Poll: Who won the debate?

Trump did not misfire at all. He kept Hillary/Holt from controlling the Narrative by ignoring the things that did not matter and instead kept hammering the issues people care about, jobs, economy, security, ability to do the job, Hilliary’s incompetence, her failure to do anything she is now talking about, and again exposing the media bias.

What was taken away were points like Democrats talk a good game during election,, but leave blacks to suffer once elected, that Hillary has had decades to do what shes saying she will do and has not even tried, that she lies, etc

Nobody outside the stupid people give a dam about Trump’s tax return, nor do they see Trump’s nationalism as trickle-down, nor that hes not going to be good on national security, etc. He did what he had to do to attract the undecided.

Trump had an audience of a hundred million watching and got his message out clear.

Among the 100 million viewers there were at least two groups, viewers like you and me who know the issues and have made our decision and nothing is going to budge us from our support for Trump. Likewise those who support Hillary are unlikely to be disabused of their error.

The second group consists of people were not really interested in politics who are unfamiliar with the issues because they simply don't care much about the issues or they would already have been informed. If they vote, they will vote on a general impression of the demeanor of the candidate they see on television during the debate. It matters not to them who is better on the issues it only matters who appears to be in command of the issues. Even more important, it matters who looks presidential, who has the gravitas, who can they see as their president.

It's the second group, the persuadable, the undecideds, the potential voters who are relatively uninformed, who will decide this election.

All Trump had to do to preserve his momentum and win the election was look presidential but instead he interrupted, he cried about unfairness, he was petulant, he smirked, and he fought with the moderator, a no-win endeavor.

Judging from the test of what must a candidate due to advance his or her chances, Hillary stands the best chance of having improved her position.

Hillary Clinton’s yucky, battery-run switch it on smile backfired. People know in their brain and gut that Trump is correct in his summation of the terrible state of this country and what has to be done to correct it.

People who have ever memorized a speech know Hillary rehearsed short paragraphs of strung together gobbly-dee-gook words, as she’s always done. She said she studied. This student of the evil Saul Alinsky, who inspired her to want to bring down America, needed to practice the words because she knows nothing to say spontaneously. She might even have had prompting via electronic devices and notes. She’s failed at every single thing she’s ever done and caused immense long term disasters domestically and internationally. She has Muslim Brotherhood closest advisors. What is such a person doing on a podium running for president? The Democratic Party is complicit. She should long since have been arrested and put on trial for high treason.

Anyone above the age of six months old can sense easily what a complete liar and fake she is. Babies, with their sixth sense, if they were forced to be subjected to her, would cry to be taken to their mothers. Everyone knows that, so they staged a young girl showing up on the streets of New York for her to hug a few hours after her total neurological collapse.

No matter how serious the topic during this event and others, she turned on that rehearsed, condescending, evil smile, the kind that has gotten more than one human in big trouble. Another of her smiles is the fakery when she pretends to see someone in the audience whom she knows, when there is no such person and she knows it. She pretends to know something the audience does not.

What she did knew without doubt during this “debate” was that the moderator was afraid to be a real moderator and that he would give her pass after pass and ask Trump the questions her handlers specifically wanted him to ask.

Trump did get across some very important messages, nonetheless.

First Trump was working on undecided and Democrats. Your opinion of how Trump came across is not supported by any evidence outside left wing sources, not in almost all polls, not in social media, not anywhere but the Trump-haters.

People want an outsider not another polished lawyer politician. Hillary cannot win legitimately, she does not have the support of the people.

Fact is Hillary went into the debate with high expectations and behind in the polls. She needed to take Trump out decisively. She failed. As such no matter your opinion of Trump’s boorishness, he did what he needed to do, scored many long term take-away points and did not harm himself.

The points that Hillary is all talk no action will stick; the point Democrats ignore blacks for the 4 years between elections to suffer will stick; the point Americans are in danger because Hillary with Obama created ISIS will stick, the point she lies so easy will stick; etc.

The points you make have been hammered in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of attack ads- obviously they are not harming him.

Your opinion of how Trump came across is not supported by any evidence outside left wing sources, not in almost all polls, not in social media, not anywhere but the Trump-haters.

Rubbish. It is supported here in this conservative forum. It is supported by CNN's poll, it is even supported by conservatives on Fox and in print.

People want an outsider not another polished lawyer politician. Hillary cannot win legitimately, she does not have the support of the people.

All this might be perfectly true, and I hope it is, but it does not have much to do with who actually advanced their cause in the electoral college.

Fact is Hillary went into the debate with high expectations and behind in the polls. She needed to take Trump out decisively. She failed.

I did not say she succeeded, I said she was more likely of the two to have succeeded. The polls will tell us who succeeded and who failed.

As such no matter your opinion of Trump’s boorishness, he did what he needed to do, scored many long term take-away points and did not harm himself.

I contend that precisely the opposite was the case. I think he harms himself considerably and we will know when real polls, besides CNN, tell us whether his momentum continues or has been blunted. By the way, I did not use the word, "boorishness."

Again, we all hope these assertions of yours are true but don't have much to do with the discussion about the debate.

The points you make have been hammered in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of attack ads- obviously they are not harming him.

When a candidate commits a gaffe or otherwise validates a narrative about himself, the damage is always much, much worse. In this case, the narrative has been put out there to the tune, as you say, of hundreds of millions of dollars. The question is, did Trump validate that narrative?

We shall see, soon the polls will tell us.

Personally while I agree with your analysis of Trump’s performance, surprisingly it does not appear others do.

First, as you say the CNN snap poll gave the nod to Clinton last night, but that was the only one. All the other snap polls had Trump as the winner some by impressive margins and of those decisive margins, only one was from a source that would be biased towards Trump (Drudge). The others were from MSM sources, and still had margins of 10, 15 even one had 20%, IIRC. An illustrative graphic of all those polls was posted earlier today but I don’t have it or I’d post it. I could find it if required.

Snap polls aren’t particularly useful for much except to show enthusiasm for a candidate however unless one posits the existence of Trump bots flooding the online polls with yes votes (an unlikely scenario) the results of those polls were quite dramatic. And surprising, again given your objective analysis which I believe to be correct.

Also there is the one post-debate poll, conducted more rigorously than a simple online poll, out today that also shows Trump resonated with the voters. See here: https://www.scribd.com/mobile/document/325456792/National-Poll-September-26-2016-Post-Debate-Poll

In question after question Trump scored favorably, save a few questions, and outside the margin of error.

I agree with your analysis; after watching the debate I went to bed disappointed with his performance. But again, surprisingly, it does not seem that others share our opinion of his debate. For whatever reason it seems Clinton did indeed tank, even though she had all the “right” answers and appeared more in control of the situation.

Apparently people really are fed up with the polished politician. And are willing to give Trump a lot of latitude for this reason.

I said "Your opinion of how Trump came across is not supported by any evidence outside left wing sources, not in almost all polls, not in social media, not anywhere but the Trump-haters."

You responded: "Rubbish. It is supported here in this conservative forum. It is supported by CNN's poll, it is even supported by conservatives on Fox and in print."

CNN, Murdoch's (Open borders) FOX and Former Cruz bots as well as DU trolls fall under the Trump Hater designation. Thank you for proving my point.

(This comment and response is redacted as there is no controversy here.)

I said: "Fact is Hillary went into the debate with high expectations and behind in the polls. She needed to take Trump out decisively. She failed."

You responded: "I did not say she succeeded, I said she was more likely of the two to have succeeded. The polls will tell us who succeeded and who failed."

The polls are all fake. As Gallop pointed out they can no longer do accurate polling. The Technology has changed and people are not willing to talk to pollsters hence the tiny populaiton sample sizes, online polls and the media using public relations firms hired by professional politicians like NBCWSJ keeps getting caught doing. The Fact is the script was written before the debate began that Hillary would win it (see CNN, etc) and that she would then recover and surge in the polls. Totally meaningless propaganda.

Want to see who they are really doing use objective evidence such as crowd size, number of small donors, enthusiasm, online social media activity, merchandise sales, etc. Polls are useless and proven useless by how far off they have been this season. Silver is batting zero for 12, They were off Brexit by 14, etc.

I said: "As such no matter your opinion of Trump’s boorishness, he did what he needed to do, scored many long term take-away points and did not harm himself."

You responded, "I contend that precisely the opposite was the case. I think he harms himself considerably and we will know when real polls, besides CNN, tell us whether his momentum continues or has been blunted. By the way, I did not use the word, "boorishness.""

The Trump haters have used the same arguments since before the Primary. Real world results show they have no effect. The term "boorish" etc is generic for the complaint of Trump's behavior that is not the same as the professional politician lawyers with teams of public relations people scripting their every word.

{Point redacted as no controversy is present}

I said: "The points you make have been hammered in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of attack ads- obviously they are not harming him."

You responded: "When a candidate commits a gaffe or otherwise validates a narrative about himself, the damage is always much, much worse. In this case, the narrative has been put out there to the tune, as you say, of hundreds of millions of dollars. The question is, did Trump validate that narrative?"

They did not before and they have not so far with Hundreds of millions of dollars spent in pushing the charge. No reason to expect the failed attacks will succeed this time either.

You said also" "We shall see, soon the polls will tell us."

No matter what the polls will try to help Hillary. That's what they are paid to do and there is no way to accurately poll today. So relying on the enemy to tell how it went is setting up to fail since they will lie.

I ask, how many institutions must be made wrong (even conspiratorial) for Trump to be right? At some point when we've made the whole world corrupt we have to ask whether we are abandoning honest partisan support and succumbing to paranoia?

Those who were saying the Brexit polls were wrong: were they being paranoid?

Weren't their multiple organizations doing the polling on Brexit, and weren't they all confirming each other?

Moreover, weren't these polls part and parcel of a relentless State-run Establishment propaganda campaign which blasted on every channel 24/7/365?

Sound familiar, anyone?

And yet their "consensus" was off by, what, 8+ points?

As for how many of the institutions must be made wrong, I can't imagine that any realistic polling model could be over-weighting democrats so heavily, both in terms of party splits and voter enthusiasm.

Virtually every poll which I have seen which looks rosy for Hillary has ridiculously impractical assumptions regarding such figures.

Now, it's well known that budging those specific variables by just a point or two in the "right" direction can produce an obvious bias in favor of a certain candidate, which can then be used to feed a propaganda narrative.

I think the enthusiasm gap, the changes in party registration, and the independent and "never voted" vote is going to blow all of these "rose colored glasses" pollsters right out of the water. Their heads are going to explode.

Just like the Brexit pollsters missed the populist/anti-globalist wave, echoes of which have been rippling all over Europe for the past several election cycles, and just like all the other polling organizations have been consistently underestimating this general trend, so too are American pundits completely missing (and indeed denying) the massive movement building here in America, and which is being driven by many of the same concerns.

The Revolution is ON!

Vote Trump!

I don't know of anyone who maintains that all polls are accurate all the time just as I don't know of any sensible person who argues that all polls are wrong all the time. Interestingly, Dr. Gallup himself once told me that his firm had Truman beating Dewey in 1948 but they reported the opposite because they simply could not believe their own research. He said they would never do that again and I believed him. Gallup is now out of the political polling business because they always regarded that as a loss leader to bring in the profitable commercial business.

But to return to the polls. They get more accurate as they get closer to the election and some of them were extremely accurate in 2012, for example. Nate Silver was dead on for two election cycles, for example. Some polls are more accurate overall and over time than others. I have read to my sorrow on these very threads multitudes of ironclad assurances that the polls favoring Barack Obama were oversampling Democrats and Romney was sure to win. The pollsters were right and the conservatives who did not have enough trust in their fellow conservatives to let them know the truth, were wrong.

I do believe the polls can point us to a trend and that is why before the debate I thought that the trend lines were clear, that Trump had the momentum, and that he would win the election if his momentum continued. Therefore, Hillary had the task in the debate of disrupting the momentum. That was an inversion of the conventional understanding which obtained only weeks perhaps even only days before. That gave all the advantages in the debate to Trump and presented Hillary was an uphill battle, especially for a person who is unlikable and thoroughly disliked who must play the aggressor. That being so, I argued that Trump had only to show himself to be presidential, to present himself to be worthy of the office and not to worry about winning every point because the bulk of the undecided nation dislikes Hillary and had done so for decades and was going to look at Trump to see if they can safely vote for him. My belief is that Trump blundered in the debate and the conservatives on this thread who see him as the winner because they like the way he argued the issues they like, misunderstand the context of the debate. The context was visual not issue oriented. It was a job interview for Donald Trump and he needed only to look the part to get the job.

Did Donald Trump lose the job interview even as he pleased conservatives on the issues?

We shall see in the course of time whether he passed the interview and we will be educated by, guess what, polls. I understand they will begin to come out today, Wednesday, and we will see whether Trump's momentum has been blunted or not. If not, I think he will march on to victory because he is clearly made of Teflon or kryptonite.

Meanwhile I am content to wait for real polls to point to the trend. Of course, I do not dismiss the possibility that I am wrong in this scenario, I was wrong many times in the primaries misjudging the public's reaction the Donald Trump.

But to return to the polls. They get more accurate as they get closer to the election

Thus, the further out they are, the more they amount ot propaganda, especially when "tweaked" in the pro-Establishment way we have seen, and then used as part of an overall State propaganda campaign.

That's why I asked you about Brexit, because you're overseas (or were), living in Germany, right? Germany itself has been surprised by some recent election results, if I'm not mistaken.

The same trends that the European elite are in denial of (indeed they're fighting against these trends tooth and nail, and losing, in general) are being resisted by the American elite, and these mainstream, pro-Hillary pollsters (and they are both mainstream and biased in favor of her) are going to be wrong by at least a few points. That means if things look close on November 7, the advantage will be Trump's.

One thing for sure, if these pro-Hillary pollosters and pundits are going to be wrong, they're going to make darn sure that they're wrong in Hillary's favor, not Trump's which will conveniently continue to serve their propaganda narratives through election day.

The Revolution is ON!

Vote Trump!

During the primary season I was forced in the schizophrenic role of opposing Trump on this forum but defending Trump to my German neighbors who uniformly regarded him as a Philistine. When Brixet occurred I used that as an analogy, "if you want to understand the Trump phenomenon you must understand Brixet." But my German neighbors, nevermind the establishment, simply did not get Brixet. Perhaps that's because Germany is a very successful exporter of 40% of its GNP. When I suggested to them that the English reaction to the flood of refugees into Germany was really a reaction to loss of sovereignty, they simply looked blankly in return. Angela Merkel presumes to make a decision on behalf of 300 million EU citizens who had no control over their destiny as refugees who were admitted into Germany could freely diffuse into the other countries.

I count the attitude of the Germans to be a function of their extremely limited source of information about America, it is as though all political information came to Americans through National Public Radio and MSNBC. The culture is much like the culture of an American university.

Today, they are appalled that the nation might elect Donald Trump so to defend him requires the teaching of a veritable cram course not just on American politics but on European politics. It's only very lately, for example, that public opinion has begun clearly to swing against the refugee policy. The Germans I talked to simply did not understand the threat from Islam, or even the threat to their way of life from an in-flood of refugees. They uncritically accept the leftist premise that anything can be accomplished by education, that man is inherently a blank slate which requires only the proper education to make model citizens of him. They simply do not understand what Islam represents.

As to the accuracy of polling in America, Real Clear Politics averages actually gives us a very good indicator of how the election is going to go. They were pretty accurate in 2012, for example. If the election is close, I think the bias that you allege to be in the polls of over counting Democrats will simply not be there, it was not there in 2012 in many polls. In fact, all the assurances that we got on these threads that the polls were wrong because the Democrats were oversampled was just plain wishful thinking. When will conservatives begin to trust other conservatives with the truth?

That brings up the next problem relating to a close election: the ground game. Trump has no ground game and the quality of the Republicans ground game which he inherits is questionable at best. The ground game of the Obama campaign in Ohio, for example, was so good that it exceeded pollsters expectations and there is reason to believe that Trump will be vulnerable in a close elections to the ground game which will have been inherited by Hillary. There is always the question of cheating which favors Democrats in close elections.

The most dangerous thing in politics is to underestimate your enemy and to disbelieve unfavorable polls.

If I remember correctly, though, these same organizations that were accurate in 2012 were very much off in 2014.

These outfits tend to be in denial and miss these wave elections. Same thing happened in 1994 (and 1980).

In elections such as 2008 and 2012, the "accuracy" of the mainstream pollsters can be attributed in large part to them getting the party splits and voter enthusiasm right.

In those other cycles that I referenced, in each case they missed the "wave", and I think that's exactly what's happening this cycle.

As for "disbelieving unfavorable polls", there aren't even that many of those left to disbelieve. Even with the obvious pro-Hillary bias, the polls have been trending in Trump's direction. And we also know historically that undecideds tend to break against the incumbent in such instances, and while Hillary isn't technically an incumbent, she's certainly a proxy for one, and those considerations still apply, IMHO.

Tournout decides elections, and turnout should favor Trump very heavily this year, unless something highly unusual happens between now and November 8. The evidence for that is ample and compelling.

The Revolution is ON!

Vote Trump!

I too am looking for indications of a wave election and they are there to be found: The huge turnout for rallies, while not at all significant in determining who is ahead, does tell us something about intensity and it might tell us something about the latent power of the campaign; the encouraging signs of registration in many states increasing Republican count in decreasing Democrat count; the increased early voting ballots going to Republicans.

These things tell me not that we are going to have a wave election but that the tinder and gasoline are there waiting for a spark. That is probably a very good thing because wave elections seem to be limited to the midterm elections rather than presidential election, indeed we have not seen a wave election on the presidential level since Reagan. More, we haven't won a popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections and that, combined with our structural disadvantage in the electoral college, means that wave elections at this level are hard to come by. Yet, for other structural reasons, it may be that we need a wave election to win.

As you say, turnout is everything and it might be that the constituent elements of the Democratic Party simply are not aroused to turn out for midterms. That means the African-American vote. So I think it is true that Republicans are highly motivated and Democrats appear to be weakly motivated which explains why the race card is being played at the highest level by the candidate herself.

How this applies to polls is an art not a science and it will be difficult for pollsters to figure party participation at the polls when that is complicated by unknown levels of intensity. I'm inclined to agree with you, it is dangerous to over count the Democrats this time around but I will bet that the data mining system put it in place with revolutionary results by the Democrats in 2012 probably has a very good understanding of intensity. They will simply know precinct by precinct whether individual voters are motivated or not. The question is, do they know how to motivate them?

There are black swan events to be considered such as an economic crisis which occurred in 2008, a medical attack which exposes Hillary's true condition, a terrorist attack, or a revelation actually coming from wikileaks which amounts to a smoking gun. Any one of these, except an economic debacle and a terrorist strike, would be welcome as well as beneficial but that is hardly a way to plan a campaign.

I am eager to see what the legitimate polls tell us about debate performance which should begin to come in today and certainly by Friday.

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