Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by jedberg on Monday October 03, 2016 @01:08PM (#12629244)

Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats, because the young and poor tend to be the ones who don't vote and tend to vote Democrat. Back in the 90s MTV had "Rock the Vote" (actually it was a progressive non-profit who partnered with MTV) and their goal was the same.

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Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by nostrademons on Monday October 03, 2016 @03:08PM (#12630370)

Interestingly, 538 ran a piece recently that implies that that's not the case this election, and that Trump actually has far more upside from unregistered voters than Clinton does:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/missing-white-voters-cou...

The summary is that by far the largest unregistered cohort is those who are young, poor, and uneducated. And this election, the poor and uneducated group is largely in Trump's camp, while in past elections they may have split roughly evenly between Republicans and Democrats depending on other issues.

The other interesting thing is that the Trump campaign has done fairly little with voter registration drives, perhaps because of this image of it largely helping Democrats. Would be an interesting example of how hewing to common wisdom rather than data can end up hurting a candidate, if 538's analysis is true.

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Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by jedberg on Monday October 03, 2016 @03:23PM (#12630493)

This is fascinating. And I definitely trust data more than common wisdom. Good thing for the Democrats that Trump doesn't. :)

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Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by tomcam on Monday October 03, 2016 @03:33PM (#12630585)

Citation?

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Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by nostrademons on Monday October 03, 2016 @04:19PM (#12630966)

About the missing Trump voters or about the Trump campaign not paying attention to data? I gave a citation for the former above - as for the latter, well, the evidence is contradictory. Trump said in May that he considers big data overrated [1][2], though he reversed himself in August [3].

The tricky part about using data is that it takes time to build an effective data operation. It takes time to collect the data, it takes time to analyze it, and then you need a large ground organizational effort to actually turn that data into votes. The last day for voter registration in most swing states is Oct 11, barely a week away. Even if he's recently had a change of heart, it's likely too late to do anything effective.

[1] http://elections.ap.org/content/ap-interview-trump-says-big-...

[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-big-data-gamble-146939531...

[3] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/trump-cambridge-analytica/

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Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by pdog on Monday October 03, 2016 @01:34PM (#12629511)

> Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats

What? This is only true if you believe that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations are exclusive to Democrats.

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Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by daveguy on Monday October 03, 2016 @01:45PM (#12629608)

That should have read:

Non-targeted get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats.

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Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by rat87 on Monday October 03, 2016 @02:03PM (#12629795)

Still wrong there are Republicans not registered / not voting. Its just a different demographic target.

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Re:Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny by rat87 on Monday October 03, 2016 @02:02PM (#12629779)

Get out the vote campaigns can be broad and general or can be targeted at voters likely to vote for your candidate/issue(either right or left). As long as you're not discouraging the occasional person voting for the other side from registering I don't see anything wrong with that.

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