5.8 KiB
[Unsong] Interlude ש: Obama
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 50
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Created: 2017-01-26T03:51:06
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+18] (37 minutes later)
[deleted]
u/JoeBidenBot [+5] (37 minutes later)
Why don't you give some thanks this way
u/callmebrotherg [+8] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (an hour later)
Thanks, /u/JoeBidenBot
u/JoeBidenBot [+5] (an hour later)
How's it goin?
u/callmebrotherg [+5] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (an hour later)
It's going pretty good. How about you?
u/ulyssessword [+9] (3 hours later)
I'm curious how much of this is original research vs. ideas from the Obama = Anti-Christ camp.
u/holomanga [+6] (9 hours later)
It was also previously mentioned in his livejournal back in 2008.
u/aeschenkarnos [+1] (3 hours later)
Original research into their crazy ideas maybe? Here's an interesting website that claims that Donald (the Last) Trump is the Antichrist. Pareidolia and schizophrenia are a powerful combination.
u/thebishop8 [+5] (2 hours later)
The presidency is rarely held by democrats 3 terms in a row, someone even made an article about it: http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2013/01/historic-re-election-pattern-doesnt-favor-democrats-in-2016/.
Which makes me wonder if people are going to chalk up Trumps election as placebomancy.
u/Schuano [+3] (9 hours later)
What other elections besides Roosevelt and Reagan bush has either party had 3 in a row?
u/ZeroNihilist [+2] (10 hours later)
If each party has exactly 50% chance of winning each election, then 1 in 4 randomly chosen subsets of 3 should be all the same party (8 possible combinations, 2 of which are matching).
However, it's happened only twice for the Democrats, with Andrew Jackson (2 elections) and Martin Van Buren (1 election), then later with Franklin D. Roosevelt (4 elections).
I don't think the Democrats of the 1830s actually bear much resemblance to the modern ones (I seem to recall the Democrats were actually the conservative party back then), but even if they did it would be very different to the Republican situation.
FDR is also a special case, since he was likely elected because of his personality (and the term limits came in because of his popularity) and not transferrable to Democrats in general.
In fact, since Pierce/Buchanan in the 1850s, the only two consecutive Democrat Presidents are ones who took over after a death in office.
By contrast, the Republicans have had 4 elections (Grant×2, Hayes, Garfield), 3 elections (McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft), another 3 (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover), and one more 3 (Reagan×2, H.W. Bush).
So not only have the Republicans had multiple relatively recent runs of consecutive election wins, they've also had far more consecutive wins with different candidates.
Note that this means there are 8 total "runs of 3" Democrats or Republicans (a run of 4 elections is 2 distinct "runs of 3" by this metric), whereas there have been 47 elections since Andrew Jackson (including his terms).
We would expect to see 12 "runs of 3" if the election results were 50/50 and totally independent, so it's slightly more likely that there's a bias towards changing party affiliations, especially changing from Democrat to Republican. You could model this as a Markov chain if you wanted to work out what the actual probabilities were, I suppose.
u/MereInterest [+5] (21 hours later)
I put together a quick Monte Carlo simulation, assuming equal probabilities of each candidate in each election. With 47 elections, the number of "runs of 3" are plotted here. The mean is about 11.25, but the standard deviation is pretty wide. Since about 24% of the simulated runs of elections have 8 or fewer runs of 3, we don't have strong evidence in concluding that there is a bias.
u/thebishop8 [+1] (10 hours later)
Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren - Democratic - 1829-1841
Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur: Republican - 1869-1885
William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft: Republican - 1897-1909
Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover: Republican - 1921-1933
So it looks like Republican have held office for 3 terms in a row 5 times, while democrats have have done the same only twice.
u/LeifCarrotson [+2] (11 hours later)
Out of curiosity, why odd-numbered years for the timelines? I know the inauguration is in January, but the election is always in November of an even-numbered year (divisible by 4).
I'd typically say that Obama was president from 2008-2016.
u/thebishop8 [+2] (20 hours later)
I was using this wikipedia page as a reference, I guess they use inauguration day as the start date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States
To use your example of Obama, they put his start date as January 20th, 2009.
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+0] (a day later)
This is exactly wrong. It seems odd that you'd point out the discrepancy and not realize that you're on the wrong end of it.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
The American presidency is too small of a dataset to make meaningful statements about, particularly as things change so radically between elections. However if you look at the rest of the world, its very difficult for incumbent parties to stay in power for multiple terms, adn they tend to lose support over time