Was watching NBC news last night (for entertainment, I added them to the "fun stations" list along with "Fox"). And it was funny how they were baffled and backpedaling hard on why Trump won, and they never expected it.
However, one thing that seemed to make them happy was the stock markets. "Oh look, stocks are crashing worldwide" and they kept belaboring that point, as a validation in a way "see we warned you how bad Trump was" kind of sentiment.
For example US Steel (X) jumped a whopping 20% since yesterday. Something tells me they probably won't be focusing on that.
One wonders, does anyone there look around and say "What have we become? Are we just clowns here making stuff up? What if we actually tried to tell the truth, maybe just turn the spin level from 9 to a 3 and see what happens... as an experiment"
CNN was hilarious. King and Blizter kept looking at one county in WI, saying 'just wait'. You could tell they were not really mad as obvious HRC supporters, but just completely shell shocked on what they witnessed. By the end, they kept going back to that county looking for magical votes to appear I guess.
Meanwhile, the NYT website had Trump as the >95% winner a couple hours prior.
How King didn't tell Blitzer to shut up is beyond me. King would be trying to drill down to something interesting, and Blitzer would jump in with "Show me Alabama!".
Funny how yesterday there were posters here accusing the NYT model as pro Hillary biased. What could they do better if the polls were simply wrong? Their election day forecast model was pretty impressive - it detected the swing early in the evening.
Yeah, it was a depressing read for Hillary supporters. I was hoping their models were wrong but they were pretty much dead on almost everywhere. It swung a lot in some places like Florida, but it got Wisconsin right pretty early on. From a geek perspective it was definitely interesting to track.
Bad polling data is a more likely culprit for the confusion. There's some cognitive dissonance involved when the months of poll numbers and projections turn out to be completely wrong.
Between the Brexit, the Canadian Liberal party sweep, and this election, there is some methodology error in modern polling in the English speaking world that needs to be figured out.
The real issue is the change in the phone system. Pollsters used to just dial a random number in the telephone book. Now most numbers are unlisted, and most people won't answer the phone to strangers (or the people that do answer are rather unrepresentative, at least.) All polling methods require getting a random sample of the voting population to be accurate. That's super hard, perhaps impossible.
I enjoy being polled. I find the questions they ask fascinating, especially the push polls, where they ask you your preference, say something stupid about a candidate, and then ask you if that changed your opinion (more or less).
>One wonders, does anyone there look around and say "What have we become? Are we just clowns here making stuff up? What if we actually tried to tell the truth, maybe just turn the spin level from 9 to a 3 and see what happens... as an experiment"
I personally don't think the events can be compared. Brexit has a lot of (unknown) implications for the UK, due to the fact that it's not clear what deal they'll get from the EU. On the other had Trump being elected president is just a change of the president of the US. There's no immediate threat.
I was also amused watching NBC (and CNN) last night. They were so desperate to keep the hope alive, constantly saying "It's not over yet! It's not over yet, too close to call", when it was obvious it was already over.
Don't think it was so much desperate as you don't want to make an early call on the presidency without being sure. They acknowledged that they didn't really see a path, but wanted to get specific info in (like absentee ballot numbers) first before making the official call. Some states still haven't been calling half a day later.
However, one thing that seemed to make them happy was the stock markets. "Oh look, stocks are crashing worldwide" and they kept belaboring that point, as a validation in a way "see we warned you how bad Trump was" kind of sentiment.
For example US Steel (X) jumped a whopping 20% since yesterday. Something tells me they probably won't be focusing on that.
One wonders, does anyone there look around and say "What have we become? Are we just clowns here making stuff up? What if we actually tried to tell the truth, maybe just turn the spin level from 9 to a 3 and see what happens... as an experiment"