Originally posted by Nibedicus
Seriously. Ell, with all due respect (sincerely) just admit you were wrong and be a gracious about all this. Congratulate the winners and move on. At this point, sourgraping by playing the "I'm not REALLY wrong" game only makes you look very childish and only really makes ppl relish the whole situatuon even more.I'm sure everybody KNOWS that your statement allowed for a possible Trump win. But the nature of your delivery and the very point of your post was to rub into everyone's faces your utter confidence in a likely Clinton win. Confidence which was evidently misplaced.
Just let it go.
I apologize in advance if my post is somewhat harsh (not my intention, believe me). I went thru several iterations to try to avoid making it so.
So I've alluded to this in previous discussions, but I guess I should make it clear here.
My primary issue is not with people thinking that Trump or Hillary would win the election (a careful read of the OP would make this clear). I remember getting pretty irritated by some of my friends who were so confident that the Democrats would keep the Senate in 2014, for instance. I obviously thought that the evidence leaned towards Hillary - which it did - but there's always room for statistical variation.
The real pet peeve I have is with the mentality, often disproportionately shared by Trump supporters, of trusting their "gut feeling" and random guesses over hard evidence in areas where gut feeling would be the least effective. We see this to disastrous effect in their beliefs on climate change, evolution, etc., but the same effect took place with these polls as well. Essentially, people blindly declaring that Trump was going to win because of some vague mumbo jumbo about him "fighting the establishment" or something.
I've had serious discussions beyond this forum with people who favored Nate Silver's relatively conservative model (I incorrectly sided with Sam Wang's); in that case, it's a respectable debate because we're all trying to do an honest analysis of the evidence, and that makes for useful, productive discussion. But posters here getting on and just screaming TRUMP IS GOING TO WIN like they scream similar nonsense about climate change, etc. is just intellectually demeaning.
Now, of course, Trump did win - but just making an accurate prediction isn't very impressive if you stumbled upon it randomly (broken clock is right twice a day, blah blah). There is definitely a lot to be said about polling error, like almost certainly massive miscount of voter enthusiasm; and if the posters in question had focused on doing credible analysis of that, then I could have an interesting discussion with them, and concede if I turned out to be wrong.
But seriously, Republicans were screaming that Romney would win in 2012, that Obama was born in Kenya, that Hillary would be indicted, that the polls would be rigged, that climate change was a myth, blah blah - and they finally get one prediction right, and that doesn't impress me.
(Yeah, this sounds intuitively pedantic because lots of people will just automatically equate this to being a sore loser without really looking at it carefully, but I'm not optimizing for perception here.)