I'm still struggling to understand where this obsession with explaining how Trump got people to vote for him comes from. The real killing blow was the low turnout for the Democrat candidate. Trump only had to beat Clinton and practically nobody (outside the most progressive parts of the US) voted for Clinton.

Trump may have swayed some undecided voters in his favours as a protest vote but all he had to do was rally the Republican voters and make Clinton look so bad the Democrat voters wouldn't want to get her elected.

The question isn't why Trump won, the question is why Clinton lost. In terms of absolute numbers, Clinton couldn't even match the numbers with which Obama was re-elected. She won the popular vote but the popular vote is not where you win the presidency and she knew that.

The voters who should have been Democrat voters didn't have faith in their candidate and I think they didn't even have faith in their party. Trump's election is not simply a weird victory of a Republican outsider, it's a massive defeat of the Democrat establishment.

I know a Trump voter who voted for him because of his Orlando speech where he was apparently the only candidate to state what actually happened: Islamists were killing gay people. Everyone else apparently didn't talk about either or both of those things.

Because that's not what 'actually happened'.

A single young man with a sordid past and complicated relationship with the gay community claimed allegiance to Islamists immediately prior to massacring dozens of people at a gay-centric dance club.

According to Wikipedia, no credible evidence for the "self-hating, closeted gay" narrative has been found by the FBI.

The killer was upset about the US presence in Iraq/Syria and had been preparing the attack for some time, possibly helped by his wife (arrested and charged with helping him). Both were Muslims.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Orlando_nightclub_shootin...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/politics/noor-salman-a...

But of course it's not that simple.

From the wiki:

>Mateen's ex-wife, however, claimed that his father called him gay while in her presence. Speaking on her behalf, her current fiancé said that she, his family, and others believed he was gay, and that "the FBI asked her not to tell this to the American media"

Because conservative, old Muslim men never call anyone "gay", right? For wearing a trendy piece of clothing, for example?

My male friend has been called "gay" a few times because he likes Broadway shows.

You can believe in any hearsay you want, but at the end of the day, this was a US-hating, Muslim guy/couple, killing LGBT people (for whom many Muslims have special hatred, and like to throw them off the roofs).

My point is that we should be cautious about assuming that his motives were uncomplicated.

For what it's worth, the FBI also found no evidence linking him to ISIL.

We can't possibly know what he felt in his heart, but making policy decisions based on the assumption that we can is reckless and only serves to further smooth over any of hint of subtlety left in American public discourse.

So there's no evidence connecting him to Isil (which there generally isn't: Isil spread messages to sympathetic people telling them to do things - ask employees of one well known company who have an unlisted London office because someone wants to slit their throats). Recapping:

- The FBI has investigated and found no links that he was a patron of the club.

- He has, for a fact, murdered people in the name of Islam.

We can't know what he felt in his heart, but also we don't have any reason to believe his stated motives aren't his actual ones. It an uncomfortable fact, but a large percentage of Muslims say they believe in Sharia which holds some pretty awful beliefs about gay people (and women, and others).

All I'm saying is that it's impossible to know the extent to which those beliefs contributed to his actions. There are millions of people of all religions, including Islam, who aren't too keen on gay people. But the vast majority have never killed anyone.

Incidentally, his actual 'stated motives' were "[his] people... getting killed" in air strikes in general, and the death of Abu Waheeb in particular.

The tricky part about Clinton "not matching the numbers" of Obama's reelection is that she received more votes than he did. She received more votes than everyone who has ever ran for President with the exception of Obama in 2008.

Nobody is claiming that Trump's win is illegitimate due to the electoral vs. popular mismatch, but it's clear that something is seriously wrong when a candidate can win an election by several million votes and still lose the presidency. If I were a Democrat, I'd be even more annoyed that my party had won the popular vote four times in the 21st Century and only won the presidency twice.

I think the obvious answer is to increase the number of representatives in the House. Wyoming residents currently have 3x the influence in presidential elections as people from Texas, which is seriously askew given the relative power of the two.

> something is seriously wrong when a candidate can win an election by several million votes and still lose the presidency

I'm not an American so the electoral college is completely alien to me but what you're saying is basically that you disagree with the entire point of having the electoral college.

Clinton lost in almost every state. The reason she won the popular vote (which, again, doesn't matter in the presidential election) is that she won in some of the states with the highest population, like California. Yes, this means she won more people over, but they still only represent a fraction of the demographics.

The electoral college has obvious flaws like swing states being the primary concern of candidates during much of their campaigns. But it's important to understand that without the electoral college there would be other problems, specifically the most populous states practically deciding the election.

So either way it's unfair: either it's unfair to a large portion of the overall population by putting states above people, or it's unfair to a large number of states by putting population above state rights.

It's really a question of what the US wants to be. Do you want to be an alliance of sovereign states united under a federal government, or do you want to be a singular nation with a central government that delegates to the individual states for bureaucratic reasons?

It seems a lot of Americans say they want the former but secretly think they have the latter. A weighted state-based system will always result in "undemocratic" results like the 2016 election, a direct vote will always be unfair to smaller states. You can't have it both ways.

In my opinion the electoral college should be abolished and the US elections (all of them) should be reformed in a way that no longer necessitates a two-party system but in practice state rights are an important issue to Americans.

The US motto may be "e pluribus unum" but that doesn't mean the political landscape can be treated as a homogeneous playing field.

Isn't the obvious answer to eliminate the electoral college? The president effects all citizens equally, so it makes the most sense that each citizen's vote should have equal weight in the presidential election. We don't need the electoral college to promote state's rights. States already get 2 senators regardless of population and get to make their own state laws (as long as they are constitutional).

The article [1] and video [2] below shed some light on the "how". The video is mentioned directly in the article. The text explains how highly sophisticated targeting was deployed by the Trump campaign, and how it differed from Clinton's campaign. Highly informative.

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analytic...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc

I'm talking here about the alt-right, e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos' crowd, who self-profess that this was partly why they voted for Trump. People for whom this election was largely cultural, and saw Trump as a "fuck you" to the safe-space, microaggression, language-policing left.

I know they have real concerns, like economic pain, threats to their way of life, and concerns about mass immigration—concerns which, by the way, I argued in the grandparent that the left counters with labels. "Your concerns aren't real; you're just xenophobic." But I think the cultural stuff was a big part of it.

I realize they don't represent all Trump supporters, and never said they did.

I hope (what I have come to term) 'the authoritarian left' realise that this is basically what the military might call 'blow-back'.

If you're going to stage a cultural revolution you should at least get that there will be some form of counter-revolution at some point. And if your revolution is concerned with things that don't concern the the rest of the populace (and in fact sounds like complete gibberish to them), best of luck with that fight...

Anecdotally, the people I know personally who voted for Trump did so because they "didn't like Hillary" which I translate as "just to fuck with everyone". They knew who they were "supposed" to vote for, and rejected that. They didn't once repeat any of Trumps proposed policies or justify their choice based on public positions. They were given a choice between two flavors of politicians, and picked the one they liked (or the the one they didn't, not like)

As a Midwesterner, I've found many unexpected Trump voters who had similar motivations. A lot of: "well, Hillary isn't going to change anything and things need to change". Not a lot of deep consideration as to what this 'change' will mean (beyond potential reinvestment in infrastructure and "jobs").

I actually think this may be quite a problem for President Trump down the line. These are friendly, community minded people who - generally speaking - overlooked (rather than covertly support, as everyone seems to project) Trump's more outlandish/discriminatory rhetoric. If he comes up short on the community reinvestment and gets mired in a bunch of unseemly scandals, the support of these people will drop off.

I'm actually worried it won't be a problem. For those Americans who don't obsess over policy, all Trump needs to do is make them happy in the week of, or month of the re-election and he'll have a decent chance. Combine this with the voters in each side who "robo vote" for their party (mostly to prevent the other party from winning) and it will again be a close race. Lastly, many of the policy changes can't be easily measured (or take much longer for the effects to be felt) which allows the party in power to convince voters to stick with them to allow time for the new policies to take effect.

Maybe - but I'm skeptical that he will largely be able to follow through with his promises. Many of the big issues we face aren't problems created by/solved by political leaders. For instance, we're not going to quickly turn around job loses in the US because we're fundamentally seeing a shift in the importance/balance of labor to capital. Low-skill manufacturing jobs are never coming back - and there isn't a ready pool of alternative ideas that previous presidents were just refusing to implement (or some nonsense). If a president could solve that problem it would already be done.

That said, what people think is true is - of course - whatever they can be convinced is true. Immigration really isn't/hasn't been a problem, so if the president can build an unnecessary wall and convince people that immigration isn't a problem anymore because of it then maybe we're boned.

Recall seeing statics (polls) that showed about the same amount of Hillary and Trump voters decided on policy issues. The most popular reason to vote in both camps was to make sure than the other candidate did not win.

Its was very symmetric.

for better or worse, we'll never know what negative/unpopular/bad things a President Clinton would have done

an election is a choice between 2 alternates though

didn't like X (maybe 'thought X would do bad things' is a better way to translate that), is a valid reason to vote for Y, and doesn't translate very well to "just to fuck with everyone"

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if you dislike Trump, the Democratic Party's failure to give the American people a better alternative to Trump than Clinton, deserves some portion of the blame

(and while we're on it, the medias failure to hold the democratic party accountable to produce better options than Trump deserve a good deal of the blame as well)

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These things work in balance, Trump gets away with a lot of the stuff he gets away with, because people don't trust the alternatives,

people don't trust the alternatives, because those alternatives have proven themselves unworthy of trust

>This is extremely superficial, arrogant, even offensive to people who voted for Trump.

It's also what Trump supporters on this very site and elsewhere have stated to be their rationale. Trump was meant to be a "brick through the window of the establishment" thrown by angry, conservative, lower-middle class white voters driven to desperation by globalism and liberal cultural oppression, who wanted the existing system destroyed so that something more representative of their values could replace it. Various articles have been written about the phenomenon, so clearly it was a factor.

I know plenty of people who actually did vote for Trump because they hated Hillary. Only reason given.

I knew a handful of people who simply didn't "like" Clinton, but also felt a need to "throw a wrench into the system." Some of whom I had pegged as relatively progressive.

I'm sure it's a small minority, but I encountered people who said they thought Trump was a bad choice but were voting for him just to upset liberals.