2016 Nov 9^th

I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t get all the egg off my face; it will be there until the 2018 election. Trump has two years of fictional total control and then the electorate will give him his mid-term grade. Wanna bet on the result.?

Not since Harry Truman (my first vote by the way) was prematurely declared the loser to Dewey in the 1948 election’s newspaper headlines, have the prognosticators been so wrong.  How did that happen? Two things to consider: 538, which clearly favored Clinton, did not claim that Trump would surely lose; neither did Paddy Power whose odds favored Clinton, but did not have Trump as a 100 to one shot. Sometimes the long shot wins; sometimes you do fill an inside straight.

Peter Hart, the pollster, in an interview this morning, suggested the second consideration: He said that 90 percent of people contacted by his pollsters refused to answer any of their questions. Who were those people? Consider that Trump has been hammering away at “crooked” polls, that is polls not showing him well ahead, and lately that was most polls, what would a Trump fan likely do when approached by a pollster? If you are only getting a ten percent response rate, your results will almost certainly be biased. Any elementary statistics text will tell you that a biased sample cannot be corrected by simply increasing its size.

This might be a major problem for the polling industry if people representing one viewpoint are not willing to admit that to a stranger. Compensating for that possibility in a poll would be very difficult.

The immediate result of Trump’s win is the expectation that, now having a solidly Republican Senate, House of Representatives and a SCOTUS just waiting for his nominees, he, will have a nice easy route to passing any legislation he wants. That is unlikely.

Trump has already shown a thin-skinned, easily provoked hostility toward anyone who is not sufficiently worshipful of him and his opinions. This has rankled many senators and they will continue to be rankled. Now that Trump has won the election many previously neutral, or even hostile, senators are suddenly making nice to Donny boy. Of course they are; didn’t he save their bacon? Unfortunately, it works both ways; some of them might forgive him (Will John McCain “who is not a hero because he was captured?”) but then will Trump forgive those who never endorsed him, or were publicly hostile, such as Lindsey Graham?

Trump’s path to legislative accomplishment is not a slam-dunk. This is partly because of his inability to forget slights and partly because his new colleagues don’t see him see him as a member of the Republican club. Trump’s open mouth is his greatest enemy.