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Clinton Probably Finished Off Trump Last Night

I’m not sure I need to tell you this, but Hillary Clinton is probably going to be the next president. It’s just a question of what “probably” means.

Clinton went into the final presidential debate on Wednesday with a lead ofabout 7 percentage points over Donald Trump. And according to the onlytwo scientific polls we’ve seen, voters thought that Clinton won the debate. Occasionally, the initial reaction to a debate can differ from the way it’s perceived days later. But in this case, the morning headlines, which focused overwhelmingly on Trump’s refusal to say whether he’ll accept the election results, are potentially worse for Trump than the debate itself. In YouGov’spoll of debate watchers, 68 percent of voters said they think the candidates should pledge to accept the results of the election.

There are less than three weeks left in the campaign, and there are no more guaranteed opportunities for Trump or Clinton to command a huge public audience, as they do at the conventions and the debates (although, they’ll get plenty of attention, of course). Millions of people have already voted. Trump has had a significant advertising deficit, and an even more significant deficit in terms of his turnout operation. He’ll probably spend a significant chunk of the remaining news cycles quarreling over his contention that the election is rigged, and with the numerous women who have accused him of sexual assault. He doesn’t have an obvious — or even a not-so-obvious — path to the presidency.

So we’re left to argue about the probability of an unforeseen event, or a significant polling error. It’s perhaps significant that almost no matter what news has occurred, and there’s been a lot of it — terrorist attacks, mass shootings, foreign crises, her email scandal, the Wikileaks dump, her Sept. 11 health scare — Clinton has almost always led Trump in the polls, although there have certainly been times when the election was close. What if her State Department emails are sitting on one of Julian Assange’s servers? That would be interesting, I suppose. But there are also October (or November) surprises that could work against Trump: more accusations from women, more damaging videotapes, further leaking of his tax records.

The other possibility is a massive polling failure. There aren’t really any direct precedents for a candidate coming back from this far down to win an American presidential election, although you can make a few loose analogies. Harry Truman’s comeback over Thomas Dewey in 1948 almostworks as a comparison, but Truman wasn’t coming from as far behind as Trump is, and there was much less polling in 1948. Ronald Reagan had a significant late surge against Jimmy Carter in 1980, but he was ahead beforehand — and the surge came in large part because of a debate that occurred just one week before the election, whose impact was too late to be fully reflected in the polls. If Trump was going to have a Reaganesque surge, in other words, it probably would have started with a commanding performance in last night’s debate — and not another loss.

Brexit? Even that comparison doesn’t really work. The final polls showed a toss-up between the United Kingdom leaving the European Union or remaining in it, and “leave” eventually won by 4 points. If the polls were biased against Trump by that much in this election, he’d still lose, by a margin approximating the one by which Mitt Romney lost to President Obama four years ago. The primaries? They’re a reminder that one ought to be humble when making predictions. But the polls pegged Trump just fine— in fact, slightly overestimating his performance in many early states such as Iowa.

That’s not to say that a polling miss is impossible. Our polls-only model still gives Trump a 14 percent chance and our polls-plus forecast a 17 percent chance, although that’s before accounting for any impact of last night’s debate or some of the other circumstances I’ve described. Presidential elections are rare events, rare enough that we don’t really know what the tail ends of the probability distribution look like, and it’s prudent to make somewhat conservative assumptions under those conditions. It’s possible, also, that the polls are significantly underestimating Clinton rather than Trump — perhaps a combination of Trump’s lack of a ground game and hisvoters’ feeling despondent because he says the election is rigged will yield a double-digit loss.

If Clinton wins by a clear margin, it will help to resolve a longstanding debate among political scientists and historians, since it will suggest that campaigns and candidates do matter and that elections aren’t always determined by economic conditions, which would predict a much closer outcome than the one we’re likely to see. Furthermore, Clinton’s win will have come by rather conventional means. Her big surges in the polls came following the conventions and the debates. She got the largest convention bounce of any candidate since at least 2000, and she won the debates by a clearer margin than any previous candidate in the six elections in which there were three debates that CNN polled.

There was nothing flashy about Clinton’s performance at either the convention or the debates. She was just prepared, steady and tactically smart — such as goading Trump into feuds with the family of Khizr Khan, or Alicia Machado. Trump might seem like an easy opponent to take down, and he certainly hasn’t helped himself. But as Trump himself would probably point out, 16 Republicans failed to do so. We won’t know for sure for another 19 days, but Clinton may have finished him off last night.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-probably-finished-off-trump-last-night/

 
Results are out, Hillary won again and Trump has lost bigly. :usflag:


20poll-debate1.jpg

A picture is worth a thousand words!

Hillary Clinton wins third presidential debate, according to CNN / ORC poll

By Jennifer Agiesta, CNN Polling Director 10/20/2016

(CNN)Hillary Clinton won the final presidential debate, topping Donald Trump by a 13-point margin according to a CNN/ORC poll of debate watchers, giving Clinton a clean sweep across all three of this year's presidential debates.

But Wednesday's debate watchers were closely divided on which candidate they trusted more on the issues most important to them.

Overall, 52% who watched tonight's matchup thought Clinton did the best job, to the 39% that thought Trump did. That's a tighter margin than in the first two debates. After the first debate, 62% of those who watched said Clinton won, 27% Trump, followed by a 57% Clinton to 34% Trump margin for the town hall debate held October 9. Link





CBS News Battleground Tracker poll: Who won final debate?

By Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto

More Democrats than Republicans watched the third debate, and people who watched say Hillary Clinton won, while voters in the battleground states say the losing candidate should accept the results of the election.

By a double-digit margin, voters in 13 states identified as battlegrounds by CBS News say Hillary Clinton won the final presidential debate of the 2016 campaign. Forty-nine percent say Clinton won, while 39 percent think Trump was the winner. Twelve percent call it a tie. Link
 
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Results are out, Hillary won again and Trump has lost bigly. :usflag:

(CNN)Hillary Clinton won the final presidential debate...


CBS News say Hillary Clinton won...

and the the Breitbart and Drudge polls say Trump won :rolleyes:

these mean little, just spin from the various pro and anti camps, 3 weeks from now are the only polls that count. :partay:

all the major US news channels have already called it for her, but are you 100% confident ? :azn:
 
Clinton went into the final presidential debate on Wednesday with a lead ofabout 7 percentage points over Donald Trump. And according to the onlytwo scientific polls we’ve seen, voters thought that Clinton won the debate. Occasionally, the initial reaction to a debate can differ from the way it’s perceived days later. But in this case, the morning headlines, which focused overwhelmingly on Trump’s refusal to say whether he’ll accept the election results, are potentially worse for Trump than the debate itself. In YouGov’spoll of debate watchers, 68 percent of voters said they think the candidates should pledge to accept the results of the election.

If the the margin of victory is large enough for Clinton, Trump's threats not recognize the results will be meaningless. Still, making such an idiotic statement has become a Trump hallmark.

UPDATE:

Trump just announced he will now accept election result.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/polit...y-accept-election-results-if-i-win/index.html

I think his handlers impressed on him the idiocy of his comments made the night before.
 
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and the the Breitbart and Drudge polls say Trump won :rolleyes:

these mean little, just spin from the various pro and anti camps, 3 weeks from now are the only polls that count. :partay:

all the major US news channels have already called it for her, but are you 100% confident ? :azn:
I almost feel sorry for you.

All these polls were fine for Trump when they suited his purpose..but, not anymore :lol:

Here is Captain Retard this morning -

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said he will accept the results of the US election "if I win".

"I would accept a clear election result but I would also reserve the right to file a legal challenge in the case of a questionable result," Mr Trump said.

See how much he has been speaking of defeat - he knows the game is up, and is now working on the post election narrative
 
It is quite funny actually. Any decent republican candidate would have beaten Hillary Clinton other than this buffoon, such was the negativity around Clinton. I have no doubt that someone like Romney would have comfortably won the presidency. But I guess far right republicans deserved Trump and hence at least 4 more years of a democratic president.
 
It is quite funny actually. Any decent republican candidate would have beaten Hillary Clinton other than this buffoon, such was the negativity around Clinton. I have no doubt that someone like Romney would have comfortably won the presidency. But I guess far right republicans deserved Trump and hence at least 4 more years of a democratic president.

Spot on. Even Ted Cruz, unlikeable as he is, had a better chance of beating Clinton than Trump. But GOP is keen on pursuing white conservative voters even though demographics clearly show their numbers are dwindling. Need to broaden the base to include non-white voters.
 
See, I told you guys. Now we know how Trump was winning all the so-called online polls.

After Hillary bested him, some of his desperate supporters especially the users of Reddit and 4chan (mostly Alt-right racists) banded together to rig the online polls and I’m not surprised I already knew it, they were totally bogus.

But what surprised me was that Trump himself was bragging about those useless polls, what embarrassment this man is.

Listen to his goofy and embarrassing interview:

Just freaking hilarious: :lol:


4chan and Reddit bombarded debate polls to declare Trump the winner

You may be getting trolled right now without even knowing it.
Donald Trump supporters artificially manipulated the results of online polls to create a false narrative that the Republican nominee won the first presidential debate on Monday night.

The efforts originated from users of the pro-Trump Reddit community r/The_Donald and 4chan messaged boards, which bombarded around 70 polls, including those launched by Time, Fortune, and CNBC.

There’s an unspoken rule of the internet: Never trust online polls. They’re too easily corruptible.

4chan, the notorious message board, has a long history of botting online competitions. In 2009, users flooded the Time 100 poll to ensure that the site’s founder, Christopher “moot” Poole, made the cut. In 2012, the pranksters employed JavaScript to vote for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Time’s annual Person of the Year poll and followed suit the next year with Miley Cyrus and Edward Snowden. 4chan also ensured a school for the deaf won a Taylor Swift concert. Likewise, a Twitter prankster helped send Pitbull to Kodiak, Alaska, as part of an online challenge by Walmart in 2012.

These types of efforts aren’t always successful, but given the tight turn of online polls during debates, they’re highly susceptible to such pranks.

In this latest incarnation, multiple Reddit users enlisted the Trump-supporting masses on r/The_Donald, which has over 200,000 subscribers, by posting dozens of online polls that are vulnerable to vote brigading, bots, and other forms of manipulation that make these non-scientific surveys notoriously unreliable. Read more
Online polls are garbage, you can vote as many times as you want, there are hundreds of anonymous web browsing websites that one can use for free.

Please also read the above post and see what Trump supporters have been doing, absolutely shameful, just shows their desperation.

@T-72
 
Trump has been behind in every scientific poll and since the 1st debate the deficit has simply grown and grown. This was always going to be the case...he is no longer simply speaking to the converted.

He has to reach out to those not in his base and he is no longer just speaking to acolytes - his flaws are coming up...dare I say it...Trumps.
 
It is quite funny actually. Any decent republican candidate would have beaten Hillary Clinton other than this buffoon, such was the negativity around Clinton. I have no doubt that someone like Romney would have comfortably won the presidency. But I guess far right republicans deserved Trump and hence at least 4 more years of a democratic president.
To be fair to the Republican party, he was never their choice, but unfortunately, one after the other establishment candidate went down and they ended up with him.
 
To be fair to the Republican party, he was never their choice, but unfortunately, one after the other establishment candidate went down and they ended up with him.
No...No need to be fair to the republican party.

They helped create Trump.

Right from the moment Obama had his inauguration - they've fed the bullshit.

These are the facts -

$2 gas
5% unemployment
more insured
rising mid-class income
more High School grads
Bin Laden dead

now compare that with what Dubya left Obama...Yet, you listen to Republicans and Faux News - the country is falling apart. So, no they deserve Trump and worse.
 
I almost feel sorry for you.

All these polls were fine for Trump when they suited his purpose..but, not anymore :lol:
no need to feel sorry for me, I'm watching this whole thing from a distance, all I care about is the foreign policy implications of either of them being elected potus, and so far I feel Trump is the common sense guy with his stated approach to Syria and the middle east, which is the big flashpoint right now.

God help us if Hillary is elected, for she will guaranteed make a very bad situation even worse. Look at her terrible record in the middle east, listen to what she's saying she'll do (no fly zone, war with Russia, more regime change..)

See how much he has been speaking of defeat - he knows the game is up, and is now working on the post election narrative
86e51ceb1337861a025c6f64c78dde65.jpg

the democrats took it all the way to the supreme court in 2000

and the media is rigging it and in the tank for clinton (wiki)

I think this is a giant ongoing media psyop to demoralize Trump supporters to try and dampen voter turnout, 20 days is a long time.
 
Spot on. Even Ted Cruz, unlikeable as he is, had a better chance of beating Clinton than Trump. But GOP is keen on pursuing white conservative voters even though demographics clearly show their numbers are dwindling. Need to broaden the base to include non-white voters.

LOL not in a million years would Ted have beaten Hillary. Character wise I rate Trump higher than Ted Cruz and that is not a joke.

and the the Breitbart and Drudge polls say Trump won :rolleyes:

these mean little, just spin from the various pro and anti camps, 3 weeks from now are the only polls that count. :partay:

all the major US news channels have already called it for her, but are you 100% confident ? :azn:

Even you have softened up. LOL reality is hitting home slowly, but surely.
 

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