What does the working class look like?

Google defines the working class as the social group consisting of people who are employed for wages, especially in manual or industrial work. But that basically points to blue collar workers. During this past election cycle, the media referred to the working class as the working poor. So let's use the latter as our identifier.

Each year the Current Population Survey (CPS) puts together a poverty report. The most recent report can be found here. The poverty threshold is around $12K for a single worker or $24K for a 4-person household. The CPS reports that 13.5% of Americans live under the poverty threshold. That's approximately 43.1 million people.

Reading post-mortems from places like The Atlantic, CNN, The Hill, The New Yorker, etc. the conventional wisdom is that Hillary abandoned white working class voters (which had been in the Obama coalition) and therefore lost the election to Trump. And sure enough the 2012 exit poll shows Obama winning voters who earned under $30,000 63%-35% whereas the 2016 exit poll shows that Clinton won that group 53%-41%.  Given that her margins among minorities were not too different from Obama's margins, we can chalk up the bulk of that difference to white voters.  Just how many voters is that?

Of the 43.1 million people living under the poverty line, white people account for 28.6 million or 66%.  On the other hand, whites account for 79% of the people living over the poverty line. The CPS data does not breakdown age-race demographic combinations but we do also know that of the 43.1 million poor, 66% are above the age of 18.  If those people voted at the same rate as wealthier Americans (our first assumption), then we would be looking at about 15.7 million people under the poverty line that voted.  Since the CPS does not offer data for race-age subdivisions, we have to make a second assumption that the distribution of the poor over the age of 18 is the same as the distribution of the poor in general, such that 66% are white.  Multiplying that 15.7 million by 0.66 we find a total of 10.4 million voters here that make up the "White Working Class" - in effect, 7.6% of all voters.

Hillary turning Obama's 28-point margin of victory into a 12-point margin of victory, therefore means she lost 1.2% net votes to Trump. Compare that to the 2-3% that she lost because of Comey's interference and another 2-3% that she lost because of Putin's interference. And don't forget that a good sized chunk of that 1.2% may have flipped because of Comey or Putin.  To ascertain that Clinton's loss, therefore, was due to neglect of poor white voters is therefore an absolute falsehood.

How Far are the Russian Hackers Willing to go?

Back in November, a few days before the US election, German Chancellor Merkel publicly stated her worry that Russian hackers could influence the elections in her country's and other Western countries' elections.

In the face of the never ending tennis ball machine (h/t Bob Cesca) of awfulness that was the Trump campaign, this was largely overlooked at the time. But as the New York Times reports:

After hackers infiltrated the German Parliament’s computer network in May 2015, it took nearly a year before the country’s intelligence agency concluded that the attack was most likely the work of their Russian counterparts.

Last week, when 900,000 Germans lost access to internet and telephone services, it took a matter of hours before politicians began pointing fingers at Moscow.

Berlin is now concerned that Germany will become the next focus of Moscow’s campaign to destabilize Western democracies as national elections approach next year.

Those fears intensified after the Obama administration accused the Russian government of attacking Democratic Party emails during the American presidential campaign.

The increasing dissemination of false news, disinformation and propaganda during the American campaign and before Italy’s referendum last weekend has added a related layer of worry about the potential to corrupt public debate and democratic processes.

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Putin isn't stopping with Trump. He's making sure he has allies in all of the large global economies.

Whatever comes of this will not be good.

State of the Recount

From David Wasserman:

Differential in MI 10K
Differential in WI 12K
Differential in PA 46K

Trump's combined lead in those three states has already fallen by 38,000 votes. It's not inconceivable that the electoral map could shift enough to empower the 15 faithless electors.

Trump won the election - as far as we know

Yes, Trump won by an effective 107,000 votes on election day (and as of today, quite a bit less than that) but there were many questions about the win that just didn't sit right. For one, the polls on the final day were remarkably clustered around a 3 point Clinton lead. Not just nationally, but in many of the swing states as well. For another thing, the final results were well outside of the margin of error of the exit polls. So we're looking at a result that, while mathematically possible (for two related events to both fall into the margin of error we are talking about fractions of a percent likelihood), just seemed outside of the realm of possibility to most observers.

So what caused it? Logic says it must be one of four possibilities:
1. Bad poll sampling all the way through including on election day itself; 
2. Voter suppression that didn't show up in the polls;
3. Human error in recording results;
4. Tampering of election results.

Regardless of the reason, I think we all deserve to know what happened, if nothing else than to preserve the sanctity of the voting process itself.

But you'll never guess who doesn't want that to happen.