(11-09-2016 02:27 PM)OldOwlNewHeel2 Wrote:  [quote='Owl 69/70/75' pid='13767500' dateline='1478715474']

Secondly, the idea that it's "way, way less than 50%" is debatable, too.

Quote:Much like Trump’s alleged opposition to the Iraq War, this not an impossible claim to investigate. We know, for instance, some nearly 60 percent of Trump’s supporters hold “unfavorable views” of Islam, and 76 percent support a ban on Muslims entering the United States. We know that some 40 percent of Trump’s supporters believe blacks are more violent, more criminal, lazier, and ruder than whites. Two-thirds of Trump’s supporters believe the first black president in this country’s history is not American. These claim are not ancillary to Donald Trump’s candidacy, they are a driving force behind it.

Although the article from which that paragraph comes dates from September, every single number in that paragraph comes from an article in June 2016 or earlier, when there were still other Republican candidates. The set of "Trump supporters" back then is a part, but probably not a representative part, of the set of "Trump supporters" in September, or the the set of Trump voters yesterday. One of the source articles shows this clearly, with bar graphs for Clinton, Kasich, Cruz and Trump on each question. The bar graphs for Kasich and Clinton are pretty similar, the ones for Cruz are a little different, and the ones for Trump are a lot different.

Also, one of the articles cited is a Vox article that seems particularly unscientific. The article defines various intermediate measures and somehow meshes them together to generate various second-order statistics, but it doesn't do a very good job of explaining how all that was done. One of those second-order statistics has the rather loaded name of "racial resentment", and is based on four questions, each of which could (at least in theory) be answered either way by someone who is not actually resentful.

Which doesn't prove that the "way less than 50%" claim is not debatable, but does suggest that it's debatability is not as clear as the quotation might imply.