## Tuesday, May 10, 2016

### Math lessons from the Donald Trump Nomination (non-political)

There may be articles titled Donald Trump and the Failure of Democracy. This is NOT one of them. This is about some math questions. I drew upon many sources but mostly Nate Silver's columns:Donald Trump's Six Stages of doomHow the Republican Field Dwindled from 17 to Trump (a collection of article),Four things I learned from the Donald Trump Primary. For the best news piece of the year on Donald Trump see John Oliver's

1) Trends. Since 1972 (the beginning of the modern era of prez primaries) the republicans, have ALWAYS (with one exception I"ll get to) nominated someone who was either PRZEZ or a sitting or former Gov, Senator, or VP who had ALSO been a serious candidate in a prior primary-prez race. The only exception is W who was a sitting Governor but had never run before, though he of course had name recognition. In short, someone FAMILIAR. This also fits our image of the Republicans as an old boys network (Dole got the nomination in 1996 because it was his turn). Hence most pundits expected the same this year.

a) The old ML maxim: Trends hold TILL THEY DON"T.

b) Nobody quite fit the pattern. The only ones who had run before were Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Mike Huckabee. Rich S and Mike H were niche candidates, Rick P had wider appeal in 2012 but entered late and stumbled (the WHOOPS moment, though more on that later).  Jeb was like W, Former Gov with family name. So based just on Trends Perry or Jeb should have been the nominee, but its not that strong a match. (Added Later- A commenter says that John K ran briefly in 2000. My criteria was had been a serious candidate- not quite well defined, but John K would not have qualified. Even so, Governor and ran a bit, so he also was close to the criteria.) IF YOU HAVE A TREND AND USE IT TO PREDICT MAKE SURE THE DATA YOU HAVE FITS THE TREND.

c) I WILL NOT claim that I predicted any of this but there is an inkling of what happened in my post The law of the excluded middle of the road republicans where I pointed out for each candidate (including Trump) why they couldn't win. IF YOU HAVE A LARGE NUMBER OF LOW PROB EVENTS WHERE ONE WILL HAPPEN ITS HARD TO PREDICT WHICH ONE.

d) The pattern itself is only based on 11 data points and you might not want to count  the four where there was a republican prez running for re-election. And 11 data points is not the full story--- the political situation from 1972 to 2016 changed dramatically. So these are data points on a moving target. Perhaps they should use papers like New analysis and algorithms for learning with drifting distributions. ITS HARD TO DO ANY REAL DATA ANALYSIS WHEN YOU DON"T HAVE ENOUGH DATA AND IT CHANGES OVER TIME.

2) Domination: Republican primary voters (in the past) wanted a candidate who was both conservative and electable. But what combination? I read that Chris Christie had no chance since it was thought that Jeb, S Walker, and Rubio were all MORE electable and MORE conservative- so they dominated him. Hence Donald Trump couldn't win since he was (though to be) less electable and his prob less conservative though that's hard to tell since he never held office. Hence he can't win. But some voters were tired of voting for electable as  McCain and Romney were allegedly electable. And some were just plain angry. If you think your problems are because of immigrants vote Trump, if you think your problems are because of Wall Street then Feel the Bern. VOTERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT CONVEXITY AND DOMINATION.

3) Nate Silver. He's the Pollster who is NOT a pundit, does NOT let who he wants to see win affect what he predicts, wrote a great book about predictions: The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail But Some Don't and got many predictions right in recent years. He wrote an excellent article Donald Trumps six stages of Doom in Aug 2015 which said what the obstacles are to the nomination and giving the nomination a 2% chance. To his credit he has owned this prediction in that later columns have told us where he went wrong. (Most pundits never say Gee I was wrong')  So why did his prediction not pan out?

a) They did in a sense. All of the problem he pointed out that Trump would have, Trump DID have- for example, Trump did not have a good organization to control delegates, and the party did try to stop him. So in a strange sense Nate was right. Except that he was wrong.

b) Back to Nate's 2%. Bill James (Baseball Stats guru) wrote (I am paraphrasing) If you are given odds of 500-1 that some awful team will win the world series  than TAKE THAT BET. People have a hard time telling unlikely from REALLY unlikely. And the NY Mets did win the 1969 world series. (A quote from 1962: There will be a man on the moon before the Mets win the world series- true by two months). Also note that the the Leicester Soccer Team won this year despite being (literally) 5000-1 underdogs (see here). WAS NATE WRONG? If you give an event 2% chance and it happens I can't say you are wrong. In fact, if most everyone else gave it less than 2% or even 0  (which is the case here) then you are... less wrong.

4) Bill Gasarch. Based on TRENDS above I predicted Paul Ryan (and I owe Lance a dinner). My mistake was betting Ryan-I win, ANYONE ELSE-Lance wins (oddly enough, with a contested convention I might have still won that bet) . I should have made Lance name 5 candidates, and if any of those five win, he wins, but if its Ryan I win. I  doubt he would have named Trump.

5) Game Theory: Lance has posted about Primary Game Theory. The main issue for a Trump voter might be Gee, if I vote Trump he is not electable event though I like him, so I'll vote for X instead who is more electable' But voters are not game theorists. Plus they voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney based on that and they lost. So when Rubio said A Vote for Trump is a Vote for Hillary he may be right but the voters are not listening.  Plus since Little Marco only won Minnesota and Puerto Rico (they have a primary! who knew!) he was not positioned to talk about electability. Plus one could argue that VERY few of the candidates could beat Hillary. In an early Column Nate thought only Jeb, Little Marco, and Scott Walker (remember him?). So once Rubio dropped out the electability argument was useless.

6) More Game Theory: Many of the candidates wanted someone ELSE to go after Trump so they went after each other.

7) The Pledge: For fear that Trump would run third party they all signed a pledge promising to support whoever got the nomination. When they signed it they never imagined that Trump would be the nominee.

8) Prediction Markets: They did pretty well, in about March they came around. Last week David Brooks maintained that Trump would not be the nominee, but he was kidding. I think.

1. These is a lost hype in the liberal media about Trump. He is a more like a centrist than a Republican. His bigotry is to hide the fact that he was the most liberal of the GOP candidates.

http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-35703300

His attraction is his anti-globalization rhetoric. Globalization has been hurting American middle class for decades and most politicians are complicit in the scam. There is a genuine anger among Americans that Trump is tapping into. His actions are unpredictable, sure, but if on the other side you have the people who have created this mess then why not roll a dice in place of continuing with the status quo?

Is there anyone who doesn't think it is a mess? Not just dysfunctionality caused by Cruz-like figures. The wages have been stagnating, the middle class is taxed to support wars on the other side of the globe, the social security is unsustainable but politically explosive, while the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes and keep lobbying for laws and deals that disproportionately benefit them. The effective tax rate they pay is less than half of what people on payroll pay. The wages have been stagnating since 1980s despite American GDP growing a lot. Corporations want to make work cost even less by bringing in more foreign workers or did you think that the likes of Google and Facebook and Microsoft are pushing public policies out of altruism? They want to increase increasing the pool of potential employees to cut the salaries of their employees by more than half. People in the center who don't care much about the cultural wars between conservatives and liberals are angry and they are the ones which determine the outcome of this election. Don't be surprised if Trump punches Clinton where it hurts and wins the election.

2. Back in the industrial revolution many workers lost their jobs to automation and declared war on the machines, destroying them in night raids. Today we realize how misguided those raids were, which is not to say that their issues weren't real.

Trump's attack on immigrants are the modern equivalent of those night raids, equally misguided though motivated by a real life problem. And just like back then the solution is stronger labor legislation which is not antiimmigrant or antimachine, but proworker.

3. John Kasich announced as a candidate in the 2000 Presidential election cycle, but dropped out early in the primary process.

4. @Anonymous 7:22 AM

There are very big differences between industrial revolution and current technological revolution. The current accumulation of wealth at the top, for 30 years the wages of ordinary Americans have not gone up while the rich continue to rip the fruits of the rigged system. The regulations are created to protect the interests of big corporations not innovation against the democratic will of ordinary Americans.

Read more about the industrial revolution. It wasn't a pleasant event, it was a very painful event for most people lasting over a century that only sorted out itself with the establishment of the modern welfare states after two world wars and rise of nationalism and communism and millions of deaths and the great depression.