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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Sam tweeted that this was his favorite article about the election: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...

It really does a great job of helping explain Trump supporters.

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If you found the Cracked article insightful, an even deeper discussion of this "dark matter" phenomenon ("I don't know anyone who supports candidate X, but I can measure their gravity, so they must be out there somewhere") is in this essay from Slate Star Codex.

"I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

The article (and phrase) I found really helpful in understanding the split in support is:

"The press takes him (Trump)literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-ma...

I'm not from the US, so take this as an outsiders view.

Clinton says different things in public than she does to her friends. She also flip flops. This is not trustworthy.

Trump is unpleasant, but at least he talks straight.

I think this could be the last election of its kind in the USA, a two party system that works to produce these two candidates? Someone (Facebook, google, twitter) will come up with a better way of informing the public how unfair the system is.

How is electoral reform view in the US? In the UK it is very popular and there is often talk of STV or something similar.

[edit] I am losing valuable imaginary internet points! Oh no! Here, this makes my point better than I can:

Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/01/us/elections/n...

> Clinton says different things in public than she does to her friends. She also flip flops. This is not trustworthy.

> Trump is unpleasant, but at least he talks straight.

You seem to imply that since Trump "talks straight", he doesn't flip-flop?

If that's what you're implying, it couldn't be more inaccurate; he has sharply contradicted himself countless times, straight-up denying things he's documented as saying (on TV, Twitter, etc.)

Clinton talks like a professional politician, Trump says whatever comes to mind at the time. I'm not sure I like how professional politicians talk, but I'm a little nervous that "comes to mind at the time" might lead us into a very bad place.

You might enjoy this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUBE4YlTXvE

Yeah - I do. Look at any politician with more than one term of anything under their belt and you're going to find similar problems. I'm voting for Gary Johnson anyhow.. not because I expect him to be more consistent, but because I very much want a viable third party.

Electoral reform is a hot topic, but what people usually mean by it is not a change in how the votes are counted. The most popular issue is campaign financing (with the current arrangement being that there's no practical limit a private party can pour into the elections, so long as they do the Super-PAC dance). Another big issue of concern is gerrymandering. For Democrats, the way their primaries function (superdelegates etc) has been in the spotlight.

As far as voting system itself is concerned, electoral college is the most common issue that is raised, and switching to national popular vote counting is the most common proposal to fix it. There's an ongoing attempt to do this from bottom up, by signing up enough states that they can basically impose this without changing the Constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

Things like STV for presidential elections, or MMP for parliamentary, are mostly under the radar - there are certainly people who are aware of them and push for them, but they're a very small minority, and the public is largely unaware.

Just to give you some sense of how these stack up, the only electoral issue that has been discussed at length in this political campaign by any of the major candidates (including primaries) is campaign finance reform. I haven't heard a peep about electoral college or proportional representation.

Interesting. I work in education in the UK and the way we assess pupils is a relatively complex calculation based on a number of factors.

So schools, teachers, pupils and parents are all aware that attainment is a complex beast and requires an open, yet complex calculation.

Which leads me onto STV and other ways of counting votes, none of these are as simple as first past the post, but these are all far simpler than what we do in our schooling calculation. So I think people are ready to make voting a little more complex and a lot fairer. If we educate them and give them a chance.

I think it's mainly that there are other, more obvious problems to tackle before getting to STV etc. One thing at a time and all that.

Even those things are immensely complicated politically, because they would upset the existing balance between the parties, and in the current climate of extreme partisanship, whichever party is affected is going to pretty much automatically be against it. For example, if we switch from electoral college to national popular vote, it's pretty much guaranteed to give all future presidential elections to the Democrats, at least until GOP has a massive reform. Obviously, they're going to be against it. Similar issues arise with gerrymandering, and even such normally non-controversial issues as making voting easier (increasing registration periods and making the process easier, increasing advanced voting period, mail-in voting etc).

So I wouldn't expect any progress on that front until the present deadlock is broken. On the other hand, whatever new party will arise on the right from the ashes of GOP (or existing third party take over the spot), is likely to be in the minority for a while - and hopefully, that would motivate them to make electoral reform for a more proportional representation a prominent part of their platform. On the other hand, Democrats are likely to get more complacent and corrupt from a long uninterrupted stretch in power, and a few particularly nasty public scandals could be used to prime the voters for an upset election. So we'll get there; it'll just take time.

I think in an era of the populace vehemently hating at least one politician that is running for office (whatever that office may be), and sometimes hating all the candidates a voting system that actively targets least regret should be used; such as condorcet voting, or full preference method.

I'm kind of surprised 'Hillbilly Elegy' hasn't come up yet.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-lives-...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-orig...

I feel like this deserves a link to the rebuttal. I'm not embracing it (or Jacobin), but it's a plausible indictment of Elegy. On a related note, it should be noted that the average Trump supporter earns more than the average white American. There's a more subtle grouping here than "rural poor".

[1] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/hillbilly-elegy-review-jd...

> It really does a great job of helping explain Trump supporters.

I think what we're seeing are the results of taking 6 trillion dollars that should have been spent building infrastructure for working class Americans and instead wasting it in Iraq.

I think this is basically the major and effective meme/emotion that Trump plays into: Nostalgia. Thiel also voiced concerns about the state of the infrastructure at a GOP Convention. Nostalgia is a strong emotion and it is often based on false memories or weak comparisons. Sure, large parts of our infrastructure are worse than they were 50 years ago, but on the other hand we had very different problems back then. We used to consume goods that turned out to be toxic. Today almost everyone has access to extremely fast transportation via air travel. Almost everyone has access to the world's knowledge at any time. Medicine has improved a lot. "Make it great again" is the central lie and people are dumb enough not to question it and to believe his financial independence would make him a superior leader, when in fact he only displays characteristics that are opposed to the ones we should expect from a good leader, for example decency and intelligence.

Holy moly that number keeps getting bigger.

The budgetary cost of the Iraq war was, according to the Congressional Research Service, $815 billion[1]. Even if you would rather model long-term or indirect costs, there was never, ever $6 trillion in the Federal budget over the corresponding period that could have been redirected to "infrastructure for working class Americans".

[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

Without the war there would not have been 6 trillion dollars to spend...

I think Trump supporters are regular simple Americans who are looking around and seeing they haven't benefited from the economic prosperity at a rate equivalent to their output and are facing an all out assault on their labor via neo-liberal policies adopted by both major parties. Neither party is going to point back at themselves and Trump has seized their support by blaming common scapegoats and tapping in to populist racial, gender and religious discrimination. Democrats have and do do this too, ie "super predators", etc.

It's a great article, but only describes a very small minority of Trump supporters. The median household income of a Trump supporter is $72,000, well above that of the median voter, or the median Clinton supporter.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-...

That surprises me greatly. I'm assuming that the fact that the poor themselves don't vote anyway skews the medians of voters up anyway, as they hint at in that article. What a way to dash "established facts."

For a more formal look at this, I'd suggest looking at Sarah Kenzidor's work over the past year. She's a journalist in St. Louis with a PhD in... sociology? (I think?), specializing in the Uzbekistan country & regime. She's brought that knowledge to bear on the Trump campaign and has spent a lot of time trying to explain to the 'coasts' Why Trump. Her book on this is called the "View from Flyover Country". I haven't read the book, specifically, but I've read most of her articles on the matter since the spring.

That article is rough around the edges but very insightful. I keep this in mind a lot. I think to just go ahead and label all Trump supporters as idiots or degenerates is very unproductive. There is some message that speaks to the people left behind that maybe the Democrats are ignoring.

>The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living."

It's impossible to over emphasize how core to the problem this is. From social mobility to resentment of the "elites" and a dozen others.

I spent my high school years in rural Arkansas (after living a more urban existence for most of my life). This article does a fantastic job of articulating exactly what I've observed.

The Guardian also published a really good article explaining how blue-collar workers are hurting because of their jobs being off-shored, and how Trump's promise to end free-trade agreements and bring those jobs back to the US is the biggest reason behind his appeal:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald...

It doesn't do a good job of explaining why someone like Thiel (or my well-off friends) support Trump. They're city people with lots to lose.

i found this article enlightening as well:

http://www.stirjournal.com/2016/04/01/i-know-why-poor-whites...

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