Free publicity. Didn’t the media give Trump $3 billion in free airtime/coverage or something like that? Talking about him nonstop? The guy didn’t need to run many ads; everyone knew who he was.
I want Weiner to run to be Sherrod Brown’s VP.
BROWN/WEINER 2020
Right, they wanted an inexperienced neophyte. One of the few things I can truly still hope for from this disaster is that they realize what a terrible idea that this was.
It seems ironic that you say money isn’t a factor, when Trump himself is a self-described billionaire. I say self-described because I believe in reality he is nowhere near as rich as he pretends to be. Do you know how money you’d have to LOSE to go from billionaire to bankruptcy? Multiple times?? Of course, the Donald gains and loses other people’s money, so it probably doesn’t affect him personally. Or the lifestyle to which he and his sycophants have become accustomed to.
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So the genius vote needs 100s of millions of advertising directed its way for what reason?
Can we knock it off with this please? There is no such election. It. doesn’t. exist. It never has and it probably never will.
As John Mace once pointed out to elucidator, the situation is somewhat analogous to who wins the World Series. The World Series winner is the team that wins the most contests, not the team who scores the most runs overall.
In this country we hold 51 contests (each state plus D.C.), or elections, to decide who will be president. Trump was elected because he won at least 270 electoral votes (or ‘points’) from his wins in those 51 elections. The total number of people voting in those elections is as irrelevant and beside the point as the total number of runs scored by the losing team in the World Series.
No I don’t think we should knock it off. There is such a thing called a Mandate. The majority of the population can truthfully say they don’t support Trump’s values or goals. The amount Trump lost the popular vote by is an important data point, and those opposing his agenda are justified to bring it up where-ever possible.
To get back to the OP, Trump won because he (or, more accurately, Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner) ran a modern, cost-effective and technologically savvy campaign that focused on winning the presidency by winning the electoral college. Hillary’s campaign on the other hand was stodgy, traditional, clumsy and expensive. Yes, Trump got lots of free advertising from the media in the beginning, but he also drew virtually unanimous bad publicity and condemnation from that same media once he became the nominee. So it’s specious to claim free publicity from the press is partially responsible for his victory.
Here’s a link to a Forbes’ article outlining how Kushner ran Trump’s campaign. It is fascinating and enlightening, and anyone interested in la true and factual account of how Trump won the election on a shoestring rather than hewing to traditional methods would be well advised to read it.
If you want to trumpet the fact that she scored the equivalent of the most runs in a world series, that’s fine. But you cannot with any factual basis claim that she won the most votes in ‘the election’, because no such election exists.
Well, that plus he was a well-known celebrity and reality-TV star with a long track record of very newsworthy buffoonery and gaffes, which kept him in the center of the media spotlight.
These antics included, among other notorious incidents:
- denying that ex-POW John McCain was a war hero;
- making fun of the looks of the female Republican candidate;
- telling lies about “thousands of Arabs” cheering in New Jersey at the fall of the Twin Towers;
- making fun of a disabled reporter who called his bluff on those lies;
- calling for a total ban on Muslim immigration;
- requesting supporters at his rallies to beat up protestors and promising to pay any legal costs thus incurred;
- accusing, with no evidence, the father of another Republican candidate of having conspired in the JFK assassination.
Seriously, the Trump campaign is not a reliable blueprint for electoral success for any serious politician. It worked for Trump, but nobody with less established notoriety or higher information levels or ethical standards should expect to be able to imitate it.
It exists rightly or wrongly in popular conception, therefore it exists. Oh and also there is this:
Trump’s twitter rant when he thought (incorrectly) that Romney won the popular election.
Trump got the second-most votes in the election. It’s a fact. You can google it.
Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me just which election that was. I can’t seem to find it on Google or anywhere else.
I see. So delusion = reality? Somehow I’m of the opinion that this runs contrary to the stated mission of the board.
Well, gee, if only you had said something sooner, maybe point out liberal hypocrisies, or something like that.
As an alternative, maybe you can knock it off your own self? Please?
There is such an election. The popular vote doesn’t determine the winner, but it’s absolutely a statistic about the election that’s gathered, and it’s important for folks’ perception of how much of a mandate a person has who wins the electoral college, and a lot of people have detailed and sophisticated arguments about why the popular vote SHOULD determine the winner of the election. Your repeated insistence that the popular vote is a fantasy is ridiculous.
Money doesn’t buy you an election. It shifts it in your direction. Money can push it some few percentage points. The OP’s argument is similar to a Climate Denialist asserting that since the temp went down on a particular year AGW isn’t happening.
If the election is going to be 55/45 shifting it two or three points is meaningless. If it’s going to be 50/50, it really matters.
Trump got a lot of free press because of his celebrity and the odious nature of nearly everything that came out of his upper-pucker. So you’d really have to figure the value of the constant coverage he got to compare the amount spent in any meaningful way.
The idea that because this election went for Trump that money in politics isn’t a problem is utterly inept thinking.
What search terms did you use? That might be the problem.
Then perhaps you can tell me what it’s called? And what its rules are? And what happens when someone wins it?
As for myself, a so-called election that has no name, no rules, no effect, and exists only one’s mind can’t really be called an election.
I hardly think raising and spending 600M to beat someone who raised 1.1B means “money isn’t necessary.” Trump raised half as much, but that’s still a lot of money.
To get an honest accounting, we’d also have to see how much foreign nations spent on directly influencing the election for each candidate. I can tell you with high confidence which candidate got more campaign spending from other another nation.
I’ve never liked this concept, not at any point in my life or with any president. For one thing it is so amorphously defined anybody can claim any politician either does or does not have one. Under one definition simple victory is enough no matter what the margin, but under others the concept of “large” victories arise. Which might work in Australia where everyone has to vote, if you could somehow just nail down how large “large” is. But it hardly applies in the United States where so many do not bother to vote at all.
Personally I think we should stop talking about mandates altogether, at least in terms of presidential elections.