US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6184

On November 11 2016 05:31 RvB wrote:

He never said that.

On November 11 2016 05:27 LegalLord wrote:

Those actually sound like pretty damn good things to drop. We just might avoid the worst case scenarios we were worried about.

On November 11 2016 05:27 LegalLord wrote:

Those actually sound like pretty damn good things to drop. We just might avoid the worst case scenarios we were worried about.

On November 11 2016 03:30 Acrofales wrote:


Anyway, extra runoff elections are not necessary if you have some form of preference ranking (this would be miserably awful on paper, but could be pretty easy to do digitally), you can do instant run-off which is a great way of doing run-off elections in a single round (although the ballot is more complex, which is a serious argument against it).

On November 11 2016 01:51 TheYango wrote:
The discussion right now about the electoral college is a red herring here. Even if Clinton won the popular vote, it's still true that almost 50% of the country voted for Trump. Whether you disenfranchise slightly more or slightly less than 50%, the problem is still the same.

The electoral map posted by Danglars illustrates the real problem here: we are a country that is living in two different worlds. The way rural America experiences the world is too different from urban America does. Even the urban Trump voter probably voted for Trump for vastly different reasons than his rural counterpart. In the last day since the election, I've been trying to reconcile myself with how so much of the country not only has a different worldview from my own, but one that seems utterly incompatible with my own.

It is easy to dismiss their view as uneducated or illogical, but that doesn't make the problem go away. It's easy to be partisan and blame the other side, when in fact a lot of what's wrong isn't the fault of either party, and is just an inevitable consequence of advancing technology and a shift in economy toward 21st century tech. We need to make a better effort to understand each other as a country, and what we should be doing to help such a massive swath of people who have been left behind by the 21st century.

Clinton’s campaign assumed that the Obama coalition, which relied heavily on urban minority and suburban women voters, was permanent. Democrats saw little need to court blue-collar whites in places like western Pennsylvania, as Clinton did in 2008, or even acknowledge what’s happened there over the past 40 years. In a moment of utter tone-deafness back in March, Clinton even said at a town hall in West Virginia, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Voters remembered that. Across eastern Ohio and rural Pennsylvania, political signs in town after town declared some version of, “Elect Trump, stop the war on coal.” Perhaps without fully realizing it, the Clinton campaign conveyed a blunt message to working-class whites across the region: we don’t care about you.

She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch. Whether or not she would win was always a secondary matter, something that was taken for granted. Had winning been the party’s number one concern, several more suitable candidates were ready to go. There was Joe Biden, with his powerful plainspoken style, and there was Bernie Sanders, an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure. Each of them would probably have beaten Trump, but neither of them would really have served the interests of the party insiders.


And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest. They chose Hillary even though they knew about her private email server. They chose her even though some of those who studied the Clinton Foundation suspected it was a sketchy proposition.

To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s well-being, or maybe both.

Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:

• Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
  
• Her scandals weren’t real.
  
• The economy was doing well / America was already great.
  
• Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
  
• And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.

How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?

On November 11 2016 05:27 LegalLord wrote:

Those actually sound like pretty damn good things to drop. We just might avoid the worst case scenarios we were worried about.

On November 11 2016 06:00 Introvert wrote:
Don't look now, CNN projects Trump will win the popular vote. We'll see. It could at least put this EC discussion to bed again. And add another "wrong" to my prediction list.