Bassman007
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If Hillary Clinton Had Won
Because these people are really strange
If Hillary Clinton Had Won
Whatâs different â and whatâs the same â in a world where the 2016 election went the other way?
By Nate Silver
Greetings, citizens of Earth 1! Iâm filing this dispatch from Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton got just a few more votes last November than she did in your world. And I really do mean just a few more: On Earth 2, Clinton won 0.5 percent more of the vote in each state, and Donald Trump won 0.5 percent less. That was just enough for her to narrowly win three states â Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan â that she narrowly lost in what you think of as âthe real world.â Races for Congress turned out exactly the same here on Earth 2, so Clinton is president with a Republican Congress.
Things are really different on Earth 2! Merrick Garland is on the Supreme Court instead of Neil Gorsuch. Clinton didnât enact a âtravel ban.â The United States didnât withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Kellyanne Conway has a CNN show.
OK, maybe things arenât that different. This is Earth 2, not Earth 5, where Clinton won in a landslide, or Earth 4044, where Jim Gilmore is president (itâs a cold and dark place, and I wouldnât advise visiting). Earth 2 preserves about as many of Earth 1âs features as possible, other than the things that just canât be the same because you have Trump as your president and we have Clinton as ours.
But donât think of this as science fiction. There are a lot of things that you, citizen of Earth 1, can probably infer about what life is like over here. Clintonâs first term has a lot in common with Barack Obamaâs second term, for example. And the "laws" of political science â subject as they are to being broken now and again â are still largely intact. The presidentâs party usually suffers at the midterms here on Earth 2, for example, just as it does on Earth 1.
A couple more things: I know the whole multiverse thing might seem uncomfortable, so Iâve provided some annotations that help to situate my report in your Earth 1 experience. And because of the website youâre reading, Iâve focused more on politics than policy â although thereâs a mix of both. As your president would say: Enjoy!
These right-direction/wrong-track numbers have been poor for years, not just as a result of last yearâs election. That doesnât make them any less consequential, however. Five of the past six elections (2006, 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2016) can be thought of as change elections, with 2012 being the lone exception where voters preferred continuity.
This Thursday marks 250 days
Do the math, and youâll find Iâm referring to Saturday, Nov. 12, four days after Election Day last year. As Iâll explain in a moment, it took a few extra days to verify that Clinton had won the election on Earth 2.
since the Associated Press and other news organizations declared Hillary Clinton to be the âapparent winnerâ of last yearâs presidential election â and six months since Clinton took office. But itâs almost as though the election never ended. Just consider the stories that have dominated the news so far this week:
On Monday morning, Clinton and the rest of the political world awoke to a barrage of incendiary tweets from Donald Trump. âCrooked H is a failed, FAKE PRESIDENT,â said one of them, which linked to a Rasmussen Reports poll showing Clintonâs approval rating at 37 percent.
On Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr announced that heâd call upon former Attorney General Loretta Lynch to testify before his committee next week as part of hearings on whether Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, interfered with the FBIâs investigation into Clintonâs private email server.
Also on Tuesday, Fox Newsâs Sean Hannity revealed what he said was âshocking new evidenceâ of widespread voter fraud in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states Clinton won by just 7,000 and 17,000 votes, respectively.
On Earth 1, Clinton lost Michigan by roughly 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by about 23,000 votes and Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes.
(Hannityâs evidence consisted of an academic paper that has widely been discredited.)Iâm referring to a 2014 paper by Jesse Richman, Gulshan Chattha and David Earnest, which posited a high rate of noncitizen voting. The paper, which was cited by Trump in campaign speeches, failed to account for measurement error resulting from citizens who voted but incorrectly identified themselves as noncitizens.
And on Wednesday, White House press secretary Brian Fallon got into a shouting match with reporters at his daily press briefing, triggered by what he later said was frustration over the mediaâs failure to cover new revelations about Russiaâs apparent interference in the 2016 campaign.
These storylines â Trump tweeting something inflammatory about Clinton, Republicans investigating Clinton, Clinton feuding with the press â keep repeating themselves. It sometimes seems as though weâve spent the six months of Clintonâs presidency trapped in the Most Annoying News Cycle Ever, with no chance of escape. But the truth is that there hasnât been a whole lot else to talk about. With Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, Clinton has little hope of enacting her legislative agenda. And although North Koreaâs increasingly ambitious nuclear tests are a major concern, Clintonâs foreign policy has largely been a continuation of Barack Obamaâs and so has seldom made news. At this monthâs G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, for instance, the media devoted more coverage to Clintonâs choice of pantsuits than to the G-20âs reaffirmation of the Paris climate accords. So letâs tune out the noise of the news cycle and consider Clintonâs first six months from a historical perspective.
Clinton is historically unpopular
Clintonâs presidency is not going all that well. Yes, the Rasmussen Reports poll Trump cited was an outlier
Compared to other pollsters, Rasmussen Reports polls frequently show better numbers for Republicans and worse numbers for Democrats.
but her approval rating average is just 41.7 percent, the lowest at the six-month mark of any president elected since the 1930s (when approval ratings were first routinely collected).Throughout last yearâs campaign, Trumpâs popularity numbers were historically poor, but Clintonâs were only slightly better and were still worse than any major-party nominee other than Trump. The same pattern holds across the political multiverse. On Earth 1, Trumpâs approval rating has been hovering at around 39 percent; Clintonâs numbers are just slightly higher on Earth 2. But theyâre still the worst of any elected president after his or her first six months on the job, breaking the previous low set by Bill Clinton (45.7 percent). Gerald Ford had a 39.4 percent approval rating six months into his term, but he was not elected â he assumed office when Richard Nixon resigned.
Yes, itâs silly to refer to Clinton as a âlame duck,â as The New York Timesâ Maureen Dowd did last week in a column that called for Clinton to hand the presidency over to Vice President Tim Kaine, but Clinton hasnât accomplished much on the policy front. Even relatively unambitious proposals that the White House once thought might attract some Republican support, such as a bill to tweak to the Family and Medical Leave Act, have instead been bogged down in congressional committees.
Clinton did manage one significant political accomplishment: getting Merrick Garland appointed to the Supreme Court. With the court set to consider a slate of landmark cases this year on matters including redistricting and abortion, the importance of that achievement should not be understated. But it came at a price. The deal she struck with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,
.
Because these people are really strange
If Hillary Clinton Had Won
Whatâs different â and whatâs the same â in a world where the 2016 election went the other way?
By Nate Silver
Greetings, citizens of Earth 1! Iâm filing this dispatch from Earth 2, where Hillary Clinton got just a few more votes last November than she did in your world. And I really do mean just a few more: On Earth 2, Clinton won 0.5 percent more of the vote in each state, and Donald Trump won 0.5 percent less. That was just enough for her to narrowly win three states â Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan â that she narrowly lost in what you think of as âthe real world.â Races for Congress turned out exactly the same here on Earth 2, so Clinton is president with a Republican Congress.
Things are really different on Earth 2! Merrick Garland is on the Supreme Court instead of Neil Gorsuch. Clinton didnât enact a âtravel ban.â The United States didnât withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Kellyanne Conway has a CNN show.
OK, maybe things arenât that different. This is Earth 2, not Earth 5, where Clinton won in a landslide, or Earth 4044, where Jim Gilmore is president (itâs a cold and dark place, and I wouldnât advise visiting). Earth 2 preserves about as many of Earth 1âs features as possible, other than the things that just canât be the same because you have Trump as your president and we have Clinton as ours.
But donât think of this as science fiction. There are a lot of things that you, citizen of Earth 1, can probably infer about what life is like over here. Clintonâs first term has a lot in common with Barack Obamaâs second term, for example. And the "laws" of political science â subject as they are to being broken now and again â are still largely intact. The presidentâs party usually suffers at the midterms here on Earth 2, for example, just as it does on Earth 1.
A couple more things: I know the whole multiverse thing might seem uncomfortable, so Iâve provided some annotations that help to situate my report in your Earth 1 experience. And because of the website youâre reading, Iâve focused more on politics than policy â although thereâs a mix of both. As your president would say: Enjoy!
These right-direction/wrong-track numbers have been poor for years, not just as a result of last yearâs election. That doesnât make them any less consequential, however. Five of the past six elections (2006, 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2016) can be thought of as change elections, with 2012 being the lone exception where voters preferred continuity.
This Thursday marks 250 days
Do the math, and youâll find Iâm referring to Saturday, Nov. 12, four days after Election Day last year. As Iâll explain in a moment, it took a few extra days to verify that Clinton had won the election on Earth 2.
since the Associated Press and other news organizations declared Hillary Clinton to be the âapparent winnerâ of last yearâs presidential election â and six months since Clinton took office. But itâs almost as though the election never ended. Just consider the stories that have dominated the news so far this week:
On Monday morning, Clinton and the rest of the political world awoke to a barrage of incendiary tweets from Donald Trump. âCrooked H is a failed, FAKE PRESIDENT,â said one of them, which linked to a Rasmussen Reports poll showing Clintonâs approval rating at 37 percent.
On Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr announced that heâd call upon former Attorney General Loretta Lynch to testify before his committee next week as part of hearings on whether Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, interfered with the FBIâs investigation into Clintonâs private email server.
Also on Tuesday, Fox Newsâs Sean Hannity revealed what he said was âshocking new evidenceâ of widespread voter fraud in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states Clinton won by just 7,000 and 17,000 votes, respectively.
On Earth 1, Clinton lost Michigan by roughly 11,000 votes, Wisconsin by about 23,000 votes and Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes.
(Hannityâs evidence consisted of an academic paper that has widely been discredited.)Iâm referring to a 2014 paper by Jesse Richman, Gulshan Chattha and David Earnest, which posited a high rate of noncitizen voting. The paper, which was cited by Trump in campaign speeches, failed to account for measurement error resulting from citizens who voted but incorrectly identified themselves as noncitizens.
And on Wednesday, White House press secretary Brian Fallon got into a shouting match with reporters at his daily press briefing, triggered by what he later said was frustration over the mediaâs failure to cover new revelations about Russiaâs apparent interference in the 2016 campaign.
These storylines â Trump tweeting something inflammatory about Clinton, Republicans investigating Clinton, Clinton feuding with the press â keep repeating themselves. It sometimes seems as though weâve spent the six months of Clintonâs presidency trapped in the Most Annoying News Cycle Ever, with no chance of escape. But the truth is that there hasnât been a whole lot else to talk about. With Republicans in charge of both chambers of Congress, Clinton has little hope of enacting her legislative agenda. And although North Koreaâs increasingly ambitious nuclear tests are a major concern, Clintonâs foreign policy has largely been a continuation of Barack Obamaâs and so has seldom made news. At this monthâs G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, for instance, the media devoted more coverage to Clintonâs choice of pantsuits than to the G-20âs reaffirmation of the Paris climate accords. So letâs tune out the noise of the news cycle and consider Clintonâs first six months from a historical perspective.
Clinton is historically unpopular
Clintonâs presidency is not going all that well. Yes, the Rasmussen Reports poll Trump cited was an outlier
Compared to other pollsters, Rasmussen Reports polls frequently show better numbers for Republicans and worse numbers for Democrats.
but her approval rating average is just 41.7 percent, the lowest at the six-month mark of any president elected since the 1930s (when approval ratings were first routinely collected).Throughout last yearâs campaign, Trumpâs popularity numbers were historically poor, but Clintonâs were only slightly better and were still worse than any major-party nominee other than Trump. The same pattern holds across the political multiverse. On Earth 1, Trumpâs approval rating has been hovering at around 39 percent; Clintonâs numbers are just slightly higher on Earth 2. But theyâre still the worst of any elected president after his or her first six months on the job, breaking the previous low set by Bill Clinton (45.7 percent). Gerald Ford had a 39.4 percent approval rating six months into his term, but he was not elected â he assumed office when Richard Nixon resigned.
Yes, itâs silly to refer to Clinton as a âlame duck,â as The New York Timesâ Maureen Dowd did last week in a column that called for Clinton to hand the presidency over to Vice President Tim Kaine, but Clinton hasnât accomplished much on the policy front. Even relatively unambitious proposals that the White House once thought might attract some Republican support, such as a bill to tweak to the Family and Medical Leave Act, have instead been bogged down in congressional committees.
Clinton did manage one significant political accomplishment: getting Merrick Garland appointed to the Supreme Court. With the court set to consider a slate of landmark cases this year on matters including redistricting and abortion, the importance of that achievement should not be understated. But it came at a price. The deal she struck with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell,
.
