2016 Election - Fact vs Fiction
EIB Fact Check
1. Fiction: “Clinton Has 90 Percent Chance of Winning.” — Reuters, echoing entire U.S. media’s Election-Day data showing Hillary capturing “303 votes in the Electoral College to Trump’s 235,” 11/8/16
✓ Fact: “Trump Triumphs: Outsider Mogul Captures the Presidency, Stunning Clinton in Battleground States.” — front page banner headline, New York Times, 11/9/16
2. Fiction: “We’re going to wake up in the morning to a Brexitlike [crash] reaction in the stock market. That’s going to rattle a lot of Americans.” — Chuck Todd, NBC News, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Dow Closes Up 250 Points; Financials Surge After Trump Election Upset.” — CNBC, 11/9/16
3. Fiction: “[G]lobal markets … have been collapsing overnight, and the fact is that Donald Trump has to rectify that. He could be facing the kind of economic collapse that Barack Obama inherited when he took office.” — NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, NewsBusters, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “An Early Winner from Trump Victory: Futures Exchanges” — Wall Street Journal, noting that Trump’s acceptance speech “spur[red] traders to rethink what a Trump Presidency would mean for growth … That kind of response helped send futures volumes to historic records in the wake of Mr. Trump’s unforeseen win,” 11/11/16
4. Fiction: “I can assure you that Donald Trump is going to get historic low numbers amongst Latinos, he’s going to be probably in the teens. If he breaks 20 it’s a good night for him with Latinos, and it would be sweet, sweet justice, if after everything he has said, … if tonight it was the Latino vote that defeated Donald Trump.” — Ana Navarro, “Republican strategist” (who voted for Hillary), CNN, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Trump claimed 29 percent of the Hispanic vote on Tuesday compared to Romney’s 27 percent in 2012.” — “Trump Did Better with Blacks, Hispanics Than Romney in ’12,” NBC News, 11/9/16
5. Fiction: “This was a white-lash against a changing country … against a black President, in part.” — Van Jones, CNN, 11/8/16
✓ Fact: “[Hillary] did win 88 percent of the black vote to just 8 percent for Trump. However, this was significantly lower than the 93 percent of black voters Mr. Obama won four years ago. The falloff in her share of the black vote was entirely due to black men … Among black men [Trump won] 13 percent.” — CBS News, 11/9/16
6. Fiction: “[T]he extent to which Donald Trump has won, winning a campaign of racism and bigotry, turning out millions of white Americans for that campaign, suggests we are living through a … pushback against the advancement of African Americans, of Hispanics, of women, of Muslim Americans…” — Jamelle Bouie, CBS News, 11/8/16
✓ Fact: “Whites voted less for Trump than for Romney, while both blacks and Latinos voted more for Trump. There’s nothing here that suggests Trump appealed to white backlash in any special way. Quite the opposite.” — Mother Jones, 11/9/16
7. Fiction: “White and wealthy voters gave victory to Donald Trump.” — The [UK] Guardian, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Trump’s electoral map represents a powerful, largely rural backlash against a country where wealth and power have increasingly accrued to the [Democrat] cities.” — Bloomberg, 11/10/16
8. Fiction: “[A] Trump Presidency … marks the decline of ‘religious conservatism’ in American politics, which has done much damage to the Republican Party among well-educated voters, particularly women.” — Richard Painter, New York Times, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “[E]vangelical leaders say … Mr. Trump will deliver on the political promises he made to them. These include appointing a conservative to the Supreme Court, defunding Planned Parenthood, protecting businesses that refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings, and rescinding the mandate in the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance coverage for birth control.” — New York Times, 11/11/16. Trump won the evangelical vote 81-16 percent, according to The Washington Post, and won white college graduates by 4 percent, according to NPR.
9. Fiction: “Early Exit Poll: Clinton Winning Ground Game.” — Politico, 11/8/16
✓ Fact: “Hillary Clinton’s Vaunted GOTV Operation May Have Turned Out Trump Voters.” — Huffington Post, 11/10/16, revealing that “[v]olunteers for the Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina have reported that when reminding people to vote, they encountered a significant number of Trump voters. Anecdotal evidence points to anywhere from five to 25 percent of contacts were inadvertently targeted to Trump supporters.”
10. Fiction: “For Democrats and some political prognosticators, the answer to their surprisingly bad night is simple: [FBI Director James] Comey.” —Washington Post, 11/8/16
✓ Fact: Exit polls showed that when asked to name what mattered most to their vote, the highest percentage of voters, 39 percent, wanted a candidate who “can bring needed change.” Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there was only one “change candidate.”
11. Fiction: “People heard loud and clear that Clinton was in some kind of trouble related to email whereas the stories about Trump … do not seem to have broken through.” — Matthew Yglesias, “Media Obsession with a Bulls∗∗t Email Scandal Helped Trump to the White House,” Vox, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Study: 91 Percent of Coverage on Evening Newscasts Was Negative to Donald Trump.” —Politico, 10/25/16
✓ A year-long DataFace study of media coverage found far more negative articles about Trump than Hillary during the campaign. According toQuinnipiac, 55 percent of likely voters said the media was biased against Donald Trump.
12. Fiction: “There probably is a strong sentiment about not having a woman President … [W]e’ve talked about excitement among women to have a woman President, but there’s always … hostility to that kind of change. And the fact that we’re seeing this, particularly among non-college-educated white men, is not surprising. I think some of it has to be attributed to the fact that Trump is running against a woman.”— Cokie Roberts, blaming sexism, ABC News, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Women were predicted to come out in force to vote for the first female President and against a man who demeaned them … Instead, they voted more or less as they always have: along party lines.” — “Why Women Did Not Unite to Vote Against Donald Trump,” New York Times, 11/12/16
✓ According to exit polls, Trump beat Clinton among white women by 10 points, 53 percent to 43 percent. White working class women voted overwhelmingly for Trump, reports CNN, 62 percent to 34 percent.
13. Fiction: “Amanda Cox, the editor of [The New York Times’ ‘data-driven’] The Upshot, said the model clearly indicated that Mrs. Clinton was the [90 percent-plus Electoral College] favorite based on polling data … the mistake lay elsewhere; there was a ‘failure of communication,’ she said, in telling readers … that probabilities are just that, probabilities, not guarantees.” — New York Times, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: The Washington Times pointed out that only the Trafalgar Group had accurate polling because they recognized a “‘shy’ Trump effect [due to media bullying] that the other major pollsters [guilty of ‘confirmation bias’] did not try to identify and thus was left out of their turnout models.” Trafalgar correctly called the Trump win with 306 electoral votes the day before the election.
14. Fiction: “If the woman President Obama called the most qualified person ever to run for the White House couldn’t break through, the question remains, who can?” — NBC’S Andrea Mitchell, News-Busters, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: Ob
1. Fiction: “Clinton Has 90 Percent Chance of Winning.” — Reuters, echoing entire U.S. media’s Election-Day data showing Hillary capturing “303 votes in the Electoral College to Trump’s 235,” 11/8/16
✓ Fact: “Trump Triumphs: Outsider Mogul Captures the Presidency, Stunning Clinton in Battleground States.” — front page banner headline, New York Times, 11/9/16
2. Fiction: “We’re going to wake up in the morning to a Brexitlike [crash] reaction in the stock market. That’s going to rattle a lot of Americans.” — Chuck Todd, NBC News, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Dow Closes Up 250 Points; Financials Surge After Trump Election Upset.” — CNBC, 11/9/16
3. Fiction: “[G]lobal markets … have been collapsing overnight, and the fact is that Donald Trump has to rectify that. He could be facing the kind of economic collapse that Barack Obama inherited when he took office.” — NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, NewsBusters, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “An Early Winner from Trump Victory: Futures Exchanges” — Wall Street Journal, noting that Trump’s acceptance speech “spur[red] traders to rethink what a Trump Presidency would mean for growth … That kind of response helped send futures volumes to historic records in the wake of Mr. Trump’s unforeseen win,” 11/11/16
4. Fiction: “I can assure you that Donald Trump is going to get historic low numbers amongst Latinos, he’s going to be probably in the teens. If he breaks 20 it’s a good night for him with Latinos, and it would be sweet, sweet justice, if after everything he has said, … if tonight it was the Latino vote that defeated Donald Trump.” — Ana Navarro, “Republican strategist” (who voted for Hillary), CNN, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Trump claimed 29 percent of the Hispanic vote on Tuesday compared to Romney’s 27 percent in 2012.” — “Trump Did Better with Blacks, Hispanics Than Romney in ’12,” NBC News, 11/9/16
5. Fiction: “This was a white-lash against a changing country … against a black President, in part.” — Van Jones, CNN, 11/8/16
✓ Fact: “[Hillary] did win 88 percent of the black vote to just 8 percent for Trump. However, this was significantly lower than the 93 percent of black voters Mr. Obama won four years ago. The falloff in her share of the black vote was entirely due to black men … Among black men [Trump won] 13 percent.” — CBS News, 11/9/16
6. Fiction: “[T]he extent to which Donald Trump has won, winning a campaign of racism and bigotry, turning out millions of white Americans for that campaign, suggests we are living through a … pushback against the advancement of African Americans, of Hispanics, of women, of Muslim Americans…” — Jamelle Bouie, CBS News, 11/8/16
✓ Fact: “Whites voted less for Trump than for Romney, while both blacks and Latinos voted more for Trump. There’s nothing here that suggests Trump appealed to white backlash in any special way. Quite the opposite.” — Mother Jones, 11/9/16
7. Fiction: “White and wealthy voters gave victory to Donald Trump.” — The [UK] Guardian, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Trump’s electoral map represents a powerful, largely rural backlash against a country where wealth and power have increasingly accrued to the [Democrat] cities.” — Bloomberg, 11/10/16
8. Fiction: “[A] Trump Presidency … marks the decline of ‘religious conservatism’ in American politics, which has done much damage to the Republican Party among well-educated voters, particularly women.” — Richard Painter, New York Times, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “[E]vangelical leaders say … Mr. Trump will deliver on the political promises he made to them. These include appointing a conservative to the Supreme Court, defunding Planned Parenthood, protecting businesses that refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings, and rescinding the mandate in the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance coverage for birth control.” — New York Times, 11/11/16. Trump won the evangelical vote 81-16 percent, according to The Washington Post, and won white college graduates by 4 percent, according to NPR.
9. Fiction: “Early Exit Poll: Clinton Winning Ground Game.” — Politico, 11/8/16
✓ Fact: “Hillary Clinton’s Vaunted GOTV Operation May Have Turned Out Trump Voters.” — Huffington Post, 11/10/16, revealing that “[v]olunteers for the Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina have reported that when reminding people to vote, they encountered a significant number of Trump voters. Anecdotal evidence points to anywhere from five to 25 percent of contacts were inadvertently targeted to Trump supporters.”
10. Fiction: “For Democrats and some political prognosticators, the answer to their surprisingly bad night is simple: [FBI Director James] Comey.” —Washington Post, 11/8/16
✓ Fact: Exit polls showed that when asked to name what mattered most to their vote, the highest percentage of voters, 39 percent, wanted a candidate who “can bring needed change.” Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there was only one “change candidate.”
11. Fiction: “People heard loud and clear that Clinton was in some kind of trouble related to email whereas the stories about Trump … do not seem to have broken through.” — Matthew Yglesias, “Media Obsession with a Bulls∗∗t Email Scandal Helped Trump to the White House,” Vox, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Study: 91 Percent of Coverage on Evening Newscasts Was Negative to Donald Trump.” —Politico, 10/25/16
✓ A year-long DataFace study of media coverage found far more negative articles about Trump than Hillary during the campaign. According toQuinnipiac, 55 percent of likely voters said the media was biased against Donald Trump.
12. Fiction: “There probably is a strong sentiment about not having a woman President … [W]e’ve talked about excitement among women to have a woman President, but there’s always … hostility to that kind of change. And the fact that we’re seeing this, particularly among non-college-educated white men, is not surprising. I think some of it has to be attributed to the fact that Trump is running against a woman.”— Cokie Roberts, blaming sexism, ABC News, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: “Women were predicted to come out in force to vote for the first female President and against a man who demeaned them … Instead, they voted more or less as they always have: along party lines.” — “Why Women Did Not Unite to Vote Against Donald Trump,” New York Times, 11/12/16
✓ According to exit polls, Trump beat Clinton among white women by 10 points, 53 percent to 43 percent. White working class women voted overwhelmingly for Trump, reports CNN, 62 percent to 34 percent.
13. Fiction: “Amanda Cox, the editor of [The New York Times’ ‘data-driven’] The Upshot, said the model clearly indicated that Mrs. Clinton was the [90 percent-plus Electoral College] favorite based on polling data … the mistake lay elsewhere; there was a ‘failure of communication,’ she said, in telling readers … that probabilities are just that, probabilities, not guarantees.” — New York Times, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: The Washington Times pointed out that only the Trafalgar Group had accurate polling because they recognized a “‘shy’ Trump effect [due to media bullying] that the other major pollsters [guilty of ‘confirmation bias’] did not try to identify and thus was left out of their turnout models.” Trafalgar correctly called the Trump win with 306 electoral votes the day before the election.
14. Fiction: “If the woman President Obama called the most qualified person ever to run for the White House couldn’t break through, the question remains, who can?” — NBC’S Andrea Mitchell, News-Busters, 11/9/16
✓ Fact: Ob
A meteorologist told me weather forecasts for public consumption purposely inflate probabilities. If there is a good model that predicts a 10% chance of rain, they bump it up to 20% or 30%, even though if they reported 10% a careful observer would record they it rains out of ten days when they report a 10% chance. A casual observer remembers the one day out of ten when rain spoiled their outdoor event and feels like the forecast was unreliable.