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Comment by yolesaber | Hacker News Reader

>High brow smack (condescension) like that and "basket of deplorables" are what America revolted against.

Actually, the majority of Americans agreed with Hillary Clinton. She won the popular vote by over a million votes. We just use an outdated system built to appease slaveholders that does not necessarily represent the bulk will of the people. Trump won on a technicality of our (antiquated and frankly awful) system, not on a mandate.

>If the liberal left was truly smart, why did they allow the president to run up more national debt than all presidents prior...combined?

The president doesn't make the budget or handle the accounting of the US. Congress does. Guess who controls Congress? Hint, not the liberal left.

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> Actually, the majority of Americans agreed with Hillary Clinton. She won the popular vote by over a million votes. We just use an outdated system built to appease slaveholders that does not necessarily represent the bulk will of the people. Trump won on a technicality of our (antiquated and frankly awful) system, not on a mandate.

While I agree that the electoral college is not the best system, we can't really know what the results would have been if the popular vote determined the presidency. Campaigns are optimized based on the electoral college and each would have been run differently on a different system. Also, voter turnout may have been different because you no longer have partisan strongholds which may discourage voting.

Not only that don't forget there's 4 million Americans who live in the US territories. They are American but don't get to vote for president because they don't live in a state or (since the 70s) DC. That's more than the population of Connecticut, for example.

> Actually, the majority of Americans agreed with Hillary Clinton

A plurality did, not a majority.

But still more than went with any individual alternative.

> Trump won on a technicality of our (antiquated and frankly awful) system, not on a mandate.

It's not so much antiquated as evil; it's designed specifically to magnify the power of voters in states with people counted for assigning representation that don't vote (primarily to secure slavery, but its continued to reward other forms of disenfranchisement since.)

"A plurality did, not a majority."

Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to look up the difference :)

A plurality is also called a simple majority.

That's definitely not true, unless in some special context.

I'm not sure about English, but "simple majority" and "absolute majority" are commonly used to refer to a plurality and >50% respectively in German.

Wikipedia [0] also recognizes this meaning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_majority

The Wikipedia article indicates that simple majority may refer to majority, plurality, FPTP, or super majority, indicating no preference as to which might might be the most commonly understood.

A "simple majority" means 50%+, not a mere plurality (its the same as just a "majority", it's generally used to contrast with a supermajority.)

> We just use an outdated system built to appease slaveholders that does not necessarily represent the bulk will of the people.

It may have been built with slave/free state "fairness" in mind, but even today the mechanism serves to level out the tyranny of the majority, from the states' perspective.

I fail to see how a tyranny of the minority is better than a tyranny of the majority. The current winner-take-all system must provide one or the other.

I fail to see how it is a tyranny of the minority. US is a federation after all.

A state doesn't have a "perspective". A state is just a line drawn around a collection of people. Mathematically, a majority of states have excess power in proportion to its population. From a state's imagined perspective, it's a tyranny of the majority.

The country is mostly red. Even though Clinton got 200k more votes I'm sure you can see why the the electoral system is in place.

I like to add there is still 4 million votes that are being counted. Projection even from CNN is that Trump wins the popular vote.

[0] https://mishgea.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/geographic-lands... [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-10/trumps-geographic-l...

Every source I can find has her winning by around 200k. When you are talking about 120M votes that is rather insignificant.

When it's the difference in winning the majority and still losing the election, it is significant.

FWIW, technically it's a plurality, not a majority. To win a majority, you need to win over 50%.

Earlier projections I saw said a million, but you are right thanks.

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