I despise Trump and I despise the dishonest, manipulative way he ran his campaign, but some of the recent coverage smacks to me of people just coming up with more excuses to get around the fact that a lot of people voted for him.
We have a habit of being kind of condescending towards rural voters, and the trend towards, 'you didn't have any agency, you were just manipulated into this' is uncomfortable to me.
2.9 million more votes is a big fucking deal IMO>
https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/donald-trump-hillary...
I'm sympathetic to people who feel like Hillary should have won based on popular vote, but even if Hillary had won, that's still 46% of the population who voted against her, and I still think it's dangerous to chock a number like that up to "well, the Russians meddled and Facebook is evil."
A lot of people consciously chose to vote for Trump, not because they were mind controlled, but because they actually thought he was the best candidate.
Oklahoma is a subsidized state full of ignorant people for the most part. I live in an "educated" town and its abysmal here just the same.
So when propaganda/marketing to people that don't even understand the basics, Hillary gonna take UR guns and murder them babbies, sells quite well. All the while everything is reverting to the ownership class.
I'm well off so it will all be fine for me, but for the working middle-class and poor. It's only going to get worse, and voting for Republicans for the past 4 decades has clearly shown that to be the case.
So... yeah. 46% for is more surprising to me than 48% against.
I honestly expected closer to 60% against. My takeaway from election night was, "Oh, I really don't understand American demographics very well."
Every few years, something pops up that shows most of us don't understand our own demographics. Such as polls where the majority of Americans estimate the black population to be around 40% (it's actually around 10-15%), or the LGBT population around 20-30% (it's actually around 5%, maybe even lower), or, well, the Trump election.
My personal take: The media was so focused on Trump's personality quirks that, however bad they are, it seemed like they had nothing bad to say about his actual ability, accidentally making him appear like a pretty good candidate (especially compared to the actually-relevant-to-the-job controversies around Clinton, like email security). So while I was a bit surprised that he won, I always expected it to be a close race.
I think ability-vs-personality is one of those things that people largely mistake what other people will care about.
I'll say it again: Gerrymandering has nothing to do with the electoral college.
Unless you think that state lines were drawn (all at the latest in 1866, when the last gray area between Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada was cleared up) with modern political considerations in mind, gerrymandering (the manipulation of electoral boundaries for some political purpose) has nothing to do with the electoral college.
What I was getting at is that the actual winner of the election wouldn't change anything about the 46% of voters who chose Trump over Hillary.
That speaks of problems and divides that are deeper than Facebook.
To me the bigger issue though is the 45% of eligible voters who didn't bother to show up (or were prevented from showing up).
Not at all, really...it's simple economics to see why this is so.
You see, Trump didn't have to win the popular vote, he had to win the electoral college to become President, and because of this, all sort of possibilities emerge about being KILLED in the pop vote and winning elections.
Trump hardly spent a dime in CA...therefore in the most populous state he handed Clinton a huge pop vote tally. But he very wisely chose to spend his money and time in swing states like MI and OH and others where a much smaller vote count could swing the election to his favor.
I could do the math for you, but that would be I think too reductionist.
there are some really good youtube videos about the US electoral college and what a vote in Montana is worth compared to a vote in California
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
If you want better, do better.
> We have a habit of being kind of condescending towards rural voters, and the trend towards, 'you didn't have any agency, you were just manipulated into this' is uncomfortable to me.
The reality is that these "rural" voters almost surely have far more agency then any typical city dweller does due to the nature of the environment in which each lives, so it's just a fucking joke that Trump "duped" these "dumb hicks" into voting for him.
Psst...come closer...you want to hear the real reason he won???
H. Clinton was without any doubt the absolute worse candidate in the history of 20th and 21st century politics. period end-of-story.