I do very much believe that things will get worse before they get better. I don’t care to predict specific outcomes, but from the environment to the economy and national security, I suspect we’re in for some inclement weather over the next 5-10 years. However, I think things will eventually bottom out. Trump ‘won’ because of a technicality that exists in our political system, and even then he just barely won. And he won largely with voters who are aging. If we do hit rock bottom, then by the time it happens, right wing voters will probably be unenthusiastic and there will be fewer of them. And there will be a groundswell of younger voters wanting to go in a different direction.
That highlights another one of the problems with the campaign that wouldn’t actually be fixed by ‘12 days earlier’. Instead of addressing her problems or owning her positions, Hillary and her followers would just keep trumpeting “At least I’m not Trump”, which isn’t a winning strategy. People aren’t forced to vote for one of Hillary or Trump, they can also vote third party, write-in a vote, or just stay home on election day. It would have been of extreme value to her campaign to remember that. “Hillary isn’t as bad a Trump” makes some people who are already going to vote for her feel good, but isn’t going to convince people who are undecided or uninterested that she’s a good choice. And those were the people she needed to reach to actually win.
Trump won the election solidly and not by a ‘technicality’ but by the basic mechanism of the election for president. Pretending that Trump didn’t ‘really’ win because Hillary wasted campaign money, time, and effort rallying extra votes that had no effect is just ignoring reality.
I find it frustrating when people act is if they just discovered that the Electoral College exists, and that it is some esoteric feature, hidden in the depths of our political system. Every candidate running for president knows damn well what it takes to win. The popular vote is meaningless, and running it up deliberately in states that “don’t matter”, especially when the race is tight, is brain-dead stupid.
It’s not “a technicality”. It’s the way we have always run the system for almost 250 years now.
Also, it’d just happened, back in not-all-that-long-ago 2000, when it was Bush-v-Gore. How can that not loom large in the memory?
(Something else that happened back in 2000, but doesn’t loom nearly as large in the memory: an Olympian won Decathlon gold despite failing to actually win any of the individual events. So the bronze medalist, in best swifter-higher-stronger fashion, outran him in the 100m dash, and outleaped him in the high jump, and outmuscled him in the shot put – and all of that, along with being a better hurdler and hurling a discus farther, meant precisely dick, as they all knew going in.)
Of course, Trump for his part won’t even accept that and to this day still insists that he also won the popular vote if you discount the “3 to 5 million illegal votes”, so apparently he cares just as much for the popular vote despite the fact that every reasonable person agrees that he won the election for President.
I say let’s take him at his word that the vote was rigged, invalidate the entire election, reject both of these narcisssitic ass-clowns and their supplicants, and find a collection of candidates who can actually represent the interests of the population, encourage them to have a courteous and pointed debate about the issues facing the nation, and then elect the one that proposes the best solutions and shows a willingness to work with the legislature rather than engaging in “Art of the Squeal” whining about how unfair it all is or pissing about how one scandal of her own creation was blown out of proportion and cost her the election. Is it really so fucking hard to find reasonable, honest, intelligent people to run the government?
Stranger
Yes, it’s actually a really hard thing to do.
Maybe we should pick people randomly from the phone book. Or would that be Facebook, these days?
To be honest, I’d sooner trust Hillary or Trump as POTUS over random-Facebook/phonebook-draw.
Though Trump might fairly be said to be obsessive over the popular vote, the fact is that the popular vote matters to every President–and to virtually all Americans.
Linked: an Ngram for “popular vote” from 1948 to 2008 (the last date Ngram will show)–it demonstrates the consistency of interest in the topic. You’d expect a big spike after the 2000 election, but that’s not the case; Americans have been deeply interested in the popular vote results for decades.
Trump apologists will continue to screech about the popular vote being meaningless–but the facts are otherwise. The popular vote lends legitimacy. That’s why, given the belief that the Blue Wall states were safe electoral-vote wins, the Clinton campaign decision to try to run up the popular vote actually did make sense: being able to point to a big popular-vote win would have helped Clinton accomplish policy goals.
They were wrong about the Blue Wall–but not by a landslide. The small margin of those losses points, again, to the fact that the campaign was not (as Clinton haters like to repeat ad nauseum) “a disaster” or “horrible”. They’d do some things differently, no doubt, in hindsight–as well they should. But the ‘run up the popular vote’ strategy made sense in the circumstances.
Actually, IMHO competent evil is worse because the competent evil person has a better chance of getting their agenda passed.
I don’t particularly think either Clinton or Trump are evil. Unsuitable for the Presidency but due to different reasons.
Slee
Pffft. The ones screeching here are the popular vote enthusiasts-- you need to let it go. And many of us here who realize how meaningless it is voted for Hillary, not Trump.
If it were meaningless it would not have been a topic of absorbing interest to so many Americans for so many decades.
You’re never going to get people to believe the number of votes a President gets is meaningless. It doesn’t matter what the Constitutional mechanics of the Electoral College may be–people will still care about the popular vote and believe that it affects the ability of a President to get things done.
A few years into Bush’s presidency, few, if any, people still cared about the fact that Gore won the popular vote.
Well it does when we have an electoral system which strongly favors fudning by political action groups and industry-supported “institutes” which skew the focus of issues, fund nonsense science to support their position, and spew out bogus factoids while attacking candidates who speak factually, all under the guise of “freedom of speech”. We need to recognize that corporations are not “people” and their “speech” does not include deliberate misdirection and mistruth or vast amounts of campaign funding, provide a genuinely level platform for multiple parties to address the public, provide an independent fiscal analysis of proposed programs and initiatives, and limit actual campaigns to publically funded events with a limited window of time instead of a two or more year long procession of increasingly bizarre and vicious challenges.
Stranger
In your opinion.
(For some reason, the many times Trump and his spokespeople have asserted confidently “no one except the media cares about the tax returns” comes to mind, here…)
Yeah, some of you guys are still screeching, like I said.
The same can be said about many scientific facts, and yet they are facts regardless of what people “believe” or not.
Don’t misunderstand me: I am well aware that, based on the 200+ year old political tradition in this country, Trump won fairly and squarely. I’ve long since told Hillary Clinton supporters to stop trying to delegitimize Trump’s victory on those grounds. However, if Trump nation believes that he won in some sort of landslide, then they’re sadly mistaken. The same message could have - and should have - been said to Barack Obama fanboys and the Democrats in 2008 and 2012. This country is still trying to decide what kind of country it wants to be, and I suspect that there is a decided generational gap that, within the next decade, will become self-evident.
I fully accept the legitimacy of Trump’s victory based on the current system.
However, I would point out that the victory was narrow – 70,000 or so votes across three states.
I use the word “technicality” to describe the electoral college system because fewer and fewer really believe it ought to exist at all in the 21st Century. And going forward, confidence in the original Constitution is only going to wane. So yes, I stand by calling it a “technicality”.
And if she was queen of the leprechauns and I stole her magic pot of gold and I was granted 3 wishes, I’d be president*. Lord, it’s becoming obvious that she’s nearly as delusional as Donald Trump. (Ok. Not really. No-one short of Kim Jong Un(?) is as delusional as Trump. But ever since she lost the election, she’s been edging into that territory)
*Actually, I’d be unquestioned ruler of the world. BOW BEFORE GRAND POOHBAH FENRIS, MASTER OF THE EARTH!