Talk:2016 United States presidential election

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Consensus on pre-election discussions about presentation of candidates

Order of candidates in the infobox: It has been agreed by consensus from an RfC at the article United States presidential election, 2016 that US presidential election articles will use the following criteria for ordering candidates in the infobox [pre-election]: order based on results of the candidates or their parties from the previous presidential general election. Link to previous discussion: here

Infobox inclusion (pre-election): It has been agreed by consensus discussion in 2012 that presidential general election articles will use the following criteria for inclusion of candidates in the infobox prior to the election: Candidates will be included in the infobox who can mathematically win 270 Electoral Votes through ballot access (appearing on the ballot) and/or write-in status (with pledged electors). Links to previous discussions:

The following images have been discussed:

Hillary Clinton (consensus link)

Consensus

Donald Trump (consensus link)

Consensus

Gary Johnson (consensus link)

Consensus

This article has been mentioned by a media organization:

Chris Alcantara (2016-10-27). "The most challenging job of the 2016 race: Editing the candidates' Wikipedia pages". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2016-11-07.

Archives (index)

Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
21, 22, 23, 24

This page has archives. Sections older than 30 days may be automatically archived by when more than 6 sections are present.

Mathematics in Results by State

As mentioned in the article this section should be updated. As an European citizen I do not completely understand how American democracy works. I would at least exspect that the counted votes in an election are accurate. The sum of votes is not correct: In the list for US total wikipedia gives the count 136,669,237, but when I add the single states with Excel (Maine and Nebraska in mind) I come to 136,359,313. There are differences of some 100.000 votes for the candidates. Mysterious! And I can not find better figures in other sources. Strange. Armin D. A. (talk) 16:27, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Armin, if you transpose the "Results by State" section into an Excel spreadsheet, you need to remove the extra rows for the separate districts in Maine and Nebraska (because there's another row for each state in there that combines the districts into a state total). If you do that, then column "W" will total 136,669,237. 162.119.240.103 (talk) 18:20, 31 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Electronic mails

It looks like this is the same team which leaked the Hilary Clinton and the Emmanuel Macron electronic mails. Might be added in the article... http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/elections/macronleaks-des-milliers-d-emails-de-l-equipe-de-campagne-de-macron-pirates_1905721.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.67.188.213 (talk) 07:56, 6 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Inaccurate polls? No, they were right.

There are a number of articles where this issue should be addressed, and I'm not sure how to start. The issue is the widespread idea, reported in numerous RS, that the pre-election polls during the 2016 campaign were inaccurate, when in fact they weren't. The polls predicted that Clinton would get the most votes and win. Well, they were right, at least in part; she did get the most votes, but no polls could have predicted that this was one of those rare occasions where a popular vote win wouldn't translate into an electoral college win.

This article addresses the issue:

"Others say Trump’s negative [popularity] poll numbers are no more reliable than the pre-election media polls last November that were supposedly far off the mark.

"That’s a canard. The NBC/Wall Street Journal, CBS/New York Times and ABC/Washington Post final polls all showed Hillary Clinton winning by four percentage points. The Bloomberg poll, which I directed, had her winning by slightly less than three points. While losing in the Electoral College, she won the national popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, within all the polls’ margin of sampling error."^[1]

We should make an effort to fix/counter the mistaken impression, left by numerous RS, that the polls were wrong. They were not, and this source can be used to puncture that balloon. -- BullRangifer (talk) 05:51, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Hunt, Albert R. (May 7, 2017). "Be Afraid, Mr. President". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved May 9, 2017.

The polls were wrong, though. Have you seen any of the state polls? The average in Wisconsin was more than 7 points off the mark. The last two polls in Minnesota averaged to C+9 when the result was C+1.5. Ohio was off by 4.6, Michigan by 3.7, Iowa by 6.5, NC by 2.7, PA by 2.6, ME2 by 10. In numerous cases this error was more than enough to change the result of the state or district. The national polls were roughly correct because they underestimated Clinton's margins in states like California and overestimated them in swing states.Rhydic (talk) 18:05, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, some individual state polls were inaccurate, but the national polls were basically right. Clinton did get more votes. I think that's the point of the Bloomberg source. -- BullRangifer (talk) 04:53, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"The margin of error is a statistic expressing the amount of random sampling error in a survey's results. It asserts a likelihood (not a certainty) that the result from a sample is close to the number one would get if the whole population had been queried." While it explains why individual polls were wrong, it does not explain why all the polls were wrong (except Rassmussen). The cause of the inaccuracy was not sampling error but error in methodology. As the passage says, sampling error disappears when the entire population is surveyed. But a survey of the entire population would still have resulted in Clinton winning by 4%. Why? Because the pollsters incorrectly identified the population by overstating the number of Clinton supporters who would vote and underestimating Trump's. TFD (talk) 23:22, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Comey Letter and the Election

I think we should put a section in on the Comey letter. This analysis is pretty good and lays it out well: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/

In sum, I think there is some good evidence that the Comey letter is what tilted the election to Trump. Seems like an important fact to include.Casprings (talk) 19:52, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Much as I respect Silver’s analyses; it’s one guy’s opinion. I think you’d need a widespread consensus before adding such to an encyclopedia. Objective3000 (talk) 20:02, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The election was so close that had any of a number of events not occured, it might have affected the outcome. Not campaigning in the Rust Belt, choosing a corporate Democrat as her running mate, the DNC and Podesta email leaks, Clinton's unpopularity, the Russians, fakenews. Similarly, had Trump lost, we would be examining a similar list. We could also mention prior events that led to Comey finding these emails when he did: using private servers, Wiener texting underage girls, Clinton and Abedin not telling the FBI about about these emails, etc.

Comey was just fired, which might merit a one sentence addition. Objective3000 (talk) 21:49, 9 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Russian interference section

The current section title is "Russian interference concerns". I propose changing "concerns" to "allegations", since "concerns" seems to be subtly endorsing claims about Russian interference which are currently controversial. Thoughts? Augurar (talk) 09:17, 15 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voter Demographics section is incorrect

http://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/2016/11/10/lies-damn-lies-and-exit-polls/ 69.67.84.39 (talk) 15:06, 17 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid an un-vetted private blog is not a sufficiently reliable source for the information you wish to change. Do you have anything better? --Jayron 32 15:12, 17 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Replace image.

I may be already autoconfirmed, Because of a red link image, i'll replace the red link image with the image from Donald Trump's page because the red link in question is Donald Trump's image. Gary "Roach" Sanderson (talk) 19:42, 6 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I have replaced it with the picture that had been in place all along the campaign season; that's better than an anachronistic picture taken in 2017. — JFG ^talk 20:34, 6 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 11 June 2017

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Hello,

Could someone please consider adding extra "–" to indicate "no result available" to the rows missing them? A global replace of "||||" with "||–||" might do the trick.

This would help me and other data scrapers to extract data more quickly and easily.

An example is shown below in the "=== Results by state ===" section:

old:

| align=left|[[United States presidential election in Alabama, 2016|Alabama]] || WTA ||729,547||34.36%||–||1,318,255||62.08%||9||44,467||2.09%||–||9,391||0.44%||–||||||–|| 21,712 ||1.02%||–||588,708||27.72%||2,123,372||AL||Official<ref>{{cite web|title=State of Alabama: Canvass of Results|url=http://www.alabamavotes.gov/downloads/election/2016/general/2016-Official-General-Election-Results-Certified-2016-11-29.pdf|date=November 29, 2016|accessdate=December 1, 2016}}</ref>

new:

| align=left|[[United States presidential election in Alabama, 2016|Alabama]] || WTA ||729,547||34.36%||–||1,318,255||62.08%||9||44,467||2.09%||–||9,391||0.44%||–||–||–||–|| 21,712 ||1.02%||–||588,708||27.72%||2,123,372||AL||Official<ref>{{cite web|title=State of Alabama: Canvass of Results|url=http://www.alabamavotes.gov/downloads/election/2016/general/2016-Official-General-Election-Results-Certified-2016-11-29.pdf|date=November 29, 2016|accessdate=December 1, 2016}}</ref>

Below is a list of rows in the results by state section that would benefit from the "||||" to "||–||" replacement, as a normal row should have 25 elements:

# row: 3 row header: Alabama data elements: 23
# row: 4 row header: Alaska data elements: 23
# row: 11 row header: District of Columbia data elements: 23
# row: 12 row header: Florida data elements: 23
# row: 14 row header: Hawaii data elements: 23
# row: 17 row header: Indiana data elements: 23
# row: 23 row header: Maine, 1st data elements: 24
# row: 24 row header: Maine, 2nd data elements: 24
# row: 29 row header: Mississippi data elements: 23
# row: 32 row header: Nebraska (at-lg) data elements: 23
# row: 33 row header: Nebraska, 1st data elements: 23
# row: 34 row header: Nebraska, 2nd data elements: 23
# row: 35 row header: Nebraska, 3rd data elements: 23
# row: 36 row header: Nevada data elements: 21
# row: 38 row header: New Jersey data elements: 23
# row: 41 row header: North Carolina data elements: 23
# row: 42 row header: North Dakota data elements: 23
# row: 44 row header: Oklahoma data elements: 21
# row: 45 row header: Oregon data elements: 23
# row: 49 row header: South Dakota data elements: 21
# row: 55 row header: Washington data elements: 23
# row: 58 row header: Wyoming data elements: 23

Thanks very much for your very valuable work!

Sincerely,

-Chris Krenn (democracygps)

[Hunt_5/7/2017-1] Hunt, Albert R. (May 7, 2017). "Be Afraid, Mr. President". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved May 9, 2017.

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