Tag Archives: trump

There Was No Apparent “Whitelash” This Year

by RustyEbersbache Posted on November 9, 2016

Mother Jones

Among liberals, one of the most popular explanations for Donald Trump’s victory is that it was a “whitelash,” a primal scream of lost influence and latent racism among white voters. I myself certainly talked about racial animus quite a bit during the runup to the election. However, in the spirit of figuring out where we were wrong, the actual voting patterns suggest this is flat wrong. Using exit poll data from 2012 and 2016, here is Trump’s share of the vote compared to Romney in 2012:

Whites voted less for Trump than for Romney, while both blacks and Latinos voted more for Trump.1 There’s nothing here that suggests Trump appealed to white backlash in any special way. Quite the opposite. But now let’s add a column to the table:

Among whites, Trump lost 1 percent of white votes, but third-party candidates gained 3 percent. Among Latinos, third-parties gained 4 percent, and among blacks they gained 3 percent.

This is the big difference. Who did third-party candidates hurt the most, Trump or Clinton? And why? Or was the damage equal? You need to answer this question before you can say anything sensible about race.

It’s worth nothing that this doesn’t mean that race played no role in this election. But it does mean two things. First, white racial animus seem to have played no more of a role than it did four years ago. Second, although Trump’s blatant appeal to white ethnocentrism did him little good, it also did him no harm—and that was true among all racial groups. That’s disheartening all on its own.2

When more detailed data is available, it might turn out there are specific subsets of the white vote that moved very strongly toward Trump. But what we have so far doesn’t suggest anything of the sort. If you still want to claim that whitelash played a big role in this election, you need to contend with this.

1You can break this down by age or gender, but it doesn’t really change anything. For example, white men moved slightly toward Trump while white women moved slightly away from him. Likewise, middle-aged whites moved slightly toward Trump while young and old whites moved slightly away. But the differences are small enough that they don’t change the picture much.

2Since I first put up this post, several people have suggested that national data isn’t the right way to look at voter demographics. Instead, we should look at the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But that doesn’t change things. If you look at the exit poll data, Trump did slightly worse than Romney in Pennsylvania and slightly better in Wisconsin and Michigan. But the operative word is “slightly.”

Still, maybe turnout was up among white voters? That’s possible. But we don’t have that information yet, and I’m not sure when we’ll get it.

Link: 

There Was No Apparent “Whitelash” This Year

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There Was No Apparent “Whitelash” This Year

Post-Election Cat Blogging

by DavisToler9481 Posted on November 9, 2016

Mother Jones

My usual schtick at this point is to tell everyone to settle down. Things won’t be as bad as they seem. Not this time. What happened yesterday is appalling. We have elected a buffoonish, misogynistic, race-baiting, game-show host to be president of the United States. I can’t even begin to assess the damage he’s likely to do over the next four years.

I didn’t see this coming, and it’s no comfort that few others did either. But obviously everything I thought I knew was wrong. I need time to digest this, and in any case, there’s no point in reading anything I have to say until I come to grips with why and how I was so wrong. While I’m digesting, however, someone needs to take a close look at unmarried men. If there’s any single demographic group that powered Trump to victory, that was it.

I’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the only people in my household taking this philosophically.

Link to article – 

Post-Election Cat Blogging

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Post-Election Cat Blogging

The World Reacts to America’s Climate Denier-in-Chief

by AnnettaBernhard Posted on November 9, 2016

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

MARRAKECH, Morocco―Attendees at the climate conference here are grappling with a reality few expected: America’s next president will almost certainly be openly hostile to efforts to address the biggest environmental threat of our day.

Representatives of more than 200 countries are currently gathered in Morocco for the 22nd Conference of the Parties, where they are hashing out the details of the landmark Paris Agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions and avoid the worst effects linked to global warming.

Officials from environmental and scientific groups gathered at the United Nations climate change conference tried not to dwell on the prospect of a doomsday scenario, but were clear that a climate change-denying Donald Trump would not be in the best interest of America, or the world. But they tried to remain positive.

“It’s clear that Donald Trump is about to be one of the most powerful people in the world, but even he does not have the power to amend and change the laws of physics, to stop the impacts of climate change,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union for Concerned Scientists, a science advocacy group based in the US, at a press conference held shortly after the election was called early Wednesday. “He has to acknowledge the reality of climate change, he has a responsibility as president-elect now.”

The US presidential election results came as a surprise to many who on Tuesday thought Hillary Clinton would be elected and plans to continue the Obama administration’s work on climate change would make press conferences a relative non-event. But Trump’s name is on everyone’s lips as many wonder where America will stand in future negotiations.

Some groups have not been as diplomatic.

“The election of Trump is a disaster for our continent,” Geoffrey Kamese, a senior program officer for the group Friends of the Earth Africa, said in a statement. “The United States, if it follows through on its new president’s rash words about withdrawing from the international climate regime, will become a pariah state in global efforts for climate action.”

The US delegation had previously planned to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the amount released in 2005, by between 26 and 28 percent by 2025. The prospect of a presidency helmed by Trump, who has said that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, throws that into question. He has threatened to ignore those pledges and leave the Paris deal, end all funding on the issue, appoint climate deniers to lead major government agencies and roll back President Barack Obama’s sweeping environmental legacy. His election won’t help the fight against climate change.

The previous climate pact, the Kyoto Protocol, failed to meaningfully address climate change because the United States backed out, a move that set back climate change progress two decades.

But climate advocates tried to spin the fallout from Trump’s election positively, arguing that other nations aren’t likely to wait for the US―the world’s second largest polluter―to take action.

“Other major countries in this process will continue to go ahead with the climate commitments that they have made under Paris, not because they’re trying to please the United States, but because it’s in their own self interest to protect their people from the impacts of climate change,” Meyer said. However, he continued to note inaction on behalf of America could certainly impact other international negotiations.

Katherine Egland, chairman of environmental and climate justice for the NAACP, stressed that for the Paris Agreement to succeed, “no one country can be perceived as not doing its fair share.”

“We remain a nation of honor―our word is our bond,” she said. “We have signed a binding agreement along with scores of other countries and we will demand that agreement be honored.”

Mariana Panuncio-Feldman, senior director of international climate cooperation for the World Wildlife Fund, said despite the outcome, “the momentum for climate action has never been greater.”

“At this point, given the progress that we have seen, we are confident that the nations of the world will keep focusing on the work that needs to go ahead,” she said at a press conference. “With the momentum that we have behind us we need to remain confident that the arc of climate justice will bend towards solutions.”

From:  

The World Reacts to America’s Climate Denier-in-Chief

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Ringer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The World Reacts to America’s Climate Denier-in-Chief

The Miami Herald Endorses Hillary Clinton in a Simple, Yet Powerful Editorial

by VallieC63822 Posted on November 8, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

With Florida up for grabs this Election Day, residents in the key battleground state woke up on Tuesday to a last-minute endorsement from the Miami Herald announcing its choice for the White House. The succinct, five-word editorial below:

For a deeper dive into how Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump campaigned in Florida, head to our report here:

Link: 

The Miami Herald Endorses Hillary Clinton in a Simple, Yet Powerful Editorial

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Miami Herald Endorses Hillary Clinton in a Simple, Yet Powerful Editorial

Donald Trump’s Campaign Just Scored a Big Win in Pennsylvania

by WolfganElias Posted on November 7, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A federal judge in Philadelphia has refused a request by Democrats to issue an order that would prohibit the Trump campaign and its supporters from intimidating Pennsylvania voters at the polls on Tuesday.

Pennsylvania is one of the few swing states that could help decide the presidential election. The state’s Democratic Party filed a lawsuit last week—similar to lawsuits filed in five other swing states—alleging possible voter intimidation and requesting an injunction compelling the Trump campaign to not harass voters. In his opinion issued on Monday in a district court, Judge Paul Diamond, a George W. Bush appointee, said the Democratic Party had not proved that a substantial threat of voter intimidation exists in the state. Moreover, he said, the party had waited too long to bring its concerns before the court.

“Plaintiff has not explained what it learned in the last month or even the last week that created emergent conditions. On the contrary, Plaintiff has long known of the acts and statements on which it bases its claims,” wrote Diamond. “Plaintiff has not explained why it filed its Emergency Motion only two business days before the election…Plaintiff has contrived to transform this litigation into a mad scramble.”

The judge also chided the Democrats for using media reports as much of their evidence and for taking portions of that evidence out of context. “I am thus compelled to base a ruling that could restrict Defendants’ Election Day speech and conduct on media reports,” he wrote, noting that several items cited by the Democratic Party as evidence of possible voter suppression actually constitute protected election activity.

Taking issue with the Democrats’ claim that white nationalists’ enthusiasm for the Trump campaign could lead to intimidation of minority voters, the judge wrote, “Unless it is psychic, Plaintiff has no idea who might have been ‘energized by’ Mr. Trump. Plaintiff’s heated suggestion does not even rise to the level of speculation.”

Source: 

Donald Trump’s Campaign Just Scored a Big Win in Pennsylvania

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump’s Campaign Just Scored a Big Win in Pennsylvania

Trump Team No Longer Proud of the FBI

by RubenDriskell Posted on November 6, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For months Donald Trump attacked the FBI as a corrupt, rigged organization because it had failed to indict Hillary Clinton. Then, when they announced an ongoing review of some new emails last week, he suddenly declared that he was “very proud” of the FBI. But now they’ve announced that they found nothing new and still have no plans to indict Clinton. What does Trump think of that?

Trump’s handlers have taken away his cell phone, so we don’t know. However, we’ll always have his surrogates, who continue to have access to America’s Agora:

Obviously Comey caved to the Clinton machine and is every bit as corrupt as they thought. Drain the swamp!

This article:

Trump Team No Longer Proud of the FBI

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Team No Longer Proud of the FBI

Staring at Defeat, Donald Trump Is Sleepless and Vengeful

by BradHeanearesg Posted on November 6, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The New York Times has a truly remarkable piece this morning about the final days of the Trump campaign:

Aboard his gold-plated jumbo jet, the Republican nominee does not like to rest or be alone with his thoughts, insisting that aides stay up and keep talking to him. He prefers the soothing, whispery voice of his son-in-law.

….Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a jarring split screen: the choreographed show of calm and confidence orchestrated by his staff, and the neediness and vulnerability of a once-boastful candidate now uncertain of victory.

….Aides to Mr. Trump have finally wrested away the Twitter account that he used to colorfully — and often counterproductively — savage his rivals. But offline, Mr. Trump still privately muses about all of the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day, including a threat to fund a “super PAC” with vengeance as its core mission.

His polished older daughter, Ivanka, sat for a commercial intended to appeal to suburban women who have recoiled from her father’s incendiary language. But she discouraged the campaign from promoting the ad in news releases, fearing that her high-profile association with the campaign would damage the businesses that bear her name.

How…Nixonian. Yikes.

Credit:

Staring at Defeat, Donald Trump Is Sleepless and Vengeful

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Staring at Defeat, Donald Trump Is Sleepless and Vengeful

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

by Terry9514k Posted on November 6, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

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.

View original:  

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

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Poll Averagers Are Having the Wonk Version of a Knife Fight. Choose Your Side!

Donald Trump Once Again the Target of Malicious Gossip From Haters and Losers

by DaisyNewsom Posted on November 5, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The company that owns the National Enquirer, a backer of Donald Trump, agreed to pay $150,000 to a former Playboy centerfold model for her story of an affair a decade ago with the Republican presidential nominee, but then didn’t publish it, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the matter.

The tabloid-newspaper publisher reached an agreement in early August with Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playmate of the Year….Ms. McDougal expected her story about Mr. Trump to be published, people familiar with the matter said. American Media didn’t intend to run it, said another person familiar with the matter. Ms. McDougal didn’t return calls for comment.

….A contract reviewed by the Journal gave American Media exclusive rights to Ms. McDougal’s story forever, but didn’t obligate the company to publish it and allowed the company to transfer those rights. It barred her from telling her story elsewhere. The company said it also would give her monthly columns to write and would put her on magazine covers.

Trump and the Enquirer deny everything, so this is probably just idle gossip. It doesn’t really seem like him anyway, does it? Anyway, this was all back in 2006, when Trump was only 60 years old and didn’t know he’d run for president someday. I’m sure he’s given up cheating on his wife since then.

And speaking of Melania, I guess we finally got the goods on her. Apparently she did paid modeling jobs in the United States seven weeks before she got a work permit:

The details of Mrs. Trump’s early paid modeling work in the U.S. emerged in the final days of a bitter presidential campaign in which her husband, Donald Trump, has taken a hard line on immigration laws and those who violate them.

….The documents obtained by the AP show she was paid for 10 modeling assignments between Sept. 10 and Oct. 15 of 1996, during a time when her visa allowed her generally to be in the U.S. and look for work but not perform paid work in the country. The documents examined by the AP indicate that the modeling assignments would have been outside the bounds of her visa.

We can all let this go, right? It’s bad enough being married to Donald. She doesn’t deserve any more grief.

View original article: 

Donald Trump Once Again the Target of Malicious Gossip From Haters and Losers

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Once Again the Target of Malicious Gossip From Haters and Losers

Judge Issues Restraining Order Against Trump Campaign to Prevent Voter Intimidation

by JuneRDIqgdfcixw Posted on November 4, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In a surprise ruling, a US district judge in Ohio issued a restraining order against Donald Trump’s campaign to prevent anyone working on the campaign from harassing and intimidating voters at the polls on Tuesday.

The order came after a two-hour hearing in which the judge pressed Trump’s lawyer to justify the candidate’s inflammatory rhetoric about voter fraud. It also applies to close Trump adviser Roger Stone, who has organized poll-watching activities, and the “officers, agents, servants, and employees” of Trump and Stone.

Voter fraud has been a popular theme among Republicans this year, from Trump to state Republican leaders who cite fraud as a reason to make it more difficult to vote. But as Friday’s ruling shows, it’s a lot easier to warn about fraud on the campaign trail than in front of a judge.

The restraining order is the result of a lawsuit filed by the Ohio Democratic Party against Trump, Stone, and the Ohio Republican Party. The suit asked the court to declare it illegal to intimidate voters at the polls. Similar suits have been filed in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan. The Ohio complaint laid out a long history of remarks by Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, encouraging supporters to watch the polls. (For example, Trump told a crowd in Akron, Ohio, “And when I say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about right? You know what I’m talking about.”) The order also covers Stone, after the complaint detailed efforts by his group, Stop the Steal, to recruit poll watchers and conduct exit polls on Election Day, among other activities. The complaint cited provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 that prohibit voter intimidation.

Here’s the order:

DV.load(“https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3214407-Order-Trump-Stone.js”,
width: 630,
height: 600,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-3214407-Order-Trump-Stone”
);

Order Trump Stone (PDF)

Order Trump Stone (Text)

Civil rights lawyer Subodh Chandra was in the courtroom and tweeted throughout the hearing. Here’s what he observed:

Later Friday afternoon, the Trump campaign appealed the ruling to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

This story has been updated to include the judge’s order and Trump’s appeal.

See original article here:  

Judge Issues Restraining Order Against Trump Campaign to Prevent Voter Intimidation

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Judge Issues Restraining Order Against Trump Campaign to Prevent Voter Intimidation