[Burritamos]

Hillary won a majority of the popular votes in the primary as well as the majority of pledged delegates (i.e. not just superdelegates). I don't think I understand how that counts as 'suppressing' your vote. Mind expanding on that a bit?

[Alex3917]

Things Hillary and her campaign did during the primaries:

- Rigging the primary/caucus schedule so that all the states favoring Hillary would be the first to vote.

- Rigged the debate schedule by purposely scheduling them at odd times when no one would by watching so that Bernie couldn't get his message out.

- Cheated in the debates by receiving the questions in advance, and was given extra time by the moderators.

- Got the media to censor all virtually all coverage of Bernie. E.g. on the days when he had big primary wins, the media covered the speeches of every other candidate except him.

- Illegally disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters in New York and Arizona alone by removing them from the voter roles, or else removing their party affiliation. Disenfranchised millions more around the country by, e.g., forcing California voters to vote provisional and then just throwing out their ballots without counting them.

- Circumvented campaign finance laws by having donors send money to the state parties, but then requiring the state parties to send all of that money to her campaign. All while trashing Bernie for not raising money for the down ticket races.

[brightball]

That's very similar to the playbook used against Ron Paul in 2008. That's one of the reasons that the Trump strategy was so interesting.

Ron Paul focused on concepts, history, logical points and got a huge following because of it as well as a lot of money raised. He sparked a lot of the Libertarian movement that we see today...but he was largely blacked out by the media and especially Fox News. They even edited him out of debate rebroadcasts.

Trump on the other hand played to the media shock free press. He'd garner national attention as the media took opportunity after opportunity to shame him...and it worked. He got tons of free press because the media focused on shaming opportunity and sound bites while candidates with good points get ignored. It's an absolute reflection of how our media works.

[moyta]

It really is a reflection of how our media values things, shocking content gets airtime, reasonable well formed opinions get minimal airtime.

What Ron Paul did inside the republican party, whereby his supporters ran the party at the state level in many states was incredible, they really knew how to make a run of it!

[DefaultUserHN]

The good thing about Trump winning is that Ron Paul will finally be able to work with the Trump administration to implement some of his great ideas.

[moyta]

I'd say the vote was suppressed, but that is mainly due to how hard it is in the US to vote. You need to be registered to vote months in advance, depending where you live you likely need to show up to a polling place and wait for hours in line on a particular day during work hours, etc.

All this means that of the 220 million eligible voters, only 120 million actually voted this election, whereas for Obama in 2008, 130 million people voted (nearly all of that 10 million going to Obama). If Hillary had had a stronger ground game, or pulled in the Bernie call canvasers, she could have turned those 10 million out to the polls.

The sad thing is, after Bernie's loss, many of the people I met in West Michigan did not turn out to vote, or if they did they did not vote for Hillary. I know at least 15 of the people I met did not vote, and another 5 voted for another candidate.

[pessimizer]

The turnout wasn't that bad for this election, the turnout was bad for the Democratic base this election.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/voter-turnout-fell-espe...

"The drop in turnout was uneven. On average, turnout was unchanged in states that voted for Trump, while it fell by an average of 2.3 percentage points in states that voted for Clinton."

[saghm]

I might be misinterpreting this, but wouldn't that quote imply the opposite? If the states that voted for Clinton had fewer voters than before but she still won, the seems to me like that means that the people who did vote were Democrats, not those who didn't