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The spiritual successor to 2016 U.S. Presidential Election General, this time about any and all politics you desire. As always, behave, keep it relevant, and if you feel like something deserves its own thread, go for it!

RIP 2016 Election Thread.

Even Clinton's sad to see it go.

The 2018 midterms will soon be here and talking head analysis has already begun. While Dems are facing one of the toughest midterm's in decades (25 Dem Senate seats are up compared to 8 GOP ones), midterms have historically benefited the opposing party--you have to go back to 1934 to see a major swing in favor of the party in power--so it's unlikely Trump will get a filibuster-proof Senate. Then again, the Democratic Party always has a turnout problem and that's always way worse in midterms.

FAKE NEWS disaster at WashPo after they publish a story claiming Russian hackers infiltrated the nation's power grid through a virus that originated in a Vermont utility plant, which set off a fresh round of "RUSSIA IZ ENEMY TRUMP R TR8OR" cries from Congress.

Story now includes an editor's note saying that authorities have found no indication Russia was involved and the laptop which had a virus wasn't even hooked up to anything. That has not stopped them from leaving the original story up in full.

Previous headline:

Now:

BUT as Forbes points out:

rUsSiA DiNdU NuFfIn

Noice

^ Please either contribute something to the thread or don't post.

Judge blocks rule against anti-trans health care discrimination

A federal judge in Texas with a history of anti-LGBT rulings issued an order Saturday blocking the Obama administration from enforcing the Affordable Care Act to prohibit discrimination in health care against transgender people and women who have had abortions.

In a 46-page decision, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, an appointee of George W. Bush, issued a preliminary injunction against the rule on the basis it violates the Administrative Procedure Act “by contradicting existing law and exceeding statutory authority” and likely violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as applied to the plaintiffs, who are religious-affiliated medical providers challenging the regulation.

…

O’Connor writes Congress couldn’t have meant to include transgender people by barring gender discrimination in the Affordable Care Act because lawmakers spelled out both “sex” and “gender identity” as protected classes in the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Violence Against Women Act.

The sweeping nationwide injunction seems to enjoin the Obama administration from enforcing the rule not just for religious-affiliated providers, but for health care providers regardless of whether or not they’re religious affiliated.

…

Even with O’Connor’s injunction in effect, Keisling said the law’s prohibition on gender discrimination in health care remains in place and transgender people can still sue if they feel they’ve experienced discrimination in health care.

“The order does not change the fact that federal law bans gender-based discrimination,” Keisling said. “Transgender people who are turned away when they are sick, injured, or otherwise need health care, or are denied insurance coverage they’ve earned or paid for can still seek legal redress in the courts.”

The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on whether the Obama administration will appeal the ruling. Should the administration decide to appeal, the case would go to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. It remains to be seen whether the Justice Department under the Trump administration, which begins on Jan. 20, would continue defense of the regulation.

Excuse the bit of bias. I like Washington Blade for how in-depth it goes in stuff like this.

Here's a source from Reuters, a much more neutral source if you want it.

This is a bit of an interesting and complicated decision, although I see some information to be gleaned from it without needing to dig into the actual decision. This judge is establishing himself as a somewhat reliable one for rulings that go against what the American left wants in terms of transgender issues. This may make it a more strategic game for both sides, trying to jockey for or against getting this judge to rule – and maybe, if it goes far, trying to get him off the bench. That'd probably require a lot more to happen, though.

With an incoming Trump administration, I'm not placing bets on a more left-leaning federal judiciary. Judges like this might become more common, and Dems would have to fight from the local level. More state rulings, less federal rulings. This may just be a quick taste of what we have incoming.

Then again, I'm mostly speculating here. It's possible I don't know what I'm talking about, in which case, go ahead and correct me.

This is like the stupid ass wedding cake BS. A transgender person can be rushed to a religious hospital with a heart attack or broken leg or whatever, they can't be denied service because they're trans. This is already law, and those protections aren't up for debate.

What religious hospitals don't want to do is be forced to perform procedures they genuinely believe have no medical value. Their religious views mean that they will never consider transitional surgery in the best interest of their patient. They will never consider sterilization in the best interest of their patient. This is fact for the doctors who affiliate themselves with religious hospitals. It's not just "I don't want to do this" it's "I have full confidence that this procedure would not benefit you in any way".

I bring up BDD in relation to GDD a lot. If someone is physically hurting themselves and has fallen into extreme depression because they can see, because they're not blind, would you consider blinding them a beneficial medical procedure? You'd be hard pressed as hell to find a doctor who would agree to that procedure, forget personal morals, it's against the medical community's ethics to intentionally render people disabled. There are even non-religious doctors who are uncomfortable performing transitional surgeries because its against their ethics to remove two perfectly healthy breasts, for example. That's why transitional surgeries are most often performed by a plastic surgeon instead of a general surgeon.

The key question here is: are those surgeons obligated to perform procedures they feel have no medical benefit just because they receive federal funds? It's not permission to discriminate and ban trans people from receiving medical care, it's permission to recuse themselves from a procedure they're wholly uncomfortable performing.

There are other questions that need to be considered. Is the religious organization the only hospital around for 100 miles? Can a compromise be made so that a doctor willing to perform these procedures could have access to facilities without the religious organization funding or partaking in the actual operation? Possibilities exist, I just don't understand why we're always fighting for one side or the other in court.

Because in truth, a lot of these stories about court decisions are more or less fed solely by the mainstream media wanted to get views. People who are scared watch their programs more, because they want to know what's happening with these events and how to get the best outcome out of a scary situation. So the news organizations take stories, ramp them up to their worst possible outcome, and then have a bunch of unaffiliated people talk about it for an hour or five, and call it a day.

In truth the debates that occur in the public space mirror almost nothing of what actually happens in the courts and in the legal debate aspect. The public probably gets on average 5 to 10 percent of the story accurate, and this goes for all sides in the public debate, pro or against, and the rest is filled in with Strawmen. Any debate of this quickly becomes a derailed discussion into "What if trans people start getting murdered by their doctors because they aren't legally people anymore?" and also "Trans people want to make Jesus a shemale while also forcing christans to give their children hormone therapy".

It all devolves into strawman, hypothetical, nonsense. To the point where the original debate, the original topic about a judge in texas blocking part of a federal healthcare bill, is completely abandodned for the "Trans are humans" versus "Trans are evil" sycophants and fear mongers.

Well, can't blame 'em. Apocalypse always sells.

ARS Technica, trusted liberal media source for years, frequent appearances on NPR, is now being denounced by the left as "fake news" because it has concluded the US government's much-anticipated analysis of Russian-sponsored hacking operations provides almost none of the promised evidence linking them to breaches that the Obama administration claims were orchestrated in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

It's always a lovely exercise in schadenfreude when the Left cannibalizes itself.

People still think that the popular vote should replace the electoral vote, even when I tried to tell them about the highly populated states leaning liberal making the former not as reliable, with reasons like:

"There is no such thing as a "liberal state". That's a label. A state is an area of land. What makes it "liberal" is the fact that it's predominantly occupied by people that have that mindset.

If you're voting based on the popular vote, that is the opinion of the entire populace of the United States, it really doesn't matter what state they're in. If more people vote one way, then so be it. I don't care if more of them happen to conglomerate in one place."

Thoughts?

The reason I don't like this mindset is because it encourages candidates to only campaign in the really populated areas like New York, California, and Pennsylvania. It causes them to pretty much completely forget about the other states like Colorado, Utah, and Indiana. If anything, it makes it even more crucial for politicians to campaign in those heavily populated areas, and forget about the sparsely populated ones where, surprisingly, a lot of actual work is done like farming, mining, and manufacturing. Those are the types of people we should listen to more because they're the ones that are keeping this nation going, not these urban people who blog at the Starbucks on the corner of the street 24/7. Without them, our nation's infrastructure would pretty much collapse.

^ "They'd ignore small states" doesn't really work too much, because fairly big states already consist of most of the states candidates care about. The only small-EV state to get a good amount of attention was New Hampshire, and NH is just weird.

Regardless, I think we should have the electoral college, but it be structured differently. I'll copy-paste a post I made about this, and my reasoning for it.

The gist of it is that states do, in fact, have interests, and each citizenry does have different goals than others. The states borders are not arbitrary places to say "people in this area will get more say than others", because within those lines there are demonstrably different likes. Smaller states should have more of a say, because otherwise the things that matter the most to them will get drowned out by bigger states.

The haphazard system we have right now is not the way to go about it. All states should have a proportional system, where if a candidate gets 75% of the vote in a state, they get 75% of the electoral votes. This makes sure that all people are represented, not just that loud group that always votes in each deep red/blue state.

The reason I don’t like this mindset is because it encourages candidates to only campaign in the really populated areas like New York, California, and Pennsylvania

The effect of the electoral college at the moment is the exact opposite of this. States ranging from very sparsely populated to middle of the road – Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio – are given almost all of the attention during the primaries and general election. The only "large" state considered to be contestable is Florida. Since candidates campaign almost exclusively in battleground states, nobody pays even lip service to the economic engines of the U.S.; New York, California, and arguably Texas are given no voice during campaign season.

Ideally, every state would be given proportional attention, but short of that a system that incentivized campaigning in larger states over smaller states would be more reasonable than the inverse.

Those are the types of people we should listen to more because they’re the ones that are keeping this nation going, not these urban people who blog at the Starbucks on the corner of the street 24/7. Without them, our nation’s infrastructure would pretty much collapse.

California economic output 2015: $2.44 trillion. Larger than France.
Texas: $1.64 trillion. Comparable to Brazil.
New York: $1.45 trillion. Comparable to Canada.
Combined output of Colorado, Utah, and Indiana: $0.80 trillion.

The San Francisco metropolitan area, home of the Starbucks-blogging hipsters, has a higher nominal GDP ($0.43 trillion) than the entire state of Colorado. Memes do not reflect reality.

(I got cut off by an ad that effectively erased what I was typing, but given that Rivers summed up what I wanted to say, perhaps it's for the better.)

The haphazard system we have right now is not the way to go about it.

Given the layered history of the EC, I wouldn't call it "haphazard" by any stretch. And while giving a proportional amount of votes to a party based on how much of the vote they won in a state is good in theory, it's certain to stir up more controversy if you can't legally enforce a two party system. This is regardless of how the votes are amassed-- raw, or through the EC.

I've said this ad nauseam, I'm sure, and I'm sorry in advance: Clinton did not win the popular vote-- at least, not as per the principle of the popular vote. The point of the popular vote is majority rule. Thus, if Clinton and Trump were the only competitors, then she would have won the popular vote also in principle.

But they were merely the only competitors that mattered-- about 5% of the vote was carried off by neither of them, and Clinton only had a 1-2% lead on Trump in raw votes. In other words, more people voted for not-Clinton than those who did. If we then decided based on this, the majority would certainly not be represented.

This issue exists for any voting system with more than two competitors-- even the EC, as the 1824 Election exemplified. And don't even get me started on the 1933 Chancellor of Germany election.

Either the EC is reorganized so that there's no possible way for someone to gain a plurality without also gaining a majority of EC votes, regardless of how many candidates are running (I'm not sure if that's mathematically possible), or a two-party system is forced, nullifying the need for a reformatting of the EC (or if you so prefer, nullifying the need for an EC; though, I'm not sure how well this would sit). Otherwise, in the case where a majority isn't carried, the vote would go to the House of Reps, where each state would get exactly one vote-- an alternative that would prove to be more controversial in a conversation about representation.

On the topic of mathematically impossible political systems, I would recommend everyone familiarize themselves with Arrow's impossibility theorem.

I'm not entirely on board with the concept of the office of the President as America has it at the moment, mostly because its very existence implies partiality toward a two-party system. George Washington would probably have been horrified by what his office has become. But any reform would be an enormous waste of political capital as there are far more pressing problems facing American democracy, so I don't see any political commentator seriously entertaining the notion.

{ The San Francisco metropolitan area, home of the Starbucks-blogging hipsters, has a higher nominal GDP ($0.43 trillion) than the entire state of Colorado. }

California produces expensive tech parts.
North Dakota is only behind Texas as our largest petroleum producer.
Colorado is the largest producer of premium cuts of beef.
Iowa leads in corn production.

Our infrastructure will not collapse if California stops building airplanes (#5 global producer).
It will collapse if Iowa stops producing corn (#1 global producer).
Or if North Dakota stops producing petroleum (#1 global producer).
Or if Colorado stops producing premium beef (#1 global producer of high quality cuts)

California's other top exports are wine and almonds and dairy. Three goods that suffer greatly from drought and can be easily produced where the changing climate has become more suitable. There's a lot more to reality than GDP.

Your point about California is a non-starter. Once those jobs move to the heartland, the states to benefit should be given appropriately greater representation in politics. Until that happens, its 20 million workers producing $2.44 trillion per year are not to be ignored.

If we want to discuss the likes of maintaining infrastructure, then a comparison of the ratios of federal expenditure to income should be used. In such a case, Colorado (1.19) is marginally more dependent than California (1.18); and both states depend on the likes of New York (0.96).

Then this whole conversation is a non-starter because 20m people aren't being ignored. Nobody is being ignored.

Mmm, not quite. Statistics such as how often each state is visited by a candidate, as well as ad spending, demonstrate that certain states more than others are having their priorities reflected in each candidate's message. This almost certainly has a role in shaping how they govern. Note the lack of representation for the South and both coasts.

Presidents don't govern over individual states. They don't make policy, they don't write laws. People have an extraordinarily warped view of the President's role because Obama has been abusing executive orders for 8 years. The President's daily role is diplomatic. He's a figurehead.

Electoral votes don't matter more or less depending on how many times Candidate X visits the state or how much money Candidate Y spends on ads, and none of that changes a candidate's position on the issues that matter most to that particular state. What would have changed if Trump personally campaigned more on the west coast? Or if Hillary had bought more ads in Kansas?

Sure; the executive branch is the weakest branch of government. That doesn't mean it's powerless, or else I doubt either of us would be discussing this subject matter.

The logic is simple. Appealing to 5,000 people in a swing state that could put you over the top is more worthwhile than appealing to 1,000,000 people in a safe state. Candidates are therefore more likely to emphasize the issues facing people in said swing state over the issues experienced by voters in said safe state, and this will be reflected in their official platform (or else they risk being hammered for inconsistency and excessive pandering). Since Presidents tend to try to keep their promises to the public, this gives the small swing state outsize influence on how the President governs. What's so hard to follow about that? The ads and visits don't mean anything on their own; they just reflect the attention given to select states.

Oh, safe states.
You mean like Wisconsin?
Or Pennsylvania?
Maybe Michigan?
Weren't they calling that The Blue Wall?
Awkward.

The logic is only simple if one assumes "safe states" are safe.
We just learned exactly why a candidate should never assume anything.

& why would a safe state stay safe if a candidate prioritizes swing state issues over it anyway? That's literally what happened, Hillary assumed all of these states were safe for her thus they no longer were. This is the argument of someone who's mad the partisan ebb and flow didn't go their way this time around.

Which one's the bad guy?

Assange doubles down on Hannity.

{ HANNITY: Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta's emails, can you tell the American people 1,000 percent that you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.

ASSANGE: Our source is not a state party, so the answer for our interactions is no. But if we look at our most recent statement from the US government, which is on the 29th of December, OK, we had five different branches of government, Treasury, DHS, FBI, White House presenting their accusations to underpin Obama’s throwing out 29 Russian diplomats. What was missing from all of those statements? The word WikiLeaks. It’s very strange. }

ya know what, I had not actually noticed that….

Campaigning isn't what matters, it's the policy. Going by popular vote you only need to appeal to the liberal metropolitan areas and can ignore the fly over states, which means your policies can harm them and still get elected. With the electoral college, you have to appeal to the rest of the country to get elected, which ensures the interests of the rest of the country and not just the hippies on the coasts.

Weren’t they calling that The Blue Wall?

A fatal designation. In Pennsylvania Clinton's "lead" in the polls going up to the election was around half the average margin of error. These states were absolutely not safe in 2016 and the Clinton campaign's treatment of them as otherwise was a grave miscalculation that probably cost her the election. Trump was much more astute in treating these states as competitive, campaigning nonstop in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the rust belt. (His campaign this season was an excellent example of my aforementioned reasoning in play: he turned his grip on a small but loyal working class demographic into outsize results in several swing states.)

Historical precedent does not a safe state make. Texas was safe Republican because Trump had a 11-point lead, not because it traditionally votes Republican. Your rebuttal is nothing but a misdirection.

Appealing to 5,000 people in a swing state that could put you over the top is more worthwhile than appealing to 1,000,000 people in a safe state. Candidates are therefore more likely to emphasize the issues facing people in said swing state over the issues experienced by voters in said safe state, and this will be reflected in their official platform (or else they risk being hammered for inconsistency and excessive pandering).

But that only matters if they actually attempt to integrate material that runs contrary to their platform, or if they literally don't mention anything affecting the so-called safe states, if they don't outright discredit their concerns-- something that you would actively have to try to do if you were any flavor of competent.

…oh.

Clinton failed to heed the slice of white working voters who broke the "blue wall", and it cost her the Presidency. That much is beyond doubt. What are you trying to say?

That emphasis on given issues isn't throwing out other concerns as long as you still talk about said other concerns, but not talking about said concerns or discrediting them, is?

It's in response to you seemingly implying that voters will feel shafted by a candidate that doesn't focus on their concerns as much as certain other issues, whereas they would only feel shafted if A) the other candidate was focusing on their own concerns more and/or B) they never talk about their own concerns/actively discredit them.

The split between "safe" states and "swing" states is inaccurate. There's a reason the maps I made separated states into levels of Solid, Likely, Lean, and Tossup. Solid meant that if this wasn't right, a serious failure of my understanding of how the elections work happened. These did not fail – 100% accuracy. Some likely states didn't go the way I expected, which meant there was an error but it's not a ridiculous one. Lean and tossup states, obviously, are going to be hard to guess. That's why they're in the categories they are.

Cali, Texas, D.C., N.Y., Idaho – those are safe. They were pegged at above 95% chance of going one way or another, and due to correlated error, it was likely that either none fell or multiple. (Thus, instead of looking at it individually, you could say there was a ~3% chance that multiple states in this group of states would go a way other than expected.) And, as I already iterated, none fell.

They did make a mistake in not reinforcing those "Blue Wall" states. That much is exceedingly clear. I'm not arguing that the Clinton campaign was right in handling those states the way they did. What I'm arguing is for is that we don't take overly simplistic views.

which ensures the interests of the rest of the country and not just the hippies on the coasts.

There are a lot more kinds of people on the coasts than just hippies. This is the flipped version of "and not just the rednecks in the south" – overly simplistic and not entirely fair.

{ Texas was safe Republican because Trump had a 11-point lead }

"Florida was safe Democrat because Hillary had an 8-point lead"?

It cost her the election because the electoral votes in those states made a difference.
So we're still trying to figure out who is being ignored under this system.
It's not the swing states who get the most ads and campaign stops.
It's not the safe states who we just concluded probably decided the election.
Where are the people whose vote doesn't matter?

{ Some likely states didn’t go the way I expected, which meant there was an error }

It's not an "error" that people didn't vote the way you expected them to…
You act like these percentages are absolute, like the election was a code for you to crack.

ya'll
I can not

LOOK AT THIS (and enjoy the comments)

{ The Post initially reported incorrectly that the country’s electric grid had been penetrated through a Vermont utility. After Burlington Electric released its statement saying that the potentially compromised laptop had not been connected to the grid, The Post immediately corrected its article and later added an editor’s note explaining the change. }

hahahaha this is their third correction and it sure as hell wasn't immediate! My first post in here is their first "corrected" headline which still blames a "Russian operation"! WashPo is destroying themselves in their attempt to find some way to destroy Trump, 2017 is going to be the greatest.

Speaking of the Washington Post, what say you on their most recent and most popular piece?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/02/yes-donald-trump-lies-a-lot-and-news-organizations-should-say-so/?utm_term=.dc364e6c6a4f

Florida was one of the most extreme examples of a flip. Of course there will be exceptions to the rule every year. This does not discredit the rule.

EDIT: Wait, what am I saying? I must have conflated Florida with a different state. The RCP Average had Trump up in Florida before the election. Where are you getting your data from?

It’s not the swing states who get the most ads

Nevada, Florida, NC, Ohio, NH, etc. – swing states.

What?! It's the last McClatchy poll that also said she was taking 23% of Republican crossovers in early voting, her lead there was supposed to be mathematically impossible for Trump to overcome, it was covered by every mainstream media source as proof the GOP was dead. Her own campaign got to talking about how the Democrats were pulling ahead in Florida and North Carolina, effectively blocking Trump's only path to the White House.

You apparently miss these things obsessing over poll averages and bad conjectures from biased pundits.

{ Nevada, Florida, NC, Ohio, NH, etc. – swing states. }

Yes, the swing states who got the most ads, it's not their voters who are being ignored. The votes of non-swing states whose voters decided the election by voting for Trump after Hillary failed to campaign effectively also mattered significantly. So exactly whose votes don't matter/are ignored to the point where we need to make changes to the electoral college system?

Ford CEO CANCELS PLANS for new Mexico plant, will invest $700 million in Michigan instead, aims to create at least 700 news jobs.

{ Ford (F) CEO Mark Fields said the investment is a "vote of confidence" in the pro-business environment president-elect Donald Trump is creating. However, he stressed Ford did not do any sort of special deal with Trump.

"We didn't cut a deal with Trump. We did it for our business," Fields told CNN's Poppy Harlow in an exclusive interview Tuesday. He said Ford did speak with Trump and vice-president elect Mike Pence this morning. }

This is the second major USA investment Ford has committed to thanks to Trump.

I'm just waiting for someone to call out the attempt to weaken the independent Office of Congressional Ethics by Republicans or to say that it was actually good Idea.

Well, honest question, how competent is said Office? Does it go after all sides fairly and without distinction?

Trump tweeted a rebuke and they pulled the proposition. It's already dead.
AP – GOP drops weakening of ethics office, challenged by Trump

& no, the office is not actually independent and in its short history has many controversies over ignoring blatant ethical violations by Democrats while going after the GOP on what we consider "hand slap" issues. The proposal would have absorbed that "independent" committee into the House and created a new ethics panel made of an equal number of Congressmen from each party. It was a good idea.

If it was a good idea, then I guess the Democrats stopped it? With Trump's approval?

The media outcry is more than likely what stopped it. The press ran headlines about "the destruction of independent ethics oversight" and buried the new panel creation in the middle of their reports (if they mentioned it at all) and also left out all of the controversies which led to the proposal to dismiss the committee in the first place. So the general public was losing their shit over half-true reports that intentionally left out information to inspire that exact response. Trump then tweeted that their timing was shit and he wouldn't defend their move, so they gave it up. Anyone's guess if they'll rewrite it more plainly, maybe put out an actual press statement, and try again at a later date.

It’s the last McClatchy poll

Wow, why are you reading into a single poll about early voting instead of looking at the aggregate? Her campaign latched onto it simply to assure her supporters; the state was always competitve and was always treated as such by both candidates.

The 11-point Trump lead in Texas was an aggregate, which you attempted to rebut with a single outlying poll. That's not how it works.

votes of non-swing states

These "non-swing states" you speak of were actually treated as swing states by the candidates. Read the article I linked. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin both took ad money, and these were the states where Trump's razor thin wins gave him the election. And to answer your question about who is being ignored, as I said earlier – note the lack of representation for the South and both coasts.

You know its very telling that the news outlets who have helped to fan the flames of their angry viewers haven't told them the way to enact the change they want to the electoral college.

It's remarkably simple and easy, compared to any other widescale change. All they would need to do is orginize a few grassroot campaigns and letter writing campaigns to their local senators, congressmen, mayors, governess, state senators, justices etc, asking them to change the way they handle the electoral voting process from a "winner take all" system to a "distributive" system. To make it so that the popular vote percentages are reflected in the electoral voters cast votes. If a person wins 70% of votes in a state with 10 electoral votes, the winner gets 7 votes, and the other votes are distributed based on the election results.

The electoral college functions on a state by state level. The way it decides who gets the votes are done at a local level. If they want it changed, they could do so at a local level and make it so. They got 4 years to do so, I'm sure they could pull it off with enough dedication and time.

Odd how they don't. They want it done at the federal level, a supremely more difficult task. And odd as well how a lot of media outlets seem to push their viewers to pursue this monumentally more diffcult way of changing the electoral college. It's almost as if, they don't want it actually changed, but they just want people very angry and frustrated going into the next elections.

McClatchy is an aggregate of 29 papers in 14 states which has won awards for journalistic independence, RCP is a collective of mainstream media sponsored polls that publishes hugely biased interpretations of its data. RCP openly admitted this about itself and the rest of the media post-election.

{ The story of 2016 is not one of poll failure. It is a story of interpretive failure and a media environment that made it almost taboo to even suggest that Donald Trump had a real chance to win the election. At RealClearPolitics, we know that the RCP Poll Average is a powerful tool for gauging election trends and projecting outcomes. But we also recognize that it is not a perfect tool, and that even when aggregating multiple polls, the margin of error within each survey allows for a range of possibilities to exist. This is especially true in an election year that was as unique and volatile as 2016. }

Trump also spent almost no ad money in Wisconsin, and he didn't spend in Michigan, so they weren't being treated as swing states by him, and they were written off by Hillary as safe states.

No, I don't see a lack of representation in the South and on the coasts. Their votes aren't being discounted or ignored just because the candidate didn't personally campaign there or take out ads, that's ridiculous. It doesn't even sound like you're arguing for electoral vote representation at this point, you just want a candidate to spend equal amounts of time campaigning in each state, which is bizarrely pointless. They're federal executive candidates, not state governors.

The final McClatchy article to mention polling in Florida was published on Nov. 7 and quotes Nate Silver who states that voting was tied – I'll take your word on their reliability and also point out that the RCP article is simply an obvious warning about margins of error that you're reading too much into.

Trump also spent almost no ad money in Wisconsin

$500,000 in a single week is "almost no ad money".

>obvious warning about margins of error that outrights admits a failure on their part

$500,000 in a single week is "almost no ad money".

Relative to what he spent in general, and relative to what Clinton spent in general, yeah. Relative to what Clinton spent there when they got around to focusing their efforts there, no.

They outright admit a fault of interpretation. I'm not using their interpretation – I'm using their numbers.

If you're talking about relative numbers, Wisconsin accounted for 3.5% of Trump's ad spending while holding 1.8% of electoral votes, which meant it had twice its supposed significance to him. Of course, it's the least outstanding example – Maine and New Hampshire are both much, much better examples of outsize spending by the Trump campaign as part of the swing state pull effect.

The highest amount of money he spent in the last full week of campaigning (which was the link I gave you) was $158k in Nevada. It was $52k in Wisconsin, the only state he spent less in was Virginia. It was only $82k in Pennsylvania. If you're referring to a different week then link your source.

If anyone is reading too much into polls here it would be you and Rivers, but we're used to Rivers infatuation with data.

"we had these perfect polls which totally knew all along Trump had a very decent chance of winning but our own bias made us report it as though Hillary was invincible, OUR BAD YA'LL" is not so much an obvious warning as a sheepfaced apology on behalf of the entire polling community for their utter failure as independent reporters.

{ Wisconsin accounted for 3.5% of Trump’s ad spending while holding 1.8% of electoral votes, which meant it had twice its supposed significance to him }

This is the unhealthy obsession. There is no rule or law or even reason to think you must spend money in proportion to the significance of the state's electoral votes. Their positions are not going to change to reflect issues that matter more to the east coast whether they spend X dollars there or Y dollars, whether they visit there X times or Y times. It could not be less related to that state's electoral vote significance.