They were mad at the people they voted for while they were angry, so they voted for someone while they were furious to make everything better.
You can’t just pose a question, refuse to accept the probable answer, and then come up with anything worth talking about.
I am sometimes a Democrat, sometimes a Republican, it depends for me on the local state issues I am voting on. I can change voter registration and not be locked into a particular party.
And I absolutely, absolutely voted for Trump against the perpetuation of the Clintons. I have had quite enough of those people. I really don’t find positives in Trump.
I think that many voters thought that they were throwing their vote away by voting for Trump. but the Clinton hatred was high.
It was Hillary, her campaign, her assumed crown, the continuation of the Clinton Dynasty. That was the whole deal.
You, and many, are ignoring the situation staring you right in the face. You will not make progress until you acknowledge the anti-Clinton vote.
It was Hillary, I don’t care if you like it or not.
Wouldn’t that make you independent?
For many if not most Republicans, the fact that Trump had an ® after his name, and Hillary had a (D) after her name, was reason enough.
I suppose. Local issues matter more to me than the national election. My presidential election vote is a throw away. I’m in Oregon so the electors are going blue no matter what my personal opinion of the national issues or candidates are.
Am I happy that Trump won? Yes! I think that Hillary would be George W Bush light. More international interventions, more of what Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex that he knew was already entrenched in US government.
Perpetual war. The complex needs that. Clinton would have provided that. It would be all in the bank. Because the bank owns her.
Trump was and remains an unknown. Not beholden to his Republican Party masters, I think that they are having reservations too. Go ahead and shake things up. He won’t get very far before the machinations of the government wear him down.
My Republican mother voted for Trump because she’s a longtime Hilary hater. I suspect she would have voted for him anyway, as Trump somewhat reminds me of the abusive asshole Mom married not once but twice.
My Republican grandmother voted for Trump because “the Bible says it’s for men to be in roles of leadership”. She, at least, has admitted to misgivings about Trump, so possibly she could have gone for Bernie.
I didn’t ask the rest of them.
So I might not be directly fit for this poll, I voted third party after mostly voting Republican previously as neither of the main candidates were electable and I had other much, much better options.
I can tell you, however, that had it been a runoff or just the two of them. It would’ve been an easy choice. Trump every time. Hillary Clinton would’ve under no circumstances gotten my vote. Bernie Sanders would’ve in an election against Trump.
My wife voted Trump. She is exceedingly Christian, conservative and Republican. So that would’ve never been a question.
I can’t answer for them (I’m not an American) but from what I’ve read and heard a lot of them voted for him because the consequences of a Clinton win would have been disastrous for the right. With at least three justices on SCOTUS in their eighties the victor could get to shape SCOTUS for the next few generations, either in a liberal or conservative image. That was cited as their top priority by many Republican voters and it’s easy to see why.
They may have found Trump distasteful, may well have had to hold their nose whilst voting but not to vote for him would have been unthinkable in such a momentous election.
Well that’s just silly.
Didn’t they know that without a senate majority, Clinton wouldn’t have been able to nominate any supreme court justices whatsoever?
Gosh, they must be mighty out of touch.
In the primary or the general?
As someone who has been confused by why so many people felt someone like Trump (who struck me and a lot of people as a dangerously unhinged and unqualified con man) was the best pick for president, I looked into it too and answers like these came up a lot.
[ul]
[li]They like his stance on trade policies[/li]
[li]They like that he says what he means and doesn’t focus group his opinions[/li]
[li]They feel he is a successful businessman, which they associate with positive character traits (ingenuity, work ethic, competence)[/li]
[li]They hated Clinton[/li]
[li]They felt that something needed to change (jobs, health care, etc) and felt even though Trump was unpredictable, Clinton would be more of Obama’s policies which didn’t work for them economically[/li]
[li]The supreme court is important, it is 4/3 with 1 swing vote right now. So having the GOP pick a candidate was important. [/li]
[li]Fear Clinton would confront Russia over Syria, possibly starting a war. [/li]
[li]The debt doubled under Obama, they felt hopefully a businessman will be able to cut it[/li]
[li]Do not agree with importing Syrian refugees for fear terrorists would get in[/li][/ul]
Like it or not, there are millions of people in this nation who hate Trump, but who hated Hillary even more. So a different Democrat may have had different outcomes.
What’s weird about that, Catfish, is the number of people I personally know and argue with who swore up and down they would never vote for Hillary because she was too centrist. I’m not gonna ask them about it, in some cases decades of friendship might hang by a thread.
But how did they get so pissed off? Started from “grumpy”, as I was, I never liked the Clintonista, menshevik, Republican Lite crapola. They were eager for Bernie Bed-hair, then all the stuff comes out about Democratic Leadership shafting Bernie every chance they got. I do not claim to know how many Bernie people refused to vote for Hillary because of that, cause I don’t know, and never will.
I just note in passing that this nugget of enragement came about courtesy of Vlad the Impaler, from hacking the DNC. Sowing dissension in the opposing party? Hardly a new idea.
My parents are Republicans and we were able to talk about who we were each voting for prior to the election. Back when the winnowing of the candidates was going on, they were for Huckabee, when he dropped out, they were ok with Cruz. At the end they “plugged their nose” and voted for Trump. They voted for what they were hoping would at least be their values being represented:
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Border protection/ limiting immigration. They lived in Arizona for a couple years and while they never had any problems with immigrants personally, the stories about their golfing buddies having immigrants “literally running through their backyards” was enough that they wanted the borders sealed up.
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Abortion and the Supreme Court. They want that Scalia mentality represented on the court and are against stare decesis being used to decide a case.
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Israel. They were horrified that the democrats don’t do everything in the world to support our “one ally in the region”.
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Gun control. The week after 9/11 they bought a gun “just in case”. They lived in a tony suburb of Minneapolis at the time. When Obama was elected, they bought two more so they’d have them before “he took them away”.
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American Exceptionalism. They believe that anything that could make the US slip from a perceived position of being #1, especially when it comes to the military, is beyond the pale.
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A perception that the GOP is better at reducing the tax burden and stopping spending.
They did not, however, vote for the character of the person. They find him reprehensible and if they had their druthers, he would be replaced by Pence who is at least a “statesman”. As it is, the ends are justifying the means, they are cringing by the personality of Trump but are happy with the policies being enacted/promised for the most part.
I think there have been a fair few threads that have touched on this. But don’t confuse voting for Trump with voting for Trump himself. IMHO different people voted for Trump for different reasons: the Supreme Court; not-Clinton; protest against the elites; the arrogance of liberals; the abuse of liberals calling them racists, sexists, etc; the lack of respect; and doubtless many more. That said, I’ve yet to find one person who voted for Trump because he was Trump. Indeed, while it is implied in those who voted him for the Supreme Court choices, not one said they voted for him because he was on the Republican ticket.
As for Dopers, I’ve repeatedly called out Dopers’ arrogance over the past year.
And those filthy little proles took your arrogant, snooty, contempt and used their votes to give you what they saw as a well-deserved kicking.
To repeat a quote to which I linked earlier:
Trump looks to be a dreadful President and it’s your fault.
What does that say when people are willing to trash their country and their own lives because they believe a bunch of strangers said mean things about them? Are you seriously saying that Trump wouldn’t have been elected if liberals had just been nicer to the alt right and people who think gays need to be put in asylums and people who don’t care if poor people die as long as they don’t have to pay for it? With that kind of thinking, how is anything ever the fault of conservative or “proles”? Isn’t that just a gigantic shift of responsibility?
Why are you looking to the media?
I am one of the few Republicans on this board. As a matter of fact, I very well may be the most conservative person here (certainly in the top 5). I have told you people repeatedly (including in this very thread!!!) that that is precisely how I felt. This election was truly a choice of the lesser of two evils, to at least a full order of magnitude more so than most elections. And yet most of the people on this board have totally ignored my explanations.
If you in fact DON’T want explanations – and your behavior strongly suggests that – then why do you keep starting these threads?
Well, I’m sure that part of it is because many of the policies liberals really hate… don’t really worry traditional Republican demographics.
Well, maybe we could compromise on letting them stuff puppies into blenders, if they promise not to hunt down DREAMERS with packs of baying bloodhounds.
Here is the thing that, for some reason, a ton of people do not understand on this board.
Clinton, and more importantly, the liberal wing of the Democratic party are told a lot pf people that their problems do not matter, that if they do not support every socially liberal policy fully and without question they are deplorable and that things like who can use which bathroom are more important than getting better jobs to people who are hurting financially.
It isn’t about gay rights for the vast majority of people. It was that gay rights were more important to the liberal politicians than the real world problems these people face.* Read that again. The priorities were out of wack for a bunch of people.
Additionally, they believe that they have already been trashed. Their needs have been ignored by the liberals. The liberals then, adding insult to injury, run around telling them that they are stoopid, racist and just plain evil.
Trump came along and said, in so many words, ‘You are right, you need better jobs and I will get them for you. You deserve them and we will make America great!’.
Bullshit? Yeah, but Clinton was focused on calling people deplorable instead of trying to inspire them. Trump, in his odd and bizarre way, tried to inspire. And it worked.
Slee
*Note, I voted third party and don’t give a shit about the socially conservative issues.
And there you go. You ignored and proved my point at the same time by contrasting gay rights with “real world problems” and saying you don’t care about social issues. Of course you don’t have to care; you don’t have to face their consequences every day.
But I can tell you that my friend of 17+ years cares every much about what happens to his marriage to his husband, and what the results say about society’s views at large about him. So yes, if you don’t think that gay people deserve the same legal protections as everyone else, if you don’t care that your narrow views on birth cause actual real people to die, if you don’t see anything wrong with the numbers on police shootings in regards to minorities, how is that NOT “deplorable”? Unless you agree that the fags should be put in asylums and women who have sex are whores and blacks are shot more because they’re more criminal than whites?
I think Slee is talking about priorities, not dissing gays. Can we spend more of our time focusing on improving the economy and not get so worked up about which personal pronoun someone uses when referring to Caitlin Jenner? I saw an interview with a woman participating in The Woman’s March. When asked why she was there, she replied: “I’m here to support LGBTQIA rights.” :smack:
Sure, I hope we can find some time to squeeze in some work concerning the rights of our Asexual siblings*, but when your constituents don’t have jobs, or don’t feel secure in their jobs, then you need to put that at the top of the priority list.
Trump, for all his faults, seems to be able to speak the language of the people. Or at least, better than the alternative (she who must remain nameless). Biden, I’m confident, would have crushed him.
*I assume the “A” is for Asexual; and remember, folks, that “brother” and “sister” are, what, gender-normative or something?