I had a feeling this was going to happen today when I saw that virtually everyone in my Facebook feed and everyone on the streets of NYC was supporting Hillary. Every extra +1 in NYC is pretty much going to be -1 in a swing state.

As one of the hundreds of folks banned from DailyKos for being too liberal, I've been spending some time reading the Trump subreddit, and I have to say that Hillary has run perhaps the worst campaign in memory:

- Rigged the primaries against Bernie, disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters, and cheated during the debates.

- Spent 5x more on paid media advertising, and got all the social media sites to censor pro-Trump messages.

- Paid shills to attack anyone who disagrees with her policies on social media.

- It looks like there is a good chance her campaign was behind the attempt to frame Assange for pedophilia.

- Made gender her primary selling point with her #imwithher slogan. (Imagine if she had gone with something like #TheNextAmerica instead, to contrast with MAGA.)

- Accusing Trump of saying and doing tons of things he didn’t actually say or do.

- Characterizing Trump supporters as racists, bigots, deplorables, etc.

- Paying people to incite violence at Trump rallies

- Accusing Russia of hacking her campaign’s emails when in fact it was oedesta who gave out his password to a phishing site… twice… without two-factor enabled.

- Having Bill meet with Loretta Lynch during the email investigation. Then appointing Podesta's close friend to run the email investigation which resulted in a last minute FBI coup forcing Comey to make a statement.

I didn't vote for Trump, I don't support Trump, and I'm as horrified that he's going to be President as anyone else. But I have to say the actions of the DNC, Hillary, her campaign, and many of her supporters have been egregiously bad.

And now everything is super fucked.

edit: For everyone downvoting me, go turn on The Young Turks livestream and hear it from Cenk.

Not surprised; a day of reckoning was bound to come for the left. Consider that even if Trump had lost, his power base would still have existed afterward. Trump is not the problem, Trump is a symptom.

The American left took its eyes off of what's important, namely the working class, and instead spent its time and political capital on frivolous[0] causes. This is a wake-up call to refocus.

[0] Lots of things some might consider important are frivolous when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck.

One person who has been clear-headed about this for weeks is Michael Moore. Michigan and Wisconsin were supposed to be in the bag for Hillary, but that looks like where the surprise swing is coming from. Moore said from on the ground it felt like white working class people suffering from deindustrialization felt Hillary would do little for them, and might pick up the Molotov cocktail of Trump to throw into the system. His comments have been in lots of pro-Trump videos for weeks. Looks like he was right.

Then you'll see the economic fallout, and then it's just four years of misery, and people who can afford to, getting the hell out.

Everyone mentions Brexit but I have to wonder it the roots of this goes back to the 90's. Remember the battle of seattle and the likes?

I can think of a few other more local (to Australia) events that seem to make sense when you factor in this bubbling discontentment.

To be fair, the polls were consistently in the opposite direction. 538 had clinton at 70%, PEC at 99%, everyone else somewhere in between. It's a black swan event, bubble or no.

> It went so far that people who would vote for Trump lied in polls just so that they don't receive strange looks or something worse.

Hi there.

I swear to God, it's like coming out all over again. That this should be true of any political stance is utterly absurd, but, hey, here we are.

> The meltdown of the "media" and shock is just pure funny.

Oh good. It's not just me, there are others who want Trump to win just for the lulz. I don't care for his presidency, but Clinton belongs behind bars right now. I hope Trump wins and then does something to land him behind bars too. That would be my preferred outcome. The media has to change too, but I don't think a Trump presidency would be capable of bringing that about.

Well, you can't blame them. They really wanted Hillary to win, while conveniently trying to manipulate the public at the same time.

Bernie was leftist. Clinton, not so much.

It's strange, as an outside observe I see hate spewed against giant swaths of the population (the 'establishment', the 'leftists', the muslims, the hispanics, the blacks or whatever) from Trump supporters. But those same people keep complaining about the hate they perceive from the left or whatever.

It's bizarre. Are people supposed to embrace the racism, sexism and bigotry?

I just checked.

They gauges moving around is definitely random.

The updates are done with a "president.json" file, fetched every 15 seconds, but the timestamp in the json data only changes every 30-180 seconds.

So all of the movement is just random jitter to make it engaging.

Maybe a bit disingenuous.

(Note: I first thought they might be using websockets, but no WS connection is made on the page. Only a ajax fetch of president.json)

Disable jitter by running the following in console:

  require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return 0;}

  require('forecast/jitter').get = function(){return Math.random()*10;}

I think it's an interesting way to represent uncertainty; it seems pretty intuitive to me.

Yeah, it looks hilariously fake.

Looking though the source code, they have a jitter amount. It adds a little visual interest.

A decent mechanism to minimize page refreshes at the very least.

Periodic real updates with something more expressive than a spinner, which have never been convincing enough to keep me from mashing reload.

I thought the same thing, would like to see the background calculations running all three.

That's random, there is no network activity. Screams "black pattern", who on earth randomizes a graph on election results. Come on.

Yes, and this is a good thing.

It is better than what we do, informally. We all use models (of some sort) when we process information; e.g. I discount certain publications and value others. But few people actually make their models explicit and ask others to critique them.

Making a model public and explicit is a great first step. Building more models on top is a good thing, not a bad thing.

The United States is/was a collection of independent state governments. At one point, many state governments selected the electoral college representatives from their states. Until it was amended, states governments chose their senators.

There are political and historical reasons for having the system work this way, much like how the ordering of primaries is a contentious and complicated arrangement.

It was originally designed to stop stupid people from throwing the election. We'll see tonight if it still works.

You are not alone; many Americans have the same question.

Yeah, the entire system is screwed up by this insane electoral college. But majority-rule is insane even on a popular vote. The only good way to elect consensus candidates who serve everyone well is to implement score voting http://scorevoting.net/

Well, the reason we still have the election instead of just polling people is because the polls aren't always accurate.

For poll statistics this is like cigarettes not causing cancer moment

Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

I know in Canada they have a media blackout for each timezone until polls close (or are almost closed). The assumption is people will change their vote based on early counts.

However, that may have changed with the internet since you can't stop anyone from getting early results.

Edit: yup, looks like Canada stopped that back in 2014 [1]

[1]http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/election-reforms-include-end...