Vilageidiotx

2016 US Election: Day Zero

There are a few interesting little tidbits to note about this election.

First off, whereas Trump won the electoral college and therefore the election, Hillary won the popular vote (or at least seems to have, there are still a trickle of votes left to count, but mostly from solid blue states). That is to say that in total more people voted for Hillary than for Trump (at a slim margin, about 200,000 more). This is the fifth time in US history this has happened, the last time being 2000 where Bush narrowly squeezed by in the electoral college even though Gore won the popular vote by 500,000. This phenomena didn't occur at all in the twentieth century, appearing to be a strictly 19th and 21st century thing, possibly connected to how extremely divided these periods of American history are compared to the more fluid and landside-tending elections of the 20th (and before anyone infers ominous Civil War vibes in this, there were no such electoral-popular splits in the Civil War period of electoral history (1848-1865), a period more defined by dramatic party implosions and, of course, a big-ass war).

This means, interestingly enough, that of the seven Presidential elections I have lived through (I was born in 1989), the Republicans only won the popular vote once, that being in 2004. 2000 and 2016 have been Electoral-Popular splits going to the Republicans, with 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012 being Democratic victories.

There are ominous signs in this for both parties. On one hand it implies the population is drifting slowly to the left, which could put pressure on Republicans (this isn't exactly a startling idea). On the other hand, this population growth is bunching up in states that are already solidly blue as people flee the "Flyover States" for the coasts, thus draining traditionally blue midwestern states of their urban votes and creating an electoral challenge for the left that has cost them two elections in sixteen years. The story Democrats have been telling themselves is one where they keep the blue states and add quickly urbanizing states like Texas and Georgia to their ranks, but this election shows it may not be that simple for them as the rust belt is slipping out of their hands.

The other interesting detail contradicts my earlier opinions about the election. The turnout for this election... well, I'm getting conflicting reports to be honest, but it looks poor. I suspect we'll hear more about this later in the week. But what I can say is that, with only a small amount of the popular vote still left out there to count, and most of that in solid Hillary states, it is looking like Trump is performing at John McCain levels of popular vote, and below Mitt Romney. It doesn't look like there is enough vote out there to bring us up to 2008 levels or 2012 levels, so imma just call it: what really hurt Hillary wasn't people flocking to Trump, but simply an inability to get people out to vote for her, crucially in the midwest where she especially failed to resonate.

The last thing is that, forgetting the Presidential election for a bit, an unsurprising winner of the 2016 Election was Marijuana. California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Nevada passed recreational Marijuana. They join Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and DC. Further more, Medical Marijuana has passed in a further list of states so that the number of states where Marijuana prohibition is in full effect has been whittled down to just Idaho, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Indiana, and West Virginia. I can't say for certain, but it is looking like very soon the Federal Prohibition will become a dead letter and some President (Very possibly Trump, though I have no earthy clue what his position on the matter is) may just become the one who officially makes weed nationally legal.

Another interesting thing I noticed just looking over ballot measure results is that a number of minimum wage increases were put on the ballots of several states, and it looked like they all passed with respectable margins. Most of them are Blue states except Arizona, a state that went for Trump, which passed a slow-increase to $12 an hour and legally mandated paid sick leave by %59 of the vote.

2016 US Election: Day Zero

@Vilageidiotx Fair criticism, but nothing major that would show to me how Trump is going to fail as a politician/president.

@Buddha

For a lot of why people are so uncertain about Trump, you have to remember who exactly he has been to Americans until now. There are people comparing this to if Kanye West became president because, to us, it sort of looks like that type of thing.

You get this billionaire playboy who becomes famous in the seventies as a sort of walking rich-guy stereotype, like we needed him around as a metric to measure new-money in the same way you might imagine an attractive celebrity setting your idea of what a "10: is. That's the schtick he plays, and he plays it until he's more celebrity than businessman. It's not like if Warren Buffet, or even a Koch brother, ran for president, because those are traditional dignified rich guys. They make predictive statements on money markets. Trump lives in a golden penthouse and writes books about how rich he is. When I was little, that is who Trump was, the guy who shows up on morning talk shows just to sit there and, like, be rich.

Then he gets a reality show to milk off of this. The first season of the Apprentice is actually the only time I ever watched an entire season of a reality show beginning to end. It's like a carnival, he comes down an escalator and tells some yuppies to do something like sell lemonade in Manhattan, they act silly and backstabby about selling the fucking lemonade, and at the end he brow-beats them and fires one of them. Later he does the same schtick with third rate celebrities. I dunno, I didn't see that one, I just know it had Gary Busey in it, who for context is an actor who is famous for having got in a motorcycle accident that gave him serious brain damage.

That's about the time he tried to put his name on a bunch of random shit and it all failed. All the Trump Steak and Trump Water came from this time.

Then he sort of disappeared. I guess he got married, or maybe he was just so boring I didn't notice him? Until, shit, about 2010 he randomly hits the news in this big name-calling spat with Rosie O'Donnel. That was it. They just insulted each other back and forth for a month. It was dumb and we all watched it because watching celebrities be dumb is something we do.

Then when that dies down he grabs onto the Birther thing, and that's what I think is the birth of whatever he is doing now. He spearheaded the movement declaring Obama a secret Kenyan, then he ran in the primaries in 2012, failed, and we sorta thought that was that.

Everything that has went on since, whether it is his policies, or his weird debate performances, or his comments about women, have to be taken in the context of this being a guy who we all associated with yelling at Rosie O'Donnel on tabloid tv just five years ago.

To add to this, though I don't think this is as well known, there are only four prior presidents to have never held elected office: Zachary Taylor, a general and hero of the Mexican-American war, who was elected, promptly turned against the exact people who elected him, and died in office; Ulysses Grant, the general who more or less won the Civil War, and who's Presidency is considered one of the most corrupt in American history; Herbert Hoover, a business man who served as secretary of commerce, and who's presidency is basically defined by the beginning of the Great Depression and his failure to act; and finally Eisenhower, the commander of the allied forces in WW2, who's presidency was actually pretty good, and he's liked by both parties even today. Trump, by being a real estate mogul turned reality tv star, is safely the least qualified president in American history. Considering he makes his own party nervous (the elected parts at least), and the democrats are guaranteed to despise every breath he takes (albeit they don't have any ways to express now), he's got a helluva time ahead of him.

This is to say that he is an inexperienced president with unusually high unfavorability going into his presidency (both candidates were historically unfavorable) and a congress that isn't comfortable with him, and whom he himself has plenty of scores to settle among, and he has to do something to dispel the massive cloud of doubt hanging over his presidency in two years before congress can be turned blue. Because in 2018 we get to vote again, on some senators, and all of our congress.

So we could talk about the policies of course, but this is an uphill battle for him. It's going to be a very weird four years.

2016 US Election: Day Zero

I fundamentally believe that "protest voting" is fucking moronic. Screwing over your entire country by voting for someone/something you know is goddamn terrible and an inferior choice just to stick your finger up at the establishment is stupid in the extreme. The catharsis gained by lashing out and expressing your dissatisfaction with the establishment with this sort of protest vote is vastly outweighed by the sheer damage that is usually caused by said vote. This is exactly what I am seeing in my own country, with Brexit.

Anyone who protest-voted in this way, who voted for Trump without believing his policies were best, has condemned themselves and their neighbours to four years of absolute travesty for the sake of essentially throwing a childish tantrum. The working class voting Trump just to assert that they are an important demographic, just to say "PAY ATTENTION TO ME LAH-DEE-DAH", is, again, just stupid, especially as they one of the demographics who have a high chance of suffering under his presidency. If you're dissatisfied with the Democrats, there are better ways to go about fixing what they're doing wrong than voting for someone you know is probably going to be worse.

So, the majority of Americans either: genuinely think Trump is a legitimate candidate and they like his policies; or they voted for him in protest, the flaws of which I have highlighted above. Neither of those is exactly endearing me to Trump voters, and, by extension, to the American populace who majority-voted him in.

@Halo

I don't think it was a protest vote in the sense you are thinking. I do not think that people voted in enough numbers to "stick it to the man" just for the sake of being spiteful. Like, I don't think the working class was throwing a tantrum. That's not the best way to view it and, if that becomes the narrative on the left, this is going to keep happening.

Cracked (of all fucking websites) did a good article about what was happening here.

The electoral map tells the tale. Her firewall cracked in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. This fits neatly with a map of the manufacturing "rust belt"



This is a part of American that, for the most part, fell and fell very hard. In its prime Detroit was a model city. Now it's literally a burnt out husk we all pretty much make fun of. Flint's water is so fucking poisoned it's a goddamn emergency. St Louis was the tenth largest city in the entire fucking world in 1900, now it's a graveyard that's hemorrhaging people. The rural part of these states aren't great either. Hundreds of little farm towns have devolved into unemployment traps and meth dens, where people who can move to a city have packed up and left, leaving behind those who are more or less stuck. That's the American midwest, the part of the United States that gave the election to Trump. For most of them, most policy decisions are pretty much academic, things they can talk about but can't necessarily touch. They are interesting because they have a pretty even spread of conservatives and liberals, but also because that sort of thing isn't what moves them. It's doubtful they switched because of racism, because these areas went for Obama pretty hard. It can't be because they are too right wing, because Sanders did pretty well there too.

I think it goes like this: Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and miffed a lot of old union guys. Obama came in promising change and he swept those states because he was telling an anti-elite, anti-wealth story. Hillary Clinton comes up, a wall street corporatist selling the TPP, and talking about green jobs while brushing off concern about declining industries, and she faces off against Sanders who, though he is a Jewish Atheist Socialist, manages to do very well in these places because he had a message of holding the elites to task, opposing the TPP, and bringing jobs back. Sanders message doesn't carry enough of the country though, so Hillary becomes the nominee and takes her pitch against Trump, who though he's a questionable figure, he opposes TPP, he promises to stave off immigration, and he promises this will bring back jobs. Hillary does pretty much exactly what she expects to do everywhere else in the country, but the rust belt collapses for her and she loses.

That's it. They voted for the policies they think will directly affect their lives. I've seen culture wars narratives and racism narratives bandied about for explaining this election, but the map just doesn't spell that out for me. The map tells me that the midwest voted against globalism and wall street, not to be spiteful, but because they think it'll make a difference in their lives. I disagree, but I absolutely see where they are coming from, and I think the worst thing the left can do now is demonize them.

Have yet to see anyone actually look at his policies and point out errors.

@Buddha

Didn't I, like, literally poke at them a couple of days ago? I mean, I have seen people doing it. I've done it myself.

2016 US Election: Day Zero

@Vilageidiotx that last point is not a really good one. I find it hypocritical to complain about a candidate when the majority elected them. Hate on them for their policies, but don't fucking hate on them just for winning.

That's retarded.

And yeah, but see, foreign people have no invested interest in the American electorate no matter what, so venting doesn't even vent anything, it just sounds like you're trying to be interesting by showing a faked political awareness.

@Buddha

It is a form of hating on their policies though. Liberals aren't sitting here thinking "Oh dear, how horrible we won't get a trophy!" The left is concerned about the policies Trump will inevitably pursue, and since the fact this is going to happen now has hit them all at once last night rather than slowly over the election, they're going to rage a bit. Democracy isn't supposed to be a faith, where everyone gets in line emotionally. It's a way to use this sort of civic engagement to avoid the internal decadence, and dogged poor judgement, of totalitarianism. As Trump would put it, it's to inject "High energy". So long as everyone follows the rules, and so far everyone has, the rage is perfectly natural. For the record I totally thought the rage following Obama's election was silly and manufactured, but I didn't see it as a threat to democracy. If anything it is an important feature.

And we are living in a globalized society, so what happens in America will effect others. I mean, you said yourself you wanted Trump to win for reasons pertaining to Russo-European relations.

Maybe, just maybe, the DNC should have chosen Bernie or literally anyone that didn't have so much dirt on them instead.

@Vor

You see Dems get progressive candidates competing in their primaries from time to time, and if they are too progressive the blue dogs trot out the legacy of McGovern. But really, except for Bill Clinton, centrist Dems have been having a hell of a time. The left needs to stop worrying about McGoverns and start worrying about Gores, or Kerrys, or Hillarys (as the Reps learned with McCain and Romney).

We all said Trump was too extreme to win too, but here we are. This might be the new normal. You can't win elections on status quo anymore, you have to offer something now, some real energetic movement that gets people excited to vote. The trend of this year has been anti-establishment, this totally fits in line.

18th Century Ice Age

@Vilageidiotx

Meh. Will be comedy gold to watch from here.

@NecroKnight

It's going to be bizarre.

2016 US Election: Day Zero

<Snipped quote by Halo>

That's only half the story though, isn't it? Things are bad enough in this country, for enough people, that Donald goddamn Trump was more palatable than four more years of the establishment. Think about that. Did you know that's how bad it was? I didn't. I've been in the CNN bubble like everybody else, and they sure as hell weren't talking about it. 58 million people -- that's a very big number -- are that desperate, and here I thought the biggest issue facing america was the use of public restrooms.

I don't believe in silent majorities. These people were always trying to be heard, and we've been ignoring them so completely that this result is unthinkable. People moved to tears in the Clinton campaign -- you shoulda been crying for these people long ago, and honestly I think you needed your hearts broken.

Granted, now we've got a deplorable in the white house. I mean..... some of that is disingenuous from the same people who cheered for Bill, but putting that aside I don't like this guy, and I'm gonna have to deal with that. We'll get over it if he's good.

@mdk

I agree completely with this. Working class are still the most important voting block, and they let the world know last night. The states she lost were exactly the old industrial midwest, and really, they earned that loss by being so flippant about the problems there. Now I don't think Trump's plans will help at all, I think they'll hurt actually, and I'm a bit anxious about my own future, but I totally understand why the electorate chose a candidate who responded to their problems with a bizarre plan over a candidate who was condescending about the idea that they even had problems at all.

You can't support democracy when your candidate wins but hate it when someone you don't like wins. That's not democracy, that's a cover up.

@Buddha

Eh, you can though. People throw their hats down when they lose. No states seceded, nobody is rioting in the streets, Clinton conceded the race; we're doing fine. The losing side lost hard when it expected a win. Venting is inevitable there.

plus Halo is fuckin british so it's not like he has to respect the american electorate anyway

18th Century Ice Age

@Vilageidiotx

Full republic victory as I saw.

@NecroKnight

They knocked it out of the park. Now we're at the "Shit, what next?" stage that has to follow an upset after this weird an election.

18th Century Ice Age

@Vilageidiotx

Party when?

@NecroKnight

When I collect my post-election thoughts most likely.

2016 US Election: Day Zero

2:20AM ET. All signs say Trump will be the next president. I am absolutely giddy when I think about everybody who lost -- $2billion worth of lobbyists, establishment democrats, establishment republicans, potentially the most corrupt candidate we've ever had (who oh by the way openly despises half the country), and last but certainly not least, the unprecedentedly biased media.

For all that I'm still rather disappointed in who won -- but short of the McMullin Miracle, this was the best outcome I think I could've hoped for given the shitty options. I would've liked to see the Democrats pick up the Senate, especially in the wake of this (totally suppressed) republican demographic turning out with such fervor -- I think the GOP will be all to eager to consolidate that support long-term, which means they're gonna be loathe to resist any Trumpisms that might come out of the executive branch (and there may be lots of those). We really could've used a potent blue counterpoint on the Hill. Say lavvy.

Waiting for things to officially be official -- but, uh, hey world, buckle up for the wildcard. I'm not sold on 'lock her up,' but surely we can get behind 'drain the swamp.' That's long overdue. Will it happen? .....no, almost certainly not, but then again we said the same thing about President Trump.

edit: Officially official. Welcome to Trumpland.

@mdk

I didn't expect this win so I am still getting used to it. This is the first election in the three Presidential I've paid attention that didn't go how I expected ahead of time, so this is the first time I get to square with the very new feeling of expecting one direction and then being shifted all at once entirely in the other.

It is very interesting. Can't say I know what to expect.

Personally I think what we just saw is what happens when the Dems make assumptions about working class demographics they've done a poor job attending to over the years. We got our Brexit. The map might just have changed. Time for a seventh party system?

<Snipped quote by Doivid>

Depends if Trump is serious about his Nato pledge. Then it could seriously tip European power towards Russia and leave Europe cold in the water if we bail out. The balance of power could seriously be altered.

@Dinh AaronMk

I admit I have a hard time imagining a situation where Russia walks into, say, Poland and everyone here just shrugs. I dunno, if he actually goes the appeasement route... we'll have to see I guess.

B!tchfest: a healthy release for our non-roleplay annoyances.

<Snipped quote by Vor>

I agree. People suddenly think they know everything there is to know about politics.

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

There are so many snappy people here.

Anyways, it's over. Trump won. The end.

@HaleyTheRandom

It's a surreal ending, but at least we are done with it.