My point is that many of his 2016 votes were "anyone but Clinton." If he had a more appealing opponent, it wouldn't have been close.

The reality that's hit me this year is that most Americans will vote for anyone who wins "their" party's primary. Everything else is rationalization.

It is denial to say they don't want Trump. They truly do want him.

I think he did 62.9 million last time and is at 70.5 now.

More people got out and voted, and more people voted for trump than before.

I think this also explains why more partisan rhetoric wins. It gets more people mobilized, while not really hurting you with moderates. It only hurts you with people who think. Who're a tiny minority. (I'm not convinced I'm one of them.)

I agree in principle, the majority of people will just vote party line. But there is no doubt that Trump supporters came out in force in 2020 far greater than 2016. I cannot for the life of me understand why so many people think Trump is an ideal choice for President, but I do continue to try and listen, maybe I will finally get hit with the clue bat. I've got Trump fans as friends, but they can never really articulate why I should agree with them other than 'democrats bad'. And that doesn't resonate with me, because I need something more than simple tribalism to guide my choice.

> A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath

* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/large-port...

The middle class in America paid for globalization in a way that the lower and upper classes have not. I spent enough time in other countries to truly appreciate that there are 1 billion less people in poverty because of globalization. But they are also very many angry people who will point out that globalization has not been great for them. The only politician who They felt they could turn to was Trump.

I can go on and on and on. While America could never return to the post WW2 position, there were ways to make the current position bearable which were not taken due to ideological and political reasons.

Eventually, China will use its huge manufacturing edge to create a military advantage - this is already starting to happen - and then it could bully all of East Asia to give its trade massive advantages, while absorbing Taiwan.

The US must rebalance before it is too late. Hopefully latest technological development might make this rebalance easier.

And also not to forget, that the social systems, that we have built to make up/downs in the cruel nature more bearable, they have not been globalized. It is, when one looks at each country, still very local. If everything is more distributed and in different political zones, i think, they will fall apart, as the money went somewhere else, where production happens.

We will see.

It's also an economic choice: the suits could have shared the economic benefits more (or politicians redistributed more), but in Capitalism excess 'created value' tends to go to the owners (Capital), and so we got a rise in the concentration of wealth over the last forty years.

The divide between the have and have not could be stronger, though, when you dont have, maybe that is still a lot more to what you have today (e.g. medical progress), it is just not as much as the ones at the top.

And then the cycle continuous, the divide will be used to form agendas, and so on.

I think what hinders us the most in installing a proper system for globalization, that all these areas have grown for centuries and it is definitly not easy to unify and agree on something. I hope, people have answers for that. I definitly do not want a system like communist china for that, i just "escaped" one myself, even though it probably has many advantages too. :-)

Hillary Clinton had a very long history of antagonizing anytime she could people on the right. For example remember her slut-shaming of bull Clinton’s accusers, or her attack in the “vast right wing consipriacy” trying to defend her husband from the totally untrue charges from Monica lewinsky. The reality of it is that the Democrats have to appeal to more than just their base to be elected. They seem to of learned that lesson this time.

You say this like Clinton did well. This is a sub 5% advantage over a racist game show host.

That's because a few blue states have huge population such as California.

If states don't have an ability to have a voice for themselves as states, what's the point of them at all? They gain this small but important nudge towards autonomy from the electoral college.

I really think the president should be by popular vote, but don't see any way this would ever get changed.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

I personally disagree with a state choosing to sacrifice its voice in such a way, but it's its right to do so, to award its votes how it sees fit.

This is true even if we got rid of the senate, the EC, and every federal body had purely population-proportional representation (which I am in favor of).

Making the president of the whole country be elected directly by the whole country would not make states redundant, far from it.

The Three-Fifths Compromise is intrinsically related to the electoral college, because it instructed how to count slaves when determining how many House seats a state would get.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only one. Another problem is that electors are allocated to the winner of the state popular vote no matter how close it is.

> Without the senate the electoral college is just a popular vote.

Even if you didn’t count Senators for the purposes of electoral votes, you could still end up with one candidate winning the popular vote and another winning the electoral vote.

https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/

> Are you implying that each Californian should count for less than one vote?

In a federalist republic, yes that's exactly what that means. The country was deliberately designed as a collection of independent states, and not a single population whose diversity is merely geographic.

Hmm... Couldn't it be argued that this haven't really been the case since the civil war?

When I lived in SF, most Americans I met weren't originally from California (not had they lived there long).

* https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-engine-blue-america-1...

> There's a decisive break between Democratic and Republican support at a population density of 800 persons/per square mile.

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-01/how-the-d...

In 2016, California had the 3rd most votes for Trump, with 4.5M.

Similarly, despite losing the state 52/43, Texas contributed the 4th highest count for Hillary.