Wait. Sorry, I'm the crazy one. Its the memes. The dank pepe memes are what helped him win. How could Hillary have been so blind?
There are many divisions and shorthand ways of trying to describe the divide, and none are fully satisfying, but one of them is that some people are economically threatened by rapidly accelerating technology, and some are economically empowered. Another is that some people are threatened by trade, and some profit from it. And so on. The global economy is changing rapidly, the distribution of wealth is becoming more unequal, and not everybody is thriving in that context.
Talking about it in raw dollar terms in the aggregate has value, but it's one of many data points. Class resentment is a powerful force that has underpinned nearly every major political realignment in history, I'm not sure why everyone has such a hard time seeing it.
Adding a mode, median, and interquartile ranges will help tremendously in finding where the "bulk" of Trump voters lay.
If nothing else, I'm sure you know that one big outlier can skew the entire data sheet, for instance, like Peter Thiel?
If anything I'd expect this to farm karma.
It seems to me (a few years on this site on two accounts) that your opinion is most popular and the ones who don't like it are less likely to downvote (either because they can't or because they don't want to).
I don't have access to the backend though so it is just a feeling.
Edit: hehe, someone has taken the task on them to prove me right. -1 at the moment.
I can't trade in my Internet points here in Europe and I don't plan on visiting US anytime soon so I just find it funny :-)
So memes, then.
Of course Occam's Razor doesn't always point to the correct answer, just the simplest one.
I think most people accept that but it does still leave the question, 'why Trump?'
It'd be interesting to see Sanders vs Trump in parallel universe.
As a Trump voter - but not a Republican - this pretty much sums it up. His SCOTUS list and the formation of his "Second Amendment Coalition" nudged me from the "he's better than Clinton" to the "maybe he'll deliver something I want" column, but there are no circumstances where I would have voted Clinton.
> It'd be interesting to see Sanders vs Trump in parallel universe.
I think it would have been a slaughter in that case, instead of the squeaker it was. Trump's biggest challenge was winning over the libertarian wing of the GOP. If he were against Sanders, that part of the party would have been locked down from day one.
Sanders would have had a much better chance with moderates, independents, the anti-establishment groups, etc.
It also shows to me how broken the US election system is. We badly need something like approval voting. It's unacceptable that we ended up was two candidates who both had awful approval ratings.
Trump basically stumbled on this untapped political bounty more or less by chance, but he has smart enough to recognize its value and design a political persona that would speak directly and effectively to that group[1] The fact that there was otherwise no obvious leader around whom the Republican party could gather gave us Trump-the-candidate.
Trump-the-president was a slightly more complex matter. There was another candidate that was able and willing to tap into this new constitutency of the politically ignored: Bernie Sanders. Unlike the Republicans, there was also one obvious Democratic leader around whom the preexisting constitutencies of that party could gather. The problem with Hillary Clinton is that she is the very incarnation of political status quo; instead of picking Bernie as her vicepresident she doubled down on keep ignoring the chronically ignored. She went as far as to antagonize them, mistaking the whole of the group for a very vocal minority of them, - the racist misogynist know-nothings.
I do not need to tell you that was a huge mistake. The way the American politics work, you win by winning most battles, not by winning the biggest battles. Even if the majority of individual votes went to her, she still lost; and she lost because she decided to abandon a number of critical camps. Or rather, because by failing to notice this new political constitutency, she lost electoral votes that historically should have been Republican. She did not notice the balance of power shifting under her feet. Again, having Bernie on her team would have helped her to put a fight in most of the battlefields that Trump winned just by being the only one to show up there.
[1] I am using the term "group" loosely here. The way I see it, it is more a coallision of different disempowered groups that had little in common beyond feeling cheated by the status quo. By example, I've heard a number of women that voted for Trump were mothers and wives of the millitary, who saw Clinton's warmongering as an existential threat to their families and voted accordingly. Trump's friendly overtures towards Putin make much more sense if you frame them as subtle signaling to that particular subgroup.
The massive voter base is still the minority and it's easier to blame meme magic than to re-evaluate a dysfunctional system of democracy.
This is the reaction of irrational people who can see no other solution other than those they come up with. In their ordered world all other opinions are those of the ignorant, the bigoted, and racist. As such they are all discounted if not ignored.
Trump won because of who he wasn't and he took down to political establishments to do so. Why wouldn't they both be mad and worse the press who for too long decided instead of being journalist that they should be part of the story. I cannot recall a time in my life where I have seen so many stories from the press reporting on the press.
So while the linked article has no real place on HN it is just indicative of a narrative being pushed by the losing side. Someone else gave it to him, we were never wrong or disliked, we were cheated. (we as in them)