Popular vote besotted

Short-term update: a top article on Zero Hedge.  Thanks for sharing, and enjoying.

It was a hard-hitting presidential race, and the second (of possibly three) runnings for former FLOTUS Hillary Clinton.  A number of her advisors and she insisted that she had a significant lead, and even the Donald Trump camp in the final weeks knew that they were against the ropes.  For the latter, this blog was often used to cite decent and encouraging representations of how strong Trump’s odds were (since here, we wrote six articles most were shared by them suggesting he would do quite better than any other established poller had suggested.)  And no one complained in early October about the Electoral College rules, no one complained that Russian President Putin was hacking our election system, no one complained that the results would be illegitimate if too many Whites versus Blacks come out to vote, and no one complained that Americans were going to have a negative view of Hillary’s e-mails (from servers, to leaks).  When asked at the 2^nd presidential debate whether the election outcome would be accepted, it was Ms. Clinton who had to call Mr. Trump’s response “horrifying” and a “taking down of our democracy”.  Why not; it was game over after that Access Hollywood gift, and it’s time to plan expensive fireworks over the Hudson River on election night.  Those fireworks never happened (well in Mexico City it did, but not here), and in fact she was simply an indolent no-show at her own election night party.  There was an unravelling that had finally caught up to her, and seen by the world on this one chart below, where her election night odds out-of-the-gate plummeted even below my own tight and relatively low probability that was given to her long ago.  Now all the arm-chair pundits are busy trying to reinvent analysis of what all went bad.  Are there clues about the election results and the build-up of campaigning, using probability theory, which could have reshaped these recent events?

Then only on the day after this election, see which internet word search suddenly became significant.

And later still, see what’s been on Hillary Clinton’s mind.  Citing her comedian math guru: who gave Donald Trump a 1:50 chance in his Primaries, followed by a 1:6 chance during most of the campaign (even though we know here, here, and here that her station was already on full-melt mode, by mid-October).

See Hillary's last tweet (which was nearly a month ago), and thinking only about recounting the election.

Or these rare comments that she has given since the election, pointing to what she thinks caused her collapse.  But why cite the comedian who -as shown above- didn't get any part of this election right to begin with?

Who campaigned more prudently?

We have been hearing Donald Trump’s side claim that he was simply more ingenious in picking the “key” states to campaign in, and if the traditional rules were to win the popular vote then he would have changed his overall strategy to win that way.  At a macro level, we mathematically calculated that he would have a >2/3 chance of winning the popular vote if that were the original scorecard.  But let’s take things more micro.  Since Kellyanne Conway emerged as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, more than a couple months prior to election, we have a record of all the major campaign appearances for both candidates in order to see who took advantage of the vote decision-making time better.  Hillary Clinton simply went to 2/3 as many appearances, and each time to smaller audiences, versus her rival.  But she did appear from time to time at some music concerts, confidently assuming that was enough (it wasn’t and outside of millennials, she lost the popular vote in the rest of the age spectrum, not to mention completely across the U.S. ex-California and we'll see in a moment why that's critical).

We also know that there were 6 economically worse-off states that flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.  She campaigned with less appearances in each of these 6 states.  Now that’s bad and indefensible.  As a portion of all of her appearances, her relative efforts were competitive in five of these 6 states and very strong in Ohio.  Yet even in for Ohio’s growing population, her total votes fell ruinously, and her popular vote margin was even more disastrous: from (Obama +3%), to (Clinton -8.1%).

Then when looking at 10 other states with large voter swings (5 towards Democrats and 5 towards Republicans), yet of course where it still didn’t matter to flip the state, there are only a small amount of wasted campaigning by both sides.  Except New York and California (notice above that state was pivotal for stickler of the now popular vote argument).  Hillary Clinton wasted nearly 7% of her campaigning in two blue states, only to increase her popular vote margin by a total of 1m!  But for no good reason as the popular vote margin % was already in the low-20s% in her favor.  So this is just another example of unwise campaign strategy.

What if the original rules were the popular vote, then what likely changes would have happened among these two tough contenders?  What if Donald Trump spent less time in the 6 states noted above, and instead campaigned harder in states such as California (he never did), and Texas (only one appearance).  This would be sufficient to wipe out the current lead Hillary Clinton has in the popular vote, simply by blunting the margin difference between elections (seen in map below).  Not enough to suggest Mr. Trump would have had an easy advantage however.

So this is where we need to take an additional leap, from probability theory to game theory.  We would have to assume the magical change for 2016 would have spurred up additional voter turnout in these otherwise disparate large states, as they did in the manufacturing, Rust Belt states.  Eligible voters in those states "where there vote doesn't matter" participate 1/3 less than in states that are "battle ground"; clearly that "missing vote" gap would be reconstituted and dramatically effect the popular vote outcome.  And the messaging would have therefore have needed to be altered, and there is every reason to believe Donald Trump would have been able to be at least enough effective in that to be successful on the popular vote metric.  Whether this means 70% chance, or 55% chance, these are both still effective considerations.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, by the most in history
How dare Mr. Trump not offer her a cabinet position?  The evidence is just so clear, with 63 million votes (3 million greater than Donald Trump).  And it is true that when seeing the world now through just the popular vote, she did win.  Some are, of course, now arguing that the popular vote is simply the fairer mechanism to have this sort of democratic election.  And those are worthy debates in any sort of reform (but so too are many other changes that can happen, such as who is eligible to vote and what are the rules for recounts, etc.)

What’s interesting to explore here are all the different ways one can slice and dice the miserable election results, in order to get a sense of exactly how much history Hillary Clinton made. 

First let's lay out the basic facts.  Mr. Trump won the Electoral College with 304 votes, or 57% of it. Either way they are both ranked 39th of the past 49 elections. Perhaps not great, but let's see if Ms. Clinton did better.  We know that she did not win the popular vote by the most people ever, and the margin of 2.9 million that is oft cited is actually ranked 20th of 49 elections.  It's only when one culls these 49 elections for the five popular vote winners, who also lost the Electoral College, does Hillary become the best (but out of five).  Any student of statistics should know though, that unlike the Electoral College that is fairly fixed in total counts during recent elections, looking at (differences in) absolute votes when the population growing unbounded is absurdly inappropriate.  One must instead look at these votes, as a portion of the population. And in this case her 2.1% margin ranks at 41st of 49 elections, and her 46% of the poplar vote ranks even worse: at 43.  Hardly history-making, as seen in the summary illustration below.

Next is a graphics from The New York Times (incidentally cited there last Sunday's print). Hillary Clinton loses more Electoral College votes (faithless Democratic Party electorals) than not just Donald J. Trump, but more than anyone else in over a hundred years. Were the "the Russians" behind that?  Or was it FBI Director Comey, or sexism, or something other than the candidate?

And in the end, we see that there is a narrow sliver by which we can state that she won the popular vote by an excellent ranking relative to prior elections.  Of course even if she lost the popular vote too, we could be quibbling about other characteristics of the election where she won certain demographics (recall after Brexit popular vote, everyone argued that the very young specifically wanted to remain in the European Union and therefore it was more fair to count their votes higher than older citizens), if not back to the old hat of claiming the elections were simply a fraud.  Which isn’t “horrifying”, and we’re watching this unfold right now as one side goes "low", but simply selfish to the Democrats’ reputation that President Obama -and those such as me who worked for him- wanted to see lifted higher for the sake of our great nation.  Hillary Clinton would be sage to follow her own proposal, when having to analyze her own past performance: