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| Home Front: Politix |
| Data Driven Nonsense |
| 2016-11-13 |
| The more I read Z-man, it seems the better I like him When I was a young man starting out in the world, I was once given an assignment for the marketing people. The job was to gather up and detail the costs of various marketing programs. For some reason they did not track these things in the accounting system. That meant I had to rummage through filing cabinets pulling out invoices and then tabulating the results in a spreadsheet. My guess is I was given the task mostly because I was the only guy who could use Lotus 1-2-3. I gathered up all the data for the periods in question and put together a report. Out of curiosity, and to be a suck up, I created s chart that showed the impact of various marketing efforts on sales. I even factored in things like the number of peak sales days in a month and adjusted the results to reflect these variances. What jumped out to me was that marketing did nothing for sales. I then expanded the data range to include previous years and it was more obvious. Our marketing was a waste of money. I was young, but I was not an idiot so I gave the VP of marketing the numbers without my analysis. He then used them in his presentation, in which he claimed to be the key to the company’s success. I sat watching it waiting for someone to point out that he was full of baloney, but no one did. What I realized was everyone believed in these types of marketing schemes. They had to work because everyone did them. The VP of marketing liked his job so he told everyone what they wanted to hear. The point of this walk down memory lane is that people have been using data to lie to one another long before we had cheap database software and Chinese quants cranking out reports. My bet is the first modern humans to migrate out of Africa had a meeting where Grog held up a skin, with marks on it, that he claimed was proof that slow food and fast women were just over the horizon. Data analysis is often just another form of magic that we use to grease the wheels of life. This always comes to mind when I hear political types talk about their data operations. Reince Priebus is running around saying it was the GOP data operations that got the Trump vote out on Tuesday. He was on the radio claiming that his team “knew what people ate for lunch, when they went to work and how they voted in the past” so they could target these voters and get them to the polls. He made it sound like they had studied all of us since birth so they could maximize their vote. This is nonsense. Trump had none of this stuff in the primary and he poleaxed everyone in his way. His “ground game” was to go on TV and radio and be interesting. Then he went on Twitter to give reporters something to ask him. In the general, he preferred the old fashioned whistle stop tour. Instead of a train, he flew around on his plane and did stadium shows near airports. His campaign was lean and mean, avoiding the trap of hiring an army of experts. Trump was outspent something close to 5-to-1 when including outside groups. Conclusion at the link I did listen to Trump's speeches. Unlike the usual case with politicians, I enjoyed doing it. He could call people names and express things in a politically incorrect manner. The most important thing he did, each and every speech, was tell his audience that they were "amazing." Contrast that with confining half the country to a "Basket of Deplorables." His attacks were always against his opponents, not against their supporters. Yup. The Donald did another thing that was very very smart in his speeches: he'd tell you that what he was going to do was going to benefit you personally. "You're going to love this." "This is going to make America great." "You're going to do better." And so on. He was able to connect you in the audience to these otherwise abstract things about jobs, defense, environment, immigration, and so on. That personal connection is surprisingly hard to do in a stemwinder and he was brilliant at it. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #10 A GOP candidate who promises to dismantle racial quotas might finally get the 70% of the white vote needed for routine electoral vote landslides. Congress would have to end funding for, and to repeal the totality of civil rights laws in this country. That is the sinew of the power of the left in 2016. |
| Posted by: badanov 2016-11-13 18:50 |
| #9 You're dead on ZF the rise of the Super-Minority. A GOP candidate who promises to dismantle racial quotas might finally get the 70% of the white vote needed for routine electoral vote landslides. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2016-11-13 18:03 |
| #8 You're dead on ZF the rise of the Super-Minority. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2016-11-13 16:44 |
| #7 There's also the emergence of white identity politics in certain regions in response to the perceived rise of the same among other ethnic/racial groups, fanned on by Democratic strategists looking to lock up vote blocs in opposition to the GOP. "Identity politics. It's only wrong if you Crackers do it" |
| Posted by: Frank G 2016-11-13 15:48 |
| #6 The bankruptcy of Peabody Energy, the biggest coal company in the US, may have been the last straw for some coal states. Trump won by over 40 points in WV, a state Carter won in 1980, and Reagan won by a few points in 84. Romney had a 27 point margin. There's also the emergence of white identity politics in certain regions in response to the perceived rise of the same among other ethnic/racial groups, fanned on by Democratic strategists looking to lock up vote blocs in opposition to the GOP. The Democratic party is identified as the black (or at least anti-white) party in much of the South, which is why they tend to be GOP-dominated in spite of some of the largest (in % terms) black minorities in the nation. Trump's Rust Belt victories might simply be the beginnings of a similar movement towards white bloc voting for the GOP in that region. If that occurs, the Democrats might be in trouble. And that's not even counting the odds of potential contagion in the direction of lily-white New England and the rest of the mid-Atlantic states. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2016-11-13 15:13 |
| #5 Z-man: Kelly Ayotte is staggering around Manchester New Hampshire with her panties on her head, asking people if they know where she lives. She went all in on rejecting Trump and now she is out of a job. The politicians that listened to their party leaders and distanced themselves from Trump were all punished at the polls. Ayotte won more votes than Trump, as did most GOP members of Congress. Fort Bend, TX, flipped from GOP in 2012 to Democrat in 2016. Trump won in 2016 with the right message for the Rust Belt states. Uncle Sam as a super-sized Switzerland via perhaps the abrogation of existing defense treaties and an end to new free trade pacts. Equally, Hillary lost the Rust Belt states despite trying to appeal to the black vote by showing up with the parents of dead thugs and backing BLM. She showed, mainly, that only Obama has the charisma / pigmentation to get an out-sized black voter turnout. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2016-11-13 14:56 |
| #4 GIGO |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2016-11-13 08:06 |
| #3 She lost because she is an awful person with nothing to offer. This is the politically correct way to express my beliefs. I would have used a few well placed 4 letter words... |
| Posted by: BrerRabbit 2016-11-13 08:06 |
| #2 The very last sentence of the article, please make it so. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2016-11-13 02:55 |
| #1 Forget connect, he LIKED his audiences, they are customers! |
| Posted by: Shipman 2016-11-13 00:53 |