Trump’s Data Team Saw a Different America

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-10/trump-s-data-team-saw-a-different-america-and-they-were-right

by protomyth • 10 years ago

39 100 10 years ago

bloomberg.com

kristianov2• 10 years ago

Lessons learnt: smugness gets you nowhere.

woofyman2• 10 years ago

Exploiting people's fears gets you everywhere.

snowwrestler8• 10 years ago

Trump is incredibly smug. And Hillary's campaign spent 90% of its effort drumming up fear about Trump.

It's not so simple.

kristianov2• 10 years ago

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.

npiazza83• 10 years ago

A bad narrative beats no narrative.

sp332• 10 years ago

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

pcunite14• 10 years ago

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

24gttghh2• 10 years ago

Citation please.

pcunite14• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

pcunite14• 10 years ago

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.

zeveb2• 10 years ago

She won the popular vote after all.

As of this moment, that's not true: Mrs. Clinton received 48% of the popular vote. That's more than Mr. Trump, but that's not a majority.

pg314• 10 years ago

It might have looked like a total landslide to you, but it wasn't. He won the electoral college, she won the popular vote. The polls had it as a close election and they were off by a couple of percent.

pcunite14• 10 years ago

When I went to view CNN's analysis the day of the election, it was reporting (on their website) a 90% chance Hillary would win.

masonic3• 10 years ago

They were off by more than a percentage point. The NYT's vote differential reported Tuesday afternoon was 1.2%; the actual was less than one-seventh of that.

deadringerr• 10 years ago

Yes, the number of followers for Trump on various social media were substantial but might not be reliable figures [0] due to bots. I'm sure Trump isn't alone with the use of bots, but so far analysis shows that many bots were being utilized as part of his campaign.

[0] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-bots-democracy-usa-el...

pcunite14• 10 years ago

Good point about the bots.

sithadmin• 10 years ago

The three letter news agencies were all acting like it was impossible. They were not investigating numbers like I was.

Observing that social media accounts have X followers does not constitute 'investigating the numbers', even in the most casual of senses.

pcunite14• 10 years ago

It is one data point that no one was talking about.

snowwrestler8• 10 years ago

This is an example of how an online information bubble can affect one's perception of reality.

It looked like a total landslide to me based on national and public data.

But it wasn't a total landslide, so your understanding of the data was not accurate. Will you accept that, or will your bubble filter just reject it since Trump won?

pcunite14• 10 years ago

I'm trying to have a conversation with you. I'm presenting factual information. I was there. I saw the numbers. You can continue to believe the other narrative, or we can have a conversation.

thisisdallas• 10 years ago

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.

zimpenfish4• 10 years ago

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.

m52go• 10 years ago

Then maybe it's our job to stand as a nation against their hate and show them we won't tolerate it.

Forget The Man and remember yourself.

andrepd• 10 years ago

And science denier, climate change denier, anti-vaxxer, religious zealot, etc.

riyadparvez• 10 years ago

"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.

epmaybe3• 10 years ago

That's the hardest part. I want to, I truly want to understand the other side, to make sense of what it is we can do to become more inclusive and accepting of everyone, to try and boost the entire country, not just parts of it.

But it's so hard to do that when there's so much that I find morally and ethically reprehensible about the president-elect and the public statements him and many of his supporters have made.

rdtsc3• 10 years ago

Yet Trump was holding a rainbow flag at his rally:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/2/donald-trump-...

and then got a lot of flak for it in Utah in christian newspapers and media for it. Maybe he'll keep Pence in check, who knows...

Hillary being extremely "pro-LGBT" is also taken too much for granted. In one instance Hillary's crowd during the nightclub shooting was perceived to have thrown the gay community under the bus when they suppressed the news about it, because it might have had an "Islamic terrorist" component to it, so it would have hurt her slightly in her rhetoric. Many people have not forgot that.

People noticed she took large donations from the Saudis and Qatar and other places like that. I know a some women who voted for him, certainly noticed that part.

EDIT (another thing I thought of): During the process I was really fascinated with the media, new forms of media, popular media, etc. As part of that I was looking at how news spread on Reddit among Hillary and Trump supporters. One thing that was unexpected is that Trump's supporters included people from all walks of life: young, old, gays, transgender, Hispanic, Black, other minorities and they all were rather civil and respectful, they got along, all having fun with their frog mascot and whatnot. On the Hillary's side, there was a lot of hatred, condescension, as soon as someone mentioned anything critical about her, immediate downvotes and labels like "sexist" thrown around. It looked rather unhealthy. That militant attitude might come from the right place, but I can't imagine it being healthy, and I wonder if it cost her the election.

SpikeDad• 10 years ago

Yea. This fact is commonly being forgotten. Not on is the man anti-LGBTQ he's a total con artist. His money is from his father, he's been bankrupt a number of times only to be bailed out by his father and banks that peddle his name for their own benefit.

He has no conception of togetherness, of sacrificing one's own goals for the good of the larger group. He's part of the gang that's shit on the Constitution, obstructed government for their own petty reasons and have no issue with legislating to punish people that didn't vote for them.

Sadly the Democrats will try to take the high road, give in on terrible laws just to make it appear that we're not obstructing in hopes of - I don't even know what.

Everyone is singing the praises of the Republicans for seeing the real America except for the fact that the real America is a scared, selfish bunch of folks. If Trump had ANY ACTUAL CRED then I would feel less sad. Everyone is acting as if Trump can actually do something - there is zero evidence of that other than he can lie like no one's business.

binalpatel• 10 years ago

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.

awinder• 10 years ago

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.

tdb78932• 10 years ago

Please forgive my ignorance but why was NAFTA so bad?

TetOn• 10 years ago

Right or wrong, Rust Belt residents see NAFTA as at the very least indicative if not the direct cause of the hulking, abandoned factories that form the rust in "Rust Belt."

infinite8s2• 10 years ago

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.

nickthemagicman• 10 years ago

Not to mention her sketch behavior and the DNC.

dr_• 10 years ago

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.

dwiel2• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

infinite8s2• 10 years ago

Joe Biden is probably the only one who could have done it.

curun1r2• 10 years ago

was going to have to bring out minorities, young voters, and college educated voters in droves to win.

One interesting thing that this election showed was that race and gender are two fundamentally different traits. In all the talk about diversity, we lump the two together far too often when gender is really a completely different beast. Minorities, and African-Americans specifically, overwhelmingly turned out and voted for Obama. Clinton didn't get nearly the same effect with women despite her opponent being an unabashed misogynist. It seems that race > religion > gender when it comes to voting identity.

dagw• 10 years ago

Don't forget education. Early analysis seems to indicate that whether a person had a college degree or not was a better indicator than gender for how they would vote.

forkandwait• 10 years ago

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.

mark-r• 10 years ago

There are two parts to a polling prediction: predicting how each demographic is going to vote, and predicting how many of each group will show up to vote. I believe the weighting refers to the second part of the process. It appears that the groups more likely to vote for Hillary stayed home on Tuesday more than anybody predicted.

There's an article I read within the last couple of days that goes into detail about the weighting process, but I couldn't find it again.

HillaryBriss• 10 years ago

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

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

lujim• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

hga2• 10 years ago

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.

Neliquat• 10 years ago

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

dwiel2• 10 years ago

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...

ryan606• 10 years ago

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.

Trump’s Data Team Saw a Different America

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