The good news this past week is not that we picked the winner in the presidential election. The good news is, it is over, sort of, and we can be content to find our own answers about why the polls gave us the wrong information.
No matter what we may assume, very few of the news media prophets seem any better at reading our nation's inner mood than Fox News' evening talk show host Sean Hannity. After several evenings of him sounding like a broken record about the failure of the Obama administration we finally just turned him off. However, he seemed to be talking to the correct audience, because the interviews after the election have indicated his "talking points" were meaningful to a lot of voters. That is not proof they heard the information from him, but he must have been on the same wavelength wth the Trump supporters.
At the last count I saw over the weekend, Hillary actually won the popular vote on a nationwide basis by over 400,000 votes. The website I was using reported over 120.5 million votes nationwide with additional votes being counted that would increase the total. Winning the popular vote, however, does not guarantee a victory with a system where all of a state's electoral votes go to the candidate with the majority, no matter how large or small the difference might be. The best Hillary's majority in the popular vote could provide was 228 electoral votes to Trump's winning total of 290 electoral votes.
It is easy to see why the pollsters erred so widely. With everyone conceding New York and California to Clinton and believing that her charm and the promise of a lady being in the White House, who expected the swing states to provide Trump his winning margin? California gave Hillary a winning margin of over 2,700,000 votes with a winning percentage of 62 percent. That translates to 55 electoral votes which should sound like a Democratic landslide in the making. Add the numbers from New York and it is easy to see where her confidence in her victory came about. New York has 29 electoral votes and her margin of victory (over 1,500,000 votes of 6,781,000 votes cast) looks over whelming. She gained a combined 84 electoral votes or 36.8 percent of her electoral total from two states. That has to be a confidence builder to any political candidate's team. Her individual vote count would cause any pollster working for her campaign to relish the 4 million vote lead in those numbers.
All kinds of explanations have been offered about why the polls were so wrong. No one so far has been honest enough to acknowledge that they could easily sway the outcome of the poll numbers by simply polling those two states' voters more frequently. I have had enough training in statistical sampling to know there are numerous ways to obtain a more favorable outcome if you desire to do so. Computer generated call lists do not provide an exact sample of American culture without some guidance.
The real answer to the "surprise" Trump win probably lies in the minds of people like me, and perhaps you, who made a final decision about 30 minutes before I went to the polls. It was a given that Trump would carry Arkansas, so any vote on my part would actually be meaningless in the final outcome. However, to help balance the final nationwide popular vote, my vote could be somewhat meaningful.
There seemed to be an expected win for Democrats in Florida with 29 electoral votes and a demographic population ideally suited for Clinton's political strength. Add a win in Florida along with California and New York and the electoral vote register looks promising. However, Trump's winning margin of slightly over 100,000 votes gave those 29 electoral votes to him. A similar situation in Pennsylvania with a slim winning majority of less than 100,000 votes gave Trump their 20 electoral votes. Ohio followed a similar pattern by "swinging" to Trump and adding 18 electoral votes to his total. Here his margin of victory was over 400,000 and a percent of 52 percent. These three states, which were accepted as being close calls and crucial to both sides, made a significant difference when subtracted from Hillary's total and moved 67 electoral votes to Trump's count.
One of the most interesting states for me was the outcome in Wisconsin. As I have mentioned previously, my family of sons and grandchildren reside there. I listened to their views about the candidates, the campaign and their expectations from the two candidates as well as their personal views of supporters of both candidates who made national television news. Wisconsin has a Republican governor and probably a Republican state legislature. However, they have an extremely liberal educational system centered in Madison, and a heavily black center in Milwaukee County. What I heard in my conversations, was the same uncertainty about who to support as we saw in our local area. With only 10 electoral votes at stake, it was not like California or New York, but it was an uncertainty in the expected win column. In the end, the winner was Trump with a winning margin of less than 20,000 votes but he gained all 10 electoral votes.
Milwaukee County has a black sheriff who was a strong supporter of Trump and a very outspoken voice against the Democratic party that has allowed the black community to be "purchased with welfare dollars." Much of this would be lost on people who have no personal knowledge of Wisconsin demographics and/or politics. However, the states mentioned seem to mirror the results that Trump found when he was running for the Republican nomination and it was Republican vs. Republican -- issue vs. issue.
Hopefully we don't see a repeat of this warped political campaign four years from now.
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Editor's note: Leo Lynch, an award-winning columnist, is a native of Benton County has deep roots in northwest Arkansas. He is a retired industrial engineer and former Justice of the Peace. He can be contacted at [email protected].
Editorial on 11/16/2016