lolgaxe wrote:
I don't know why anyone would be upset over the results, really. It's been pretty clear that a bowl of shit was going to be President since like January. So it's the runny one instead of the dried up one.
Yup. This.
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I can at least take solace in the fact that while I was wrong, I wasn't nearly as wrong as some people when it came to predicting this outcome. And some people made some painfully embarrassing predictions this time.
I'll take my "broken clock" award now, I suppose. For what it's worth. I think what happened with the polls is that when you spend a ton of effort demonizing, not just the candidate, but anyone who supports him (basket of deplorables , anyone?), you kinda can't be surprised if the result is fewer people
saying they support him, even while actually planning to vote for him on election day. In any normal election cycle, that might have been matched with people actually choosing to stay home due to said association (which is kinda the whole point of making the association in the first place), but in this case, there were likely a heck of a lot of people who didn't like Trump at all, but hated Clinton more, and when you add in the need on the right for a Republican, any Republican, to sit in the White House to reverse some of the equally hated Obama executive orders, and then add the whole "need to replace Scalia" bit into the mix, it's not really that surprising that far more people voted for him on election day than were saying they were going to vote for him in the opinion polls.
For a lot of conservatives, this election wasn't about Trump at all, but a need to prevent the court from being stacked with 5 liberal justices, 3 conservative justices, and Kennedy (who rules with the liberal wing on most things anyway), and effectively losing every court decision for the next half century. For that, they're willing to put a clothespin on their nose and vote Trump. Add in Clinton's incredibly poor support among traditional blue collar democrats (like, say steel and coal workers in Pennsylvania, or auto workers in Michigan), and the results start to make a lot more sense. I suspect that a fair number of those blue collar voters were also loath to say they were voting Trump to a pollster, but felt they had no choice if they wanted to continue to have a job in the future.
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The whole electoral versus popular rant was fun for the first ten hours, but now it's just annoying. The time for that is in the middle of a term, not after your choice loses.
I've never really understood that argument. The entire point of the EC is to ensure that the election isn't determined purely by popular vote, but must represent support across a broad geographical portion of the country. When the popular vote and the EC results differ, that's the EC system actually working. If they were always in agreement, there would be no need to have an Electoral College. It's the fact that they don't that is why it exists. Just amazes me that people don't seem to get this.