Trump supporters don’t care if they “benefit”; they care about hurting as many people as possible as much as possible, even if they die themselves.
That’s a pretty absurd statement.
Even in the electoral vote, he barely won – a razor thin margin in three states that, had a fraction of 1% voted differently, would have swung the election to Hillary.
Not as close as 2000, but in terms of how many votes actually separated victory from defeat, this was the 2nd closest election in several decades, if not more.
Yeah, this is like someone in a tennis match winning 6-6 (with tiebreaker), 1-6, 6-6(with tiebreaker), 6-4 and claiming they won in a blowout when in fact it’s difficult to imagine a closer match and in fact lost the more games.
Popular vote is how it works at the state level, however. Trump won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes by 10,704 “popular” votes. Trump won Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes by 22,784 “popular” votes. Trump won Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes by 44,292 “popular” votes. So that’s 46 electoral votes won as a result of a 77,780 popular vote difference. I would absolutely call that “barely winning”, and that is far from an insurmountable change for the Democrats in 2020.
Nope. Trump won by a the thinnest of margins. A football stadium’s worth of people out of a nation of 300 million plus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/swing-state-margins/
Which is meaningless, because New York and California are America. Both states draw the bright and ambitious from the rest of the country, year after year.
We are America, and the wealth we create pays the freight for multiple red states in the hinterlands.
I agree with your general point.
But it’s worth noting in the context of such arguments that Clinton had similar margins of victory in some of her states. She won Minnesota (10) by about 45K, Nevada (6) by about 27K, and New Hampshire (4) by about 3K. If Trump wins either MN or both NV & NH, then he wins the election even if he loses MI, WI, and PA. Saying that your guy could have won had they run the table on every single close race is not being realistic.
What’s true is that had Clinton’s margin been 1% closer in every single state she would have won. But that’s not how the battle was fought.
That said, I agree that it was obviously an extremely close race which could have gone either way and people saying the results show the Democrats are doomed are way off base.
I think some of this may be the results of ill-conceived optimism on the part of many Democrats that they had a permanent lock on the presidential race - the realization that this is incorrect has caused some soul-searching. But not being as dominant as you thought is not remotely the same thing as being doomed.
You are attempting relevant analysis, while most posts are just rehashing the election and endless debate whether SJW’s should ‘pardon’ people who voted for Trump or damn them to the eternal fires of hell (if there was a hell). 
The question of the thread rather is the delta since the election, in terms of a hypothetical next election. I’m not sure I agree with you. The main reason is that approval polls make no attempt to weed out the people who don’t vote, but are influenced by the generally left of center tone of US media, entertainment and education worlds. Trying to discern a small move against an elected Republican by comparing real election results to approval polls is generally not very valid.
That said your subjective impression is as good as mine. But my subjective impression is that things are more or more less unchanged. Immigration of Muslims to the US is not popular. Trump’s people bobbled the roll out of this order, but I agree with OP theme it’s a delusion on the left to think the underlying policy is very unpopular, even beyond people who voted for Trump. Likewise with illegal immigration. It’s hard to articulate why the average person should see either thing as a positive for them in their lives. And that’s how you get people to vote for stuff, not by browbeating them that they’re immoral to oppose you.
Then as I mentioned, Trump has done concrete positive things from POV of non-Trumpist people on the right, as in generally reasonable (from conservative POV) cabinet nominees, and especially the Gorsuch nomination.
Then the wild card is what potential voters would be tempted to vote differently, or moreover to show up/not show up for the side they almost surely would vote for if they did show up, because Trump is still acting childish and narcissistic, at least a good deal of the time, now that he’s actually president. Maybe it’s true that would shift things, even if people had realized in their heads he probably wouldn’t change, to actually see and hear it. But I tend to think not so significant, so far.
I suspect one big factor might be if people start perceiving that Trump’s personality flaws are actually damaging things in a tangible way.
[It’s like if you have a tough nasty dog out in your front yard. You might not be concerned as long as you think he’s intimidating the Bad Guys. But when you stop getting mail deliveries you might rethink it. :)]
All true, but I think we can also emphasize that Red voices in California and New York, like Blue voices in Texas, are not getting heard under our current system. And god knows there are lots of California/New York Republicans who would like to have their votes count, for a change.
The Electoral College sells them short, too.
Do mind who’s making it and their record of statements on this board.
That denial of the malice of the Right is a major reason Trump and the Republicans were elected, and why the Democrats have been ineffectual for decades. They keep trying to deal with a benevolent right wing that doesn’t exist.
Yes, every president’s numbers look like that. That’s why I started out stating the way we represent the outcomes of elections (presidential, that is, and not just this recent one) distorts what really happens, as in exaggerates the margin of victory, and so exaggerates the “support” of the victor. Let’s say 4 people are standing around trying to decide what to have for dinner. One person says pizza, another says burgers, and the other two say nothing. "Allowing for rounding, that’s essentially what happens in most of our presidential election. Did the group “send a clear message” about what diners want, etc? Hardly. Yet people, be they for one side or the other or supposedly neutral, will say those kind of things about election outcomes.
Your point about after the fact polls is well taken. Since I don’t consider myself up to sped on that at the present time, I defer commenting.
It’s not a “red herring” because it represents 66 million actual people who do not support Trump or his policies. Just because someone wins an election doesn’t make them CEO of America for 4 years. Even the CEO of a company can’t just do what he wants, assuming he wants to keep his employees and customers.
I quite like the shit-stirring quality of the OP. Made me laugh.
So, first, I’m not an American, and so I couldn’t vote in the election. My prime minister just copped an earful of spitty bile from the new president, and so in a roundabout way I think of myself and my country as a stakeholder in the conversation.
If I could have voted in the election, it would have been against Trump. So let’s get that out of the way.
The thing which bothers me about the post-election reporting is what I’m seeing on Facebook. I get newsfeeds on Facebook from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Cambodia Daily, the Moscow Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, The West Australian, the Straits Time, the Times of India, the Bangkok Post, China Daily, the South China Morning Post, and the Japan Times.
Save for the Moscow Times (which I suspect isn’t actually written in Russia), China Daily, and the Cambodia Daily, everyone of those publications pushes an anti-Trump line. I am constantly under the impression that the Trump presidency is on the verge of collapse.
So, I agree with the OP in that I suspect many of us on the left or centre are still in our echo chambers. I can’t make an informed opinion on whether Trump’s supporters are deserting him or fully behind him. The polls which some of these publications make a fuss about - Trump was the lowest approval polling president before inauguration - are I assume done by the same pollsters who predicted Hillary Clinton would be president. All I seem to get is partisan news.
That doesn’t mean I am going to start reading trash like Breibart, but it would be nice to get an actual sense as to what the majority of Trump voters actually think about the conduct of the presidency so far. I assume base Trump supporters love the fact that he has irritated California, irritated tech companies, and irritated “elitist” judges, simply because they are bloody-minded about the political and economic elite and perceive that Trump is doing what he promised.
But what about sane and reasonable GOP voters? Do we have any sort of fix as to whether the old school Republican establishment are with Trump? Is the Koch Brothers-led “revolt” actually real?
I don’t know if I agree with the premise that GOP supporters are still behind Trump. There are nice, sensible, rational Republicans. Here, we have the “doctors’ wives”: economically conservative, socially tolerant. And some of those on the religious right must have an issue with the Muslim ban? I know some Texan Republicans: they’re nice people who are just plain Texan rather than anti-elitist or economically-trapped Rust Belters (albeit with a penchant for guns which I find culturally unsettling). Some of those who voted for Trump because they identify as GOP voters must surely be questioning some of the ways in which things are rolling out.
But I can’t work it out.
the margins in the votre where he won in the middle states were extremely thin. some hundreds votes change, he loses.
that is indeed barely winning.
it is mathematics. not politics
I do not care otherwise about your strange election system, it is simply the facts.
It’s not meaningless at all. Trump had as large a margin of support outside of NY and CA as Clinton had in the country as a whole, the idea people on this board have that he had no real support is just mind-boggling. The reason to question totals for NY and CA is that they are distorted in normal election years because there’s little reason for Republican voters to show up for presidential races - the states are going to go Democrat no matter what, so there’s a chunk of people who stayed home. In this race in particular, Clinton actively campaigned in NY and CA with the explicit goal of increasing her popular vote totals at the expense of swing states that she ignored, while Trump completely wrote off both NY and CA and spent his money winning the actual election.
Say two teams, the Houston Cowboys and the Detroit Tomahawks make it to the playoffs. In the weeks before the playoffs, they have some exhibition games against non-winning teams. The Houston Cowboys play as hard as possible in those games and rack up as many points as possible against the weaker teams, white the Detroit Tomahawks take it easy against the weaker teams and save their effort for the playoffs. When the playoffs come, the Houston Cowboys are exhausted from their exhibition games and lose, so the Detroit Tomahawks win the contest. But then diehard Houston Cowboy fans keep insisting that they really won because HC got more points than DT, even though HC got those points at the expense of winning the real contest.
Trump is certainly an unpopular president, but the idea that he has no support doesn’t bear any relation to reality. Comparing his vote total to the total number of people in the US is only reasonable if you do it for all presidents and candidates, and you end up with a similar argument for ‘only a fraction of people voted for him’ even for candidates with a large popular vote margin like Reagan or Nixon, or fairly strong margin like Bill Clinton or Obama.
Which is especially bizarre since they thought that after Bill Clinton, sneered what an ‘idiot’ Dubayah was, then managed to lose to him twice. You’d think they would have done the soul searching then.
You could say the same thing about any non-swing state, including the many deep-red states. It’s ridiculous to separate any state totals as less representative, or less meaningful, than any others.
It’s also extreme hyperbole to say anything like “Trump has no support”, but that doesn’t justify saying that NY or CA are special and somehow less representative of what America believes than other states.
We are a visceral society. Action movies with lots of explosions rake in a lot more money than movies with deep intellectual content. Trump’s supporters see him as an action hero, one who bypasses the tedious bureaucracies and blows shit up. Yes, the aftermath has to be cleaned up and rebuilt at high cost, and the bullet-ridden bodies have to go through the funeral process in front of their distraught loved ones, but the movies don’t cover that, so Trump supporters don’t consider it.
They didn’t concern themselves with issues of race, immigration, or any hot button liberal issues. That’s too boring. They just wanted to see him fuck shit up. Liberals need hero figures that are adrenaline junkies, not condescending bookworms and whiny activists.