Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance has dug in on his claim Haitians in an Ohio community are abducting and eating pets, even as the state’s GOP governor and other officials insist there is no evidence of such behavior.
But the salacious claim was easily debunked.
“The Vance campaign provided the Wall Street Journal with a police report to prove their claims about cat-eating Haitians in Springfield. The WSJ spoke to the woman who filed it, who said she later found her cat alive and well in her basement. She also apologized to her Haitian neighbors.” Justin Baragona posted to X with a link to a story in The Wall Street Journal.
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Five-thirty-eight is a joke. Who did Five-thirty-eight project to win in 2016? Yeah.
Who did professor Allan Lichtman predict to win in 2016? The winner! He uses a strange science technique that have retrospectively lined up with presidential winners since 1860. He has an impressive tract record of ten successful predictions - note he predicted Gore in 2000 but there is very persuasive evidence that Gore actually did win had the vote counts been honestly counted. Hence the Brooks Brothers riot that threw the election to the Supreme Court.
Republicans are now positioning for that to happen again in 2024.
This is the ignorant “I don’t understand statistics” take. If Nate Silver had given Clinton a 100% chance to win, then maybe you’d have some sort of point. But, in fact, the 538 projection gave Trump a much higher chance than most of the major election models, to the point that I remember Nate having to defend himself against angry people on Twitter over and over. He wrote an article ahead of the election pointing out that if an outcome has a 30% chance of happening, not only is it possible, but in fact you expect it to happen 3 in 10 times. I was very nervous on Election Day 2016 specifically because I had been closely following 538 projections.
This post is further evidence that everyone should be required to take a statistics course. It’s like saying “statistical probability says there is a 66.6% chance of me rolling this six-sided die and getting a 1, 2, 3, or 4, but I rolled a 5, so that model is WRONG!!”
I hope you can see how dumb that sounds.
Additionally, Lichtman referred to the popular vote in his book, essay on the topic (neither of which I assume you’ve read), and in all previous predictions. So he was actually wrong about his 2016 prediction given Trump lost the popular vote, much though Lichtman has tried to revise history since then.