Credible News Sources: The Russian Hacking Story

[Bootstrap]

Neither of us can predict the future.

But more voters rejected Trump than accepted him. I don't think either us speaks for "voters" or "the American people".

!!! SNIP !!!

BUT, prior to the election, FOR YEARS, the-word-was, all-"facts"-were, clinton had the electorate in the bag, trump had no hope, no matter the popular vote!

i guess something got overlooked.

Here's what got overlooked: Neither of us can predict the future. Neither could the polls. That's why we hold elections instead of just trusting the polls.

Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else

Even the Trump campaign itself put their candidate’s chances at 30 percent, right about where FiveThirtyEight had him.

FiveThirtyEight’s probabilities are based on the accuracy of polling averages in presidential elections dating back to 1972. That is, our models are based on how accurate polls have or haven’t been historically, instead of making idealized assumptions about them. For instance, national polling averages in the final week of the campaign have missed the actual outcome by an average of about 2 percentage points. That’s larger than you’d expect from sampling error alone2 and suggests that the polls sometimes suffer from systematic error: Almost all of the them are off in the same direction.

That’s something like what happened this year. In fact, the error in national polls wasn’t any worse than usual. Clinton was ahead by 3 to 4 percentage points in the final national polls. She already leads in the popular vote, and that lead will expand as mail ballots are counted from California and Washington, probably until she leads in the popular vote by 1 to 2 percentage points overall. That will mean only about a 2-point miss for the national polls. They may easily wind up being more accurate than in 2012, when they missed by 2.7 percentage points.

But what about the state polls? They were all over the place. Clinton actually overperformed FiveThirtyEight’s adjusted polling average in 11 states and the District of Columbia. The problem is that these states were California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington. Since all of these states except for Nevada and perhaps New Mexico were already solidly blue, that only helped Clinton to run up the popular vote margin in states whose electoral votes she was already assured of. That’s especially true of Calfornia, where Clinton both beat her polls by more than 5 percentage points and substantially improved on Barack Obama’s performance from 2012.

[Bootstrap]

Request: can we return to the Russian hacking story in this thread, and not discuss every possible issue involving the election, Trump, or Clinton?

And perhaps we can pay attention to the "credible news sources" part of this, too. Which news sources are getting this right?

[lesterb]

I think the county electoral map states it well.

No, it doesn't.

No but it is a good illustration of exactly what the inventors of the electoral college wanted to do. In their opinion, Montana has as much right to state their opinion as California does. Had the popular vote made the decision, than rural areas would invariably be trodden underfoot in an election like this.

This election proves that the system works how they envisioned it.

It's democracy with a twist.

[PeterG]

I think the county electoral map states it well.

No, it doesn't.

to me, it paints a vivid picture similar to 2014.
the divide is rural/urban, not north-south, black-white, or other.

That may well be. But it is not evidence of a landslide, which is what Robert seemed to be claiming.

The apparent source of Robert's graphic presents it as an example of a misleading election map of limited utility. It offers the following maps as better examples.


Click here for a nifty interactive version of the last map.

[PeterG]

Request: can we return to the Russian hacking story in this thread, and not discuss every possible issue involving the election, Trump, or Clinton?

My apologies. Feel free to ask the mods to move or delete my off-topic posts.

[Jazman]

Being thankful is always a good thing. At times though when I have said almost exact things as you just did in your last post, Jazman, I have been accused of being complacent and not caring about the many so called disadvantaged in our society.
\
I guess sometimes you just cannot win.

I understand that... even as I was writing out my response I was thinking of people/situations (like Russia with its firmly in control autocrat/plutocracy) where I imagine for some it's difficult to be thankful...

[Jazman]

I've been part of producing the bunny trails, so I'll try to help this back on course. Is there real data showing that the hacking (whoever did it) suppressed the Obama coalition/vote, therefore handing it to Trump or was it really his rhetoric, his good marketing (and it was), his attraction to nostalgia, etc that just got more people out for him? Or was it the couldn't-get-much-done during Obama's time (due in part to Tea Party/GOP) that soured enough independents, etc. I recall seeing numerous stories of Dems/former Obama voters/etc who went for Trump this time around. I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of the hacking charge. I think it's serious; but was it really the nudge over the tipping point in this case?

[Bootstrap]

I've been part of producing the bunny trails, so I'll try to help this back on course. Is there real data showing that the hacking (whoever did it) suppressed the Obama coalition/vote, therefore handing it to Trump or was it really his rhetoric, his good marketing (and it was), his attraction to nostalgia, etc that just got more people out for him? Or was it the couldn't-get-much-done during Obama's time (due in part to Tea Party/GOP) that soured enough independents, etc. I recall seeing numerous stories of Dems/former Obama voters/etc who went for Trump this time around. I'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of the hacking charge. I think it's serious; but was it really the nudge over the tipping point in this case?

Your guess is as good as mine - we will never have that result. But surely this is something that should be investigated whether or not it changed the actual outcome of the election.

[Bootstrap]

The challenge is the Congressional Oversight Committee called the CIA to meet with them to share their findings and the CIA refused. That was very strange. You think with an agency as big as that, they could find someone to go share with the oversight committee.

OK, your turn. This one is fairly straightforward, could you take a look at some news sources that have a different bias than your own and see what explanations they are giving for this?

OK, no takers, let me fill this in. Two agencies, the FBI and the CIA.

FBI reports to Congress, and has law enforcement responsibilities here at home. CIA reports to the President, has no law enforcement authority, and is primarily responsible for foreign espionage.

Short version: the CIA wants to complete their own investigation first before reporting the results of that incomplete investigation to Congress, and they report to the President. They have only about a month to finish that investigation. When they complete it, their first priority is to report to the President, then to the FBI. Congress comes next.

Getting dragged into a Congressional investigation now would probably slow them down, and they probably haven't yet decided what can be shared with Congress - remember that their confidentiality rules are different from the FBIs, and the two agencies often have subsets of the data, and when you share this kind of information, you have to think about how much you are betraying about the way the information is gathered in the field.

[Robert]

Short version: the CIA wants to complete their own investigation first before reporting the results of that incomplete investigation to Congress, and they report to the President. They have only about a month to finish that investigation. When they complete it, their first priority is to report to the President, then to the FBI. Congress comes next.

So maybe they should not have leaked it to the press? Seems they came first.