Communities Dominate Brands

A Thanksgiving Blog: 15 Years of TomiAhonen Consulting. Lets Celebrate a Few of My Clients

Its been 15 years. Gosh time flies. The American Thanksgiving weekend is now. It’s a holiday that Americans tend to spend with their families. In my business life, I’ve just passed my 15 year milestone for my company, TomiAhonen Consulting. I had done mobile consulting longer than that as I set up and ran Nokia’s Consulting Department and even before that, was employed as a ‘Management Consultant’ and in various other tech consulting positions or tasks. My total professional consulting background runs about two decades and I've spent exactly two decades in mobile and almost three decades professionally employed in tech. But my business - my consultancy business - that is 15 years old, which is quite an astonishing milestone to me, personally. It seems like only a few months ago, that I left Nokia to start my own business. So I wanted to note that, and Thanksgiving is actually a good moment to do that. Because of ‘family’.

Those of you reading this blog who have seen me live, at one of your company’s private sessions with me, heard me say it at the end: “You are now part of my family.” And this blog and my engagement with you is living proof that I stood by my word for 15 years. All of my paying clients, every single one of them, has come back ordering more paid work. Every single customer has been so satisfied they have bought more consulting from me. They keep coming back. I am so pleased that this is so, that I have been able to deliver some value to my clients. But you, my ‘family’ - you also know this. You know that I have reacted and responded and helped and offered assistance, regardless of whether that meant immediate ‘paid work’ for me, or not. I am not in this to try to become rich. I am in this out of the love of this industry and a chance to be in it. So on this Thanksgiving weekend, I will ‘spend time with my family’ and share some logos and brands and memories from just a few of my clients, some big, some small. So lets make this one of the rare picture essays on the CDB blog.

And let me make something very clear, I talk about my ‘reference customers’. What do I mean? I mean that they are the type of paying customer who has admitted in open that they are using or have used my consulting services. Sometimes that is very obvious, like if they have me chairing one of THEIR customer events, or delivering a keynote or guest speaker lecture at one of their events or doing publicity on their behalf such as appearing at their press conference as an industry expert etc. This is a remarkable honor and I am always thrilled when this happens. At other times its more random or obscure as a reference but its no less obvious. It happens for example when a CEO of a company mentions at a public conference seeing me about to do the conference keynote, that their company uses me too. That is tremendous and a great honor. Or it can be for example a Tweet, coming out from employees while we are having a private session with the company internally, which isn’t open to the public, but the Tweet does go out, and thus ‘reveals’ that the famous Tomi Ahonen is visiting with them, doing a private workshop. My reference customer list has grown so long, I have literally stopped keeping it current. Look at that list on this blog, here on the right in the column. That is an OLD list of my reference customers. Its pretty well a ‘Who’se Who’ of the tech, telecoms and media (and banking) space. When you have China Mobile and Vodafone and HP and Intel and Nokia and Ericsson and the BBC and the Economist and Bank of America and HSBC... and Google.. who else do you need? At this level, I really have stopped keeping count.

However, let me give you two metrics. I did count my TOTAL customers. Not my reference customers. All paying customers. And just among the Global Fortune 500 (ie for American readers, these are 500 companies so big they would all fit inside the Fortune 200) I have just under 1 in 10 of all of them as paying clients! Its most of the telcos and tech companies, but also banks, retail, travel etc. Nearly 1 in 10 of the 500 largest corporations on the planet have bought consulting services from me personally. And thats not counting the reports and forecasts that I have sold. Its my TIME personally. Look at that reference list again. If those companies say in public they use me, how many more are competitors to them, who also have used me, but have not yet said so in public?

And those who read this blog know, this industry is run by the operators. Its not a handset business, its not an apps business, its not the payments providers or internet service providers who are the core of this business. If you work in this industry, whatever country you are in, you tend to curse the fact that the mobile operators rule this industry. Half of all the revenues earned by the industry go directly into the pockets of the operators. The other half is divided by all others such as handset makers, network providers, service providers, and various content owners and bit-players like.. banks, TV broadcasters, advertisers, retailers etc. Of the 20 largest mobile operators on the planet, 16 have used my services! And of those 16, twelve have been kind enough to admit it in public, ie are ‘reference customers’ of mine. In order of their size from largest to smallest, my 12 giant reference customer telcos are: China Mobile, Vodafone, Axiata, Telefonica, Orange, Telenor, MTN, Singtel, Saudi Telecom, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile and MTS.

And may I add two very special customers of smaller than Top 20 size? NTT DoCoMo of Japan is the company that created this industry. They launched commercially the world’s first mobile network four years before most think it started by that Motorola phone and Ameritech in Chicago. NTT DoCoMo launched the world’s first 1G network back in 1979 in Tokyo. And they’ve kept innovating, including launching the world’s first commercial 3G network (and they will demo 5G at the Tokyo Olympics), and has done more to invent this mobile industry than any other company, from launching the mobile internet to the QR code to NFC to the mobile wallet. NTT DoCoMo is a reference customer of mine. The only other mobile operator of incredible pioneering stature, would be Elisa of Finland, who launched the world’s first digital mobile network ie the first 2G network, the first telco to launch mobile data commercially (which as we know, is SMS text messaging) and on it also the first mobile payments, first mobile downloaded content, the first mobile advertisement etc. Elisa is also yes, a reference customer of mine.

My customers have flown me to visit 78 countries on all six inhabited continents. I have literally seen the world, in the past 15 years with my clients. I have been privileged to live the life of a prince. I’ve been wined and dined in the best restaurants and seen wonders and experienced magical memories. But the point is, for a consultant to survive, you have to have a lasting return business and customers who are loyal. My clients have been loyal to me and I love them for it. So let me show just a few of their logos where we happened to capture me at one of their events or locations or some other weird instances. Obviously its almost never that I would get to take any pictures inside my customer facilities but sometimes we have pictures outside, or sometimes at an event they have arranged. And my apologies to all the other customers who are not here. You remember me and my visit. I was not trying to take pictures with everybody. I was always respectful but if anyone else wanted a picture with me, I was more than happy to do that. This collection of pictures is 'accident'. What pictures do I happen to have. Most of the pictures of me visiting you, those pictures you have and I never even saw them. And that is fine, I am not in this for the fame and fortune haha. But i do want to say thank you and to celebrate my clients.

So let me start with Malaysia. Its a funny thing but often in some country every local player wants me to visit them. Malaysia was one of those, early on, and I keep going back to Kuala Lumpur for ever more work. So here is a picture from 2005, very poor quality image shot on an early cameraphone but I had to take this picture, to celebrate this giant sign. Look at the scale of the giant welcoming banner at the hotel where this event was held:

Yes we had the event by Celcom the Malaysian telco (part of Axiata Group who have used me widely) and yes, they flew me all the way in from London to run a 3G workshop in Kuala Lumpur. And I was thrilled, it was my first visit to Malaysia and an exiting expanding time for my business. Since then I’ve done a lot of public and private events in Malaysia, including for example with these guys:




Maxis yes is another operator in Malaysia. Their HQ is at the Petronas Tower which was once the tallest building in the world. It is kind of cool to get to go do a job in such a building too (for a fan of architecture like I am). And while we are on Malaysia, how about this:




MITV was the local Malaysian cable TV operator part of Berjaya Group, which is now known as U Television, one of the country’s giant broadcasters (Berjaya is a multi industry conglomerate doing things like hotels and retail etc). But MiTV brought me in to run a workshop for them. It was one of the first broadcasters getting into the mobile space and started my expansion of the ‘digital convergence’ story into the 17 industries I now track.

The media work has kept expanding, so here I am in Brazil doing an event hosted by HSM the Brazilian business press giant for their clients in Sao Paulo.

And I have worked with advertisers all around the world, this is from an event with WPP and their agency MadHouse in India, in Mumbai.

I get brought to visit all sorts of cool places and see stuff most don’t get to see, and then sometimes they do offer me the chance to take a picture. Like this one, at Al Jazeera’s broadcast studio while the news was going out live (this was the English Language side). A TV broadcast setup is always a very fascinating and mysterious place to get to visit.

But most of my work is with telcos. Some of them are global giants like Telefonica, this is shot outside their HQ in Madrid Spain.

And at other times I work with a local telco, like this is NCell of Nepal in Kathmandu. I love my work and I love my clients.


 

Some of my work has been with industry tech companies that have brought me on long ‘rock concert tour’ type of series of events, so for example Blackberry had me visiting many of the countries of Latin America in a series of ‘Blackberry Connects with the Experts’ events. This is me speaking for Blackberry in Buenos Aires in Argentina

Other times its a client who does semi-regular events but has me coming with them to always new countries and areas to meet their clients, like Nokia Networks did with me at events literally on all six continents. Of all my pictures with Nokia, I like this picture from Egypt because it shows a little bit more of the background too, that you can see we are not just at a NokiaSiemens event but in the digital tech park in Cairo, visible in the background.

And then there are joint events and Ericsson, Swedes truly are the masters of collaboration, do these kinds of things, like this one with Telkomsel of Indonesia in Jakarta, where they flew me in to do the keynote part of the day. Ericsson has also flown me to visit much of the world.

And I do work a lot with the telcos. So its sometimes a local Telco like CNT of Ecuador. And again, this is typical of how I work. After I did my keynote at that event, I am sitting at the CNT stand, chatting with CNT customers and partners. I love my work!




And at other times its a regional operator like Tigo. Here I am in Honduras helping Tigo Media spread the story of the new opportunities in mobile media, advertising and payments. Gosh I love my job!




Its not only mobile operators, we also do work with regulators. I am here visiting with the Colombian regulator in Bogota.

And then smaller companies, this is visiting with Layar in Amsterdam.

And companies utterly outside of mobile or tech, but having an interest in our business. Here Tony Fish and I are doing a series of events in Britain about using mobile for the job search and recruitment industry, a series of events that was arranged by JobSite in the UK.

But it is telcos who use me. Lets do another country. How about South Africa. This is Vodacom and an old picture of me, back when I had only released my first book so this is year 2002 in Johannesburg.




So what about the competition? Yeah, sure, MTN has also used me in Johannesburg. This is a picture of me outside their offices.




And then the industry in South Africa? I do not count Huawei as an official reference customer (obviously they might be a private client, I won’t comment on that) but in a kind of way, they have ‘sponsored’ me so to speak.  They sponsored the MoMo event that flew me to Capetown to do the year-ending party for Mobile Monday. And gosh, I get to hug the three gorgeous Huawei-girls? I have the best job in the world!




Now most of the time what the events arrange are ‘pretty normal’ but sometimes there is something truly extraordinary. So Google had this cool mock-up for doing group pictures to play with the Google search home page. They had the blocks, and separate letters in the Google standard font and colors, that you could come with your team, each hold one of the letters, and have a custom Google search page mock-up you could use as your screen saver, etc. Lovely idea and one that only works if you’re haha Google. But me being the clown that I am, I had an idea, asked for a private picture and didn’t spell Google, I spelled...  007. So yeah, this was part of another 'rock tour' type of series of Google customer events we did all over Asia and this was in Taipei Taiwan.

And you guys know, I’m the formal guy who is always in a suit and tie, with my silly hats. So you never see me in T-shirts or blue jeans, not even if you spotted me at an airport lounge. But there have been a few cases where we have special attire for me. Lets start off with the Supreman outfit. Vodafone is the global operator who has used me at more of their global footprint offices for work, than any other telco. I’ve literally been seen at their HQ in Newbury England, to the exact opposite side of the world - Vodafone New Zealand. If you go any further flying out from England, past New Zealand, you’re starting to come back towards England again. Its literally to the opposite side of the plane. And yes, I cheated, I already showed you Vodacom who is/was part of the family. But this is a cool picture for the Vodafone superman costume. Its a cut-out at the Vodafone Turkey office where you can put your head through that hole and take that picture. Here’s my thanks to all of my many many Vodafriends in the vast Vodafamily. Vodafone had me highlight their first-ever mobile advertising event they held in the UK, at he Formula 1 McLaren Center, where we got to see all the iconic F1 cars including cars driven by Keke Rosberg, Mika Hakkinen and Kimi Raikkonen, the three Finnish F1 World Champions. I love my clients but some of them have loved me back even more than others, and gosh, Vodafone, you make me feel like Superman. I love you guys!

But again, my clients are not just the big giants. This is a gift from a small messaging provider company called SMSall out of Pakistan. A local traditional outfit that the Pakistani messaging company gave me as a gift. I was really touched. And yeah, in another world, this could be the way I travel the world, eh? Very stylish.

Talking about stylish? How about AWA the digital agency in Ecuador? They had gorgeous Andrea Serrano hosting a giant event where they gave the guest speakers a genuine Panama hat and yes, I got to hug Andrea... :-) I have the best job in the world!

Then there was Siemens, who gave me a lot of work out of their telecoms unit, before they decided to merge with Nokia telecoms, so two of my best clients became one best client. But one of the most memorable Siemens events we did, was in Oman, where we visited a private castle, saw a world champion bellydancer give a private performance and we did a short tour of the desert dressed as.. yes, beduins. Ah, what a life!

And then there is this handshake. The image is pretty darned red for a Tomi-always-in-a-suit picture, but yes. Ferrari jacket? In front a Ferrari poster? The picture of the nose of the F1 car shows in small print just about the name of which client this is about. If you know the man you know this is Jevgeni Kaspersky the CEO of Kaspersky Labs the anti virus software people out of Russia. This picture is taken in Shanghai when Kaspersky brought me as their guest to the F1 race and I had the full Ferrari hospitality treatment. I will never ever ever forget that weekend and I have a separate picture essay of that time of course on the blog. But yes, I have the best job in the world.




Not to be outdone, we have to also do this picture. There is no NTT DoCoMo in this picture but those who were in the early mobile internet industry all know this man as Mr NTT DoCoMo for outside of Japan, Voytek Siewierski, who signed most of the Western giant media brands starting right with Disney, onto NTT DoCoMo’s iMode service in Japan. Voytek ran NTT DoCoMo’s European operations a decade ago and he brought me to a private tour of the Renault F1 factory (where I saw 3D printing for the first time and was utterly amazed). They were a major sponsor of the Renault team as Fernando Alonso went onto win his first F1 Championship. Thank you NTT DoCoMo not just for your wonderful consulting business but for this incredible memory.

Lets do one more peculiar outfit. A hat? Where is my trademark hat? You’ll notice its a Telenor logo on that hat. Telenor as a group has used me almost as much as Vodafone but Telenor has a very special place in my heart. I left Nokia to start my own consultancy on October 1, 2001, to focus on the ‘3G’ mobile data opportunity. That was the day when the world’s first 3G network went live in Tokyo. One week later the Economist would publish a story calling the 3G mobile internet the largest gamble in the history of business enterprise and pointed out to many esteemed analysts who thought the industry might collapse and be ruined. So I was quite anxious about my prospects. Was I making the biggest mistake of my life? So on the second week of my new life, in London, I was chairing a mobile forecasting conference about 3G, and one of the speakers introduced himself saying “It’s such an honor to present at this conference which is chaired by Tomi Ahonen who has helped build our 3G strategy at Telenor.” Of course we knew each other but I had absolutely no idea he would say that. I had thought it would take me years to build a modest reputation 'schlepping around' the world trying to hussle up clients, and to try to build a reference customer portfolio that would show some respect. And instead, a nice man from Telenor said when my business was less than two weeks old, that yeah, we use Tomi Ahonen as our consultant! Now. What he meant, of course, was that they had used Nokia 3G Business Consulting to help them build their 3G business case (and not my new company that had just started), but who was I to interrupt a speaker doing his intro? Telenor became my first reference customer less than two weeks after I started my Consultancy and literally many months before they actually BOUGHT their first consulting services from me, haha. The picture? Is with Telenor affiliate in Bangladesh, Gremeenphone. Yes, I love all my customers but Telenor, you are something special! Tusen takk, tusen takk! Takk for i dag.

I do not have any pictures at all from most of my client visits. I sign NDA agreements and I try not to be intrusive and never take pictures unless told its ok. I do not want to show more than one picure from any client for which I have more than one picture, that would be kind of doubly-unfair to all the others for whom I have no pictures to share. So I just picked one representative picture out of those that I did have for multiple jobs with some client. And most, I have no pictures to share. But this picture essay was a trip down 15 years of memory lane. I truly have lived the life of a prince and have been treated to wonders and mysteries and secrets and plans and ideas that are amazing and have changed the world and will change the world.

A consultant is that only because of his clients. This Thanksgiving as I have passed 15 years of life as a consultant, I wanted to share a bit of the joy with ‘my family’ those who have used my paid consulting services in the past. Thank you! Thank you for the life you have given me. And now I have a surprise for you. This is only for my clients. Sorry, the rest of my blog readers and Twitter followes and book audiences, you have to accept, that the only reason there is still a Tomi Ahonen writing for you, is because those paying clients have sponsored this lifestyle for me. So for my clients only...

FOR THOSE READERS WHO ARE EMPLOYED BY MY CLIENTS

For those of you who are currently employed by any one of my hundreds of clients, I have a gift for all of you. Every single one of you, among my clients. If you have ever seen me at one of your company events, as an internal speaker or workshop host for any internal seminar or event or workshop or session or training - I have a gift for you. Whether you and I actually shook hands or not (many of you will remember, I try to shake everybody’s hand in our internal events, don’t I? And I had a gift for you even then, didn’t I?) I have a gift for you now. A gift that will make you also popular with your colleagues at work, and one that justifies the time you’ve spent with me here on this blog all those years.

If you have seen me present on your company’s behalf at a public event (like many that I described in this blog), so you know your company flew me in to do that event on your company’s behalf, that also counts. I was hired to help you. I don’t mean if you saw me at a public conference or doing a guest lecture at a university. I mean for example the branded events like Ericsson or Google or Nokia or Blackberry or Vodafone or Tigo events, where we do an event sponsored by your employer, to your clients like agencies or developers, etc. So yes, if you have seen me at an event your employer hired me to do, then you also count. This is for you.

EVEN MORE, if you read this blog (or follow me on Twitter) and you CURRENTLY are employed by a company that has once used me, even if you personally never saw me do that famous event when I was at your company HQ, but you’ve seen the video, or you have the slides, or you hear you boss talk about it all the time, then yes, you also count. This is meant for my CLIENTS. Anyone employed at one of my clients counts. A special treat, a gift for Thanksgiving.

Every one of my clients gets a special gift to celebrate 15 years of TomiAhonen Consulting. I have sent that gift to my contacts already. Odds are you, reading this blog today, have not YET received it via internal forwarding. You are entilted to it now. I will send it to you immediately and you can then forward it further and be a hero to your colleagues.

So, if you are employed by a company that has used my consulting services in the past, please contact me. I will send you the gift now directly and you can forward it to your collagues as well. I will need you to contact me either via Twitter or via email to tomi at tomiahonen dot com - and you will need to contact me via your work email address (not gmail or hotmail etc). Don’t worry, I am not harvesting email addresses, gosh, I don’t have time to even follow up on any ‘update’ emails anymore haha. But I will share this gift literally with every client and have started the big email blasts to my mailing lists. Someone in your organization has received  this gift already this week. But they might not know to send it to you... If you read this blog, and work for any company that has ever hired my work, you are entitled to that gift as well. So send me an email or send me a Tweet, and we will take it from there.

And to all my regular readers on this blog, don’t feel jealous. You should be thanking those paying customers for keeping me in business, they are the reason why this blog has survived 12 years and still has no advertising to annoy you, and we do no registration and I keep company with you here in the comments from time to time. I do plenty of nice free gifts for all my readers and fans, on this blog, on Twitter and at the public confences, but my clients, my paying customers. They get treated extra special, of course. So with that, let me end with one picture that I just love, as a picture capturing me and a moment. Its not from a customer event, but it could have been. I love that it is a MoMo event, that it has me in silhouette only, like a consultant should be, never in the bright lights. And the photograph captures my ending slide that said ‘Smile its Mobile Monday’. The guy in that hat. I have the best job in the world:

This is me in Capetown at the year-ending MoMo event a couple of years ago. Tomi, a glass of wine, talking about mobile, to a passionate MoMo crowd. A gorgeous profile picture by MoMoSouthAfrica. Thank you for the picture. Thank you to all my clients for a fabulous 15 years. If ever you needed another session from me, I will always be there for you. I love my life!

Handset Installed Base Passed Tipping Point. Now More than Half of All Mobile Phone Handsets in Use are Smartphones

We have passed a significant milestone for the planet's digital connectivity. As of last quarter, we passed the tipping point where now there are more smartphones in use, than dumbphones (aka 'featurephones'). The new sales of smartphones has been more than dumphones for three years but with the installed base, worldwide, it takes this long for the trends to catch up. And as smartphones now sell more than 4 out of every 5 new phones, this trend will go to its logical conclusion. In five years we're at the point where all new phones sold are smartphones; and by middle of the next decade, the last dumbphones will quietly disconnect from their networks for the last time.

To celebrate this milestone, lets take an early pair of preview graphics from the new edition of my mobile handset statistical volume, the TomiAhonen Phone Book. It is the sister volume to my popular TomiAhonen Almanac. The Almanac comes out every year (in the Spring). The Phone Book comes out every other year (even years, at the end of the year). So we are only weeks from the next Phone Book, and here lets do two graphics from it to celebrate that milestone.

NEW SALES OF MOBILE PHONE HANDSETS BY TYPE

So first lets do the new sales. As you can see from the graph, the year when more smartphones were sold than dumbphones was year 2013. The total sales of new handsets is about 1.9 Billion units. And this year nearly 80% of that will be smartphones. Here is the annual progression of the shift in new sales, light blue is dumbphones and red is smartphones. I have placed the dumbphone sales on the bottom to illustrate how its tech life cycle is coming to its natural end:



Graphic Source: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016
This graphic may be freely shared


And the three dips in the total numbers reflect the economic downturns we've seen. In 2001 the economic recession that had a delayed effect to the tech market. Then the 2009 'great Recession' and now the brief handset sales recession we saw in the first half of this year.

INSTALLED BASE OF HANDSETS BY TYPE

Then lets compare that to the shift in the installed base. Note I am now placing the smartphones to the bottom of the graph, to show the growth in a more easily observed way but with the same colors:

Graphic Source: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2016
This graphic may be freely shared


So yes, we will end the year with about 5.6 Billion mobile phone handsets in use, and the year ends with about 2.9 Billion smartphones in use (currently 2.8 Billion as I just reported in the Q3 market data). So the year ends with an achieved planetary migration rate of handsets from dumbphones to smartphones at 52%. It will reach 100% before the middle of the next decade.

So that's a nice milestone. (And obviously readers of this blog knew this was coming this year, we've known this for a while.) Remember, apps are not the future. Apps are just gaming and social media tech solutions. A mobile is far more than apps, do the mobile internet and messaging before you even think about any apps. Also please remember there are mobile subscriptions than phones (many people have multiple SIM cards they switch into the phone to switch networks and dual SIM phones are increasingly popular in many markets) ie the planet has more total active mobile accounts than humans alive; and that the unique ownership of mobile phones is less than the total handset installed base because some of us walk around with two phones in our pockets.. All that explained in the Almanac and the Phone Book statistics of course. But for the handset industry sales and installed base numbers, we passed a big milestone now.

For those who want more handset industry numbers, the must-have statistics volume is of course the TomiAhonen Phone Book. At nearly 200 pages and nearly 100 stats and graphics on everything from screen sizes to camera resolutions to regional splits of smartphone OS platform penetration rates etc, see the TomiAhonen Phone Book. It only costs 9.99 Euro so its by far the best value for any statistical volume also about the handset industry. And here is a special bonus. Anyone who buys the Phone Book now, will get both the current 2014 edition immediately, plus the 2016 edition when that ships in a few weeks, for the same low price. Isn't that a great value? See the table of contents and more here: TomiAhonen Phone Book 2014. (Don't worry if the page shows some older info, of course I ship the latest version..)

Q3 Smartphone Market Numbers, Top 10 brands, OS Wars, Installed Base (oh, and our brief smartphone market recession is already past)

Time for the Q3 Update to the Smartphone Market Share Wars. Its Samsung, Apple and the Chinese (ok, with an LG thrown in). The OS wars are long since won, done and dusted, owned by Google's Android. Migration rate of new sales of phones to smartphones is now past four of five new phones sold. A bit of good news, the smartphone market is back to growth again. After we had two quarters of unit sales decline, we now have again growth, so the smartphone market recession was brief and now past. For the full year this does mean we'll end up roughly flat with smartphone sales full calendar year 2016 vs 2015 (possibly down a few points). But growth suggests also we may well see a nice year in 2017 of healthy growth again.

Lets do our quarterly numbers: the Third Quarter Smartphone Market Unit Sales Top 10 are as follows:


BIGGEST SMARTPHONE MANUFACTURERS BY UNIT SALES IN Q3 2016

Rank . . . Manufacturer . Units . . . Market Share . Was Q2 2016 
1 (1) . . . Samsung . . . .  73.2 M . . 19.8% . . . . . . . ( 22.6% ) 
2 (2) . . . Apple  . . . . . . . 45.5 M . . 12.3% . . . . . . . ( 12.8% ) 
3 (3) . . . Huawei  . . . . . . 33.6 M . . . 9.1% . . . . . . . (   9.5% ) 
4 (4) . . . Oppo . . . . . . . . 23.9 M . . . 6.5% . . . . . . . (   5.7% )
5 (5) . . . Vivo . . . . . . . . . 19.8 M . . . 5.3% . . . . . . . (   4.8% ) 
6 (7) . . . Xiaomi . . . . . . .14.5 M . . . 3.9% . . . . . . .  (   3.7% )
7 (8) . . . Lenovo .  . . . . . 14.0 M . . . 3.8% . . . . . . . (   3.2% )
8 (9) . . . ZTE  . . . . . . . . 13.8 M . . . 3.7% . . . . . . . (   2.7% )
9 (6) . . . LG  . . . . . . . .  . 13.5 M . . . 3.6% . . . . . . . (   4.1% ) 
10 (10) . TCL/Alcatel . . .   9.1 M . . . 2.5% . . . . . . . (  2.2% ) 
Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109.5 M
TOTAL . . . . . . . . . . . .  370.4 M

Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis 21 Nov 2016, based on manufacturer and industry data
This table may be freely shared 


So while Samsung had its exploda-phone quarter and ended up cancelling the whole Note version in its Galaxy series (and separately now has also deadly washing machines exploding, its truly the Annus Horribilis for the boys and girls there in Gangnam) but Samsung continues on the top of our charts, as this is Apple's bottom of its annual market share fluctuation. Now we will see the typical strong Christmas sales for the iPhone and if Apple is lucky, they might catch up to a troubled Samsung for a quarter (not for a full year of course).. if they're lucky. Huawei in number three continues to be unassailed from the bottom and not a threat to the top two. Steady as she goes.

In the mid-tier we have a tight race for the fight for the sixth slot with four brands separated by a few hundred thousand total smartphones sold. We see LG dropping from 6th to ninth and the other three Chinese brands all move up one slot. Oppo and Vivo are doing well in the bottom of the Top 5 and expanding steadily abroad. TCL/Alcatel is the last brand in the Top 10 and at least the India domestic market brand rivals have had a bad time in their ultra-competitive market so I don't foresee Micromax or Karbonn or Lava jumping into the global Top 10 soon Meizu of the next tier Chinese brands is the likely next to pop into our Top 10 possibly.

In new sales we see more than four out of five total handsets sold today are smartphones. The migration rate to smartphones has slowed down somewhat so it looks like we'll hit year 2020 as the first year when at the end of the year, essentially no 'dumbphones' are sold anywhere on the planet (new production of dumbphones to be at about 1% or less of total handset market by Q4 of 2020). In terms of total market, the two quarters of handset sales decline are now past, in Q3 of 2016 the industry sold 5% more smartphones than Q3 of 2015. So we are now returning to (modest) growth. One quarter won't save our year, we'll end up with a flat or slightly down year. Last quarter's numbers are here.

As I said last quarter, we are now in a recession market (or we were). So the consumers are postponing purchases, holding onto their smartphones longer and they also buy cheaper, rather than more expensive smartphones. So we see all major premium brand smartphone makers with lower sales compared to the previous quarter like Apple, Samsung, LG. But the growing brands are discount/value brands like Vivo, Oppo and TCL/Alcatel. Expect the same effects to now linger for at least a quarter or two, as consumer sentiment in the economy will always lag the real indicators, ie consumers take a while to become convinced its safe to spend again..

In the OS wars, its pretty much all Android with iOS doing its bit at 12%. Windows is selling at a level below half a percent so we now round out Windows OS to zero. So 87% for Android, 12% for iOS, and less than 1% covers all others from Tizen to Windows to Sailfish etc.

For the installed base, we get this update:


INSTALLED BASE OF SMARTPHONES BY OPERATING SYSTEM AS OF 31 OCTOBER 2016

Rank . OS Platform . . . . Units . . . . Market share  Was Q2 2016
1 . . . . Android . . . . . . . . 2,211 M . . . 80 % . . . . . . ( 79 %)  
2 . . . . iOS  . . . . . . . . . . . . 523 M . . . 19 % . . . . . . ( 19 %) 
Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 M  . . . . 1 %
TOTAL Installed Base . 2,770 M smartphones (ie 2.8 Billion) in use at end of Q3, 2016

Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis 23 August 2016, based on manufacturer and industry data
This table may be freely shared 


So the world has 2.8 Billion smartphones in use. Essentially half of all phones in use globally today are now smartphones. 80% of them are Android based smartphones, 19% are iPhones. All other OS platforms now round off to 1% of the installed base. Even the last Windows brand loyalists are abandoning the brand of OS for their smartphones such as Lenovo announcing it won't bother with Win 10 smartphones (while they make Win 10 PCs).

A related note, the number of users of the internet from mobile phones has been greater than the users accessing from personal computers (including tablet PCs) for many years. We know that (although some analysts still seem surprised by it). Now the first data is reported that internet USAGE has shifted from PC to mobile. Statcounter has reported this moment (but they count tablets as 'mobile' so their number is not quite the moment we were waiting for). However as there are about 1.7 Billion PCs connected to the internet (including tablets) and over 3.0 Billion mobile phones (smart and dumb phones, including phablets but excluding tablets) and 45% of internet users access the internet at various times both from a mobile phone and a PC but 47% of the people on the planet who use the internet, have no PC and only access by a mobile phone... of COURSE the traffic is also going to migrate to mobile. Its inevitable. Facebook for example celebrated its moment just in October when more than half of FB traffic now comes from mobile (and duh, by far most of their revenues come from mobile).

Yeah, its 'Mobile mobile mobile' as I keep singing at my seminars and keynotes. And for all who need all the numbers (such as the number of internet access devices and users haha) - the best source of mobile industry stats is.. the TomiAhonen Almanac 2016. Get it here.

Quick Notes from Smartphone Wars - Kodak, Nintendo, Lenovo and Blaupunkt

A few quick notes from a few less-familiar players in smartphone wars. So yes, I'll do the math shortly on Q3 smartphone market (nothing exciting there, we know Samsung, Apple, Huawei are the top 3, the excitement is long gone from that 'race').

But first off, as I was doing some back-log Tweets of old tech news items to cover, on Twitter, today, I noticed a few interesting tidbits of smartphone-related news. These are all October-timeframe news items (so they're old but went to cover them anyway).

Kodak. Does a camera-looking smartphone that is very retro in its appearance, they call the Ektra. It is an old Kodak brand. The smarphone camera has a typical camera hump, the look is very similar of old cameras with a fake leather finish with steel-color plastic trim. Looks kinda interesting. Except it's a total nothing cameraphone. They went through all the trouble of making it look 'pretty' (if you think it does) and they ADDED THE HUMP but have no great camera functionality that comes with it. Its no better than your standard top-end smartphone cameras but now you have the ugly bump in the back! 

This is again the same dumb attitude to a smartphone as Blackberry did with its dumb square screen. You get all the down-sides and none of the benefits. Its like the fake 'Landau' tops that some US car makers put on their cars to make them LOOK like they had folding convertible roofs but they actually had solid steel roofs. And now Kodak wastes its brand on this nonsense trying to offer a 'smart looking' and 'real camera looking' smartphone - that they doesn't have a great camera! That's madness. And a huge wasted opportunity.

Well, talking about wasted opportunities, how about Nintendo? They have a new console coming in March called the Switch. And in it, they have a lovely touch-screen pocketable gaming device that has add-on side panels, that turn it into a proper gaming handheld device. And it seems like gosh, that's a brilliant Android smartphone. Except its NOT A PHONE !!! Its ONLY a tablet and now its just a stupid second device that means that anyone who buys it and carries this in their pocket ALSO HAS TO CARRY a phone!

Its the other dumb way to do a pocketable today. Gaming is already rushing full-speed to mobile (about half of total gaming revenues comes from mobile) and what do idiots at Nintendo - based in the country where this industry was born - do with it? They make it LOOK like a LARGE phablet smartphone but don't give us the smartphone functionality! Again. Idiots. This is dumb dumb dumb not understanding their customers and how we behave as consumers. Everybody is ADDICTED to mobile. If you put your gadget onto the mobile, it will ALWAYS be carried. It becomes the FIRST device. But if you make a SECOND slab tablet-wannabe out of your Nintendo Switch, its the SECOND device that MAY be carried sometimes. Thats the sure way to lose this war.

Ok. Lets end with the sad losers in smartphone hardware and turn to smart losers in smartphone software. What about Lenovo the computer guys who do Windows based laptops and who promised us a Windows based smarphone (most Lenovo smartphones of course run Android). This was one of those 'victories' that Microsoft had when they bribed manufacturers to promise to make Windows smartphones and I said no they won't. And now Lenovo has said, they won't bother to make Windows 10 based smartphones (while they do make Windows 10 based laptops, that should tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about how much Windows 10 is dead in mobile).

And lastly, Blaupunkt. Remember this German consumer brand? The Blue Dot, it is literally, blau punkt. Blue Dot. They have launched a series of smartphone accessories such as earphones and now are about to launch their first smartphone (on Android). It will at least be marketed in India, lets see where else it will be sold (in Germany perhaps). No word yet on its specs. Expect mid to high end of price range, I would think they use the premium brand image and position price-wise above the India local brands.

Ok, I'll get to the Q3 stats soon.

I was totally wrong about Trump and Hillary. And obviously this will be my last Trump-related blog article

I'm writing this at 01:00 AM East Coast time on the early morning of Wednesday 9 November. Trump has not yet been called the winner but he's ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona, its pretty clear he will win the election.

So first, congratulations to the supporters of Trump including all who visited my blog and who left comments. Secondly, I was totally wrong with my long-term forecasts that Hillary was going to win, and my actual 2016 election forecasts about Trump that he could not win. I was also totally wrong about my interpretation of the polling results where I thought the polls showed too weak a result for Hillary and she'd outperform the polling.

It is now clear that there was no women's vote surge (it actually seems from exit polling data that female voter turnout was DOWN compared to previous elections). It is also clear that the Get-Out-The-Vote effort by the Democrats was not relevant in this election and apparently their 'big data' based voter targeting system also did not deliver this election.

I hereby end my commentary of the US elections (for this cycle). I don't think there is any reason to bother to dig into that GOTV effort or its data systems either, but I may do some follow-up on that, perhaps. A possible reason is that the Republicans have enough of a counter to the Democrats' advantage from 2012 and there is rough parity in the data wars and the ground game. I may return to that topic but the other election coverage on this blog will now end.

I am sorry that my forecast(s) did not turn out. I was totally wrong. Wrong to a huge degree. I was far more wrong than most pollsters and other forecasters. With that, this is my blog so you have to accept this blog entry, I won't be having comments to this entry.

We will return to technology-related topics and there should be some smartphone market share data coming shortly, once I sleep past this election nightmare. But yeah, congrats to all Trump supporters. You were correct. It must feel extra sweet, because everbody - including me - was telling you he could not win. The Trump Train did in the end, achieve a victory. His fans, they have truly delivered for Donald Trump.

Ok My Final-Final Call. 12 Point Landslide for Hillary on Tuesday and Texas Goes Blue

Updated on election night: I was totally wrong. I am leaving the text here but overstriking it. I won't hide from the fact I made this forecast but I was clearly totally wrong.

 

I didn't want to do one more forecast. I had hoped that my last one from 3 weeks ago could stand. But... we had a 'semi' October surprise out of the FBI letter, that I yelled and screamed about that its a total nothingburger - and it was nothing. It was a letter about ANTHONY WIENER'S emails, not Hillary Clinton emails, and yet, idiot American media obsessed about those emails the last week and what happened? The attention on Trump's women and Russia connections and all other problems was swept aside.

That said. I still think it will be a double-digit election landslide. I think the numbers 'can' support this view but I recognize that as of 11PM (23:00 hours) East Coast time on Monday night, the average of the 11 last polls out either Sunday or Monday, say its a 4% race. Fair enough. Those 11 polls however, they have a huge amount of undecided voters still - 5.6% - and those have to be allocated.

So this is how I thought it through. The MEASUREMENT of the race today. Because of the FBI Director's silly letter, the race stabilized around 4% in the 4-way race and ended around there, in the polling (3.5% as the mathematical average of the 11 pollsters). I first eliminate the 3 pollsters who have an atrocious record of being pure propaganda pollsters and consistently showing silly results against what others find (Rasmussen, IBD/TIPP and Gravis). I kept Bloomberg while it also had a Republican bias, as they didn't issue ridiculous polls systematically. Of the remaining 8 polls, I took the average result, and then took the undecided count (5.4% as measured of these 8 pollsters). I allocated that 5.4% by a mix of the two 'Non-Trump' models I talked about earlier today - one is based on an even split 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 between Hillary, Johnson and Stein. This assumes many also hate Hillary so the two will vastly outperform their proportion. And the other method takes strict mathematical proportion of these 3 remaining choices (which greatly favors Hillary). I think its also likely that Hillary will get more than just a third of these last votes because of her powerful GOTV effort that the two others don't have.

But after the undecided vote is allocated, I come exactly between a race of 7% or 8% ie exactly 7.5%. And then I need to allocated the actual election-day performance gain to Hillary that I said before, would be worth 4%. That takes us to 11.5%. The last rounding off that I imagine comes from 'hidden Hillary-voting married Republicans' who would not dare admit to anyone they'll actually vote for Hillary. There is a gender gap already among Republicans favoring Hillary but I think it will be modestly bigger. That gives us the gap between Hillary and Trump when all votes are counted, around Friday of this week - to be 12%. Then the remaining votes I allocate to Johnson 6%, Stein 3% and others including McMullin 1%.

So I predict Tuesday election result will be:

Hillary 51%
Trump 39%
Johnson 6%
Stein 3%
Others 1%

This is less than my previous forecast that said 16% but the ending of the race did take off some of that top end. I yes, say Hillary will win by 12% tomorrow. I predict her victory is called at 11:01PM EST when California vote comes in. And of how far she goes, I predict she wins Texas, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina plus all states that Obama won in 2012. That means she also wins Ohio and Iowa where she is currently behind in in-state polling.

I further predict Hillary wins the one vote out of Nebraska, and McMullin wins Utah, so the EV vote will be 413 for Hillary, 119 for Trump and 6 EV votes for McMullin. Here is the map via Real Clear Politics of what I think tomorrow's election result will look like:




I'll say Senate goes 51/49 Democrat. Democrats hold Nevada, pick up Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and North Carolina. Florida Rubio seat will be far less than 1% and could go either way. I say he just holds his seat. House stays red but Democrats pick up 19 seats.

We will see tomorrow how this - quite wild - forecast turns out. I am convinced Hillary will outperform her polling and that these polls we have, do not quite adequately measure how far she is ahead. 12% election result. Double-digit enormous landslide. Trump kept to under 40% and Texas goes blue (Texas will be counted into the morning hours and it will be decided by less than 1%)

Live Poll Decypher Blog: Day Before Election (and Election Contest) (updated 4x)

This is a live blog to update any and all polls that come out in the last day before the election in the USA. I will help calculate out the undecided vote so we get to see what the 'final' opinion of that pollster is without the fudging of the undecided vote. I will also average the polls only for those out on the last two days (from Sunday), ie the 'final' polls (the RCP average looks also at older polls).


UDPDATED - 11:30PM EST (Reuters/Ipsos)

NOTE WE NOW HAVE A CONTEST. Free to enter, you can win copy of the book with 1001 jokes about Trump (see below)


In this blog I will give you the three scenarios of how the undecided vote may go, so you can pick which way to interpret the data (and I will average those three). As some pollsters have been more accurate than others this season, I will indicate which pollsters have a bias one way or the other (R is Republican bias, D is Democratic bias, W is wild fluctuations on both extremes). And with that, I will include two sets of the data, one for the 'good pollsters only' and the other with 'all pollsters including bad'. I will update this blog as new polls are released up to Tuesday if any are released then. So the numbers you will see, may change as more polls are added. When I first publish this at 2 PM EST (New York time) ie 14:00 for us rest-of-worlders, we had 9 pollsters out. I will include them in alphabetical order. Note the top set is the 'best pollsters' set. The bottom set is the 'all pollsters set'.

BEST POLLSTERS OPINION

I measured all 166 polls released of the 4-way race this season, against each other. There were some pollsters who systematically had a bias (like notorious Rasmussen, who sneakily grew their bias for Trump from 0% in July to 5% by October in gradual increments). Others had occasional nutty polls like CNN/ORC who once found a 5% lead for Trump when all rival pollsters in the past 10 previous or next polls all had the race for Hillary - etc. But there are pollsters who were never off the consensus view by 3% or more. They, the 'best set' of pollsters this season were:

CBS
CBS/NY Times
CNBC
Economist/YouGov
Fox
Guardian/Survey USA
GWU/Battleground
Pew
PPP

This is the 'gold standard'. These pollsters were never out with a poll that was a clear outlier. Out of this group we've had only 2 three pollsters out with polls yet. But almost certainly we will get more of them before the election. But lets take those two and see how they see the race:

GOLD STANDARD POLLSTER VIEW TO ELECTION 2016

Pollster . . . . . . . . Hillary . . Trump . . Johnson . . Stein . . Undecided . . . Raw Lead
CBS . . . . . . . . . . 45% . . . . 41% . . . 5% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 7% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
Economist/YG . . 45% . . . . 41% . . . 5% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 7% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
Fox . . . . . . . . . . . 48% . . . . 44% . . . 3% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 3% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
AVERAGE . . . . . 46.0% . . . 42.0%. . 4.3%  . . . . 2.0% . . . 5.7% . . . . . . . Hillary 4.0%

UNDECIDED VOTER ALLOCATION MODEL:
Most pro-Trump scenario: 4.2% Race for Hillary
Most pro-Hillary scenario: 9.0% Race for Hillary
Most pro-Others scenario: 5.9% Race for Hillary
Average of 3 scenarios: 6.4% Race for Hillary

Table by TomiAhonen Consulting 7 November 2016, based on raw data at RealClearPolitics
This table may be freely shared

You can allocate the undecideds based on which model you think applies. In any normal year the most reasonable way to allocate undecideds is by proportional allocation (exact percent of what they earned, applied to the last undecided voter). This gives us the most-Trump Scenario. It assumes there is no bias against any voters picking Trump and they are seriously considering the undecided choice between all four remaining candidates.

But as Trump is so toxic, the most disliked politician ever to run, its possible that he has reached a ceiling and has loyal fans, but is unable to convert those who remain undecided. Then its possible that this year we have an unusual allocation of the undecided vote, only among the three other candidates. A kind of 'never Trump' choice between Hillary, Johnson and Stein. If that is the case, we then still have two alternatives. Do they go NOW proportionately among those three (ie Hillary takes the lion's share of the undecideds) - and I call this the most-Hillary scenario; or do the undecideds also strongly dislike Hillary and the undecided vote splits evenly three-ways between Hillary, Johnson and Stein. This I call the most Pro-Others scenario.

You can pick whichever scenario you think is most suitable but note, there are still undecided voters measured by the pollsters, and they HAVE to go somewhere, either pick one of these four candidates or not vote or vote for a write-in candidate, and whatever they do, it impacts the race. So you can pick the model you think is most likely. And its possible some voters are willing to consider Trump, most not; and some who don't want Trump are willing to consider Hillary but others can't stomach her either, and then the average of the three models is a possible outcome too. I have thus included the average of the three as your last scenario option. Note that a poll that says the race is a 4% race, but has 5% undecided - is not a 4% race. Those undecideds have to go somewhere. And thus, pick the sceneario you want.

Now. There have been 27 pollsters who have done a poll of the 4-way race this year. We should get well more than a dozen of them out this year. And to be fair, lets also do the full pollster view, all polls published on Sunday or after, of the race, including those with a bias one way or the other. So here is the first second edition with the first 9 10 11 first 12 polls included (including the two in the above). The 'all pollster' average view is this:

ALL 4-WAY POLLSTER VIEW TO ELECTION 2016

Pollster . . . . . . . . Hillary . . Trump . . Johnson . . Stein . . Undecided . . . Raw Lead
ABC/WaPo (W) . . 47% . . . . 43% . . . 4% . . . . . 2% . . . . 4% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
Bloomberg (R) . . 44% . . . . 41% . . . 4% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 9% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 3%
CBS . . . . . . . . . . 45% . . . . 41% . . . 5% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 7% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
Economist/YG . . 45% . . . . 41% . . . 5% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 7% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
Fox . . . . . . . . . . . 48% . . . . 44% . . . 3% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 3% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
Gravis (R) . . . . . . 47% . . . . 43% . . . 3% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 5% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
IBD/TIPP (R) . . . 41% . . . . . 43% . . . 6% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 8% . . . . . . . . . Trump 2%
Monmouth (D) . . 50% . . . . . 44% . . . 4% . . . . . . 1% . . . . 1% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 6%
NBC/SM (D) . . . . 47% . . . . . 41% . . . 6% . . . . . . 3% . . . . 3% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 6%
NBC/WSJ (D) . . . 44% . . . . . 40%  . . 6% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 8% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
Rasmussen (R) . 45% . . . . . 43% . . . 4% . . . . . . 2% . .  . 6% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 2%
Reuters/Ipsos(D) 42% . . . . . 39% . . . 6% . . . . . . 3%. . . 10% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 3%
AVERAGE . . . . . 45.4% . . . 41.9%. . 4.7%  . . . . 2.0% . . . 6.0% . . . . . . . Hillary 3.5%
Note: (R) means Republican-leaning pollster in 2016 polls; (D) means Democrat-leaning 
pollster and (W) means Wildly swinging to both sides

UNDECIDED VOTER ALLOCATION MODEL:
Most pro-Trump scenario: 3.7% Race for Hillary
Most pro-Hillary scenario: 8.4% Race for Hillary
Most pro-Others scenario: 5.5% Race for Hillary
Average of 3 scenarios: 5.9% Race for Hillary

Table by TomiAhonen Consulting 7 November 2016, based on raw data at RealClearPolitics
This table may be freely shared

The above tables will be updated as more polls come in. Note while the mathematical average of the polls say 3.5% race that is BEFORE the undecided voters are allocated. When undecided voters are allocated these pollster average views suggest a race between 3.7% Hillary victory up to 8.4% Hillary victory and very likely it would be around 5.9% based on these polls.

Now one note of caution. This is the consensus pollster average view of the race as of Monday night. There are five factors very difficult to measure in polling, that are likely in play in 2016. These 5 factors are likely to influence the election BEYOND what those polls say.

FIVE FACTORS NOT CAUGHT BY POLLING (AT ALL, OR ONLY PARTIALLY MEASURED)

Female voter surge. Many of the pollsters have used a standard voter turnout model, of 53% women, 47% men as its been in many election cycles very consistently for more than a decade. If the voter turnout does end up with 53% women, that is fine. There are strong signs, however, out of voter registration data and early voting data, plus anecdotal evidence, that women's vote has surged this year. More women are voting than normal, partly because a woman is on top of the ticket for the first time, and perhaps also driven by the strongly sexist rhetoric and behavior of the rival candidate, Mr Trump. If women turn out more, and the women's vote on Tuesday ends up at 54% or 55% of the vote, that means Hillary (and Jill Stein) are likely to outperform what the polls measured. IF however, a given pollster has used a female/male mix of more women than men, greater than 53/47, that factor might be already measured. I will try to discover this and indicate it.

Hispanic voter surge. Many of the pollsters have had a hard time contacting Hispanic voter or they have deliberately used polling samples to count Hispanic vote at a modest level, similar to the 2012 Hispanic voter proportion of the total vote. There is strong evidence both from voter registrations and from early voter data, and a lot of Hispanic-specific polling, that there is actually a surge in Hispanic vote. If the pollster has not increased their Hispanic voter ratio to reflect this, that would suggest their model under-counts Hillary support. The historic level of HIspanic vote in 2012 was 10%. This year its likely to be 12% to 14%. I will try to discover this and indicate it.

The Democratic party's Get-Out-The-Vote machine was built on a radical bleeding-edge technology type in 2012, by the Obama re-election team to great cost and with great effort. That machine has not been matched by the Republicans and it is now being used by Hillary's team. In 2012 this blog calculated that the GOTV effort advantage by Obama was worth 4% of the final election, and turned a 1% nail-biter election as measured on election-eve polling, into a 5% blowout by Obama on election day. This GOTV effort is likely to play a big part again this year and would favor Hillary; it could favor her GREATLY. I believe in rough terms its advantage this year would yield 4% ABOVE WHAT THE POLLING is indicating. BUT note, there is overlap with the effect of GOTV and the above female voter surge, and the Hispanic voter surge.

There is likely a voter enthusiasm/turnout DECREASE from 2012, in two significant demographics: Youth vote will likely be down, and Black vote will likely be down. These are already fully measured in the polls and thus they should not impact the MEASUREMENT and any error between polling and the final outcome. So these two factors are 'baked in'.

On the Republican side, there is a hope/wish by the Trump supporters of a secret Trump voter demographic, called the 'Shy Trump Supporter' who hides from his Trump support but will vote for Trump. They believe/hope that these Shy Trump voters have lied to pollsters and therefore, there will be a greater Trump turnout than measured in the polls. This would be a variation of the famous Bradley Effect measured in California (which however, went into the opposite direction, they said they were FOR Bradley and then voted against him) but there is some measurement of this phenomenon for the general election suggesting its likely a myth. We will not know until election day, but there is no real evidence this is happening. It may be. It could cause the Trump vote to be under-counted in the polling.

Lastly there is the phenomenon of the Secret Hillary voting Female Republican. There is a clear gender gap measured in polling, and Hillary steals more Republican voters than Trump steals Democrat voters (it happens in all elections but in most elections this is rougly balanced out; 2008 was an exception when many Republicans voted against Sarah Palin on the ticket). But apart from the measured gender gap, there may be secretive Hillary voters hiding among wives and daughters of Republican strong male household heads - husbands and fathers. The sexism and sexual abuse that Trump has brought to the front, has introduced a new rift in the Republican party among its core rural religious and very 'loyal' voter base. The wives of many Republicans are protesting. Some are in households where the husband or father has 'iron rule' and usually gets to boss the family around. And the husband/father may THINK that his wife/daugher will vote for Trump. She may SAY she will but because of the sexism or sexual abuse that Trump has exposed (that often also underlies the Republican party and even some religious leaders) may drive such female voters to secretly take revenge in the ballot box and vote for Hillary instead. Anecdotally there is some evidence of such voters but no measurement of their size, and it would be impossible to measure by polling. Note - its likely that this will not be even measure in the Exit Poll. If there is a significant discrepancy with the Exit Poll result and Hillary final vote being somehow more than Exit Polls said - this is the most likely reason why. It might be a meaningful percent of total vote, could be 1% or 2% that were Republican women, secretly voting for Hillary even as they never admit this to anyone, perhaps fearing a violent reaction by the man heading the household.

The first 3 of these 5 factors are real, they have been measured, and most pollsters do not factor the top two into their polls; the third item - the GOTV effort cannot be measured in polling, it only can be witnessed after it has been deployed on Tuesday. The last two items are far more wishful thinking and with very scant if any evidence and may be far smaller in their total impact to the race. Four of the five factors help Hillary (one was measured to add 4% to the final outcome, in 2012) and only one would work in the opposite direction and the only published estimate of its possible size said it is so slight, it would mean less than 1% effect on the final outcome.

I personally believe that these last 5 factors will contribute so much to the election that it will be a double-digit landslide for Hillary. I am still awaiting all the final polls to come in. It may end up around 12% as the final election result as my guess, when these 'unmeasurable' factors are added to the polling consensus view. I will let you know. I will have my final guess before midnight USA on Monday (EST/NY Time East Coast time) based on what all polls had come in by then.


UPDATE - I have now made my final-final forecast out at 11PM (EST) and yes, I said 12% result. See full final forecast here.



PARTISAN POLLSTER VIEWS

Do we want the partisan pollster views? Of course we do! So lets take those pollsters who saw this race always with red-colored glasses, so far three four pollsters with a Republican-leaning bias have given their final count. Lets take their average:

REPUBLICAN-LEANING 4-WAY POLLSTER VIEW TO ELECTION 2016

Pollster . . . . . . . . Hillary . . Trump . . Johnson . . Stein . . Undecided . . . Raw Lead
Bloomberg (R) . . 44% . . . . 41% . . . 4% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 9% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 3%
Gravis (R) . . . . . . 47% . . . . 43% . . . 3% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 5% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
IBD/TIPP (R) . . . 41% . . . . . 43% . . . 6% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 8% . . . . . . . . . Trump 2%
Rasmussen (R) . 45% . . . . . 43% . . . 4% . . . . . . 2% . .  . 6% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 2%
AVERAGE . . . . . 44.3% . . . 42.5%. . 4.3%  . . . . 2.0% . . . 7.0% . . . . . . . Hillary 1.8%
Note: (R) means Republican-leaning pollster in 2016 polls; (D) means Democrat-leaning 
pollster and (W) means Wildly swinging to both sides

UNDECIDED VOTER ALLOCATION MODEL:
Most pro-Trump scenario: 1.9% Race for Hillary
Most pro-Hillary scenario: 7.6% Race for Hillary
Most pro-Others scenario: 4.1% Race for Hillary
Average of 3 scenarios: 4.5% Race for Hillary

Table by TomiAhonen Consulting 7 November 2016, based on raw data at RealClearPolitics
This table may be freely shared

Note that they find Trump the same as all others, but these three Republican-leaning pollsters find Hillary's support far lower. They then throw those voters into the undecided pile which to this group is far higher. The outcome after undecideds are allocated, by the average of these pro-Republican pollsters, sees the race from anywhere at 2% for Hillary (bigger win than Bush-Gore election of 2000), up to 8% for Hillary (better than Obama-McCain election of 2012). Then lets do the Democratic-leaning pollsters to the 'other side' of the story

DEMOCRAT-LEANING 4-WAY POLLSTER VIEW TO ELECTION 2016

Pollster . . . . . . . . Hillary . . Trump . . Johnson . . Stein . . Undecided . . . Raw Lead
Monmouth (D) . . 50% . . . . . 44% . . . 4% . . . . . . 1% . . . . 1% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 6%
NBC/SM (D) . . . . 47% . . . . . 41% . . . 6% . . . . . . 3% . . . . 3% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 6%
NBC/WSJ (D) . . . 44% . . . . . 40%  . . 6% . . . . . . 2% . . . . 8% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 4%
Reuters/Ipsos(D) 42% . . . . . 39% . . . 6% . . . . . . 3%. . . 10% . . . . . . . . . Hillary 3%
AVERAGE . . . . . 45.8% . . . 41.0%. . 5.5%  . . . . 2.3% . . . 5.5% . . . . . . . Hillary 4.8%
Note: (R) means Republican-leaning pollster in 2016 polls; (D) means Democrat-leaning 
pollster and (W) means Wildly swinging to both sides

UNDECIDED VOTER ALLOCATION MODEL:
Most pro-Trump scenario: 5.0% Race for Hillary
Most pro-Hillary scenario: 9.1% Race for Hillary
Most pro-Others scenario: 6.6% Race for Hillary
Average of 3 scenarios: 6.9% Race for Hillary

Table by TomiAhonen Consulting 7 November 2016, based on raw data at RealClearPolitics
This table may be freely shared

The pro-D pollsters see far less undecided voters and are allocating those who recently made up their minds, now to Hillary but Trump gets no gains vs all pollster average view. The range of outcomes after undecideds are allocated is far more narrow, as a clear Hillary win from from 5% (same as Obama vs Romney of 2012) to 9% (better than Obama vs McCain of 2008) by the average of these pro-D pollsters.

CONTEST - WIN THE JOKE BOOK

So we have a free contest. Guess the final outcome of the election. You are allowed one entry but you may change it up to the moment polls close on Tuesday at 7pm Eastern Standard Time (New York Time) ie when the first polls close. You have to enter via Twitter. To enter, just make your guess - what percent do you think the final election outcome will be. Do this to precision of one percent, so no decimal points. Will the election be say 48% for Hillary and 44% for Trump. PLUS also, enter the Electoral College vote, how many states will they win. the EV vote totals 538. So for example right now the Real Clear Politics average suggests 301EV for Hillary and 237EV for Trump. Send an open Tweet to me - so start the Tweet with @tomiahonen - and then include those two sets of numbers. And include a link to THIS BLOG ARTICLE. So you can cut-and-paste this link: https://t.co/BmuEWfUlva

Thats it. I will have two winning results. Whoever gets the win percentage correctly - wins the ebook with 1001 Trump jokes. And whoever wins the EV vote correctly also wins the ebook. I will allow multiple winners, so don't worry if someone else has picked 'your' number, enter anyway, you both can win. And you don't have to guess BOTH correctly (the EV vote is difficult to figure out if you haven't played with the math) but you can win on either. If you want to play with the states, to see what your EV vote opinion could be, here is the link to RCP page where you can build your own scenario, to see, what if Hillary wins Pennsylvania, and Trump wins Ohio... 

Now, I need you to enter via Twitter, sorry. So while you can discuss it also here in the comments, we won't accept entries from this blog because those on Twitter will not see those entries here from the blog. Sorry. So please do join via Twitter. But send in your guess, what will the result be. The winner gets the ebook. And you have a little over 24 hours to guess. This contest ends when the first polls close in the USA on Tuesday evening.

IF YOU WOULD RATHER LAUGH THAN DO MATH

And finally a plug. I released my joke book. 1001 jokes about Donald Trump. I call it TRUMP vs The Seventh Steve. It runs 253 pages, has actually 1,052 jokes about Trump and 1,434 jokes in total including other, non-Trump jokes like those of other Republicans. If you would rather laugh at Trump than see polling about him, why not buy the ebook, it only costs $4.99. And yes, here is the page for TRUMP vs The Seventh Steve.

Data Wars: Trump Bought Battery-Powered Toy Car for Toddlers; Hillary Runs Up-Engined Race Car (and a TEAM to run it). Perhaps the Biggest Lopsided Advantage of 2016

This blog has been updated on the election night. Its clear there was no election-altering gain to Democrats so this blog is moot. I will leave the words here but am overstiking them, as no longer relevant.

 

The Communities Dominate blog is the best source for politics-related data systems in use. It has the only published case study comparing the old method and the new, tested against each other, with all the metrics. Its about the only reason anyone in politics might have heard of the CDB blog or ‘that Tomi Ahonen’. But everybody in the data room of Hillary’s team and the few data guys on Trump’s team knows me and has read this blog. this is the definitive blog for data systems used in politics. The analysis of data systems in politics, written on this blog, are referenced in many published books about politics!

You are right now reading some utter bullshit by people from one side, and getting total radio silence from the other side. Those willing to speak are throwing about big words trying to impress like ‘Big Data’ and 'psychographics' and '100 point propensity scores'.

They are BULLSHITTING YOU. This is THE DEFINITIVE BLOG about those topics, at least where it relates to political campaigns. So this blog article on 4 November is just a brief commentary now, before Election Day, to clarify some basics. Let me start with an analogy

Putting bigger sails onto a sailship does not magically convert that ship into a steamship. It would need radical redesign, including adding a big heavy engine and its fuel, and punching a hole into the boat, through which the propeller shaft has to come, to put the propeller onto your ship. But a steam ship not only can move faster than fastest sailships, a steamship can do what sailships cannot, such as steam directly against he wind, and steam at full speed even when there is no wind at all.

Trump has put bigger sails on a sailship. But in the last election, Obama introduced the world’s first steamship and it utterly crushed Romney’s sailship (that was the fastest sailship ever made). And now, in the interim four years, Hillary has put a bigger ENGINE in Obama’s steamship. That is the data wars. Trump used an obsolete design but put bigger sails on it. Hillary took the bleeding edge design, and put an even better engine into it. This is not going to be close. The data wars will contribute 4% to Hillary’s victory margin on November 8.

ITS AN ARMS RACE

The data system wars are an ‘arms race’. Both sides are building their systems (or WERE building it, now four days from the election, they are just running them). We saw the systems used to powerful effect in 2004 (Howard Dean campaign). Then to DEVASTATING effect in 2008 (Obama vs McCain). The data wars DECIDED the race in 2012. (Obama vs Romney). The data system disadvantage by Republicans was so immense and decisive, it was listed as one of the most important things the GOP has to change for 2016, or else it could not win the election.

This is not what some obscure tech author of 12 books tells you on his silly blog. This what Reince Priebus wrote in the 2012 Republican Party ‘Autopsy’ report of Mitt Romney’s loss. They had been OUTCLASSED by Obama’s data machine. A machine that we calculated on this blog in 2012, right after the election - that it delivered 4 out of every 5 votes that Obama won. And Obama’s margin of victory was 5%. But the LAST POLLING of the weekend and Monday just before election day, said it was a 1% race. The WHOLE ELECTION MARGIN of victory for Obama - was generated with the data machine. The whole election margin! The Data machine pushed a 1% election nail-biter, into a clear dominating crushing victory of 5% for Obama. The data machine did that. I reported it on this blog, calculated all the math. The Republican Autopsy said they were outclassed and lost because of the data wars. The US campaigns KNOW this. The Ted Cruz campaign said the advantage of a modern data system is between 2.5% and 5% on election day. They essentially CONFIRMED MY MATH. All data engineers in US politics know this. The data nerds. And they all have read my blog.

TWO RIVAL TECHNOLOGIES

The two systems are not built on the same principle. Its like comparing a car to an airplane. Both have an engine. Both can move people. Except one is far faster and can do things the other cannot. A car cannot drive over the seas. An airplane can fly over the ocean exactly as easily as flying over a corn field. What Romney had, was a good car. What Obama had was the first airplane.

What Trump team now tries to tell us, is that they have a ‘Big Data’ system. BULLSHIT. Its a traditional psychographic scoring model. Like all database systems of the past. It makes guesses about us. It does that very well (they bought the service from a British company called Cambridge Analytica, paying at least 5 million for their data and analytics). What Trump has is a car with an airplane engine. It can't fly.

The Trump system is LARGE. That is not what ‘Big’ means in Big Data. Big Data is a revolutionary database methodology by which every indivdual consumer is individually measured, and typically CONTACTED. Cambridge Analytica has 230 US million voters in its database. It has NOT contacted them. It has NOT MEASURED their performance. It has run 100,000 surveys of voters to get profiles. And then assigns profiles and segments this database based on their magazine subscriptions and cable TV subscriptions and credit card scores and their address, age, educational background and voter registration etc information. That is not Big Data. That is traditional database of a consumer population. Its just very large.

Big Data contacts EACH VOTER INDIVIDUALLY. Yes. Each voter individually. That is what Obama did, that was so radical in 2012. Not that they had 100 point scores for each voter. That was a tech detail, like yes, a car has an engine and an airplane has an engine, and both engines have horsepower. You could run a car on an airplane engine or an airplane on a car engine (back in the early days of propeller-driven planes obviously, not jet engines). Both have an engine. But if you put an airplane engine in a car, it will not suddely FLY. You have to BUILD an AIRPLANE to fly, with wings, etc.

So the METHOD that gets us to ‘Big Data’ is precise technical issue, to do something on consumer customer base ever attempted before 2012. To go through the trouble of contacting every consumer (ie voter for an election). Seeing what they said on Facebook, did they download the YouTube video, did they forward it. To call that voter, talk to them. To go visit their home, talk to them. To send emails and SMS text messages to those voters. CONTACT THEM PERSONALLY. That is Big Data.

That was the bleeding edge of 2012. Nobody has this. Facebook, Google, Amazon, they did not bave Big Data until 2012, the Obama team decided to create this system (now many bleeding edge companies are doing similar systems, obviously).

Romney built a traditional database (like Trump now). It was built on the best data insights of the Republican party, and the known performance of the 2008 Obama system. It was built with a huge data staff of 30 data professionals, cost 50 million dollars, built with Microsoft. It was a rush-project done in six months. It was finished so close to election day, they didn’t have time to test it (the system failed in North Carolina on Election Day where they had to run blind).

Obama built a bleeding-edge data concept on something never done in politics before. Even though they WON the data wars of 2008. They decided to do something radical. They spent 100 million dollars and had a staff that reached 120 data scientists and built a whole array of systems over 18 months. The Obama system was built with Google, Facebook and Amazon as tech partners. It has a massively parallel database system spread over HP servers and resulted in one of the 20 largest databases ON THE PLANET. Just built for one election.

We measured the performance of the two on this blog. The Romney system DID PERFORM. It BOOSTED Republican turnout over what John McCain had in 2008. The Romney team did believe they had won the election, powered by this powerful new data machine. Except it was a total useless toy effort, compared with what Obama’s machine. If Romney had managed to build a better Bow-and-Arrow weapon, Obama had introduced the rifle. If Romney had built a faster propeller-driven airplane, Obama introduced the jet engine. If Romney built a faster sailship, Obama introduced the steamship. If Romney made a stronger explosive dynamite, Obama detonated the first atom bomb. There is NO CONTEST between these two methods.

The two are night-and-day. The Obama system is 4.5 TIMES BETTER. Not 4.5 PERCENT better (in a year when the election was decided by 5%). It was not 45% better. the Obama machine is 4.5 TIMES BETTER. 350% better. Understand. One side has something that is not 100% better or 200% better than your system. Its something that is 350% better than yours. When you spend a million dollars on a TV ad campaign that boosts your voter turnout by 10,000 votes. And the other side uses their system to run a better TV ad campaign - that also costs 1 million dollars, but they get 45,000 votes!!! 4.5 time better! 350% better!.

That is what Obama built in 2012. That is what was called ‘Narwhal’. That was using the bleeding-edge tech called Big Data. I wrote several blogs about it then and did a total analysis of the two systems compared head-to-head, written for MARKETING people, in other industries than politics, that I published here in early 2015. This is THE DEFINITIVE article about what is Big Data and why its the new era in databases. Why it makes psychographics like used by Romney (and now Trump) obsolete.

Obsolete.

VERY VERY SIMPLE EXPLANATION

Lets take a very simple example for you. I am a 56 year old white Finnish man. So, if you use Trump’s method, psychographics, you will find from my demographic data that I am a man. Thus you won’t need to target ads for women, like selling tampons, to me. It does work. Its far better than nothing. If also will find out that I am unmarried. No need to send ads about babyfood to me. And yes, there is very smart analytics that would detect, out of my purchase or web browsing behavior if suddenly I was expecting a baby haha (if say I was expecting suddenly to become a first-time father). Yes. the predictive modeling can be remarkably accurate.

Now the problems. I’m a 56 year old white man. From Finland. If you profile me, against any other 56 year old white Finnish MEN, anywhere on the planet, you will find they wear blue jeans. Finnish men hate to dress up ‘formally’. We are notorious about that. Some of the sloppiest dressers of Europe (some would not be so kind, and just say THE most sloppiest dressers - Finnish men, the women are gorgeous but us Finnish men, gosh). Ok. So he’s older, pretty affluent, lets target Tomi’s clothing ads as premium-brand blue jeans (and T-shirts and casual wear). This is what psychographics gets you. Those who have seen me, they know. Tomi doesn’t OWN blue jeans. I wear tailored suits and tailored WHITE shirts with loud (some say ugly) silk ties. Even on holidays and on vacations. I am so not-Finnish-male about this. Your psychogrphic model fails you on the EXCEPTIONS to the rules. Like in this case, what I happen to like to wear. For MOST men it will score them correctly. Me? They get wrong every time.

You think that's an isolated example? Take my music. I’m 56 years old, white guy, from Finland. What is my music taste. It HAS to be rock music. Hard rock, heavy metal. ZZ Top, Rolling Stones, Status Quo, Led Zeppelin, etc. Has to be. Or it could be classical music or jazz. But very likely rock. Heavy metal rock music. Essentially all of my peers of my age like that kind of music. Me? My fave music is rap music. Its ‘black’ music that is for YOUNGER generations. There are plenty of rap music fans (and a rap music scene) in Finland but they are all younger. Nobody age 56 in Finland ‘likes’ rap music! But I do. And I fell in love with rap BEFORE I moved to live in New York City. I was a fan of the music from its birth when most said rap is not music. Again the psychographics systems work in most cases, but fail with the exceptions.

A FASTER SAILSHIP OR REVOLUTIONARY STEAMSHIP

Psychographics works. It is FAR better than nothing. Romney built the most powerful database system the Republicans had ever had. They used it for targeting Get-Out-The-Voter efforts in 2012, with the help of 30 data professionals and Microsoft - and they truly built the state-of-the-art of psychographics. And it worked.

Except it is obsolete. They are building the most streamlined oceanliner sailship, when Obama has introduced steamships that can forge straight against the wind, and even run full speed when there is a lull and no wind at all. The steamship killed the sailing ships as commercial vessels (but sailing then became a leisure activity). That is the kind of revolution we saw in 2012. And the Republican party admitted it. They knew they had been defeated and knew they had to build a system like Obama’s.

Well. What did Trump do? He said he doesn’t believe in data. He ran most of his primary race without data. After he won his nomination, the Cruz team showed Trump what all they could do, and when Manafort came in to provide some sane professional campaign elements to Trump, he did get convinced to do some datamining. So he hired Cambridge Analytica, who has what? A Big Data system? No. Cambridge Analytica is a psychographic database segmentation system exactly like Romney’s except its a bit more modern. It is very good. But Trump is again doing a faster sailship. It’s because Trump is a cheapskate and learned that he’d have to pay 100 million dollars to do anything near what Obama had and Hillary now has. So its far easier to just outsource that work to the British and get their insights.

What was it used for? It was used to target TV ads, online ads, and help in the fund-raising targeting (the Nigerian money scam type of emails that Trump sends to his gullible supporters). Yeah. It works for that.

BUT IN HILLARYLAND

Meanwhile. What has Hillary done? She has vastly expanded the Big Data based system she has, the old Obama 2012 system now far upgraded and expanded. It drives every activity they do. So one of the details. They run 1,000 simulations every night on their system of the election. Not one simulation every night. Not ten. Not one hundred. They run 1,000 simulations every night! They test EVERYTHING. Now that Melania talked about bullying, what is the impact to the voters without any response? What if we run the Trump is a bully ad? What if we run the Hillary is the woman standing up against bullies. What if we run Melania’s words on a new experimental ad against TRUMP. And so forth. They run 1,000 simulations every night. This is a campaign run on DATA. Not on intuition or gut feeling or what pops into Trump’s head any moment. Hillary’s team is the most professional campaign in history. Driven by data.

So how do they get their data into the system? They run a DAILY POLL that is MASSIVE. They run over 100,000 surveys EVERY DAY. They run over 10,000 interviews in EVERY BATTLEGROUND STATE every day. That is perfect precision on the voter feeling on any issue, in every state, to every conveivable voting demographic. But that is only the ‘thermometer’. Is there a problem. Out of the survey snapshots, every day, they run a deeper analysis on whatever is right now in the news, the FBI letter, Trump’s Goon Squad of Voter Intimidation, or Melania promising to end bullying or Trump and his Moscow money connection etc. They have DETAILED surveys every night on a fracition of the total survey size, at about 1 in 10. So they still get instant and statistically very accurate feedback on ALL issues in politics, daily.

While we’re on polls. Trump fired his pollster and isn’t paying his bills for polling work already done. He owes his pollster 750,000 dollars. That would get you about one survey in the 13 battlegound states of the kind that Hillary runs EVERY DAY. But the Trump internal poll told him the truth, he has lost the election (which is why Trump got so morose back when this dawned on him, and then his response is to kill the messenger so don’t pay the pollster).

EVERY VOTER IS INDIVIDUALLY CONTACTED

Sorry, back to Hillary. After the polling, they do IN-PERSON TALKS to every voter (in battleground states). Sometimes they knock on a door, they see the Trump-Pence yard sign, and the door is opened by an older man who says, “I’m voting for Trump and so is my wife, go away or I will call the police!” And thats the length of that discussion. They STILL CONTACTED the voter, PERSONALLY. Its absolutely vital for Big Data process, to know every consumer, whether they love you or hate you. (I talk about this in my big primer about this process).

So they visit some homes. And others they contact by telephone or email or Facebook or SMS text message. And then they constantly refine and expand that knowledge base. Who is a supporter, has forwarded YouTube videos (on EITHER SIDE)? Who attended their rally where Bernie Sanders spoke? Who is volunteering time, who has contributed money, etc etc etc? Not just voters, they also have ineligble voters who are supporters, like say kids too young to vote. Or a spouce who is not a US citizen, etc. Can still be a Hillary supporter. There was a story that they found women who were secretly Hillary supporters, who were married to Trump-supporting Republican husbands - who themselves were Republican women - but now will vote for Hillary. The Hillary team knows EVERY VOTER (in battleground states) including these hidden voters. In 2012 the Obama team contacted undecided voters on average 5 TIMES PERSONALLY in the battleground states! That is how you win elections! 

On election day, Hillary knows every voter who is registered to vote. They know the registered voters who have already voted early. They know of registered voters who have not voted yet, if they are Hillary supporters. They know what those voters do, if they are decided, and what issues matter to them. The Hillary team even knows which methods of contact that given individual voter prefers for CONTACT. Do they want to be contacted by phone and talk to someone or contacted via email or Facebook or - most popular of course, is SMS text messaging. Hillary’s process will not waste any calls or contacts on people who have already voted, or who are not registered, or who don’t like Hillary and would vote for Trump.

LIKE STEALING CANDY FROM A BABY

Trump has psychographic voter profiles and segments. They have decided that because Tomi Ahonen is a 56 year old white man who lives in a rich part of town, he is a likely Republican voter. And they target me for a get-out-the-voter effort. Even as (if I was a US citizen) they would then activate a voter FOR THE OTHER SIDE. The Hillary team knows NOT TO prod the enemy, don’t incite them to go and vote. If its a Trump supporter, don’t prod them. The Hillary team can target every single one of the 200 million registered voters in the USA, individually and personally. Yes. true target to the precision of one (in battleground states). They will not bother with that precision for practical reasons (a practical resolution of segmentation is 10,000 segments, it means that every single person is targeted so ‘uniquely’ that in their lifetime they are unlikely to get to know another person of that identical segment). If 130 million people vote, and say 70 million vote for Hillary, it means they will end up doing about granularity to individual segments of about 7,000 voters. Any TV or radio or Facebook or YouTube or Twitter campaign that gets to about 7,000 voters - IS WORTH DOING by the Hillary machine!

Trump does one standard TV ad in all 13 battleground states, that reaches 20 million voters. Hillary’s machine can get 2,900 SEPARATE marketing messages AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED to target 2,900 varieties of are you white or black or Hispanic or Asian-American; are you woman or man; are you gay or straight; are you Christian or Jewish or Mormon or Muslim or atheist or Hindu or Buddhist; are you in college or retired or working; are you unemployed, are you ex-military, are you without healthcare insurance, etc etc etc. The Hillary system is a radar. The Trump system is a binoculars. Yes you can aim your cannon better with binoculars than without but if you have radar, you will always win.

Ok. I wanted to put this blog out here for now. What Trump has is an updated version of what failed for Romney in 2012. What Hillary has is a VASTLY expanded and refined version of the new way to do political targeting. She will get AT LEAST 4% more votes because of this system on Tuesday, over what the last polls tell us. At least 4% more votes. If the average of polls for this weekend say, say its a 7% election for Hillary, then add 4% and Hillary will win by 11%. Take this to the bank. We have MEASURED it and if you don’t believe it, read these blogs. The math is all there.

Definitive Study of Obama vs Romney data wars 2012

Application of Big Data lesson of 2012 applied to modern marketing in 2015 (if you have not read about these matters, start here, its not too technical)

The Latest Insights and Updates to the Data Wars of 2012, written in late 2015

I will of course write a full analysis of this race after we get the details, after the election is over. The data machine is the biggest engine driving Hillary’s victory. It is a ‘secret weapon’. Some of the info of 2012 was so well hidden, the RESPONSE to Obama 2012 built by say Ted Cruz in 2015, was not strong enough to deal with what Hillary has now, because they hid part of their ability back then. 

But this blog will get you all the data we can find, and crunch the numbers again, and we’ll see how big the impact of the data advantage was for the Democrats. Its about time the Republicans stop playing around with toys, and get serious and build a proper Big Data system, not a toy using psychographics. And what Cambridge Analytics has, is a large database yes, its not Big Data. Its nowhere close. Its just the old thing we saw with Romney, with a bit more precision. A better sailship. A faster propeller-driven airplane. What Trump is driving is children’s toy car, the battery-driven kind of ‘Ferrari’ the child can sit in and drive in the yard. Hillary has a proper RACE CAR. And its now been fine-tuned and has an even more powerful engine. Oh, and she has a TEAM of engineers to keep it in peak performance. And now these two will race each other. I am laughing so hard. Psychographics? That is what Trump bought? In 2016? After the Romney Autopsy? I am laughing hysterically...

Panic Reset: Is There A Tightening Race or Is The Race TOTALLY Settled? Hillary vs Trump is.. Totally Settled

In the past few days there have been several ... questionable .. polls out. And suddenly the Democrats are utterly in panic mode. And the Republicans feel that they suddenly have a chance to win the election. Ha. Ha. Ha. No there is no race. This is so settled, and so long ago. No, there is no movement. The race is not getting tighter.

How do we know? There is a consistent daily tracking poll that has measured this race for months. Its the Reuters daily tracking poll. Their latest data shows to November 1, so it includes the full effect of the nonsense FBI letter too. This poll is a 5 day daily tracker poll, so they take the last 5 days of polls (doing usually a bit over 200 interviews per day, weekends included, every day. They remove the oldest poll - 6 days ago, adding the latest one, and thus every day the last 5 days are counted. A rolling poll. ) And if we take their data for every consecutive 5 day period, we get nice over 1,000 interview polls of Likely Voters, very confident statistically, having less than 3% margin of error. And then, if we take the last TEN such 5-day intervals, we have 10 consecutive polls that run back 50 days, back to mid September, before the first debate. And lets see how the race looks like. This is the SAME pollster, every 5 days, no people here are duplicated, this is 10 consecutive polls each large enough to have over 1,000 interviews at least, and a margin of error of under 3%. In total it covers 14,000 interviews. This is what the race looks like:






Yes. There is NO MOVEMENT. Those are about as flat lines as are statistically possible. The fluctuation is more TYPICAL STATISTICAL ERROR than any measured movement. This picture hides THREE DEBATES !!! That Hillary won, by HUGE margins. But no movement. There is p*ssygate, barely visible. There is the FBI letter now. And no. This race is NOT getting tight. It is NOT a 1% race. Its a SEVEN POINT RACE. Its what its been all along. Over the past 50 days if anything, the race has WIDENED slightly, from a 5% race at the early part, to now a 7% race. Over the past 50 days, it averages as a 6% race. This is not a close contest. Romney and Obama were at 1% this time in 2012. McCain lost to Obama by 7% in 2008. Hillary is ahead by 7%. The race is not suddenly getting close. The only reason the RCP average now shows a tighter race, is because Republican propaganda pollsters like Rasmussen have bogus polls out. If the race was getting tight, this poll would show it. It isn't showing ANY movement. Once we get the normal reliable pollsters out with their next (final) polls, the race will be back to the same normal 7% its been all along!

These candidates are the best known candidates ever to run. The voters know fully well who they are and if they can vote for them. Trump is at a 40% ceiling and cannot penetrate that. Hillary will get somewhere above it but she isn't popular either. And this is not a contest. Trump has lost this election already. The voters knew in September they don't want the orange-faced, phony-hair small-fingered vulgarian.

The major pollsters will run their final polls this weekend. We'll get at least a dozen polls, could be as many as 20. THEY will tell us that this race is not close. But if the race was getting close this daily-run poll at Reuters would show it. Look at that picture. Its as flat as a heart monitor of a patient that has died. There is no race. Trump has lost this election. He lost it long ago.

Countdown to the End of Trump: Seven Days Left. Seven Days. One Week To Go, and Then He's Gone!

One Week to the End of Trump. Lets do the second-to-last Countdown to his demise. As I've already written, as Trump did not get a knock-out punch in the final debate (actually lost that one too, so he went 0 for 3 in his debates against Hillary) this election has been over for weeks now. Hillary Clinton leads the average of polling by a modest amount (due to some very questionable polls just out), but her lead in the Electoral College map is that massive, that she is coasting to an easy win. An easy win. Don't be fooled by those eager to keep the suspense going for another week. This race is done. Stick a fork in it. But again, its the weekly Countdown, so lets do the numbers.

Hillary is still up up in the RCP average by 2.2%. (That was 5.5% last week, before that 7.1%, 4.8%, 3.7%, 1.6%, 1.1%, 2.2%, 3.4% in RCP average by the 4-way polls of previous weeks). The mathematical average of those weekly averages is 3.5%. Never once has Hillary been behind on our weekly review of the latest polling averages. Not once. Both in 2008 and in 2012, Obama was behind McCain and Romney within the last 2 months. Hillary has NEVER been behind in the RCP average. There have been Over the past two months the RCP average has told is its a 4% race. To be precise, EVERY weekly average of the polling is consistent with the election being a 4.1% race. EVERY average including today, is CONSISTENT with a race that is 4.1% plus/minus 3% margin of error which is what a typical 1,000 person survey would have as its margin-of-error (many of the polls are SMALLER with larger margins of error). Today's 2.2% average is CONSISTENT with a 4.1% race. And the past two months is NOT consistent with a 2.2% race and absolutely not a 1% Race or Trump being in the lead.

Don't be fooled by a stupid ABC/Wapo tracking poll that has bizarre turnout level of white voters in this year of all years, when Hispanic voters are registering at record numbers and where all voter enthusiasm at the early voting is saying, there is a big surge of new voters, especially minority voters coming in. Don't be fooled. This race is not tight. The polling is consistent with a race result like Obama vs Romney in 2012. That nonsense FBI letter is not tumbling the race either. Its a letter about ANTHONY WIENER's emails. Anthony isn't even running for office, he was disgraced for his penis pictures and he resigned. He isn't working for Hillary either. So its a bullshit story peddled by the media who are desperate to have an exciting election to sell their news programming. They don't want to tell readers that this election is over. So we get nonsense polling like ABC/Wapo thinking only white voters will show up. And while we are on bizarre polling, lets mention Rasmussen. There have been 87 polls out about the 4-way race in the two months of September and October. 87 polls. Only 8 have said that Trump is in the lead. Only 8 polls. Thats yes, one in ten polls has said Trump is ahead. Do you go with the 90% odds or do you take odds of 10%?

But wait. Of those 8 polls that said Trump is ahead? FOUR of the eight are by ONE POLLSTER, Rasmussen! 23 professional pollsters have surveyed the race at least once in the past two months, 18 of them have never found any Trump lead. Four have each found once a Trump lead but those four pollsters have issued 13 OTHER polls in the SAME PERIOD that say Hillary is ahead. EACH of those pollsters who once found a slight Trump lead, has ALSO counted the race several times to be a Hillary lead. But 18 pollsters have consistently found NO Trump lead. And then there is bizarre Rasmussen who thinks the race is tied. HALF of their polls say Trump is ahead! Their biggest polled lead for Trump is -5% !!! When nobody else has even once found it more than -2% Trump and 18% pollsters have not found once a Trump lead at all. Rasmussen has a consistent 3.5% 'house effect' where they show a result that is favorable to the Republicans. It is consistent over the years, its calculated out by pollster specialist sites like 538 Blog where Nate Silver says the same thing. Rasmussen is a Republican Party propaganda pollster. They do not release their cross-tabs, so we cannot see what kind of bizarre mix of interviews they had (maybe they didn't ask any blacks, that would explain their nutty results) but yeah. If you want to believe Rasmussen, then they think its a 0.5% race based on 8 polls they have released. And their lastest polls says its a TIE. Now if you accept Rasmussen has a house bias in favor of Republicans, that is worth 3.5%, then yeah, Rasmussen is TELLING us the race is .. 3.5% for Hillary. This is NOT a close race. Do not be fooled by idiots who can't do math.

The actual race is for the Electoral College ie 'the map'. RCP Electoral College Map (no toss-ups) shows 305 EV Votes (was 333, 322, 340, 322, 292, 294, 311, 340) for Hillary, and 233 (205, 216, 198, 216, 246, 244, 227 and 198) EV votes for Trump. 270 is needed to win. Since last week the swingiest of the states this cycle, Florida has dipped back into Trump. So now compared against the last election (Obama-Romney 2012) Trump is up in 3 states (Florida, Ohio and Iowa) while Hillary is up in 2 states (North Carolina and Arizona). The AVERAGE of those snapshots gives 307 EV votes for Hillary and 231 for Trump. This election is very close to the Romney Obama 2012 election which ended as 333 EV votes for Obama vs 206 EV votes for Romney. Yes Hillary is poised to win every state that Obama won against Romney, but gaining two, and losing three, for a net loss of one state. The closest analogy to this race, currently, is the Obama-Romney election of 2012 - EXCEPT if you go compare the two races side-by-side, Hillary is FAR AHEAD of where Obama was at this point in time, seven days before election day! Do not be fooled by the bullshit. This race is not close.

The TV ad wars have Trump trying several hail-Mary gambits of utterly silly spending this late, in states that were never competitive to begin with, and would have needed serious effort for months. He's now up in Wisconsin, Colorado and Virginia, all states that are far too far gone to flip at this stage. The top 4 states are in exactly the same sequence by both sides, they agree by TV ad spending that Florida is biggest, then Ohio, then Pennsylvania and then North Carolina. Both sides AGREE that this is the real battleground. They show it by their TV ad spending. And Hillary is up in 2 of the four by in-state polling averages, and Trump would need to sweep all four to become President. So the latest polling in the four states that decide the race:

Florida - Trump leads by 1.0% (last week Hillary led by 0.4%, 3.6%, 2.4%, 2.8%, previous weeks Trump led by 0.5%, 0.9%, 0.2%, earlier Hillary led by 3.6%)
North Carolina - Hillary leads by 2.6% (last week Hillary led by 2.0%, 2.7%, 2.6%, 1.8%, Trump by 1.4%, earlier weeks Hillary by 0.6%, 0.7%, 0.3%)
Ohio - Trump leads by 2.5% (last week was 1.0%, 0.7%, then Hillary led by 0.5%, Trump led by 3.8%, 2.0%, 2.0%, previously Hillary led by 1.8%, and 3.3%)
Pennsylvania - Hillary leads by 6.0% (was 4.8%, 6.8%, 8.6%, 2.1%, 1.8%, 6.2%, 5.8% and 6.0%)

NOTE - Trump has to win ALL FOUR of these four states. He has never led in Pennsylvania since we started the count-down. You might make up a point or maybe two points in one week. But there is no way Trump makes up for a 6.0% deficit in Pennsylvania in the remaining week. There is not enough time. And Trump isn't even TRYING to win PA. He is campaigning in New Mexico (not a battleground state), Wisconsin (hopelessly lost at least as badly as Pennsylvania) and Michigan (which also is not a battleground state). Trump isn't even FIGHTING for Pennsylvania anymore. He knows he has lost it. He already says, he might lose. It won't be that bad, if he loses. Their internal polling has shown the same results as Nate Silver on 538 blog. He KNOWS he has lost this election. And he is NOT TRYING his hardest, on the last week, to flip Pennsylvania. Instead he goes on a glory tour of those states where his fans will adore him for seven more days, and not listen to the local Republicans in despair in the battleground states who cry about how they are losing this election.

Understand, even if Trump somehow pulled a miracle and won Florida, Ohio, flipped North Carolina where he is behind by 2.6% and flipped Pennsylvania where Trump is behind by 6.0% - he STILL WOULD LOSE. Because now Hillary is so far ahead, she is AHEAD IN ARIZONA. A red state that voted for Romney by a ten percent margin in 2012!!! Yes, Trump HAD to win all four of those battleground states to have a chance to become President, but he couldn't lose ANY states that Romney won. He is now behind in Arizona! Hillary is up by 0.6% in AZ, plus spending a million dollars in TV ads and has 130 full-time staff in Arizona to turn-out-the-vote. Trump? Has zero staff in Arizona. He can't afford it. He can't even afford to fly his plane, he has to hump to some of his events by bus. Trump TOTAL paid staff nationwide is 300. Hillary has 130 paid staff turning out a Democratic victory out of a RED STATE !!!

This race is over. Hillary Clinton is padding her lead now. She wants to pull a bigger win than Obama did in 2012. She is AHEAD at this point in polling, versus where Obama was seven days out, against Romney!  Do not be fooled, this race is not close! 

Lets talk briefly about the campaigns. Hillary has the largest surrogate army in history, starting with the most popular ex-President alive, Bill Clinton. She has the most popular sitting President in HISTORY, more popular at this point in time than yes, even Ronald Reagan. Hillary has Barack Obama campaigning for her. She has the most popular POLITICIAN in the country, even more popular than her popular husband, Michelle Obama campaigning for Hillary. She has her main rival, Bernie Sanders campaigning for her. She has VP Joe Biden, she has Senator Elizabeth Warren, she has her popular daughter Chelsea Clinton, she has Planned Parenthood boss popular left wing activist Cecile Richards. She has the whole Democratic caucus of Senators, Governors, Members of the House, and past politicians all stumping for her. Her campaign covers ALL of the battleground states - and yet, this week, Hillary has made time to do an event in... ARIZONA. Personally! She has sent her surrogates there before. Now she is so far ahead, she can afford to go campaign one day in AZ. Help turn that state blue.

How is Trump? The oldest living Republican President, George HW Bush, is not campaigning for Trump. He won't vote for Trump. He is voting for Hillary! The other living Republican President, George Dimwit Bush, is also not campaigning for Trump. He won't vote for Trump either. Both of their popular Republican wives - are voting for Hillary! Barbara Bush said its an idiot Republican woman who wuold vote for Trump. Thats a nice endorsement there, if you can get it, Mr Trump. And the past Republican nominee? Mitt Romney? Is not stomping for Trump. He won't even vote for Trump. The previous Republican nominee, John McCain is not willing to appear with Trump nor talk about Trump. The latest VP choice and top-ranked Republican, Paul Ryan, has not once appeared at a campaign event with Trump. But his rivals, John Kasich just was in the news, that he voted, and didn't vote for Trump. Neither Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio are willing to appear with Trump. But over 100 past or present Republicans have said in public that they cannot vote for Trump and will be voting for Hillary instead! Trump only has his VP, Mike Pence running with him on the campaign trail and Pence seems to be running a parallel universe campaign, with an imaginary running mate. He is constantly at odds with Trump's positions. That is not how you win elections.

But lets get into the weeds. The Get-Out-The-Vote effort. Trump was in Nevada. In Las Vegas. He held a rally there. And part of the reason was to drive up early voting numbers (a symbolic effort because the math is not there to win a campaign in the modern era by holding mass rallies only), but Trump of course thinks of 'Make America Great AGAIN' so like many 70-year-old foolish white angry men, he wants to go back to a more serene time when women, blacks and Hispanics 'knew their place'. But at least as a SYMBOLIC act, to try to boost early voting, yes, he claimed to run the event to help early voting. Except the event was nowhere near a polling place. So Trump? Mr Liar, he said, oh, we have busses. There were no busses. By the time his desperately flailing team had rounded up some busses, only dozens of the thousands of Trump supporters were still left, to take to a polling place. A TOTAL WASTED EFFORT.

Lets compare. Hillary runs PARALLEL superstar events, often highlighted by rock stars from Katy Perry and Beyonce to Cher and Bruce Springsteen. She's had the Star Trek TV show casts support her, as she has had the West Wing TV show cast support her. They are running a show. When Obama or Michelle show up, they get 10,000 person audiences. SEPARATE from Hillary's own audiences or those of her VP Tim Caine or those of Senator Elizabeth Warren or Senator Bernie Sanders etc. But then what do they DO? At those events, Hillary's team has PAID STAFF circulating among the audience, collecting VOLUNTEERS. They are immediately signed up. What do those voluteers then do? They get SCRIPTS online, to make calls supporting Hillary. They gets telephone pitch scripts TAILORED to their backrgounds. So a nurse, gets a story about what Hillary does for healthcare. A retired teacher gets a script about education and about retirement. And so forth. What is more, the volunteers get PHONE NUMBERS of SIMILAR voters!!! A nurse calls a nurse, an Iraq War veteran calls an Iraq War veteran, a car factory worker calls a car factory worker, etc. This is the supercharged version of the most powerful volunteer army in any election, ever made, that Obama built in 2012. And that army reached 300,000 total volunteers. Hillary will far exceed that number. She will probably hit half a million volunteers. By contrast, so you understand, Romney in 2012 had 40,000 volunteers which was by far the largest number the Republican party had ever managed to collect.

So you say, thats what Trump is also doing. Or is it? Trump has not had full-time staff collecting names of volunteers! Yes. He sees crowds in thousands, even exceeding 10,000 often, and he has no systematic effort to collect their names or get them to sign up as volunteers. He started to collect names - by SIGN-UP SHEET. So yes, not actual people, but circulating papers in the crowd (because Trump is so cheap, he doesn't have a big organization to do this kind of things. There is no staff in most states, and Trump himself, doesn't even WANT to go visit the battleground states, their mood is too sour because he is losing). So what happened to those sheets? Nobody follows up. In fact, at some events, the SIGN-UP SHEETS WERE NOT EVEN COLLECTED. People signed up, and the pages were left there, tossed into garbage! Hillary has often as much as 50 staff at an event, circulating meeting every visitor, and asking them to sign up. And then they have immediate tools to get them started, including a smartphone app and SMS based contact to immediately get the volunteers involved. DURING THAT EVENT. Trump, throws his paperwork away. Nobody there to take those potential volunteers even in to help. This is a ship that has long since sunk, and the Captain is standing proudly at one of the lifeboats thinking he still is running the Titanic.

There is no way a campaign run this badly, can possibly catch up to, far less overtake, a campaign run so professionally. At EVERY stage of the race, past two months, Hillary has been safely ahead in the average of polling. At EVERY stage, she has held a lead in the Electoral College vote. She is AHEAD of where Obama was against Romney at this point in time. Hillary won all three debates. The only way the race could be changed is by an 'October Surprise' type of event like Sarah Palin reading all the newspapers or Mitt Romney talking about 47% or Donald Trump grabbing women by their p*ssies. But no, Hillary Clinton was not at some sex orgy with Anthony Wiener grabbing his nuts. The Anthony Wiener email story 'FBI letter' is bullshit. Its not even ABOUT Hillary Clinton.

Its possible yes, in the last days, we get some nasty surprise in this last week of the campaign. Yes that is possible. Its far more likely to be about Trump and his Putin connections, or Trump and his abuse of child labor as sex slaves, or his sexual groping, or his bankruptcies, or like haha, he is now not paying HIS OWN POLLSTER for three quarters of a million dollars of WORK ALREADY CONDUCTED. What can the pollster do? He spent weeks doing big surveys in a dozen states to get the picture for Trump. That is intense labor. And now that Trump was told, you're going to lose, he isn't paying? Talk about a scumbag. But yeah, Trump tax returns. Trump Foundation scandals. Trump illegal labor. Trump visa scandals, with his wife, with his undocumented labor. Trump and Fidel Castro, Trump and Muammar Gaddafi, Trump and Kim Jong-Un. Trump's 300 million dollar loan from Russia's Alfa Bank. Trump's 100 million dollar loan from Deutsche Bank. Trump's unknown-size loan from Chinese banks. Trump buying Chinese steel or Trump dealing with Iran. Trump is a bag of handgrendades rolling on the floor, all with their pins pulled, and we just don't know when they will explode. They all will. And some are due now, in the next seven days. This man is not winning this election but he is prone to massively underperform where the polling suggests the race should finish.

If you want to see last week's Countdown summary, its here.

The election is in seven days. I have published the definitive TV Guide for viewing the election, with the math on what states may come in early, and what that means for the race. Read this before you watch the election results. And Bookmark that page, to come back to it on November 8.

I have published my 'final final' forecast exactly 3 weeks before election day. I predicted Hillary wins by 16%. Full forecast including analysis and reasoning is on the blog of course, and please remember, I called the 2008 election, the 2012 election as well as Trump's exact Primary victory correctly and all three of those within one state of how they finished. Take my forecast seriously, its likely to be very close. My forecast of why Hillary wins by 16% is here.

To see the full race, my big all-numbers blog of the Election Scorecard of 3 October is here.  

Of the Senate Race, RCP Senate Map (no toss-ups) has the race again gone one state for Republicans, at 49/50. It is very tight, with a number of states flipping back-and-forth. This change was due to polling giving Nevada now back to the GOP (that won't hold but its very tight in NV). (This race was at 50/50, 49/51, 48/52, 50/50, 49/51, 49/51, 49/51, 50/50). The Democrats' Turn-out machine will ensure this is not a 50/50 result. Hillary has moved resources already into Missouri and Indiana (states that she is not competitive in) because those resources help the SENATOR races there. The Democrats are so flush with money, the SuperPAC supporting Hillary has stopped showing Hillary ads in some states, and now only shows ads for Senators like in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. The next Leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York is so flush with cash, he has sent millions to his Senate colleagues to help in their campaigns, and so forth. Meanwhile Trump stopped sharing any money with Republicans several weeks ago, and is himself running out of money. The senate will not end up 50/50. The Democrats will have a (small) lead in Senate seats when the votes are counted.

The House Map by RCP is up. It went up weeks ago but unfortunately RCP has not updated it, so it keeps showing a safe Republican House outcome. Democrats will pick up some seats, but probably not take control of the House. Currently if the Democrats were to sweep all 15 of the 'toss up' seats for the House as well as of course winning all that RCP projects they are ahead - the Democrats would be 15 seats short of the majority in the House. If we assign the toss-ups exactly evenly, the House would remain in Republican hands by a 22 seat majority.

And finally a plug. I released my joke book. 1001 jokes about Donald Trump. I call it TRUMP vs The Seventh Steve. It runs 253 pages, has actually 1,052 jokes about Trump and 1,434 jokes in total including other, non-Trump jokes like those of other Republicans. I will release one page out of the ebook every day until election day, to give out 10% of the ebook for free. So visit this page even if you just want to see 'the daily jokes' about Trump. If you want to buy the ebook, it only costs $4.99. And yes, here is the page for TRUMP vs The Seventh Steve.