[RD] Clinton vs. Trump - USA Presidential race.

I'm not really sure if/how a Libertarian winning 11% in this election would matter?

 

Prior elections seem to indicate that a hopeless 3rd party just either splits the vote fairly evenly between the major parties... in other words, has no effect, or makes the party that was going to lose anyway, lose worse.

 

What? That isn't true. Dissatisfied Republicans have not historically given votes to Green Party candidates, and dissatisfied Democrats aren't pulling the level of Constitution Party types. The level that a 3rd (or 4th) party candidate "takes away" votes depends on the state, the other candidates, and that party.

 

Gary Johnson is the fairly well-liked former governor of New Mexico (as a Republican). He was the Libertarian candidate in 2012 too, where he almost cracked 1%. It was the Libs' second-best performance ever lol. I wouldn't not be surprised if his name recognition is at least 11%, and it would be near-100% in NM specifically. I think he stands to gain quite a bit from the Republican fracture if neither Trump nor an anti-Trump runs as an independent, snapping up votes from the losing faction. I'd be shocked if he did better than 5% as a result, but even that would be an unheard-of performance for a Libertarian on the national level.

My impression of him is that he's a pretty decent guy, too. I'm not a fan of libertarianism as an ideology, but he's actually had to make his ideology work in the real world, and he does genuinely care about the socially liberal part of libertarianism.

 

Getting 5% of the popular vote qualifies you for federal matching funds. Granted, the Reform party got those in 1996 and didn't build on their momentum in any particular way, but it's something. I can imagine a variety of outrageous scenarios where the Libertarians become a major player after this election, but they're decidedly far-fetched. So it probably won't matter at all in the long-term but it's kind of interesting.

 

Every election features multiple "3rd parties." I'm talking more in terms of 3rd party candidates that get more than a non-negligible % of the vote. Or if you prefer, lump them all together, and my point still stands. Talking about what individual 3rd parties did who got a extremely small percentage of the vote doesn't make as much sense to me.

 

Oh yeah, we have a lot of numbers, for sure, you can call it even a data if you want, but any data are useless if you don't know how they will interact, if you can't put them into any sensible model.

And to prevent possible misunderstanding: I think that very, very probably Clinton wins. But I haven't got to this conclusion using anything that I would like to call data-based approach, or data-driven science or anything with "data" in its name.

The wannabe saints of data journalism spent last year talking about how Trump's ceiling in the primaries is like 20 % and he has no chance of being the nominee and such (Yeah, this article by Nate Silver irks me to this date). Using data doesn't make predictions unbiased and neutral just by its own purity.

 

The thing about data, models, and the social sciences is this...

In the physical sciences, at least until you bore all the way down to quantum mechanics, you have observations (data), you create a model and you make more observations (data). If all goes well you have a model that is a reliable and useful predictor of reality.

In the social sciences you make observations (data), you create a model and you make some more observations...but you always have to consider that the reality is actually not constant over time so the observations you are making are of a reality that is at least slightly different from the reality that you got the data to create the model from. If you are really good, like John Maynard Keynes good, you come up with a model quickly enough that is so powerful that even though reality has changed slightly the model is still sufficiently accurate to be useful.

However, every time you use this model to make an accurate prediction of the if this, then that result variety (which is what makes the model useful) the result you are getting is further altering the reality that the model was based on in the first place. This automatically degrades the accuracy of your model.

 

The Races are winding down, again. This time, it looks like it might stick. Clinton just had another rude shock in Indiana, but her lead in ordinary delegates is insurmountable. It would take Clinton withdrawing for Sanders to win. Cruz has withdrawn, so Trump will gain the 1237 votes he needs on the first ballot.

The conventions are two months away. What can we expect til then?

J

 

Lots of clueless articles in The Atlantic and WaPo seeking to explain the rise of Trump.

 

Sure, but that just means that despite all the data we're constantly collecting, we will never design a perfect model that is impervious to black swan events. Models provide evidence, but there's never a guarantee that something that the model doesn't account for won't appear and make your model output garbage.

Silver, FWIW, is about as honest as it gets in trying to get the predictions right. That doesn't mean he's spin-free, but he does make conscious efforts to correct for his biases. His models and predictions are based on past election results and all kinds of current polls, and nothing about those indicated to him that Trump had much of a chance in November 2015. But no primary remotely like this one had ever occurred before, so trying to apply evidence from past elections was a fool's errand. Trump turned out to be a black swan event, not a boom-and-bust candidate like Herman Cain from 2012 or something like that.

 

Trump has unleashed his Bankai on Hillary Clinton:

http://fusion.net/story/299490/dona...acebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fusion


All lies of course, but its Trump, so...

 

To name two in a crowd. It's very simple. Trump controlled the media. His free publicity was more than all the ads for all the other candidates, both parties, combined.

J

 

Not quite. He manipulated the media. And the media people happily jumped in, fully aware, because it kept them busy. Trump made news, he sold. He was - is - unavoidable.

I'm only surprised no one noticed this before and made use of it! It was not possible in the era when just a few big media groups controlled the media landscape in each city. The owners of these groups, and the big advertisers, could direct them on what to not cover.
But once the "news channels" acquired global reach with the maturity of the Internet, a new era of desperate competition among a huge number of media groups for ratings/public attention began. Every local (or even national or international) news media group is now in competition with every other around the world that operates in the same language. They can no longer afford to ignore a story that is potentially popular, because some other competitor will take it.

That new landscape has existed for some 10 years now, Trump seems to have been the first to understand and exploit it. It wasn't easy, it takes a master manipulator to make himself impossible to ignore by the media for an extended period of time and avoid being destroyed in the process. Look at Snowden: he failed, the stories he released were not sufficiently interesting, it all revolved around a single issue that did not impact directly on people's day to day lives, the initial outrage wore out and they could be ignored by most of the the media afterwards.

Not so with Trump, at least so far. He managed to produce one outrage after another, without doing anything so nasty that he'll be permanently damaged in the eyes of the public. Or so risky that he'll be targeted for elimination by the most unscrupulous elements of society. The owners of the media may detest him, the news reporters may despise him, but they are locked into following him around nevertheless. And what is "worse", they're being lead around instead of leading, because they apparently have nothing on Trump that wasn't known already. So he sets the agenda, unlike what happens with most politicians' relations with the media. This also explains the rage of the "professional" politicians and their mouthpieces in the media: they're green with envy! The whole thing has been fascinating to watch.

 

I wonder if the current media reality of many desperately struggling media companies instead of a few secure ones has affected Chomsky's analysis of how the media work. It seems sort of quaint and completely wrong nowadays. All sorts of people are inserting "news" everywhere, and everyone is skeptical of all sources except for the ones they want to believe in. It's almost hard to believe there was a time when most people from all walks of life were so naive as to believe Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or any of a half-dozen other similar-looking men.

I can see how the old media are attempting to control the flow of information about Trump to be within the bounds of discourse considered acceptable by them and their advertisers, at least by spinning the narrative against him even while they can't afford to stop covering him, and how they've failed so badly. It's like watching a fish flopping around on the end of a fishhook. Then again death is usually rather pathetic-looking, and what they're doing is dying.

 

Trump has exposed the political analysts as frauds, and he has exposed that Politics is just another form of entertainment. And the news media hates him for both of those things.

However, there really is no surprise, or there should be none. Trump quickly rose to the top in the polls, took center stage (thanks FOX News) and has been there virtually the entire cycle. He has been leading the entire time. Everyone who just looked at the polls and believed them has known all along that he would win. It was only the folks that were denying the clear evidence of the polls who kept insisting he would falter.

Now the polls are all clearly, saying hes toast in the general. Once again you have one side looking at the polls and believing them while another side is again "going with their gut" and believing he will inexplicably outperform the polls. He won't. We were right to trust the polls that he would win the GOP primary, and we are right to trust the polls that he will lose the general. Its that simple.

 

Is this not agreement?

Don't blame Fox for Trump. Everyone played their part. CNN, NYT, Politico, etc.

J

 

Things have begun. In his typical style, Trump has launched a flank attack on Clinton. Interestingly, it's a gender card. The Donald is calling Hillary an enabler of serial abuse of women. While this has been out there for a while, the level has ramped up, indicating a major campaign ploy. I think the dialog is worth following.

Some points.
* This is not going after votes. Instead, it attacks the solidarity of Hillary's core support.
* Trump is not spending any money. The media is doing it for him.
* That alone is worth observing.

In the following article, note how Trumps claim is clearly stated up front. The body of the article brings out the old names--Wiley, Jones, Broderick, Lewinsky. All this was necessary before the defense can be stated. What more can Trump ask for? He does not need to win the argument, but a continuation is ready at hand. Clinton replies that there was no evidence. A pattern of behavior is itself evidence. So it continues.

Hillary Clinton can and will answer the factual allegations of this charge. She has not, yet, parried the main thrust, to wit, that she is cold and uncaring, particularly of other women.

The election does not hinge on this point. It is nothing more than a pawn move in the opening. Still, pawns are said to be the soul of chess. This pawn move costs Trump nothing, but it deflects attention that Clinton needs and taxes her resources. With such moves, the Donald disposed of everyone but Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries.

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...abler-bill-donald-trump-presidential-campaign

J