Hillary Clinton’s Nevada Triumph

The population of Nevada is about 2.8 million. According to the WaPo, Mrs. Clinton scored a resounding victory. She received 6,238 votes. 500 more than the other guy.

[UPDATE] Thanks to a commenter for pointing out my mistake:

Those are county delegate vote totals, not popular vote totals. Because the dem caucus process is dumb we don’t know how the popular vote broke down, but turnout has been estimated at 80k.

So maybe she got 50,000 votes? [/UPDATE]

Also, here is Tyler Cowen on what those who are surprised by the success of Donald Trump might have gotten wrong. Again, I give credit to Martin Gurri for getting it right. The public is revolting more, and more revolting, than we thought.

14 thoughts on “Hillary Clinton’s Nevada Triumph

  1. After the goals of the Obama administration became too clear to deny, the Republicans gained the House and claimed that they needed to have the Senate. After they gained the Senate, they claimed that they still couldn’t stop Obama. The voters have turned to Trump after the Republicans have failed them. Is this really surprising?

  2. Those are county delegate vote totals, not popular vote totals. Because the dem caucus process is dumb we don’t know how the popular vote broke down, but turnout has been estimated at 80k.

  3. Actually, while I admire him and am inclined to defend his claims, I thought one of Cowen’s points was pretty lame. I would have expected him to be a little more reluctant to make such a confidently provocative claim by clutching at some weak statistical demonstration like that, about which he is usually much more properly and judiciously skeptical. Disappointing.

    Here is the the image that he said teaches us that, “Republican primary voters are more racist than we had thought.”

    Excuse me, but that scatter plot is obviously a total mess. What do you figure R is? Even being charitable and accepting the best-fit line, the effect size is small, and without the last point or two, it wouldn’t even obviously be upward sloping. Come on.

    And might ‘black percent of population’ also correlate with anything like, say, education or income or those Republican voters? Have we corrected for those to ensure that racism is the most explanatory factor?

    Also, the message is obviously that “Trump support” is apparently equivalent to ‘racist’. That’s low. It’s also really, really unwise to raise the status of the general claim that any correlation between white behavior and black populations fraction is ‘racist’.

    • A necessary condition for Tyler’s inference is that black people cause white racism in some way. Otherwise the line has to slope downwards.

    • What is the basis for attributing “racism” to Trump voters? I despise Trump (as much as I despise most of his establishment and libertarian detractors), but I’ve never heard him say anything racist. In fact, I’ve never heard of him deviating from conventional political correctnesss on black-white issues at all. In light of recent events, noting that Muslims immigration into the West presents a problem does not strike me as “racist,” even putting aside the fact that the category of “Muslims” is not a race and includes many “whites.” And is it really racism against Latinos to suggest that we ought to deport immigrants who turn out to be felons? Trump’s voters apparently haven’t noticed, but this is all he intends to do to limit immigration.

      The public may be revolting (in a very stupid way), but they are reacting to an even more revolting, and bigoted, elite that hates them and demands that they acquiesce in the destruction of everything they value.

      It would be nice if Arnold could extend some charitableness to the ordinary people of the United States, instead of endorsing something that writes off a significant segment of them as racists. Maybe he used up all his stores of charity on Obama and the rest of the leftist establishment. Too bad they won’t reciprocate.

  4. I love your blog, so I wish you wouldn’t write “…the public is…revolting more, than we thought.” The phrase runs contrary to your stated intent to take the most charitable view of those who disagree, for the sake of an (admittedly) clever line.

    Please keep up your excellent blogging. P.S. For the record, I’m not a Trump supporter.

  5. Mass illegal immigration, particularly from South America, has been unpopular for a very long time. The political class has been patting the plebs on the head and assuring them they’d do something about it, but then haven’t followed through. The political class is divided, and even those who might agree with the plebs are rather ambivalent. The path of least resistance has been to put on a border patrol and fence show, but not do enough to actually stop the flow of illegal immigrants.

    Whatever the merits of immigration, illegal or otherwise, and whatever the motivations of those opposing immifrations, it’s clear there are a lot of people who feel they’ve been ignored or fobbed off for a long time. They’re frustrated. I don’t think most of them view Trump as an ideal candidate, but rather the ONLY candidate who is taking their views and concerns about immigration seriously.

    It seems to me the political class is way, way out of alignment with ordinary people on this issue, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

  6. “The public is revolting more, and more revolting, than we thought”

    To me it means the name recognition horse race has been exposed as more flawed than we thought. So perhaps we should not be as dismissive of a public using the only protest vote offered.

    • In the alternative, there are a few possible Straussian interpretations of a statement like, “X is more Y than we thought.”

      The question is, does everyone in the intended audience already secretly – or open-secretly – believe that X is very Y, but are reluctant to include matter-of-fact-like assertions about it in their usual discourse?

      What is needed to turn this open-secret into an acceptable part of open conversation is (1) some signal about which everyone can be confident regarding its perception by many others, and (2) some piece of ‘news’ that allows for a socially acceptable excuse for why one is saying this thing today but didn’t say it yesterday.

      A claim that some new result is confidence-boosting ‘evidence’ today, whereas the right position yesterday was agnostic uncertainty, is the perfect cover story. The claim being repeated by a high status source with a large audience, and in a way that is sure to get lots of retweets, is the other secret ingredient.

      Of course this is dirty pool if the ‘new’ ‘evidence’ is in fact – and quite obviously – a giant baloney sandwich.

      • I find the whole “I was wrong before, and this is exactly why” thing pretty weird.

        We assume, for example, that Hilary Clinton is a ‘normal’ candidate for president. Why would we do this? To me, Trump having traction exposes the Occam’s Razor option, which is just that the process isn’t that great.

  7. I’m torn. On the one hand, I think the public has legitimate reasons for staging a sort of revolt. The left is rotten, the right is ineffectual; why not throw in with some fringey firebrand? On the other hand: Donald Trump? Really? That’s the protest candidate everyone latches on to?

    I guess the best you can hope for here is that, in the same way that European parties like UKIP and FN had their origins among some pretty odious people and were eventually taken over by some more respectable, less hateful folks, the Donald’s angry populist movement, assuming it doesn’t simply peter out, passes on to someone a bit more responsible, a bit wiser, and who can restrain the worst impulses of these folks and champion their concerns without scaring the hell out of everyone else. But that’s probably too much to ask, at this point.

  8. In reality, Nevada had very conflicting data on the Latino vote. Exit polls showed Bernie doing well but most entrance/exit polls are notoriously off target. (In 2004 Exit polls showed John Kerry winning Ohio.) Otherwise, HRC biggest victories were in Clark County (Las Vegas) where the Hispanic population is the heaviest. At this point, it is hard to see the Democratic Party ‘Throwing a revolt’ as the Primary process is usually messy to a degree.

    Anyway, we have Texas next week where the Latino voting patterns will be obvious.

  9. * I meant, “more revolting” is the phrase that runs counter to the spirit of your blog.

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