Political Prediction Thread

[hobbsyoyo]

That's a good point.

As with my comment on polling in the other thread, at this point I think it will be very hard to definitively prove at this point. I mean that with respect to both shy-Trumpers and shy-Hillary voters.

 

[Sommerswerd]

However, if I were a Trump supporter I wouldn't have wanted to talk about it with any of my friends.

Yes, but that is exactly my point... You would be ashamed if you were a Trump supporter, because you are liberal, and as such, embrace the idea that Trump supporters are at least substantially motivated by racism, bigotry etc... So of course you would be ashamed to be one.

But Trump supporters don't agree with you or your perception of the situation. So they don't share your shame, or feel the shame that you think they should.

Also, your friends that you say you would be ashamed to tell you were voting for Trump... they are liberals too right? Well a Trump supporter living in interior PA doesn't have a ton of liberal friends to be ashamed to. All his friends are voting for Trump. So why does he need to feel ashamed? He doesn't.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

You do know that it's possible to be a conservative without being a racist, right? And that their are lots of liberals in places like interior PA? They may not be a powerful voting block but they exist. Our country is not so homogeneous in various regions as the results would show. Hell, almost half of Texan voters supported Hillary.

You're treating his entire voting bloc as same-minded and closed off from liberal America and that isn't the case. We shamed lots of people in this election and it had an impact. Not everyone who voted for Trump was super hyped on his racist, dog-whistling rhetoric and they wouldn't have been very vocal supporters of him. But they turned out and voted and proved nearly the entire polling apparatus wrong.

On the whole interior PA thing -

Seriously have you lived in places like that? I have. It's not as monolithic as you seem to paint it as. People can and do make friends across party lines. But when some of your friends are outright demonizing the opposition (even rightfully so in this case), it's going to make people on the receiving end of that either get louder or quieter in their support of Trump. That's exactly what happened and to top it off, our side just sat out the election.

 

[Farm Boy]

We also skew youngish to middle aged, here, I think? I know that many of my parents friends voted Trump. I also watched my parents, who are super shy, kabosh political talk from them, express their disgust and intention to move to a 3rd party, and that was that. I saw the Trump voter that was willing to speak up get bogged down amongst my in-laws. I believe the phrase "That's because you don't have a daughter" ended that conversation.

Legitimate question Sommer as I seek perspective, how many family dinners do you think politics farted all over in the shy-liberal circles?

 

[Sommerswerd]

Legitimate question Sommer as I seek perspective, how many family dinners do you think politics farted all over in the shy-liberal circles?

If I take your meaning, yes I have certainly personally witnessed relatives (living in states including, but not limited to PA, FL, MI, and GA) who expressed ambivalence about voting... quote: "There's no point", "This is a white-power election so Trump's winning regardless", "My vote doesn't matter", "Who cares, I don't even like Hillary like that", "I was considering Trump/Hillary/Stein, but now I'm just like forget it"... on and on. And I have personally witnessed those relatives getting shamed over and over about it with all the proclamations you can imagine... and then softening to "Well, yeah I guess I might vote, when you put it that way."

I just didn't think much about what was going on until metalhead posted about the pollster only counting "definitely" voters instead of "probably" voters.

@ hobbs- I think I have pretty good record here on not lumping all Trump voters together, (or labeling all Republicans as this-ist or that-ist), so I think you may be projecting on to me a little and missing my point as a result. I've never lived in Appalachia, including "upstate" PA, however, I am a lot more familiar with that part of the country than you seem to think. I'll leave it at that as it wasn't my intention to get into a contest about who is more bluegrassy than who.

I agree that shaming has an impact. I think that in this case it resulted moreso in entrenched positions along with resistance/reaction/grievance more so than being bashful enough to tell the poll guy you were voting for Hillary when you really intended on voting for Trump.

 

[metalhead]

I know these "flyover" people, people from the T of Pennsylvania fairly well. It is absolutely inaccurate and totally counter-productive to try to say that there isn't at least a strong plurality who are racist. It annoys me to no end that we're supposed to now pretend otherwise, but the New World Order has a new, white nationalist brand of Political Correctness that we're already doing a bang-up job of promoting.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't think it helps anyone to essentialize and individualize racism in this fashion.

 

[metalhead]

Nor do we want to forget that a week ago, 60 million people expressed that overt racism and bigotry wasn't a dealbreaker when picking a president. That doesn't make all of them racists, and perhaps it ultimately doesn't matter if they are or not individually, but I'm not sure we need to let the ones who are off the hook, or try to whitewash what a fair amount of people in these communities are really like.

And hey, my Mom is from North Philly and her whole family is racist. My Dad is from a relatively far suburb of Philadelphia, and his whole family is racist, too. So it's not like you have to be from the T to be racist in Pennsylvania. If we're being honest.

 

[Lexicus]

Nor do we want to forget that a week ago, 60 million people expressed that overt racism and bigotry wasn't a dealbreaker when picking a president. That doesn't make all of them racists, and perhaps it ultimately doesn't matter if they are or not individually, but I'm not sure we need to let the ones who are off the hook, or try to whitewash what a fair amount of people in these communities are really like.

And hey, my Mom is from North Philly and her whole family is racist. My Dad is from a relatively far suburb of Philadelphia, and his whole family is racist, too. So it's not like you have to be from the T to be racist in Pennsylvania. If we're being honest.

My point was that I don't think racism is something people "are" or "aren't", it's something they may uphold or contribute to with their behavior or thinking, but I don't think it's best seen as an individual trait.

In any case I'm under no illusions about what these people voted for, regardless of their individual attitudes. The only question is how openly white nationalist the Trump Administration will be. I expect that all the civil rights achievements of the last 60 years will soon be under frontal assault from a political party whose opposition to them was never far from the surface. It is possible, if Trump appoints the right kind of Nazis to the right posts, that Constitutional government and mass democracy may be finished in the US.

 

[Akka]

Yes, but that is exactly my point... You would be ashamed if you were a Trump supporter, because you are liberal, and as such, embrace the idea that Trump supporters are at least substantially motivated by racism, bigotry etc... So of course you would be ashamed to be one.

But Trump supporters don't agree with you or your perception of the situation. So they don't share your shame, or feel the shame that you think they should.

That's a very, very simplistic take on political opinions and social pressure.

 

[Bootstoots]

Racism runs the gamut from the KKK to people who feel mildly uncomfortable around black men. It's a totally different state, but the Louisiana Senate race allows us to place a sort of lower bound on the worst kind of racism there, because David Duke ran in the jungle primary. He got 3.0%, if the Wiki article is correct. Keeping in mind that this is down from 32% (jungle primary) and 39% (runoff) in the Louisiana gubernatorial race in 1991 (link), that's a pretty remarkable amount of progress in 25 years.

Certainly racism was a factor in Trump's election. Most of the overt racists vote Republican anyway, but he probably did drive up turnout significantly among overt racists, and that was likely important in his winning close states. It was much more a factor in the primary, where his monopoly over the votes of racists and lunatics (the Alex Jones brigade) was crucial to his victory.

But you have to keep in mind that Clinton lost a lot of people in the Midwest who voted for Obama in 2012 but who voted for Trump in 2016. The best example of this is Iowa, where the population is ~95% white but still voted for Obama by a 6% margin in 2012. It was the only Midwestern state, including Illinois, where Obama clearly won the white vote in 2012; MN's white vote was 1 point Rep (within the margin of error) and all the others were worse. Iowa swung 15 percentage points Republican, and very little of this can be explained by turnout. The map transformed as follows:

Spoiler What went wrong, Hawkeye edition :

(apologies for slightly different color scheme)

2012 election:

2016 election:

Now for something a little more controversial. If a candidate's policies were exactly the same as mine except that they had made racist statements, and the opponent was Paul Ryan or some other Randroid, I'd vote for the racist, provided it was only fairly low-grade racism and not KKK-grade racism. I place a high but non-infinite value on a candidate's racial views, and mild-to-moderate racism isn't a total disqualifier if the other candidate is remarkably terrible. That's a function of white privilege, of course, but that's the way it is.

 

[Lexicus]

Of course, because when it comes down to it you won't be on the wrong side of the barbed wire.

I also don't like your scenario because randroids are also white supremacists pretty much by definition. They may not be such out of personal conviction, but they always end up supporting white supremacy both culturally and politically.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I think there are likely a good number of shy Trump voters. Remember that Trump ran against "the establishment" and by "the establishment" he meant the politicos but also the media, academe, etc. And he cast it that all these elite organizations were against the Average Joe; they all regarded him as a ignorant, racist rube. When a possible Trump voter in Pennsylvania gets a call from the Marist Poll, he thinks to himself, "Ah, there's one of them ivory tower libruls who thinks so poorly of me; I'm not telling him who I'm really leaning toward voting for."

But shouldn't we by now have the data that would let us start to estimate the extent of the shy voter? I know it's a little complicated because polls report percentages rather than raw numbers of voters, so deflated turnout for Democrats will register in part as higher-than-polled percentages for Trump. But there has to be a way to get a fix on this, by factoring out the deflated Clinton vote and then comparing election night results with the last good poll for a state.

In addition to shy voters, I suspect the polls were off because of the modeling they use convert their small sample set into a prediction. In usual elections, pollsters can probably say that if the white male in Somerset County whom they happened to get on the phone, age 53, income $52,000, who voted Democrat in the last election says he's voting Democrat in this election, that probably means that 51 percent of registered Democrats in non-urban Pennsylvania counties will vote Democrat. But Trump was so unorthodox, that all of those principles on which pollsters can generally rely to convert their small sample set into larger projections were just not applicable this time round; they assumed a conventional Republican candidate.

 

[Sommerswerd]

And hey, my Mom is from North Philly and her whole family is racist. My Dad is from a relatively far suburb of Philadelphia, and his whole family is racist, too. So it's not like you have to be from the T to be racist in Pennsylvania. If we're being honest.

I remember the last time I went to Geno's (Philly folks will know what I mean) I saw all the signs that said "THIS IS AMERICA! SPEAK ENGLISH WHEN ORDERING! WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE!" I remember feeling sick to my stomach, and not hungry anymore... This place is in the heart of Philly... so yeah, what you said.

 

[metalhead]

Now for something a little more controversial. If a candidate's policies were exactly the same as mine except that they had made racist statements, and the opponent was Paul Ryan or some other Randroid, I'd vote for the racist, provided it was only fairly low-grade racism and not KKK-grade racism. I place a high but non-infinite value on a candidate's racial views, and mild-to-moderate racism isn't a total disqualifier if the other candidate is remarkably terrible. That's a function of white privilege, of course, but that's the way it is.

I have actually grappled with this hypothetical quite a lot. The, "What would I do if the shoe was on the other foot?" question as applied to Trump. For a while, I said, "You know what, I'd probably vote for the Democratic version of Trump, if it meant a chance at a liberal Supreme Court and other policy I support." Then I tried to think of what that would even be. Someone suggested that the Democrats' equivalent would be nominating Kanye West. That made me feel better, because I'm pretty sure I would not vote for Kanye West for president. That's not to say Kanye West would stoke racial animus for votes the way Trump has done, but he'd have similar deficiencies in both fitness and temperament, and even greater deficiencies in terms of relevant experience - at least Trump has (allegedly) run a big-ish company.

One could argue that Hillary Clinton has made racist statements in the past. Many have, as a matter of fact. I don't think saying a few racist things in the course of one's life is necessarily disqualifying; it kind of depends on what the statements are, and what the intent was. If the person was repeatedly saying racist things in the campaign, but was otherwise competent and was dead-on with policy (which would be hard to conceive of considering my stance on policy & race, but anyways), I might pull the trigger. I guess it sort of hinges on whether what the person was saying was likely to embolden racists to act, the way Trump's words have predictably incited violence against people of color.

 

[Lexicus]

Again, racism as-individual-trait is a worldview of limited usefulness. The racism problem is not about Trump or any other hypothetical or actual Presidential candidate. Trump is a symptom, the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Sommerswerd]

That's a very, very simplistic take on political opinions and social pressure.

Ok, but simpler than say... "When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists (or "Their rapists" depending on whether you want to make an irrelevant distinction or not) . And some, I assume, are good people.”

Is my take on "political opinions and social pressure" more "simplistic" than that? If yes, then fine, we can agree to disagree. If no then, I offer that trying to address simple falsehoods with complex rebuttals is often ineffective... ask Hillary.

Again, racism as-individual-trait is a worldview of limited usefulness. The racism problem is not about Trump or any other hypothetical or actual Presidential candidate. Trump is a symptom, the tip of the iceberg.

Yes exactly... of a lot more than just Big R "racism".

 

[metalhead]

Again, racism as-individual-trait is a worldview of limited usefulness. The racism problem is not about Trump or any other hypothetical or actual Presidential candidate. Trump is a symptom, the tip of the iceberg.

When you're picking a president, though, that one individual's proclivites towards or away is hugely consequential. I agree with you 100% that the narrative around racism in America, particularly in the context of police murders, mistakenly focuses on the question that way, but when talking about practical repercussions of a presidential election, it matters big league what that one person's feelings are on the matter.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Of course, because when it comes down to it you won't be on the wrong side of the barbed wire.

In fairness to Boots, he has never been anything but upfront and clear-eyed about this nuance of his positions, so he deserves credit for being more introspective than most of us. Another thing is that I suspect that if it came to a martial-law, shooting, blood-running-in-the-streets scenario... he'd immediately have a lot more skin in the game than most.

 

[Lexicus]

When you're picking a president, though, that one individual's proclivites towards or away is hugely consequential. I agree with you 100% that the narrative around racism in America, particularly in the context of police murders, mistakenly focuses on the question that way, but when talking about practical repercussions of a presidential election, it matters big league what that one person's feelings are on the matter.

Well, yes and no. No because this is a system and the President doesn't (just as one possible example) need strong feelings on race to govern in a viciously racist manner. Yes because clearly the President has more scope than anyone else in the world to make his opinions felt.

In fairness to Boots, he has never been anything but upfront and clear-eyed about this nuance of his positions, so he deserves credit for being more introspective than most of us.

I'm not trying to undermine Boots or be 'unfair' to him, I'm trying to make him see that this is an issue that's rather bigger than whether the President or potential President said some racist stuff that might offend some people. The issue with Hitler wasn't that his comments about Jews were offensive. The issue with slaveowners and segregationists isn't that they say the N-word a lot. These, again, are symptoms, not the disease.

EDIT: I suppose, what I'm trying to say, a bit more clearly, is that the hypothetical of a person who aligns with you 100% on policy but says racist things from time to time is just never going to exist. It isolates factors that, in the real world, affect each other.