Open letter to Roger Ailes / Fox News -- recruit prominent signers immediately please

[Warren D Smith]

http://rangevoting.org/AilesLetter.html

--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)

[Clay Shentrup]

You need to put this on a real petition platform like Change.org. Having people sign by emailing you will make you look incompetent unfortunately.

[Nevin Brackett-Rozinsky]

Also I’d suggest refraining from using the word “best” to describe your own website (in your signature below the letter) unless you can reference an independent organization that selected your site as such.

[Jan Kok]

Trump and Fox News are having a feud. There is a Fox Business/WSJ Republican Debate coming up in November. Does anyone know if Fox business and Fox News are close enough that Fox News would be happy to find a way to exclude Trump from their debate?

Instead of promoting Approval or Score Voting for doing the polls, I would suggest that we promote the Republican candidates vs. Clinton or Sanders type of polling. This is taking a step away from our goal of promoting Approval/Score,, but the advantage is that it makes the argument simpler and easier to understand. We can say, do you want to include in your debate the candidates that have the best chance of winning against the Democrat? Then use the R vs D polls to select the debate participants. The results of those polls are radically different from the Plurality polls, for example, Trump appears at the bottom of the R vs D polls, but appears at or near the top in the Plurality polls!

By the way, major KUDOS to Warren for figuring out who really should be interested in better polling methods, and addressing his open letter to those people. I invite Warren to redo the analysis based on the most recent polls. Meanwhile, maybe the rest of us can get together and do some wordsmithing on the letter (I think the letter is slightly insulting to Fox and Republicans as it stands now), and also figure out how to get the attention of the actual decisionmakers.

I asked three of my Republican friends or acquaintances for their reaction to the letter, and so far have gotten a lack of response, which puzzles me. Do staunch Republicans really not care whether a Republican wins the presidency in 2016? Or do they not have the attention span to read and understand my email and Warren's letter? What I have heard, from three brief verbal discussions is: "Trump is unlikely to become the Republican candidate. It's still very early, the poll results will change drastically with time" "Ten candidates will drop out the day after the Iowa caucuses." The third friend thinks there is no hope as long as candidate selection is controlled from the top and not by the people.

Another interesting development is the Trump refused to pledge not to run as an independent! "Why should I give up my leverage?" Trump asked. On the other hand, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-taking-pledge-run-party/story?id=32987615 points out:

"Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has directly called on all candidates to pledge not to make a third-party run. The Republican Party has leverage here: senior GOP officials say it is possible that future debates could be limited to candidates who have pledged support for the party -- a move that could leave Trump out of debates if he is still leaving open the possibility of running as an independent.

The RNC has already made it clear that it will withhold valuable party data on Republican voters from any candidate unwilling to pledge support to the party."

[Warren D Smith]

If you want to redo the analysis based on more recent polls, go ahead,
you could start from my web page and rewrite it to suit your purposes.

I think Trump is an interesting experiment in progress, unfortunately we all are
the lab animals and the situation is disgusting. I do not know if
the Schwarzenegger strategy can actually be pulled off on a nationwide
scale. There seem to be some rather
transparent anti-Trump manipulation attempts going on, e.g. the Fox
debate-moderators
Trump-directed questions, and the News stories all focused entirely on
bullshit made-up "gaffes" as so-called news stories rather than
discussing anything
with any actual substance... which pretty much managed to
accomplish the impossible by sort of making me actually like Trump.

http://rangevoting.org/Trump2015.html
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/RangeVoting/conversations/messages/16947

My attempts to get the open letter published all failed, and I have no evidence
Fox/Ailes listened to me either.

[Warren D Smith]

Post-debate poll finds Trump's lead has only widened, despite all
the transparent anti-Trump moves Fox & the media made:

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/NBC-SM%20Post%20Debate%20Poll%208%2009%2015.pdf

(warning: online poll, not phone)
So... all indications so far:
Trump's "Schwarzenegger II" strategy continues
superbly...

[Warren D Smith]

Republican R versus H.Clinton (polls):
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html

[Warren D Smith]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/10/us-usa-election-poll-idUSKCN0QF1WL20150810

is a story about another online poll, by Reuters/Ipsos, which agrees
Trump remains way in lead among GOP rivals post-debate. Data here:

http://www.ipsos-na.com/download/pr.aspx?id=14724

[Jan Kok]

There seem to be some rather
transparent anti-Trump manipulation attempts going on, e.g. the Fox
debate-moderators
Trump-directed questions, and the News stories all focused entirely on
bullshit made-up "gaffes" as so-called news stories rather than
discussing anything
with any actual substance... which pretty much managed to
accomplish the impossible by sort of making me actually like Trump.

I had not seen Trump speak before last week's debates. (I don't watch TV much!) After the debate and some post-debate interviews, I find myself liking him too.

On the other hand, the candidate I would most like to win the Republican nomination, I don't like very well at a personal level. For me, there seems to be about zero correlation between liking the candidates and wanting them to be president.

These articles pretty well explain this phenomenon:

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/125930283831/how-trump-becomes-president

which refers to

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-surprising-reason-donald-trump-is-so-persuasive-as-a-candidate-2015-8

[Clay Shentrup]

Wow. Liking Trump. Go figure.

[Jan Kok]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 10:54 PM, Clay Shentrup <cl...@electology.org> wrote:

Wow. Liking Trump. Go figure.

Hah! I like Obama too, personality-wise. Doesn't mean I'd want either of them as president!

That was my point. No correlation between liking someone and wanting them for president or other positions of political power.

But how many people just vote for who they "like"?

[Jan Kok]

Here's what I just sent to the Rand Paul campaign's "contact us" web page. Others, feel free to adapt it to your own purposes.

Subject: How to improve Rand's standing in the polls and improve Republican chances of winning

 

The Rand campaign and all people who prefer that a Republican wins the presidential election should focus on and promote the use of HEAD-TO-HEAD POLLS for measuring the popularity of the candidates and for choosing the candidates that appear in the top tier debates. Head-to-head polls are simply a better measure of progress toward the objective: winning the election!

 

Rand does very well in head-to-head polls against Hillary Clinton, coming in a close second place behind Jeb Bush. Rand does much worse (approximately EIGHTH place) when measured with the more common "Who is your favorite candidate" type of poll (called a PLURALITY poll).

 

Here is a comparison of Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Donald Trump, using the two polling methods. Data is taken from:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html (asks people whether they prefer Bush or Clinton, Paul or Clinton, Trump or Clinton, etc.)

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/NBC-SM%20Post%20Debate%20Poll%208%2009%2015.pdf (asks people "who is your favorite?")

 

Candidate            head-to-head polls                  plurality poll

Jeb Bush              Clinton wins by 4.2%                   7%

Rand Paul             Clinton wins by 5.5%                   5%

Donald Trump      Clinton wins by 14.8%!!!           23%

 

Notice how Trump is leading according to the plurality poll, but is actually DEAD LAST among the 11 candidates listed in the head-to-head polls! This clearly shows that the type of poll you use makes a huge difference in the results.

 

Again: head-to-head polls give a measure of each candidate's chances of winning in the general election. On the other hand, Plurality polls give a very misleading and practically useless indication of "popularity." They are misleading in at least two ways: 1) Trump may be the favorite Republican candidate among 23% of the people surveyed, yet some of those surveyed may actually prefer Clinton over Trump. 2) The Plurality figures show only first-choice support; they don't show how much second- or additional-choice support each candidate has. For example, Rand is the favorite of 5% of those polled. But the RCP head-to-head polls show that 41.3% would vote for Paul (vs. 46.8% for Clinton) in an election between Paul and Clinton. So Paul has a lot of second- or additional-choice support from a lot of people; indeed he has support from more people than Trump!

 

Conclusion: The Rand Paul campaign, as well as most of the Republican Party, should focus on commissioning and using HEAD-TO-HEAD POLLS for comparing candidates, choosing candidates to appear in the top-tier debates, and gauging their progress toward their objective of WINNING THE GENERAL ELECTION.

 

Much more detailed analysis: http://rangevoting.org/Trump2015.html

 

Jan Kok

Cofounder, Center for Range Voting (rangevoting.org)

Cofounder, The Center for Election Science (electology.org)

[Warren D Smith]

Good letter to Rand Paul. I had in fact sent letters to all GOP
candidates' campaigns who
would have been better off with other voting systems used to assess
getting into the debate. However, not one campaign showed any sign
of a response in spite
of their political lives being at stake and some of those campaigns
being pretty small operations who you'd presume would have been able
to notice what I said since
not exactly swamped with correspondence.
I also had sent it to about a dozen newspapers,
not one reacted. I also sent of course to Fox/Ailes.

The only things I could see I could have done better was doing it all
a week earlier,
which would only have been possible if I worked infinitely fast; and
harassing them all by telephone for days on end, which I did not; and
keeping Clay Shentrup in ignorance of what I was doing, so he could
not fuck it up by sending idiotic insult emails to people I was trying
to court.

Re me "liking Trump" I think a better description would be "disliking the
behavior of Trump's enemies." I did not buy Jan Kok's psychobabble.
The alternate psychobabble that worked for me better is: in a finite
set, if you see A behaves badly, that makes you "like" B by comparison.
I saw all those trying to screw Trump behaving badly, that was all.
It made him look good by comparison. If the non-Trumps keep behaving that way
and everybody reacts like I did, Trump's chances should be high.

To win the nomination, Trump merely has to keep his opposition split, prevent
catastrophe, and keep himself looking different from all of them -- his
lack of actual substance (if so) will be nearly irrelevant. The
debate appears to have
aided Trump in the sense it just increased the vote-splitting among
the non-Trumps,
increased the viewer perception {Trump} and {all rivals} were of
different ilks, and
the transparent naively-anti-Trump moves by Ailes and other media probably also
actually helped Trump by these metrics. The question is can Trump keep
this going for about 8 months under very heavy scrutiny -- Schwarzenegger
had a much easier balancing act since less scrutiny, more rivals,
shorter timespan.
Trump could donate money to some of his rivals A in order to help them stay in
the race, just in case others of his rivals B threaten to eliminate the A's.
That option combined with the fact that now anonymous huge donations are fine,
should enable him to keep trying to control the airplane. The
dynamics are not something
entirely beyond his control.