It's looking like it might be a Brexit moment for the USA. The filter bubble echo chamber of social media and 24/7 coverage of celebrities stumping for Clinton is going to leave a lot of people shocked tomorrow when/if it's officially given to Trump.
I had a feeling this was going to happen today when I saw that virtually everyone in my Facebook feed and everyone on the streets of NYC was supporting Hillary. Every extra +1 in NYC is pretty much going to be -1 in a swing state.
As one of the hundreds of folks banned from DailyKos for being too liberal, I've been spending some time reading the Trump subreddit, and I have to say that Hillary has run perhaps the worst campaign in memory:
- Rigged the primaries against Bernie, disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters, and cheated during the debates.
- Spent 5x more on paid media advertising, and got all the social media sites to censor pro-Trump messages.
- Paid shills to attack anyone who disagrees with her policies on social media.
- It looks like there is a good chance her campaign was behind the attempt to frame Assange for pedophilia.
- Made gender her primary selling point with her #imwithher slogan. (Imagine if she had gone with something like #TheNextAmerica instead, to contrast with MAGA.)
- Accusing Trump of saying and doing tons of things he didn’t actually say or do.
- Characterizing Trump supporters as racists, bigots, deplorables, etc.
- Paying people to incite violence at Trump rallies
- Accusing Russia of hacking her campaign’s emails when in fact it was oedesta who gave out his password to a phishing site… twice… without two-factor enabled.
- Having Bill meet with Loretta Lynch during the email investigation. Then appointing Podesta's close friend to run the email investigation which resulted in a last minute FBI coup forcing Comey to make a statement.
I didn't vote for Trump, I don't support Trump, and I'm as horrified that he's going to be President as anyone else. But I have to say the actions of the DNC, Hillary, her campaign, and many of her supporters have been egregiously bad.
And now everything is super fucked.
edit: For everyone downvoting me, go turn on The Young Turks livestream and hear it from Cenk.
Yep. Trump is a monster, but this feels sort of good knowing how Clinton and her supporters acted. If only people could have seen the light about the Clintons a year ago, then maybe there would've been better choices today.
And remember! The blame for a Trump presidency lies with none other than Hillary Clinton. She's the one that cheated a popular opponent in the primaries, that strategized to promote Trump during the Republican debates, that infiltrated the media and turned journalists into self-admitted "hacks", and she's the one that interjected herself into the presidential race despite knowing that her "scandals" -- electoral corruption, mishandling of classified information, pay-for-play at the Clinton foundation, Bill's history of child rape, etc. -- all disqualify her as a viable opponent to Trump.
Well, to be Machiavellian for a minute, Trump is the only candidate that Clinton has a prayer against. The other Republicans consistently outperform Trump in the polls. On the other hand, this has been a bad year for pollsters.
If she really believed in her causes and not her career, she could have decided not to run and backed a promising successor a long time ago.
Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that the Democrats wanted to ensure that the Republicans would nominate someone more extreme. Look at the PDF attachment here. There's more than just this quote, too:
Operationalizing the Strategy Pied Piper Candidates
There are two ways to approach the strategies mentioned above. The first is to use the field as a whole to inflict damage on itself similar to what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more “Pied Piper” candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
Is there anyone else that could have secured a majority in the House and potentially (as of 1247am EST) the Senate? I doubt that, DC politics is more about trading wins like potheads passing the joint around. I don't mean that pejoratively but literally -- Republicans and Democrats trade wins and losses to curry favor with one-another, meanwhile the interests of the American people are secondary to this political snobbery.
Furthermore, who else could have rallied the masses to vote so thoroughly? A Jeb vs Hillary election would have been very dull, almost depressingly so, meanwhile a Cruz vs Hillary election would have bordered on hopelessly disinteresting.
My hopes are that 1) the media will keep a better eye on Trump (going off the last 8 years, they'll ignore any atrocity as long as it's committed by the blue team), 2) that Trump is not as smart as Clinton, and therefore less able to deceptively achieve his goals and 3) that 4 years of Trump will mobilize Americans to fix their electoral system and seek out real alternatives to the Democrat / Republican duopoly.
Oh please, stop the rhetoric. There will still be an election in 2018 and even in 2020. More importantly there will still be redistricting after the 2020 census and using a Trump backlash the Democrats might actually be able to redistrict in their favor along demographic lines, shutting out the Republicans from majority control of national and state houses for ever.
And you realize that Clinton is actually a Republican too? I'm not calling it our Brexit moment, nor am I remotely excited about the next 4 years. I don't know what kind of moment it is, but let's not pretend that Clinton was a safe alternative. She is as dangerous as Trump, if not more so.
I personally would have liked to see Jill Stein hit 5%, but that looks unlikely.
Clinton may have been a centrist and not helped the Poor. Trump won't help the poor, so it's at best a toss-up.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who are not white, male, Christian, heterosexual, natural-born. And it's gonna get difficult for all those people. Clinton would've left them alone, Trump is fanning the flames of xenophobia.
Nope. I don't think John McCain or Mitt Romney would ever want a dictatorship. Heck, I think 90% of Americans would take up arms if a president didn't give up power peacefully and the military didn't peacefully stop listening and push him out the door.
I meant in terms of this election being a reaction against the moral decadence of the establishment rather than being about economic independence. I didn't mean that the US was going to become a dictatorship. (And in fact Iran itself still has elections.)
Not surprised; a day of reckoning was bound to come for the left. Consider that even if Trump had lost, his power base would still have existed afterward. Trump is not the problem, Trump is a symptom.
The American left took its eyes off of what's important, namely the working class, and instead spent its time and political capital on frivolous[0] causes. This is a wake-up call to refocus.
[0] Lots of things some might consider important are frivolous when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck.
This isnt a day of reckoning for the Left. He hijacked the GOP against its own will and destroyed the DNC. That's a collapse of two establishment parties, not one.
Stop. The. Name. Calling. Stop it right now. Even if your demographic breakdown were correct[0], those are your fellow citizens your're referring to. That tone is why the left is in the state it is right now.
Trump is, perhaps, not going to help "those people" but neither, in their minds, was Clinton. They are simply going with the "perhaps" rather than (again, in their mind) certain no.
Arguing to stop the name-calling is about as effective on HN as it would be on the YouTube comments for a John Oliver video. HN is decidedly slanted on this matter. It's business as usual for democrats to call people names if you don't agree with them. Has been for as long as I can remember.
You'd be surprised. The left is no more unified that the right, in many ways, and members of the mainstream left have been cautioning against this derisive labeling issue for quite some time now. See, for example, Rensin's "The smug style in American liberalism" linked to on HN at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106004
Sorry, I don't get it. Which part is the name calling?
I also am not sure what you mean by 'fellow citizens' or 'the left'. I'm not American. And Hillary Clinton is not a left candidate, she's centre-right.
I put the racist in parenthesis, so clearly I don't mean all of them. But I think a lot of the sort of poor/working class Mid-Western people are in fact racist. If you listen to some reports of Trump rallies; or if you listen to how a lot of these people viewed the 'black lives matter' movement, I don't think its inaccurate. Or if you look at the very strong undercurrent of racism that permeates all of the US.
Racism has been shamed for many decades, and Trump made it 'in' again.
Racism was a major issue in this election. The SNL's 'black jeopardy' skit was surprisingly observant in this respect [1]. I didn't expect people on HN to just dismiss it like that. Or completely ignoring an argument about how people cutting their nose to spite their face, because it included the word 'racist'.
It's kind of ironic, like I tickled somebody's PC funny bone, when Trump's campagin was all about the freedom to say whatever you want.
My apologies, I had assumed that you were American.
Since this is a thread on an American presidential election, on the American political spectrum, Mrs. Clinton would be considered to be on the left or center-left.
I imagine at the very least he won't treat them with open contempt and hostility. That probably goes a long way for some of these voters.
I'm not a Trump supporter, but I do live in coastal California, and the absolute derision with which I see relatively privileged, affluent, college educated people treat or talk about the working/rural poor in "flyover" country makes me question whether, despite my current views, I too wouldn't vote Trump if I found myself on the receiving end of such hostility.
For starters he didn't walk around calling them uneducated idiots like many on the left have and continue to do.
Bernie and Trump are touching into the same underlying problem that a lot of people have been left behind. They have felt screwed by the system for awhile and this is what we get. Heck, Bernie supporters got screwed again during the primary.
This is also only the start. Wait until we automate all fast food and driving jobs to see what a angry, jobless populace looks like.
Remember when she called them a "bag of deplorables"? Not that trump was exactly statesman like, but I don't remember him insulting Clinton supporters, just Clinton herself.
Trump has words ("the best words"). The words will inspire Congress to pass laws. The laws will (in theory) help the people. Trump will continue traveling around the country, and report back to Congress what is or is not working.
Beyond that it's difficult to say, Trump has promised little but hinted at a lot.
One person who has been clear-headed about this for weeks is Michael Moore. Michigan and Wisconsin were supposed to be in the bag for Hillary, but that looks like where the surprise swing is coming from. Moore said from on the ground it felt like white working class people suffering from deindustrialization felt Hillary would do little for them, and might pick up the Molotov cocktail of Trump to throw into the system. His comments have been in lots of pro-Trump videos for weeks. Looks like he was right.
Where is there to "get out" to though? Economically the US has been outperforming the rest of the world recently.
I'm especially worried because the developer job market is a lot worse outside the US than inside it. I genuinely don't know where to go (recession seems inevitable).
I'm not particularly well informed on the actual logistics of mounting a secession from the rest of the US, although at the very least I would imagine securing water rights would itself be a significant challenge for SV, but I very much doubt the "disruptors" in SV have the wherewithal to stomach such an endeavor.
I'm not super familiar with the geography there but I'd imagine everything west of the rockies (is that the right mountain range) would go with California and I thought that this was the source of the water.
I believe a large part of Northern California's, and by extension Silicon Valley's, water comes from the Sierras. The communities of the Sierras, as well as those of the Central Valley which separates Northern and Southern California, tend to be fairly conservative. They also have high rates of firearms ownership. I don't think they would be too keen to join in on a hypothetical SV secession.
Yeah, have fun with that. I don't think putting money in the markets right now is a great move unless you can afford to lose it all. Granted, that's always the case to some extent.
We were already looking rough before Trump, the UK has Brexit, the EU is struggling, China is... who the hell knows. I think we could be in for some historically bad times, and all of this while the Middle East and Northern Africa are burning.
If not for nuclear detente, I'd be pretty concerned about WWIII right about now.
It won't happen, but it'd be hilarious if the Democrats planned to rig future elections by importing millions of immigrants to vote for them, and they instead end up emigrating by the millions to Canada thus swinging it in the opposite direction.
At this point I'd almost welcome a truly rigged system, or even a secret service member who doesn't mind a lifetime in prison. Eight years of W. Bush was bad, and frankly I doubt the economy could withstand whatever Trump has in "mind".
As someone who very much dislikes the prospect of a Trump presidency, and is in fact well to the left of the Democratic party and Hillary Clinton on most social and economic issues, I find this line of thinking quite troubling.
Perhaps rather than hoping for assassinations or voter fraud, those of us who identify as "progressive" could instead channel that mental energy into finding ways to better appeal to large groups of working class people who are imo justifiably angry at the state of things in this country.
You know what? People as a group are just too stupid and easily manipulated to be helped, and given that Trump now gets to pick (probably) 3 SCOTUS seats? We're cooked.
Basically, for most of us here, the rest of our lives will have this election hanging over us, for the implications on the SCOTUS alone. As I said, people who can afford it are going to leave in droves.
No, Evangelicals and uneducated whites are how we get President Trump, along with a majority of people who don't even vote, and a minority who "vote their conscience" with a fool like Johnson despite the lessons of 2000.
If you think that your "I'd almost welcome" weasel wording makes what you're implying acceptable, you need to reconsider the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy.
To be fair, the polls were consistently in the opposite direction. 538 had clinton at 70%, PEC at 99%, everyone else somewhere in between. It's a black swan event, bubble or no.
A 30% probability event coming to pass isn't a black swan event. This term is unfortunately overused for anything unexpected but that isn't what it means.
LA times had it for trump. They had their own weighting. Their results when adjusted for commonly accepted weighting matched the common poll average. So it is in the weighting.
At this time we still cannot be sure who will win but all this to me looks like a big fuck you. It looks like a middle finger and it shows how disconnected media moguls, establishment, bureaucracy and "righteous" leftists-democracts are with the people on the ground.
It went so far that people who would vote for Trump lied in polls just so that they don't receive strange looks or something worse. That is the fear above mentioned "establishment" instilled into people. And it's not just US...
The meltdown of the "media" and shock is just pure funny.
Let's forget about all the controversy around Clinton family. I will just leave this[0] here.
Your statement here, in addition to some of your other comments, is increasing going down a path of vilifying Trump voters as nothing more than racists, xenophobes, and now literal Nazis. You seem to leave no room for the possibility that while there are undoubtedly racists among the Trump supporters, and that Trump has made comments I would consider undignified, and I certainly didn't vote for him, there may be legitimate reasons why so many people across the country felt that Trump was the best opportunity to have their voices heard. Or at least that he represented an opportunity to reject the status quo.
Perhaps those of us who have been fortunate enough, either through pure luck or a combination of circumstance and hard work, to have escaped the trap of poverty and self destruction, would be better served if we empathized with the plight than many of the poor, poorly educated, rural working class are subject to rather than simply dismiss them as rednecks, hicks, white trash, and now apparently Nazis, or any number of derisive names I hear many of my "progressive" acquaintances use.
Don't do me any favors like that. He may be calling me the third
guy down from Erich Röhm, but at least he's being upfront about it, and there's something refreshing in that kind of naked honesty. Ugly as it is, it does make a change from empty condescension.
> The meltdown of the "media" and shock is just pure funny.
Oh good. It's not just me, there are others who want Trump to win just for the lulz. I don't care for his presidency, but Clinton belongs behind bars right now. I hope Trump wins and then does something to land him behind bars too. That would be my preferred outcome. The media has to change too, but I don't think a Trump presidency would be capable of bringing that about.
It's strange, as an outside observe I see hate spewed against giant swaths of the population (the 'establishment', the 'leftists', the muslims, the hispanics, the blacks or whatever) from Trump supporters. But those same people keep complaining about the hate they perceive from the left or whatever.
It's bizarre. Are people supposed to embrace the racism, sexism and bigotry?
I think people have more problems with a candidate trying to shut down uncomfortable opinions through the back door than with a candidate who's openly sexist and xenophobic.
Anyone supporting trump is getting labeled a racist, misogynist, xenophobe. We've seen what happens to to people like Thiel and Eich, people try to get them black balled from the industry because they dare to disagree.
Then someone openly flouting this "PC ideology" you've been getting increasingly frustrated by comes along they look quite appealing.
“The Advocate, a magazine that once raised me as a gay innovator, even published an article saying as of now I am, and I quote, ‘not a gay man’ because I don’t agree with their politics,” he announced. “The lie behind the buzzword of diversity could not be made more clear. If you don’t conform, then you don’t count as diverse. No matter what your personal background.” -Peter Thiel
Don't forget "homophobe", while you're at it. I have to say, it's a real scream to hear that one from guys who cringe when I talk about sucking cock. It's even better than being lectured on race relations by white dudes who've never lived anywhere that had more than three black people out of every thousand.
> Then someone openly flouting this "PC ideology" you've been getting increasingly frustrated by comes along they look quite appealing.
Oh, my, yes! Especially after we've had such opportunity to observe, firsthand and in detail, what progressivism actually does to all but a PR-vetted, camera-ready token few of those on whose behalf its adherents claim to act - to say nothing of those whom it explicitly discards.
We know well what it's like to be trod upon in no more noble cause than advancing someone else's bid for power. We should do - they've been doing it to us for decades. And, more and more, we are realizing that there is nothing in it for us. More and more, we're no longer willing to serve as the compliant little political puppets that people like ant6n and M_Grey demand we be, because obviously they know better than we do what's good for us. "Too stupid and easily manipulated to be helped," I believe it was, and of course we're too ignorant to recognize the difference between being helped, and letting ourselves be co-opted and fucked over time after time after time.
"Too stupid and easily manipulated," eh? In fairness I have to give him that second one - we've certainly let progressives lead us by the nose against our own best interests often enough over the last few decades. But that's changing, and doing so faster than I'd have imagined possible only a few years -- only a few hours! -- ago. If they're really too blind to appreciate the arrogance and the sheer unmitigated gall of simultaneously holding us in such contempt and demanding we lick their palms and show our bellies and do as we are told, that's their lookout, not ours. And if they're really too bound up in their damnable ideology and the wreckage of their quest for power to recognize how gravely they've gone wrong, then to hell with them.
> Then someone openly flouting this "PC ideology" you've been getting increasingly frustrated by comes along they look quite appealing.
But you know, it's not just a matter of flouting "pc ideology". It's not just words. Trump is actually openly racist and sexist not only in words, but also in actions.
It seems like Hillary has done all kinds of shady deals just to manipulate opinions. Trump on the other hand is just being Trump - he just says whatever the hell stupid thing is in his head at the moment. People perceive him as honest, even though what he says is highly contradictive - but at least his speeches and ad money is all he seems to be using, rather than doing blatant media manipulation.
The whole time I thought - if I were American, I would have had to vote Hillary because Trump seems dangerous, but after reading the following I'm actually not sure anymore. It makes me understand today's result somewhat. The Clinton campaign more and more seems like an entire season of House of Cards.
A lot of things can be misinterpreted if you already have your mind in the specific drawer.
You remember when Trump said that Putin is strong leader and afterwards that if he is the president US won't be weak anymore?
Well, he actually meant that Obama is weak and not that Putin is strong. But most of the media and people interpreted that as a thumbs up for Putin. Actually it was thumbs down - as in - it won't be so easy with me.
My 'drawer' is that the US has a deeply dysfunctional system, and it's in even deeper denial about itself. The lack of education is also a major concern, as is the whole 'fuck you' mentality of all the disenfranchised folks; and the even bigger 'fuck you' mentality of the people in money and power.
The only thing that could possibly help it is a pluralist democracy, but I guess that would be too boring, and just wouldn't advance the joyful hate of the binary system.
Nice but the three top gauges are moving suspiciously fast. Do they add a little random the the real number to give a sort of error margin visualisation ?
Jitter is a visualization of uncertainty. Rather than display a range, it displays a needle moving within that range.
It's only misleading developers, who will think that data is being streamed rather than fetched once. Other than that it's a clever (and yes, entertaining) way of displaying margins of error.
Can I offer that, of all the things in news and dataviz to shit on, this isn't one of them? I mean, really, an "abuse of our attention" - what?
Yeah, I thought about it a little, and I guess you are right.
Only a dev would think about the possibility of a statistical model updated with a second(s) granularity.
And be disappointed (I was) that it's actually just updated every few minutes with a fetched JSON file, rather than some fancy instant updates pushed down via a websocket connection. :D
I think you're actually completely wrong about that. I think most people will assume it's an actual update when the animation moves. It's the devs that will stop to think if they're actually doing that or not, and have the knowledge to check for themselves.
Exactly :) I agree with what you said elsewhere in the thread as well, it's certainly a way to retain users on the page longer and have them stare at the gauges very attentively. I actually love this on so many levels.
I'd imagine scaling out a single static file and sending a CDN purge every half a minute is significantly easier than maintaining millions of live websocket connections
I wrote an "abuse of our attention". Here's why. Attention is a limited commodity. Movement attracts the eye. Using movement is fine if it conveys information. Movement that never stops should only be used if each movement conveys information.
In this case, a better solution would be a blurred needle.
It is well known that multi-tasking and context switching has a cost. The same applies to movements on visualizations.
I don't want to scroll away because I want to see when the mean value moves based on real data, not jitter.
One can convey mean and standard deviation without animation.
When something moves, the way it moves catches the eye. Arbitrary movement is wasted movement when it comes to conveying real information.
Take electron orbital clouds [1]. They are a nice way to show uncertainty with a static image and without animation. Indeed, an animation of an electron moving around would not the tell the story as effectively. A blurred probability cloud is a better way to do it to tell the story of probability.
Also, a blurred cloud is useful precisely because it does not imply that electrons follow predictable paths.
> Other than that it's a clever (and yes, entertaining) way of displaying margins of error.
No dispute that it's clever and entertaining. These are undesirable qualities in a reliable source of information.
Can you imagine reading a scientific journal in which the data narrative was deliberately engineered to keep you guessing until the conclusion? You would be right to raise eyebrows at a publication that is investing in your attention rather than its own accuracy.
There's no dire consequence here, it's just slightly dystopian that US presidential elections are unapologetically leveraged as a vehicle for mass entertainment by the press itself.
Good thing the NYT is not a scientific journal then? And that what you mentioned has nothing to do with jitter, either.
HN is so incredibly cynical sometimes. How are "clever and entertaining" undesirable qualities in reliable source of information? The only requirement in a reliable source of information is reliability. "Entertaining" is very much a desirable quality if you actually want people to care about said reliable information.
My argument is that jitter doesn't make it unreliable as it's simply a visualization of the uncertainty. So if it gets people interested and doesn't do it inaccurately, that's a win in my book.
You would be right to raise eyebrows at a publication that is investing in your attention rather than its own accuracy
Por que no los dos? One doesn't conflict with the other.
> unapologetically leveraged as a vehicle for mass entertainment
Sorry America, you turned those elections into mass entertainment all by yourself ;)
Agreed, if it was oscillating wildly between extremes that would be one thing, but moving a few degrees is IMHO a helpful reinforcement of the margin of uncertainty.
You're being too generous... this visualization misleads everyone who knows how to read an analog gauge. Your car's speedometer does not jiggle around to represent its own imprecision.
Perhaps if the person being weighed jumps around, in which case the scale is doing its job correctly--or a very sensitive scale reacting to changes in air pressure. Scale readings generally do not jiggle/bounce with a static load.
After standing on a scale and you get oscillations from momentum which soon resolve to your actual weight. You see the same thing when putting fruit on a scale at the grocery store.
You can see similar issues with most purely mechanical dials to one degree or another when they are responding to a rapid change.
Sure you could use it that way but even so its an unclear representation at best. At worst misleading and disingenuous. If this is the information beung conveyed why not just have a bell curve of probability or a certainty range?
Examining whether the graphic is misleading is exactly in their purview. If they believe it is, they would be as likely as anyone to improve their standards and processes.
Of course they aren't going to get it fixed tonight if that is what you are thinking.
I think the idea is to indicate these numbers have error bands:
The estimates below include an estimate of uncertainty. We expect the uncertainty around these estimates to narrow, especially after races are called.
I don't see any reason why we'd expect the uncertainty to be updated more than every 30-180 seconds or why any of this is the least bit "disingenuous".
Dug through the code. Just inspected the element showing the number to get the class (.widget-info-display-cont) and searched through 'general-main.js' to find where the element is created. A timer that updates the value in the element is found ~100 lines further down.
That's how they load the module that does the jittering. So by assigning its .get() method to be a noop instead (return 0), it does nothing (besides pointlessly return zero) when attempting to load.
There is a proliferation of predictive models and their outcomes vary widely. LA Times consistently predicted a Trump win, FiveThirtyEight was down to a coin toss a few times, while The New York Times was persistently pro-Hillary. While those models were meant to help people make sense of the large number of individual polls, now we need models to make sense of the models.
It is better than what we do, informally. We all use models (of some sort) when we process information; e.g. I discount certain publications and value others. But few people actually make their models explicit and ask others to critique them.
Making a model public and explicit is a great first step. Building more models on top is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Dow futures down 752. Canada's immigration site down.
The Trump transition team, in rented office space in Washington, just became very important. They're Trump's HR department, and have to recruit the several thousand people the President gets to appoint. Because Trump isn't tightly connected to the "Republican establishment", the usual suspects aren't in line for those jobs. So where do they come from? Business?
Will Peter Thiel go to Washington? Secretary of Commerce, perhaps?
The United States is/was a collection of independent state governments. At one point, many state governments selected the electoral college representatives from their states. Until it was amended, states governments chose their senators.
There are political and historical reasons for having the system work this way, much like how the ordering of primaries is a contentious and complicated arrangement.
I feel the original question was more in the line of "Why are US presidential election are not like elections in the many other democratic countries?" and is a huge trivialization of a complicated issue.
Forget or deny to know? For people living in the USA, forgetting that must be quite a challenge; every four years, there's half a year of real reality tv, extensively covered all over the news, to remind them of it.
It's not obvious by any means, that's why I pointed to the reference work on that topic. There are reasons the electoral college was implemented, whether they are still valid of not is a different question entirely.
Furthermore, it's not even clear what the question is. Why it's not elected by the US populous? Because it's the President of the United States being elected, not the President of the people of the United States. Why is it not a direct vote? In part, to make the system resilient to the tyranny of majority which was feared by Founding Fathers.
There is extensive literature on that topic by the designers of the system itself and one cannot summarize it in a HN comment. So if the the Americans the parent was referring to are indeed puzzled by that question there are answers to be found.
Yeah, the entire system is screwed up by this insane electoral college. But majority-rule is insane even on a popular vote. The only good way to elect consensus candidates who serve everyone well is to implement score voting http://scorevoting.net/
Nope STV is not so good, it still falls to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem which applies to every single rank voting system.
Sure, first-past-the-post is horrid, but if you expend political will, time, power, energy, money to reform the voting system, it's a tragedy to replace a horrible system with a bad one when we actually know of a good one. We will not get infinite, costless resources and chances for voting reform.
Several systems work well for electing a good consensus candidate in a single-winner election, including Condorcet, Approval, and various forms of range voting.
Score voting is just another term for range voting. Approval is just score voting with the lowest resolution, effectively. Condorcet can elect a consensus candidate but inherently is worse at this than score/range/approval.
Condorcet is a rank system so Arrow's Impossibility Theorem applies.
Also, being a rank system, there will always be arguments about
interpretation where people can hand-wring over how the outcome would be
different with Borda or IRV or another way to determine the results of a
rank-vote election. Finally, Condorcet always supports
tyranny-of-the-majority rather than consensus. A polarizing candidate with 51%
support and 49% strong disapproval will always win any rank vote, while a
consenus candidate everyone likes can win a score or approval vote.
Effectively, score is range is approval, same basic idea, and ONLY that
idea is simple, clear, zero argument about interpreting results and none of the
pathologies of rank voting. And no, rank voting is NOT able to elect consensus
candidates over polarizing ones in the way score voting does.
I leave work and I see Clinton is the probable winner. I drive home, get some dinner, and I get a text from the WSJ that stock futures are crashing because Trump might win?!? What the friggin hell pollsters? I get the feeling some explaining on the part of the newspapers and new networks is in order.
Fair, that would be way too high. I was really meaning to reference relative turnout for each candidate. That is, which party or candidate is better at actually getting their voters to do their job and vote.
I know in Canada they have a media blackout for each timezone until polls close (or are almost closed). The assumption is people will change their vote based on early counts.
However, that may have changed with the internet since you can't stop anyone from getting early results.
Edit: yup, looks like Canada stopped that back in 2014 [1]
Here is a survey of some extremely unlikely but entertaining outcomes.
1) Neither candidate gets 270, McMullin gets at least 1, either from Utah or a faithless elector. The "never trump" republicans in the House elect McMullin over Trump. End result: Evan McMullin as president
2) Same as 1), but with Gary Johnson
3) Majority in electoral vote, but some faithless electors withhold their vote. I'd actually very much like to see this happen, as it would be far more interesting to see the House have to decide on this.
4) Tie, deadlock in House and Senate. End result: Paul Ryan as president
Last year, I would have agreed with you. However, I have wholesale lost all faith in my ability to understand how politics works. I would have said that this country would never elect Donald Trump, reality TV star (I understand other things as well), as president of the United States.
Aside from the obviously fake jittering gauges, it seems like whenever I reset the page the pointer goes to about 68% and then after 5-10 seconds jumps to 77%. Not sure if it's caching a number and then updating or supposed to make me stay on the page.
Why is voting actually hard to do? Even though we're so encouraged to vote, there is a lot of red tape. For example, depending on your street address, you may have to vote at a garden variety pick of a building. At my university, I couldn't vote in building A because my apartment was on street X. I ultimately was not able to vote today because it was actually _hard_ to vote.
Do you watch Last Week Tonight? People used to use Monday as a travel day to vote on Tuesday. It may not be so easy now, but they're trying to make it _easier_
I just tuned in to CNN: I think the way they cover the results is ridiculous.
They just babble off random, pointless numbers without pause, with their fancy interactive maps in the background.
They announce small changes with a sensationalism that's almost pathetic (KEY RACE ALERT! ALL OFF A SUDDEN Clinton takes the lead in Florida!! (by 20k votes... with a vote count of 30%).
Very little actual, substantive discussion of key results to watch out for, of key states, ...
One of the biggest news channels in the world should be able to do a bit better than that, IMO.
Their function is to entertain, information is an afterthought. It is not a managerial decision, all TV is directed by ratings, "entertainment" is what people want, so "entertainment" is what they give to them.
I tried watching CNN once, when I was stuck somewhere. Im not from US of A. It was a painful experience, realising just how much of a piece of trash that channel is
They would spend riddiculous amount of time on hearsay or drama, then just switch to some kind of "news" stripped of any context one could use to actually get some information
One of the top stories on the homepage this afternoon was about how everyone in the Trump family was glancing over to see how the other members voted. Are grade school antics what the system has come down to?
It's interesting looking at the way some of the prediction markets behaved through this cycle. Up until results started coming in, sites like predictit.org were all "predicting" overwhelming Clinton victory. That so far has clearly not panned out.
I think it says that these prediction markets aren't so good at actually predicting anything: all they really do is sort of act as a barometer of how media narratives influence popular thought on certain subjects. I do expect that they will correlate with outcomes better than 50/50... but not so much so that the "wisdom of crowds" line is really justified.
I voted 3rd party to try to get the Libertarians above the % threshold on matching funds. It worked in 1992 but was squandered in 1996 by Perot's party. I was hoping it might work again with a party not built around one man. Sadly, the Libertarians did everything in their power to screw this one up too.
Libertarians had a real chance to stand out as a actual alternate response to the static and predictable policy stances of the Dems and Repubs. However, Gary Johnson struck out badly on several occasions, especially when it came to his knowledge of international politics. And that weird interview when his tongue just stopped working for 30 seconds but he kept on talking.
I feel that I'm an educated person, and I try to keep up with politics in America, but I really don't understand our system. How can some states be called with less than 20% of the votes being counted?
Is there any research on this news impacting voter participation? Ie if they feel their party is losing do they throw in the towel even though they still might have had a chance?
Sure, it won't impact the election in that state because it's polls are closed. But in theory it could affect the election on the west coast were polls are still open.
Just like there are swing states, there are swing counties. As soon as you figure their results out, you can call the state with a good degree of confidence.
'Call' doesn't mean the result is guaranteed; it means that the person making the call is very sure that will be the result. See it as "if I were a bookmaker, I would take a X:1 bet on this" for a fairly large value of X.
Those making a call will typically check how well the results for the counties that reported results so far correlate with the polls and historical results, guesstimate what that would mean for the other counties, and call it when they think the result is clear (hopefully, they employ statisticians to make the call, but even then, it remains an inexact science)
For example, if a state has had over 90% votes for party P in all its counties in the past ten elections, the polls say that won't change, results of ten percent of counties nicely distributed over the state in terms of city/countryside, rich/poor, race, etc. show it hasn't changed, making the call that P will win is easy. Everybody would take that bet.
If the 20% is from the Democratic part of the state and the rest of the districts to report are Republicans and the Democrat is not ahead (or reversed) then you can make a call. It really does matter which districts have fully reported.
It's weird - I see "Reporting %" as a stat but it's not clear to me whether that means "percentage of possible votes counted" or "percentage of counties/constituencies counted". If it means the latter then I can absolutely see why 20% would call it, it just means there's lots of low-population counties. If the former then it's just speculation I think.
Makes me laughing all these predictions and poll pre-election giving an advantage to Hillary, and suddenly the odds were flipping around. This gives a clear lessons to all these politicians who used to manipulate the media and the statistics. I feel sad for all these people who did their best to stop the big wave. Trump literally won the silent majority.
Meh. The United States has been through some pretty rough times. It is, of course, impossible to predict the future by looking at the past, but it seems unlikely that this is anywhere near the "season finale".
On the other hand, the USA has contentious elections on a regular basis with basically no violence. That's the real strength of representative democracy.
My guess is that we're headed towards the season finale, but only in a few years. The left already had their moment of huge disappointment (when Obama was elected for "Change", and was not able to actually change anything). Now the right will have the same experience as they far overestimate Trump's ability to follow through on his proposals (e.g. fighting rampant corruption).
I went to a Trump rally recently and found it truly unbelievable. Thousands of people, all demographics seemingly represented, lined up for hours despite the cold, dark night and horrible parking conditions. Trump was over two hours late, and the rally did not end until past 1am, but the energy and general goodwill towards each other persisted the entire time.
Yes! It doesn't matter what sex, color, sexual orientation or if we agree with everything - we are UNITED! This is a movement. Establishment vs anti-Establishment. People over globalism.
Look I know where you a coming from but the way the country is lead doesn't really help average joes.
When manufacturing and other jobs are outsourced who are going to buy the goods when your citizens can't afford them? You have people out of jobs instead of them producing stuff and creating more business.
POTUS is a figurehead responsible for meeting heads of state, law and order, and starting wars. Their veto power allows them to horse trade for the legislation they wish they could enact.
> When manufacturing and other jobs are outsourced
shrug if we were competitive, we would get those jobs. POTUS and the legislature should focus on keeping the roads maintained, streets safe, police in check. Leave business to the invisible hand of the marketplace.
I just don't think we can trust this candidate. His only allegiance is to himself. "We will have to leave borders behind," [1] "Hillary Clinton will 'go down at a minimum as a great senator" [2]. "His grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth, okay?" [3]
> When manufacturing and other jobs are outsourced who are going to buy the goods when your citizens can't afford them?
The problem with manufacturing is it is not really outsourced, but automated. Unions helped to push out the jobs that were left by making it hard to compete wage wise. It's why you see plants opening in the south where there are no unions.
I'm really coming around to some sort of basic income. We are quickly approaching a time where there are just not enough jobs. How we get from here to letting people live jobless is going to be a challenge.
A billionaire who could have taken it easy for his later years.
I genuinely believe he sees the country is a mess and he wants to help. What he has gone through to win is unbelievable.
Probably he gets some initiatives through and rest is politics. Likely D & R try to block his drain the swamp initiatives. In 'Art of the Deal' Trump outlines the way he negotiates. Taking extreme position and coming down.
I'm not convinced that such "old days" ever existed. I'm open to the idea, but the more I learn of history, the more it seems like the deals were the exception, not the rule. The system was designed from the beginning to make things difficult.
I like to consider all the compromises in the antebellum United States. They show up in the history books as great legislative successes, but in the end, a half century of dispute came down to a war.
"That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves." (Thoreau)
Gridlock in the US government is a feature, not a bug, if for no other reason than it forces polarized, mutually opposed interests to compromise their principles and self-interest to get anything done.
As someone who feels that most times new government initiatives have a net negative impact, a gridlocked system sounds like a decent outcome, all things considered.
I complained recently that political discussions are too easily suppressed on HN, and dang's response was that they inevitably veer into flame wars, and that preemptively flagging political threads is necessary / ok. I hope this thread continues to disprove that, since HN is an important place for political discussion to be happening.
Among other things... There's real dissatisfaction among the working class which inspired people to support both Bernie and Trump, and to vote against the status quo.
But the problem is, they remember that they used to live better just a few years ago, while simultaneously seeing others (political and financial elites) getting richer and richer. That gives even myself a fundamental feeling of unfairness, even though as a programmer I'm far from Trump's target demographic (although still working class).
If that is your basis for voting, flip a coin. No single candidate is going to change that, and its not clear if it is even possible to revert so dramatically.
