Longroom

An underappreciated moment in this election was Longroom shitting their diapers after dummies everywhere quoted them religiously as an unbiased source. Longroom.com was a small, now defunct website that provided two things: pro-Trump news and "unskewed" polls. Nobody cared about its news (clickbait aggregated from other sites). Its polls were a different story.

Longroom rose and fell in the space of a few weeks. Immediately following the Democratic National Convention, polls had Clinton up 8% -- yet Longroom predicted Trump victory by about 1% and promised that its polls were free of "media bias" (a bullshit term not used in statistics). As a result, it was heavily promoted by Trump supporters as a more reliable polling source.

Polling website 538 ran two articles discussing the poor methodology and sketchy identities of Longroom's founders. Soon afterward, Longroom went offline. While dead, Longroom served as fertile grounds for conspiracy theories about how the Clintons had covertly eliminated another whistleblower. There is no evidence to support this, but when has that stopped conspiracists before?

Methodology (a long shot from valid)
Longroom claimed that it was adjusting for "media bias". After adjustment for this bias, Longroom always predicted Clinton and Trump in a tight race, usually with Trump winning by 0.1-1%. How did they do it? Longroom wrote:

Longroom states that it made sure the percentage of registered Dems and registered Reps were the same as they were on voter registration forms. Frankly, this data does not exist. As 538's Harry Enten writes:

Beyond that, Longroom provides no numbers to back up their methodology whatsoever -- suggesting that it's not a methodology at all.

Longroom's "methodology", in practice, appears to have been to shift every poll Trumpward until it's a tight race. As proof: Of the dozens of polls they cover, only one (Quinnipiac 6/21-6/27) is asserted to have a Republican bias. 538 compares pollster's results to actual results and determines their bias; the split is almost exactly 50/50.

Longroom also claimed:
 * 1) That they correctly predicted the 2012 election (and that "it is a mathematical certainty, that as the election approaches, all of the polls will begin to match the polls here on LongRoom"), yet Longroom.com didn't have a polling section until 2015 and has no section documenting their 2012 polls or results.
 * 2) That they use APL -- " programming language that we and other actuaries have used for the last 30 years" -- despite the language being invented in the 60's and almost unused today.

Owners (took a long walk off a short pier)
Exactly who ran Longroom is unclear. The Longroom "About Us" page listed four editors:


 * 1) "Michael Ellis - Managing Editor (LR_Michael): Michael Ellis is an Internet Executive with over 23 years of experience, including general management of mid to large sized publications. He has been involved with internet community management his entire career."
 * Doesn't show up on Google. Wrong account on Twitter. Strange for a 23-year Internet veteran.
 * 1) "Chris Moore - Digital Media Administrator (LR_Chris): Chris Moore's career spans more than 15 years as an entrepreneur and principal in e-commerce, software, and server management."
 * Doesn't show up on Google. Wrong account on Twitter. Strange for a 15-year electronic-commerce veteran.
 * 1) "Fiona McDonald - Systems Administrator / Art Director (LR_Fiona): With over twelve years of experience Fiona McDonald has worked in a multitude of media. She has created and designed logos and brand identity for corporations and small businesses alike, as well as designing and administrating successful community driven web sites."
 * Doesn't show up on Google. Doesn't exist on Twitter. Strange for a creative media professional.
 * 1) "Ryan Barrett - Content Manager (LR_Ryan): Ryan has experience in newspaper journalism, new media, and professional media as well as social media and community management."
 * Doesn't show up on Google. Wrong account on Twitter. Strange for a media veteran.

Both Whois.net and ICANN WHOIS domain lookup reports both fail to report the owners. Nate Silver writes:

How strange that someone claiming to be part of an antigovernment organization should proceed to support Trump.

Conspiracies (a long list of confirmed kills)
[O]bviously [...] Hilliary [sic] Clinton[ ]and nefarious evil doers had the people behind Longroom liquidated as part of a grand conspiracy to hide her poor polling numbers (but left the Twitter profile online, because despite the power of Hillary Clinton to do evil, she cannot remove a Twitter profile). The idea that they took it down themselves once people started looking into the site is patently absurd.

Many Trump supporters believe that Hillary had Longroom.com taken care of before it could spoil her plans.

How did she do it? Methods include:


 * 1) Fatally DDoSing the website,
 * 2) Assassinating the owners,
 * 3) Using Jewish control of the media to strongarm Longroom into submission.

This is patently ridiculous:


 * 1) First, Longroom showed no signs of a DDoS attack (slow servers, failure to load media, etc.). Second, Longroom apparently created a custom error message (Error 513)  which does not exist -- the correct error message that should display when servers are overloaded is Error 503
 * 2) The founders of the site did not exist. They cannot be assassinated. (Next on the Clinton kill list: Aslan and his conservative magick!)
 * 3) Surprisingly, there's also very weak evidence for the International Jewish Conspiracy.

Reality
In the final popular vote, Trump got 45.99% to Clinton's 48.08%. This shows the irrelevance of polls that look at the overall vote rather than considering outcomes on a per-state basis.