Washington Post March 21, 2016: Donald Trump will win in a landslide. *The mind behind ‘Dilbert’ explains why.
1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.
2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal on an emotional level.
3. By running on emotion, facts don’t matter.
4. If facts don’t matter, you can’t really be “wrong.”
5. With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.
6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics — and identity is the strongest persuader.
"Once you realize that everyone is completely irrational your life gets a lot easier. You can start to use the principles behind this to see why people really do things, as opposed to using rational facts, and then use that to your advantage." — Scott Adams
FiveThirtyEight, Nov. 4, 2016: Trump Is Just A Normal Polling Error Behind Clinton
Four years ago, an average of survey results the week before the election had Obama winning by 1.2 percentage points. He actually beat Mitt Romney by 3.9 points. If that 2.7-point error doesn’t sound like very much to you, well, it’s very close to what Donald Trump needs to overtake Hillary Clinton in the popular vote. She leads by 3.3 points in our polls-only forecast.
All of this is to say that even if Clinton’s lead over Trump doesn’t shrink anymore, Trump might still win. He would need only a normal-sized polling error. Of course, that error would need to be in his favor, and there’s nothing inherent about polling errors that says they must aid the trailing candidate.
