1626

I thought about it but they were complete strangers at a Church dinner where I was pretty much a complete stranger, felt like the last place I wanted to get into a political debate.

1627

Not surprising given that the population grows every year. She doesn’t beat Obama so you have to go back twelve years to Bush 2004, who only won 50.7% of voters. The population has grown 9% since that election (according to google). Not trying to have a go just ranting about inappropriate comparisons like these.

EDIT: I should say I think the focus should be on how many more votes she got than Trump. I have no issue with the general sentiment of the article.

1628

Damn, old people at a church dinner. I am truly sorry.

1629

I’ve been seeing this a lot and I don’t just buy it. Especially this part.

"Nate Cohn, an election analyst at the New York Times, estimates that once all votes have been counted, 63.4 million Americans will have voted for Mrs Clinton and 61.2 million for Mr Trump, giving the Democrat a ‘winning’ margin of 1.5 per cent. "

I’ve been running this search about 6 times a day since election night
2016 popular vote
as of 11/13/2016 at 11 PM EST here are the current totals from AP (I believe)

Donald Trump
Republican Party
47%
60,350,241

Hillary Clinton
Democratic Party
48%
60,981,118

Gary Johnson
Libertarian Party
3%
4,164,589

Jill Stein
Green Party
1%
1,255,968
Other candidates
0.7%
840,260

At this moment Hillary leads Trump by .5% of the popular vote almost exactly the same Gore vs Bush margin.

At the end of election night for me (morning for most of you) Trump was up by 500K in the last 5 days she has been gaining a steady 250K/day. The deadline to receive Absentee ballots in California is Monday, Nov 14 and to be postmarked Nov 8. The big unknown is how many uncounted ballots remain to be counted. I doubt she is going to hit another 2.5 million votes. As practical matter with a popular vote election, we still be sitting here Sunday night not really knowing who won the election.

1630

One might assume the switch to such a system might include some additional changes meant to hasten some of these slower processes.

I mean, you’d assume that. I’m not at all saying the disfunctional US government is capable of actually doing so :)

1631

Some right-wingers are strongly pushing social media stories right now that DT won the popular vote also, or that he would have won but because absentee/prov ballots are not counted if they don’t change the result

https://twitter.com/DanAmira/status/797997532597067776.

1632

When I hear racism in a public place directed at me from a stranger around strangers, my confidence in America might actually uptick a bit if I thought anyone in the room actually cared. I view silence as not only acceptance but support… for the racist.

The time for silence was gone a long time ago, before the election season even started.

1633

Yes, and on election night you were absolutely convinced Trump had won the popular vote :)

If you won’t trust experts, maybe just looking at the historical data would help? The final numbers for 2012 were 65.9M vs 60.9M. But on election night, about the time you proclaimed Trump to be a guaranteed popular vote vinner? It was 58.7M vs. 56.1M. That’s 12M uncounted votes (vs. the 7M NYT was projecting this year at that time).

At the end of the week the 2012 counts were still just at 61.1M vs. 58.1M. So 4.8M Obama votes and 2.8M Romney votes were still to be counted at this point in that election cycle. The slope appears to be a bit gentler, but at least so far there’s no evidence that the pattern has been completely disrupted. And you’d need a very dramatic change for the NYT projections to turn out.

1634

Thanks, that is helpful data which I couldn’t find, where did you find it?
But yes, given the performance of election expert this last year or so (not just this election). I am skeptical that we should be so trusting

On election night I would have made a bet that Trump would win the popular vote, but I wouldn’t have given any odds, so not really guaranteed or absolutely convinced.

1635

Apparently AZ and MI margins narrowing with last votes coming in, down to about 8k each. Crazy how close the election was really, almost 2000 level.

1636

Jesus, I just watched SNL’s opening scene from this Saturday with Kate Mcinnon as Hillary playing piano and singing Leonard Cohen’s Halelujah. That was it. I almost teared up and so did Kate…one of the best performers that show has ever had.

A dark drama for opening instead of comedy.

1637

I’m not aware of any database that has a full historical time series. That would be pretty cool :-/ But you can reconstruct some of it from news articles from the following weeks. The specific 2012 numbers I quoted were from this post:

1638

Are you sure you’ve got the AZ number right? I’m seeing 80k, which is going to be a safe lead even with 200k uncounted ballots. (8k would be crazy, since AZ flipping would mean that WI+MI provisional ballots + recounts actually become meaningful).

1639

I see wisconsin at 27k and michigan at 12k - that’s razor thin. Arizona is still at 80k from what i can dig up.

1640

Either the LA Times poll was right and all the other polling data including (much more rigorous) internal polling by both the RNC and the Clinton campaign was wrong, or something happened during the last days of the election to sway fence sitters. The evidence suggests it’s more likely the Comey letter* had a larger impact than polling being systematically wrong for the entire election. (*To be clear, I don’t think that was Comey’s intent.)

As for the media being in the tank for Trump, I don’t think they thought that way, rather it’s their obsessive “both sidesism” and pursuit of the horse race scandal story.

blob.jpg915×525 115 KB

What impact MSM has on informing opinions and impacting voter choice I can’t say, but clearly with razor thin margins even if that impact is minimal it becomes significant.

As for my blue collar comments, those were miserable jobs made more miserable by my co-workers, but I’ve had a lot of unskilled jobs - landscaping, dishwasher, warehouse, human service, road construction and factory. The latter two is where my “contempt” stems from, the others were fine - and that’s probably because those jobs weren’t all male like construction and factory (and I personally get along much better with women than men, so certainly some of that is on me.) Still I should have been more judicious in my observations.

1641
1642

Well put. See, @Strollen, I think it is fair to place some of this squarely at the media. You specifically call out places like the NYT, but when we talk of media, that is only a small sliver. When you look at the coverage CNN, ABC, FOX, CBS, the whole group of TV news spent more time and more stories covering e-mails than all other issues combined. Tell me that didn’t make a difference?

When actual policy never gets discussed, but breathless exhortations of ‘this email stuff looks bad’ and not even any discussion of if it was bad, well, they carry more than a little of the blame here.

That image? Fucking perfect @MrGrumpy. It really does highlight the issues with the coverage.

1643

One might wonder if, perhaps, issues of policy had come up, if the destitute bolt-tighteners of the Rust Belt might have realized the Democratic party was offering a lot of actual, real, and not-false ideas. . .

1644

I think the media was shameful. Inept. All the stuff everyone says about them is true. But it shouldn’t matter. It’s like complaining about the refs in sports. If you execute a strong game plan and do what you need to do, they should be non issues.

Clinton should have won this even with the shameful media performance.

1645

I think that the problem is that actual issues are complex, and have answers more nuanced than, “I’ll fix it, trust me.”