Next election, will you trust major media and polls?

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dank69

Lifer
Oct 6, 2009
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No, I won't. I haven't believed MSM for awhile now. I typically read several and cross reference. Almost all have their own agenda, and out right lie to the public. They sway stories or news to fit whatever narrative they want. It's pretty sad.

Yeah Hillary won the popular vote. You can't go changing the rules now and claim that she would have if the popular vote mattered. Both candidates would have campaigned differently if the election was won by the popular vote, but it isn't. Trying to claim that because about 1% (maybe 2% now?) more voted for Hillary means something now is silly. Just as it is silly to not give any weight to the alleged voting from people registered as dead, or the video that clearly shows a DNC staffer admitting to busing people around to vote over and over again. Jobs were lost, proof enough. How much? No idea. I'm sure it happened on the other side too. I don't have a lot of confidence in our voting system. But I'm sure someone will attach me for saying that, or believing that voting fraud took place.
Thanks for sharing last week's conservative talking points. I especially like how you go off about electoral vs. popular when nobody was discussing that.
 
Jul 9, 2009
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I don't trust the main stream media. Much of the MSM in the UK has become increasingly left wing, especially the BBC. Back when we all voted on Brexit, it was mostly the left wing crowd who wanted us to stay in the European Union, and we saw the same thing then, almost every news outlet saying we'd remain in, the polls all showed remain with a 10pt lead, and the leave campaigns were utterly smeared to hell and back, the media where overwhelmingly behind the remain camp and it was transparently obvious to people like me who backed leave. Fast forward to the day and leave won by 4pts and the media had a melt down about how the leave camp lied, on and on and on.

So when I followed the US election, which I did closely and became a trump backer and I started to see their media do the same, I KNEW there was bias there. Every time we see Trump in the news it's always a picture of him looking silly and every time we see hillary she's looking presidential. Everything reporting on Trump was about shenanigans rather than campaign points and vice versa for hillary. The run up to election day the MSM went dark on major political issues like the findings in the leaked Podesta emails, about project veritas and the uncovering of the violence and scams the democrats employed to disrupt voting and Trumps rallys. Anyone mentioning wikileaks was simply cut off the air mid sentence, we saw that over and over again.

And I knew from putting out feelers to speak to real people I know in the US that Trump was campaigning well, his rallies had way more attendees, people were backing him but keeping their mouth shut, because the media and the left wing establishment, and quite frankly a massive amount of the left wing supporters are fast to try and socially shame people for their beliefs by hurling accusations at them of racist and sexist, etc.

And I knew this was going on, I knew the media were skewing polls and basically trying their hardest to destroy this man, so just like with Brexit, if the polls say it's close but we know they have a left leaning bias, then we can be fairly sure he's got a good chance at winning. So I put a bet down on Trump at 3/1 a few weeks before his win and walked away with a bundle of cash, because that's how sure I was that the media is slanted left.

This isn't the last time we'll see this, because left/right has stopped being simply about differing political opinions but a virtue war waged by the left. Many of them portray people on the right as monsters, or Hitler, the way they talk about Trumps win is like something out of a Disney movie, like he's some kind of evil spirit in a mans body, and that everyone who voted for him is literally a sexist, racist, homophobic, patriarchal shitlord. They talk about this as dark clouds hanging over america, about WW3, some kind of literal Apocalypse or nightmare come alive to damn us all to an eternity in hell. The hyperbole I see every day on the net, reactions from popular liberal youtubers and so on, it's crazy, it's like people have lost their minds. If you treat politics like this, rather than being serious and accepting that some things are just different points of view, and actually engaging in debates about issues rather than trying to shame people into silence, then you create a silent majority and you create the need for a president like Trump who will blow through political correctness and give a voice to people who are so poorly represented.
You can certainly see by the response from fkimo that the whole shaming thing is still active. The one thing you missed was the active violent threat to people that backed Trump and showed it by having yard signs, bumper stickers, wore hats etc.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
88,239
55,791
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I said in the primaries, and you respond with drivel about coverage PRE primaries?

Are you fucking kidding me.

Trump got more coverage than anyone because he moved the needle. Nothing surprising there. During the primaries, the media essentially ignored Bernie and was forced to cover Trump more and more (ratings = money, and money > ideology). Then, once the primaries were over and we had Trump vs illary, the gloves came off and it was time to start attacking Trump. It was a nice organized coalition of lefty main stream media and lefty social media platforms smearing Trump. illary was so dislikable that they didn't even bother to try and push her, they figured just smearing Trump (he's Hitler!) would be sufficient. It wasn't.

Thank you for proving me correct yet again. You are immune to evidence.
 

Commodus

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 2004
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Anyone that understands statistics realizes that the polls weren't really heavily flawed. Sometimes, unlikely things happen.

This. I do think many on the left were overly confident of victory (myself included), but the OP's claim -- that the polls clearly lied -- is similarly flawed.

A minority chance of winning does not mean that the chance is zero. It simply means that the circumstances under which that win occurs aren't considered likely. Statistical models suggested that Trump wasn't likely to win some of the states he did, and indeed his margin of victory was occasionally very small (a few dozen thousand votes). That, to me, does not signal that the data models were horribly flawed.
 

buckshot24

Diamond Member
Nov 3, 2009
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Where the media got it wrong is the certainty that Trump was going to lose. HuffPost presidential forecast gave Hillary a 98% chance of winning which is just ridiculous.
 

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
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A fifth of the time, the guy with a 20% chance wins. That's how statistics works.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
88,239
55,791
136
Where the media got it wrong is the certainty that Trump was going to lose. HuffPost presidential forecast gave Hillary a 98% chance of winning which is just ridiculous.

HuffPo's Pollster said there was a 98% chance that Clinton had a national popular vote lead, which she did. Their prediction was correct.
 

buckshot24

Diamond Member
Nov 3, 2009
9,916
85
91