The tl;dr is voter apathy in key midwest states. IIRC Trump underperformed but Clinton underperformed even more. It is difficult to say with certainty but the FBI letter probably cost her the election by slightly depressing turnout.
It also looks like the Republican effort to disenfranchise people by reducing early voting, voting hours, closing polling stations, enacting voter ID laws, purging voter rolls, etc has worked in the sense that it slightly reduced Dem turnout which was enough in this election. Their efforts to steal elections by gerrymandering themselves into power has also given them outsized control of the House and various state governments.
It is really embarrassing that the majority of the country votes D and the Rs have control over the government. It's pure subversion of democracy.
Russia certainly tried to influence the election but if it had been Obama running (or anyone charismatic) instead of Clinton it wouldn't have mattered; Trump would have lost by a huge EC margin.
I'm far more worried about the long-term damage to the country now that the FBI has once again become an open political weapon, and that Rs are unapologetically disenfranchising people in an attempt to maintain power permanently.
> Russia certainly tried to influence the election but if it had been Obama running (or anyone charismatic) instead of Clinton it wouldn't have mattered; Trump would have lost by a huge EC margin.
While I don't agree with a great deal of the rest of your assertions, this stands out to me as the important one. If the Democrats had run almost anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would have likely won.
> the FBI letter probably cost her the election by slightly depressing turnout.
Of course it's hard to point to one factor in such a complex, real world situation, But look at a chart of Clinton's poll numbers; she was comfortably ahead, and as soon as Comey's letter came out, her number dropped like a rock and never recovered.
> It is really embarrassing that the majority of the country votes D and the Rs have control over the government.
Note that the Democrats have won the popular vote in 5 of the last 6 national elections. Other than George W Bush's second election in 2004, the GOP hasn't won a nationwide majority since 1988.
I'm limiting it to political events centered on the candidates, almost all of which in the near lead-up to the election were focused on Hillary. And the only really close states were PA, MI and WI, all of which went to Trump by a sliver.
In this case, it bears repeating that Trump lost the overall vote, and lost women's votes 54-41%.
The country is a democracy, not an elected dictatorship. Voters and their desires don't disappear the day after the election. Republicans took resistance of Obama's presidency to record levels; only their propagandists can say with a straight face that those who oppose Trump should be quiet for the next four years.
> Trump lost the overall vote, and lost women's votes 54-41%.
I guess I don't see the point you're trying to make here.
The GP asked how Trump got elected. He overwhelmingly won white, Christian, middle-class (and above) families - a group that has felt left out of American politics for the past decade or so.
It is also important to point out the overall vote is not important and never has been. It is a way for losers to complain be it republican or democrat, however when you get down to it is symbolic at best.
Mao may not think popular opinion matters, and maybe he could ignore it in his dictatorship, but it's wrong in the U.S. The President leads a democratic political system, the heart of which is the will of the voters. Those in government need to keep the voters happy or they will lose their jobs; that's the way it was designed and the way it works.
It shows the cynicism of the GOP that they would adopt a talking point from Putin, endorse something so undemocratic, and pretend to suddenly forget the unprecedented resistance the engaged in when Obama was President.
Also, my point was relevant to the comment I was responding to.
I think it is disingenuous to say popular vote matters in a country where voting is voluntary, to extrapolate the popular vote over the rest of the non voting population isnt fair. At best he lost the popular vote of the people who bothered to vote.
> extrapolate the popular vote over the rest of the non voting population isnt fair
I don't know what you mean by "fair", but the non-voting population has much less influence over politics than the ones who vote. Regardless, we have surveys showing the opinions of non-voters and Trump, at least a couple weeks ago, was at record levels of unpopularity among Presidents-elect.
But I don't see how it's relevant to the point, which is that elected officials are compelled to and do respect the opinions of voters.
> The fact of the matter is Trump's support base is broader than his opposition
No, its not.
> at least, in the states where it matters.
Even there it likely isn't now -- even if it was in the most trivial sense on election day -- given the degree to which his support has fallen since then.
Who is measuring this support? The same people who called the election for Hillary 99%. I think a dose of skepticism is warranted after such a monumental failure to measure the temperature of the nation.
> Who is measuring this support? The same people who called the election for Hillary 99%
Wrong. You are confusing pollsters with an exaggeration of a subset of the set of analysts working with data from those pollsters (and the subset in question is whose approach was criticized by the most well-regarded in the broader set for the exact thing that led to overstating Clinton's likelihood of victory.)
This error though reflects exactly a frequent propaganda line from the Trump camp, and when it gets echoed here and in other forums its often corrected the, so at this point I have begun to doubt whether is ever an honest error rather than deliberate injection of "alternative facts" into the discussion as a distraction.
Sorry I dont really understand what you are saying, are you saying Trump calling the pre-election polls incredibly biased , which turned out to be true, propaganda?
It also looks like the Republican effort to disenfranchise people by reducing early voting, voting hours, closing polling stations, enacting voter ID laws, purging voter rolls, etc has worked in the sense that it slightly reduced Dem turnout which was enough in this election. Their efforts to steal elections by gerrymandering themselves into power has also given them outsized control of the House and various state governments.
It is really embarrassing that the majority of the country votes D and the Rs have control over the government. It's pure subversion of democracy.
Russia certainly tried to influence the election but if it had been Obama running (or anyone charismatic) instead of Clinton it wouldn't have mattered; Trump would have lost by a huge EC margin.
I'm far more worried about the long-term damage to the country now that the FBI has once again become an open political weapon, and that Rs are unapologetically disenfranchising people in an attempt to maintain power permanently.