Back to political opinion polls today I’m afraid. Yep, the UK’s Brexit is all done and dusted (haha) but now our overseas friends seem to be facing what might be an even more unlikely choice in the grand US presidential election 2016.
Luckily, the pollsters are on hand to guide us through the inner minds and intentions of the voters-to-be. At last glance, it was looking pretty good for a Clinton victory -although, be not complacent ye Democrats, given the lack of success in the field of polling with regards to the afore-mentioned Brexit or perhaps the 2015 General Election here in the UK.
Below is perhaps my favourite most terrifying poll of recent times. It’s a recent poll carried out by the organisation “Public Policy Polling” concerning residents of the state of Florida. As usual, they asked several questions about the respondents’ characteristics and viewpoints, which lets us divide up the responses into those coming from Clinton supporters vs those coming from Trump supporters.
There are many insidious facts one could elucidate here on both sides, but given that at the moment the main polls are very in favour of a Clinton win (but see previous comment re complacency…), let’s pick out some that might hold relevance in a world where Clinton semi-landslides to victory.
Firstly, it shouldn’t particularly matter, but one can’t help but notice that Clinton is of the female persuasion. But, hey, rational voters look at policies, competence, experience or similar attributes, so a basic demographic fact alone doesn’t matter, right?
Wrong: the survey shows that just 69% of all respondents thought that gender didn’t make a difference. And, predictably, twice as many thought that the US would be better off with a male president than those who thought it would be better of with a female president. The effect is notably strongest within Trump supporters, where nearly 20x the proportion of people think the US would be better with a male president than with a female one.
Now, I can imagine some kind of halo effect where it’s hard for people to totally differentiate “my favourite candidate is a man and I can’t imagine having a favourite candidate that is not like him” from “my favourite candidate is a man but the fact he happens to be a man is incidental”.
But that nearly 40% of Trump supporters here claim that generically the president should be a man (implying that if it was Ms Trump vs Mr Clinton, they might vote differently), it seems potentially a stronger signal of inequality than that, especially when compared to the lower bias between Clinton supporters and preferring a woman – which is equally as illogical, but at least has a lower incidence. We can note also a pro-male bias in the “not sure” population too.
Of course we don’t actually have an example of what the US is like when it has a female president, because none of the 43 serving presidents to date have been women.
But we do know part of what Hilary Clinton is already presidentially responsible for apparently. “Coincidentally” (hmm…) her husband was one of the previous 43 male presidents, and apparently the majority of Trump supporters think it’s perfectly right to hold her responsible for his “behaviour”.
Yep, anything he did, for good or bad (which, let’s face it, is probably biased towards the bad for those people who support the opposing party and/or don’t appreciate cheating spouses) is in some sense his wife’s fault, for the Trumpians.
But if she’s so obviously bad, then why does she actually poll quite well, at the time of writing? Well, of course there can be only one reason. The whole election is a fraud. And given we haven’t actually had the election yet, I guess the allegation must also entail that poll respondents are also lying about their intentions, and/or that all the publishers of polls are equally as corrupt as the electoral system of the US.
Yes, THREE-QUARTERS of Trump supporters polled here apparently believe that if, as seems quite likely, Clinton wins then it can only be because the election was rigged. The whole democratic process is a sham. The US has fallen prey to semi-visible forces of uber-powerful corruption. We should presumably therefore ignore the result and give Trump the golden throne (to fit inside his golden house). Choice of winner aside, this is a pretty scary indictment on the respect that citizens feel for their own democratic system. This is not to say whether they are right or wrong to feel this way; to us Brits, I think it sometimes seems that in the US money has even greater hold over some theoretically democratic outcomes in the US than it does over here – but that so many have so little regard for the system is surely…a concern.
But wait, it’s not just that she may hypothetically commit electoral fraud in the near future. She has apparently already committed crimes serious enough that she should already be locked up in prison.
Over EIGHTY PERCENT of Trump supporters polled here think she should literally go to prison; and this isn’t predicated on her winning. Well, there’s no shortage of bad things that can be laid at her door I’m sure, she has after all been serving at a high level of politics for a while already and, without being an expert, it seems like there are many serious allegations that people lay at the Clintons’ feet. But it’s perhaps quite surprising that the large majority of her opponent’s supporters want to throw someone who is likely to be their next president in jail. I don’t think even the Blair war-crimes movement ever got quite that far!
Unless…well. I’m only sad they didn’t ask the same question about Trump. Perhaps we could be more at ease if at least the same proportion of people thought he should be locked up. An oft overlooked fact is that analysis is often meaningless without some sort of carefully-chosen comparison. Perhaps there’s a baseline figure of people that think any given prominent politician should be jailed (but I’ve not seen research on that).
It’s hard to imagine though that the fact Trump has himself actually appeared to threaten her with jail doesn’t play some role here with his supporters though. It is apparently unprecedented for a major party nominee to have said publicly that his opponent should be jailed – but say it he did, most famously during their second presidential debate. As the Guardian reports:
Trump, embracing the spirit of the “lock her up” mob chants at his rallies, threatened: “If I win I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation – there has never been so many lies and so much deception,” he threatened.
Clinton said it was “awfully good” that someone with the temperament of Trump was not in charge of the law in the country, provoking another Trump jab: “Because you’d be in jail.”
Eric Holder, who once was the US attorney general, didn’t really seem to like that plan.
So we’ve established that in the eyes of the average Florida Trump supporter polled here that if Clinton wins then the whole shebang was fraudulent, she already should have been locked up in prison, and, besides, the fact that she’s a women should probably ban her from applying to the office of the president in the first place. That’s a strong indictment. But, of course, there’s another level to explore.
Is Hillary Clinton a malevolent paranormal entity, intent on destroying humankind?
Erm…2 out of every 5 Trump supporters here think yes, she definitely is an actual demon. And the majority aren’t sure that she is not an actual demon.
Even only just over 50% of the “not sure” supporters are also sure she’s not an actual demon. It’s also entertaining to contemplate the c. 10% of her supports that think she might be demonic yet still fancy her as president.
The lower figures might be down to some variant of the excellent StarSlateCodex’s concept of the “Lizardman’s Constant” which can perhaps be summed up as there’s a lower bound % of people who will believe, or claim to believe, any polled sentiment.
But there they benchmark that at around 4%, and ten times that proportion of Trump supporters here respond that they are certain that Clinton is a literal demon. There are many ways to introduce biases that lead to this sort of result, which StarSlateCodex does go over. But 40% is…big…if this poll is even remotely respectable.
So, where has this idea that she’s a demon come from? Have Trump supporters as a collective seen some special evidence that proves this must be true, that somehow the rest of us have overlooked? Surely each individual doesn’t randomly become subject to these thoughts which even believers would probably term an unusual state of affairs -is there no smoke without fire? (pun intended)
Well, perhaps it has something to do with a subset of famous-enough people have stated that she is.
Trump himself did refer to her as a devil, although in fairness that just maybe possibly might be an unfortunate turn of phrase, if we want to be charitable. After all, to his credit, evidence suggests he’s not great at following a script (or at least not one you’d imagine a typical political spinner would write).
Perhaps more pertinently, for certain a certain subsection of viewers anyway, is presenter Alex Jones of “Infowars” fame (a website that apparently gets more monthly visitors than e.g. the Economist or Newsweek), he who Trump says of “your reputation is amazing…I will not let you down”, who did go on a bit of a rant on this subject.
MediaMatters have kindly transcribed:
She is an abject, psychopathic, demon from Hell that as soon as she gets into power is going to try to destroy the planet. I’m sure of that, and people around her say she’s so dark now, and so evil, and so possessed that they are having nightmares, they’re freaking out… I mean this woman is dangerous, ladies and gentleman. I’m telling you, she is a demon. This is Biblical.
There’s so much more if you’re into that sort of stuff; see it all on this video, including the physical evidence he presents of Clinton’s demonness (spoiler alert: she smells bad, and Obama is obviously one too because sometimes flies land on him).
Unfortunately I’m not aware of time series data on perception of Clinton’s level of demonicness – so I’m afraid there’s no temporal analysis to present on causal factors here.
At first glance some of this might seem kind of amusing in a macabre way – especially to us foreigners for whom the local political process is hugely less pleasant or equitable than it should be, but it doesn’t usually come with claims of supernatural possession. But the outcome may not be so funny. In the likely (but not certain) event that Clinton wins, Florida at least seems to have a significant bunch of people who think the whole debacle was rigged, and Clinton should have a gender change, an exorcism and a long spell in jail before even being considered for for the presidency.
Update 1: this sort of stuff probably doesn’t help matters – from former Congressmen / Radio host Joe Walsh:
Update 2: the polls are a lot closer now then they were when I started writing.
Dabbling with Data 