Hillary Clinton did not run a terrible campaign

Politics & Elections
241

You seriously are asserting that Donald Trump did not have widespread popular support???

Map of State by State Results (shaded by extent of victory)

Map of County by County Results

Cartogram Map of Results by State

These three maps make clear EXACTLY what happened. Donald Trump won the contests in 30 out of 50 states, and those states are located in every part of the country except the NorthEast and the West Coast. He received more votes than Hillary Clinton in roughly 2600 of the more than 3100 counties in the nation (includes the 38 independent cities of Virginia). But as the cartogram shows, Clinton racked up wins in states with large populations. A map showing margin of victory by county shows this to an even better extent: Clinton really wowed them in strongly urban areas of the NE and the West Coast, as well as in places like Chicago and Houston.

So whatever you want to say about Donald Trump’s victory, you CANNOT make the assertion that he wasn’t widely popular when it came time to choosing between him and Hillary Clinton.

Which brings us back to why this issue is important from the standpoint of debunking the claim that Hillary Clinton “won” the popular vote. It’s apparently not enough for some people that Ms. Clinton received more votes from people voting on that day than Mr. Trump did. This gets stretched into some sort of narrative that SHE was actually the winner that day, and only the fact that the system is rigged kept her from victory. But the trouble with this claim is that it equates being very popular in a limited number of areas to being popular nationwide. The maps and the results they are based on show that’s not the case. And there is a REASON for that, part of which we were trying to suss out in this thread.

And if you still don’t get what happened, take a look at THIS map:

County by county swing between 2012 and 2016

Ignoring the anomalous results in Utah (a function of the third-party candidate from that state), we can see that the only places where Hillary Clinton out-performed her predecessor was in strongly urban areas, especially on the West Coast. In short, her campaign did better in cities than Barack Obama’s did. But she achieved that at the cost of losing ground everywhere else in the US! The killer is the concentration of heavy red colors through the “heartland” of America (the Midwest). She lost almost every one of those states, winning only Illinois (with its strong urban Chicago vote) and Minnesota (long a bastion of liberal thought). That’s why she lost the election. She campaigned to win the cities, and lost the rest of the country in the process. And that’s EXACTLY what the “Electoral College” process is designed to preclude as a winning strategy.

So stop trying to amplify the fact that she received more votes that day than Donald Trump did into some sort of result that it is not. Then, I, at least, will stop pointing out that this is a meaningless statistic.

242

Now, while I’m at it, I notice that ElvisL1ves has managed to exit the conversation about “slavery” and the Electoral College, once I and others began putting up actual facts, backed by evidence, challenging his notions. Perhaps real life has intruded; it happens. So if it has, I’m quite ready to receive some response from him that consists of more than just denying what’s been presented without offering any actual evidence to the contrary…

243

You said " This gets stretched into some sort of narrative that SHE was actually the winner that day, and only the fact that the system is rigged kept her from victory. But the trouble with this claim is that it equates being very popular in a limited number of areas to being popular nationwide."

I haven’t see one person here say that trump isn’t the president. So this is a straw man right?

How is it meaningless that Clinton got more votes than Trump? Obviously not to Trump, and not to the voters, not to anyone who uses the word “mandate” or the phrase “political capital.” Just to you?

With all that you said it appears that you are equating being very popular with a limited number of people to being popular nationwide. This is also an error.

244

I think he said “nation wide” because his wins were throughout the country, compared to Hillary’s more concentrated support.

245

You’re doing very little to disprove the sexism charge with this comment.

Nope, the EC is inherently undemocratic. I don’t see how anyone can argue otherwise. “Oh boo hoo boo, the votes of city dwellers count more because there’s simply more of them!” So? Without the EC, every individual’s vote counts. There’s no guarantee that Democrats would be guaranteed to win every election solely because of Democrat leaning states. If anything, a lot of people in guaranteed “blue” states sit out elections because they know their individual vote won’t make a difference. The EC basically encourages low voter turnout. If the popular vote is how presidents were elected, candidates would be forced to work to appeal to everyone instead of just battleground states.

Is the US the only country in the world with uneven population dispersion? Of course not. Damn near every country has this issue. But most countries of such with a democratic electoral process don’t utilize this silly, outdated system to elect their leaders. It doesn’t accurately reflect the true will of the people. If anything, it tips the scale in favor of the small minority, which is more grossly unfair. The EC isn’t evenly distributed because there are many states whose EV count is disproportionate to the actual size of their respective populations.And then there’s the fact that the “winner-takes-all” system makes it so that a candidate that barely squeaks by with a victory in a state takes all the EVs. All in all it’s not a fair system in theory or in practice.

And a huge part of why it was implemented in the first place was born of the belief that the populace simply wasn’t intelligent enough to be trusted with electing a qualified president (how ironic). The slavery argument isn’t entirely without merit, either.

246

I notice that DSYoungEsq somehow still thinks he’s contributing to the discussion.

247

Right. And that would be a statement that placed a higher value on geography than on population. Not everyone would feel that way. I think it’s less democratic, and less representative for one thing. So I think people who are mortified about the goldfish are trying to figure out how to do this differently in the future. Seems reasonable to me.

248

A lot of discussions have gone in this loop:

"Why did Hillary lose?
“Because many voters hated her.”
“Why did they hate her?”
“Because (this, this and that)”
“But those aren’t *good *reasons to hate her!”
They don’t *have *to be good reasons. All that matters, electorally, is whether the hate is present. A voter who hates Hillary for bad reason will vote against her just as much as a voter who hates her for good reason.

249

I don’t think that was his point; he’s pushing back against is that Trump’s victory is somehow less legitimate or flawed because it came as a result of the electoral college. On the other hand, we have Little Nemo pushing back against the notion that Trump and the GOP have a mandate to work with. I think both sides are probably correct to a degree, and I don’t think we’ve broken any new ground in this discussion. The American electorate remains highly polarized along racial lines and among an axis of urban/cosmopolitan/college educated America on one side and rural & suburban/mostly white/less formally educated America on the other. The Republicans have been more successful in waging this culture war probably because they care more about winning it, whereas a lot of Democrats just hope it can somehow be resolved. That being said, I think some Democrats are at the point where they too want to win and care less about the etiquette and norms of discourse.

250

What would happen is that instead of visiting battleground states, candidates would visit major metropolitan areas. They’d skip places in rural Wisconsin and Missouri. They wouldn’t visit Youngstown, Ohio; they’d just go to Cleveland and Cincinnati instead.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about this, either. As you say, this is how presidential elections function in many parts of the world. But let’s not forget that some democracies don’t have a presidential system but rather have a parliamentary system, so those out of the way districts are essential to building a majority or plurality that could then select the presidential equivalent.

In a presidential system, there’s at least an argument for having some mechanism that requires someone with that kind of power acknowledge the existence of many different types of constituencies. Obviously the EC doesn’t address the many forms of discrimination that exist in society, but it does put limits on regional discrimination, and that has its merits.

I am in favor of removing the faithless elector - that part of the EC is not only outdated, but if ever there was an occasion to utilize it to defend the republic against voter incompetence, it would have been December of 2016. Obviously, that airbag failed to deploy. It exists only to cause political mischief, and I fear that going forward, that’s exactly what will happen as the parties (particularly the GOP) continues to ignore more and more of our political institutions and norms. A gang of faithless electors would be a nightmare, and yet constitutionally speaking, completely valid. Thus we wouldn’t have a constitutional crisis but a straight up political one. That part of the EC absolutely needs to go. The EC results need to be binding.

251

Why would they be going to cincinnati (which they did go to) rather than youngstown? Both are in the same state. Both would garner the same number of votes? Both are identically valuable in either system.

Now, I can understand why they would go to LA or New York rather than to youngstown. With the EC, there is no reason for them to visit any “solid” states. The only states that are worth visiting are the battleground states. So the EC pretty much demands that the candidates ignore about 80% of the country, the 40% they won’t get, and the 40% they are “guaranteed” by their party affiliation, and only pay attention to the 20% that can be flipped.

As far as faithless electors go, that is the least important bit of the EC. Faithless electors have never changed an election, or even came anywhere close. The EC and the popular vote have disagreed twice in the last 16 years. That’s an actual problem that should be addressed.

If I had anything to say about faithless electors, it would be to remove the bindings that states have tried to put on them, and encourage them to be more circumspect with their votes, to vote their conscience, as the will of the voter is not to elect a president, but to choose the electoral college to choose a president. The only reason to keep the EC around is for its ability to prevent a ideological demagogue populist with no ability or temperament from assuming the office. They failed this time, but if we are to keep the EC, then it should be better instructed on its constitutional duties, not have them stripped away.

ETA: Keep in mind, electors are chosen by the party leaders. They are faithful members of the party. They aren’t going to go off the rails and elect someone counter to the ideals of the party that elected them, so I am not sure what shenanigans you think that republicans will be playing with them in the future.

252

Which ‘political institutions and norms’ do you think the GOP, in particular, is ignoring? I can think of a whole raft that Dems have ignored in recent years, but I’m struggling to come up with a comparable list for the Repubs. What’s yours?

253

Now I remember why I keep coming back here. :stuck_out_tongue:

254

Yeah. but you’re taking my posts out of context. :smiley:

255

Thanks. Now I have a handy post to cite as an example of people trying to create a false narrative.

Because there’s nothing else those maps prove. Showing that Trump won in more counties tells us nothing meaningful. Counties are not equal; Loving County, Texas has a population of 82 and Los Angeles County in California has a population of 10,170,292. Putting them side-by-side is ridiculous. But Republicans love maps like that because it lets them use their red marker a lot.

256

Let me help you guys out (plus anyone else interested in that discussion). Please have at it over in GD.

257

It was a question about the death penalty:

“19 states and the District of Columbia have banned the death penalty. 31 states, including Ohio, still have the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, since 1973, 156 people have been on death row and later set free. Since 1976, 1,414 people have been executed in the U.S. That’s 11% of Americans who were sentenced to die, but later exonerated and freed. Should Ohio and the 30 other states join the current list and abolish the death penalty?”

Now, I agree that the death penalty isn’t exactly a tough question to answer (I don’t think there are many gotcha questions during a primary) but I am pretty sure that there is an advantage to having advance knowledge like this. I mean its still cheating right? And this is only the stuff we have proof of. And that makes Hillary a cheater right?

How do we know this is the only incidence of her cheating? how do we know this is the only incidence of her collusion with the DNC leadership?

258

Do you not know what a cartogram is?

259

ho is trying to create this false narrative? AFAICT the only false narrative we have seen is that Hillary somehow got the election stolen from her by slavery.

260

You know this isn’t the pit right?