Yes, people can...in the aggregate. But aggregating people takes a lot of work. So unless you devote yourself to the task of saving social security (by mobilizing lots of people to fight with you) then you're not going to have much influence. The ~50 million Trump voters, how much influence do they have with him right now? fuck all. I don't mean that as a comment on him, just pointing out the huge asymmetrical power differentials. Voting does make a tiny difference, but that's like saying you can steer a boat by getting the passengers to rush to one side of the deck or the other. It's technically true but nobody actually steers a boat that way.

He's a billionaire and a TV star. Are you a billionaire and a TV star? No? Then you are not comparable to Trump.

He's not an outsider. He's absolutely a member of the elite.

He's not a politician. The last one not a politician was Dwight Eisenhower, and the list is real sparse before him. [1]

But I never said I was compared to Trump, I was stating that common people absolutely made a significant impact to this election against the wishes of the incumbents

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unit...

Im not making this a political argument, just stating the fact that people absolutely had a hand in this election.

Just because you're surprised, doesn't mean it was "the people". You can't have an Electoral College system in which shuffling Toledo across state lines changes the electoral outcome and credit the people for political outcomes.

Are Michiganders still angry about that?

Not that I know of, but the point is that our system ought to be robust against historical and statistical flukes. If you're going to decide elections via first-past-the-post at all, you should at least make the election pass a 95% likelihood hypothesis test for difference-of-means or something.

I''m of the same sentiment, but I feel that even more rigor and a smaller p value should be demanded from our election methods. 99% seems like a nice number.

is that really true? this election more than ever most voters believed they had to choose the lesser of two evils and didn't like their choices. both candidates had record disapproval ratings. i understand trump isn't a typical politician but it didn't quite seem like people got what they want... more that they voted against hillary and for a republican supreme court.