It doesn't even matter much what Trump will or will not do. It is a *fact* that certain hateful groups are feeling *very* empowered by his victory tonight. Head to Stormfront, head to Lepen's site, see who exactly is celebrating today all over the world. Trump can't control them even if he wanted to. That is why people, especially minorities, are scared. It's not only about what laws Trump will or will not pass. It's also about their everyday interactions with certain people that, as I said, are hugely empowered by what has happened.

Small example from my own country:

http://www.ekathimerini.com/213537/article/ekathimerini/news/golden-dawn-says-trump-win-a-victory-for-ethnically-clean-states

When a neo-nazi gang feels empowered and validated, *everyone* should be scared. Sorry, but you guys that voted for Trump only see him, assume he will "tone things down" after he accepts the presidency and that the "checks and balances" will prevent him from doing too much damage as a President, and don't realize what kind of people you've made feel like kings today. You *really* have not thought this through. If you are truly not racists and sexists, and you believe Trump is not either, are you prepared now to go out on the streets and defend people from the actuall full-fledged racists that, as far as they're concerned, have their very own president now and feel unstoppable?

-----

That said, Clinton was a horrid candidate - if you're so damn worried that you're gonna lose votes from the Green Party, make an effort to, i don't know, actually meet those people half-way? Say...take a freaking stance about the Dakota Access Pipeline and the struggle of environmentalists and native americans that is not totally useless :

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/28/what-crock-clinton-breaks-dapl-silence-statement-says-literally-nothing

In general, Clinton failed to inspire and mobilize her own people(white people and even white women, whose majority voted for Trump) the same way a black man did in 2008 and 2012, ffs. Obama mobilised people, especially young people, with "Yes We Can" and "Hope". Clinton expected to inspire people with "At least I'm not Trump", "I'm the most qualified" and "We can only do some things, don't get your hopes up, see I'm a super-pragmatist". White Americans are largely to blame for Trump's victory, as shown by the polls, and Hillary is one of them. She seemed to ran on the premise of "I am entitled of your vote, and if you can't see that you're stupid". To the people left of her, she was "I won't move for you, you will move for me, because Trump"(most of them did exactly that regardless). She simply failed to inspire. That is all. Hopefully this is the last we're going to hear from the Clintons ever again.

Did you even read the articles? The race played out EXACTLY as he predicted, with Trump using the EXACT same points he speculated Trump would, all called in 2015/early 2016. I know you don't want to consider my point of view for any reason, but that articles are essentially irrefutable in their conclusion (It matched with reality perfectly), with an extremely solid premise.

Just wanted to point out (particularly for people that didn't follow the blog) that Scott Adams' predictions played out "exactly" as they did because he changed his predictions on the as events rolled on. Whatever his motivations, there's a bit of confirmation bias there. The kind that he made a point of saying to watch out for throughout the election.

Can you convince them that they have nothing to fear?

That was your question, and the answer:

I don't need to convince them, Trump's previous actions have convinced me that he'll be better than Hillary. He needs to immidiately shift focus and taper down expectations, Which he's already starting today

http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/u-s-election-2016/1.752144

By the time he takes office, you're going to see a much more moderate Trump with much less rhetoric. It would fit his campaign's strategy perfectly.

The short answer, to your question, @Oberon_Command, is no. Take that from me, a minority. The simple reason is that there's a pretty big cognitive gap here. Those y'all that voted for Trump can fall into one of three categories.

1): Are racist, which granted, one could argue, are a minority, who pretty much love and agree with what Trump says

2): Legitimately think that what Trump is saying is not racism, which is either a warped consciousness or an inability to perceive what Trump's statements in just this campaign have sounded like to minorities

and finally

3): Know that this man is racist, may not be racist themselves, but simply don't care, for whatever reason, possibly believing that it won't matter, or that since it doesn't really affect them, who cares. There's lots of other reasons for this one, but I won't list them here.

I'll state my views once, and I'm not going to repeat myself for those who think I'm overreacting: the best case scenario is that Trump does literally nothing, proves to be a failure, etc. That's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario?

...

The bottom really falls off at this point, because shit could really hit the fan based off of just what he's said, what his rallies have been like, etc. Unlikely? Sure, it does hinge on unlikely, but we are the very same people who didn't think he could even win the candidacy to his party, let alone the presidency. Regardless, the worst that could happen with Hillary is that nothing changed, which I was willing to accept.

But even if, for a moment, we assume Trump will do nothing, that brings us to our next point:

It doesn't even matter much what Trump will or will not do. It is a *fact* that certain hateful groups are feeling *very* empowered by his victory tonight. Head to Stormfront, head to Lepen's site, see who exactly is celebrating today all over the world. Trump can't control them even if he wanted to. That is why people, especially minorities, are scared. It's not only about what laws Trump will or will not pass. It's also about their everyday interactions with certain people that, as I said, are hugely empowered by what has happened.

Small example from my own country:

http://www.ekathimerini.com/213537/article/ekathimerini/news/golden-dawn-says-trump-win-a-victory-for-ethnically-clean-states

When a neo-nazi gang feels empowered and validated, *everyone* should be scared. Sorry, but you guys that voted for Trump only see him, assume he will "tone things down" after he accepts the presidency and that the "checks and balances" will prevent him from doing too much damage, and don't realize what kind of people you've made feel like kings today. You *really* have not thought this through. If you are truly not racists and sexists, and you believe Trump is not either, are you prepared now to go out on the streets and defend people from the actuall full-fledged racists that, as far as they're concerned, have their very own president now and feel unstoppable?

This is why minorities feel frightened. And to those of you who voted for Trump, that is what you've empowered.

That said, Clinton was a horrid candidate - if you're so damn worried that you're gonna lose votes from the Green Party, make an effort to, i don't know, actually meet those people half-way? Say...take a freaking stance about the Dakota Access Pipeline and the struggle of environmentalists and native americans that is not totally useless :

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/28/what-crock-clinton-breaks-dapl-silence-statement-says-literally-nothing

In general, Clinton failed to inspire and mobilize her own people(white people and even white women, whose majority voted for Trump) the same way a black man did in 2008 and 2012, ffs. Obama mobilised people, especially young people, with "Yes We Can" and "Hope". Clinton excpected to inspire people with..."I'm the most qualified" and "We can only do some things, don't get your hopes up, see I'm a super-pragmatist". White Americans are largely to blame for Trump's victory, as shown by the polls, and Hillary is one of them. She seemed to ran on the premise of "I am entitled of your vote, and if you can't see that you're stupid". To the people left of her, she was "I won't move for you, you will move for me, because Trump". She simply failed to inspire. That is all. Hopefully this is the last we're going to hear from the Clintons ever again.

Clinton was a terrible candidate. Not more terrible than Trump, I still believe, but she was simply unable to inspire the people. I don't think that anyone here ever said that Clinton was a good candidate. I would honestly have preferred Joe Biden, if he ran. The Democrat party could really have chosen a much better candidate. It's still not an excuse, however.

Yea, it's going to be a dark four years, especially for those of us who don't have the luxuries many others take for granted when talking about why Trump won't mean anything for racism.

I did not vote, but at least 24 hours before Election Day, I predicted that Trump would win. How? Over the past several months, I've noticed that conservative comments consistently outnumbered liberal comments on various websites--Yahoo! News, CNET, YouTube, Huffington, IEEE Spectrum, etc. In the case of Yahoo!, which used to show thumbs, conservative comments also tended to have more likes while liberal comments had more dislikes than likes. I noticed the same phenomena with racist comments. While obviously not scientific, media outlets could have employed this sort of analysis to some degree. This would seem to be one way to overcome the reverse Bradley effect, that phenomenon phantom mentioned earlier.

My prediction is that the outcome of this election will encourage the proverbial comment section to come to the real world. The big question for me, though, is: Will people still get fired for saying racist things on camera?

In regard to offshoring, immigration, and trade, I suspect that many voters neglected to consider that this election outcome may actually accelerate companies' use of automation, something that's much harder to regulate. Well, it's their lesson to learn.

What I find interesting is this: If the pollsters were so incredibly wrong, then what does this say for other polls such as the ones stating Obama's approval rating is highly positive. An argument that has been put forward by many of the voters whom voted for Trump is that they have become disenfranchised, sidelined, forgotten and ignored. Was this demographic also overlooked in regard to other polls as well?

What I find interesting is this: If the pollsters were so incredibly wrong, then what does this say for other polls such as the ones stating Obama's approval rating is highly positive. An argument that has been put forward by many of the voters whom voted for Trump is that they have become disenfranchised, sidelined, forgotten and ignored. Was this demographic also overlooked in regard to other polls as well?

I say absolutely not, at least not in the same way.

First, note that the polls were systematically wrong, but not in an unprecedented way (Brexit, last midterm election, etc.); I wouldn't even say they were incredibly wrong -- they were wrong by 2%, which probably wouldn't have been considered an interesting amount of error had it gone the other way. The Obama approval has been mostly been reliably far enough above the 50% that an error of 2% probably wouldn't even drop his approval below 50, to say nothing of making it lower than his disapproval rating.

Second, there are some plausible reasons that this error would have happened, but none of those reasons seem to apply to things like the Obama approval rating. My guess is that the biggest source of error was that likely voter models were just wrong. Trump energized people who had often never even voted before (and fewer people turned out for Clinton than expected), and most models treat voters' past history as something to control for. Since approval ratings aren't votes, this source of error simply can't apply -- if you sample people randomly, you get a representative sample; there's no need to figure out whether those people are actually going to do anything.

Finally, and I think this is actually the least important source of error, the supposed "shy" Trump supporters were supposed to be a source of error. Incentives for this would include lying about supporting Trump to avoid social stigma (which is a demonstrated, measurable effect even in anonymous situations like polls) and lying about supporting Trump for the sole reason of making the polls unreliable. These incentives to be "shy" don't really apply in the case of Obama's approval rating, since most people who don't like Obama are perfectly willing to admit that they don't approve of Obama. Furthermore, Trump supporters have a disincentive to lie about support of Obama, simply because that could give the illusion that more people like him than actually do.

That said, this polling error might still be very important to polling in general. First, assuming this is proven to be true, it looks like the likely voter models failed in a fairly major way. They made the result closer to accurate in the midterm elections than not using them, but even so, they probably aren't really that good yet, and there's not a lot of data to suggest how to improve them, simply because they're a relatively recent phenomenon. Second, it seems like the (misinformed) assumption that the polls were strong evidence of a Clinton win may have actually hurt her.

It's also worth noting that the few polls that did correctly predict the final outcome only did so by accident, and for the wrong reasons. Specifically, there were serious methodological flaws in things like the LA Times (see here), and a lot of theme were even less correct than the polls predicting a Clinton win; they just happened to be off in the "right" direction. Given all this, it seems to me like there's an opportunity for someone to look into trying to seriously solve a lot of these problems in a major way, otherwise polls may be reaching the end of their usefulness permanently (although again, they're not being as wrong as quickly and as often as people may think).

Polling doesn't assume turnout of voter registrations properly either, and questions aren't really accurate when you don't get that right.

People like me surely bump Obama's approval higher, yet voted Trump (I approve of most of Obama's term, yet I voted Trump).

As for what the KKK et al feel empowered by... I don't care in the slightest.

Racist groups in the USA are infiltrated by the FBI, and if they ever try to organize/plan something they're just arrested/disbanded. And seriously, when was the last time the KKK was a problem in the USA? You have the FBI to thank for that.

As for who they wanted, they actually wanted HIllary. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-14/ku-klux-klan-grand-dragon-will-quigg-endorses-hillary-clinton-for-president

They publicly endorsed Trump right before the election because they know their endorsement's toxic.

Know who else the KKK wanted to win? Obama, because they thought he'd fail/it would increase their membership rates.

Don't worry about what the crazies think, because they aren't worth the thought.

The short answer, to your question, @Oberon_Command, is no.

Correct, it's not possible to prove something before it happens, or ensure someone that something that could happen won't happen. This is true with anyone in any situation, though. Time will tell.

the best case scenario is that Trump does literally nothing, proves to be a failure, etc. That's the best case scenario.

Why would this be the BEST case scenario? What if in the next 4 years he actually delivers on his promise to "drain the swamp" and implement term limits in the Senate? Or restores manufacturing to the rust belt?

Both are certainly possible with a stacked senate/house/supreme court. If you think the best case scenario is that Trump is too stupid to figure out how to navigate a presidency, you're definitely caught up in the media's hyperbole, and nothing anyone can say will convince you otherwise.

Don't worry about what the crazies think, because they aren't worth the thought.

Of course you don't worry about what they think(or do) in their everyday interactions, you're not the one that are going to be harassed now that they feel they're got their very own President. You're good. You're solid. You're fiiiiine. Please do explain to a minority like deltaKshatriya how he also "does not need to worry", oh wise one.

(And one does not need to be an *actual* member of a fringe group like KKK to harass minorities, ffs, just harbor a general resentment towards them that now he feels is validated and mainstream - you have *really* no idea what we're talking about).

I mentioned them because racist groups were mentioned.

When was the last time a group of people went around lynching minorities, exactly?

If you feel unsafe, no one can convince you otherwise because it's in your head. No one will feel empowered to go out attacking people because Trump got elected, despite what the Huffington post says.