* A Republican just won without being very religious and being wishy-washy on abortion.
* The loser out-spent the winner by huge amounts. Does money really buy elections? Maybe, but not this one.
* The rich abandoned Republicans, but many poor and working-class abandoned Democrats. [1]
1: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/e...
Been following the coverage since the primaries and though I don't know who I would have voted for, seeing the self righteous intelligentia being so blatantly wrong on the election outcome gives me an embarrassing satisfaction.
None of the established media did even try to keep a disguise of neutrality. Not in the US, not the BBC or here in Germany.
You can be against Trump all you want, but where has "journalistic standards" been gone? If your whole organization is made up of individuals who see themselves as morally-superior while being a Clinton-biased - how realistic is it that this organization is able to get a realistic glimpse at the outside world?
How could nobody see that ignorance and stupidity on that level was not helping them... It is like they took a gun, paid a lot of money for it, and then used it to shot themselves in the foot.
They had reporters, viewers, executives that were one both sides of the issue. So one this one thing it wound up..."fair and balanced".
Anytime a bunch of like-minded people reports on something, you'll wind up with a sideways story.
So not all media is as liberal as you say. The sad bit is that the source of media is so partisan that we only listen to what we want to hear (that goes both to the right and to the left).
So what are we left it?
In the US, however, the word has a second meaning, which is more about abortion and civil rights and all that than it is about money. I suspect that the GP meant that definition of liberalism by "moral liberalism".
For example, I keep getting baffled by US speakers at EU dev cons, as they sprinkle or finish their talks with their domestic political stances. For example finishing their talk about their dev ops set up out the blue with: "heres a chat room I've opened up for all the LGBT devs here that feel discriminated against". Not only not an issue in most of EU countries but certainly non-existing at the specific con. Very wierd.
The other time I remember one speaker twittering about the blatant racism of a German airline in their safety instruction videos. He managed to be ignorant not only of the context, or of the reference to a beloved German novel (Karl May's "Winnetou") but the whole concept of decency (in that, that you may not get the whole picture if you enter another culture so don't rush to your culture's conclusions). If he had invested the same amount in understanding context as he had in extruding anger, he might have even understood that the "Winnetou" stories are anything but derogatory towards native americans.
I would have said attention buys elections, and Trump was the kind of candidate that had the media tripping over themselves to give him free coverage. That definitely seems to explain the primary season, but the general election campaign turned things around a bit by consisting almost solely of negative attention that hurt the candidates when they were in the spotlight. I guess neither candidate could spend enough to buy anywhere near as much attention as the various scandals attracted, and perhaps this campaign season was meaningfully different in overall tone.
Media treated people as idiots, in some cases CNN went to levels of stupidity and lies that would have put Fox to shame. They thought they were helping their candidate, but they were actually hurting the cause.
The fact that many Democrats have voted for Trump doesn't mean Trump is great necessarily, it means they really hated Hillary and what she represented (and no, not because she is a woman, if anything this will always be remembered as step-back for woman as a US president, people will remember Hillary and cringe next time).
Thank you ! This is EXACTLY what got me to go vote. I wasn't even planning on going, and finally I just hit the tipping point of negative-smear campaign BS and I said, "alright, if you treat me like a child, I'm going to rebel like a child" and I voted for exactly who they told me I shouldn't. I had every intention of staying home.
See http://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-has-gotten-nearly-3-b...
I always wondered if the president really has the power people perceive him to have, or if he's still influenced and bound by many people in the background.
One can observe this with Obama. He made promises (like closing Guantanamo etc.), which he ultimately couldn't force through. But why? Possibly, because he isn't nearly as free in his decision making.
Now, Trump claimed to do a lot of things and I'm wondering if he really can pull that off or if many of his extraordinary claims and goals won't be doable, because of other people with power.
This is what I don't like about modern politics: So many things are claimed to be done, but ultimately, it's all bullshit and you only know what you've voted for long after the election – which could be something entirely different than you'd voted for in the first place.
Then again, Trump didn't just win the election, Republicans also won majority in the House and Senate. So it's going to be a lot easier for Trump to push policies through than it was for Obama.
Both leading candidates were despised by a large number of people. Many people were heard talking about having to vote for the lesser of two evils. Therefore it makes sense to frame the election in this way. What we have today is not a pro-Trump victory, but an anti-Clinton victory.
I don't think the Democratic establishment realised what a gamble it took by favouring Clinton over Sanders, if they had just let open primaries decide who their candidate would be I'm fairly confident a Democratic candidate would now be heading for the White House.
But then, 24 hours ago, both parties would've expected one result and have since received the other so that's easier to say with hindsight.
Nothing is certain in politics, but I'm curious about why you hold that opinion. Why would you consider Sanders a big risk?
Sanders definitely would have been a big risk. But in hindsight and especially given the weak set of potential candidates available to the Democratic Party, a big risk may have been necessary, and Trump was probably the best opportunity they could have hoped for to gamble on a non-traditional candidate of their own.
I spotted this on Twitter and thought it was insightful:
"Both parties nominated the only candidate that the other side's candidate could beat," Karl Rove, apparently.
just a few days ago Trump's campaign released their final tv ad:
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/07/trump-s-white-n...
to your or I that may seem abhorrent but most of Trump's base would have lapped it up quite hungrily
as well you had surrogates as highly noted as Ann Coulter were saying things like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/08/de...
One of them was hated by 50 percent and loved by 50 percent. The other was hated by 50 percent percent and accepted by 50 percent as the lesser evil.
Really? The polls on unfavourables say otherwise. Neither candidate was well liked by 50% in those polls.
This election was hugely divided across class lines. Technically it's by college education status. But I believe that is highly correlated with social class.
So if lower class people voted Republican for economic reasons, they're only hurting themselves. Of course they'll blame immigrants or whoever, so that it can all end up in a vicious cycle of stupidity.
It's hard to say lower class people are voting against their own interests when the entire economic (Wall Street) and political establishments that they see as their opponents were completely behind Clinton. Who knows what Trump will end up doing, but they all knew what Clinton was going to do... more of the same.
So voting for Trump is still fundamentally irrational from an economic perspective if you're poor or lower middle class: it's possible that Trump will block part of the Republican agenda (e.g. on healthcare) -- who the hell knows what the guy is really thinking apart from his selfishness and thin-skinned narcissism -- but with Clinton it would have been guaranteed. And surely more of the same is better than change in the wrong direction?
And yes, it's also possible that Republicans in congress will suddenly change their tune on healthcare, come up with budgets where the spoils aren't overwhelmingly going to the rich, and so on. But really, how rational is it for voters to bet on that given those politicians' past behaviour?
And it's not like the middle and lower classes have been treated that much worse under Republicans than Democracts when you get down to it. Certainly Republicans have been the party of Wall Street and Big Business for awhile, but there's plenty of people who still think getting rid of welfare and cutting taxes to the rich is what's best for everyone. I don't agree, but we can't reverse time and see what would have happened had Mondale won instead of Reagan. Maybe his policies would have pushed us farther into recession and actually made those lower classes less well off. And obviously we've seen the flip side of centralized communism completely fail, and rationally speaking a lot of intellectuals from 19th century Europe thought that was the inevitable logical and fair system of the future.
Sure. Most of our species' history also happened in an environment that is extremely different from the world we live in today. I don't think the history of civilization in general and large states with high levels of economic specialization in particular has been long enough to really affect the tuning of our brains sufficiently.
And thanks to the exponential increase in college tuition over the past couple decades, the class/education status has almost completely converged.
[1]: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/jill-stein-expect-trou...
I think people have no idea how much this was a vote against Hillary. Look at Trump, even with all his rhetoric and crazy statements he made, they still picked him! That says a lot about Hillary and the DNC and the campaign they ran.
Their last campaign was pretty much "if you choose them, the world will end", instead of trying to present their own policies and how they would improve things.
And they're still completely arrogant about it. It seems they will repeat their strategy the next time, but then they are in opposition, which is an easier game to play. Also, they try to blame the entire economic slowdown on the current government, even though the oil price fall is unprecedented (and Norwegian industry is seriously oil driven)...
Sigh, I'm so tired of politics. It's all about blame and ideology instead of stuff that actually matters to people.
In any case, she lost 40% of her party and really did nothing to reach back out to it. And Trump capitalized way back in April on that by planting the seed suggesting himself that Bernie should make the 3rd party run.
I share the sentiment: She lost more than he won.
What the DNC ignored was the passion and enthusiasm that Bernie and Bernie supporters had and brought to the issues and the election. Bernie filled places. Several thousand came to see him in La Crosse, WI at the Onalaska Civic Center. Only a few hundred, hand picked, supporters (were allowed and) saw Hillary in La Crosse, WI at Western Technical College.
HRC's campaign lacked passion and enthusiasm.
More years spent getting caught up on intraspecies drama (bathroom use!) rather than working on big ideas.
I'd argue that Pence brought quite a lot to the Trump campaign in reeling in Republicans skeptical that Trump would champion conservative causes.
What did Kaine bring to the Clinton campaign? Not much it appears.
Most people at 538 seemed to think that this theory would be invalidated after the pretty probablye Clinton win, but was a reason for them to consider the uncertainty high.
I think tomorrow they are going to discuss if this theory is not vindicated after all.
This is what 1 in 3 looks like.
Well, unfortunately, we have 4 years to think about it.
My wife and I are already looking at immigrating. I'm actively sending resumes to other places. If I can't fix it, then I'll leave it to those that want it this way.
(I guess this is what it felt like when the regular Germans had Hitler voted into power?)
This hatred is about Muslims, immigrants, deportation forces, bad trade deals, "stop-and-frisk" and rights reductions, and anti-liberalism.
Change Muslims for Jews, and well...
This is also interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughTrumpSpam/comments/4teoxl/a_f...
Not an absolute majority though, but neither did Trump.
The presidential third party vote more than doubled this election compared to 4 years ago.
> They aren't even allowed to debate.
Ron Paul begs to differ.
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The challenge, of course, is the the system is susceptible to the spoiler effect. Trump won Florida's 29 electoral votes by just 1%. Gary Johnson alone had double that number in the state.
In 2000, the entire election was decided by 537 votes for George Bush in Florida. And the majority of Ralph Nader's 97k votes in the state would have gone to Al Gore in a two-party race. The Green Party lost the Democrats 4+ years of the presidency.
He didn't. And he wouldn't do that either.