(I would like to respectfully ask that there be very little or no relitigation of the 2016 Democratic primaries in the comment thread...I simply would like to note that if these political science quants are correct in their data, this looks...weird. Thanking you in advance! CK )
OK, I am going to post two tweets that have been making the rounds and that have been generating discussions.
Then I am going to ask a question.
Please note the disclaimer.
OK, here is my question:
Assuming that this data is accurate, WTF HAPPENED IN PENNSYLVANIA?
I can wrap my head around the Wisconsin and Michigan numbers simply because Bernie won the primaries in those states.
The Pennsylvania numbers here seem very weird to me because Clinton won the 2016 primary in Pennsylvania by 12 points and, now that I think about it, Clinton won the 2008 primary over Obama by 9 points.
Yet Pennsylvania had twice the percentage of Sanders-Trump voters as Wisconsin and Michigan?
That certainly doesn’t make any sort of sense...even though I can think of a couple of plausible explanations.
Here is a link to the data set that Mr. Morris linked to when asked. I know that we have a few quants here who will need to see it.
Guide to the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (pdf)
And again, please note the words at the very beginning of this thread...I’m not looking for a pie fight...just noting something that seems very weird to me.
Thursday, Aug 24, 2017 · 8:47:13 PM +00:00 · Chitown Kev
This article on the very same survey in Newsweek gives a pretty good rundown of the overall numbers.
As I noted in the comments, Pennsylvania was a closed primary whereas both Wisconsin and Michigan were open primaries...but the apparent ratfuckery that may have gone on in Pennsylvania seems to have been even worse, in some way.
Thursday, Aug 24, 2017 · 10:55:11 PM +00:00 · Chitown Kev
I will also submit for this thread this article from mid-July at McClatchy
“I get the fact that the Russian intel services could figure out how to manipulate and use the bots,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner told Pod Save America recently. “Whether they could know how to target states and levels of voters that the Democrats weren’t even aware (of) really raises some questions … How did they know to go to that level of detail in those kinds of jurisdictions?”
The Russians appear to have targeted women and African-Americans in two of the three decisive states, Wisconsin and Michigan, “where the Democrats were too brain dead to realize those states were even in play,” Warner said.
Twitter’s and Facebook’s search engines in those states were overwhelmed, he said, meaning they couldn’t discern fake news from real news.
“On your news feed, you suddenly got … ‘Hillary Clinton’s sick’ or ‘Hillary Clinton’s stealing money from the State Department,’” said Warner.
In light of this report, I do find it...interesting that they did not bring up any sort of possible microtargeting in Pennsylvania. Was Pennsylvania targeted differently?
Which would also indicate a level of sophistication about various jurisdictions that the Russians may not have known on their own.