Tag: Trump

Opinion polling can’t stabilise democracy

Something I’ve been thinking about since the Brexit vote: There was a prevailing sentiment at the time that the British people are inherently conservative, and so would never vote to upend the international order. In fact, they did, by a small but decisive margin. But how was this “conservatism” imagined to act? The difference between 52-48 for Leave and 48-52 is happening in the minds of 4% of the population who might have decided the other way. Except that there’s nothing to tell them that they are on the margin. If you are negotiating over a policy, even if you start with some strategically maximum demand, you can look at where you are and step back if it appears you’ve crossed a dangerous line.

A referendum offers two alternatives, and one of them has to win. (Of course, a weird thing about the Brexit vote is that only one side — Remain — had a clear proposal. Every Leave voter was voting for the Leave in his mind. In retrospect, the Leave campaign is trying to stretch the mantle of democratic legitimation over their maximal demands.) There is no feedback mechanism that tells an individual “conservative” voter that the line is being crossed. Continue reading “Opinion polling can’t stabilise democracy”

A year of Trump

I decided to go back over my comments on Trump from the past year, to see if there is any insight I had, or anything I missed. I don’t think there’s anything there that seems embarrassing in retrospect. The few people interested can find all my comments under the tag “Trump”. But here are some highlights:

  • Back in March I noted the sexism of the media coverage that portrayed Clinton as weak and Trump as strong, even in newspapers like the NY Times that would not consider themselves sympathetic to Trump.
  • I compared Newt Gingrich’s Trump apologetics to those of Albert Speer on Hitler.
  • I first got really frightened of Trump’s potential when I read the NY Times reporting on Sanders supporters who mostly want politics to be entertaining: “A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change…”
  • In June I commented on the weird contortions of logic that the Republican establishment used to argue that Trump is not a fundamental danger to American democracy, and the widespread conviction that Trump’s problem was unfortunately inflammatory language, that could be resolved if he would just speak differently.
  • In July I wrote that, while I still expected that Trump would lose, the mere fact that he could get so far reflected deep sickness in American democracy.
  • I commented repeatedly on the false persistent assertion in the media that both candidates are inherently unpopular and nothing could change that. In fact, Trump has been persistently unpopular. Clinton only unpopular when she is involved in a presidential campaign.
  • In October I commented on the weird distortions of probabilistic language and reasoning that political pundits were using to convince themselves that a Trump victory was impossible. Shortly before the election I took up this theme again. “The reality is likely to be somewhere between 2% and 50%. Where it is, is almost impossible to judge… But even 2%, for the risk of a crybaby fascist as president, is far too much. It’s not clear to me how the US can come back from this disaster, even if Trump loses.” “A fundamental problem with the PEC estimate [99+% chance of Clinton victory] is that it clearly puts very little weight on the possibility of model failure.”
  • Trump’s flirting with antisemitism.
  • Trump’s belief that his prodigious intellect allows him to see simple solutions to problems that the eggheads claim are complicated.
  • I was surprised that Clinton ran a so openly feminist campaign. Trump, locker-room talk, and the pathologies of masculinity.

Constraints

Maybe an opportune to repost something I wrote in June. Mitch McConnell had just remarked that Trump was no danger because “No matter how unusual a personality may be who gets elected to office, there are constraints in this country”. It reminded of the famous comment of Franz von Papen, leader of the Centre Party in the Weimar Republic, and the man who advised President Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor

Wir haben ihn uns engagiert. … Was wollen sie denn? Ich habe das Vertrauen Hindenburgs. In zwei Monaten haben wir Hitler in die Ecke gedrückt, dass es quietscht…

We hired him to work for us. … What’s the problem? I’m the one who has [President] Hindenburg’s confidence. In these two months we have completely backed Hitler into a corner.

He has such a wonderful way of connecting with the working class…

Advance warning

One of the things that seems to have gotten anti-Clinton forces into the highest dudgeon is the report that one or more questions at a Democratic primary debate were leaked to the Clinton camp. My very own right-wing troll — the only one I’ve had on this generally uncommented-upon blog — expresses (in response to this post) this sentiment to support his contention that polls are all made up.

This was commented upon in tones of offended sense of fairness by Donald “System-is-Rigged” Trump, whose grave concern for Bernie Sanders’s treatment by the Democratic establishment surely presages a cooperative working relationship between the two of them.

Which makes this passage particularly interesting from the NY Times review of Megyn Kelly’s new book:

The day before the first presidential debate, Mr. Trump was in a lather again, Ms. Kelly writes. He called Fox executives, saying he’d heard that her first question “was a very pointed question directed at him.” This disconcerted her, because it was true: It was about his history of using disparaging language about women.

Why were the polls so wrong?

While Tuesdays election result is a global disaster, it is most immediately distressing for three groups: American Latinos, American Muslims, and American pollsters.

First of all, let us dispel with the idea (that I have heard some propound) that they weren’t wrong. Huge numbers of polls done independently in multiple states gave results that were consistently at variance in the same direction with the actual election results. I can see three kinds of explanations:

  1. The pollsters shared a mistaken idea or methodology for correcting their tiny unrepresentative samples for differential turnout.
  2. Subjects lied about their voting intentions.
  3. Subjects changed their minds between the last poll and the election.

3 seems unlikely to account for a lot, as it seems implausible to suppose that many people changed their minds so rapidly. 2 is plausible, but hard to check and difficult  impossible to correct. 1 is a nice technical-sounding explanation, and certainly seems like there must be some truth to it. Except, probably not much. As evidence, I bring the failure of VoteCastr.

Slate magazine teamed up with the big-data firm VoteCastr to trial a system of estimating votes in real time. Ahead of time they did extensive polling to fit an extensive model to predict an individual’s vote (probabilistically) as a function of several publicly-available demographic variables. Then they track records of who actually voted, and update their totals for the number of votes for each candidate accordingly.

Sounds like a perfectly plausible scheme. And it bombed. For instance, their final projection for Florida was 4.9 million (actually, 4,225,249) for Clinton and 4.6 million for Trump, a lead of about 3% for Clinton. The real numbers were 4.5 million and 4.6 million, a lead of 1.3% for Trump. (The difference in the total seems to be mainly due to votes for other candidates, though the total number of Florida votes in VoteCastr is about 100,000 more than in the official tally, which I find suspicious.) They projected a big victory for Clinton in Wisconsin.

The thing is, this removes the uncertainty related to reason 1: They know exactly who came to vote, and they’re matched by age, sex, and party registration. Conclusion: Estimating turnout is not the main problem that undermined this year’s presidential election polls.

What is the rating on this movie?

Looking at the NY Times headline

U.S. Faces a Startling New Political Reality After Donald Trump’s Victory

with some mentions of possible cabinet positions for Chris Christie and Rudolf Giuliani, and I had the powerful sense of having fallen into one of those movies where the protagonist accidentally upsets his time stream — for instance, travels to the past and crushes a butterfly — creating an alternate reality where all kinds of bizarre events start to accumulate in the intermediate past: For instance, instead of the respected former secretary of state who is president in our reality, there is a depraved reality TV star who has become president and then filled his cabinet with criminals and then nuked California. (They were nasty.) There must be a way to fix this…

Bullet not dodged

I thought I should post an email that I wrote yesterday morning, expressing my despair before the election, when I thought we might “dodge the bullet” of Trumpism, but still held out little hope for a political system that put us in front of the gun in the first place: Continue reading “Bullet not dodged”

Second season

When my daughter asked me recently, “What happens if Donald Trump wins?” I said I just couldn’t imagine it (even though, as I noted, I couldn’t see a good reason to think it extremely unlikely.) The mind recoils from such madness, though as I have also noted, Berlusconi is a good precedent, and it took nearly a decade to winkle him out of office. Berlusconi with nukes and the NSA.

But while I tried to find a reason for confidence, there was always a nagging voice telling me: People are going to want to see how this show ends. This was the voice of the Sanders supporter quoted in the NY Times back in June who said he would probably support Trump in the general election because Clinton would be boring:

A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in. There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.

The showman Trump had set up an outrageous spectacle that ended on a cliffhanger. If you vote for Clinton, the Trump show gets cancelled, and you never get to see what would have happened.

That dark side won (though not a majority, apparently — now the Republicans will never agree to get rid of the electoral college). The Trump show has been renewed, and we’ll all be watching it — living it, really — for at least the next four years.

Democratic antinomianism

One thing that the US and UK have in common is a sort of democratic antinomianism — a pervading sense that to the holy all things are holy, and to the inherently democratic all things are democratic. Thus they can spy on their populace, torture prisoners held indefinitely without trial, hold embarrassingly badly organised elections, and still be offended at the notion that anyone might have anything to lecture them about democracy. They can elect, or come close to electing, a comically unfit would-be ethnic-nationalist authoritarian strongman and still celebrate their constitutional order.

This is a reason why I feel particularly comfortable in Germany. Germans can be arrogant, on a personal and national level, but they have learned deep in their bones distrust of colourful demagogues.