2016 US Presidential Elections | Trump Wins

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Raoul said:
Hillary is going to look extremely shaky if Sanders fares better than expected in Iowa, which wont bode well for her going into NH where he is actually stronger.
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Nah. He needs to win both, to have a shot in Nevada where he's close but not close enough. If he wins all 3 and avoids being destroyed in SC (where he's nowhere near and faces the minority vote problem), then he is viable. If not, he's done.


naturalized said:
Sorry, may I have a source for this please mate? I'm not questioning you, it's just that the 538 poll of polls shows the complete opposite - a sharp, shocking swing back towards Hillary in Iowa (note that that's poll-only, not polls-plus). Since I last posted a few days ago, all the Sanders momentum has not just disappeared but essentially reversed itself. We're back to Hillary 66%, Sanders 34% (chance of winning, not vote share) in Iowa.

The RCP poll of polls shows the same thing, albeit less dramatically.

Do any Americans have any idea why the sudden bump for Hillary? Don't remember seeing any big news that could be responsible for this (or the original Sanders surge for that matter)
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http://www.desmoinesregister.com/st.../?hootPostID=a1ff07bc340b3034d9e44f8b354cc57c


The swing back to Hillary is a single Gravis poll which puts Hillary +21 (57-36). Gravis has consistently been an outlier in every poll so far (their last one was +18 when the average was about 8-10), well above the average of the others in its Clinton estimate. So has PPP, to a lesser extent, and, on the other side, YouGov has consistently been favourable to Sanders.
According to 538, January is the month people start paying attention, and apparently the number of undecideds has fallen* - but the drop for Clinton as opposed to the rise for Sanders is strange.
Sanders supporters are attributing it to college students going home for the holidays and convincing their parents :lol:


* - no, I just re-read the poll, it has risen! People fleeing Hillary into nowhere!
 
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InfiniteBoredom said:
It's all projections, but for a start, a Clinton presidency wouldn't have woken a very ugly sleeper segment of the American population, the birther/Tea Party type. A Clinton presidency would be more involved and help fundraise/elect Dems at states level, and the electorate as a whole will be more receptive to any achievement trumpeting going out of the White House.

The Dems had 31 governorships, super majority in the Senate and majority in the House in 08. It doesn't take a genius to see that without a figure like Obama, it's much harder for the GOP to play up the 'outsider, un-American' schtick they used so effectively to gain their seats in swing states. Better the devil you know and all.
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Which was an unnatural situation caused by the 2006 anti-Republian vote (at the height of the Bush era) which continued into 2008, fueled by the recession.
With Hillary they wouldn't play the "outsider" card but they would play too soft/not womanly depending on how she went, they would definitely talk about her elitism (which becomes not a real American). Don't forget, they hate her just like they hate Obama. The same 8 years of gridlock would have happened under her too. With a few more wars added in.

EDIT: till the recession hit, Obama and McCain were running very close with McCain ahead. There is no guarantee about what would have happened if she was the nominee - there's no doubt that Obama is by miles the better campaigner and ran a new style of campaign in 2008.
 
So what can we predict about voter turnout in the event of a Trump nomination, or a three-way race? Three-way contests haven’t led to higher turnout on a consistent basis.1 But will Trump voters stay home if Bush, Cruz, Rubio, etc. is the nominee? Or will supporters of those candidates sit out a Trump candidacy?

Based on what we know about voter turnout, these two scenarios are not the same thing. Supporters of Bush, Cruz, Rubio or other mainstream candidates are much more likely to be reliable voters. Iowa State political scientists David Andersen and David Peterson found, for example, that Trump supporters in Iowa are more likely to have spotty records of participating in primaries. It’s possible that these findings don’t directly apply to general election participation in the rest of the country, but the evidence doesn’t end there. Two researchers, Doug Ahler and David Broockman, also found that Trump supporters tend to fit the profile of a “moderate” voter — which is to say, inconsistent. In this Monkey Cage piece, they presented evidence that while conservatism on immigration is, predictably, correlated with Trump support, so is liberalism on taxes. Ideological consistency is strongly associated with turning out to vote (see Alan Abramowitz’s “The Disappearing Center”), as is past voting.

All this is to say that Trump voters are more likely to defect from the Republican Party if one of the other candidates gets the party’s nod — either to stay home or to support the third-party ticket. Reliable Republican voters, on the other hand, are a better bet to show up and support the party ticket, even if they have to hold their noses to do so.
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/theres-one-thing-worse-for-the-gop-than-a-trump-nomination/
 
berbatrick said:
Nah. He needs to win both, to have a shot in Nevada where he's close but not close enough. If he wins all 3 and avoids being destroyed in SC (where he's nowhere near and faces the minority vote problem), then he is viable. If not, he's done.




http://www.desmoinesregister.com/st.../?hootPostID=a1ff07bc340b3034d9e44f8b354cc57c


The swing back to Hillary is a single Gravis poll which puts Hillary +21 (57-36). Gravis has consistently been an outlier in every poll so far (their last one was +18 when the average was about 8-10), well above the average of the others in its Clinton estimate. So has PPP, to a lesser extent, and, on the other side, YouGov has consistently been favourable to Sanders.
According to 538, January is the month people start paying attention, and apparently the number of undecideds has fallen* - but the drop for Clinton as opposed to the rise for Sanders is strange.
Sanders supporters are attributing it to college students going home for the holidays and convincing their parents :lol:


* - no, I just re-read the poll, it has risen! People fleeing Hillary into nowhere!
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Your assertion that Gravis is the source - and the only source - of the Hillabounce is clearly right on second glance, but it seems provably wrong to say Gravis has a house effect for Hillary. You say that +18 is anomalous and because it's in between a +9 and a +11, that is literally correct. But ignores that behind +11 is +32, +14, +22, +18, and +18, all within December. +32 is clearly a house effect - it's some no-name college which 538 doesn't even bother to rank (and which is probably not subject to 538's controlling for house effect for that reason). Let's also ignore Fox News' +14 just because, even though they're a pretty solid B at the 538 poll ranking. The remaining polls are Monmouth University and PPP, which are both reasonably (and in Monmouth's case, highly) regarded. http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/pollster-ratings/

Gravis may well be full of shit - 538 ranks them at a C - but it's clearly untrue that they're consistently full of shit, or at least that they're consistently shit in favour of Hillary (ctrl-f Gravis here to verify this). They've been reporting results well within the norm throughout the race. Something anomalous is happening here. That something could be an unbelievably, anomalously shite poll - or something else.

2) Also, it's not quite only Gravis. PPP's latest poll - the one that 538 is ranking highest in their methodology - has Hillary up 6, just over the +5 lead she has in the poll of polls. This is a weakly positive result which 538 is counting as a "plus" for her win probability. (Am I doing the maths right here?) At the very least, it's an arrest of Sanders' momentum.

3) I strongly suspect that Gravis, like PPP, is picking up some signal - but mostly noise. These kinds of huge swings are exactly what volatility (actual voter opinion volatility, not pollster noise) looks like. It's a bit weird for political junkies (like ourselves), but as 538 and you correctly point out, most people simply don't give a shit about politics until just about now, and will change minds rapidly and frequently till then.

4) Thanks for digging your source up - sorry to make you do it.

Ed: alternative theory - Hillary down recently is due to Trump's recent attacks on her and her husband. He's a shitmonger, but as my roommate's Internet history convincingly demonstrates, there are plenty of people out there with an appetite for swallowing complete shit. Attacking like a kindergardener worked on Bush, Carson and seemingly Cruz so far - it's not obvious to me that Hillary is completely insulated from this.
 
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Was reading Mr. Sander's economic proposals. I wonder if he'll figure out soon that we are no longer in the 60s.

Also, the hate for Wall Street is real. Stealing from Paul Graham's recent essay: I feel like a wild animal overhearing a conversation between hunters.
 
berbatrick said:
Nah. He needs to win both, to have a shot in Nevada where he's close but not close enough. If he wins all 3 and avoids being destroyed in SC (where he's nowhere near and faces the minority vote problem), then he is viable. If not, he's done.
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If he wins both Iowa and NH, the momentum and narrative will completely change and she will be perceived as collapsing again like she did against Obama.
 
Red Dreams said:
whats wrong with his proposals.
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Unrealistic in many ways, I think. Taxing trading for example is one thing: he proposes taxing stock trades at 0.50%. It sounds small, but even teams like mine not involved in high frequency trading will feel the sting from that (and the clients actually pay for any commissions and taxes incurred in trading, making firms pay could create an agency problem where as I might not do the best for the client because it will cause costs for me). But beyond the sting, what would likely happen is a lot of trading would go abroad, maybe just to London. Get the stocks listed as Deposit Receipts there (which many companies around the globe use to be listed in major markets such as here) and get back to trading. The tax collected would end up being much less than projected, and you've just shipped demand for clearing and custody services from the US to the UK.

That kind of thing, the overall notion that you'll dictate to companies and financial institutions, and they'll just sit, take it, and pay whatever the government asks. Wall Street isn't the terrible beast its made out to be, just partly. I found it ironic when I was exiting the cinema after watching The Big Short, and I overheard a lot of people saying to the effect "I didn't quite understand". Well, obviously I do because its my job and my interest since late high school, but its the other people who are wanting to dictate how the industry is going to work.

Government's job will always involve regulating financial institutions and markets. They can't even exist without government providing legislation, credibility and enforcement. And I'm aware thank banking itself will try to insert its interests (which is why one thing I agree with Bernie is severely limiting political donations), but on the other hand trying to reform without expert input won't work out well.

Just this kind of thing in his economic proposals. He wishes well, obviously. But all his solutions involve either introducing new regulations to the effects of limiting activities in certain industries, or the government spending more, which means the government must tax more, and every tax generates dead-weight costs, even those on the super rich. Also, said super rich will also not just sit around and happily be taxed. I usually joke that if you were to impose an 80% income tax on any level, you'd find the next day that everyone in the bracket has disappeared (I know Sanders hasn't proposed any tax at such level).
 
naturalized said:
Your assertion that Gravis is the source - and the only source - of the Hillabounce is clearly right on second glance, but it seems provably wrong to say Gravis has a house effect for Hillary. You say that +18 is anomalous and because it's in between a +9 and a +11, that is literally correct. But ignores that behind +11 is +32, +14, +22, +18, and +18, all within December. +32 is clearly a house effect - it's some no-name college which 538 doesn't even bother to rank (and which is probably not subject to 538's controlling for house effect for that reason). Let's also ignore Fox News' +14 just because, even though they're a pretty solid B at the 538 poll ranking. The remaining polls are Monmouth University and PPP, which are both reasonably (and in Monmouth's case, highly) regarded. http://fivethirtyeight.com/interactives/pollster-ratings/

Gravis may well be full of shit - 538 ranks them at a C - but it's clearly untrue that they're consistently full of shit, or at least that they're consistently shit in favour of Hillary (ctrl-f Gravis here to verify this). They've been reporting results well within the norm throughout the race. Something anomalous is happening here. That something could be an unbelievably, anomalously shite poll - or something else.

2) Also, it's not quite only Gravis. PPP's latest poll - the one that 538 is ranking highest in their methodology - has Hillary up 6, just over the +5 lead she has in the poll of polls. This is a weakly positive result which 538 is counting as a "plus" for her win probability. (Am I doing the maths right here?) At the very least, it's an arrest of Sanders' momentum.

3) I strongly suspect that Gravis, like PPP, is picking up some signal - but mostly noise. These kinds of huge swings are exactly what volatility (actual voter opinion volatility, not pollster noise) looks like. It's a bit weird for political junkies (like ourselves), but as 538 and you correctly point out, most people simply don't give a shit about politics until just about now, and will change minds rapidly and frequently till then.

4) Thanks for digging your source up - sorry to make you do it.

Ed: alternative theory - Hillary down recently is due to Trump's recent attacks on her and her husband. He's a shitmonger, but as my roommate's Internet history convincingly demonstrates, there are plenty of people out there with an appetite for swallowing complete shit. Attacking like a kindergardener worked on Bush, Carson and seemingly Cruz so far - it's not obvious to me that Hillary is completely insulated from this.
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I didn't know PPP had a good rating from 538- they've been pretty consistently a good poll for Clinton (and a nightmare for both her and Sanders in the H2Hs).
And I read somewhere that a majority of "undecideds" choose in the last month for the Iowa primary- and that a very significant number (30+% maybe) decide in the last week, and some 10% on the last day! So volatility is natural I guess.
 
MarceloFalcon said:
Unrealistic in many ways, I think. Taxing trading for example is one thing: he proposes taxing stock trades at 0.50%. It sounds small, but even teams like mine not involved in high frequency trading will feel the sting from that (and the clients actually pay for any commissions and taxes incurred in trading, making firms pay could create an agency problem where as I might not do the best for the client because it will cause costs for me). But beyond the sting, what would likely happen is a lot of trading would go abroad, maybe just to London. Get the stocks listed as Deposit Receipts there (which many companies around the globe use to be listed in major markets such as here) and get back to trading. The tax collected would end up being much less than projected, and you've just shipped demand for clearing and custody services from the US to the UK.
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I can't say I have a problem with taxing stock trades. As you allude to, it will penalize speculative/high frequency trading that has destabilized financial markets in recent years. I don't see the big shift in trading elsewhere; New York and London will remain trading centers of the financial world for the forseeable future. Very few locations have the concentration of talent, capital and infrastructure to deal with the trading volume the NYSE and LSE handles. You don't like US taxes? Let me know how UK taxes work out for you.

MarceloFalcon said:
That kind of thing, the overall notion that you'll dictate to companies and financial institutions, and they'll just sit, take it, and pay whatever the government asks. Wall Street isn't the terrible beast its made out to be, just partly. I found it ironic when I was exiting the cinema after watching The Big Short, and I overheard a lot of people saying to the effect "I didn't quite understand". Well, obviously I do because its my job and my interest since late high school, but its the other people who are wanting to dictate how the industry is going to work.
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Films that gravitate around Wall Street are usually dumbed down and sensationalized. However the depiction of greed (at the top, not among the middle rank) is nearly spot on. Nothing wrong with that, humans are greedy by default. If government doesn't rein in the excesses regularly, disasters like the market crash in 2008 occur. I agree that people who understand the market should be making regulations. I don't see large financial institutions willing to work with the government on developing reasonable consumer protections and market restraints. Keep in mind, the face of financial regulations may be random senators from Nebraska, but they're receiving input from industry experts and officials within the SEC, IRS, etc. I think/hope.

MarceloFalcon said:
Government's job will always involve regulating financial institutions and markets. They can't even exist without government providing legislation, credibility and enforcement. And I'm aware thank banking itself will try to insert its interests (which is why one thing I agree with Bernie is severely limiting political donations), but on the other hand trying to reform without expert input won't work out well.
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Agreed.

MarceloFalcon said:
Just this kind of thing in his economic proposals. He wishes well, obviously. But all his solutions involve either introducing new regulations to the effects of limiting activities in certain industries, or the government spending more, which means the government must tax more, and every tax generates dead-weight costs, even those on the super rich. Also, said super rich will also not just sit around and happily be taxed. I usually joke that if you were to impose an 80% income tax on any level, you'd find the next day that everyone in the bracket has disappeared (I know Sanders hasn't proposed any tax at such level).
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The campaign trail is rife with populist rhetoric, on both sides. Getting more from the rich sounds awesome to the average citizen. If he makes it into office, I doubt his overall economic policy will be entirely based on that. Does make me wonder how the rich felt back in the 50s when marginal tax rates at the top exceeded 80%.
 
adexkola said:
The campaign trail is rife with populist rhetoric, on both sides. Getting more from the rich sounds awesome to the average citizen. If he makes it into office, I doubt his overall economic policy will be entirely based on that. Does make me wonder how the rich felt back in the 50s when marginal tax rates at the top exceeded 80%.
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I've read that they made up all sorts of loss generating activities (but not cash expending) to have a smaller taxable income. Everyone was professional tax evader.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808
 
adexkola said:
I can't say I have a problem with taxing stock trades. As you allude to, it will penalize speculative/high frequency trading that has destabilized financial markets in recent years. I don't see the big shift in trading elsewhere; New York and London will remain trading centers of the financial world for the forseeable future. Very few locations have the concentration of talent, capital and infrastructure to deal with the trading volume the NYSE and LSE handles. You don't like US taxes? Let me know how UK taxes work out for you.
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I think 50 basis points is a bit rich, its more than you usually pay in commissions to the broker executing.


adexkola said:
Films that gravitate around Wall Street are usually dumbed down and sensationalized. However the depiction of greed (at the top, not among the middle rank) is nearly spot on. Nothing wrong with that, humans are greedy by default. If government doesn't rein in the excesses regularly, disasters like the market crash in 2008 occur. I agree that people who understand the market should be making regulations. I don't see large financial institutions willing to work with the government on developing reasonable consumer protections and market restraints. Keep in mind, the face of financial regulations may be random senators from Nebraska, but they're receiving input from industry experts and officials within the SEC, IRS, etc. I think/hope.
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I know they have staff and experts, but not much Sanders proposes seems to come from those, or certainly not the leading scholars on certain issues. Also, the fact that The Big Short was already dumbed down from the book (although thankfully they weren't innacurate from what I could judge), which was already simplified from what technical/academic papers you can find on the issues, and a large part of the public still didn't get it, was what made me make something of it. These people ideally wouldn't be screaming "Yeah!" when politicians go on a tirade about Wall Street's greed. They'd go "ugh... I don't really know much", which is what I do when anyone's talking about global warming for example (I think at the very least energy efficiency is desirable in and of itself). Just overall, and this isn't new in any way, people are completely unaware of their lack of understanding.
 
adexkola said:
If government doesn't rein in the excesses regularly, disasters like the market crash in 2008 occur.
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You can argue that Government causes the problem in the first place.

If, throughout the 2000s, savers were allowed to sell their money directly to borrowers, without the intervention of the Fed, say, the price of money would have been much higher, and the asset bubble would never have arisen. But the Government or its agencies want to keep interest rates low, and, favouring borrowers over lenders, distort the market for money. The result is that money is underpriced, people buy more and more of it and use it to purchase other assets, which in turn become overpriced, and eventually everything implodes.

Of course Government has always been intimately involved in the money supply, and it's hard to envisage its removal from that business, but it does represent a fundamental distortion of supply and demand which causes many problems.
 
Will Absolute said:
You can argue that Government causes the problem in the first place.

If, throughout the 2000s, savers were allowed to sell their money directly to borrowers, without the intervention of the Fed, say, the price of money would have been much higher, and the asset bubble would never have arisen. But the Government or its agencies want to keep interest rates low, and, favouring borrowers over lenders, distort the market for money. The result is that money is underpriced, people buy more and more of it and use it to purchase other assets, which in turn become overpriced, and eventually everything implodes.

Of course Government has always been intimately involved in the money supply, and it's hard to envisage its removal from that business, but it does represent a fundamental distortion of supply and demand which causes many problems.
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It is hard to envisage politicians being willing to give up on their printing presses, but from an organisational point of view it would be easy to create a monetary system, that is based on the ideas of free markets.
 
MarceloFalcon said:
I've read that they made up all sorts of loss generating activities (but not cash expending) to have a smaller taxable income. Everyone was professional tax evader.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808
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Ha! That explains it.

MarceloFalcon said:
I think 50 basis points is a bit rich, its more than you usually pay in commissions to the broker executing.
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I can agree with that. I'd rather subsequent trades within a specified period be penalized more (sort of a weighted scheme) instead of a flat rate per transaction across the board. feck knows how you'd implement that though.

MarceloFalcon said:
I know they have staff and experts, but not much Sanders proposes seems to come from those, or certainly not the leading scholars on certain issues. Also, the fact that The Big Short was already dumbed down from the book (although thankfully they weren't innacurate from what I could judge), which was already simplified from what technical/academic papers you can find on the issues, and a large part of the public still didn't get it, was what made me make something of it. These people ideally wouldn't be screaming "Yeah!" when politicians go on a tirade about Wall Street's greed. They'd go "ugh... I don't really know much", which is what I do when anyone's talking about global warming for example (I think at the very least energy efficiency is desirable in and of itself). Just overall, and this isn't new in any way, people are completely unaware of their lack of understanding.
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I'm going to add the book to my reading list. I enjoyed Margin Call and Too Big to Fail as movies. Very true on the bolded. Fortunately I think there is a lot of room between Bernie's rhetoric and the industry, where something reasonable can be worked out. Obama was speaking heavy about Wall Street 8 years ago, but some people argue Dodd-Frank was a massive concession to banks (I'm aware some argue the opposite, but overall it wasn't as drastic as Obama would have hoped).
 
Will Absolute said:
You can argue that Government causes the problem in the first place.

If, throughout the 2000s, savers were allowed to sell their money directly to borrowers, without the intervention of the Fed, say, the price of money would have been much higher, and the asset bubble would never have arisen. But the Government or its agencies want to keep interest rates low, and, favouring borrowers over lenders, distort the market for money. The result is that money is underpriced, people buy more and more of it and use it to purchase other assets, which in turn become overpriced, and eventually everything implodes.

Of course Government has always been intimately involved in the money supply, and it's hard to envisage its removal from that business, but it does represent a fundamental distortion of supply and demand which causes many problems.
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I think the government definitely had a role to play. However in a market where toxic assets weren't hid under incorrectly rated complex products, there would have been a less harsh adjustment, independent of government shutdown. I think the industry, through the creation and massive use of CDOs started the problem. Government policies exacerbated it.
 
adexkola said:
I'm going to add the book to my reading list. I enjoyed Margin Call and Too Big to Fail as movies. Very true on the bolded. Fortunately I think there is a lot of room between Bernie's rhetoric and the industry, where something reasonable can be worked out. Obama was speaking heavy about Wall Street 8 years ago, but some people argue Dodd-Frank was a massive concession to banks (I'm aware some argue the opposite, but overall it wasn't as drastic as Obama would have hoped).
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I've enjoyed most of Michael Lewis' books. The Big Short if quite a fun read, and informative as well. Also tells you that Wall Street's actions weren't uniform as the overall narrative portrays (and in this case I'm not blaming anyone, every narrative is simplified and most firms had exposure). Goldman Sachs realised at the last minute, but still soon enough, that things were going down and they got somewhat protected. UBS on the other hand was still buying CDOs while the world was collapsing.
 
The problem is, that the exact same mistakes are getting repeated. The subprime auto loan bubble will burst in the next couple of years. Obviously that is not as bad as subprime mortgages, but it is crazy, that the same mistakes are done again.
 
Cruz has done ok given all the attacks. He's lucky its Fox doing the debate otherwise the likes of CNN would've kept up the questions on his undeclared million dollars.

Bush has done quite well and actually come across as a sane alternative. Christie has also done quite well.
 
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