Information cascades and voter perception in the 2016 election
November 9th, 2:30am New York city, Clinton supporters are told by the campaign manager to head home and await the results since they won’t be clear for a while, a soft concession one might argue. Gloom spread through the crowd as people started realizing the inevitable, Trump was winning. To many of them, this came as a shock and indeed some media outlets dubbed it the upset of the century. Here at Cornell, the news of Trump’s victory came as a shock to many, especially since being a liberal campus, most people were in support of Clinton. In the weeks and ultimately the days leading up to the election, most of Clinton’s supporters could not see anything but a Clinton victory. It was almost inevitable to them. The polls and most media outlets couldn’t agree more. While the polls might have been close in the days leading up to the election, most were skewed towards Clinton.
So what went wrong? How could the polls be wrong? They were supposed to be scientific and a representation of the country’s position. How could all the highly educated political pundits have gotten it so wrong? Some people on campus could have sworn that they had never even met a Trump supporter. So where did all the people who voted for him emerge from, and more importantly, where had they been hiding this entire time.
While there are many reasons for what happened on November 8th, one explanation is information cascades. First, since most of the “liberals” also have liberal friends and most if not all of their interactions are in liberal circles and in circles of like minded people, it soon becomes obvious how one might have never met a Trump supporter or interacted with one. Negative stories were shared on social media about each camp and they spread like wildfire – but mostly in the respective camps. Trump supporters saw plenty of negative articles about Hillary and vice versa. This led to a lot of fake news spreading among the said camps since each camp wanted oh so badly for their candidate to win that they would come up with anything that they thought would demonize the other side and further their agenda. While there may be some outliers, such stories only spread within the said camps and ended up solidifying the base as it were without necessarily gaining any more votes. I mean Hillary was stuck at about 46% and Trump about 44% for the longest time, while the numbers might have bounced back and forth, they did not veer off those figures by much. Clinton supporters wondering why she wasn’t winning by more, and Trump supporters might have been wondering the same (in his strongholds). In the end everyone was in their own bubble and it took the election to burst them.
Secondly, liberal media painted this really negative picture of a Trump supporter. Soon a lot of Clinton supporters’ social media feeds, started seeing a surge in videos and photos showing the worst of the Trump supporters. It was not long before it was considered almost insane to be a Trump supporter. Words like bigot, racist, white supremacist and others started flying around. I have to say, at one point, I also could not see why on earth someone would support Trump, even as a protest vote against Hillary, especially as a protest vote against Hillary. I think this environment led to the Bradley effect, Trump supporters not admitting that they are his supporters for fear of how they might be perceived by their very liberal, very pro Hillary, very anti Trump colleagues especially in campuses like ours. So everyone’s public opinion followed the crowd.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/15/facebook-fake-news-us-election-trump-clinton
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/us/politics/debunk-fake-news-election-day.html?_r=0