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sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Obama's approval rating is 56%, and has been on a steady upward trajectory since around this time last year. It has dwarfed either candidate's approval for the entire election I believe. That's the status quo at president, right there.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/gallup-daily-obama-job-approval.aspx

Now let's look at the election numbers:

2012

O 65,915,795
R 60,933,504

Note that Obama's approval rating wasn't particularly good in 2012, and was notably worse than now. Like 50%ish, give or take.

2016

T 59,692,974 (-1,240,530)
C 59,923,027 (-5,992,768)

There was no massive white racist Republican wave in 2016. Trump SHRANK the GOP base by >1.2m. Clinton on the other hand lost just under 6m votes that didn't go to Trump, but simply went away.

This was a low-turnout "get out your base" election on both sides, where Trump did a mediocre to poor job, and Clinton did a DISASTROUS job. Clinton didn't lose voters to Trump in meaningful numbers, and Trump didn't get a wave of hidden turbo-racists to vote - she failed to get out HER PARTY'S OWN BASE. The people who had just voted for black gay Muslim communist Satan Barack Hussein Obama in 2012, at a time when the public liked him LESS than they do now, just stayed home.

e: I'm well to the left of the Democrats, but I don't think the "status quo" label killed them per se, because the "burn down everything" candidate lost the GOP votes compared to :mitt: of all loving people, and Obama's popularity remains high. What killed them was that Hillary didn't excite and motivate her own base, and wasn't liked generally, and the electorate chooses almost entirely on feelings rather than facts. Trump combined huckster charm and a message of "gently caress the other side" that worked on at least most of the core GOP base, even though everyone else hated it.

sean10mm fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Nov 10, 2016

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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD
Jul 7, 2012

A good deal of that is less campaign strategy and more inherent weakness of the candidate.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

A good deal of that is less campaign strategy and more inherent weakness of the candidate.

You might have missed my edit but that's basically what I think. People already predisposed to vote for her party didn't want to vote for HER, specifically. That's the definition of a bad candidate, honestly - if you can't win your own side, you're DOA.

sean10mm fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Nov 10, 2016

Pedro De Heredia
May 30, 2006

sean10mm posted:

Obama's approval rating is 56%, and has been on a steady upward trajectory since around this time last year. It has dwarfed either candidate's approval for the entire election I believe. That's the status quo at president, right there.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/gallup-daily-obama-job-approval.aspx


The polls being so off, as well as the outcome of the election itself, should make you be a bit skeptical of what this number means and represents.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World

Pedro De Heredia posted:

The polls being so off, as well as the outcome of the election itself, should make you be a bit skeptical of what this number means and represents.

This is kind of apples and oranges though, the favorability numbers always showed Clinton being really bad, which was in fact true to the election outcome.

It was the state Trump vs Clinton polls that were garbage. That's what all the predictions were based on, and the fact that even the R-leaning polls were like C+5% turned everything into poo poo.

sean10mm fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Nov 10, 2016

Mind_Taker
May 7, 2007



KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

A good deal of that is less campaign strategy and more inherent weakness of the candidate.

I tend to agree with this. But how do you ensure that the most viable Democratic candidate in a general election wins the primary election? How do you prevent someone like Hillary, who obviously failed to turn up her based in the general election, from becoming the next Democratic nominee for president? Despite claims from many Bernie supporters saying that the DNC rigged the system, didn't Hillary actually win the nomination fair and square? (honest question, I'm not well-versed in the whole DNC scandal)

Mind_Taker fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Nov 10, 2016

Sylink
Apr 17, 2004

You can start by having the party /DNC inner circle not be a bunch of sycophants jerking each other off, see DWS etc.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
Any idea where those lost votes come from?
Are they minority voters who weren't enthusiastic about voting for a White person?
Were they deterred by suppression laws?

Or are they White people who just couldn't decide who was worse.

Pedro De Heredia
May 30, 2006

sean10mm posted:

This is kind of apples and oranges though, the favorability numbers always showed Clinton being really bad, which was in fact true to the election outcome.

It was the state Trump vs Clinton polls that were garbage. That's what all the predictions were based on, and the fact that even the R-leaning polls were like C+5% turned everything into poo poo.

I'm not sure it's apples and oranges.

There's no reason to look at Obama's approval rating and think it isn't true … except for the fact that America just elected a guy whose entire political life has consisted on hating Obama viscerally. We can at least consider that 1) maybe he isn't that popular, or 2) his job approval rating does not reflect America's desire to actually continue his policies and performance.

The favorability numbers were also almost always better for Clinton than for Trump, and he won most swing states.

Mind_Taker
May 7, 2007



Sylink posted:

You can start by having the party /DNC inner circle not be a bunch of sycophants jerking each other off, see DWS etc.

Can you expound on this for me? I'm honestly curious and not well-versed in the inner workings of the DNC.

Sylink
Apr 17, 2004

Look up DWS and her work on down ticket races (not much).

But it seems from the outside that everyone at the DNC was rushing to leech off the sweet Clinton gravy train they expected to ride into the white house. Huge amounts of assumption and hubris, which reeked of "elitism" seems to be the status quo there based on leaks/general news articles.

So instead of working to bolster the party, they haven't worked on downticket/smaller races for years. They were obsessed with money and GOTV and it got them nowhere. They scourned 40% of their base that supported Bernie by mocking them in money instances.

It was like a race to see who could pat themselves on the back more for getting the 1st woman president elected in a good old boys club going back through the 1990s. I said in another thread this election was a nostalgia tour nobody wanted. Look who is in office now, no one new. Just the same old hacky fucklords.

People think they got a revolution, they got 1991's shittiest hits.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Obama is almost certainly a trillion times better liked than HIllary Clinton, and it's entirely due to personality, charisma and rhetorical skills. People don't like the status quo generally, but they like it 100x better from him than from Hillary. He's also way more convincing when he spins incrementalism as Big Deal Progress.

Also, Republican attempts to pin manufactured scandals to him failed really hard compared to their attempts to do the same to Clinton. She is just sketchy enough compared to him that they always gain more traction.

Outside of political junkies, nobody understands anything about policy beyond dumb catchphrases. Substance means almost nothing, Trump ran on totally self-contradictory gibberish. W was an open moron who won because people FELT LIKE he was a good ol' boy like them. Reagan was a bastard who went senile, but who also won blowouts because he was everybody's sweet old grampa.

e: I also agree the DNC as an institution has been a trash fire since Howard Dean left.

e2: It also wouldn't surprise me if we learn that Clinton made some kind of strategic blunder like she did against Obama in the 2008 primaries. She lost all the swing states but ran up the popular vote score in a) states she had no hope of winning, and b) the bluest of the blue states. Maybe she got greedy and spent all those GOTV resources trying to win 400 EVs by taking Georgia and Texas instead of locking down PA? I dunno.

sean10mm fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Nov 10, 2016

Polygynous
Dec 13, 2006
welp

sean10mm posted:

e2: It also wouldn't surprise me if we learn that Clinton made some kind of strategic blunder like she did against Obama in the 2008 primaries. She lost all the swing states but ran up the popular vote score in a) states she had no hope of winning, and b) the bluest of the blue states. Maybe she got greedy and spent all those GOTV resources trying to win 400 EVs by taking Georgia and Texas instead of locking down PA? I dunno.

It's possible, I don't know what the gently caress happened in PA. There seems to be a trend of the DNC loving up and state parties having varying success at picking up the slack, like holy poo poo if more states managed what Nevada did. In PA at least the Dems won AG and the other two row offices, but lost Pres and Senate. The Senate candidate was also a woman, which you'd hope wouldn't matter; the more relevant factor was probably just Republicans spending a ton of money painting her as "corrupt" too. (But of course lost seats in the state legislature as usual.)

Here's the local paper article on the ticket splitting. The AG candidate got about 150,000 more votes than Hillary (5% more), with more splitting outside of the southeast and cities. In one county the AG got 49% more votes than Hillary.

Grognan
Jan 23, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

Mind_Taker posted:

I tend to agree with this. But how do you ensure that the most viable Democratic candidate in a general election wins the primary election? How do you prevent someone like Hillary, who obviously failed to turn up her based in the general election, from becoming the next Democratic nominee for president? Despite claims from many Bernie supporters saying that the DNC rigged the system, didn't Hillary actually win the nomination fair and square? (honest question, I'm not well-versed in the whole DNC scandal)

"Fair and square" Media messaging was taking their cues from her campaign staff. Incredibly regressive rules about internal primary voting in states she did well in. In New York you could not change party affiliation to vote in the primary in April 2016 unless you did so in October 2015. You know, like way before Sanders actually announced his campaign I think.

So a lot of enthusiastic youth, independents, and republicans that wanted to cross the aisle because of understandable disgust with establishment status quo in both parties got shut out of the primary voting process.

Also going by ground floor experience in the NV state caucus they ignored their own rules to rubber-stamp Hillary's delegates. The primary this season was supposed to be a formality instead of a selection process.

Good things Nevada does: Early voting and same day party affiliation change for district caucus voting. We managed to hold on to Harry Reid's seat and legalize weed.

Grognan fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Nov 10, 2016

Harry
Jun 13, 2003

I do solemnly swear that in the year 2015 I will theorycraft my wallet as well as my WoW
Hillary and the DNC looked like a corrupt political machine circa 2001-2005 Republicans and they went all in on the minorities and women will vote for her plan. For the first one, their convention was a disaster and when DWS resigned in disgrace the second Clinton got the nomination (and was hired by the campaign the same night) and this was only reinforced with all the Podesta emails. For the second part, I think people vastly overestimate how much minorities and women really care about a woman president.

Cerebral Bore
Apr 21, 2010


Fun Shoe
What happened is that third-way centrism is and always has been complete horseshit and without a charismatic candidate like Obama to paper over the flaws it collapsed completely.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World

Cerebral Bore posted:

What happened is that third-way centrism is and always has been complete horseshit and without a charismatic candidate like Obama to paper over the flaws it collapsed completely.

Without a charismatic candidate you almost always lose, full stop. Unless the other guy is somehow even more of a gray lump, like HW vs. Dukakis or some poo poo.

E: Most voters don't know what third way or neocon even mean, but they know who they like. Voters are shallow as gently caress.

sean10mm fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Nov 10, 2016

SickZip
Jul 29, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

Vladimir Putin posted:

Forget what have you done in 30 years. What did Obama do in 8 years? He saved the economy in 2008 but since then we still kind of stuck in limbo. She can't run as the continuation of the status quo when the status quo is lukewarm for the country and downright horrible for certain people.

The focus on "The Economy" as a abstract is a massive part of the loss of Hillary and repudiation of Obama in this election. The Economy was saved but whose economy? The banks for sure and some abstract country averages went up, meanwhile most Americans simultaneously got hosed, stayed hosed, and got to constantly hear about how the great the economy was doing.

I think Obama's personal likeability paper-overed a lot of disgust and disillusionment. Turns out people might have liked Obama, and even liked him as president, without actually liking the job he was doing

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World

SickZip posted:

The focus on "The Economy" as a abstract is a massive part of the loss of Hillary and repudiation of Obama in this election. The Economy was saved but whose economy? The banks for sure and some abstract country averages went up, meanwhile most Americans simultaneously got hosed, stayed hosed, and got to constantly hear about how the great the economy was doing.

I think Obama's personal likeability paper-overed a lot of disgust and disillusionment. Turns out people might have liked Obama, and even liked him as president, without actually liking the job he was doing

I think Obama is seen as more progressive than he really is pretty consistently. It's easier to project left-ish hopes on him because a) he didn't openly run as a "splitting the difference" guy like Bill Clinton did in the 1990s, and b) congress is so monstrously obstructive to him that anything to the left of Pinochet is DOA anyway, so it's easy to imagine him with a good agenda that is just being stymied by THOSE FUCKERS. The entire Clinton political identity was unapologetically built on openly splitting the difference to catch Republicans wrong-footed, not (unfulfilled and/or impossible) Hope & Change. Also, the negative legacy of 1990s "war on crime"/"entitlement reform" poo poo seems to be more in the popular consciousness now. Basically "actively did a thing that has a bad legacy" is a bigger stain than "failed to do more (that he couldn't get through Congress in a million years anyway)."

WhiskeyJuvenile
Feb 15, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo

gradenko_2000 posted:

I think it was in the first post-debate analysis that people were saying that one of Trump's genuinely workable attacks on Clinton was:

"You had 30 years to fix this, why didn't you fix it?"

Now, in the media-savvy, debates-are-all-about-scoring-points level of discussion, Clinton managed to deflect the attack. Get Trump to say something stupid, change the subject, whatever.

But Clinton never actually answered the question, either.

And perhaps people noticed.


Quoting Harry Reid, that's a clown question bro

WhiskeyJuvenile
Feb 15, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo
A lot of handwringing over the fact that like 100k voters in a 120m voter election decided it

Like yes turnout and all but Hillary just plain lost, it's not like she was blown out

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

A lot of handwringing over the fact that like 100k voters in a 120m voter election decided it

Like yes turnout and all but Hillary just plain lost, it's not like she was blown out

People are handwringing because Trump seems uniquely terrible and he won. A narrow loss to a generic business vermin Republican by the same margin wouldn't upset people nearly as much.

cowofwar
Jul 30, 2002

by Athanatos
White women voted for Trump because the average woman is a homemaker who is financially dependent on her husband. When she fears for the family's economic security she will put her family and home before her identity as a woman and all other progressive ideals.

We all like to pretend that all women are now strong, independent and enfranchised but the actual demographics of North America don't reflect that picture. America isn't full of professionals in urban centres, it's full of poorly educated truck drivers with poorly educated stay at home moms with two kids, a mortgage and a precarious financial situation that has only got worse over the last 20 years and who are scared about the future.

theflyingorc
Jun 28, 2008

ANY GOOD OPINIONS THIS POSTER CLAIMS TO HAVE ARE JUST PROOF THAT BULLYING WORKS
Young Orc

sean10mm posted:

This is kind of apples and oranges though, the favorability numbers always showed Clinton being really bad, which was in fact true to the election outcome.

It was the state Trump vs Clinton polls that were garbage. That's what all the predictions were based on, and the fact that even the R-leaning polls were like C+5% turned everything into poo poo.

The state polls being so off also meant that Clinton, the ultimate pragmatist, didn't realize she was missing a key voter block in rust belt whites. Had weaknesses there shown up in August, she would have heavily targeted them. Had the election not been so obviously "already over", more people would have been motivated to vote and make sure Trump didn't win.

I think without the polling errors, there's a very good chance this wouldn't have happened.

Vladimir Putin
Mar 17, 2007

by R. Guyovich

theflyingorc posted:

The state polls being so off also meant that Clinton, the ultimate pragmatist, didn't realize she was missing a key voter block in rust belt whites. Had weaknesses there shown up in August, she would have heavily targeted them. Had the election not been so obviously "already over", more people would have been motivated to vote and make sure Trump didn't win.

I think without the polling errors, there's a very good chance this wouldn't have happened.

Yeah I agree. She was flying blind and therefore had no opportunity to adjust.

WhiskeyJuvenile
Feb 15, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo

sean10mm posted:

People are handwringing because Trump seems uniquely terrible and he won. A narrow loss to a generic business vermin Republican by the same margin wouldn't upset people nearly as much.

Sure but the point I'm trying to make is that a handful of rallies' difference in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and we'd be talking President-Elect Clinton today means that Tuesday wasn't like a resounding rebuke of neoliberalism, even though I want it consigned to the dustbin of history

theflyingorc
Jun 28, 2008

ANY GOOD OPINIONS THIS POSTER CLAIMS TO HAVE ARE JUST PROOF THAT BULLYING WORKS
Young Orc

Vladimir Putin posted:

Yeah I agree. She was flying blind and therefore had no opportunity to adjust.

It's really a whirlwind of things that had to go wrong. We have to remember that BILL MITCHELL WAS RIGHT, outside of polls there was no evidence she was winning! The only person who seemed to take "maybe the polls are wrong" seriously was Nate Silver, and days before the election we were all literally mocking him as "Shook Nate" when he was basically exactly correct.

Lt. Danger
Dec 22, 2006

jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

You're all kinda making it sound like the result was some kind of unpredictable fluke.

theflyingorc
Jun 28, 2008

ANY GOOD OPINIONS THIS POSTER CLAIMS TO HAVE ARE JUST PROOF THAT BULLYING WORKS
Young Orc

Lt. Danger posted:

You're all kinda making it sound like the result was some kind of unpredictable fluke.

It was difficult to predict, and I saw literally nobody but Michael Moore (lol) expecting it to go down like this.

Without the influence of polls, Clinton might have not avoided important groups.

It's hard to say what the right tactic is in regards to polling data because Romney ignored polls and went with his gut and got owned, Clinton went strictly by the polls and got owned.

Harry
Jun 13, 2003

I do solemnly swear that in the year 2015 I will theorycraft my wallet as well as my WoW

cowofwar posted:

White women voted for Trump because the average woman is a homemaker who is financially dependent on her husband. When she fears for the family's economic security she will put her family and home before her identity as a woman and all other progressive ideals.

We all like to pretend that all women are now strong, independent and enfranchised but the actual demographics of North America don't reflect that picture. America isn't full of professionals in urban centres, it's full of poorly educated truck drivers with poorly educated stay at home moms with two kids, a mortgage and a precarious financial situation that has only got worse over the last 20 years and who are scared about the future.

What? The majority of white married couples have had two parents working for like 15 years now.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Predictions based on aggregating polls were EXTREMELY accurate in 2004, 2008, and 2012. And nobody provided a good reason to think all polls would be C+5% outta nowhere before the election.

Nate was still very wrong (he had like 80% Clinton win probability on election day), just less wrong than others because he literally just had a 10% "meteor outta nowhere kills everyone lulz" factor in his model. Which in retrospect looks really smart compared to taking polls at face value, but he didn't actually predict that all the polls would turn into poo poo simultaneously in this election. Like, even if you went by all the historically Republican-leaning polls Clinton was going to win walking away. It was bizarre and nobody has explained it yet that I know of.

Vladimir Putin
Mar 17, 2007

by R. Guyovich

theflyingorc posted:

It was difficult to predict, and I saw literally nobody but Michael Moore (lol) expecting it to go down like this.

Without the influence of polls, Clinton might have not avoided important groups.

It's hard to say what the right tactic is in regards to polling data because Romney ignored polls and went with his gut and got owned, Clinton went strictly by the polls and got owned.

I think you have to go with the polls. You look at data and that tells you how you are doing and you adjust if you're loving up in some areas. The data isn't always accurate for example in Clinton's case. But without data you're basically making poo poo up.

Lt. Danger
Dec 22, 2006

jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

Mark Blyth predicted Trump, also Brexit. This wasn't force majeure - I think people were invested in not seeing Clinton's weaknesses and potential obstacles, because doing so would be inconvenient. Some of this was understandable (the Electoral College produces weird results but you're not about to change it any time soon) but a lot of it was wilful ignorance, I reckon.

WhiskeyJuvenile
Feb 15, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo
I mean Trump's campaign thought they were gonna lose too so...

Polygynous
Dec 13, 2006
welp
A system where organizations gauge public opinion by calling people and asking how they're voting is willful ignorance, ok.

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World

Polygynous posted:

A system where organizations gauge public opinion by calling people and asking how they're voting is willful ignorance, ok.

Yeah, you can't really call it "willful ignorance" when people made so much effort and spent so much money to collect and analyze the polling data that taken together was extremely correct in 2004, 2008 and 2012. Like crazy accurate, in fact.

People made judgments based on methods that were demonstrably correct in 2004, 2008 and 2012 that spontaneously turned into poo poo in 2016 for reasons nobody has even explained yet. If Clinton looks like she's cruising to a win based on the best evidence available, you aren't being willfully ignorant, your bowing to the (apparent) facts.

theflyingorc
Jun 28, 2008

ANY GOOD OPINIONS THIS POSTER CLAIMS TO HAVE ARE JUST PROOF THAT BULLYING WORKS
Young Orc

sean10mm posted:

People made judgments based on methods that were demonstrably correct in 2004, 2008 and 2012 that spontaneously turned into poo poo in 2016 for reasons nobody has even explained yet. If Clinton looks like she's cruising to a win based on the best evidence available, you aren't being willfully ignorant, your bowing to the (apparent) facts.
I think the issue is one of these three things:
1. Bad LV screens assumed Trump voters wouldn't vote for various reasons
2. Embarrassed Trump voters literally lied to pollsters
3. A large number of Trump voters, being innately distrustful of polls, hung up before taking the poll.

Again, Clinton is the most "will of the whole electorate" candidate we've seen in a long, long time. If she knew that rural whites were a key demo against her, she would have spoken directly to them much, much more often.

wjs5
Aug 22, 2009
Huh dnd goons really are dumb. News at 11.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World

theflyingorc posted:

I think the issue is one of these three things:
1. Bad LV screens assumed Trump voters wouldn't vote for various reasons
2. Embarrassed Trump voters literally lied to pollsters
3. A large number of Trump voters, being innately distrustful of polls, hung up before taking the poll.

Again, Clinton is the most "will of the whole electorate" candidate we've seen in a long, long time. If she knew that rural whites were a key demo against her, she would have spoken directly to them much, much more often.

It might be the reverse of the embarrassed Trump voter - the Democrat who voted in 2012 for Obama that would never choose Trump over Clinton in a poll, or admit that they won't vote, but also had no actual motivation to go out and vote for her. I mean, the main thing to explain is Democratic turnout dying completely since Trump actually did under-perform Romney, which you would think would predict a loss.

But really I have no idea. All polling everywhere turning into poo poo outta nowhere was the craziest thing.

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Lt. Danger
Dec 22, 2006

jolly good chaps we sure showed the hun

No, you dummies, I'm not talking about bad polling data or whatever, like if Clinton just had more accurate info she would have made the right choices. There were deep structural factors at play here, too many perhaps to be mitigated. You can't campaign-rally your way out of the insider/outsider narrative, or 1990s conservative talk radio, or end-of-history political complacency.

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