Hacker News Reader

> Trump said terrible things and people voted for him because he said those terrible things.

I understand your frustration (I'm right there with you. I felt like a family member died after the election), but I think the statement I quoted is an exaggeration.

Trump had a few groups of people that helped him win the election. I'd break them into these groups:

* Traditional republican voters who didn't like much of what Trump said, but worried about liberal Supreme Court justices.

* White supremacists. Most Trump supporters weren't white supremacists, but most white supremacists were Trump supporters.

* People who feel that Washington is deeply corrupt and want to see the existing system torn down. Trump has pledged to introduce term limits for congress people, along with banning certain government employees from becoming lobbyists for a period of time.

* Working class people who liked Trump's trade policies. He's pledged to renegotiate certain trade deals in an attempt to lessen our trade deficit. That would make it less appealing to outsource jobs, which union workers found appealing.

I voted for Hillary, but I admit that I like his anti-corruption and trade deficit policies. Unfortunately I'm horrified by his policies on muslims, undocumented immigrants, etc.

Quite simply, people who think like you and me lost on Tuesday. We lost badly. We need to take some time to figure out where to go from here, because if we run the next election like this one, we will probably lose again.

We spent a lot of time being upset about the white supremacists who backed Trump. We didn't spend enough time addressing the concerns of union workers, anti-corruption advocates, and republicans who didn't like Trump. It probably cost us the election.

> I think the statement I quoted is an exaggeration.

But none of your points explain why. Trump said terrible things, that he would commit war crimes, restrict the first amendment, he won't respect the election if he loses. He's praised dictators, denied climate change, committed charity fraud, stiffed 800+ small businesses, walks in on underage girls changing and brags about it. He lies about something one day and deflects attention away to blame someone else when called out on it.

It's fascinating that he gets a pass on saying and doing these things. "It's an exaggeration." Personally, I think it's because he was a reality TV star. We expect celebrities to say and do ridiculous things, and then roll our eyes at it.

Except he's president now, and he isn't acting.

> ... he won't respect the election if he loses.

You mean like all the people protesting against Trump?

> Deflecting

Peaceful protesters aren't presidential candidates threatening to not respect the vote.

How does that justify giving a pass to the terrible things Trump has said and done?

It wouldn't justify Trump doing it, but I'm curious if you supported blackballing Al Gore after he contested the 2000 election with a lawsuit. I've heard a lot of people complain about the Supreme Court, but rarely complain about Al Gore himself for contesting.

Al Gore contesting the Florida count with a 537 margin for victory is different than "if i don't win, it means its rigged"

Don't be obtuse. College students painting banners is a far cry from a presidential candidate refusing to concede an election over imagined vote fraud. And there is a strong chance that's what Trump would have done.

Protestors are doing much worse than "painting banners". Like hanging and beheading an effigy of Trump [0]

~~0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kht_qNBXzbU~~ (wrong video)

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpUvZLZ6axM

That video was posted back in March, during the Republican primaries. I have no idea why you think it's related to the protests this week.

My mistake, I was searching for an independent video quickly and linked the wrong one. Thanks for pointing that out.

This is the incident from yesterday that I heard about and was searching for video of:

> Heads roll in the streets of Los Angeles as a large Donald Trump effigy was set on fire by protesters the day after he was elected president.

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/11/10/donald-trump-e...

> College students painting banners

If that was it then you were right. Even European newspapers who rooted for Clinton report looting and fires.

I will partially excuse the protestors for that because in any big protest you will always draw people looking for an opportunity to just do something bad. However, with people like Joe Stump advocating violence I cannot believe all of the violence isn't random bad actors.

Concede? Like how Al Gore conceded? Yes, perhaps Trump would have challenged the results.

However, that won't be necessary, as Trump can now honestly attest that the elections aren't rigged.

I'm not sure if we can make that assertion, given the Deep State is safely ensconced regardless of which figurehead is offered up for our worship and ridicule. How does the old chestnut go, something about how if voting made a difference they wouldn't let us...

Al gore lost by margins that triggered automatic recounts.

Vs saying weeks before hand that the election is going to be rigged, I can only lose if it is rigged, etc...

These protests are more of the 'Fuck that guy!', and not the 'The elections were rigged, storm the White House!' kind that the right threatened.

Oh, I agree that Trump's politics are horrifying. Since I identified 4 groups of Trump voters, I'll try to explain why I think they stuck with him, even though he said terrible things.

* Traditional republicans: A lot of them couldn't stand his rhetoric, but they're worried about the Supreme Court. I think a lot of these people felt horrible about voting for him, but they're playing the long game.

* White supremacists: They loved his rhetoric, so no explanation is required.

* Anti-corruption advocates: It might sound like a cop-out, but I'm blaming this one on the media. According to exit polls, 70% of people who thought both candidates were terrible ended up voting for Trump. I understand why a lot of people didn't like either of them, but this is a classic false equivalence. I think the media spent so much time talking about Hillary's emails that people started to think it was as bad as Trump's talk about nuking people, killing the families of suspected terrorists (war crime), bringing back torture (many troops won't like that), and so many other disqualifying things.

* Working class people: Despite being stalwart democratic voters (this election notwithstanding), many of these people aren't very liberal. LGBTQ rights aren't something they think about much, and I don't think they're big on feminism, environmentalism, or animal rights. They're worried about their jobs, the health of their unions, and off-shoring. Trump promised to punish companies for sending work to other countries, and to gut environmental regulations for the sake of creating new unionized gas/coal jobs.

Also, it's important to point out that voter turnout was terrible in this election. Trump got fewer votes than Mitt Romney did 4 years ago, but he won. Hillary severely underperformed Obama in almost every state. Roughly 50% of eligible voters exercised their constitutional right on Tuesday.

1 in 4 eligible voters went to the polls and voted for Trump, 1 in 4 voted for Hillary, and the other 2 didn't vote at all. That's the real story here. We failed to get people excited about voting for Hillary, so they stayed home.

Two minor points:

Trump got more votes than Romney: http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/did-trump-actua... and http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/442086/donald-trumps-vo...

Clinton represents the status quo for corruption, as evidenced by the continuing questionable practices of the Clinton Foundation, and people who have been upset with the way politics work correctly and directly linked her with that behavior.

How did voting for trump solve that when he's a coastal new yorker that bragged about buying political and is actively stuffing his cabinet with industry lobbyists?

Trump's call may have been about Washington corruption, but that doesn't mean anything is actually going to change.

Dunno, you'd have to ask someone who voted for Trump based on that issue what they expected he would do. I didn't vote for either of the two major party candidates.

Trump gets a pass on those things for the same reason HRC got a pass on voting for the Iraq war,[1] or why JFK is still a liberal icon,[2]: party affiliation overcomes almost everything else.

[1] The Iraq war was such a disaster, that when polled today the majority of Americans won't even admit that they supported the war in 2003: http://reason.com/poll/2014/10/16/poll-reveals-americans-sup....

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096770/JFK-took-vir...

That is fair. I'll grant you that. I had concerns about Hillary.

And I can appreciate Trump's anti corruption policies. It will be very interesting to see if he does engage in a trade war, slapping tariffs on goods made outside the US. If he passed legislation about charging taxes on carried interest that too would be positive.

However I'm scared as all hell about everything else. If he does anything good that will be a minor miracle. He is a sociopath and a narcissist. His tax plan will blow a hole in the federal budget while maintaining entitlements. There was an article where he asked the generals "why cant we just nuke them" 3 times. It's going to be like Bush but a lot worse.

> Trump had a few groups of people that helped him win the election. I'd break them into these groups:

Don't forget:

* Minorities. Although Trump didn't win their vote outright, more minorities voted Republican this time than last. He even won the Hispanic vote in NYC.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/e...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/20/donald-trump...

As a bystander I think you lost because of political correctness. Declaring racism and biggotry and all those other things wrong does two things. Firstly, it makes it easy to ignore anyone expressing these thoughts. Because they are simply wrong. Secondly, it effectively hides any other view. You won't even know your colleague is a racist because he knows He cant say it. But political correctness will not change how people think. All of these people without a voice - the racist, biggots, sexists and the stupid - found a voice and voted for him. Guys, half of any population is statistically less smart than the other. You have apparently pissed off that other half and have to live with the consequences. In the land of the free it should be ok to be racist. As a society, you don't have to be but you cannot deny that racist idiot his right to be racist. He should not get his way but he should have the right to speak his mind.

> Guys, half of any population is statistically less smart than the other

But most are within a similar band.

Liberal arrogance again.

> people who think like you and me lost on Tuesday. We lost badly.

As far as last count Hillary won the popular vote (though not by much). The election was very close at any rate.

Trump was just better at parroting and promising the things he heard from rural Americans. He listened to them. And he sold them on their own ideas and made them sound tenable. That's all there is to it.

I hear what you are saying, and I agree with it. Thing is the aforementioned family member is not a hard core republican. I'd say more of a conservative democrat. She did not vote against a corrupt system. She voted because of racial resentment. And she wasn't all too happy about a woman president either, despite the fact that she is a woman.

Have you read said's response? I came to learn something, hoping to take something away. This guy said is a member of a different minority group resentful of African Americans overrepresentation in this country, and is an Indian. This is not an isolated incident for me so far, where I've heard from either a member of a minority group or a woman voted for Trump that has no substance, but rooted in resentment against another minority group. This is making me more depressed.

Maybe this is a couple of isolated incidents. But what I'm learning is only making me more depressed.

^ This is a spot on analysis.

The only thing I have to add is that the tangential way they go off on Indians and hypothetical scenarios seems random, but is probably part of one of the misinformation campaigns.

Not some evil-motivated, conspiracy laden plot to lie to the public, but stories created by attention-hungry publishers, who are so desperate to trigger outrage for just a moment to get some eyeballs, that they stretch and manipulate information to seem threatening.

This is what I think the election has shown: that if you make a person perceive they are threatened, isolate them by telling them other sources of information (other than your own) are biased against them, that you can get them to act in the most irrational ways.

thanks for the kudos. I appreciate it.

Can we just also add to what you said that...you know, Hilary Clinton actually won the most votes? She just didn't win them in the right areas that send the critical number of representatives to the electoral college to (not) debate and vote on who should be president.

Have they finished counting all the votes yet?

It's very close and the lead switched at least once. We won't know who finally won the popular vote until the counting is done.

California has millions of votes remaining to be counted. Clinton won the popular vote, and probably by a million or two.

it's been getting larger, most of the votes coming in are from larger areas that on average in this election voted for Hillary and 99% of the vote is in (some ballots in some states like California could be counted up to 3 days after end of election if they were postmarked on the day of the election). It's highly unlikely that large pockets of Trump votes would be found to make up 300K+ gap now.

What's even crazier to me is trump has yet to pass Mitt Romney vote total. He didn't even beat the last republican candidate but won the election.

Your last statement is wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931386

It's not wrong until the totals are final.

or he passes Romney

So... it is wrong and there are still more ballots being counted.

Yeah - but they weren't votes from "real Americans" ;)

But the campaigns were run to win electoral votes. If the rule for winning was popular votes, the campaigns would have been run entirely differently and the results would have been entirely different.

What I do think the results indicate is that neither party is effectively capturing the support of a large majority of Americans. The typical observation is that we are a country divided, but I rather think that there are a large number of Americans who would prefer voting for a synthesis of typical Democratic and Republican policies, but that isn't possible. Some of those people fall on the Democratic side and some fall on the Republic side during an election and that changes depending on the candidates.

This is an important point people dismiss too easily. If the campaigns would have had to focus on popular votes, they would have been run differently. Trump would have given more time to California and Hillary would have campaigned more in Texas, for example.

It's obviously impossible to say what the outcome would have been, but the campaigns definitely would have optimized differently.

In a different universe things would be different. This is always true and I agree with you what you mean in pointing it out. From a human level though he still didn't cross the popular threshold. Regardless of constitutionality that leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm not all up on your electoral system but isn't that the whole point of having an electoral college rather than just doing it by simple majority?

Yes, generally speaking.

Direct voting was intentionally discouraged by some of the founders, to prevent the "tyranny of the majority". The goal was to force a candidate to appeal to as many types of people as possible, and not allow someone to just focus on what the simple majority of people want.

It could be argued that in this election the electoral college technically performed the function it was originally designed to do -- that is, give rural areas a small but possible opportunity to out-compete urban ones in an election despite having less total citizens.

In one sense the electoral college worked as intended. Except that it does not function as intended. As intended it was to be a deliberate body that would debate the candidates and decide the next, best president from all options given. It was meant to be a final review process to make sure a tyrant or despot didn't get through, for instance.

It goes to how the election should be interpreted.

Donald Trump is clearly the President-elect of the United States and will become the chief executive of the country.

But that is different than the election demonstrating that he is the ideological leader of a majority of the country.

> I have a family member who voted for Trump because they can't wait till he sends Muslim out of the country and sends Mexicans back to Mexico and builds a wall. Trump said terrible things and people voted for him because he said those terrible things.

These people certainly do exist, but not nearly in the numbers the media portrays them to. If so, how did we elect a black man twice and just miss electing a woman to the highest office in the land? I refuse to believe the narrative about how racist rural America is.

And to the extent there is racism in rural America I posit a good portion of it is driven by folks looking for someone to blame for their currently undesirable status in the global economy.

If NY and CA were struggling, all the racists would be on the coasts and not in WI, MI, and OH, etc.

You're a little right and a little wrong. It's wrong to paint all rural Americans as foaming-at-the-mouth racists. But if you think that many (perhaps even a majority) of rural Americans aren't racist, homophobic and xenophobic, then you haven't spent much time in rural America.

I also think that this depends on how you define "racism".

Absolutely, rural Americans are "racist" in the sense of not using approved language about people. On the other hand, that is a somewhat different thing than actually hating or despising people because of their skin color (etc).

This article was mentioned in previous HN posts:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-on...

And I think this passage explains this point:

If you'd asked me at the time, I'd have said the fear and hatred wasn't of people with brown skin, but of that specific tribe they have in Chicago -- you know, the guys with the weird slang, music and clothes, the dope fiends who murder everyone they see. It was all part of the bizarro nature of the cities, as perceived from afar -- a combination of hyper-aggressive savages and frivolous white elites. Their ways are strange. And it wasn't like pop culture was trying to talk me out of it...

There's clearly not a racist or misogynist majority, but there are definitely still a lot of racists and misogynists in the US. This morning I read about a dramatic rise in racist harassment, Muslims afraid to go outside, Latino-looking kids who got beat up at school, Trump-labeled vandalism.

There are clearly still a lot of terrible people, and they love it that Trump won. They feel that this result proved them right, and allows them to act out their bigotry.

> And what is with the comments about Indians? Are we talking Indians from India or Native Americans.

Indians from India. Like my parents.

> Who is demanding we replace black people with indian people.

No one.

> Where are they [blacks] over represented? What the hell are you talking about?

1. Sports, including practically all of our nation's most watched television events

2. Music (and despite this, smaller genres of music that don't overrepresent blacks are shamed [1])

3. Celebrity/gossip news

4. Advertisements, particularly those aimed at boys

Blacks are dramatically overrepresented in media consumed by young men, yet these naval-gazing "costal elites" never say, "Hey, we should reduce black overrepresentation and give Indian guys a chance."

> It doesn't make any sense, the same way Trump made no sense during the debates.

A large group of people see right through you and your priorities for us, and you're calling that a "blind spot". I genuinely hope you'll come around.

[1]: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/710-the-unbearable-whiteness-o...

The content of your post is completely lacking any substance whatsoever, and is totally unrelated to the post. Your cultural resentment of Blacks is transparent. I now understand your concern about how the "left only cares about replacing white people in popular culture with black people." It all makes sense.

It is so obvious you have an axe to grind and that you voted for Trump because of things totally unrelated to his policies. You voted for Trump because there is too much Kanye and Lebron in the media.

Not shocking though. I've read and heard a few members of minority groups talk about why they voted for Trump. Women afraid of Brown and Black people. Latinos afraid of Muslims. Muslims afraid of women being in control. You would think that after so many minority groups would feel attacked by Trump that they might band together. I want to say it's disappointing but it's not totally surprising. Totally divorced from what the substance of this election was supposed to be about. Your axe to grind.

The KKK is having a rally in NC to celebrate Trump's victory. You might want to share your concerns with them, you have a lot in common. I'd be very curious to hear how it goes.

> You voted for Trump because there is too much Kanye and Lebron in the media.

Correct. Other "minority groups" (as you put it) are allowed to be resentful about white overrepresentation; Indians are allowed to be resentful about black overrepresentation. Under Clinton, groups like Black Lives Matter would be given more influence and control, and that would make my life more miserable and make me feel more marginalized.

> You would think that after so many minority groups would feel attacked by Trump that they might band together.

Let's ignore the fact that Trump has never attacked Indian people, and his white supporters have never once attacked me.

At the heart of your post are two assumptions:

1. Indian guys have something to gain by supporting black activism.

2. I haven't tried talking to black activists.

Both assumptions are false.

Progressive black activists are greedy. They want to take, take, take, take, and take from white people, yet the moment you ask them to consider how it must feel as an Indian guy seeing so many black guys in popular culture, you're a devil.

Them: "We fought hard for our representation! Don't appropriate our struggle! You didn't earn any of this—we did! If you want more representation, fight for it yourself!"

Me: "Well, I guess that's what I'm doing right by trying to talk to you about this."

Them: "Go bother white folk about this—they're the ones holding you down, not us. I don't have the time."

As it turns out, white people are underrepresented in many important areas of popular culture, and the white people who are in popular culture are almost exclusively progressives who are happy to keep other white people out.

Racial politics are badly broken, but I trust white people over black people to give me a fair shake.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2822059 Here's some interesting data on trump supporters.