Why Trump Won the Electoral College in 2016

No one can know for certain the details of what happened in 2106. However, reasonable estimates can be made from the advantage point that hindsight sometimes affords. Obviously, different people will see things differently and weigh factors differently. For example, some people believe that Russian efforts to help the president in 2016 were completely irrelevant with on effect on even one single vote. Others believe that Russian efforts were necessary. Yet others are unsure. Some do not care and/or have no opinion whatever for any or no reason(s).

As usual for contested political issues, opinions and non-opinions are all over the place. Opinions can be observed with a sense of just about anything, including wonder, confusion, fear, self-congratulatory smugness, etc.

Here's my current list of the main factors roughly in order of importance. Although the individual factors listed here can account for many votes or few votes, their impact on the outcome is important or necessary.

• Most important: White voter unease with (i) perceptions of a decline in America's status in the world, and (ii) impending social and demographic changes, primarily the coming change from majority white to majority minority. (sources here, here and here) 
• Economic complaints about wage stagnation and increasing costs (sources here and here)
• The media's constant coverage of the president due to his entertainment value; this gave the president nationwide advertising with an estimated worth of about $2 billion (source) 
• The president's mastery of dark free speech, particularly his lies and his ability to evoke unwarranted fear, outrage and bigotry, and his ability to play the media to his advantage (source here and here)
• FBI director James Comey announcing two investigation of Clinton in the weeks before the election (sources here and here)
• The inherent advantage to the president that the electoral college conferred (source) 
• Support from Christians, especially Evangelicals
• Clinton's lackluster personality and inept campaign, despite winning the popular vote (source)
• Russian efforts to help the president, which former DNI James Clapper considered to be necessary, but the true impact will never be known with reasonable certainty (source)
• Decades of conservative dark free speech against Clinton including lies, smears and false, crackpot conspiracy theories, e.g., Pizzagate, despite repeated investigations that never led to any indictments, convictions or guilty pleas (source)
• Lackluster voter turnout, induced in part by relentless dark free speech (propaganda) directed against Clinton, which led some voters to not vote (sources here and here)

As will be apparent, the listed factors can be interacting and overlapping to varying degrees, e.g., some Christian voters were also motivated by their religion and unease over ongoing social and demographic changes.

An astronomer calculated that Earth's intelligent life is probably 'rare.' Here's what that means

Intelligent life would probably not evolve that often if you reran Earth a few hundred times.

If we all got together and started Earth over, winding time back to the moment right after the land cooled from hot magma and giant meteor showers stopped devastating the planet, would life rise again on this planet? And would that life ever become intelligent? 

A new paper published May 18 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers an answer: Life likely spawns quickly and easily under Earth-like conditions. But intelligent life is probably rare and slow to emerge, suggesting it might not re-appear.

Some reports have suggested this paper is about the odds of intelligent life emerging beyond our planet ⁠— alien life and alien civilizations. But the author, David Kipping, a Columbia University astronomer, kept his focus on Earth itself. His paper leaves questions about other planets unanswered. He used a statistical method called Bayesian analysis to study the handful of data points available, landing on the conclusion that we're probably lucky to exist at all.

What 'Bayesian analysis' means

There are two main approaches to statistics, said Pauline Barmby, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario who wasn't involved with Kipping's paper: frequentist and Bayesian. When news networks announce who just won a presidential election, meteorologists predict the weather, and public health officials estimate coronavirus infection rates from limited samples, they're usually using frequentist approaches. In other words, they use the limited information they have to judge what the truth about the world most likely is. Bayesian analysis more closely resembles the way human beings actually think.

"Bayesian analysis is just a way of describing and updating beliefs ⁠— or information content ⁠— when you see some piece of data," said Will Farr, an astrophysicist at Stony Brook University in New York, who also wasn't involved in Kipping's paper.

For instance: How likely am I to make a free-throw this time, given that I've missed the last 20 times I tried? What about if I missed the last 50? The approach forces researchers to examine the assumptions involved in the questions they're asking and their confidence in those assumptions, Barmby said.

We're very lucky

Kipping's paper took the handful of data points that have been collected on how long it took life and intelligence to emerge on Earth, as well as estimates of how long Earth will be habitable based on the sun's life cycle. He then used a Bayesian approach to figure out the odds on whether each event is a "rapid process" or a "slow and rare scenario."

If life's emergence from inanimate stuff ("abiogenesis") was fast, we'd expect that on an Earth rewound and rerun,  life would probably happen at some point in our planet's billions of habitable years, Kipping wrote. But if that emergence was slow, life might have been a lucky break. The same caveats apply to the emergence of intelligence.

Kipping worked with a few data points: 

• We know that Earth became habitable about 4.21 billion years ago. That's after the lost planet Theia (and possibly another impactor known as "Moneta" 40 million years later) slammed into the ancient proto-Earth 4.51 billion years ago, wrecking the surface and forming our moon. It took about 300 million years after that cataclysm for liquid water and an atmosphere to return.
• Strong evidence of life on Earth ⁠— microfossils in rocks ⁠— goes back 3.465 billion years, or about 745 million years after the planet became habitable. There's also a more controversial hint of life ⁠— bits of carbon with missing isotopes in zircon deposits ⁠— going back to just 304 million years after habitability, according to Kipping.
• Intelligent life — humans, in Kipping's paper — came much later. Homo sapiens emerged in the last half-million years, so recently that we're just a rounding error on that 4.21 billion year timescale.
• We're likely living in the last fifth of Earth's habitable history. Astronomers believe that in the next billion years, the sun will get so bright that the resulting energy will speed up the rate at which rocks pull carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere (some rocks do this today, just more slowly). Once atmospheric CO2 drops below 10 parts per million, plants will die off, the food chain will collapse, and only microbes will survive. At that point, Kipping assumed, if intelligent life hadn't yet emerged it would have been too late. 

Isabelle Winder, a biologist, archaeologist and expert in primate and human evolution at Bangor University in the United Kingdom ⁠— who wasn't involved in Kipping's research ⁠— said his history of life on Earth is basically correct.

Still, that's not a lot of data, certainly not enough for frequentist analysis. (We've only run one "Earth" experiment, and have no other similar planets to compare ourselves to yet.) But a Bayesian analysis offers some clarity.

Using a model that Farr and Barmby said appeared well-designed and rigorous, Kipping arrived at some numbers: There are better than 3-to-1 odds that "abiogenesis is indeed a rapid process versus a slow and rare scenario," Kipping wrote, "but 3:2 odds that intelligence may be rare."

Run Earth's history over again, and there's a decent change that we, or creatures like us, never emerge.

So what? "What you have is: Life emerged a few hundred million or maybe almost a billion years after Earth stopped being bombarded with massive objects. Humans showed up close to the 4-billion-year mark. And Earth will probably be habitable for another billion years or so," Farr said. "That is absolutely useful information. You might ask, if those numbers stayed the same, but Earth was orbiting a different type of star, [how would that change things?]"

That's relevant to an ongoing debate in astronomy around "M-dwarf" stars, Farr said ⁠— stars of a type much more common than our sun's, which might support habitable planets for tens of billions of years longer than our sun will. These M-dwarf stars, however, are also possibly too prone to radioactive flares that would likely sandblast life off those planets' surfaces.

Still, Farr said, Kipping's paper should be understood as mostly about Earth, not alien life. 

"If you want to generalize about aliens, you have to do a lot of work that's not done in the paper, and explicitly avoided in the paper for good reason; it's much more speculative," Farr said. "You asked me if any of the numbers in the paper are subjective or if they're objective. And to do that work, to generalize to aliens, you're going to introduce lots of subjective things."

But Kipping's paper is a very good statistical analysis of the very limited information we do have about our planet alone, Farr said.

The meaning of life

While Kipping's paper makes reasonable assumptions and simplifications about how life works, it's important to recognize that they are assumptions and simplifications, Winder said. Sure, intelligent life probably can emerge only some time after life itself, and life itself probably requires a habitable planet, and so on.

But Kipping's paper only looks at when life first emerged and when intelligence first emerged after the planet became habitable, Winder said. The paper doesn't care if life and intelligent life emerged more than once, though they might have. The paper also doesn't care what form those life-forms take. That's reasonable for the purposes of making a mathematical model, she said. But the details of what habitability, life and intelligence look like are trickier than the paper suggests, she said.

Before the Cambrian explosion 541 million years ago, life was relatively simple. For billions of years, the fossil record suggests Earth was inhabited by just individual cells or small colonies. Then, during the Cambrian explosion, life rapidly diversified. Within tens of millions of years, nearly every current animal body plan (including that of vertebrates) emerged.

And hordes of creatures with body plans totally unlike anything seen today also flourished, suggesting alternative, alien-seeming evolutionary routes that life might have taken. Then, a massive extinction event 488 million years ago wiped out much of that diversity of life, narrowing animal life down to what we see today.

Kipping's paper addresses the issue by abstracting it away, Winder said. In whatever manner intelligence develops in an Earth rerun, his model only cares about the first time it emerges. And it assumes that so far on this Earth, it's happened only once, with humans. Very likely, she said, the common ancestors of humans and other apes might meet our definitions of intelligence. And we don't know for sure, she said, that intelligence has emerged only once on Earth. If Earth were rerun, the results might be so different from our current reality that we'd have trouble recognizing "intelligence."

"My impression from looking at evolution and the history of life is that very rarely do you get things happening once," she said. "You get multiple origins for eyes, for instance. You get multiple ways of making a living. You possibly get multiple taxa coming up out of the water onto the land. I would think the probability of it happening again in the same way as vanishingly small."

She pointed out that the paper more or less defines an intelligent species as a species capable of writing papers like this. Astronomers in general, Barmby said, tend to define intelligent life as "other astronomers" ⁠— species that might send radio signals into space, for example, and hunt for radio waves themselves.

There are reasonable definitions of intelligence, Winder said, that suggest it's emerged more than once just among creatures alive today on Earth, in such creatures as dolphins, whales and cephalopods, or squid, she said.

Traits such as language, tool use, and the capacity to think about oneself aren't unique to humans. Whenever scientists define certain types of mental abilities as uniquely human, some animal is eventually found that have those abilities.

It would be interesting, she said, to see how Kipping's model would change if it had to account for that complexity, she said. In this model, intelligence would be treated as something that's emerged more than once on Earth to various extents and an unknown number of times. She also asked how the model would change if it treated intelligence as having emerged earlier in humanity's evolutionary history than it does now.

This second point ⁠— the exact date of intelligence appearing in human history ⁠— doesn't matter that much to his model, Kipping told Live Science. Give or take a couple hundred million years, the conclusions are pretty much the same ⁠— just as they don't change much based on the debate about when precisely life emerged in Earth's history.

As for whether it would change his model to introduce uncertainty about how many times intelligence evolved, he said, "Here it will matter, and frankly I can't give you a simple answer without repeating a complicated series of numerical integrations."

But given that the odds of intelligence emerging aren't so long, Kipping said it probably still shouldn't matter much.

"I mean it's a slight preference, but obviously not a slam dunk significance preference, so however you define intelligence, it's going to remain fairly ambiguous and diffuse," he said.

As for whether intelligent life is out there elsewhere in the universe, that remains a "grand mystery," he wrote in the paper. 

His paper didn't address, for example, whether intelligent civilizations that do emerge tend to survive or quickly kill themselves off. (Our own isn't old enough to offer answers one way or another.) The best thing to do, Kipping said, is to keep looking for hints of intelligent life out there.

But it's not clear we'll recognize it when we see it, Winder said.

https://www.livescience.com/intelligent-life-rare-or-common-on-Earth.html

Rather, The Mystery of the Working-Class White Male...

Full article at The Atlantic, by Tom Nichols:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/donald-trump-the-most-unmanly-president/612031/

"So many mysteries surround Donald Trump...

But since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? [W]hy so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage. … They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. ... They shoulder most burdens in silence—perhaps to an unhealthy degree—and know that there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family.

Not every working-class male voted for Trump, and not all of them have these traits, of course. … Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?

In order to think about why these men support Trump, one must first grasp how deeply they are betraying their own definition of masculinity by looking more closely at the flaws they should, in principle, find revolting:

Is Trump honorable?

Is Trump courageous?

Is Trump a man who respects women?

Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team?

To be a man is to be an adult, to willingly decide, as St. Paul wrote, to “put away childish things.” There’s a reason that Peter Pan is a story about a boy, and the syndrome named after it is about men. Not everyone grows up as they age.

It should not be a surprise then, that Trump is a hero to a culture in which so many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence. And especially for men who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.

In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him.

I think that working men, the kind raised as I was, know what kind of “man” Trump is. And still, the gratification they get from seeing Trump enrage the rest of the country is enough to earn their indulgence. I doubt, however, that Trump gives them the same consideration. Perhaps Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return."

Questions, comments, war stories?

Rewriting the Constitution to Balance the Budget

Apparently most conservatives and populists want to re-write some or all of the US constitution. One mechanism to do that is via a constitutional convention.

Article V of the United States Constitution says that when two thirds (currently 34) of state legislatures apply for a constitutional convention proposing amendments, Congress has to convene one. That is up from 28 states at the beginning of 2017 (see map below).[1] Congress first determines if a convention has actually been triggered. It does that by counting the state applications. The counting process is called aggregating applications. One unknown is whether different kinds of state applications can all be lumped together or aggregated, or whether they have to be of the same kind. Some state applications (plenary applications) are open-ended and ask for the entire constitution to be open to amendments. Other state applications just call for specific amendments.

Presently, 27 state legislatures have applications that propose a balanced budget amendment. Six states are calling for a plenary convention. Thus, if aggregation allowed, probably 33 of the 34 applications needed to call a convention are present. Radical far right anti-government groups such as the The Federalist Society want all applications to be aggregated, and when the total reaches 34, a convention convened to consider a constitutional balanced budget amendment, but not for a plenary reconsideration of the entire constitution.

If a balanced budget amendment is baked into the constitution by a convention, the effects of that would probably be enormous. The impact will be dictated by how balanced spending is to be attained. Regardless of the details, federal spending would need to be drastically cut. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the president and GOP members of congress increased the federal debt by cutting taxes without commensurate spending cuts. That fiscal irresponsibility was during a decade-long economic recovery. Cuts during a recession would need to be large to balance the budget and pay for existing federal debt. According to one source, on-the-books debt for 2020 is projected to reach $23.8 trillion.[2] To balance the budget, millions of Americans will feel real pain and hunger.

The GOP has made its hostility to most domestic spending clear. If the GOP gets its way, social security, medicare, medicaid food stamps and probably all other non-military spending would be reduced or in some cases might be entirely eliminated. Democrats would oppose that and would probably demand major defense spending cuts in reasonable parity with domestic spending cuts. If a balanced budget ever came to pass, the ensuing political disputes would be a food fight of epic proportions. The balanced budget amendment is the Trojan Horse the GOP wants to sneak in on to decimate domestic spending and the federal government.

Footnote:
1. The 2017 article comments on the conservative strategy to gut government domestic spending programs:

Most of the resolutions enacted in the last three years add a final clause: “together with any related and appropriate fiscal constraints.” That language opens the door to any constitutional amendments that a convention might decide fit under this broad rubric, including placing a rigid ceiling on federal spending so that all (or virtually all) deficit reduction has to come from cutting federal programs such as Social Security or Medicare, with little or none coming from revenue-raising measures. Such a ceiling would reduce or eliminate any pressure to produce deficit reduction packages that pair spending reductions with increased revenue from closing unproductive special-interest tax loopholes or from combating tax avoidance by powerful corporations.

2. Off-the books debt is unfunded liabilities the federal government has incurred over the decades. It includes things like pension obligations for federal retirees. It is hard to estimate and some politicians lie about it to advance their ideological or political agendas. In 2013, one source estimated the off-the-books liability to be about $70 trillion. A 2017 estimate put the total at $210 trillion. Whatever the real number might be, it is huge. Under a balanced budget amendment, congress will have no choice but to renege on most of those promised obligations. Those people will face real pain and hunger as their pensions vaporize under the intense heat of a balanced budget. 

Vote-by-Mail vs Vote-in-Person vs Absentee Voting

“Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters. They're fraudulent in many cases.” -- Donald Trump commenting in April 2020 without any evidence of voter fraud, a few weeks after he cast his absentee ballot in Florida’s primary

“They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” -- Donald Trump referring to the Democrats’ proposals to expand vote-by-mail in response to the Covid-19 pandemic on Fox & Friends in March 2020

An article in Wired magazine last month, The Weird Partisan Math of Vote-by-Mail, discussed the differences between the two. The article noted that research indicates vote-by-mail doesn’t help Democrats. That raises the question of why Republicans oppose it.

Wired explained the vote-by-mail situation as in three schemes. Seven states use traditional absentee balloting. That requires voters to give a reason why they can’t vote in person. That is the most restrictive scheme. The no-excuse absentee scheme is less restrictive and allows anyone can vote if they request a ballot. That scheme or some variation of it applies to about half of the states. The least restrictive scheme is  universal vote-by-mail. Five states, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, use that scheme. So do many counties in California. Under universal vote-by-mail, state government automatically mails a ballot to every registered voter, and voters then (1) have about two weeks to mail the ballot back, or (2) they can drop it off in person by election day.

Wired comments that the effect of universal vote-by-mail increases voter turnout. Some research indicates that when voting is more convenient, more people vote. Effects of vote-by-mail are complex. Sometimes it favored republicans and sometimes democrats.  Younger people tend to vote more if vote-by-mail is available. A not yet published paper that has been submitted for peer-review draws these conclusions:

We collect data from 1996-2018 on all three U.S. states who implemented universal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. We find that: (1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party’s share of turnout; (2) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party’s vote share; and (3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates. All three conclusions support the conventional wisdom of election administration experts and contradict many popular claims in the media.

Wired interviewed the lead author, Daniel Thompson, who indicated that a small advantage may be present for democrats, but the data is uncertain on that point:

“After they controlled for those trends, the Democratic advantage shrunk to either 0.9 or 1 percent—with a 0.4 or 0.5 percent confidence interval. That is indeed small—but is it really “neutral”? ‘We can’t rule out that there are some small effects,’ said Thompson. ‘But given the level of uncertainty, we can’t even say that the effect is greater than zero with a high degree of confidence.’” (emphasis added)

The situation is just as complicated for states that want to expand absentee voting. In Wisconsin’s primary this year, democrats worked to expand absentee voting and it benefited them. But in Florida, with its long tradition of absentee voting, Republicans constitute a bigger share of absentee votes.

A research article published in 2004 looked at the effect of Oregon’s universal vote-by-mail (VBM) scheme. That analysis indicated that VBM did not change voter any of several voting behaviors very much. The data indicated that Democrats were somewhat less successful at mobilizing their non-voters than Republicans were.

Public opinion generally supports VBM. Recent polling indicated that about 80% of democrats, 64% of independents, and 54% of Republicans support voting by mail. So if one is willing to give weight to public opinion, VBM is an acceptable way to proceed, at least during the pandemic.[1] It doesn't seem likely that widespread VBM and/or absentee voting is likely to have a major effect on election outcomes.

Footnote:

1. My preference is to establish universal, mandatory voting by whatever means the states want. Unexcused non-voting would trigger a progressive tax penalty that increases for voters with higher incomes. Australia has such a mandatory scheme and it works fine there. Some research indicates that mandatory people tends to lead to better-informed voters and voting.

A 2015 research paper commented on the voter knowledge phenomenon:  

“Compulsory voting is assumed to have both primary and secondary effects on citizens' political behaviour. While compulsion increases voter turnout, its effects on political engagement, democratic satisfaction, and electoral advantage are still debated. This study hypothesizes that compulsory voting increases citizens’ political knowledge, either because voters choose to become informed given the requirement to vote, or because the process of voting itself imparts incidental knowledge. It also hypothesized that knowledge is distributed more evenly in compulsory systems. Multivariate analysis of data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (Modules 1 to 4) finds some support for the first hypothesis, and stronger evidence in support of the second hypothesis. These findings inform normative debates on the merits of compulsory voting rules.”

The Epitome of Hypocrisy

This 3:46 video expresses the epitome of hypocrisy of Fox News. It shows a series of short clips of various criticisms of President Obama. All of the criticisms apply in spades to the current president.

For context, the current president's golf outings have cost taxpayers about $134 million since January 2017. Obama's outings cost taxpayers about $12.7 million over all 8 years.

Thanks to Snowflake for bringing this blatant hypocrisy to my attention.