Tag Archives: popular

Trump: I Won the Popular Vote. I Did, I Did, I Did….

by OliverTrevino Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I mentioned that the Trump campaign1 was pretty dedicated to sending Hillary Clinton’s popular vote win down the memory hole. To accomplish this, they began a gaslighting offensive to persuade the nation that Donald Trump was one of the biggest winners ever in presidential history. Kellyanne Conway kicked things off by telling Fox News, “This election was not close. It was not a squeaker.” Two days later, Trump himself defended his loss of the popular vote: “If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily.”

Then Corey Lewandowski upped the ante, claiming that Trump “won the election campaign by the largest majority since Ronald Reagan in 1984.” I guess this was a little too raw even for Trumpland, so Reince Priebus beavered away and finally found something to justify Lewandowski’s toadying: “Donald J. Trump won over 2,600 counties nationwide, the most since President Reagan in 1984.” But that still wasn’t enough. The whole popular vote thing is apparently a serious burr in Trump’s saddle, and he wasn’t happy with all this shilly-shallying. So today he decided to go for broke and insist that he just won, period:

So there you have it. It’s twisting Trump’s guts that more people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for him. And this whole recount thing in Wisconsin seems to have driven him bananas. The result is a tweet alleging that the Clinton campaign orchestrated millions of illegal votes in 2016.2 This message went out to all 16 million of his followers, who will surely pass it along to another 16 million or so—and then the media will pass it along to yet millions more.

This is an obvious lie, and it will probably take a few hours for Trump’s TV shills to figure out how to defend it. That’s how it worked with the “thousands of Muslims celebrating on 9/11” thing. In that case, his spear carriers eventually dug up a few internet factoids that provided them with a way to claim that Trump was right, and away they went. I’m sure the same thing will happen this time. I can’t wait to see how many will join in and exactly what dreck they’ll dredge up to justify it.

Alternatively, they could just admit that the Republican president-elect is an epically insecure liar who will say anything when his fragile ego is bruised. That’s not a very appealing alternative, is it?

1As near as I can tell, Trump is still running a campaign.

2Trump says he would have won if not for these votes, so they must have all been for Hillary. And if they were all for Hillary, then Democrats must have been the ones who did the vote rigging. Right?

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Trump: I Won the Popular Vote. I Did, I Did, I Did….

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Twitter Cracks Down On A Few Alt-Righters But Fails To Protect Users

by HelaineMcGowen4 Posted on November 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Twitter is finally taking steps to clean up its platform:

Long criticized for allowing bullies, terrorists and bigots to run rampant to the detriment of its own bottom line, Twitter made a surprising move Tuesday by banning a slew of accounts belonging to white nationalists and leaders of the alt-right movement — which holds that traditional conservatives don’t sufficiently protect the interests of white people….Among recently banned Twitter users are Richard Spencer, head of the alt-right think tank National Policy Institute, and other alt-right leaders, including Paul Town, Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers, according to news reports.

Maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age,1 but there’s something fishy about this. Twitter critics have been asking for years for better tools to manage the tsunami of abuse that frequently engulfs users, especially women and people of color.2 Here are a few suggestions for abuse management tools that have made the rounds:

Ability to block IP addresses
Allow people to up/down rate new accounts
Provide some kind of human tech support for complaints
Ability to block new accounts
Ability to block accounts with certain words in bio
Ability to block all followers of an account (this helps prevent abuse storms from followers of popular accounts)
Ability to suspend retweets
Ability to block tweets that contain certain keywords3

This list is by no means comprehensive, but do you notice something? Nobody especially wants Twitter to eject specific individuals: it smacks of censorship; it’s not something Twitter management is good at doing; and it will never come close to solving the abuse problem anyway. There’s no way Twitter will ever be able to ban all the flaming assholes in the world, and very few of us feel comfortable with Twitter deciding on who they are in any case. We just want tools that allow us to manage our abuse problems, which are different for everyone.

So why would Twitter do the one thing that even Twitter critics might be uncomfortable with, instead of all the things Twitter critics have actually asked for? It’s almost as if they’re trying to make Twitter reform controversial. We tried, but nothing satisfies you guys!

But then again, maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age.

1OK, fine, there’s no maybe about it.

2If you want to learn more about this, BuzzFeed’s “A Honeypot For Assholes” is probably the definitive piece about Twitter’s problems.

3Twitter announced a tool for this a couple of days ago. Time will tell how well it works.

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Twitter Cracks Down On A Few Alt-Righters But Fails To Protect Users

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Facebook and Google Are Spreading Way Too Many Lies

by NevilleGipson Posted on November 13, 2016

Mother Jones

Was the presidential election this year a close call? Of course not!

Kellyanne Conway, a key adviser to Donald Trump’s transistion team, says the general election “was not close” and the president-elect has a “mandate” to carry out the will of the people on issues ranging from Obamacare to national security. “This election was not close. It was not a squeaker,” Mrs. Conway said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There is a mandate there, and there is a mandate for his 100-day agenda, as well.”

Really? It sure seemed close to me. So close, in fact, that Donald Trump actually lost the popular vote. Let’s google “2016 popular vote” to find out:

It looks like Facebook isn’t the only one with a fake news problem. Surely one of the top three results on Google News shouldn’t be a nutbar blog dedicated to spreading false information about Hillary Clinton? How about giving a little higher weighting to actual news sources so this kind of stuff doesn’t happen?

Trump’s team is dedicated to telling us that the election was a landslide, and there are plenty of doofus sites out there who are happy to spread whatever lies will help that along. Nothing can stop this from happening, but at least big players like Facebook and Google should try not to help them along.

UPDATE: There’s also the problem of deliberately fake news sources. Mike Caulfield has more on that here.

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Facebook and Google Are Spreading Way Too Many Lies

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Poll Averagers Are Having the Wonk Version of a Knife Fight. Choose Your Side!

by Terry9514k Posted on November 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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With 2 days left until our long national nightmare ends, we are now arguing about the statistical models underlying poll averaging. Seriously. Last night, Nate Silver got into a massive war with Huffington Post writer Ryan Grim after Grim published an article headlined “Nate Silver Is Unskewing Polls — All Of Them — In Trump’s Direction.” Grim basically accused Silver of applying an ad hoc correction to his polling model so that it would show a tighter race. Silver responded pithily: “This article is so fucking idiotic and irresponsible….The article made clear you have **no fucking idea** what you’re talking about.”

Well. I guess it’s not surprising that a historically nasty presidential race has also produced a historically nasty wonk war. This morning, however, Silver was on This Week, where he defended himself in more family-friendly terms:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Another variability that we’ve seen here right now. There have been a lot of other forecasts out there, Princeton Election Consortium, Huffington Post, several others — and The New York Times. Yours is much more bullish for Donald Trump and more cautious on Hillary Clinton than theirs are. Why?

SILVER: Because we think we have a good process and, presumably, the other guys have lousy processes. –ed….Look, you have some forecasts that show Clinton with a 98 or 99 percent chance of winning. That doesn’t pass a commonsense test, which is we’ve seen lots of elections where there’s about a three-point polling error. In 2012, in fact, Obama beat his polls in many states by about three points. If Clinton were to beat her polls by three points and you see something we call a borderline landslide, but if it goes the other way, and all of a sudden Trump could very easily win the electoral college.

I have a couple of comments. First, I don’t get the point of making a prediction about the percentage chance that a candidate will win. It’s useless. If Hillary Clinton wins, every pollster will be able to say they called it, because every pollster has her with more than a 50 percent chance. What’s the point of this? Better to just tell us the national and state averages, and leave it at that. I think everyone is smart enough to tell a tight race from a blowout.

Second, Silver is being a little disingenuous here. Have we really seen a “lot” of elections where there’s a three-point polling error in the poll averages? Sure, in some state contests, where there aren’t very many polls. But in a presidential election, where there are dozens? In the case of Obama 2012, Silver had Obama ahead of Romney by 2.1 points a couple of days before the election. Obama won by 3.9 points. Pollster was farther off, showing Obama ahead by 1.5 points. But even that’s still an error of only 2.4 points.

Silver’s point about a 99 percent chance of winning defying common sense is well taken. Stuff happens. Maybe all the polls are missing something. Even if Clinton were five points ahead, I’d probably still operate under the assumption that Trump had a one in twenty chance of winning. That said, a three-point lead with two days left really is pretty overwhelming. You can make a case that maybe Clinton will only win the popular vote by one point, but will then lose all the swing states and lose the Electoral College. But even that strikes me as a one-in-twenty kind of deal. If Al Gore had won the popular vote by 1 percent in 2000, he would have won the Electoral College handily.

Anyway, Hillary Clinton has been ahead of Trump by a steady 3-4 points for the past year, and I’ve come to believe that most of the variability in the polling averages is fictitious. On Tuesday, I’ll bet she wins by a solid 3-4 points, maybe a bit more because Trump’s ground game is so amateurish. That’s my prediction.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, the latest ABC and NBC polls have Clinton up by 5 points.

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Poll Averagers Are Having the Wonk Version of a Knife Fight. Choose Your Side!

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The Case for Calm

by VedaGLWCow Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

A couple of worried Democrats are coming over for dinner tomorrow. Since I’m the voice of calm, my job is to explain why they probably shouldn’t be panicking over polls showing that Hillary Clinton’s lead is shrinking. This is pretty easy to do, but first this year’s standard disclaimer:

This is the weirdest presidential campaign in my lifetime. Everything I know might be worthless. Caveat emptor.

OK, so why am I still feeling pretty calm? I could show you the pretty picture from Pollster, which really doesn’t show much change over the past year, but I’ve already done that—and anyway, haven’t I said that Sam Wang is my preferred pollster? Indeed I have. So here is Sam Wang:

Roughly speaking, Hillary Clinton has had a steady 3.5 percent lead over Trump all year. Then she got a boost from the Democratic convention and a few bad weeks for Trump. That wore off and she dropped back to a little below where she’s been all along. In the last few days, Clinton has started rising again, and my guess is that over the next few weeks she’ll meander back to her longtime lead of 3.5 percent. Pollwise, the single most remarkable thing about the Clinton vs. Trump race is how stable it’s been ever since the day Trump took his famous escalator ride down to the ground floor of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy.

To the extent that Democrats are panicking, I think it’s because a few weeks ago Clinton was ahead by 7 percent or so, and everyone was licking their chops and wondering if a landslide was possible. It was deflating when that turned out to be a mirage. I got caught up in that a bit too, and it was probably foolish. In reality, it was just a temporary bump and was never likely to last.

Still, even if Clinton has a fairly reliable 3.5 percent lead, isn’t that pretty disappointing? I mean, she’s running against a clown like Trump. This isn’t some normal Republican like John McCain or Mitt Romney. She should be ahead by 6 or 7 points. What the hell is wrong with America?

I’m not sure about that. But keep in mind that election fundamentals—Democrats have held the White House for eight years; the economy is in adequate but not great shape; Obama’s approval level has been only fair until very recently—suggest that this should be a Republican year. Alan Abromowitz, whose forecasting model has had reasonable success, figures that Trump should win the popular vote by 3 percent. If, instead, Clinton wins by 3-4 percent, it means she’s outperformed the fundamentals by 6-7 percent. That’s not bad.

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The Case for Calm

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I Contain Multitudes – Ed Yong

by Myrna Posted on September 13, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

I Contain Multitudes

The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

Ed Yong

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: August 9, 2016

Publisher: Ecco

Seller: HarperCollins


Joining the ranks of popular science classics like The Botany of Desire and The Selfish Gene, a groundbreaking, wondrously informative, and vastly entertaining examination of the most significant revolution in biology since Darwin—a “microbe’s-eye view” of the world that reveals a marvelous, radically reconceived picture of life on earth. Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Ed Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are. The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squid with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people. Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.

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I Contain Multitudes – Ed Yong

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Gold King Mine still leaking one year after spill

by TamaraN45j Posted on August 5, 2016

Yellow mine waste water from the Gold King Mine is seen in San Juan County, Colorado. August 7, 2015. REUTERS/EPA

gold rush

Gold King Mine still leaking one year after spill

By on Aug 5, 2016Share

One year ago, Environmental Protection Agency contractors inadvertently leached wastewater from an abandoned gold mine into the Colorado’s Animas River — turning it a lovely shade of brown.

It caused a shutdown of the popular recreational river for eight days and flowed as far as Lake Powell, which supplies much of the region’s water for drinking. Two thousand Navajo farmers and ranchers were unable to water or irrigate their crops after the accident, and officials with Navajo Nation declared an emergency in the wake of the accident.

Today, metal-laden water is still contaminating the river at 500 gallons a minute, Colorado Public Radio reports. The only improvement is that the polluted water is now getting filtered at a temporary treatment plant.

The Gold King Mine spill exposed an problem endemic to western U.S. There are 161,000 similar abandoned mines across 12 states, with an estimated 20 percent, or 33,000, polluting groundwater and environment.

The federal government has undertaken some actions in response to the spill, but the larger troubles remain. Republicans used the occasion to highlight the incompetence of federal bureaucrats; the Justice Department began a criminal inquiry into the spill; and the EPA delegated $3.7 million (and counting) in emergency response and water quality monitoring.

Little of this addresses the mines that are still there, are still dirty, and still threaten western water supplies — water that is becoming increasingly valuable as climate change and extended droughts dry up the West.

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Gold King Mine still leaking one year after spill

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A Modest Suggestion for Pruning the English Language

by AnastasNielsen Posted on June 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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I recommend that the following two words be officially removed from the English language:

Neoliberal
Fascist

The purpose of words is to facilitate the communication of thoughts between human beings. I have conducted exhaustive research1 on Twitter and other popular social networks which conclusively proves that these two collections of phonemes now do the opposite of that. They are therefore not words. Let’s stop using them.

1Forthcoming in the Journal of Demotic Memes and Dialectics.

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A Modest Suggestion for Pruning the English Language

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Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States

by IsabellaOgle0 Posted on May 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent is a little tired of the current conventional wisdom about a Trump-Clinton general election:

Democrats should not underestimate Trump or imagine that defeating him will be easy….Democrats should obviously be prepared for any manner of attack that Trump will throw at Hillary Clinton, and they’ll need to figure out how to create a more positive narrative around her.

Rather, the point is that we should stop over-inflating impressions of Trump’s strength. We should stop ascribing magical political powers to Trump based on the questionable notion that his “unconventional” and “unpredictable” campaign makes him a more formidable foe than anyone expected. Trump will be difficult to beat, but that might be mainly because these elections are always hard.

I’ll go a little further: chill out, people. Trump is likely to get at least 45 percent of the vote. That’s just the way our country works at the moment. Ditto for Hillary. There’s probably not much more than 10 percent of the electorate that’s really, truly undecided.

This means that at any given moment, all it takes is a tiny bump based on some outside event, combined with a little bit of normal poll error, to make either candidate look like a winner. Especially this early in the campaign, this stuff is meaningless. For what it’s worth, though, the very least you should do is rely on poll aggregations, not single polls. Sam Wang has personally investigated 2 quadrillion outcomes—and boy are his eyes tired—and figures that Hillary is currently likely to win the electoral college by 336-202. Likewise, Pollster puts Hillary ahead in the popular vote by 44-40 percent. This will flutter around, and there will be times when panic seems like the best response, but it’s probably not. It’s just life in 50-50 America.

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Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States

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Donald Trump’s Ground Game Is Much Better Than We Thought

by MaritaUmkshvyj Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tuesday’s Republican primary in Pennsylvania was the ultimate test of the three campaigns’ ground organization. And the candidate who’s been most widely impugned for his ground game came out on top by a vast margin.

Donald Trump won the Pennsylvania Republican primary with 57 percent of the vote. But that was only half the battle in the Keystone State. Unlike voters in most states, who select the candidate of their choice (or a slate of delegates listed under that candidate), GOP voters in Pennsylvania see only delegates’ names on the ballot. The delegates they elect to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are not obligated to support any particular candidate at the convention. That means that for the candidates, getting sympathetic delegates elected is just as important as winning the popular vote.

The Trump campaign nailed this challenge. According to ABC News, at least 41 of the 54 unbound delegates in Pennsylvania will back Trump. Runner-up Ted Cruz has the support of just three delegates in the state, while nine remain uncommitted.

Pennsylvania’s system of directly electing delegates presented a challenge for the campaigns. A Republican voter in Pennsylvania needed to know not only his or her choice for president, but also which candidates for delegate would support that person in Cleveland this summer. That required the campaigns to do two things: ensure that sympathetic delegates made it onto the ballot (or at least identify the supportive candidates) in each congressional district, and launch a substantial information campaign so voters would know which delegates to choose.

Trump was not expected to perform well in this regard. His campaign, which has built its success on a massive press and social-media presence, has been criticized for its lack of ground organizing, which presaged trouble in the crucial delegate-wrangling stage in the latter part of the race. The Cruz campaign has been getting credit for its behind-the-scenes maneuvering to send pro-Cruz delegates to the convention in Cleveland; in states like Colorado, for example, Cruz’s delegate strategy won him nearly every delegate from the state and left none for Trump.

But in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign educated its supporters better than the Cruz campaign, and the results showed.

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Donald Trump’s Ground Game Is Much Better Than We Thought

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