[Declanomous]

I spent 5 years living in Wisconsin, and I've been telling everyone that Trump would definitely win there. The week before the election, I actually went so far as to say that I expected Hillary to win the popular vote, and Trump to win the electoral college.

I wasn't predicting a Trump win out of bias. I'm very liberal, and my friends are too. However, none of my friends believed me. I'm not going to say I was confident in my prediction, but I thought the race was much closer than it appeared. I talk to a lot of people in my job, and I could just tell that a lot of people would be far more okay with Trump as a president than they were willing to overtly say.

I'm not saying I'm some election analysis god, but I felt like people were galvanizing Trump support by refusing to acknowledge Trump as a legitimate candidate, which I think resonated with a lot of people who felt that their concerns were not being taken legitimately. The HRC campaign focused on the negative aspects of his campaign, but his support came from the fact that people felt that Trump cared about their concerns.

[protomyth]

Yeah, I deal with a lot of people all over the spectrum and there was an undercurrent of something going on. A lot of those leaked e-mails really offended people and they got passed around a lot. Its one thing to believe a group looks down on you, but its a whole different thing when you read the e-mails. I was amazed at the number of people that were going to that site and sending links.

It also seemed like the celebrity endorsements had the opposite effect. Some of the people who I've met who spoke ill of the celebrities used language that I don't think they normally use. It has been quite odd.

[MaxfordAndSons]

I agree with your analysis, but it's sort of an orthogonal point to the issue at hand. The issue is that the personalized media bubble effect prevented more people from attaining your insight, because we were simply not exposed to the same media as those who were galvanized by Trump, and on the other side of the coin, it allowed Trump supporters to avoid exposure to valid critiques of their candidate and instead be hyper focused on (sometimes fabricated, often exaggerated) content that was critical of Clinton.

[Declanomous]

That's fair. I also go out of my way to seek out people's thoughts on divisive but relatively popular topics, because people have some reason for believing what they believe. It probably helps that I don't spend much time on Facebook because I think most people who share my ideology are at least as closed-minded as people whose ideology conflicts with mine.

That being said, I saw a lot of arguments on Facebook about Trump. I don't think the echo chamber is as complete as claimed. I think a lot of the issue is not that social media provides an echo chamber, but that social mores prevent people from voicing controversial views in large groups of people who disagree with you. So, assuming the people in your friends list are from a similar socioeconomic background, a substantial majority of them probably support one candidate over the other. So the only posts you'll see about the other person are from the least "well behaved" members of your social circle.

I think the larger issue is that the quality of the conversation on social networks is just terrible. A five-minute conversation with a stranger has more depth to it than a status with 100 comments on it. Online discussions are basically won by whichever side's memes appeal to the broader audience.

[woodchuck64]

Makes sense. Now, how can Silver correct his methodology to capture the above in future elections, I wonder.

[chaosbutters314]

I think his methodology was fine and pollsters were shit. If you look carefully at the map, he basically called all the swing states hilary and trump took from one another. His model saw the holes in the pollsters data. I think to swing trump to winnning, he'd probably just have to adjust a weighting factor by fractions of a percent. Look at how close michigan, florida and wisconsin were. The tiniest of margins won it for trump in the end. Literally a handful of factories that had closed in the past decade between those states determined this race.

The scarier thing is that for the next 10-20 years, boomers in the rust belt are going to swing republican unless dems can get a Bernie. To me, whatever democrat wins the michigan primary, is their candidate above all else.

[maxxxxx]

He should call it quits together with all other pollsters. All that predicting is at best a totally useless activity or even worse, it influences voter behavior. Bet on football games instead. At least that doesn't do damage to the country.

[551199]

The main point of polls is to influence and give social proof to selected candidate.

Don't believe me? When you look how they are constructed it becomes clear. Too bad for Clinton campaign she was highly unlikable and even the most expensive campaign in history couldn't help her.

[maxxxxx]

Agreed. All polling and media was totally skewed against Sanders (and then Trump).