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Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

If he does, he will guarantee that his opponent wins. Voters these days seem to hate Silicon Valley types. It'll be like the Clinton loss, but on steroids.

In fact, we should probably all band together to stop him from running under any major-party banner.

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"It'll be like the Clinton loss, but on steroids"

In this scenario, how many million more votes does he get than his opponent? Clinton got 2.9 million more, so when you add steroids does this number go up?

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised at a 5 million vote majority losing the Electoral College again. It's a structural problem, not one of the individual candidates. The system was designed to over-enfranchise rural landowners, particularly slave-holders. The more the population urbanizes, the greater the skew of the College vote away from the popular vote.

It's designed to require a President that has trans-regional appeal. It does pretty well at that.

I don't really see how, seeing as the President doesn't end up having to appeal to rural Californian Republicans, urban Texas Democrats, or in fact anyone outside the four or so "swing states" whose outcomes actually have nonzero uncertainty. It's been most effective at setting the stage for regional warfare or breakup of the USA along the lines of the Civil War.

It certainly does. You can't win the Presidency unless you have appeal across several regions.

Hillary crushed the northeast and the west coast but that was mostly it regionally and she didn't win. A little appeal in the southeast or midwest and she would have won.

Which wouldnt be as big a problem if electors were not chosen by political party loyalty, and bound.

Don't be so sure. The so called Fake-News / Facebook stories is partly credited with Trump win. Mark Zuckerberg has over 70 million followers and likes etc. All he has to do is sit back and let his Campaign PR team go nuts over that page :) https://www.facebook.com/zuck

Clinton also lost 2 million democratic votes that switched to third party compared to the 2012 election so let's not pretend that fake news is her downfall, considering it was the media bias that gave her an edge in the primaries.

People dislike Silicon Valley types because they are perceived as pretentious, arrogant, weak physically, yet intimidating intellectually. Not that this is true for most, but still the animosity persists probably as a result of envy from workers finding themselves feeling their self-worth diminished by the loss of blue collar jobs

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