mathjax

Monday, December 19, 2016

My Buddhist Seasons Greetings

I wanted to write this felicitation on my holiday treats:

As a Buddhist I've sworn off all materialism as illusory trappings of existence. I keep to that principle as best I can. I tend to forget to remember and consider the impact and importance for others. I've also been singled out as anti social, while that seems true it's only apparent, I'm so behind on work and my obligation to help binds me to do the most I can.

But in honor of the many holidays I'm leaving these treats as a token of goodwill to all my colleagues. I don't understand holidays but I respect them because I respect you.


What I wrote:

Seasons Greetings





Sunday, December 18, 2016

How #Trump won


How #Trump Won


For those of you still catching up to reality of President-elect @realDonaldTrump, let me (as someone that predicted his victory in August 2015) enlighten you to how it really happened (vice how he did it which is false because he did not know he was going to win until late in the campaign). I will make a two page argument based on objective outside observation. I favored neither Trump nor Clinton and I argued they were both dangerous candidates. I hoped @GovGaryJohnson would make the debate stage and then at least have a chance at winning.

The first question to address is can you win if you lose popular vote? This is the stupidest question; popular vote versus electoral college is pointless until election law is changed. If you win the electoral college you win, no special mention nor extra value to winning the vote total. That is how you win. Remember the Clinton campaign mocking Trump's misunderstanding of how to win, they should have heeded their own advice. They didn't make swing states a priority. The goal of an electoral college is to prevent New York and California from deciding all elections. If you live outside these two areas you want to make sure large population centres, and all the big city priorities, don't swamp other concerns. State electoral voting demands that candidates make every state a part of the strategy rather than allowing them to ignore flyover states.

Consider all the possible, if somewhat far fetched, election outcomes against a crude timeline. If you make a matrix of all possible outcomes like so:

Candidate Decided during Primary Decided before Nov 8 Decided on Nov 8
Trump





Clinton





Johnson





Stein






And you consider the most likely reasons for candidate choice:

Candidate For Candidate Against Opponent Change vice Status Quo
Trump





Clinton





Johnson





Stein






You don't need to fill them in, just consider how the results align with these possible causes. The reason for the timing as in primary, before election day, and on election day considers the impact of media, scandals, coverage, debates and so on as the likely turning points for people to decide which they would vote for. These are arbitrary and fuzzy but generally align with major information thresholds. The people that decided earliest had the least information, the people that decided later had the most. Did having more information change the result? Both sides expected revelations against the other candidate would change the outcome. The election outcome suggests that both GOP and DNC solidified large portions of the electorate that decided on one candidate early. But that wasn't the difference.

The deciding factor was disenfranchised voters returned to politics, unemployed/desperate needed change, or otherwise opponents of the status quo wanted change. The preponderance of new voters went to Trump. It was people that turned off politics over many years that realized there was a real chance for change with a candidate that owed no debts to anyone. He proposed economic relief and policy restructuring – even without detail – that convinced enough voters he might change the status quo. That was the election decision. Logically, more people decided, in the primaries, to vote Trump than decided to vote Clinton. That included voters that don't partake in elections in general that changed behaviour because this election was different. Information didn't matter and as I describe below information against Trump didn't work for this very reason. They didn't care what he did or said, they convinced themselves with the LEAST information that he was the best chance for change. Does the proposition that normal/average people decided with the least information at the earliest moment and then stubbornly defended their choice sound more or less likely than alternatives? To me, this is the simplest explanation.

This explanation fits the most possible outcomes and the events leading up to the election; most voters decided early. Without Gov. Gary Johnson or Dr. Jill Stein on the debate stage to alter the visibility / give attention to 3rd party alternatives the vote came down to who wanted change over who wanted status quo. Both Trump and Clinton negative ratings negated each other just like most of the scandals. Neither is pious nor perfect.

The fact that famous, even pious people like the @Pontifex, people took turns insulting or criticizing @realDonaldTrump and all those pleadings did not change the outcome means that liberals did not anticipate all outcomes nor did they understand voters. The Clinton campaign truly believed they had won, in part because they were taking biased / skewed samples, but also because they deluded themselves into thinking they COULD change enough voters to win. 

There was no chance of that. That is the reward for hubris!

What really happened was most voters in the electoral majority, most average normal voters, believed and could see first hand from a lack of good paying jobs, that the USA needed to change directions. They were paying too high a price for globalization and the evidence is ready for all to see: the empty rusting factories that used to give voters a good living. In fact, "change voters" have been voting for hope and change since at least George Bush II. Bush II was the new sheriff in town, a street smart governor that wasn't a beltway insider. He promised them a stop to globalization, to make economic changes that kept jobs, but instead got distracted by 9/11 and wars. The same with Obama over McCain and Romney. He was the hope and change candidate. The underlying belief is that the rules aren't fair and the people wanted globalization to stop, if that means trade wars and tariffs then so be it.

The point is Obama, Bush, and now Trump were the more plausible change candidates than their opponents. This is a direct rebuke of free trade policy. Capitalism is choking as it swallows the world and these victims of the rise and fall of prosperity wanted another change November 8 2016, a promised dropped 16 years in a row by other promisers.

Most of the normal, average voters must have decided on Trump early on. The way that famous person after famous person failed to dent Trump's popularity, the way that $1.2 billion Clinton marketing did nothing to sway voters, it means that simple people whom decided for Trump felt shame or anger about their choice when it was rubbed in their faces. Whenever something embarrassing or ridiculous was revealed about Trump they took it PERSONALLY that the accuser was insulting them for being allied to Trump. They were being personally mocked for their choice. That made them even angrier and more determined, Trump supporters were like rabid dogs whereas Clinton supporters – because she is an odious candidate despite the varnish – were like fickle cats. Clintonites were not sanguine enough about their choice to match that level, including cheated / defeated Sanders supporters that felt (rightly) betrayed by the Democratic party. The delicious irony is, the more that sanctimonious elites lined up with Clinton, the more President +BarackObama talked, the more Bush-era apparatchiks lined up with Clinton, the more media made fun of Trump's many failings, the more comics and actors mocked Trump, it was all electing Trump in the process and demoralizing Clinton supporters at the same time. How could this buffoon even be in the running Clintonites thought, and yet the roots of their hubris lie in the fact they were so quick to judge, so quick to dismiss normal voters, that they did not attack the most important economic assumptions of Trump. 

Clintonites were too busy yelling “Racist!”, “Hitler!”, “Sexist!”, and “Misogynist!” (why they would hurl this one for normal voters who probably don't know the definition, this by itself proves their disconnection). Some of these attacks didn't even make sense to Clinton supporters. The power of their attacks dropped as they repeated them. It made decided voters LESS likely to change their minds.  Doubling down on more baseless personal attacks made themselves worse off. It was like struggling with a boa constrictor; the more you writhe the more the coils expose your weaker spots and the deeper becomes the pull of death. The voters were angry at the elites, at the Clintons, at the Obamas, at the media so more proved detrimental.

The Clinton campaign was in a death spiral from May 2016 and no one was brave enough to warn the boss. All this loss proves is that if she can't even get this right, she wasn't a good candidate in the first place and the world is better off without her.

Add to that the appalling lack of integrity of pollsters to bias the very polls they were taking, and there was no way to realize how wrong the establishment was. The “hidden” Trump voters were in plain sight but tired of the mockery from media. They stayed silent or lied about their choice because the media were nonstop nonsense and voters were sick of intrusion and condescension.

This interpretation fits with Professor Norpoth's model that predicted Trump would win based on the primary results. The primaries are the biggest sample poll run before the election so therefore a better determinant than daily sub sub sampling. The radical difference in  Trump's versus Clinton's primary numbers were all that was needed to predict the outcome no matter what self-interested political people tell you. That was the indicator of new / returning voters that wanted change.

The only way to change the outcome was if +GovGaryJohnson would have made the debate stage. He would have sounded like a sane alternative to the two hated candidates and might have tipped the balance to a tie and into a Congress-determined Libertarian victory.