This turnout estimate turned out to be wrong. See http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-voter-turnout-wasnt-w... for a closer-to-final number.

I don't know if it was necessarily that they "couldn't be bothered to show up and vote". My father decided not to vote on the grounds that he couldn't justify voting for either major candidate, and many other people who voted for Obama in the previous election cycle probably felt the same way.

What is the difference between "couldn't justify" and "couldn't be bothered to show up"? Sounds like they just want to shift the blame to the candidates rather than themselves and their own inaction. If they genuinely think both candidates are equally fit, then not voting makes sense. If they genuinely think both candidates are equally unfit, then voting isn't enough, they have to become politically active to convince people to vote for a 3rd candidate. Merely voting for a 3rd candidate without creating ground swell is likewise almost always, 9 times out of 10, punished by the American political system.

Most likely if we had compulsory voting in this country, most of the plurality, who did not show up to vote, would not have voted for Trump. It may have been a scant amount, but very clearly the more eligible voters vote, it favors Democrat candidates.

> I'd hardly call white nationalism fringe

I'd absolutely call it fringe. It has a very tiny base of support. It is also on the political extreme - far to the right of the mainstream.

I see, so you think Trump's attorney general pick is a good choice? That's the guy who once said the KKK was OK until they started smoking marijuana. Is the attorney general just a fringe position in the government? It'll be fun to see if this AG convinces the DEA to enforce federal marijuana laws on the states where it's legal. Fun meaning, I think there's a lot of dissonance on both sides just how much acrimony this election is going to continue to create - the nightmare isn't over, it's just started.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/18/10...

I'm not sure what your point is, but he said the KKK was ok around 30-40 years ago, and later disavowed it saying he was joking. In a era of much greater discrimination, that behavior and more like it cost him an appointment as a federal judge. And that incident, from 30-40 years ago, is seen as so bad that people are bringing it up again. I think that demonstrates how fringe those attitudes are - they certainly are not acceptable to the great majority of Americans. If he said it again now, his career would end in milliseconds.

Outside the racism, I agree that he is very conservative, in a way that used to be fringe, which has little support now, but is widely accepted as normalized. That, I strongly feel, is a serious error by us, the public.

As recently as the 50s, there were publicly active KKK groups throughout the US. Or at least, that's what I've gathered, from talking with locals who were adults then.

Edit: And there were (are?) "code words" for getting referrals. Some have even become everyday slang. But I've forgotten the specifics.

There are publicly active fringe groups of all sorts. You can join the Communist Party too.

I got the sense that this was far more than fringe.

And to expand/clarify, my point is that racism and xenophobia have been widespread among European-Americans since colonization. And they remain so, and not just in the "red states". Elsewhere, they're just hidden, especially by men from women. KKK may be a fringe, but there's a broad resonance. Consider, for example, that Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested for breaking into his own house!

Anyway, the Trump team has now somehow made European-Americans more racist and xenophobic. They just did an outstanding job with the Wallace strategy. Wallace was appealing to blue-collar union members in the North. But now unions are largely gone, and that demographic is either unemployed, or earning minimum wage. And arguably, that has exacerbated racism and xenophobia. Pushback against globalization and the concentration of wealth.

Damn! "... the Trump team has not somehow made European-Americans more racist and xenophobic. ..."