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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Trying to make sense of Tuesday’s dramatic result
This piece is going to have a lot more questions than answers in it.
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In short, she was not Obama. Very few people are.
"How anyone can call an election two years away when barely anyone could call this weeks election on the night is beyond me.
In two years a lot could happen. We just don't know how it will play"
That's true, but in the five States I mentioned, the Republican margins of victory are now enormous.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jonathon-pie_uk_5825cb47e4b09ac74c52316b?
"We had agreed that the situation of Hungarians already working in the UK today cannot worsen in the future, as long as the situation of Brits working in Hungary won't deteriorate either," Orban said in an interview on Kossuth radio.
"The debate will be about whether those, who would want to move to the UK in the future, will be able to go there or not."
Trump and the Republicans would have to screw un immensely in only a year and half.
https://twitter.com/Legopolis/status/796797636766470144
54 losses in the House, 8 losses in the Senate, and 10 gubernatorial losses.
Not odd at all - leftie hypocrisy knows no borders.
I would've guessed either no age difference or the old guard (as it were) being more likely to turn Le Pen's way. Maybe the critical factor is the wartime status of the Baby Boomer generation? The US and UK were never conquered. Perhaps those who were defeated (and their children) are more like to be pro-EU, pro-multi-culturalism/more fearful of emphasising their own country's interest over others.
Watching how sentiment in Germany develops will be fascinating.
These are not normal times.
Sean Trende of RCP permitted himself a tweetstorm of his prescient articles over the last 7(!) years, and why not? His clear-sighted analysis has been spectacularly vindicated:
https://twitter.com/SeanTrende/status/796826489094373376
[click through to Twitter to find all the links]
Kudos to Paddy Power. I lost a betting slip on Trump, but they have a record of my card payment, so they paid out anyway.
Not sure if or how the parallel can be drawn with Trump. We still don't really know what his monetary & fiscal policy will look like.
No, no, no.
Any evidence for that?
But yes, I'll take that advice thanks.
The Districts lines are against them. Look at, for example, North Carolina in 2012
Dems Votes: 2,218,357
Reps Votes: 2,137,167
Dem Seats: 4
Rep Seat: 9
It would take a miracle for the Dems to take the House.
Oh:...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/11/how-obamacare-helped-trump/507113/
According to ABC, 81 percent of Trump voters think Obamacare “went too far, and half of Clinton voters think it didn’t go far enough.” Likewise, NBC reported that voters who think Obamacare went too far “are breaking decisively for Trump, 80 percent to 13 percent.”
While for others it wasn't:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/learning-trump-won-in-west-virginia
Given how close (relatively) the vote, I think the 'authenticity' of the candidates angle has some merit. Certainly Clinton is seriously deficient in charisma. Trump might be more divisive than any candidate in recent memory, but you can't accuse him of charisma deficiency. That it has no appeal at all to me is irrelevant.
Clinton offered safe pair of hands and more of the same.
Hope and change beats safe pair of hands and status quo.
Authenticity and oratory beats policies and professionalism.
I love reading post-election analysis particularly after an unexpected result (of which there has been many lately).
Maybe it worked.
My concern at present is that we are getting a lot of plausible theories why a candidate who no one expected was going to win at the beginning of the week won. Some of them might even be right.
This is not the first time we've been in this position. Brexit and the 2015 general election come in the same category. Yet we're being surprised all over again.
So I intend spending a little while on receive mode rather than transmit mode so far as causes are concerned.
"Some of Donald Trump’s supporters are openly sexist, some of them are blatantly racist, some have a more general sense of discomfort that the country they thought they knew looks and sounds a lot different than it did when they were growing up." Accurate even if that some is only 0.001%, since it is still "some" and the majority are thus smeared and denigrated by these few….
In comparison, and to provide the missing balance, it would also be accurate to say that "Some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters are full of misandry, some of them are allergic to soap, some despise the institution of marriage, some spent their time disrupting Trump's meetings and did not respect his right to speech, some have a more general sense of hatred towards America and wish to pardon criminals early, allow murderers to avoid the death penalty and only serve 5 years in jail and think Venezuela is the right way to run a country….. "
Of course I would not have had to say that if the smearing had not featured in the article.
.
The pollsters didn't though.
Bloody hell, those were all polled atrociously - particularly Ohio and PA. Utterly, utterly shit.
All the pollsters and media organisations need to do next time is just head to Pennsylvania anyway. Much more crucial than the national picture (It is the swing state again, and will be correlated with the rest of the rust belt).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Citizens_Redistricting_Commission
It's just not easy passing that kind of reform when it's not in the interest of those in power.
Since WW2 every single President has run for re-election and they have won 8 out of 11 times. On that basis, he should be heavy odds on.
Johnson and Ford were obviously different in that they weren't originally elected President and were running after partial terms - if we exclude them then Presidents running for re-election have won 7 out of 9 times (the only two losers being Carter and Bush Snr).
So why are Trump's odds so long? Presumably two reasons:
1) He may not run - he'll be 74. And will he actually enjoy being President anyway?
2) The map looks good for the Democrats in the sense that if they can recover previously safe states (ie PA, MI, WI) then they win. FL, NC and OH don't really matter - win PA, MI, WI and focus on defending CO, NV, NH.
JackW's campaign was fine. The ammunition he was supplied with was boobytrapped.
*innocent face*
The public have rejected the notion that all cultures are equal. They do that not on the basis of colour or sexuality, but on the basis of experience.
The left seem to be struggling enormously with understanding this and resolutely play three wise monkeys regarding minorities and the average Joe just regards them with disdain as a consequence.
The Democrats, like UK Labour, have gotten themselves into hock to minority interests, to such an extent that some truly inexcusable behaviours are excused.
A general sense exists that there are a set of people on the left who will froth at length about Trump's words, who will then seek to excuse terrorist atrocities etc.
So effectively he did need PA.
Still, I think social and cultural decline is a lot easier to tolerate if it goes with economic growth. When both are perceived to be declining - as is the case across many of the red counties - you have a problem.
I was trying to compartmentalise and distinguish between Trump's supporters and their reasons (prejudice, gun control, abortion etc) with the 'some are this, some are that, etc'. Then push towards the insurgency and elites thing as the primary narrative that swung the election. It was a paragraph of splitting apart rather than lumping together.
It was a response against the reaction of "racism/sexism won" that was the immediate reaction in some quarters and an attempt to acknowledge that it exists in some groups but that it wasn't the most important thing at work.
I guess that wasn't as clear as I thought.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/11/britain-could-join-usa-canada-and-mexico-in-new-free-trade-area/
"Clinton lost because she couldn’t get a lot of Obama voters to turnout for her, "
I've heard this surprisingly often, considering how recent the election was. However it isn't very plausible. I assume it's popular with the losers because it's more reassuring than the alternatives.
Keiran Pedley posted an article here yesterday showing that Romney (2012 )and Trump (2016) received about the same number of votes, while Clinton (2016) received 6 million fewer than Obama (2012). Phew. So a bunch of Democrats stayed home. Case closed.
Except this completely ignores the fact that the GOP establishment disowned Trump and in many cases worked against him. The "conservative" commentariat were almost all loudly ranged against him. By contrast, those same people had energetically campaigned for Mitt Romney. To believe the "6 million Democrat voters stayed home" story, you must also believe that the Republican establishment and commentariat is utterly, totally and completely ineffectual. That either support or condemnation from Ryan, McCain, Romney and all the rest had no more influence on the election than me making a speech to my cat.
A far more credible explanation for Kieran's figures is that ...
a) Official Republican opposition cost Trump some votes - probably a few million
b) Clinton being a disastrous candidate caused some Democrats to stay at home - probably a few million
c) Trump's skills as a campaigner and his appeal as a candidate drew in enough extra votes - quite likely former Democrats - to erase the effect of a).
You can see why the establishment would hate that version - it implies that there are millions of Republican votes still available if the party hierarchy just stops opposing it's own candidate.
Which would, in retrospect, have been more plausible if it's assumed that PA, MI and WI all move "together".
Indeed.
*Restores self-imposed prohibition*
Today they control 15 governorships and 30 of 99 state legislative assemblies, and have lost the House, Senate and WH.
Obama was a unique combination of being very popular personally, but 3/4 of Americans felt he was leading the country in the wrong direction. Since 2008 the three elections where he was not on the ticket have all been repudiations of Obama's policies.
Several articles in magazines of all shades of opinion have this week described the Democratic party as a smoking heap of rubble. That's obvious hyperbole, but the party seems to have lost its way in the post-Obama world, as Obama dragged them way leftwards compared to the country as a whole.