Trump ATTACK

Most of us want to be remembered for our best qualities, greatest achievements, and proudest moments. Politicians, however, in a desperate grab for votes, choose to advertise themselves differently. In true Darwinian fashion, candidates have recognized the way to win the race is to beat out the strongest competition by targeting their weakest. Even pre-Trump, attack ads have worked extremely well in a polarized America, and they’ve become even more prevalent in the last election. A September 2016 report from the Wesleyan Media Project put it best in stating, “Just over 60 percent of Clinton’s ads have attacked Trump while 31 percent have been positive…Trump, on the other hand, has by and large used contrast ads, which both promote himself and attack Clinton. He has aired no positive ads.” Let's see what Team Trump™ has cooked up for us.

This is an issue advertisement attempting to appeal to women, specifically mothers. While I’m quick to object to the legitimacy and sincerity of the advertisement, it was probably a smart move for Trump to target middle aged white women, who really turned out for him on Election Day. By choosing Trump’s daughter Ivanka as an advocate for women’s policies he allegedly supports, he likely created sway in the minds of voters with the belief that he doesn’t have women’s issues on the agenda.

Team Trump™ did a whole lot of work last election season smearing the Clinton campaign with accusations of corruption and crooked behavior. In the following advertisement, Clinton is accused of engaging in pay to play politics, accepting money from dictators, selling out American workers, exploiting Haitians, and giving US uranium to Russia. “Hillary Clinton only cares about power, money, and herself.”

I think the top Youtube comment on the video is a good example of the reaction Team Trump™ was gunning for with this advertisement:

Team Trump™ employs a few nifty strategies in this advertisement. As one Washigton Post writer wrote, “This is Trump as his Trumpiest” This advertisement relies on a lot of assumptions about Clinton. The video begins with a fearful voiceover of international crises: Iran promoting terrorism! North Korea threatening! ISIS on the rise! Libya and North Africa in chaos! A montage of sick Hillary pictures play. This is two-fold. First, the fear mongering drives the audience into danger control. In order to avoid the collapse of the modern world, they are urged to vote against Hillary. Second, if the fear was not enough to drive the audience away from casting a ballot in favor of Clinton, her health scandal just might be.

Trump Tweets

In honor of International Women’s Day, I think it’s important to recognize the many glass ceilings encountered, and shattered by heroes of this nation. Donald Trump, for example, shattering the glass ceiling for presidential candidates having twitter beef with hip-hop artists.  Honestly, if I were assigned to write about the online presence of any presidential candidate other than Trump, I would be very sad. President Trump pushed all of the limits during his candidacy with his online persona.

Like most candidates he has this boring website. He probably didn’t have much to do with any of its content because it’s super professional; I haven’t spotted a single typo or particularly problematic statement. However, the same cannot be said for his Twitter. The New York Times explains, “Since 2009, he has used the social media platform to build his brand — and, now, to communicate with voters as a candidate for president.” Trump is something of a Twitter mogul. With double the followers of HRC, he had no problem grabbing the attention of potential voters with his impulsive and histrionic tweets.

I’m personally a big fan of this website, which compiles all of Trump’s deleted tweets. (Often because he publicly contradicted something he had once tweeted).

The president also started up a Snapchat account the day of his inauguration, by the same name as his Twitter handle, @RealDonaldTrump, but this account is heavily monitored and buffered by his staff, so it doesn’t receive the same attention as his contentious tweets.

 

And let’s not forget Facebook, though a form of social media that has become dated and less personalized for younger audiences, it still finds its place in Trump’s campaign strategy.

However, not all of his online presence really represents the person he wants his constituents to see…

Donald Trump has a host of viral videos that don’t show him in the most favorable light. There’s the Access Hollywood tape, that time he made fun of a disabled reporter, and then there’s that famous quote about Mexicans that probably didn’t help the Latino vote…but undoubtedly helped the white one.

             Some might say that Trump’s use of social media is his biggest downfall, but I say otherwise.  3am impulse tweets are a disease that plagues all of us at one point or another. In a way, his typos, poor grammar, use of catchphrases, name-calling, and late night tweets probably just made him more relatable, and improved his popularity. I’d like to say that he could have played a more professional role online to gain respect of a more moderate voting base, but he’s still the one perched in that swivel chair in the oval office so I’m finding it difficult to critique him on his campaign strategy.

Trump makes Nate SAD!

First, I would just like to state that I see what Nate Silver is doing and I don’t like it. ‘Our polls did less bad than most polls’, alright Nate, I know you have to save face but this article’s a little sad.

He's actually on the statistician and analyst side of polling but ignore that.

          It’s true that most polls and forecasts led the public to believe Clinton would be the leader of this country right now. While still hanging on to the popular vote, she did so by a smaller margin than anticipated, and with her unpredicted performance in the Midwest, she was unable to gather the much-needed votes to win the Electoral College.

Naturally, pollsters, and much of the American public was shocked. After all, most polls predicted a Hillary Clinton win by a pretty immodest margin.

Even though Nate’s article has some real arrogant vibes I think he’s right about a lot of things. For example, he explains that this was an election of high uncertainty, and we knew that from the polls. The margin of error for many of them was great enough that any of the dozens of polls that gave Clinton an edge over Trump could all be wrong within the parameters of a pretty expected polling error.

 

Honestly, I would have a latte with this man.

We know polls were wrong about the winner, but I think there’s room to give credit for what they were right about. The polls were right about Hillary winning the popular vote, which, in my opinion is the most we can really ask polls of such scale and uncertainty to get right. The polls were also right about many of the states that Trump would win, just not the ones he would lose. It’s hard to say exactly what went wrong, especially in the final days, when polls said Hillary was pulling further ahead.

A few theories:

-There’s a stigma around supporting Trump, (warranted or unwarranted) which may have cost pollsters nonresponse bias, or untruthful answers.

-There’s a certain demographic of Trump supporters pollsters just couldn’t reach, perhaps people in rural areas or those not easily reached through email or phone.

-Undecided or apathetic voters turned out for Trump at the final hour.

All of these are feasible explanations for why even the most prominent polls did not predict a likely Trump victory.

If I were to conduct my own poll for this election, I would have wanted qualitative information, since, well, the quantitative information didn’t do us much good to begin with. I’d ask questions like, “What issues are most important to you this election?” and “Does Trump’s stance on immigration policy make you more or less likely to vote for him?”. I find detailed and nuanced responses to be far more substantive in giving meaning to the results of the election than polling of voter preference.

I think the thing that makes polling so interesting and such a big part of the election cycle is the very fact that it is often wrong. I found Silver’s comments on the disbelief and shock of the nation intriguing. We know that polls are only estimated probability, but so many of us buried our heads in our hands on election night asking where the data went wrong. Polls are comfort for those they favor, and motivation for those they don’t, demonstrating an important part in the political process, given their apparent ability to influence elections.

But like anything, there are certainly limitations. Silver mentioned polls missing in the wrong direction, and I think he makes a fair point. In some cases there’s a group of people that can’t be reached and the only solution is extrapolating what we already know about those groups of people to predict their vote, which is fairly dubious way to go about election forecasting given the unpredictability of humans.

 It’s almost funny to me how much time and effort is invested in the practice of polling when we will eventually find out the real, accurate results soon enough. But this day in age is all about immediacy, and polling gives us a fast and effective way of getting a handle on public opinion, which can influence candidates and constituents for better, or for worse.