person very interested in politics, and has the wherewithal to explore the arena in some unique ways (visiting random blue collar Americans), but there's no indication he's ready to abandon his duties at FB. Or is there?

He will barely meet the age requirement by 2020

People who are merely exploring the country to learn more about it rarely feel the need to intensively document it using a professional media team.

He's making the same public motions that an office-seeker would perform. I don't think it's off base to connect the dots.

Should've hired from Bernie's team. He was outspent, fighting against the DNC (and the media), operating on grass roots rather than machine politics. He almost won. In fairness, much of the same could be said of Trump. Hillary's team lost in spite of massive inorganic advantages.

Seems like he might really be going for 2020. This might be even more interesting than 2016 was.

If he does run, I can't even imagine the type of data he has access to. What a massive advantage.

I don't think he can just use Facebook's data. That would be insane.

"I promise I won't use it. Pinky promise."

He can't but Facebook could give that data over to a Super PAC that was working for him

I know this is completely off-topic, but what's up with the comments?

To me they seem as kinda unusual for HN, more reddit-like. Among all the threads I have looked at in the last few hours, this is the only one where it is so extreme.

In all fairness the idea of Zuckerberg running for president is a little extreme (even if true) and is likely to be the subject of ridicule and criticism.

I understand that, bu usually HN refrains from commenting repetitive one-liners.

The main reason I come to HN instead of just living on reddit is that the chance that the comments refer to content in the article and not just the sentiment of the headline is much greater.

Also, comments are somewhat unique. The trouble with reddit comments is that they are completely overrun with extremely predictable memes or express some sort of emotion (usually outrage or hype) without adding anything.

I really fear that HN turns into a subreddit, because I have no idea what site I would go to next.

"HN is turning into reddit now, it used to be different" is perhaps the most repetitive comment on all of HN, though. People have been making this complaint for years and years now. It's so common that in fact there's a rule against it in the HN rules, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

(And that rule itself was written at least 5 years ago.)

Politics, Clinton, Zuckerberg, no-concrete point to debate.

"It would be a disaster of epic proportions. It would be... the perfect storm."

/gif its happening

God damn it. Now all the billionaires are lining up for a run, this is our new dystopia. Trump's election is like the moment in Rome when Caesar crowned himself emperor, the empire went downhill from there. We need to re-establish the old societal norm of hating rich people or all we're going to get are celebrity billionaires from now on. Rich people are inherently bad and evil. They got to where they are by destroying many people along the way. All our efforts as a society must be directed at limiting their power or our democratic experiment is over. Bring back the guillotines!

Such a bunch of bullshit. Plenty of people are rich because they are doctors, surgeons, entrepreneurs who provided a service and created jobs.

Nobody has ever made a billion dollars simply by being a doctor or surgeon. In medicine, it's the pharma investors who make that kind of money, not the people who actually work in hospitals.

And why would the pharma investors be bad people?

Especially since "pharma investors" includes people like the pension fund manager who tries to make sure your grandmother keeps getting her retirement check every month.

It's easy to gin up hatred against some mythical Scrooge McDuck character swimming in a money bin. Not so easy when it's that kindly old lady who lives across the street.

Either the billionaires run it or the politicians owned by the billionaires. The fact anyone ever thought it was ruled by the people is kind of amusing.

This is the type of demented thinking that brought about the gulags, which were morally reprehensible and made everyone poorer.

" like the moment in Rome when Caesar crowned himself emperor, the empire went downhill from there"

No, actually the Roman Empire started when Octavian was granted the title Augustus by the Roman Senate. It was a republic before that. He didn't "crown himself" anything.

I'm not sure which "Caesar" the OP had in mind (there were...umm... a bunch of them) but the Roman Empire continued to expand for quite a long time after the end of the Republic. It didn't start shrinking until the time of Hadrian, fourteen emperors down the line.

Would you please not post ideological rants here? There are plenty of ways to make a point about plutocracy without degrading the discussion quality like this.

Zuckerberg 2020

Trust Me, Dumb Fucks

Seriously this right here. This reason alone he will never get my vote.

His argument would have to be that he is reformed.

I'd rather vote for someone who doesn't have to come back from that - especially since it's the reason he's made billions.

>This reason alone he will never get my vote.

Would you like people to hold an off-the-cuff comment made at the age of 20 against you for the rest of your days?

I've many issues with FB, Zuckerberg and the rest of the cohort, but a comment made 13 years ago isn't one of them.

We trusted him with our data, and he's spent the last 12 years selling it, making billions, and manipulating news/views/free speech to fit his agenda.

How is this an off-the-cuff comment? It is his mantra. Are we somehow not dumb-fucks for still giving him our data? Again - he's made billions because of that comment alone.

He will never, ever, ever, get my vote.

or, "How I Became President by Discovering this One Weird Trick..."

Hiring a member of the losing team, especially one whose polling was obviously very bad (they didn't come close to accurately predicting Clinton's popularity or lack thereof), doesn't seem like the path to victory.

to be fair she won the popular by 3m, they just happened to be inefficient votes.

Which polling should have been able to reflect, and allow her to better target some of the voters she lost.

She skipped out on campaigning in several states that flipped for Trump, and didn't really do much to address her (un)likeability.

Edit - the US election is won or lost on electoral votes, not the popular vote. You play to win within the rules, not to make excuses.

Clinton's campaigning problems were cobsistent, IIRC, across all of her elections; she consistently lost ground, she just had less of it to lose in her Presidential run. (This is true not only of here Senate and Presidential general election campaigns, but also both Presidential primaries.)

It seems likely to me that it wasn't her pollsters from all those elections that were the weakness, but the candidate, who has a strong loyal base within the party, limited ability to hold on to votes that initially lean her way that aren't part of that base, and basically no ability (in part because of hardened negative opinions on a large segment of the electorate) to swing opposed or uncommitted voters.

In particular, she didn't visit Wisconsin even once during the general election campaign.

A ~1% popular advantage is not anywhere near what the committee's own polling data suggested (30-40% spread), nor that of any mainstream media outlet. They were closer to the edge of the scale than the actual number. That is to say, they were almost as wrong as numerically possible, without going the opposite direction.

She didn't win the popular vote by 1%. She won by 2.1% (that means your memory of the election results are off by a factor of two... maybe check that). Fivethirtyeight's prediction had her winning the popular vote by 3.5%, so the results were within the margin of error.

Not sure where you're getting your information from... but get it from somewhere else.

The president of the United States is not, and never has been, elected by popular vote.

In fact, virtually no Western democracy chooses its leader on the basis of a popular vote (I believe there are a few exceptions).

It's sophistry to even bring it up.

I mean, sorry to step on your narrative by pointing out this basic fact.

You guys do know that even if our government operated like Canada, or Sweden, or any of the other countries you profess to admire, that Hillary Clinton still wouldn't be President, right? In fact, under a parliamentary system, the President would be chosen by insider dealing between party hacks like McConnell, Ryan, etc.

Canada has an independent organization draw its districts, which means there is effectively no gerrymandering. Under that system, a hypothetical US Parliament would be majority Democrat, and Clinton's popularity among elected officials in her party would have made her a shoo-in in the hypothetical PM election.

"Canada has an independent organization draw its districts, which means there is effectively no gerrymandering."

That just transfers the gerrymandering power from elected officials (who can be thrown out if they annoy the voters enough) to whoever gets appointed to an unelected "independent organization" (which can't be thrown out by the voters).

In practice, this "independent organization" is appointed by the Canadian parliament (i.e., by the political parties), so it is "independent" in name only.

To expand a bit, the very notion of an "independent organization" seems questionable. Who will make up this organization?

Career civil servants? They will be biased toward whichever party proposes to spend more money on civil servants.

Appointees by whichever party controls parliament (as appears to be the case in Canada)? The problem there should be obvious.

Proportional appointment on the basis of election results? Biased toward the major parties at the expense of minority parties.

And so on.

Not even a blind grid system is immune -- in that case where you set the origin of the grid can have a major effect.

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