Month: November 2024

According to Rambam, it is natural for people to follow others when it comes to thoughts and wishes. To put it differently: people, on average, tend to be led. Rather than lead, let us just say. If one takes Rambam into account, one knows everything one needs to know about why pollsters, on the occasion of the 2024 US election, look pale to some (not everybody). Seemingly, they could not predict Trump's victory..? Is that so? Let us what the best forecasters said. Nate Silver is known, hardly requires an introduction. His magic? He aggregated all Trump vs Biden and Trump vs Harris polls he could lay his hands on, but, unlike other aggregators, like ‘Real Clear Politics’, he weighted them differentially. In weighting them he took into account not just the sample sizes but other characteristics that, in his eyes, could impact on the trend. Timing of surveys was taken into account, for example. This is not something that anyone...

Western Europe is an anti-Trump world. If there is a stable feature in the Western European politics, it is that: anti-Trumpism. For anyone who engaged in any political conversation on the topic in Europe since 2015, that much is clear. The ‘uncloseted’ pro-Trump individuals I personally came across in the UK since Trump’s appearance on the map of the world politics can still be counted in single digits. This well-entrenched European anti-Trumpism is seen pretty much nowhere else in the world. In 2017, very early in Trump’s first presidency, YouGov conducted a global survey of attitudes toward Donald Trump asking how confident respondents felt about Trump being a good US president. In every single Western European country featured in Figure 1, a majority said that they were not at all confident. It seems like the Northern European block of countries was especially pessimistic in relation to Trump , with Denmark and Sweden leading in prevalence of this sentiment. Majority of British...