How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
fivethirtyeight.com
How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
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Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#2"we were basically acting like pundits"
So, basically a giant Bayesian prior fail.
edit: got to the part where nate talks about the bayesian failure in more detail. It's good.
Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#3I've watched Trump years ago on The Apprentice. What he brought to politics was business sense and marketing know-how, which has been surprisingly absent from political campaigns before.
Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#4Trump's (presumptive) nomination was a big surprise to me. However, in retrospect, it looks less surprising. Trump was always going to attract a sizable minority, and there were really no other compelling candidates in the race. While I'm sure that the majority of Republican voters would prefer "not Trump," who that "not Trump" candidate could be was never clear. At the end, well, I am not certain that I wouldn't pick Trump over Cruz, for example.
Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#5I don't think 538 gets it even now.
Trump is a celebrity who gets free media coverage and people aspire to. So of course he was a serious contender from Day One.
The fact that he is not polished for the media is a plus to most people.
As one woman said to a news reporter earlier in the campaign, "Well, I could vote for the other candidate. But he's a politician."
Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#6I've watched Trump years ago on The Apprentice. What he brought to politics was business sense and marketing know-how, which has been surprisingly absent from political campaigns before.
and also racism, sexism and xenophobia, with an authoritarian bent.
Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#7>"...our early estimates of Trump’s chances weren’t based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we “subjective odds” — which is to say, educated guesses"
People of al stripes do this in all kinds of situations. We have a hypothesis and find data to support that.
In this case both Trump and Bernie were hard to gauge. Trump just had no prior history (I said to myself) and Bernie was never notable in national politics outside a small core constituency so the default was to discount both because on both sides they were more to the extremes (left and right ends) of their parties.
Also, both Bernie and Trump are the animus the personification of the feelings of large swaths of the electorate --so it goes beyond what they represent as isolated individuals ("movement").
most of these analysts will find it hard to discount their "instinct" even if they want to be data-driven (in a sphere where data can only reveal so much.
Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#8I've watched Trump years ago on The Apprentice. What he brought to politics was business sense and marketing know-how, which has been surprisingly absent from political campaigns before.
and also racism, sexism and xenophobia, with an authoritarian bent.
To be fair, that is not new. It just hasn't been this overt since the 60s on the national stage.
Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#9Trump's (presumptive) nomination was a big surprise to me. However, in retrospect, it looks less surprising. Trump was always going to attract a sizable minority, and there were really no other compelling candidates in the race. While I'm sure that the majority of Republican voters would prefer "not Trump," who that "not Trump" candidate could be was never clear. At the end, well, I am not certain that I wouldn't pic…
> I am not certain that I wouldn't pick Trump over Cruz, for example.
The negatives sprinkled throughout that sentence don't make it clearer.
isn't it just: "I would pick Trump over Cruz"?
Re: How I Acted Like a Pundit and Screwed Up on Donald Trump
#10I've watched Trump years ago on The Apprentice. What he brought to politics was business sense and marketing know-how, which has been surprisingly absent from political campaigns before.
and also racism, sexism and xenophobia, with an authoritarian bent.
So was everyone else in the Republican Primary lineup. The only reason Kasich came off as a moderate is because he smiled and didn't directly attack the other candidates.