By now everybody knows that Donald J. Trump won election as the 45th President of the United States. But did you know it looks like his challenger, Hillary Clinton, actually won more votes than him? Consider the data in this graphic I adapted from a New York Times article today, "Presidential Election Results: Donald J. Trump Wins":


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In the wake of Donald Trump's surprising electoral victory there is one prediction I'm glad I got wrong. I had started telling friends a week ago that if Trump won on Tuesday we'd see the financial markets drop by at least 5% on Wednesday ( Read more... )

There's a quote widely attributed to New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael after the 1972 presidential election, "How could Richard Nixon could have won? I don't know anybody who voted for him ( Read more... )

I mentioned the other day that I've been getting a lot of political mail this election season. As in snail mail.

About half the mail concerns various ballot propositions. "Props", as they're known for short, are California's form of of direct democracy where people are able to propose and vote directly on laws. I analyzed an example of why ballot ( Read more... )

I wrote last week about receiving vastly more political mailers this election season than ever before. That Wednesday we'd received 10 pieces and thought it was a lot. Today we got 15! And again, this is without a single one of them pertaining to the presidential race or our open US Senate seat. If those races were competitive in California our ( Read more... )

The term October Surprise is used in American baseball as well as American elections to describe an unexpected turn of events that can change the outcome of the race- for the championship or the presidency. So far this October we've had a few surprises in each ( Read more... )

Lately we've been getting a lot of political mailers in our mailbox. Today it was just 3 glossy flyers; yesterday it was 10. We've been averaging several a day for the past few weeks.

In the past I've lamented that my vote doesn't count. Politicians often have spent little time or money campaigning for my vote because the outcome in my area and my ( Read more... )

Over 100 years ago Mark Twain popularized the saying, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Statistics themselves don't lie, of course. The liars are the scoundrels who use them dishonestly. This week Eric Trump, son and campaign surrogate for presidential candidate Donald Trump, joined that liars club in a big way ( Read more... )

One of the first candidates of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, declared in 1858, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." He was referring to the tensions that led to the Civil War less than 3 years later. Today Republican candidate Donald Trump seems determined to prove that adage true... by declaring civil war on his own party ( Read more... )

Yesterday I posted an analysis of Monday night's first 2016 presidental debate, concluding with the opinion that Trump won. As promised I'll expand on that ( Read more... )