closg00 wrote:DCZards wrote:Well, it was Trump who kept complaining that the election was "rigged." Maybe he was right.
Apologies, the data needs to be
updated and re examined since this came out.
That article is full of logical fallacies and statistical falsehoods. I don't even know where to begin.
What first made me suspicious was the notably low general election voter turnout.
Voter turnout in 2012 was 58.6%. Voter turnout this year was 58.3% and we haven't finished counting yet.
So the notion that the 2016 election would receive two and a half million fewer votes than the 2012 election, which most Americans considered to be a far less consequential election, is odd.
2012 1.28M voters voted in 2012. This year, we are up to 1.23M and still counting. So 2016 pace trails the 2012 pace by just 500,000 and it looks like there's still about 300,000 from Washington State alone yet to be counted (plus some absentee ballots from the military, I believe).
Other states and other demographics raise other red flags. For instance, somewhere around two-thirds of all the votes cast in the 2016 general election in Florida were cast early. Various exit polls pointed to Hillary Clinton receiving as much as sixty to sixty-five percent of the Florida early vote, much of it from Hispanic-Americans. That meant Trump would have had to have received as much as seventy percent of the election day voting in Florida in order to have caught up and won the state. Although democrats tend to do somewhat better in early voting and republicans tend to do somewhat better on election day, it’s virtually impossible for Trump to have come back and won Florida after it was already basically in the bag for Clinton before election day even arrived.
I distinctly remember a Fox News poll of Florida that estimated that Trump had a 15 point edge over Clinton in polling of people who intended to vote on election day. It makes perfect sense that if the Democrats have a better get-out-the-vote effort in early voting, that they are cannibalizing from their election day numbers. Also, the early vote numbers did not favor Clinton by much at all. The D over R gap in early vote ballots totaled about 70,000 in 2016. It was 180,000 in 2012 when Obama won the state by just 0.9%.
There has also been much made of how the polls ended up being so wrong. Having spent the past year and a half observing the polls in this election, I fully agree that it’s easy for one or two polls to end up being very wrong. We saw it all the time in the primary season. But historically speaking, going back through the eighty years in which presidential polling has been conducted, it’s virtually impossible for the polling averages to have been this thoroughly wrong. In fact the last time they got a Presidential general election wrong outside the margin of error was in 1948 – and polling was unsophisticated crap back then
The election was within the margin of error. The RCP average on November 7 had Clinton up +3.3. (It was just +2.2 the day before that.) And that average didn't include the most accurate poll of the past 8 years, the PPD poll (which had Trump +1). The final result has Clinton up 0.9%. That's within 2.4 points (or 1.3 points from Nov. 6), which I assume is smaller than the margin of error which is typically 3-4.
But nevermind the overwhelmingly unlikely odds of the 2016 polling averages having been wrong. The more immediate trend is one which we saw during the primary season. In any given hotly contested primary state, Donald Trump tended to perform the same as, or worse than, his polling averages. We saw it in his very first contest in Iowa, where he shockingly lost despite being favored. We saw it again in Wisconsin and other states.
This is false. Trump radically outperformed the polls as the primary wore on. In the 15 states between Super Tuesday on March 15th and the Indiana win when he essentially clinched it, Trump outperformed polls by an average of 5.4.
Finally, there were four swing states in which Hillary Clinton was definitively favored to win, but she ended up losing: Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvnia, and Michigan. In the final tallies she lost each of them by right around one percent of the vote. That’s not how numbers work.
Sure it is. Trump's superior data tracking program knew where to campaign to get just enough to get him over the top. Also, Trump lead Florida by 1.3 according to the RCP polling average on Nov 7. And why did this logic not apply to Minnesota and New Hampshire, where he barely lost?
