First: Trump didn't win the popular vote. He eked out wins in a few "swing states" like my state of Michigan, where he won by less than 12,000 votes.
Two calls for a little statistical analysis. The simple way to say it is that Trump got pretty much as many votes as every other Republican over the last 16 years, while Clinton got far fewer votes than Obama. In fact, when you look at the numbers, Clinton got pretty much the same number of votes as John Kerry in 2004 while Trump actually got FEWER votes than Mitt Romney in 2012.
I don't want to try importing the chart and graph from Excel so here's a screen capture:
So you see what I'm talking about? Trump's vote count is pretty much in line with every other presidential election since 2000. So there was no popular uprising. Sure a lot of redneck dipshits showed up at his rallies but do you think those people were turning out for Obama? Fuck no. The more obvious but less sexy narrative is that just like 2014 the Republican base turned out more than the Democratic base. And thanks to the Electoral College system it worked out to Trump's benefit.
The more fun narrative should be how the guy whining about a "rigged system" ended up benefiting from this system. I don't think we should get rid of the electoral college, but when two elections in sixteen years end with the popular vote losing the election it's probably time to tweak it. I like having proportional delegates for every state, which may require a change from the 270 delegates needed to win. That way liberals in Texas or conservatives in California might be more encouraged to go vote, knowing their vote might actually matter.
Something that should be obvious to the "liberal media" is that since 2014 Democratic votes have been down, which so happens to come after the idiotic Supreme Court decision that repealed the Voting Rights Act because racism was dead. And, hmmm, wouldn't you know that a lot of those "swing states" won by Trump put in voter ID laws after that? A judge in North Carolina had to actually stop them from purging voters even.
The problem is the media is so fucking stupid, corrupt, and lazy anymore that they can't be bothered to report things like that. Instead they just go with the narrative that's the easiest and keep hammering it. That's part of how we ended up with Trump in the first place; the media kept hammering the email "scandal" to feed the narrative that they're the same or just as bad.
Remember a few months ago when I talked about journalism being dead and we should just go be our own reporters? Here's a case in point! Actually someone on Facebook posted these stats but I went and checked them myself. All any "real" journalist had to do was go to fucking Wikipedia and pull out the numbers from the election pages and they'd see what I did: it's not that Trump won so much as Clinton lost. Had she gotten the same support as Obama in 2012 and especially 2008, she'd be back in the White House now.
Hey maybe I should go start a site like 538 now; I'm apparently as good at this as Nate Silver.
2 comments:
The media is a huge problem. All they care about is ratings, and nothing is going to change that any time soon.
Good analysis. I've been hearing a lot (lately) about how fake news might have contributed to low democratic turnout.
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