Almost Classical

Supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton seem to be stuck in reality distortion bubbles. This is slightly more pronounced on the Trump side, where outright misinformation is believed. But the Clinton supporters are quick to selectively cite misleading information. Misleading data are only slightly better (and sometimes worse) than wrong information when trying to understand and correct problems. Trump supporters: He lost the popular vote. There was no widespread fraud, no mobs of illegal immigrants storming the ballot boxes. He lost, and lost significantly on the raw national popular vote total. (But it is complicated. See notes to Clinton supporters.) He is the least popular president-elect in the history of polling data. There is no mandate. He plans to nominate a cabinet that troubles many traditional conservatives, libertarians, and progressives. That's not a way to build bridges when you lack a mandate. He has a serious problem with facts. You know, that "tr...

Stop blaming polls or calling them "wrong" because only the Huffington Post polling was seriously flawed. Every other model actually offered accurate *ranges* of potential outcomes. The polls were not wrong. Polls give probability not certainty. They were accurate. If I tell you Hillary Clinton has an 85% chance of winning... hello? She still has a 15% chance of losing. People didn't want to accept that. They assumed 85% = she can't lose. Sean Trende has attempted to explain this with the example of Pennsylvania. The commonwealth was a close election: so close that one percent in both directions did change the winner, but that does not make the polls incorrect. It wasn't the polls: It was the pundits What occurred wasn’t a failure of the polls. As with Brexit, it was a failure of punditry. Pundits saw Clinton with a 1.9 percent lead in Pennsylvania and assumed she would win. [ Note: Margin of error was 3% in most polling! ] The correct inter...

Every online post, newspaper column, or magazine puff piece written "to Trump voters" will be read by exactly ZERO Trump supporters... or will be taken as the condescending, presumptuous tripe it is by the one or two Trump voters who care what The New Yorker or National Review (for that matter) have to say. No Trump voter cares what I write. They don't. They don't care what my opinion of them is. They don't care what any other over-educated Ph.D. or media elite offers as a critique. The reality is, the few Trump voters I know don't actually like him. They voted against the system, against BOTH parties, and hope it all burns to the ground. Some voted for the Supreme Court and district court appointments. But otherwise, they didn't vote "for" anyone. The day-to-day worker has moved on. The majority of people didn't vote and a good portion of those who did aren't that engaged a few weeks later. Life will go on. Some of us will ob...