Election 2016 Update 09-13

State of the Election 2016

Since most most of the news today is a rehash of yesterday, I'm going to take to opportunity to cover some background.

How Do I Get Updated

My start is to just google the word "Trump", then "Clinton", then "Trump vs Clinton", only looking at what the first headline that comes up. This gives me a scene at what people on most interested that day.

I then check to polls. You should not follow a single poll or try to judge as each poll comes out. Instead, you should look for poll averages. That way biases, different methods, and outliers get averaged out. Usually, I look at Real Clear Politics. And then I take a quick look at the projections at FiveThirtyEight. I;m not looking at these to see who is winning or losing. I'm doing so, to see what effect different news story have had.

After that, I just listen to the news throughout the day. I'll, also, get into the art of listening to the news later. I work in front of a computer all day and need to listen to something while I work. The news repeats itself so much, I can tell what they are talking about by the tone of their voice.

If what I'm hearing starts to sound to bias, I'll switch quickly to a source with exactly the opposite politics. I'm not so much looking to hear the different argument as much as to whether they are talkng about it at all.

How the Polls are looking

On 09-08, I said the polls should go to "+2% Clinton lead". (I actually described this as a 'guess'). Let me go into a little more detail on that. First I neglected to include a "bounce", meaning the polls will go closer, and Trump may even get ahead for a day, but then the polls bounce up towards an average of +2% Clinton. Note this chart from Real Clear Politics.

You should note the diamond patterns. Clinton and Trump move closer and then break away, the "bounce". Before election day, regardless of how they acted before, polls historically move to the "natural" state of only a difference of 1 to 3%. So +2% for Clinton is just me following history.

There's obviously a lot more to this, but I'll have to go into that later.