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Comment by rudrigu | Hacker News Reader

> Presidential elections in the US are always and only won by the candidates who spend the most money.

Did Trump outspend Rodham?

He absolutely dominated news coverage, with over twice the airtime devoted him than Clinton, 1144 minutes vs. 506. Andrew Tyndell produces an annual report of major commercial TV news coverage: http://tyndallreport.com/yearinreview2016/

He gained insane amounts of "earned coverage" -- airtime obtained without paying for it. Over $2 billion.

A conservative media source: http://conservativeintel.com/2015/09/11/trumps-earned-media-...

The NY Times if you prefer: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...

however how much of his coverage was positive versus her positive coverage?

If anything the press's doubling down against him helped him because it also showed independents how in bed the press had become with one party.

Love him or hate he has a personality and he correctly realized that with a highly negative press it was best to portray them as the establishment as well.

The part I respect is he stomped on all three establishments which do their best to control Washington (RNC, DNC, and the Press).

Given that the utterly misleading emails story dominated both Clinton coverage aand polling of voter awareness, whilst Trump's Russian connections and worse continuously were swept under the rug,vry much of it.

A study of the News in Tweets:

https://medium.com/echelon-indicators/the-year-in-news-2016-...

Discussion:

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/6MMZjbxW...

This is an indirect measure, but shows major themes in discussion of news on Twitter, by Echelong Insights. Included, and pictured, is Twitter discussion of 17 major election-related stories. Three of these, the Electoral College, Fake News, and Steve Bannon, are principally or completely post election day phenomena, but the remaining 14 occur during the election cycle.

The two most dominant stories -- Wikileaks/Hacking (33.083m) and Clinton's Email (21.124m) stories dwarf the others (Deplorables, 5.989m being the runner-up). None of the Trump negative stories (Tapes, Taxes, Melania's speech, Paul Manafort, Trump University) come close, and several discussions which could have appeared quite notably don't: Donald Trump's live speech requesting that Russia hack his opponent's emails, or Clinton's claims that Trump would be Putin's puppet. These make absolutely no appearance here -- though whether that represents poor methodology or lack of actual impact isn't clear.

Keep in mind that Twitter isn't a public opinion survey, nor is it front-of-mind awareness of news. It's a proxy for both, and proxies can be useful or deceptive.

If there's an element here that's most powerful and useful, it's the relationship between leading and non-leading items: power relations are strong. Again, from first to third ranking here is a five-fold reduction in tweets. From first to 17th, a 25-fold reduction of interest and attention, at least on Twitter.

I was a bit inaccurate there. I meant only the candidates who spend on the order of republican and democrat nominees. Independents can't afford to and they don't get votes. Except one or two guys in the 90's/2000's who got a big share at a huge financial expense.

Who even knows the name of any independent candidate? They don't have advertising to tell us what they stand for or make us believe they're big enough to win.

The alternative explanation is that candidates who run as independent aren't popular enough to garner either donations or votes. If they were, they could have won the primaries for one of the major parties. Like Trump did, certainly no favourite of the Republican establishment.

Arguably both Sanders and Trump were effectively independent. Neither had the support of their chosen parties.

Touche! Maybe this old adage should be updated - (s)he who gets the most airtime wins.

this can be explained by the mere exposure effect [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect

She won the popular vote though. Which partially proves his point. That being said, correlation doesn't mean causation.

Debatable. Take these sites with grains of salt, but leave with the idea that the results of each in combination taken with salt still skew the results ALOT.

Potentially millions of Illegals voted. (potentially) http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/trump-is-right-...

Here's one illegal that voted FIVE times. http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Trial-Begins-in-Alleged-Ill...

AND the DHS supposedly under Obama administration tried to hack electronic voting polls for six states. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-08/georgia-accuses-hom...

EDIT: I only said supposedly on the third because SIX is the supposed number, but the Georgia one DID happen.

Thanks for the opportunity to educate myself on your questionable new sources: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-29/unmasking...

Illegal voting had nothing to do with Trump's unprecedented loss of the popular vote.

Unprecedented? It happened with George W. Bush not long ago...

Unprecedented in magnitude; Bush lost by a margin of 544,000 votes, Trump received ~3 million fewer votes than Clinton.

Isn't losing an election by running it wrong worse than Win running it right? People are pointing Clinton and DNC incompetence as merit. California alone is responsible for this "magnitude", and it only proves how good was Trump' strategy.

Don't forget that Clinton lost the popular vote too; most voters did not vote for her.

Would you expand on this? By most voters do you mean registered voters? Or that Clinton didn't win a majority? From the popular vote results I've seen, Clinton won a plurality of the votes. Not that the popular vote determines the outcome of the election.

I mean that she gained only a plutority.

The winner of the US presidential election must be elected by majority vote.

Of course, as long as we're hypothesizing the election to be by popular vote, we could make it by plutority too...

From the point of view of how electoral votes are decided (excluding faithless electors), it is determined by plurality, not majority. A state's electoral votes go to the candidate who receives the most votes (a plurality), not the one who receives more than half (a majority).

It's a majority of electoral college.

It's up to each state to choose their electors (plutority of popular vote, as you said being the most common, though not the only method).

You can debate an opinion, not a fact.

If the election had been about the popular vote, both campaigns would have been run totally differently. So you can't really infer anything from her winning the popular vote.

Popular vote doesn't mean much because nobody optimized for it. It's like saying one soccer team won over the other because they touched the ball more times. But that's not the goal of the game, so it proves no point.

As others have already pointed out, the fact that Clinton won a plurality of popular vote in and of itself doesn't matter very much, other than to add support to the idea that the country is pretty divided and that neither side would have had any sort of mandate.

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