Rolling forward to interviews conducted Thursday through Sunday, the ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll shows the same results as its previous estimate of 47 percent for Hillary Clinton and 43 percent for Donald Trump, with Gary Johnson still at 4 percent and Jill Stein now at 1 percent.I'm reading that today after this brand new article from ABC News, "Trump to Enter Office as Most Unpopular President for at Least 40 Years, Poll Finds":
Donald Trump enters office as the most unpopular of at least the last seven newly elected presidents, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds, with ratings for handling the transition that are also vastly below those of his predecessors.While you're busy talking about who's the most unpopular President, can you spare a few moments to tell us which news organization has the least accurate polling?
With election polls, you are put to the test and capable of embarrassment in the end, and even so, you're not too reliable. In this current popularity poll, no one can ever show you up. There's no ultimate accounting when the people reveal how much they like or don't like Donald Trump. You can say whatever you want in the form of numbers that are called a poll, but we know that you want to cripple the Trump presidency before it even begins. I consider the poll fake news.
And I realize that from your perspective I am one of those terrible people who have "come unmoored from a shared set of core facts." I'm not hearing the call to adhere to the "knowable, hard, empirical truth." But I can't accept ABC News/Washington Post poll numbers as facts. It's a fact that ABC News/Washington Post got the election polls wrong. I don't want be moored to false facts. It's better to be unmoored. I don't want to believe in a truth beyond the real limits of truth.
I have heard Barack Obama say:
But without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, then we’re going to keep talking past each other.That's a tricky sentence. If you drift along with it, you might find it blandly pleasant in a can't-we-all-get-along kind of way. But it's actually radically specious! I've written about this sentence before, when I live-blogged Obama's Farewell Address:
Obama resorts to what's been a stock argument with Democrats since the election: We need a "common baseline of facts." That always sounds to me like longing for a time when liberal mainstream media filtered the facts. That's over. What are you going to do about it? The facts are open to debate now, and many voices can be heard. If you really love democracy, why aren't you thrilled?Looking at this sentence again this morning, I am irritated by its trickiness. The middle part is fine. I like "a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point" — let's keep learning and let's keep talking — and I agree that "science and reason matter" — let's research and study and think. I love progress in human knowledge and understanding. But why does that fine middle section belong enclosed within the statement: "But without some common baseline of facts... we’re going to keep talking past each other." That says we can't have a real interchange with each other unless we already agree. It's a complete rejection of the idea that people with different understandings of the world can have a good-faith debate and an opportunity to persuade each other or to see the flaws and gaps in their own knowledge and the need for more research and analysis. Why must conversation begin with a common baseline of facts?
It's an ugly, false statement with a big glob of sweetener plopped into it!
ADDED: The ABC/Washington Post poll oversamples: 31% Democrats and 23% Republicans.
Posts
202 comments:
1 – 200 of 202 Newer› Newest»That's fine, to want clarity and consistency, but you have to explain it to women, who must not become confused and tune away.
Trump would not have won if the Russians hadn't voted.
Their poll didn't take account of Russia.
The real winner was Hillary.
Every story will support that.
They need their core audience.
I love this post and the previous one. Old media was not only wrong, but it actively pushed Hillary. That's Hillary the criminal. Hillary who took bribes from scores of corporations and foreign countries. Old media whines and attacks new media. The same new media that is more honest, accurate and democratic. I am so, so sick of those liberal liars in old media. I celebrate new media.
"a common baseline of facts"
is authoritarian.
"That's fine, to want clarity and consistency..."
Who are you seeing expressing a desire for clarity and consistency? Mother Jones, Juan Williams, and Obama? Me? I don't see that, so you have confused this woman.
I consider the poll fake news.
Lefties told us the term fake news is over. But it's not because the term is no longer needed since it was invented to defend President Hillary from the avalanche of her own scandals, no. They're only helping us to get to that common baseline of facts.
"It's a complete rejection of the idea that people with different understandings in the word can have a good-faith debate and an opportunity to persuade each other or to see the flaws and gaps in their own knowledge and the need for more research and analysis."
Words can have different meanings. Sometimes word means world?
"Moving forward," now there's a term in need of analysis.
The way I hear it, it's like a comma, a pause, a brief respite from the speaker's confusion. The term itself means nothing, except possibly the importance of breathing.
Still, the next time I hear some fool say, "Well, we need to move forward," I'm throwing my remote at the television.
"Why must conversation begin with a common baseline of facts?" So progs can shove their conclusions down our throats. Prog conversation is all condescending lecture, as O has demonstrated for 8 years.
I have a feeling that a lot of the soon to be ex-president's facts are, in fact, assumptions or values.
For instance, we could both agree that blacks are incarcerated at higher rates than other races. The reason that is so could be debated, but since he already knows the reason, pervasive systematic racism, he has no need. And anyone not accepting that "fact" fails to share a common baseline of facts.
Why must conversation begin with a common baseline of facts?
The answer to that is in the middle part of the statement that you thought was just "fine":
I like "a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point" — let's keep learning and let's keep talking — and I agree that "science and reason matter" — let's research and study and think.
...because anyone who's been paying any attention to Obama or any lib knows that when they say things like the above, they're talking about the other guy's willingness to acknowledge that we're right, because we already have all the correct information, and all of "science and reason" support us, and that anyone who disagrees with us is by defintion closed-minded and anti-science and anti-reason.
And that's all it means.
I'm always confused when people talk about the polls being wrong. Were they that far off? The actual popular vote ended up being something like 48-46, no? That's consistent with the poll, with undecideds breaking mostly for Trump in the end.
I mean, pollsters should have done a lot more state-by-state polling to get a grasp on the Electoral College outcome (especially since neither candidate was polling all that close to 50%), but they got pretty close to the correct result on the thing they were actually polling for.
A common frame of reference. Let's start with a separation of logical domains. Continue in the scientific domain (i.e. limited in both time -- forward and reverse -- and space). Let's acknowledge that in the scientific domain, human evolution (i.e. chaotic process) begins at conception. Surely this is not controversial.
Let's see what other logic can we observe in the scientific domain.
[class] diversity is a denial of individual dignity. It is the reconstitution of institutional racism, sexism, etc.
Catatrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change is a prophecy told by Profits based on extrapolation from experiments in isolation to liberal proportions. It is a narrative spun by scientific mystics that denies the incomplete characterization and unwieldy nature of the system.
Pro-Choice is a quasi-religious/moral philosophy that is selective and opportunistic. It is based on principles that are internally, externally, and mutually inconsistent.
As for Trump, people peered out of the twilight and optimistically invited the dawn.
Revitalization. Rehabilitation. Reconciliation.
A lot of the baseline in facts is just base opinion. "'The science is settled,' et cetera, et cetera, et cetera," Yul Brynner intoned.
It's not about the baseline, it's about the repeal and replace line!
In your face!
Fine!
The science being referred to is the "settled science", i.e. settled in the prog's minds.
Witness
But the perception and implication of the polls was that they were science. Infallible! Trump had NO path to 270.
The CAGW scam is way worse. It is a prediction - at a future date well into the future - based upon faulty models. Not science at all.
This just about sums up Obama and his Presidency:
"It's an ugly, false statement with a big glob of sweetener plopped into it!"
I would love for us to have a common set of facts that are true.
Wow. Obama summed up in one analysis. A beautiful smile handing out an uninterrupted stream of Big Lies crafted to destroy the USA.
He wants so bad for us to submit to our fate...ISLAM.
"I'm always confused when people talk about the polls being wrong. Were they that far off?"
-- The polls were fine-ish, but the way they were presented was where the slanting happened. Partly this is because Romney made the same Trump arguments ["the polls are flawed and underestimating my support in key states"], so people didn't listen when Conway/Trump said the same thing.
Blogger rhhardin said...
They need their core audience.
I don't think the media even cares about the PA, WI, MI, FL, NC, OH, and IA voters that put Trump in office. They know their credibility is shot with those voters. So, they preach to the choir all the same crap.
Give Donald Trump two big thumbs up for the best in-your-face transition ever. The media are all Ellsworth M Toohey's trying to take on Howard Roark from The Fountainhead. Ayn Rand predictions based on human nature are better than Nostradamus.
If you just watch and observe the reactions Trump gets from these shitheads its pure comedy.
The article Rejahm linked to shows the panic in the left media over losing control of who decides what the facts are.
"Fake news has a real meaning — deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public."
"BuzzFeed, meanwhile, is digging deeper into the rise of deliberate deception in the form of news stories"
"Don’t get me wrong. Lies in the form of news stories are a real problem, and in need of real attention."
Only reporting one side is a form of deliberate deception or lies in the form of news stories. Leaving out key context or known or easily obtainable facts is another form of deliberate deception or lies in the form of news stories. Mixing in opinion under the guise of factual reporting is yet another deliberate form. Ignorance of the subject matter is another form of deception, though not deliberate.
It's what the left media has been doing for decades. They dont like losing their position as arbiters of what facts matter. But the lack self-awareness still surprises me. Must be hard to spot from inside the bubble.
Anglelyne said...
That about sums it up for me.
"We libs are reasonable. We'll listen to you as long as you agree with us and our set of facts."
A lot of what is purported to be "science" is actually statistical inference, from opinion polls to climate forecasts.
Most people think of controlled experimentation as science, and those who conflate the two do so deliberately to confuse the public.
It will get interesting to see how polling affects the interaction between Trump and Congress on healthcare reform.
Re. the bogus DOJ report on police: “Statistical Evidence Not Required”
Who are you seeing expressing a desire for clarity and consistency? Mother Jones, Juan Williams, and Obama? Me? I don't see that, so you have confused this woman.
I see Althouse wanting clarity and consistency, or anyway arguing as if that were the issue.
But it's the MSM business model. It can't change unless soap opera women come to reject it, in which case they'll just go out of business rather than changing.
Argue a desire for clarity and consistency with soap opera women and see how far you get. They'll say they're already clear and consistent: the Russians voted and Trump is a hate-filled man and not a legitimate president at all.
You'd just be trying to confuse them and they'd tune away.
@John Tuffnell
"word" was a typo, now corrected. I'd meant to write "in the world."
John Tuffnell said...
Only reporting one side is a form of deliberate deception or lies in the form of news stories. Leaving out key context or known or easily obtainable facts is another form of deliberate deception or lies in the form of news stories.
If you want to know what pushed me over the edge to vote for Trump, google FBI clears clinton.
Two days before the election, FBI director James Comey reported the results of the last-minute email review, declaring that there was nothing there that changed the previous conclusion. ( The previous conclusion was that Clinton had mishandled classified information, which is a crime, but without evidence that she had intentionally revealed it to others, not a crime that is commonly prosecuted. )
Almost all news organizations reported this as FBI ( or Comey ) clears Clinton, which is 100% false. ( Fox News did not state that the FBI cleared Clinton, but they did quote someone saying it, and they did not correct them on it. )
We have an ongoing one-off event at the moment. Hard news can work in one-off events.
The event being how crazy is the left and will they stop it.
When that ends, all the market for hard news collapses.
The remains will pick up soap opera again.
Cycle and repeat.
In the beginning was the world, and the world was with God, and the world was God.
Lol - that's funny. Yeah just don't look at info you don't like :-)
maybe the world is flat :-)
Paranoia strikes deep
into your life it will creep
Ann, you're on fire today...
We no longer believe in polls as they are meant to direct thought not gauge actual opinion.
#1 Rule should be no poll can be reported without the actual questions used.
It's a little late for the Left to talk about how nice reason and science and empirical facts are. Reason is a construct, a tool of white male European patriarchy. A presentation of facts is false if those facts don't align with Leftist beliefs and feelings. The primacy of emotion over reason isn't some new concept--they've been pushing that for years.
At any rate Obama is the WORST possible spokesperson for that assertion! He's the strawman-slayer in chief, and proudly so. "There are those who say" is his go-to, his verbal tic.
Concede that your opponent might have a point? The last two decades have been built around not allowing any disagreement--around denying that any opposition can be valid at all! All opposition must be based in racism/sexism/homophobia, or fear, or ignorance. Those are the only options, and that's why it's not necessary to treat people who disagree with any kind of respect. That's the entire fucking premise of Jon Stewart, of Stephen Colbert, of Samantha Bee, of John Oliver, etc! Every good person thinks this, but look at these bad people who disagree--let's all laugh at them and mock the very idea that they disagree. It's not engaging with the argument or even in debate--it's laughing at the existence of people who think they have another viewpoint (in fact, of course, what they have is some biased/prejudiced/ugly beliefs). Since the Left is obviously correct anyone who doesn't agree isn't worth talking to, isn't worth engaging with, isn't worth granting the respect due a fellow citizen with a valid opinion--the only proper response is outright mockery and derision. Those Leftists celebrities are both champions and emblematic of that approach, and it's one heartily endorsed by both the Media and President Obama.
Willingness to admit new information, my ass. Wanna explain why Hilldog didn't bother campaigning in lots of places? Wanna know why the Left was happy to write off likely-persuadable people as "deplorable" and preemptively pat themselves on the back for defeating the wrongthink crowd and consigning those regressive idiots finally to the past?
It's not a mystery.
The way forward is a feminism that gets women to fly on instruments when attractive complex narratives they like flood in on them.
You're a woman, you'll fall for it, go by the instruments.
What you feel happening isn't happening; follow your feelings and you'll death-spiral into the ground.
Which is to say, learn when to think like a man when acting as a citizen at least.
I'm old enough to remember when the Left talked about "facts" as naive. Reality is socially constructed, right?!
The Truth Is Subjunctive
Eulogy For A Mood
Obama saw his poll numbers drop. I don't remember him whining about it. Eventually they recovered.
Meade said...
"a common baseline of facts"
is authoritarian.
But call it Progressive, it sounds better.
History's been through this before.
The Left's idea that they have "the facts" & that judgements of value are turned into judgements of fact goes back (at least) to the idea of Marxist "Scientific Socialism". Guys, the Marxists really thought that they knew the "science" of how history would unfold. They really thought that the dialect allowed them to overcome the "is - ought" conundrum in moral philosophy. All this "the facts are on our side" was baked into the cake a long time ago for the Left.
It bugs me about Righties that they often won't believe that the Marxists were absolutely sincere in this belief in the"science" of their cause. "How can anyone not see that of course this isn't empirical science?" Well, the Marxist didn't see, & they did believe. Just like the atheist who can't believe that the religious sincerely believe "the crap" that he finds so repellent.
"but they got pretty close to the correct result on the thing they were actually polling for."
If only they had acknowledged that it was "too close to call," they might have redeemed their reputation.
They didn't. They said it was locked up by Clinton.
The result was consternation on the left which still does not believe it's true.
My wife asked our adult daughter, who is very bright and well educated but a lefty, what she thinks a Trump presidency will be like.
She said, "He will be impeached." There will be no political discussions with her.
I was also going to link to that City Journal article about how the Obama DOJ included no numbers, no statistics, in it's attack on the Chicago police department. Numbers are not important to the left.
David Bsker @ 8:48: "'Moving forward,' now there's a term in need of analysis."
It means "STFU."
Also, we knew going into the election that we had the two most unpopular candidates in a long time. Is it surprising fake news that the winner is unpopular?
The problem isn't that this is "fake news". It's just not news. It's olds.
Polls might be useful if I could be sure that they were meaningful. Unfortunately they seem to be used by attempting to shape opinion rather than report it. I also question if it's even possible to realistically conduct a meaningful poll in this day and age. There are so many ways a poll can be bad, so many points of failure, so many was to manipulate the results, so many ways the results can be interpreted... I just think polls are too problematic overall.
>>but they got pretty close to the correct result on the thing they were actually polling for.
They were polling to predict who would win. And they got that right, except for the part about who won.
All of the alphabet "news" channels are pro-Hillary corruption/ pro-democrat hack.
Period.
Richard Fernandez, who is my go to guy on trends, believes this is the death throes pf the western left.
The Central European youth, having lived between both worlds, may be the first generation in history to intuitively guess that the socialism which failed in the East is also collapsing in the West. We have seen the future and it sucks. Central Europeans are turning to both nationalism and newer forms of politics -- turning to anything to replace the orthodoxies that no longer work.
What the end game is will be interesting to see. It may begin Friday as the western left does its suicide attacks on the inauguration.
The DC police are preparing for truck bombs and truck attacks like that in Nice.
The Gramscian termites ate through the institutions and found with their last triumphant bite that they had eaten it all.
Its demise will leave an historic hole in Western civilization. For good or ill the Left was the West's familiar: the wheedling family bum, what we defined ourselves through and in opposition to. Without the Left neither the 20th century, the EU or the American progressive project is even comprehensible. It was the future that never happened, the madness over which mankind walked the narrow path of nuclear destruction yet which framed the debate. Now it is passing from the scene with all the drama of an empty ramen wrapper on the sidewalk.
David Goldman and Fernandez seem to me to be the best at seeing the future, dysphoric as it is.
Polls today bring to mind how Elections work under Staliists: It's not who votes that counts. It!s who counts the vote that counts."
The Professor's blog posts are so well written lately, that going behind a paywall would not hurt it. Caution: New Media At Work.
@Michael K,
The Central European youth, having lived between both worlds, may be the first generation in history to intuitively guess that the socialism which failed in the East is also collapsing in the West.
I agree with Fernandez on this as the death throes of the Left. What worries me is that the failure of the moderate Left at national governance & the failure of the extreme Left not to scare the shit out of everyone else had much to do with the historical rise of Fascism in the 20s & 30s.
I'm hoping we don't have a repeat of that history, too.
"It's an ugly, false statement with a big glob of sweetener plopped into it!"
Nice summation of the past eight years.
Richard K: agree with your view of "Spengler" and "Wretchard." Somehow they have set aside fond attachments to the familiar comforts and superficial features of our world, and can see more clearly the tectonics and forces to which we are subject.
To accept a "common baseline of facts" one has to be open to genuine facts as opposed to the sort of made up facts that lefties push. One key is the idea that "if X is true then I should see Y, so not seeing Y invalidates (or should cast doubt upon) the existence of X." (It's a lot easier to express this in first order predicate calculus.)
Here's an example. If it was true that 20% or more of all coeds are sexually assaulted during their four years of college then why don't we see angry mobs of outraged fathers storming the university admin buildings and stringing up any chancellors and deans they come across? Why wouldn't all-female colleges be flourishing instead of floundering? We don't see mobs of angry fathers and Sweetbriar is closing its doors, ergo the proposition that 1 in 5 coeds will be sexually assaulted must be false.
Likewise gun control. If strong gun control laws made cities safer then Chicago should be one of the safest cities in America. Is it?
"Richard K" --> Michael K in my last. Very embarrassed, sorry.
Let's try some "common baseline of facts"
- The economy is strong
- There were no 9foreign driven?) terrorist attacks in the USA in the past eight years.
- There have been no scandals during the Obama presidency.
- One in four women on campus will be sexually assaulted.
- The USA's standing in the world is stronger than ever....
And on and on.
Once we all agree to these, we can start to discuss joint issues.
It's like how the press said that John Lewis skipping the inauguration was a first for him...except he did it to Bush also.
Doesn't the "Trump is the most hated President ever" speak very poorly of the Left?
Conservatives sure as shit didn't like Obama --- but based on THEIR polling, we gave him way more of a shot than the Left is giving Trump.
He may have won the Electoral College but he didn't win the Popular vote by nearly 3m.
Hillary, like Bill, failed to win a majority of the popular vote also. For such a "popular political family", in 3 tries, no Clinton won 50.1% of the popular vote in a Presidential election.
Trump won the race. Period.
Unknown said...As such, instead of the constant fights between the two-sides, the people should mandate a change in Governance. The 400 or so Urban counties want to live their way and the 3000 Rural counties want to live their way. An accommodation needs to be found at the Federal level.
Nice try! Federalism is code for states' rights, and state's rights is code for racism/slavery, Unknown. You've been pushing that line all my life--on top of your assertions that the Constitution is just some sexist racist document drawn up by dead white men and instead of constraining the power of the government (and providing individuals the ability to govern themselves and live their own lives as they see fit) it should be interpreted as giving the central government power, coercive power, to order the lives of citizens according to the Left-approved Progressive set of values. You want some personal space? Sorry, "the personal is political." You want to tune out from the petty political squabbles and ignore controversies that don't affect you? Sorry, "you will be made to care."
Suddenly you geniuses aren't so thrilled about the national government's power, and reach, and scope, and size? If only someone had warned you about that problem, huh? President Pen & Phone was soooo damn cool when he was your guy, remember? Now that the President isn't you guy you want a return to federalism? I don't buy it. Had Hillary won would you be calling for that? No--you'd be exulting in her ability to cram whatever you want down all of our throats.
As such, instead of the constant fights between the two-sides, the people should mandate a change in Governance. The 400 or so Urban counties want to live their way and the 3000 Rural counties want to live their way. An accomodation needs to be found at the Federal level.
We had one.
It's called FEDERALISM.
Your side shat all over that.
So...fuck you. You refused to leave us alone. Don't cry when we return the favor.
As such, instead of the constant fights between the two-sides, the people should mandate a change in Governance. The 400 or so Urban counties want to live their way and the 3000 Rural counties want to live their way. An accomodation needs to be found at the Federal level.
So, a newfound appreciation for Federalism. Shoe, meet other foot.
Althouse wrote: "I don't want be moored to false facts. It's better to be unmoored."
Mark Twain wrote: "Those who don't read the newspapers are uninformed. Those who do read the newspapers are misinformed."
Data doesn't vote which is why polling for elections can be so far off, but polling for public opinion can be closer in tone and measurement. And common core of interests may include the fact that the earth is more than 6,000 years old, if like some fundamentalist you don't accept that there is little to discuss. Or maybe that life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are a place to begin. Really Ann your ignoring our history and fought for rights as a common base line just to make up snark.
Althouse writes a thoughtful post, but Martha (8:52) wins the thread.
"a common baseline of facts"
You will believe what we determine you should believe. WE will provide you with a common set of facts, chosen by us. WE will have weeded out those annoying "facts" that are at odds with what we will tell you to believe.
Ignore that man behind the curtain.
Here's another. Just now I read on Business Insider that an estimated 160 million Americans can't afford to treat a broken arm. If Obamacare was a success, then this should be impossible. But it is not impossible, it is real, therefore Obamacare is not a success.
What stops me cold in that Obama quote is "without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point." When did Obama ever concede his opponents might be making a fair point?
Wasn't it Voltaire who demanded that first we must agree on the definition of terms?
Yes Big Mike the reporting on sexual assault of college age women seems fairly accurate from polls, and my observation these past seventeen years, but then suggesting that fathers should storm the universities does not follow. Your argument is the fallacy of denying the antecedent,I believe, when in fact there are many quite complaints and suffering that go on in various ways-- including sometime law suits. If A then B &C etc are possible not just B.
Big Mike and JAORE-
Why do you doubt the 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 claims of sexual assault on campus? Have you read the definition of sexual assault that they use? A quick pat on the butt counts as sexual assault. By the definition they use, I'm surprised the number isn't ~19-in-20.
I'm saying this as a victim, nay a survivor, of sexual assault on campus. ( And I'm a dude. )
ABC polls represent reality now?
They're still an oversampled, biased POS.
And the Republicans are just going to be gone. Good Riddance!
Remember not too long ago when that was the conventional wisdom? That Trump would not only be crushed at the polls, he would also drag the down ballot Republicans into perdition with him? Letsseeherenow, how many days ago was that The Way It Was Going To Be?
Good times, good times!
And common core of interests may include the fact that the earth is more than 6,000 years old, if like some fundamentalist you don't accept that there is little to discuss.
About evolution. But people who believe the world is only 6000ish years old are still people who have the right to " life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And a vote.
To be clear, I believe that the earth is over 6000 years old. Been around about 4 billion actually, with life first showing up around 3.85 Billion years old. However, I don't see why holding that believe makes me any better than someone who doesn't. Certainly not in the "equality before the law" sense. That person could quite likely have a spouse and children that love him/her, put in an honest days labor, and have the right to a say in how they are governed, even if they believe something that you don't.
Unknown said...The 400 or so Urban counties want to live their way and the 3000 Rural counties want to live their way. An accommodation needs to be found at the Federal level.
It's called federalism, Unknown; it's called the relationship that existed between the citizen, the states, and the national government from pre-Constitutional times up through the New Deal era. That is, roughly until the ascendancy of the "modern" political Left.
Now, to be up front about it, I don't believe you. I don't think you'd allow that an accommodation that permitted some rule or law you didn't like in some rural county/other state. I think your side likes using the power of the State to enforce your values and force others to comply--when you're dressing it up for others you'll say something like "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" and on that basis give yourselves permission to intervene.
But. We're just a couple of jokers on a blog, so let's talk. What are you willing to do to bring about this accommodation? What changes--legal, political, cultural, etc--will you push? Which institutions committed to shrinking the size & scope of government and/or devolving power back to states and communities will you support?
In other words: I want to shrink the government. I want a return to federalism. I want to reduce the influence government policy has on the lives and decisions of individual citizens. I've wanted all of that for a long time, and I've supported politicians and institutions that purported to desire the same (when those could be found). So: given your stated belief that an "accommodation" should be found, what steps will you take and/or what causes or institutions will you now support to try and make that happen?
I find the polling impossible to believe. I also think the 80% rating for Obama is garbage too.
Trump has toned down his image and his appointees have done extremely well in confirmation hearings. Before the election it was common to hear anti-Trump comments from people everywhere, now not so much. The Democrats are acting like insanely spoiled babies and the media digs a deeper hole every day. I was a lukewarm Trump supporter, but like him more every day. About 25% of the electorate is hard-left, another 25% hard right, but most people could care less.
The fact that several prominent African Americans are open to working with Trump illustrates that perhaps that demographic is open to a new way, the Democrats haven't moved inner city blacks forward, and they are most impacted by illegal immigration in the job market, in competition for housing, school overcrowding and services. I always wondered how blacks, who had ancestors brought here brutally against their will and endured years of segregation and discrimination felt about being lumped together with illegals who made a choice to come to this country and demanded that they were equally the objects of injustice.
the reporting on sexual assault of college age women seems fairly accurate from polls,
Only if you define sexual assault in bizarre terms. Holding someone's hand without permission is sexual assault? Having someone, who is probably drunk, grope you without your consent is sexual assault?
Now, while those things can be annoying, irritating, rude......they don't arise to the level that most people think of as sexual assault. Rape.
If the polls want to be taken as being accurate, they need to BE accurate and not include things that are not relevant. Not distort the results. And most importantly....>NOT be designed to produce a result. This last one is why we don't believe the polls. They have shown time and time again that the RESULT is the goal not the actual truth or trend revealed in the data.
It is illogical to assume women would attend an institution and pay thousands to do so if the chance of being raped DWARFS the rate of rape in prisons and worst regions of the world.
The president's premise is wrong to begin with, or rather technocratic in orientation.
Politics is not a matter of using a common set of "facts" to come to the optimal solution to social problems. Politics is the messy business of people competing for limited resources while living together in such a way as to keep violence and criminality to a minimum. Ways to do this have been known for millenniums. The usual commonality between systems is fostering a shared set of values.
Dust, forced or unwanted sexual activity including kissing, exhibitionism, groping and rape is not so bizarre, but common and underreported for all kinds of reasons. I know, I know we now are to consider grabbing a little pussy just boys out for a good time-- really?
@Ignorance, actually I was aware of that, and I believe that it further included an attempt to ask a girl for a date if said girl doesn't want to date the fellow. But I could be wrong on that point. However, I don't think a guy should be patting a female on the butt unless the two have been in a relationship long enough to know that she doesn't mind. But it's not in a the same category as rape.
The usual commonality between systems is fostering a shared set of values.
And " life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is a value, not a "fact."
roesch/voltaire said...
Data doesn't vote.. Hey, you ripped that off from the Detroit Pastor in the Van Jones CNN special last week. That was his exact quote when asked by Jones why polls in Michigan were so wrong, and they repeated in over and over in the studio as some form of simplistic brilliance.
roesch/voltaire said...
...reporting on sexual assault of college age women seems fairly accurate from polls and my observation these past seventeen years And how many of these 'observed' sexual assaults did you choose to report? If you claim to have observed, and are a supporting witness to some portion of 1 in 4 women on campus being assaulted over 17 years, you've seen something....
Either you let it pass and chose not to get involved, or your observational claim is false witness.
"It's an ugly, false statement with a big glob of sweetener plopped into it!"
Just like everything Obama has said about domestic politics and policy for the last 9 years.
It's all lies, he doesn't mean a word of it except as how you frame it--we all need to agree on HIS set of facts so he can beat us over the head with them.
R/V: You should read DBQ's link. I've pulled out one paragraph to make it hard for you to ignore.
"The original 20 percent number was suspect from the start. The 2007 survey used an exceedingly generous definition of sexual assault and its response rate was relatively low. A more comprehensive and rigorous Bureau of Justice Statistics survey subsequently put the rate at 6.1 per 1,000, and found that sexual assault was 1.2 times more frequent for nonstudents than students and had — in fact — been declining since the 1990s. When confronted with the BJS survey, even Senator Gillibrand removed the one in five number from her website.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419716/posts-new-poll-campus-sexual-assault-bogus-david-french"
But without some common baseline of facts
I will tell you that the Democrat definition of racism is contextual, and that they want to define the context, and that they talk about racism a lot.
Do they mean 'good riddance?'
Unknown said...
The differences between the two are vast - one is founded on God, Guns and Fox News and the other on Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll.
FYI, God is not opposed sex, nor are those of us who are familiar with guns. Sex is how just about all of us got here.
Protest sign reads: Trump/Pence Regime Illegitimate Fascist
That is positive...yes?
And anyway, I thought we were living in a post-modern world where there is no "truth," just a narrative set by the powerful to reinforce their power.
Obama's claiming that there is an objective "truth?"
Wow!
FYI, God is not opposed sex
Yeah, he kind of invented it. And he told Adam and Eve to "go forth and multiply" before the fall while they were still in Eden. So apparently there is sex in paradise.
So we Christians got that going for us.
Dust, forced or unwanted sexual activity including kissing, exhibitionism, groping and rape is not so bizarre, but common and underreported for all kinds of reasons
@ Roesch
Correct. Those actions are not bizarre and are common interactions among young hormonal humans. HOWEVER...they are not on the same level as actual sexual assault/rape. The groping etc is unreported because it is basically a big nothing burger.
To report them as being on the level of rape or true sexual assault skews the numbers in order to falsely claim that there is a high percentage of sexual assault on campuses. The result was a predetermined goal.
The point is that a poll, and the questions it uses to gather data needs to be accurate, unbiased and not set to create an outcome. Most political polls and those like the one about campus assault are transparently set to create....not report. Like the boy who cried WOLF!!!!....we don't believe them anymore because of all the false reporting and manipulative techniques.
"The differences between the two are vast - one is founded on God, Guns and Fox News and the other on Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll."
So, same as it ever was: Good vs. Evil.
I'll buy that.
Polls are both "fake news" and "fake science."
I'd also like a definition of "rape" that doesn't give "attractive" guys more "rights". An requested kiss from a "hot" dude wouldn't qualify as "rape" while one from an "ugly" one would.
The claim that 20% of College women are sexually assaulted is just one of a very long list of lies the left has constructed in order to advance their policy objectives.
Hey, did you hear? More women are beaten by their boyfriends/husbands on super bowl Sunday than any other day of the year! Totes true amigos!! Oh, and did you know that there are more birth defects caused by beatings of women in the US than THE TOTAL OF ALL NATURAL CAUSES COMBINED!!eleventy!
Each of those specious claims put forth by the lefty liars are simply added on top to the mountain of other lies ("facts!") and designed for the sole purpose to create the conditions necessary to empower the left to "fundamentally transform" our society. And each of these laughable falsehoods was pushed in the media (all forms) and many ended up in our textbooks! "What is our children learning", indeed.
And if the "data" doesn't support whatever insanity the left is pushing lately, why, lets just change a few definitions, shall we?
Sexual assault, census measurements to alter how Obamacare insurance rates would be measured, "deportations" (added those turned away at the border to the numbers to inflate obambi's "toughness"), etc, etc, etc.
And don't get me started "climate change" and this all brings us back to "Fake News" polls the left uses to drive, not measure, public opinion.
The jig is up and the left/establishment is looking around and they have no idea what to do about it. No idea that is other than lashing out at Trump and "siccing" Brennan and the CIA boys/girls on Trump.
This is going to be so immensely satisfying over the next 4 years.
Paraphrasing the Pretender: if you don't believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming and our prescribed cure of taking more of your money, we really have nothing to talk about. Rubes.
Oh, and life begins when we say it does, i.e., when we want it to. Phhhhttttt!
Hillary won the popular vote by two points. This poll shows her winning it by four points. So because the poll was off by two points--well within the poll's published margins of error--we are now and forevermore to dismiss all such polls as "fake news"? The pollsters themselves even acknowledged up front that "Clinton’s edge in the Post-ABC poll does not reach statistical significance"!
The poll would be "fake news", moreover, if and only if the news organizations had never conducted a poll at all, made up the numbers, and then published those numbers. This is real news: they conducted a poll according to the best practices possible in this day and age and reported the results of that poll. You do not trust the results of that poll. Fine. But it is quite another thing to accuse ABC News and the Washington Post of committing fraud merely because you do not trust the results of polls.
@roesch, you should have known better than to take on a mathematician who knows propositional logic. In propositional logic the statement is written as (not X or Y). The statement is true only if Y is true or X is false. Y may be true even though X is also false -- this is the "inclusive" OR and not the "exclusive" OR.
We do not see Y, therefore X must be false. No point in quibbling.
As to the mobs of fathers, let us assume (to make the numbers simpler) that a university has 10,000 co-eds, that they are each only assaulted once during their four years, and that only one out of ten fathers would take aggressive action if they learned of their daughter's being assaulted. So in any given year there should be 0.05 x 10,000 = 500. 500 x 0.10 = 50. That's fifty angry men who certainly will take aggressive action against the administration, and fifty angry men is a mob.
As to your own likely reaction in the event your daughter was assaulted, I can only assume that you are not a manly man or that you have no lovely daughter.
Here's the bigger question: If 20% of women on campus are being assaulted, and we assume it is under reported, why aren't we doing something serious about it?
Like, I'm talking police escorting women around campus -- real police, not the failed campus security measures that are leading to 1 in 5 women being sexually assaulted.
Why are college administrations around the company not being fired? Point blank, if 20% of women in a company reported being sexually harassed, the CEO would be fired. Hell, some CEOs get fired over a SINGLE report of sexual harassment, and that can just be a hostile work environment with no one assaulted or raped!
"The pollsters themselves even acknowledged up front that "Clinton’s edge in the Post-ABC poll does not reach statistical significance"!
So you're saying that even they admit it's fake.
Ok, now it all makes sense. Print it!
Honestly, if I were a state with oversight over a state university, and the university told me 20% of their female students were being sexually assaulted for years and they've not had any success in making that number go down: I'd fire them. I'd run for office on the platform of firing the incompetents who are allowing our best and brightest to be assaulted and raped in our state institutions of higher learning and the best they can come up with are pithy posters telling men not to rape.
"Hillary won the popular vote by two points. This poll shows her winning it by four points. So because the poll was off by two points--well within the poll's published margins of error--we are now and forevermore to dismiss all such polls as "fake news"? "
-- No. But we will take them with bigger grains of salt, especially all of the people who took the polls, from commentators on the news to posters on the Internet, who insisted that the lead was insurmountable. Did you even watch, read or listen to ANY analysis of the election?
Things like this were common. Nate Silver gave Clinton a 70+% chance to win, despite as you mentioned, being within the margin of error of losing.
Yes, I get it. NOW you want to talk about margins of error and closeness of analysis, but that's not how the polls were being treated then.
Napoleon granted his populace--or, anway, the male members of his populace--the right to vote on the plebiscites he put before them. He routinely won those plebiscites by 90% margins. In England, the suffrage was much more limited, and the divisions and the arguments between the Tories and Whigs were far more acrimonious and contentious. The left considered that Napoleon's granting of universal (male) suffrage was an egalitarian act. They were less suspicious of the increased powers that these plebiscites granted Napoleon. Napoleon himself felt that the bitter debates in England were a sign of that country's lack of cohesion........ Let's draw some lessons from history: a 90% approval rating is more likely a sign of closed minds than of open debate, and leftists are frequently jerks. If you are marching off a cliff, those in the vanguard are not necessarily in the vanguard of history.
Hillary won the popular vote by two points. This poll shows her winning it by four points.
Provide a link to the poll you are referencing.
If the poll is predicting an election win in Electoral College points as opposed to a National popular vote percentage (which seems to be what you are thinking about)....this makes a difference. You are conflating two completely separate issues.
The popular vote doesn't mean anything in a National Election. It is the Electoral College votes which have been the subject of polling IIRC and the Electoral College Votes which are the deciding factor.
If you are going to use a poll as a point to buttress your debate, then you need to know WHAT the poll is asking, how it was asking the questions, who was polled, what demographics, what numbers of people were polled in order to get the statistical results. I KNOW math is haaaard!
@Unknown, that mistake everyone was making was looking at the nationwide poll. Those of us looking state by state saw an unmistakable tightening up of the race during the final ten days. A 47% to 43% advantage leaves 10% unaccounted for, and during the final week, in the upper Midwest, most of those 10% broke for Trump. I'm including Minnesota, where Clinton won but where the final result was much closer than earlier polls suggested. He and Kellyanne were right; the people looking at the nationwide polls were wrong.
This election showed the wisdom of having an Electoral College. Most of us sane folks would not care to live in a country governed by a coalition between New York City and the state of California. California seems pretty large to be a lunatic asylum, but there doesn't seem to be any other excuse for its existence.
Trump won 67% of the white vote. He won a majority of the female white vote. Among Hispanics who spoke English at home, he lost but by a narrow majority. There are a lot of people in America who wanted Trump to be president.
"If you are going to use a poll as a point to buttress your debate, then you need to know WHAT the poll is asking,"
-- Not just that. But there needs to be consistency in how the polls are used. Before the election, they were clear signs of Clinton dominating and Trump's inability to break through his low ceiling of support, according to most poll analysts out there.
Now, why, by golly, they are a sign of how close and volatile the race really was. Often said by the same people.
"Why do you doubt the 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 claims of sexual assault on campus? Have you read the definition of sexual assault that they use? A quick pat on the butt counts as sexual assault. By the definition they use, I'm surprised the number isn't ~19-in-20."
I actually agree with this. But that is because I did "read the definition of sexual assault they use". Sadly they do NOT unveil that definition when the 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 number is cited.
What is the image you see when the term sexual assault is mentioned? For most of us I'd wager it is a LOT more than a too-long-held stare.
The clear implication is that a huge percentage of college women barely escaped rape. Or, at the least were pinned against a desk and had to struggle to get free.
It is BS hiding under, technically true (if you hold your mouth just right and the wind is from the west) words.
This (the Presidents rhetoric) is a form of gaslighting, a useful term thats become popular lately.
It is a typical form of emotionalist argument used by the left.
You will often, regularly, see such used in education policy arguments in my experience.
The President used a subtle form, as Althouse notes, in implying that one side, his, knows or accepts all the relevant information on any question, and that the other side does not. This is meant to make the other side, or some of them, doubt their perceptions, that they may be wrong about the facts they are concerned with. But that is gaslighting indeed.
It is used to rule out facts, data and perceptions of the other side, to establish that the only relevant factors in a given public policy controversy are those that they select.
When pinned down, the usual leftist squid-ink maneuver is to grant the validity of facts or data in opposition to their preferred conclusion, but to ignore these afterwards in pursuit of their argument. When this is objected to they will cite the acceptance of these facts. This is yet again a form of gaslighting.
The other related bit of rhetoric used by Obama especially is to publicly acknowledge the complexity on some matter and claim that the other side has valid concerns (though this requires never mentioning what they actually are, and certainly no concrete details), but this is of course merely lip service. This is used to reinforce his claims of reasonableness, and of course to make the other side feel unreasonable.
You will find this all in academic papers also (in education, especially, in my experience). Its a corrupt and insincere form of discourse.
"'But without some common baseline of facts... we’re going to keep talking past each other.' That says we can't have a real interchange with each other unless we already agree."
I thought Obama was supposed to be a lawprof kind of guy. Perhaps he's never been involved in conducting a trial, where the point of the exercise is to decide what the facts are. In the typical trial, there is an element of talking past each other -- if the two sides didn't have different stories about what happened, there would be no need for a trial -- but it's hardly a pointless exercise.
Given how little the previous two presidents accomplished, and how much Mr. Trump is going to get done _right off the bat_, perhaps the popularity score is inversely connected with effectiveness. We'll see.
roesch/voltaire: And common core of interests may include the fact that the earth is more than 6,000 years old, if like some fundamentalist you don't accept that there is little to discuss.
I assume you mean "common core of "information", not "interest" here. Interesting example, though, since the views of fundamentalists on the age of the earth are of little interest to most people, and of even less relevance to the general political life. (You only think that if you're one of those earnest misinformed folk who bitterly cling to the belief that redneck creationists are the cause of poor educational outcomes and low U.S. scores on international science tests.)
On the other hand, as far as the refusal to consider information that violates dogmatic belief goes, the kind that actually does have widespread social and political repercussions, your liberal "Darwinian from the neck down" anti-science types have it all over those bible-bashin' fundies, whose influence is limited to occasionally annoying parents and school boards.
Or maybe that life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are a place to begin.
One man's liberty and pursuit of Happiness is another man's violation of "equality".
Thanks for providing an excellent example of the question-begging liberal "open mindedness" that I described @8:45 AM above.
Really Ann your ignoring our history and fought for rights as a common base line just to make up snark.
Her "snark" is a lot more interesting than your sniffs, which aren't even making much in the way of sense lately.
Angelyne,
That is correct. The "creationist" line isn't even a subtle argument, it is merely a form of yelling "you're poopy". It is an emotional tactic to claim moral superiority and social status.
Persons who are reduced to such low tactics are usually incapable of dealing with real data, such as NAEP scores or perhaps achievement scores for homeschooled children.
DBQ: The popular vote doesn't mean anything in a National Election.
But it should, DBQ, it should!!!!! Otherwise, oUr Demokrisy!!! has been subverted!!!!
That is, unless the *right* person wins the EV and loses the popular vote, in which case the EC has served its noble function of protecting Our Republic from mob rule/unfair regional hegemony, just as it was meant to do when it was mandated in that out-dated piece of parchment, er, Sacred Constitution, by those evil slave-owning privilege having old white men, er, Our Genius Founding Fathers.
It is an emotional tactic to claim moral superiority and social status.
Usually by people whose closest encounter with symbolic logic was sitting in the same cafeteria as a CS major.
And skipped calculus for business math.
Polls don't matter now. We're as far from another election as we can be, and the GOP has tailwinds going into 2018 due to the lack of Dem pickup opportunities. This is their chance to run the gamut on everything they said they'd pass over the years.
Trump could be polling in the teens and it won't make a difference.
As I have observed on many occasion, it is typically lay people who are most dogmatic about 'settled science', not scientists.
On that approval poll being fake news, zerohedge is on board with supporting data:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-17/new-abc-wapo-poll-shows-drop-trump-favorabilty-through-aggressive-oversamples
Brando: Polls don't matter now. We're as far from another election as we can be, and the GOP has tailwinds going into 2018 due to the lack of Dem pickup opportunities. This is their chance to run the gamut on everything they said they'd pass over the years.
Trump could be polling in the teens and it won't make a difference.
I dunno, I can see poor polling used as a stalling excuse by the usual Republican suspects. "We can't do anything about Obamacare, because polls show most Americans say they like being raped and pillaged by this health 'insurance' racket."
Hope you're right; guess we're gonna find out.
"As I have observed on many occasion, it is typically lay people who are most dogmatic about 'settled science', not scientists."
It is both amusing and exasperating to be lectured to by journalists about scientific questions.
The point is only that Ann is being unreasonable in consigning all polls to the dumpster of "fake news" merely because they missed the popular vote by 1-3 points at the last election. If you want to say that we should give Trump a three point bonus in polls based on their previous error, fine: let us say that Trump has a 43% approval rating instead of a 40% approval rating. Historically, this is still very low for an incoming president. A grain of salt, I have no problem with. To bury polls in salt on the basis of an error of a couple of points last time around is unjustified.
The other point is that the term "fake news" should be reserved for news which is actually fake: if conducting and reporting on the results of a poll is "fake news", what then are we supposed to call the efforts of someone purposefully making up and peddling hoaxes? Or are we now in a moral space where we no longer draw distinctions between the two?
"Polls don't matter now. We're as far from another election as we can be,..."
But they're all Inga's got right now.
I admit to not knowing much about Obama care [other than the ridiculously high premiums and deductibles family members are paying] but it seems that at least some insurance companies have increased their profits with it, which may explain why some of the GOPe are loath to overturn it.
Again: The polls aren't the problem. The accompanying analysis was done deliberately by people like Nate Silver (A 71% chance of victory, really?) to push a narrative. Deliberately being deceptive in how one presents the news is just as bad as saying Romney does not pay taxes or that Obama's birth certificate is a fake.
Yet, the media demand we use "fake news" only for one of these three instances. It seems that "fake news" is only meant to be used, like many things, when it helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. Republicans and conservatives are standing up and saying: Nope. The term has a meaning, and we will apply it where it fits.
@Ron Winkleheimer, beautiful!
"It's a fact that ABC News/Washington Post got the election polls wrong."
The last ABC/Post poll had Hillary Clinton up by 4%, with a sampling error of 2.5 points.
She won the popular vote by 2%. That's within the margin of error.
You realize the national polls were accurate--Hillary won by 2 percent. It's the distribution among the states that the state polling didn't pick up.
I see that the MSM is now taking polls on whether they "approve of the transition". When have they ever done that before?
But it allows them to run a story saying, "Majority, or X percent of Americans, disapprove of Trump's transition" Of course, 80% of America isn't paying attention and in any case, isn't qualified to know whether the transition is a success or no.
But the MSM uses this "fact" to attack Trump.
From the ABC Poll: "Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump end the 2016 campaign with the race between them close, their historic unpopularity intact — and, on the bright side, a weary electorate saying it's ready to accept the outcome and move on."
Too bad the Clinton side wasn't actually ready to accept the outcome and move on.
"Sexual Assault" is just like "Hate crime" or "racism". The Left takes a word and then expands its usage for their own benefit until it means anything.
Average people *think* sexual assault = rape, but it doesn't. When they see "Hate crime" they think someone's attacking a black person - but it doesn't. And they imagine "racism" means Jim Crow and overt discrimination - but it doesn't.
Since we don't know what the researchers were defining "sexual assault" as, we have no way of knowing exactly what 20% of Co-eds were subjected to. Rape? Holding hands? A pinch on the tush? Who knows?
Too bad the Clinton side wasn't actually ready to accept the outcome and move on.
No joke.
I wonder how long the video package covering the Trump protests will be as compared to the video package of the Obama protests.
The video for the Obama protests (who, mind you, was "the victim of massive death threats" --- hmm, wonder if Trump has had some and why the press wouldn't report one way or the other) would last about 0 seconds.
All I'm seeing is that the days of a peaceful transition of power is over. So be it. We can be REALLY unpleasant when we want to be. Conservatives didn't try and fuck with Obama's inaugurations (even as his supporters decided to be assholes during his first one). Such patience is unlikely to be extended again.
Blogger Bill Harshaw said...
You realize the national polls were accurate--Hillary won by 2 percent. It's the distribution among the states that the state polling didn't pick up.
But Hillary had her own campaign's state-by-state polls.
If Hillary was going for a popular vote win, she was stupid and a bad candidate. If she was going for an electoral college win, she didn't get one.
Either way it is hard to see how winning the popular vote while losing the electoral college makes Hillary the better candidate.
And we all know that if the situation were reversed -- if Hillary had won the EC while losing the popular vote to Trump -- the NY Times, WaPo, and all of the MSM would be pushing the line that the founders were right, thank God the electoral college was there to save us from a demagogue . . .
Yet, the media demand we use "fake news" only for one of these three instances. It seems that "fake news" is only meant to be used, like many things, when it helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. Republicans and conservatives are standing up and saying: Nope. The term has a meaning, and we will apply it where it fits.
Basically. It seems no stories critical of Republicans are "fake news". We are getting better at not sitting back and allowing the lunatic left to dictate all of the rules.
Now to repeal every single tax break Hollywood and entertainment gets. And to possibly re-visit IP law and reduce the length of protection by decades.
"I dunno, I can see poor polling used as a stalling excuse by the usual Republican suspects. "We can't do anything about Obamacare, because polls show most Americans say they like being raped and pillaged by this health 'insurance' racket.""
Some might use it as an excuse, but it'd only be the ones who oppose the policy anyway. A Senator or Rep who likes the policy will back it figuring the public will come around to their way of thinking, or that the polls were skewed to begin with.
@rcocean, guys shouldn't be pinching girls on the tush, either. But it isn't rape.
Steve M., just above, beat me to it.
Althouse, you've got a wonderful point, about the newspaper's commenter.
But in fact, your ridiculing of the polls is uncharacteristically dumb. The national popular vote was approx. Hillary 48% and Trump 46%. The national polls weren't much wrong at all. They just didn't measure -- and didn't claim to measure -- the razor-thin (but electorally-decisive) margins for Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
"The polls were laughably wrong" is an unwarranted takeaway from the 2016 election. And of course, the misperception comes out of the exaggerated electoral-vote margin for Trump. With Trump himself wrongly claiming that he won a "landslide." You seem to have fallen for Trump's hypnotic Twitter account, Althouse.
"guys shouldn't be pinching girls on the tush, either. But it isn't rape."
Sometimes its bad manners. Sometimes its how they met their husbands.
Humans can be so complicated. Especially women.
But in fact, your ridiculing of the polls is uncharacteristically dumb. The national popular vote was approx. Hillary 48% and Trump 46%. The national polls weren't much wrong at all. They just didn't measure -- and didn't claim to measure -- the razor-thin (but electorally-decisive) margins for Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
These same polls, save one, had a comfortable Hillary win. Silver did mention that her "firewall" was exceptionally thin, but when most people have one candidate with an overwhelming likelihood to win and they lose, then it's time to examine why they got that so wrong.
"The polls were laughably wrong" is an unwarranted takeaway from the 2016 election. And of course, the misperception comes out of the exaggerated electoral-vote margin for Trump. With Trump himself wrongly claiming that he won a "landslide." You seem to have fallen for Trump's hypnotic Twitter account, Althouse.
If they weren't "laughably" wrong, we'd have a lot less of the absolute insanity from the Left since then.
My "observations" of sexual assault on campus come form listening to students describe these events, including one boy who was beaten and left in the street when he tried to stop two frat boys from attacking a co-ed-- his words.
And in my classes with STEM students, where we read and discuss Drawin's theory of Evolution, at least one student a year has remarked that they were brought up to believe the earth was created in 6,000 years ago and they will hold to that against all evidence--more common than you think and relevant. I don't force the issue.
Fake news, my understanding, were stories pilfered from the web by teens in Macedonia who discovered that stories, either true or false giving pro -Trump anti- Hillary headlines earned them hits and money. Now the term fake news has been turned on any news folks don't agree with; how quickly the media savvy folks can move.
But Hillary had her own campaign's state-by-state polls.
She did, no doubt. And here in Michigan, I suspect that those polls told her that they were in trouble; hence, the last-minute campaigning in Michigan.
If Hillary was going for a popular vote win, she was stupid and a bad candidate.
I don't think that. I doubt Steve M. thinks that. I'm pretty certain that the Clinton campaign knew the rules. After having won presidential elections in 1992 and 1996.
If she was going for an electoral college win, she didn't get one.
Right. Got it.
Either way it is hard to see how winning the popular vote while losing the electoral college makes Hillary the better candidate.
I never suggested that; Steve M. didn't suggest that. Together, we were merely suggesting that national polling was within its own, stated, margin of error.
And we all know that if the situation were reversed -- if Hillary had won the EC while losing the popular vote to Trump -- the NY Times, WaPo, and all of the MSM would be pushing the line that the founders were right, thank God the electoral college was there to save us from a demagogue . . .
Right.
Let's get to the larger point. There seems to be a national presumption that the polls were terribly, laughably wrong because they had Hillary Clinton in the lead. The national presumption seems to be that Trump scored a huge win. In fact, he scored a remarkably narrow squeaker of a win. Despite the (accurate) national polls. Next time,if you want more accuracy, look to a collection of state polls that you trust, and count to 270. In Michigan, I must say, there was a gap that was outside of the margin of error in which Clinton (who lost by about 0.3% of the state vote) was ahead in polls by several points. But those were public polls. I do think that the internal polls by both Trump and Clinton were closer; they knew something we didn't, based on the late campaigning.
Lewis Wetzel: My comment was aimed at whether national pollsters were reasonably accurate [they are] or should be totally disregarded, not whether Clinton made good use of them or ran a good campaign.
"And in my classes with STEM students, where we read and discuss Drawin's theory of Evolution, at least one student a year has remarked that they were brought up to believe the earth was created in 6,000 years ago and they will hold to that against all evidence"
-- Assuming you are telling the truth and not lying. At best, you have 1 in 10 Americans who are Young Earth Creationists. That of course makes a lot of assumptions to get a number that high. If you are running into a student in your classes every year who is: Vocal enough to contradict you, educated enough to be in one of your classes and is a YEC -- you are hitting statistical anomalies year after year.
You are, in short, hitting ridiculous odds. You need to either take up with your administration where they are recruiting these students from, stop lying to us, or examine what it is you do when teaching to make students yank your chain every year. Because, statistically, while possible, it is extremely unlikely for you to have this experience.
Do you also have vocal people tell you we faked the moon landing -- something that's roughly fairly close to YECs? Or, are vocal, extremely rare opinions only ever coming from YECs? If so, again, I revisit the option of you lying or your students pranking you.
"The national polls weren't much wrong at all. "
They were quite wrong until the last week or so of the campaign.
Before that they normally ranged +5 to +7 as per the RCP average. Final RCP was +3.2, still badly off.
These were a very poor guide to the outcome.
"Fake news, my understanding, were stories pilfered from the web by teens in Macedonia."
-- No. Fake News was used first in relation to reporting about various Clinton scandals (some of them correctly being fake stories, and some not actually fake stories) and when Facebook had bad news links up. It replaced the term "nothingburger." The teens in Macedonia peddaling fake stories was conflated with "Fake News" when an online site rounded up a bunch of legitimate news sites/blog sites and labeled them "Fake News." The term didn't break out until Clinton used it in her farewell speech.
"There seems to be a national presumption that the polls were terribly, laughably wrong because they had Hillary Clinton in the lead."
-- The polls weren't wrong. But media pundits, analysts like Nate Silver and people on the Internet's use and application of the polls were laughably bad. For months you can find people saying the polls were too close to call, and yet if you went online and read from the NYT or elsewhere, Trump had no path to 270. Even Obama went on a late night show to taunt Trump over how bad he was in the polls.
The lash back should be more against the media's numeric illiteracy in reading polls than the polls the themselves.
"And in my classes with STEM students, where we read and discuss Darwin's theory of Evolution"
And if you are out to teach them Thermodynamics, would you prefer a homeschooled Young Earth Creationist with solid Differential and Integral Calculus, or the typical well-indoctrinated kid with High School AP Calc?
I am not a Christian fundamentalist, but that "creationism" marker is, in reality, a slur. These are disproportionately well-educated people and diligent students. Their families read more and know more, and can deploy subtle reasoning, and understand the same, far more than their peers.
At minimum they tend to have read at least one very complex book which is a glory of the English language. This is not typical of their peers.
But Matthew I am addressing only Althouse's ridicule of the polls. Punditry wasn't something she was addressing; nor was I.
National polls have a margin of error. And national polls are not aimed at predicting individual state results. You are free to suggest that national polling in a presidential contest ought to therefore be discounted. That's fine. But it isn't an error, on the part of ABC or its pollsters.
I just saw the addition. 31D/20 something R?
What planet were those pollsters living on?
"These same polls, save one, had a comfortable Hillary win. Silver did mention that her "firewall" was exceptionally thin, but when most people have one candidate with an overwhelming likelihood to win and they lose, then it's time to examine why they got that so wrong."
But wasn't that "comfortable" win based on the state polls that were off (or not recently taken)? The thing that pundits (even Silver) seemed to get wrong was that they took a close race--which it was--and kept saying "but Trump has very little chance here". That was my problem with the whole "Trump has a ten percent chance of winning" argument--it's not measurable! Of course when Trump won you could still say "well the ten percent chance worked out for him, mathematically I'm still right" but it doesn't take away from the fact that while the national polls showed a close race, pundits just didn't want to believe it. They made the same mistake in the primaries.
I don't blame the pollsters themselves, by and large they proved accurate save for a few states where they didn't poll enough (probably because everyone assumed those states were too safe for Hillary). It's just no one wanted to believe Trump really had it that close.
It will be interesting, when all, or at least a lot more, facts are out about the last election. There is some evidence that the Crooked Hillary team had no idea that things were going south for them in the rust belt. They thought they had things sewn up, and were blowing money in places that didn't matter, like AZ and CA, ignoring places that ultimately did, like WI, MI, and PA. The obvious question is why didn't they know? The Trump people knew, or at least strongly suspected, and Clinton had a lot more money, and experienced pols to work with. We also know that a lot of the polls we were seeing were intentionally being skewed in order to show her coronation being imminent (through overweighting Dems and oversampling urban voters). The biases were being wrung out, as the election neared, since the pollens didn't want (more) egg on their faces, if they had gone into the election as heavily skewed as they were in August. It is almost as if the Clinton campaign believed the intentionally skewed polls, and acted accordingly, while the Trump campaign looked at state by state polls, and threw their resources (including Trump himself) where they would do the most good.
Of course, the bigger question may be why the Dems nominated such a flawed candidate in the first place. After 8 years of Obama, they should have known it wasn't going to be easy - in most of our lifetimes, only GHW Bush after Reagan was able to win essentially a third term for his party. And, yet, they nominated one of the most flawed candidates that they could. She is maybe the most corrupt national politician of her generation, in poor health, and possessing few real accomplishments, except for having married well. Yet, the Dem party greased the skids for her nomination, with her only competition being a crotchety older socialist (of similarly meager accomplishments, outside personally enriching himself while in office), and a failed former Blue State governor. And, even then, the ruling Dems had to cheat outrageously to give her the nomination. My guess is that the Clintons bought everyone off, with promises of riches and power, once she was elected. But looking back, they surely had candidates who could have beaten Trump, walking away. For one, "Slo Joe" Biden likely wouldn't have done as badly in the Rust Belt, which, I think, would have given him the election. Indeed, I see no states that she won, that he likely wouldn't have won, and a bunch that he had, from the start, a better chance at winning, and she lost. And Biden's sunny disposition would have played much better than the lack of joy that Conway detected in Clinton's campaign. Yet, the Dem party leaders eagerly greased the skids for her nomination.
Yeah. That 70% chance Hillary wins from Silver always boggled me when his analysis was basically: "It's really close!" Then... why is she an overwhelming favorite to win?
"The lash back should be more against the media's numeric illiteracy in reading polls than the polls the themselves."
Absolutely. And they had their own example from the primaries to learn from.
"Yeah. That 70% chance Hillary wins from Silver..."
I hated that metric simply because it's so meaningless. I can say there's a 90% chance my wife is making homemade pizza tonight and when I get leftovers instead because we have no ingredients for pizza and I know this then I can still say "well must have been that 10%".
roesch/voltaire: And in my classes with STEM students, where we read and discuss Drawin's theory of Evolution, at least one student a year has remarked that they were brought up to believe the earth was created in 6,000 years ago and they will hold to that against all evidence--more common than you think and relevant.
One student a year? Oh my goodness. That is a very, very, very low incidence of "irrational beliefs resistant to evidence" in a student population.
And relevant, how? And I mean "relevant" in the context we are discussing here, not "relevant" to some vague influence that you imagine, without any corroborating data, that these quaint beliefs have on society and politics.
I'd say the impact of such beliefs is pretty close to "nada". Any government mandates, say, at which gargantuan loads of public resources are shoveled, that are based on these stubborn, evidence-rejecting convictions? You know, comparable to the time and resources pissed away based on, say, the un-evidenced religious belief that "disparate impact" is always and everywhere the result of "discrimination"? That sort of thing.
buwaya said...
"The national polls weren't much wrong at all. "
They were quite wrong until the last week or so of the campaign.
Before that they normally ranged +5 to +7 as per the RCP average. Final RCP was +3.2, still badly off.
These were a very poor guide to the outcome.
You don't seem to understand; the final election results were Clinton 48% and Trump 46%. (Please don't argue the electoral college with me; I know very well who won and it was my candidate who prevailed with more electoral votes. But that is not what was being measured in the national public opinion polling.)
That is not "badly off;" it is within the margin of error. The national polling was off by about a single percentage point.
As for earlier polling, you are completely discounting the possibility that there was a significant swing in the direction of Trump in the last week or two. Not only do I not discount that, I think that there are several unremarkable reasons to presume that that was indeed the case.
I don't want to hear about the Democrats' overconfidence. That part, I already agreed with. I am only disputing Althouse's ridicule of the final election eve national polling.
"The obvious question is why didn't they know?"
Politico did one post mortem. The answer is classic Clinton: Hubris.
HuffPo adds an interesting twist on that Hubris. They thought they were outsmarting team Trump: "A senior official from Clinton’s campaign noted that they did have a large staff presence in Michigan and Wisconsin (200 and 180 people respectively) while also stressing that one of the reasons they didn’t do more was, in part, because of psychological games they were playing with the Trump campaign."
Bruce Hayden; I am in Michigan. They were not ignoring Michigan. Obama and Bill Clinton were here repeatedly in the last days of the campaign. So was Hillary. So was Trump. An unprecedented, for Michigan, level of attention as late as November in a presidential year.
http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2016/11/05/pres-obama-hillary-and-bill-clinton-headed-back-michigan/93355328/
@Brando (and others). What I don't think the polls are capable of doing is measuring the intensity of support. It seems to me that someone might say (probably did say) that they favor Hillary Clinton but basically meant that if they got to the polling place they'd vote for her, but anything like a light rain or a line of people waiting to vote was more than two people long, or whatever, would be enough to deter them from voting. Meanwhile there were plenty of people who were ready to crawl miles through broken glass with two broken arms to vote for Donald Trump (or, pretty much equivalently, to vote against Hillary Clinton. And that's all the edge Trump needed in Michigan and Wisconsin.
@Bruce Hayden, I used to have a theory that the Democrat leadership knew they were going to lose because of how hard it is to win three terms in a row so they deliberately put up Hillary Clinton so she wouldn't screw up some more likely politician's chances in 2020. However the way Democrats have acted since the election makes me think my theory was wrong. They really did want and expect her to win.
Didn't they watch how she campaigned in 2008?
"The polls were laughably wrong" is an unwarranted takeaway from the 2016 election"
The polls WERE laughably wrong because they were polling for and asking the wrong questions.
The election of the President is not a National popular vote issue. It doesn't matter because the election is actually 50 individual States popular vote elections. The Electoral College votes are what counts. Not that Hillary is so very popular in California or NY.
The polls were MEANT to deceive the public and try to establish the meme that Hillary had the votes. Well...yes. She did have the votes. Just not the ones that count.
So the polls were wrong because they were not polling what mattered. Ha ha ha.
" What I don't think the polls are capable of doing is measuring the intensity of support."
Big Mike, whether they do it accurately they certainly try to measure intensity--polling same people over time, asking questions to determine how strong their support is--not sure if that's what they got wrong in (e.g.) PA, or if they did their samples right, or just not enough polls in those states.
Sometimes there's just no way to really test that though--you could say "yes I'm absolutely going to vote, and vote for Jones" but when you see the lines at the polls you decide "screw it". Whereas another person says "yeah, sure whatever" but they're going to vote, no matter what, and just aren't so demonstrative with pollsters.
I'd be interested in seeing the post mortems from pollsters themselves as they try and figure out what they missed in the states that they did (and why it happened in some places but not others, if they used the same methods).
You are free to suggest that national polling in a presidential contest ought to therefore be discounted. That's fine. But it isn't an error, on the part of ABC or its pollsters.
Actually, it WAS an error on the part of the pollsters....a deliberate and unforced error because they OVER sampled Democrats and UNDER sampled Republicans and Independents proportional to the actual demographics of the population They deliberately did this because they wanted to show Hillary looking stronger and especially wanted to try to show Trump as being weaker.
The error is that they got caught in their own hubris.
Skewing the data by selectively weighting the samples and producing polls that were full of errors.
"Didn't they watch how she campaigned in 2008?"
I think a lot of them just believed their own press releases--she was "owed", she was a brilliant technocrat, the only people who hate her are crazy conservative nuts, she only got better after her 2008 experience--but even then it wasn't so much enthusiasm for her as fear of the opposition. If they calmed down their terror over Trump a bit, we'd be hearing a lot more about how awful a candidate Hillary was and how idiotic it was to just hand her the nomination (which the Dems basically did).
Big Mike;
Pretty conclusively, while Trump turned out many independents in Michigan and while he seems to have swung some Democrats to his side, that was not the critical factor in Michigan. The difference-maker in Michigan was the low overall voter turnout in Wayne County. Turnout (where Dems win 85-95% of the vote) was down by more than 130,000. Trump won the whole state by less than 11,000.
I only believe the facts that Trump tells me. Everything else is fake...
If the polling says Trump's approval is 40% I know that is a lie. He is at LEAST favored by 80%. People love this man! Hugely fake polls. Sheesh.
Here are some "common baseline of facts":
Trump is the best president we have ever had.
He has already saved the economy.
He will insure everyone at no cost to the taxpayer!
He will build a great wall at no cost to the taxpayer!
This man is amazing.
Every American will flourish like never before under this man. And, yeah, he's a MAN. Wooo!
[This is fun.... I get a lot of thumps up at Breitbart.]
Chuck said..."The polls were laughably wrong" is an unwarranted takeaway from the 2016 election.
Take "the polls" as synecdoche for "the expressed opinions of pollsters" then, Chuck. Still wrong? Remember the models, Chuck? The predictions? Clinton's likelihood of winning was 85%, then 90%, then 96%, remember? Remember the many, many discussions about Trump's few "paths to victory" and how they just weren't plausible?
The pollsters used their polls to make those predictions. If you want to say "the polls themselves were correct(ish)," fine. But the predictions made were not. Even a week from the election the odds should have been close to 50-50, but almost all the reputable polling agencies had it 90-10 Clinton. That was wrong--badly wrong. Maybe it was wrong because it didn't include pertinent information (state-level polling in swing states), maybe it was wrong because the models used to correlate the national polling data to state-level results was flawed...whatever. The predictions pollsters made were wrong. It's silly to pretend otherwise and pedantic to get hung up on a technical definition of what "wrong" means in the Professor's context.
Somehow you'd think the demise of the Clinton Foundation's Global Initiative (apparently because its foreign donors no longer consider the Clintons a good investment) would at least merit coverage by the most or all of the mainstream media, yet coverage of this seems very sparse indeed.
To the extent the media still have influence, it's due to their ability to decide what's a national news story and what isn't. Thus, Treyvon Martin's death was national news, but most other killings merited only a paragraph in local print media.
Of course, NYT, WaPo etc. editors never have to explain why they don't cover a story, but, how could they consider this such not-news that it's not even mentioned?
Of course, the story is still new and, who knows,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/16/clinton-global-initiative-lays-off-22-as-donations/
@Chuck, I've carefully parsed your response, but I'm a little uncertain. You are supporting what I wrote, correct?
Witness wrote:
"Were they that far off? The actual popular vote ended up being something like 48-46, no? That's consistent with the poll, with undecideds breaking mostly for Trump in the end."
Yes, I think they were way off, and here is why- none of the national polls, none, predicted Clinton beating Trump in California by 4+ million votes. The people running the national polls gave no caveats about such a possibility. A national poll that can't account for that, or at least be able offer such a caveat, is pretty worthless as a prediction tool. Ironically, Nate Silver was the only high-profile guy in the business who at least seemed semi-seriously entertain the idea that Clinton's odds of electoral success might be significantly less than the national polls were indicating
I am beginning to think that ALT-House is actually accurate.
ABC News Poll = +4% Clinton lead.
Final Result - +2% Clinton lead.
Big Mike said...
@Chuck, I've carefully parsed your response, but I'm a little uncertain. You are supporting what I wrote, correct?
Big Mike; I am trying really hard in this comments thread to stick to one point; the national polls in the last week of the 2016 presidential campaign were not a joke. They weren't even wrong, by their own terms. They were within about a percentage point of calling it.
The national polling can't possibly make an electoral college call. You need 50 state polls to do that. If you want to bitch about Wisconsin polling, or (most of all) Pennsylvania polling, fine.
I think Althouse took a cheap shot at ABC polling, in a blog post that I otherwise found credible.
And of course, the larger point is that Trump really didn't win any landslide.
The technical details of the poll aren't that important.
What is important is that nearly pundit looked at that data and called it for Hillary, many of them called an electoral vote landslide for Hillary.
rhh,
"Which is to say, learn when to think like a man when acting as a citizen at least."
Dude...
...
...
won't it just be waaaay easier to repeal the 19th Amendment?
Ignorance is Bliss,
Was she hot?
Lol.
I understand that Trump is now Tweeting that the (current) popularity polls are wrong and rigged, like the campaign-season polls.
Except, as we have seen, the final election polls were neither rigged, nor wrong.
I want a red trucker hat with the phrase now made by Justin Amash's (R-MI) re-Tweet (of Trump) on the front: "Dude, just stop."
https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/820429521665093633
Please everyone, stop ruining baseball caps. I have one with a logo for a game I like, but I can't wear it any more because anyone who sees me from not the front thinks I'm a Trumpian.
Oversampling isn't per se wrong. It's a way to put more samples where the highest variance is.
You do have to correct for it, however. If they don't do that, then it's stupidity.
Chuck wrote:
"The national polling can't possibly make an electoral college call. You need 50 state polls to do that."
This is not really true, Chuck. Each national poll has to have state subsamples that correspond to the populations of the individual states. Literally zero national polling firms predicted that California would break for Clinton 62%-32%, and that 140% of her popular vote margin would come from California alone. If they had caught on to that factor, people like Nate Cohn and Nate Silver would not have been more than 50% sure of her even winning the election.
If the national polling can't alert you to such a polarized outcome between the states, then they are useless, even if they did manage to hit close to the actual popular vote outcome. It may be the case that the sample sizes need to be raised by a factor of 10 or more to have more value, but it might just be smarter to ditch the national polling altogether and do more frequent polling of the states that can be won by either party.
Let me put this way- the campaigns themselves don't pay pollsters to run national polls- if they did, it would be financial malfeasance and just plain stupidity. For the media, it is just stupidity, in my opinion.
Blogger rhhardin said..."Oversampling isn't per se wrong. It's a way to put more samples where the highest variance is.
You do have to correct for it, however. If they don't do that, then it's stupidity."
Yes, and I've never known. Do they correct for it?
I chose the student who believed that the earth was created in 6,000 years as the extreme representation of students who are skeptical of evolution early in their college careers, but they represent a common sentiment held by many Americans-- this by the Pew: "Currently, 43 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats believe in human evolution, while in 2009, 54 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats held that view." And over all 33 percent think humans and other living things have existed in present form since the beginning of time. This mix of beliefs makes for interesting discussion in class.
Yancey Ward; you are free to ignore all national polling, if you'd like to do that.
The news media are fond of the national polls because they are a snap shot that is very easy to communicate with a single line.
Geezus; sometimes I think that if I proposed that the sun rises in the east, I'd get an argument from the Trump fanboyze at Althouse.
I get it; you like Trump. You like what Trump says, and especially the way he says it. And you don't like it if somebody questions him. Here I am, in no way doubting his electoral validity and simply observing the most basic of all facts; that the national vote total of Clinton 48%-to-Trump 46% was pretty danged close to what the final polling suggested. Some polls were a little better than others; many called it on the nose; others were within their margin of error. There is NO case to be made, that polling was fundamentally wrong:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/
Chuck,
A national poll could have had only respondents from Nevada this past election and been "correct" by the simplistic metric you are using. If the state subsamples don't alert the pollsters themselves to a possibly catastrophic prediction error for the electoral college, then just predicting the actual popular vote is almost completely meaningless. Not a single published national poll provider pointed out that more than Clinton's entire lead arose from California's respondents alone. Now, perhaps they were hiding this factor because they didn't want Clinton to have bad polling news, but it is more likely that the polls themselves were so shoddy that they never picked up on that factor, and if they didn't, then being right was simply accidental.
Tell me this Chuck- you run a national poll, you keep finding out that out of the 250 respondents in California, Clinton wins 165 to 85 repeatedly, don't you at least offer the caveat that the national poll overstates electoral prospects? I think any pollster with an IQ above 105 would notice such a result and comment on it, but since none did, I have to conclude that not a single California subsample gave such a result, and if they didn't, then the national polls were badly wrong, even if they actually came close to the actual popular vote result.
roesch/voltaire @3:50 PM:
You've become positively sunsong-like in your ability to meander about and avoid addressing the point, any point.
I guess you're just not going to tell us how the stubborn adherence of fundies to their belief in a 6,000 year old earth is actually relevant to this discussion re "the common core of information" (or lack thereof) driving national political debate about national policy.
Though I'm sure you could, if you wanted to, right?
Yancey Ward; if the national pollsters' methodologies were so bad, how did they get the results so right?
If the pollsters had eliminated all California/New York respondents, and had somehow or another come up with a poll result that put Trump up by 50% to 40%, that result would have been a lot more wrong than the result we saw.
I fail to understand what you find so objectionable about the poll results, when they generally seem to fall within a point or two of accuracy.
I've been out having a life today but thought I would address one comment.
You realize the national polls were accurate--Hillary won by 2 percent. It's the distribution among the states that the state polling didn't pick up.
Hillary won California by nearly 4 %. She lost the rest of the country by 2% and ended up with a plurality of 2%.
That's a little different.
Yes political debate about issues based on belief and not an agreed upon set of evidence, which of course shroud be debated, is as difficult as discussing evolution with someone who believes the earth is only 6,000 yrs old. For example it is difficult to have a good-faith debate with Paul Ryan about the ACA as he claims it is a total failure in the face of increased enrollment, or Republican constituents who tell him that ACA saved their lives suggestion it need adjustment, not total repeal But I digress as Trump and told Ryan his plan will cover everyone.
Bruce Hayden; I am in Michigan. They were not ignoring Michigan. Obama and Bill Clinton were here repeatedly in the last days of the campaign. So was Hillary. So was Trump. An unprecedented, for Michigan, level of attention as late as November in a presidential year.
Shouldn't the need for that kind of stuff have told the experts that she had a major problem?
"For example it is difficult to have a good-faith debate with Paul Ryan about the ACA"
Why is it difficult?
You are rather rigidly excluding the range of issues at play. You, and the Democrats, likewise reject the defects of ACA. This is why it is difficult to argue with you. You do not want to get into the weeds and encompass the entirety of the matter.
There are massive problems with ACA. One can proceed to arguing this, reforming it, by honestly acknowledging these defects. It establishes a basis for trust. The alternative is what we have now, nothing but stupid rhetorical brickbats flying back and forth.
This is much like the creationism issue. It seems like you are categorizing these students on your single metric. They are useless and don't count because of the one thing you care about? There is far more virtue and value in them than that metric of yours in my experience.
damikesc; That was my point! It's why they were here! Internal polling in both camps, I feel certain, was telling them how close it was! That is precisely why I wrote that!
roesch/voltaire: Yes political debate about issues based on belief and not an agreed upon set of evidence, which of course shroud be debated, is as difficult as discussing evolution with someone who believes the earth is only 6,000 yrs old.
Well, that's a step up from "there is little to discuss" with people who have disagreements with you about what constitutes a pertinent "set of evidence". And at least you've made an effort to contort your irrelevant reference to creationists into something resembling a proper analogy. (After changing your point, that is.)
For example it is difficult to have a good-faith debate with Paul Ryan about the ACA as he claims it is a total failure in the face of increased enrollment...
[Rolling eyes and shaking head] This is what as known as "begging the question", rv. It is perfectly possible to debate "in good faith" about whether that "increased enrollment" indicates a real improvement in access to health care, which is, after all, supposed to be the whole freaking point of "affordable" care.
I'm sure you are well aware that there are enrollees in ACA policies with deductibles and OOP costs so high that health care is no more accessible to them than it was before they had "insurance". So yes, it is possible for "increased enrollment" to co-exist with "total failure".
...or Republican constituents who tell him that ACA saved their lives suggestion it need adjustment, not total repeal.
Nor does it follow that, if there were people whose access to health was improved by the ACA, that this makes up for the people who got hosed, or that members of the former class would lose out under any replacement program.
Perhaps it is possible to have a program that would help X without hosing Y, that would accomplish this more efficiently than tweaking the existing shambolic system? I guess even thinking such a thing is possible is arguing in "bad faith".
But I digress as Trump and told Ryan his plan will cover everyone.
Yeah, and Obama talked a lot of shit about the ACA that wasn't so, either, but that doesn't seem to bother you. Defending the ACA, which every honest intelligent liberal I've ever met understands to be a complete, corrupt, corporate give-away POS, seems to be the most important thing to you here.
Chuck: I fail to understand what you find so objectionable about the poll results, when they generally seem to fall within a point or two of accuracy.
I agree with Chuck here.
"A common baseline of facts" is, indeed @Meade, authoritarian. But Obama advocates for far more than that, and he has been for quite some time. His objective is totalitarian control over the internet and he makes no attempts to hide it. This "filtering" plan is being implemented as we speak; it's really quite alarming.
Since Trump won the election, Facebook, Google, and other "accepted" sites have come under sharp criticism by the left for failing to fix their search engine algorithms or otherwise "filter out" conservative view points, a/k/a "fake news." (And all good citizens must understand there is NO distinction between hacked, but true, news, and fake news. Any "true" news that doesn't advance the left's agenda is "hacked" or "fake" -- it's all bad and must be ignored and then destroyed.)
Here's Obama in October of 2016:
“We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to.
There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world,” Obama added.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/10/14/obama-change-wild-west-media/
Other than the fake news reported by corporate legacy media -- like Hillary's glowing exit polls, or the the Trump dossier -- can the left point to any "fake" news that came from the right? How have I missed this wild-west torrent of news that has no "basis in anything"?
Chuck wrote:
"Yancey Ward; if the national pollsters' methodologies were so bad, how did they get the results so right?"
It isn't enough to just get the overall country vote right within the margin of error- that was the point I was making with the remark about using Nevada as a proxy for the whole country. For one to conclude that any single national poll got it right, that poll has to do two things, not just one- predict accurately the overall popular vote and account for that result on a state by state basis- this is why, by the way, such polls make sure to sample people from every single state in the union. None of the national poll takers even once warned in the writeups that Clinton's lead nationally was accounted for by California alone- not one. This tells me that none of them produced results that could have been used to predict the actual winner.
If one had a truly accurate or correct national poll, one wouldn't have given Clinton better than a 50% chance to win because even leading nationally by 4%, one would have realized that she trailed in the other 49 states combined. I am telling you that none of them detected that problem with her support, and thus failed.
The national polls methodology is flawed- that should be abundantly clear to anyone with an IQ over 95. To use them to predict who is going to win the election, they are going to have to use much larger sample sizes. If not, then they are useless.
I'm kind of surprised this didn't get the "civility bullshit" tag.
Chuck said... The difference-maker in Michigan was the low overall voter turnout in Wayne County. Turnout (where Dems win 85-95% of the vote) was down by more than 130,000. Trump won the whole state by less than 11,000.
1/17/17, 2:13 PM
Wayne County- Isn't that the place where Hillary won 140% of the eligible vote? And yet there hasn't been one democrat party media type even daring to say "Voter Fraud". But sure pal, we all know Hillary won the popular vote fair and square, and it had nothing at all to do with voter fraud or 10 million illegal aliens in California and 40 or 50 million more illegals scattered throughout the rest of the country...
Anglelyne thanks- debate helps one sharpen the focus of the disagreements, but I am not begging the question by pointing out the recent increase in enrollment to ACA because I think it suggests the need for some kind of my inclusive insurance and yes the medical system is over-loaded with this influx making access to care challenging, but the 30 million dollars provided to support Advanced Practice Nurses, for example, is having a positive impact in providing access. Most of my recent care has been under the care of Pas for example. But yes the high cost of deductibles for many is a real problem( depends on the state) and this needs to change but I am not sure be repealed.
"But without some common baseline of facts"
One of the problems is who get to pick what the "common" part of that "common baseline of facts" is. Progressives believe they can pick what facts are admissible to an argument, and rule out of bounds other facts. This is to a large extent what political correctness is. Try to bring in some facts about inherent differences in the preferences of men and women to a policy discussion, for example, and wait for the fainting spells.
This leaves aside the idea that political outcomes are merely the Spock-like outcome of pure deductive reason from axiom-like "facts." It's a fact that illegal immigration results in cheap lawn care. The belief that the US would be a more pleasant place to live without a permanent underclass of alienated Hispanic workers isn't quite a fact in the same sense, but that doesn't make it an illegitimate political question.
If you had said to me early election night "Trump is going to carry Wisconsin *and* Michigan *and* Pennsylvania." (drawing three inside straights in a row), I'd have laughed, too. Who, besides his internals team, saw *that* coming?
"Hillary is going to be very busy as President the next 4-8 years."
Well anyway, now she can get some rest in the next 4 years. And it looks like she needs it.
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