DOOM, or The Official 2016 US Election Thread

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Corpsey said:
So the idea of the electoral college is to protect voters who live in the smaller states, correct?

I assumed it was blatantly unfair but reading into it a bit more I can see that there are arguments in its favour http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/11/16/should-the-electoral-college-be-abolished
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I don't see how it could be anything other than grossly unfair, given its massive bias towards smaller states which are inevitably going to have mainly rural/small-town populations and, just as inevitably, tend overwhelmingly to be Republican-voting (or, in this year's case, Trump-voting).

But even discounting that aspect, there's also the fact that it's winner-takes-all on a state-by-state basis. So every single elector in a given state goes to the winning candidate, even if they beat their opponent by just a single vote (which isn't too far removed from what happened in Florida in 2000, and which won the election for GWB). Would it be unthinkable to have a sort of proportional representation system for each state?

I just can't get my head around a 'democracy' in which a candidate who wins the popular vote (by over a million, this year!) can still somehow 'lose' the election. God knows, the FPTP system we have in the UK is deeply flawed - I mean, it seems ridiculous that the Tories can form a majority government after winning 37% of the popular vote, but they did at least win more votes than any other party - but I don't think we've ever had a situation whereby we've ended up with a Tory government and PM despite Labour getting more votes, or vice-versa.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Edgelords of the alt-left:

At the Genius office, as people set up chairs on the floor below us, Menaker described the generic Chapo fan as a “failson”—which Biederman, who is twenty-six, defined as the guy that “goes downstairs at Thanksgiving, briefly mumbles, ‘Hi,’ everyone asks him how community college is going, he mumbles something about a 2.0 average, goes back upstairs with a loaf of bread and some peanut butter, and gets back to gaming and masturbating”...

Christman saw a political lesson in the show’s fan base. “The twenty-first century is basically defined by nonessential human beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers or as laborers,” he said. “That manifests itself differently in different classes and geographic areas. For white, middle-class, male, useless people—who have just enough family context to not be crushed by poverty—they become failsons.” The “Chapo Trap House” guys are sincerely concerned with American inequality; at the same time, their most instinctive sympathies seem to fall with people whose worst-case scenario is a feeling of purposelessness. “Some of them turn into Nazis,” Christman continued. “Others become aware of the consequences of capitalism.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/what-will-become-of-the-dirtbag-left
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
"Darkness is good" - Steve Bannon interviewed in The Hollywood Reporter:

Bannon, arguably, is one of the people most at the battle line of the great American divide — and one of the people to have most clearly seen it.

He absolutely — mockingly — rejects the idea that this is a racial line. "I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist," he tells me. "The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver" — by "we" he means the Trump White House — "we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years. That's what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about."

In a nascent administration that seems, at best, random in its beliefs, Bannon can seem to be not just a focused voice, but almost a messianic one:

"Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement," he says. "It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement."

Bannon represents, he not unreasonably believes, the fall of the establishment. The self-satisfied, in-bred and homogenous views of the establishment are both what he is against and what has provided the opening for the Trump revolution. "The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what's wrong with this country," he continues. "It's just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what's going on. If The New York Times didn't exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It's a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening"...

It is clear... that it is not just the liberal establishment that Bannon feels he has triumphed over, but the conservative one too — not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. "They got it more wrong than anybody," he says. "Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical."
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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...trategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I wish people would just stop and think and see beyond that Hilary lost to Trump. I urge you to look what is happening now regarding the comments of Soros and the Rothschilds about Trump. What does this tell you? How the giants such as coca cola, the NBA, Pepsi etc are in full force against him. How the media are twisting everything he's said or negating and berating his every move all because they are part of the beast that Trump has dared to stand up to. Truth is being crucified and opinions are being built on the lies the media is telling you. We are supposed to be the ones who came here to awaken others to the beast. We are supposed to be the ones who came to create a free world and to free the minds of humanity who are trapped in this false matrix that we're supposed to see through but so many of you have also got sucked into their manufactured reality. We're supposed to be the ones that are revealing the light through the darkness. Just look at the bigger picture. Just take the time to look. Detach your personal feelings from it and look again. You must see what's going on. It's impossible that you can't if you just truly look
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Tony Walker More people voted for HILLARY.
Like · Reply · 11 hrs
Alex Brown
Alex Brown Tony Walker Oh more people voted for Hillary?? Why didnt she win the election then? Why isnt she our next president-to-be for the next 4-8 years??
Like · Reply · 11 hrs
Dale Baley Hammond
Dale Baley Hammond Because you have the electoral collage rather than just counting the popular vote.
Like · Reply · 11 hrs
Debra Carfagno
Debra Carfagno Check the numbers again from a reliable non MSM source. FACT:Clinton lost the popular votes as well.
Like · Reply · 1 · 11 hrs
Bobby Jack
Bobby Jack Take off the more than 2 million illegal votes she lost through illegal immigrant voting and she lost. Thank f**k, can you imagine that old carcass running America? All her evil, cheating, lying, murdering, stealing life catching up with her me thinks. Oh yeah, and she needs to tell her support that they need to stop what they are doing. It's done, get over it, the wicked witch just had her red shoes taken by trump. Now to expose the ones behind the curtain.
Like · Reply · 4 hrs
Elizabeth Brasile
Elizabeth Brasile Carlos Eastman NO YOU MISSED THE WHOLE POINT> GET WITH IT>.. THIS IS BIGGER THAN YOU THINK.. YOU ARE THE ONE BIAS HERE!! YEAH.. Do your fucking homework.. I have for YEARS!!!
Like · Reply · 1 hr
Jaeling Thomas Alford
Jaeling Thomas Alford After you take away all the felons dead and illegal immigrants trump won by a landslide
Carlos Eastman trump has no fucking idea why he was put there, he is part of the plan of the anti-false matrix group to beat the beast.
Dean Cornwall The point is Trump might be there for his own gain but it's irrelevant in the big picture because the beast system is dead set against him for there own reasons but it's blatantly showing the whole world just how rigged and wrong the system actually is. So therefore he is a tool to awaken more and more people to the truth and hopefully take us on the path to the world we all want
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Leo said:
not sure this character type is anything new, though, is it? i think of the film "river's edge", came out in the mid-80s featuring the same sort of arrested development types. maybe the difference now is some of them pay attention to politics.
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But also that the model they're adopting is /pol/ style edginess, which is what I found interesting:

A more precise label might be the Dirtbag Left, a term coined by the writer Amber A’Lee Frost, who is Biederman’s roommate, and who, this week, officially joined the “Chapo” roster. In an essay for Current Affairs, Frost argued that while vulgarity isn’t “inherently subversive,” it can help tarnish the unearned prestige of the powerful—something that many Democrats, as well as Republicans, hunger to do. We can either “reclaim vulgarity from the Trumps of the world,” she wrote, or “find ourselves handicapped by civility.”
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
yeah, that's a recent/emerging thing. personally, i'll probably continue to be "handicapped by civility".
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
While reading David Remnick's article on Obama grappling with the idea of a Trump presidency this weekend (interesting, if a little hagiographic at times), I was struck by this section:

We have to stop relying on a narrow targeting of our base turnout strategy if we want to govern. . . . Setting aside the results of this election, Democrats are well positioned to keep winning Presidential elections just by appealing to the base. And, each year, the demographic improves.”

To put it more bluntly than Obama did, the nonwhite percentage of the population will continue to increase. “But we’ll keep on getting gridlock just because of population distribution in this country,” he went on. “As long as California and Wyoming have the same number of senators, there’s going to be a problem—unless we’re able to have a broader conversation and move people who right now aren’t voting for progressive policies and candidates.
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Compare to Sean Trend's piece in RCP, "The God That Failed", on the "Emerging Democratic Majority" and the Democratic strategy of relying on long-run demographic shifts to simply render irrelevant large sections of the voting public:

I have written extensively about the Republican voting trend among white voters, especially among working-class whites. That is obviously an incredibly salient point in the wake of this election, where whites without college degrees voted like Hispanics, but with the impact Hispanics would have if they constituted 40 percent of the electorate. It is true that there weren’t enough working-class whites to win the election for Trump, as many asserted during the campaign. But it was closer than a lot of people think.

I’m not going to rehash everything here; it is pretty well covered in the links. I will just make two points. First, mocking the GOP as the Party of White Voters was, from an electoral perspective, extremely short-sighted. White voters are still 70 percent of the electorate (probably more). Winning around 60 percent of those voters will win a party an awful lot of elections. If Trump were to bring college-educated whites back into the fold, that share will grow.

Second, this chart should have really scared Democrats a lot more than it apparently did.

388957_5_.jpg
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EDIT: PVI is the "Partisan Voting Index"
 
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firefinga

firefinga

Well-known member
It's kinda ironic that now all of a sudden the very same parties who were throwing "the deplorables" under the bus are now busy stating "We need to listen the the common people" in fear of the populists.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
firefinga said:
It's kinda ironic that now all of a sudden the very same parties who were throwing "the deplorables" under the bus are now busy stating "We need to listen the the common people" in fear of the populists.
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just like the politicians. Trump was a maniac or similar previous to the election (which obviously he still is). Apparently he became a serious politician who "we have to work with" overnight. Gained all kinds of good, statesmanlike qualities too, it seems.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
firefinga said:
It's kinda ironic that now all of a sudden the very same parties who were throwing "the deplorables" under the bus are now busy stating "We need to listen the the common people" in fear of the populists.
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in fairness, though, clinton said (and most democrats probably believe) that "half" of trump supporters are the deplorables, whereas the other half are relatively "normal" middle/lower-income voters who have been hit with hard times or are just fed up with the washington establishment.

the way i read it, the outreach you mention is toward that second group of "common people", not the alt-right/brietbart nation/white nationalists, etc. lots of progressives still consider that other group pretty deplorable.

and it makes sense to listen to them, particularly since many of them previously voted for democrats (and they make up a substantial voting block).
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
I wonder if its even half. Plenty of scum in the US, but 30 million actual Nazis and KKK?

Not so sure.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Really dumb move to even name half of them 'the deplorables', though, since that was obviously DESIGNED to be a soundbite, and duly became one, stripped of its context, and permanently affixed to a candidate that people already thought was patronising.

Trump was smarter than Hillary in knowing that simplicity sells. 'Crooked Hillary'. Simple and effective. Did she ever try one on him? 'Twatface Trump'?
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
"half" was an off the cuff remark that she later walked back, i don't think anyone actually thinks the percentage is that high. the actual comment:

You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable. But thankfully they are not America.
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Clinton then went on to explain that the other basket of Trump supporters

are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
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firefinga

firefinga

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
Really dumb move to even name half of them 'the deplorables', though, since that was obviously DESIGNED to be a soundbite, and duly became one, stripped of its context, and permanently affixed to a candidate that people already thought was patronising.
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Yep. It doesn't matter if Hillary ment it differently - it got interpreted in another way and not in her favour.

Several studies carried out in several (western) countires ususally state the percentage of adults with strong right wing political vews are between 5-10 %. Unfortunatley tho in times of crisis (imagined or real) a lot of politically indifferent people tend to turn to the easy answers, which are usually provided by the political right.
 
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