
Trump’s Data Team Saw a Different America - protomyth
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/trump-s-data-team-saw-a-different-america-and-they-were-right
======
thisisdallas
I would just like to remind everyone of the words Obama spoke yesterday, "Now,
everybody is sad when their side loses an election, but the day after we have
to remember that we’re actually all on one team. This is an intramural
scrimmage. We’re not Democrats first. We’re not Republicans first. We are
Americans first. We’re patriots first.

We all want what’s best for this country. That’s what I heard in Mr. Trump’s
remarks last night. That’s what I heard when I spoke to him directly. And I
was heartened by that. That’s what the country needs — a sense of unity, a
sense of inclusion, a respect for our institutions, our way of life, rule of
law, and respect for each other."

Let's make sure our comments here are tolerant of others and devoid of hate at
those we might not understand.

~~~
zimpenfish
> a sense of inclusion

Hard to take from a man who chose an virulent anti-LGBTQer as his VP running
for a party with extensive anti-inclusionary policies as their platform.

Edit: To correct VIP to VP.

~~~
riyadparvez
"inclusion" is one of the feel-good words which does not mean anything in
real-life. Since this word is mostly used by liberals, I would start with the
protected classes, e.g., homosexuals, religious minorities. How do you include
religious Muslims and homosexuals in the same group? Homosexuals are regularly
being prosecuted in Muslim-majority countries. Many Muslims (devout or not)
are outright hostile to homosexuals. Do you include religious Muslims or
homosexuals? Please let me know if you know a _concrete_ solution of this
problem, I'm eager to hear that.

~~~
zimpenfish
Since "same group" in this instance is "The society of The United States",
it's quite easy. We manage it in the UK without everything collapsing (thus
far.)

If it helps, you can take "inclusion" to mean "has the same rights" \- ie.
Muslims, LGBTQ, women, etc. all have the same rights.

~~~
jules
It is interesting that you cite the UK as an example, because the US seems to
be doing much better than the UK in this regard. Polls show that 100% of UK
Muslims find homosexuality an unacceptable lifestyle choice, and more than
half want homosexuality made illegal. Not gay marriage, homosexuality.

Being inclusive and tolerant of intolerance works up to the point when the
intolerant group is large enough to wield political power.

> We manage it in the UK without everything collapsing (thus far.)

This may turn out to be awfully prescient.

~~~
zimpenfish
[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/11/british-
musl...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/11/british-muslims-
strong-sense-of-belonging-poll-homosexuality-sharia-law) has the 52% wanting
it illegal but nothing about the 100% against lifestyle choice.

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/may/07/muslims-
britain-f...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/may/07/muslims-britain-
france-germany-homosexuality) has the "100% against" figure but is from 2009
and not entirely relevant at this point.

Either way, they're both included into UK society.

------
awinder
The raw numbers seem to disagree with portions of this analysis. Clinton is
looking to have received 6M less votes than Obama in 2012, and 9M less than in
2008, while Trump matched Romney / McCain vote totals from the same periods.
This wasn't some raucous turnout by voters who hadn't been voting, spurred by
overtures by Trump. It was a refusal to turn out among traditionally
democratic voters -- many in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where
they were asked to vote for a politician who they could directly trace back to
NAFTA and a significant inflection point in the stability of their homes,
families, and towns.

~~~
tdb7893
Please forgive my ignorance but why was NAFTA so bad?

~~~
infinite8s
Free-trade is bad for those whose livelihoods are displaced with nothing to
replace them with. Of course, free-trade is easy to blame, but the elephant in
the room is that even if manufacturing came back to the US, most of it would
be done by robots.

~~~
tdb7893
Yeah, my impression is that the manufacturing will be automated, the pay of
the job will be low, or the prices will increase in most situations. I guess
it remains to be seen whether it is worth it but it seems to me that at the
very least the transition will be painful.

------
dr_
As of this writing, Trump has drawn fewer votes than McCain in 2008 and
substantially less than Romney in 2012. He even has less than Hillary. So I'm
not sure I agree with this analysis about rural voters - at least not with
respect to it being anything unique to this particular election.

What seems more likely is that there was an enthusiasm gap for Hillary Clinton
as a candidate. It's about the electoral college in the end, and a Democrat
like Hillary, who lacks the charisma of Obama, was going to have to bring out
minorities, young voters, and college educated voters in droves to win. She
simply was not able to sufficiently do this.

To win the rural vote back, the Democrats need a different kind of candidate,
none of the ones that they have offered have been able to do this since 2000.

~~~
dwiel
Bernie Sanders did this but the encumbant democrats were able to stop him. The
encumbant rebuplicans werent able to stop trump so he won. The people in these
swing states voted for bernie in the primaries (in places where independants
were allowed to participate). The DNC are to blame for being out of touch with
the general population and forcing an unpopular candidate down our throats.
Its no wonder nobody came out to vote for her.

~~~
nojvek
This 100%. It would have been a different show if it was bernie vs trump.

In a way, it's the Democrats way of saying "to hell with DNC and corrupt super
delegates".

The problem with Hillary is that she was seen as a messenger of whoever funded
her campaign. That included the ultra rich Arabs, multinational corps, etc.
She wasn't authentic.

On the other hand, trump was rich enough to not give a fuck and say things at
the risk of alienating a large crowd.

He really appealed at an emotional level. Hillary was a robot.

------
lujim
Well on a positive note, it's now clear that not even the Clinton's or all
their political allies can rig a US general election. Like or hate the result,
the Electoral College, or the "uneducated" US voter, it seems like even if the
system isn't 100% fair or perfect, at least it isn't easy to rig. (Democratic
primary not so much though)

~~~
benmw333
Agreed. The kind of money that was put up in this election... scary. Not to
mention MSM. It will be interesting to see how that evolves over the next four
years.

~~~
hga
Not so scary when you see the results, or lack thereof. How many dollars did
¡Jeb! pay for each primary voter? Early on it was low-mid 4 figures, couldn't
easily find a total. Did find something that claimed Trump spend 63% less for
each electoral vote he earned.

My thesis is that money only gets you a hearing. After that, it depends the
most on whether people like what they're hearing from you.

------
binalpatel
The interesting part of this is almost everyone was wrong in this (though when
you're talking the realm of probability, it's hard to actually say they were
wrong).

In my statistics classes we often talk about bias and biased estimates, that
you calculate something in such a way that it's systematically different than
the true underlying population value. (I.E. if Trump's true likelihood of
winning the presidency was X - we always resulted in estimates that were X
minus some value below).

Long story short - it's cool to see in the real world :). You can have the
fanciest models and math, but if the underlying data and assumptions you're
working with aren't representative of the population, then it's all for
naught.

------
dwiel
If you look at the democratic primary maps [1], you'll see that these white
rural voters were actually more progressive than their counterparts in the
cities.

Look at the county maps for Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. The
people in the cities there thought that Bernie was too progressive and so
"unelectable" while these "backwards" racist rural voters actually voted for
him.

These are the people the DNC completely ignored. These are the people that
Trump's team saw. They aren't all stupid racist hicks. They voted for Bernie.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Part...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016)

------
Neliquat
Closing by by blaming white voters? Really? Can we stop the race baiting?

------
sp332
I really doubt it. They seemed as surprised as anybody.

~~~
pcunite
I think the surprise (as stated by their campaign) was from overcoming voting
fraud, not from popularity.

~~~
24gttghh
Citation please.

~~~
pcunite
"The election is rigged"

lol

~~~
24gttghh
The process behind selecting the DNC candidate appears to have been unfairly
shifted one direction, but are you suggesting the actual process of
registering voters and counting ballots is rigged by a nationwide conspiracy
of thousands of bi-partisan poll workers?

~~~
rz2k
Pcunite is suggesting that they thought they would win the election, but the
_instrument_ measuring the outcome would be corrupted by voter fraud. In other
words they were surprised by the true outcome being the one that was
recognized.

------
kristianov
Lessons learnt: smugness gets you nowhere.

~~~
woofyman
Exploiting people's fears gets you everywhere.

~~~
kristianov
Please stop dismissing other people's real concerns. The country is divided
exactly because some are dismissing other's concerns. You are still doing it.

~~~
lightbyte
They are not real concerns. Newt Gingrich said it the best - this election was
about "feels over reals".

------
forkandwait
This was a nice article, but can anybody reference a longer, more mathematical
analysis?

At least here they talk about weighting the polling results, but I would
really like to know how, exactly.

~~~
HillaryBriss
This is not a decent answer to your question, but maybe something can be
learned from the analysis company's website.

I guess they're pretty unlikely to give us much detail about their analysis
models, secret sauce, proprietary approach, etc, but maybe there's _something_
mildly interesting here:

[https://cambridgeanalytica.org/datamodels](https://cambridgeanalytica.org/datamodels)

Cambridge Analytica claims to have a database of over 220 million Americans.

------
ryan606
I think one of the key takeaways from Tuesday: Trump won in spite of what was
widely regarded as a NON-EXISTENT ground game. I did not vote for either Trump
or Hillary, but I was pretty confident that Hillary would win due merely to
the fact that she had a much much stronger campaign organization in swing
states. Perhaps ground game, grassroots field offices, and voter databases
don't matter as much as everyone thought they did prior to Tuesday.

------
pcunite
I was studying both candidates. Watching him and her online, the numbers (live
connections) were crazy high for Trump ... like 70K+ for him. His twitter
account had more followers, he had more Facebook likes. It _looked like_ a
total landslide _to me_ (not a professional) based on national and public
data. The news agencies were all acting like it was impossible. One was giving
Trump a 10% chance of winning.

~~~
sshumaker
The fact is, the election was actually very close. If there was 1% more
turnout Hillary would have won (flipping Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan and
Pennsylvania). She won the popular vote after all. So while it's easy to make
broad sweeping generalizations, the story is more complicated than that.

~~~
pcunite
I'm trying to determine if this really occurred, but there is a report of
Terry McAuliffe pardoning 60,000 felons in Virginia for votes.

There are other reports of voter fraud.

Your vote, as well as mine, were counted. But it seems that the loss was
perhaps overwhelming and not as close. We need to get access to the voter
databases for election accountability arithmetic. My understanding is this has
not been released.

~~~
snowwrestler
What really happened in VA is that McAuliffe restored the voting rights of
people who had already served their time and were back in society. This is a
power of the governor under VA law and therefore not voter fraud.

It's also worth mentioning that the idea of restoring voting rights for people
once they have served their time has bipartisan support--in part because so
many people have served time for nonviolent marijuana possession convictions.
Take a look at the election results to see how the country feels about
marijuana possession these days.

~~~
masonic

      This is a power of the governor
    

If true (I haven't read the VA constitution), it's totally unprecedented to
restore voting rights for _everyone_ in a class with no regard to the facts of
individual cases. The partisan motive is obvious.

~~~
snowwrestler
The facts of the individual cases are factored into the conviction and
sentencing. Once the prison term is served, the person can return to society.
This is a fundamental concept of our system of justice.

The truly disturbing idea is that voting rights are removed in the first
place.

