Tag: US politics

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.

Tempering our expectations

Following up on my comment about feeling like I’ve stumbled into a dystopian timebreak, I just got a missive from the alternate timeline that we should have been in. It’s an article by Jeff Stein and Sarah Frostenson on Vox, published at 8:47pm on the night of the election. He is reporting that the early results show that the Democrats will almost certainly fail to attain a majority in the House of Representatives, and commenting on the consequences:

The Republican Party will keep control of the House of Representatives, extinguishing Democrats’ hopes of a new progressive era in Washington.

Failing to retake the House is a sign that liberals will have to somewhat temper their expectations after Election Day. With both branches of Congress and the White House, Democrats could have passed a cap-and-trade bill to combat climate change. They may have tried thrusting through immigration reform. There could have been a real chance at implementing a nationwide paid family leave program or universal pre-K. Perhaps there were enough congressional Democrats to dramatically raise the minimum wage, or pass campaign finance reform, or tackle any of the rest of the party’s key agenda items.

All of that is now probably off the table. At the very least, the odds of any of those things happening are massively diminished.

Still tempering…

Ulysses Obama

I’ve just been reading Ronald C. White’s wonderful new biography of Ulysses Grant, American Ulysses. Inspiring and depressing at the same time, it’s the story of a modest man with a peculiar foreign-sounding name. Possessed of enormous gifts of organisation and leadership, he rose from a decidedly modest background to become president. He was extremely popular during most of his eight years in office, and pursued vigorous high-minded policies as president, particularly focused on protecting civil rights of ethnic minorities, and repairing relations with other countries after a long war. At the end of his two terms he was still popular enough that he could easily have been re-elected for a third. 

His successors set about dismantling everything he had accomplished as president, and later generations judged his presidency an utter failure, partly in order to justify the racist policies that followed.

He was a talented writer, who wrote a celebrated memoir, but political opponents, who held his intellect in contempt, asserted without evidence that it had been ghost-written.

I’m not sure why this all seems relevant at the present moment.

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…

Rehabilitating the single-factor models

Lots of people — myself included — have mocked the penchant of a certain kind of political scientist who like to say that all the superficial busyness of election campaigns is just a distraction, it matters not at all, nor do the candidates really. Presidential elections are decided by the “fundamentals” — usually one or two economic variables. Except that the models work much better for the past than they do for the present or future, and so end up with lots of corrections: So much for an ongoing war, so much for incumbency, or for a party having been in office too long, and so on. They seem kind of ridiculous. Obviously people care who the candidates were. And, of course, these experts agreed that those things weren’t irrelevant, they just tended to cancel each other out, because both major parties choose reasonably competent candidates who run competent campaigns.

And last year they said the fundamentals mildly favoured the Republican to win a modest victory. But the Republicans chose a ridiculous candidate who ran a flagrantly incompetent campaign. So of course this couldn’t be a test of the “fundamentals” theory. But after all that, the Republican won a modest victory. Kind of makes you think…

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”