Presidential Race 2016

[Timex]

There are variations, but he still wins in almost every age group.

But “win” in some of these cases means “26%”.

And 26% is exactly the same percentage that Cruz had, and one percent more than Rubio in SC.

Winning a plurality with less than 30% isn’t really indicative of some kind of serious groundswell of support.

[Quaro]

Here’s why that’s wrong:
The media ignores you if you are reasonable.

Seriously. That’s why it doesn’t work.

If you are a mature adult, you get some trivial slice of airtime. The only people who get coverage are the folks who are either insulting trump, or getting insulted BY trump.

And the only way to win is to be the guy who gets the most face time. That’s what’s going to consolidate the GOP vote. And Rubio’s plan is working. He’s on the news every freaking day now. And that’s his only chance.

We can lament it all we want, but that’s how it is. Playing nice doesn’t work, because the media refuses to cover issues.

I think you can viciously attack Trump without saying he has a small penis and get just as much attention. Even John Oliver’s video posted was infinitely more professional and effective, and that’s a comedy news show where a lot of jokes come from insults. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpO_RTSNmQ)

[Incendiary_Lemon]

Winning a plurality with less than 30% isn’t really indicative of some kind of serious groundswell of support.

You took issue with poll tab that indicated an older sample?

My point was that Trump does reasonably well with young people, unlike someone like Huckabee.

[Strollen]

Bloomberg columnist, Megan McCardle has a good articleon the the feelings of a number of #NeverTrump Republicans. There are plenty of folks beside Timex and myself who will vote for Hilary. I got quoted twice in the article.

[Oghier]

Dude, do you seriously not grasp that Trump could, quite literally, start WWIII?.

I don’t find Trump’s various statements on foreign policy to be any more incendiary than Cruz’s. Trump wants to kill terrorists’ families. Cruz wants to carpet bomb Isis’s cities. They’re both proposing war crimes. The difference is that I think Trump’s statements are bombastic rhetoric. I am confident in Cruz’s sincerity.

I don’t think Trump is Hitler or Mussolini. The better comparison is Berlusconi. None of those are good choices, but I really don’t see Muslims being loaded into cattle cars in the US. That’s not going to happen. Ultimately, Trump’s only idealogy is “Trump is awesome.” Cruz could be our Norsefire party. I see him as a genuine, existential threat to our system of government.

[Quaro]

My Cruz vs Trump predictions for how they would actually be as a President has a lot of variance on the Trump side. I know how Cruz will be. Trump though is a crazy wild card. He could be a lot worse – like WWIII worse – or he could be better either because he’s completely ineffective, or because he really doesn’t believe 90% of the things that come out of his month.

[Dan_Theman]

Bloomberg columnist, Megan McCardle has a good articleon the the feelings of a number of #NeverTrump Republicans. There are plenty of folks beside Timex and myself who will vote for Hilary. I got quoted twice in the article.

Congrats on the quotes!!

[Incendiary_Lemon]

I don’t find Trump’s various statements on foreign policy to be any more incendiary than Cruz’s.

Rubio and Kasich are actually more interventionist than either of them.

I don’t think Trump is Hitler or Mussolini. The better comparison is Berlusconi. None of those are good choices, but I really don’t see Muslims being loaded into cattle cars in the US. That’s not going to happen. Ultimately, Trump’s only idealogy is “Trump is awesome.” Cruz could be our Norsefire party. I see him as a genuine, existential threat to our system of government.

Berlusconi is a pretty apt comparison.

[ShivaX]

Trump’s people are busy beating up reporters for speaking against The Leader, so I think the Hitler/Mussolini angle isn’t that far off. Cruz is terrifying in that he is a True Believer and you can trust what he says - and what he says is horrible. Trump figuratively wipes his ass with the Constitution every day. Free Speech? Not if Trump can help it. Both would be nightmare scenarios for… well everyone. Trump would have a strong chance of getting himself impeached in my opinion. Cruz, that probably wouldn’t happen to. I wouldn’t want either to even have the chance, we’d pretty much be guaranteed a war if either of them got in power.

[wahoo]

For pure prose stylings alone (“unchurched libertine”, “Taj MaWall”) it’s pretty genius. But he also brings the point home that this is the logical outgrowth of debt ceiling fights, government shutdowns, Planned Parenthood baby-part merchants, and wishful thinking goofballery regarding immigration reform and Obamacare. The GOP over the last 8 years especially built up a debt of paranoia and hate…and now this has happened.

That isn’t exactly right. Trump is seen as being more to the left that people voting in the Republican primary poll. People aren’t voting for Trump b/c they think he’s a true conservative. They know he’s not AND DON"T CARE. Trump is not running as a tea party small govt conservative. He’s not running hard against planned parenthood.

Trump is running as blue-collar white populist. There is a big overlap between some of the Sanders/Trump supporters. Trump supporters endorse more progressive taxation, more pro-union more govt spending on THEM, than the crowd who elected the Tea Party. There is evidence that Trump is drawing more voters than the traditional Republican base b/c he’s running a populist (and nativist) revolt. He’s proving Cruz’s political strategy that there were a lot of untapped angry people out there who would vote R. But unfortunately for Cruz, these aren’t people who want to back Cruz’s version of conservatism.

There is a worldwide populist strain that is growing and driven by immigration.

Trump’s people aren’t particularly ideological but they hate the elites in DC. They want revolution and someone to represent them. Some interesting data that shows that Trump is connecting with people who feel disconnected from the country and don’t have a voice. Rand just published some interesting analysis that said the strongest predictor on whether someone backs Trump is whether the agree "“people like me don’t have any say about what the government does.” Even stronger than illegal immigration as a predictor on which candidate they back.

[magnet]

But it does mean that, because they, at best, had such a small sample of republican voters under the age of 50 that they couldn’t even list the MOE.

Let’s be specific. They had a sample of republican voters under age 50 with sample error >8.5%.

That doesn’t mean they had zero. That means that they had less than 132 respondents. Because 132 respondents is the threshold you need for a sample error <8.5%.

Hell, it’s possible that they literally didn’t have any in their sample.

That’s not just unlikely. It’s impossible, because they said they weighted the final result according to demographics, and you can’t do that unless you have data from each demographic category.

That means that there is no possible way that you can weight the results to accurately represent the actual voting population. It’s not like they had a small sample with a reasonable MOE that they could then extrapolate. They had effectively no data for how young voters would vote.

That’s also false. Any data set can be combined with another data set. Of course when you do this, you need to carry over the error. So by looking at the overall sample error, you have an idea of the quality of the data that they used to construct the overall poll number. After all, you can’t combine a bunch of tiny data sets and still get an overall sample error rate of 5%.

But that’s exactly what happened. When all was said and done, they found overall 49% in favor of Trump with 5% sample error. That tells you that the subgroup sizes were much closer to 132 than to zero.

[Timex]

I don’t find Trump’s various statements on foreign policy to be any more incendiary than Cruz’s. Trump wants to kill terrorists’ families. Cruz wants to carpet bomb Isis’s cities. They’re both proposing war crimes. The difference is that I think Trump’s statements are bombastic rhetoric. I am confident in Cruz’s sincerity.

I don’t think Trump is Hitler or Mussolini. The better comparison is Berlusconi. None of those are good choices, but I really don’t see Muslims being loaded into cattle cars in the US. That’s not going to happen. Ultimately, Trump’s only idealogy is “Trump is awesome.” Cruz could be our Norsefire party. I see him as a genuine, existential threat to our system of government.

Yeah, the Muslims will only be banned from entering the country.

It’s the eleven million illegal immigrants who will be rounded up and put into the cattle cars.

I mean, seriously, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated absolutely no consideration for any of your constitutional rights.

You are prepared to say that someone who literally advocates authoritarian fascism is somehow preferable, “because he probably won’t actually commit the atrocities he says he is going to commit.”

I have no words for how fucked up that is.

[Incendiary_Lemon]

I wouldn’t want either to even have the chance, we’d pretty much be guaranteed a war if either of them got in power.

Trump just doesn’t scare me. All I see is a showman using incendiary rhetoric to cloak his otherwise moderate stances. Sure, he appears to have an outsized ego - and I do think he’d get endlessly frustrated by the constitutional constraints - but I don’t think he’s particularly dangerous.

Obnoxious, yes, dangerous no.

As to the bit about war, I think the moderates are actually more dangerous. Rubio and Kasich have both articulated strong interventionist foreign policies.

[Strollen]

I don’t find Trump’s various statements on foreign policy to be any more incendiary than Cruz’s. Trump wants to kill terrorists’ families. Cruz wants to carpet bomb Isis’s cities. They’re both proposing war crimes. The difference is that I think Trump’s statements are bombastic rhetoric. I am confident in Cruz’s sincerity.

I don’t think Trump is Hitler or Mussolini. The better comparison is Berlusconi. None of those are good choices, but I really don’t see Muslims being loaded into cattle cars in the US. That’s not going to happen. Ultimately, Trump’s only idealogy is “Trump is awesome.” Cruz could be our Norsefire party. I see him as a genuine, existential threat to our system of government.

I think you are completely wrong. President Cruz might very well work to destroy everything you hold dear, but he would do it within the system. So if the top Air Force JAG General said Mr. President that carpet bombing is a war crime, that would stop President Cruz. I think there is a legit fear that President Trump would keep firing people until people somebody agree to take out terrorist families. General Hayden on the Bill Mahr show thought that President Trump, might actually result in the military refusing to obey the presidents illegal orders. While I’m 100% sure that a military coup would be better for country than a President Trump, it is not something that I’d even worry about for any other presidential candidate from either party.

[Timex]

Let’s be specific. They had a sample of republican voters under age 50 with sample error >8.5%.

That doesn’t mean they had zero. That means that they had less than 132 respondents. Because 132 respondents is the threshold you need for a sample error <8.5%.

That’s not just unlikely. It’s impossible, because they said they weighted the final result according to demographics, and you can’t do that unless you have data from each demographic category.

That’s also false. Any data set can be combined with other data sets. Of course when you do this, you need to carry over the error. So by looking at the final sample error, you have an idea of the quality of the data that came in. You can’t expect to combine a bunch of tiny data sets and get a final sample error rate of 5%.

But that’s exactly what happened. When all was said and done, they 49% support for Trump with 5% sample error. That tells you that the subgroup sizes were much closer to 132 than to zero.

Dude, they could have had zero people under the age of 50 and still said that they weighted the results according to demographics. It would just mean that age would end up having no impact on the final weighting.

You seem to be making this assumption that their results wouldn’t do this because that would clearly yield misleading results. I’m saying that is exactly what they did, and it yields misleading results.

There is nothing in their report that gives any reason to think that it correctly represents the actual voting base. There’s no indication of what the sample size is for a full half of the population, other than if they had any data at all, that the main of error was over 8.5%.

I’m thinking it’s just a bad poll.

[triggercut]

I’m still hoping to hear some opinions about that CNN poll.

[Timex]

Trump just doesn’t scare me. All I see is a showman using incendiary rhetoric to cloak his otherwise moderate stances. Sure, he appears to have an outsized ego - and I do think he’d get endlessly frustrated by the constitutional constraints - but I don’t think he’s particularly dangerous.

Obnoxious, yes, dangerous no.

As to the bit about war, I think the moderates are actually more dangerous. Rubio and Kasich have both articulated strong interventionist foreign policies.

So you say that it’s just a showman.

What do you see when you watch older footage of fascist leaders in the speeches they gave to crowds in their ascent to power?

Cause I see exactly what you see in Trump rallies.
Exactly the same things.

[Incendiary_Lemon]

What do you see when you watch older footage of fascist leaders in the speeches they gave to crowds in their ascent to power?.

I don’t think populism is a slippery slope to fascism. It’s just populism.

[Oghier]

I have no words for how fucked up that is.

Thanks, I have a lot of respect for you, too.

Again, my point is that Cruz’s mission in life is to destroy our federal government. I’m more concerned about that than I am anything Trump is likely to accomplish. That is not an expression of support for Trump. It’s just a choice between evils. I think it would be a humanitarian tragedy if we deported 10 million people from a country built by immigration. I think it would be worse if our country literally stopped being a country.

[magnet]

Dude, they could have had zero people under the age of 50 and still said that they weighted the results according to demographics. It would just mean that age would end up having no impact on the final weighting.

the entire sample was weighted to reflect national Census figures for gender, race, age, education, region of country, and telephone usage.

You can’t weight the sample for age and region of country unless you have data for every category for age and region of country.

There is nothing in their report that gives any reason to think that it correctly represents the actual voting base. There’s no indication of what the sample size is for a full half of the population, other than if they had any data at all, that the main of error was over 8.5%.

The sample size was 427, which is what you need to know to interpret the final number.

Of course unless you have the raw data, the methods are always incomplete. Even if you knew there were 105 urbanites, you could complain that you don’t know the racial breakdown of the urbanites. And if you found out that 70 of them were white, you could complain that you still don’t know how many of those white urbanites live in the South. And so forth.

But the fact is that the most scientific interpretation of the poll is that Trump’s support lies somewhere between 44% and 54% among Republicans.

The methodology is similar to that used in every other poll you read uncritically. It sounds like you don’t like the methodology mainly because you don’t like the results.