dav345 - join date February 2017
Equine cadaver percussionist.
I don’t know if individual voters vote this way, but collectively it makes little sense to do so.
If this is what really happened, the last group of voters must not be thinking about things clearly. It would be the equivalent of chopping down a fruit tree that is just short of maturity that hasn’t yielded any fruit on the theory that “this tree must be no good, let’s chop it down and plant a different one.” It makes no sense.
Add up enough individual voters for something, and it becomes “collective.”
I live in North Carolina, where the Republican party passed the signature Where To Pee law, and refuses to rescind it despite the widespread boycotts of our state that followed. Tell me again which party is worrying about where to pee instead of creating jobs?
CNN and MSNBC constitute a “sea”? There are three national news networks in this country, and of those three, the largest and most biased supports the Republicans. This does not constitute an overall liberal bias.
This. I’ll add also that the presidency and Congress were due to flip anyway, that Clinton didn’t campaign in the right places and that although Trump won, he still had 3 million fewer votes which he got the easy way, through nationalism, racism and demagoguery instead of beating Clinton on the issues.
As well you shouldn’t. It was less than half of the country. Less than half of the people who voted, even.
Multiple reasons:
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We had a democrat in office for 2 terms, people rarely pick the same party to rule the white house for 3+ terms in a row. Reagan/Bush, FDR and Truman, but other than that it seems to be 8 years max for the last 100 years or so.
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Clinton was a known, she would be Obama’s third term. Trump was an unknown. Trump was like a long shot gambling option, it could be great or terrible. For a lot of people that was preferable to a candidate like Clinton who they felt was known.
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Trump talked about corruption and the decimation of the working class in ways that resonated with a lot of voters. He may not actually do much about these things but he connected on an emotional level with a lot of people about these issues.
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There is a pushback against multiculturalism due to all the rapid progress on gay rights, having a black president, a female president, the tensions between the west and the Islamic world, the rise of China as a global superpower, etc. I know OP said ‘no comments about racism or sexism’, but it did play a role. Maybe not the only role but it was there.
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Hillary Clinton has a lot of negatives, a lot of people who voted for Trump did so because they felt he was less bad than Clinton.
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Lots of people knew Trump had problems, but issues like the supreme court, tax cuts, repealing the ACA, etc. was more important.
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People mad at the system felt Trump was their opportunity to get revenge.
I remember looking at voting patterns and how they differed between 2012 and 2016. The main takeaway is that Trump did far better in the midwest and northeast than Romney did in 2012, but he did worse or the same everywhere else. He did worse in the sunbelt states, worse in texas, etc. But he did much better all through the midwest and northeast. Several blue states moved 5-10 points to the right from 2012 to 2016, but becasue they were so deeply blue nobody noticed. Obama won Vermont by 35 points in 2012, Hillary won it by 27 points, an 8 point shift to the right. But since Vermont is so blue nobody noticed. However when New Hampshire moved 6 points to the right from 2012 to 2016, that meant it went from Obama winning it by 6 points to it being a tie that Hillary barely won in 2016.
I think a big part of Trump’s appeal is he actually talked about the despair among the white working class. They are seeing all their hopes of a good economic life going out the window, and things aren’t getting better. Trump doesn’t have plans, but he actually listened and reflected the economic concerns of working class whites back to them. Granted, he did this in large part by blaming immigrants, trade deals, political corruption and government regulation (it is more income inequality, growing expenses, technological changes and automation that seems to be fucking people over economically). He listened to people and gave them palatable answers.
Depends. Will Sharknado be in charge of the military and possibly determine if I get health insurance? I understand what you’re saying, but do people just not really consider the gravity of the president and how it can impact people’s lives?
OK.
Ah! So you already know the answer!
But perhaps the real answer is that a lot of stupid voters turned out to vote – gullible know-nothings who responded to an unprecedentedly unorthodox campaign based almost entirely on lies and fear-mongering catering to their hopes and fears.
I don’t know how anyone could witness a discussion with the average Trump voter and not believe this to be true. I know it’s fashionable to dismiss simple explanations and look for deep underlying factors to explain things like Trump, but IMHO it’s not especially relevant to make observations about things like economic and security concerns when these things affect everyone, and it’s only when those concerns are filtered through a special kind of low-information mentality that very stupid solutions are embraced.
How do you fix this problem? Just look at what Republicans want, and do the opposite. Republicans of the Trumpist variety seek to undermine the already pathetic state of public education, they try to discredit and undermine legitimate media while bolstering their own fake news mouthpieces, they seek to defund and shut down public broadcasting. They know damn well what the institutions of knowledge are, and how to make ignorance prevail to their self-serving benefit.
You know what? If you think the media as a whole is “liberal”, you must also think that academia as a whole is liberal, and public education is liberal (they teach evolution and climate change!! :eek:), and you must also think that most western democracies are predominantly liberal (they all have universal health care and significant social services! :eek:). If your view is that the whole freaking world is “liberal” except for your own echo chamber, you might want to re-examine how you define “liberal”.
It turns out that people in a great many countries vote rationally, in the sense that if you ask them who they are voting for and why, they actually have some factual understanding of the issues and what the candidates stand for. And they are not robots. Nor is it an unreasonable expectation to have of a voter. In fact it’s the fundamental basis of a working democracy. Do you really think that the typical enthusiastic hardcore Trump supporter would be able to correctly answer ten factual questions about major national issues, or pass a simple citizenship test, or even know who his own senators and Congressional representatives are and their positions on the issues? Or would they just rant about “Obamacare”, “socialism”, and “Mooslims”?
Often, no.
Well, that and who you’d rather have a beer with.
Replace “a different one” with “an unraveled tractor-trailer tire” and you’re closer.
The Director of the FBI shoved a crowbar into the machinery.
The problem is a lot of voters are dumb and they made the wrong choice.
I don’t care if they think they had good reasons. They still voted for the wrong candidate.
If you wanted a better job, you shouldn’t have voted for Trump. If you wanted better health care, you shouldn’t have voted for Trump. If you wanted a safer world, you shouldn’t have voted for Trump. If you wanted a better life for your children, you shouldn’t have voted for Trump.
Voting for Trump is like refusing to get your kids vaccinated. There was no good reason to do it.
I often hear that lots of single-issue voters go Republican because “guns” or “abortion”; do you figure they got what they wanted, versus voting for Clinton?
Because enough of the US population with just the right geographic distribution is also comprised of awful people.
dav345, you’re looking at the election entirely wrong-end up. It was never about who voted for Trump, it was about who stayed home instead of voting for Hillary.
The Non-Voters Who Decided The Election: Trump Won Because Of Lower Democratic Turnout is opinion, but appeared on the conservative forbes.com.
Everybody knew that a white candidate would not draw the percentage of black voters that Obama did. Obama in fact went out and tried to rally black voters to come out in similar numbers. Republicans also knew this and systemically installed hurdles that would make voting more difficult for Clinton’s base supporters. The two effects worked. They can explain the entire total of 75,000 votes that meant Trump’s victory.
Voting is complicated and so are voters. With a result this incredibly narrow, many things can account for the difference. However, preemptively cutting out racism and sexism when those things are critical destroys any chance you’ll ever have of understanding the answer to your question.