[LyndsySimon]

Because 3 million women motivated enough to protest doesn't outweigh 30 million women motivated enough to vote.

The fact of the matter is Trump's support base is broader than his opposition - at least, in the states where it matters.

[hackuser]

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.

[LyndsySimon]

I don't think anyone expects them to be quiet.

> 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.

[Mao_Zedang]

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.

[hackuser]

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.

[Mao_Zedang]

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.

[hackuser]

> 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.

[DefaultUserHN]

>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.

They should have voted then. They didn't vote, and when the guy they don't like get voted into office, they get all angry. Well, they should have voted.

>...elected officials are compelled to and do respect the opinions of voters.

Trump does. He's going to implement his policies, since the voters have voted him to do so.

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[Mao_Zedang]

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.

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[Mao_Zedang]

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?