Posts by Russell Brown
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Pew has a take on the poll problem:
One likely culprit is what pollsters refer to as nonresponse bias. This occurs when certain kinds of people systematically do not respond to surveys despite equal opportunity outreach to all parts of the electorate. We know that some groups – including the less educated voters who were a key demographic for Trump on Election Day – are consistently hard for pollsters to reach. It is possible that the frustration and anti-institutional feelings that drove the Trump campaign may also have aligned with an unwillingness to respond to polls. The result would be a strongly pro-Trump segment of the population that simply did not show up in the polls in proportion to their actual share of the population.
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Hard News: Be careful what you wish for, in reply to simon g,
Some day soon, some learned journal will explain the effect of the weakened Voting Rights Act on the 2016 election
Quite. I didn't have anything to go on there, but we might find out some nasty things.
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Hard News: Be careful what you wish for, in reply to Gareth,
If Trump does go full on protectionist on trade, what price China stepping in to act as the centrepiece of future multilateral trade agreements?
Oh, absolutely. And they’d quite like the renminbi to be the default global currency too.
I’m not sure the cheerleaders realise the extent to which this presidency could degrade American influence. No wonder the Chinese see it as the beginning of the decline.
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It didn't really fit into the post, but I woke up at 2.30am, remembered that Trump had won and couldn't sleep for another two hours. It appeared from social media that I wasn't alone.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Its tough to realise Trump did this with far less money and organisation than Hillary had.
True. A lot of political wisdom about ground-games and suchlike was turfed in the dustbin today.
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This is a hell of a read from Beijing-based FT journalist James Palmer: China just won the U.S. election:
But generally, these developments will only embolden China. After the 2008 financial crisis, Beijing was convinced the world was going its way, resulting in a spate of overconfident military moves in southeast Asia which pushed some countries more firmly into the U.S. camp. Now China’s confidence will return, and few in the region will have confidence in Washington’s ability to provide shelter from China’s nascent hegemony. Taiwan, already facing tough mainland rhetoric after electing anti-Beijing leader Tsai Ing-wen, will feel completely isolated — and perhaps be vulnerable to actual invasion — without the firm promise of U.S. protection.
The second victory is in the contest between authoritarianism and democracy. From a Chinese point of view, an electoral system that produces somebody like Trump — utterly inexperienced in governance but a skilled demagogue — is an absurdity, the equivalent of picking a major company’s CEO through a horse race. In China, leaders need to be carefully chosen, groomed, and pushed, gaining experience at every level of the Communist Party system before being anointed for the top job. (That comes amid a flurry of brutally nasty and corrupt internal struggles at each level, mind you.)
China aspires toward the Singaporean model of carefully controlled elitism, a country in which Trump represents, in the words of one writer, everything they were taught to fear about democracy. The crudity of Trump’s triumphant campaign gives credence to Chinese media’s criticisms of a “chaotic political farce.” The likely split between the popular vote and the Electoral College will only further the often-made case that U.S. democracy is a sham.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to BenWilson,
True, although that will change if a swing state comes in blue. Especially if it’s Florida.
Trump has been slightly ahead there, but that’s only the rural booths. His two-point lead just reversed on the latest update. That’s the city booths coming in.
Update: 20 seconds after I wrote that, the NYT switched Florida to Trump …
Update 2: And 30 seconds later, back to Clinton.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It’s a strange election. The result is in no doubt and has been in no doubt for over a month.
Even the Senate race doesn’t look particularly close.
So we have this weird thing where the media try and find some way to make it seem exciting
Duncan Garner's "can Hillary still win?" question on Story last night was a bit of a WTF.
They could have spent time talking about and analysing the actual policies of the next President Clinton.
Bernie Sanders has been good value on the policy platform, but you're right, there's been bugger-all. Honourable exception: the New Yorker's endorsement essay, which didn't shy from Clinton's shortcomings, but said this:
A chasm lies between a candidate’s promises and a President’s legislative accomplishments, but the ambitions must be assessed, however partial their eventual enactment. In many ways, Clinton’s campaign is the antithesis of campaigns during past times of economic uncertainty. She offers no soaring rhetoric on the order of “Morning in America,” “A Bridge to the 21st Century,” or “Yes We Can.” What she does offer is a series of thoughtful and energetic proposals that present precisely the kind of remedies that could improve the lives of many working-class and poor Americans of all races. She would simplify the tax code for small businesses and streamline their licensing requirements. She would increase health-care tax credits through the Affordable Care Act, which, in theory, would both expand coverage and reduce the burden on employers. She would also seek to expand access to Medicaid and would extend Medicare to people as young as fifty-five. She would substantially increase funding for community health centers and provide significant federal support for child care. And her college-affordability plan would help students refinance debt, and support states that subsidize tuition.
Clinton’s tax plans are also designed to promote broader-based affluence. She would increase the tax rate on short-term capital gains for high earners, with lower rates for longer-term holdings; close the “carried-interest” tax loophole that favors hedge-fund managers; and levy fees on banks with high debt levels. She would impose a four-per-cent surcharge on incomes above five million dollars a year, and adopt a minimum thirty-per-cent tax rate on incomes above a million dollars a year. She supports an “exit tax” and other fiscal adjustments that would discourage so-called corporate inversion—the offshoring of companies to tax havens like Ireland. And she proposes tax incentives for investing in towns that have faced significant losses in manufacturing jobs. To address the compounding effects of trade and technology on displaced workers, she would promote training, and include a tax credit for businesses that take on apprentices. She would allocate $275 billion over five years to infrastructure improvement, focussing on transit and water systems, which should create employment while reducing inefficiencies.
In general, Clinton’s tax plan is less advantageous to the financial industry and more conducive to jobs-intensive enterprises. Despite her reputation for being overly solicitous of Wall Street, Clinton has strong proposals to prevent large financial institutions from taking on risks that could derail the economy again. She promises to defend the Dodd-Frank reforms (which Trump, like all the Republican candidates, has pledged to overturn) and to build on them. She would impose new fees on risk; strengthen the Volcker Rule, which prevents banks from making potentially disastrous bets with government-backed deposits; and bring regulatory light into the so-called shadow banking system, where much of the 2008 financial crisis began. She would demand that hedge funds and other large financial firms provide far more information to regulators about their trading activity, and her Administration would prevent those firms from becoming so overleveraged that a faulty bet could bankrupt them and lead to widespread economic crisis.
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There have been some interesting insights recently on where the bafflement and bullshit comes from. First, kids in Macedonia making fake-new websites for the advertising traffic.
And Sam Bee's fascinating chat with a couple of the army of people who troll for Putin:
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