He has never been a man of his word. He’ll shift the narrative to whatever suits him at the moment.
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We can only hope.
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You are talking about the KKK as if they were some gigantic political force, like they were in the 20s.
That organization no longer exists. ADL puts the total number of KKK members and affiliates today as around 5,000. And that is spread between 40 different organizations, many of which are feuding with each other. The Klan is irrelevant. The Klan is six idiots in a trailer park, two of whom are FBI informants, drinking cheap beer taking meth.
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Reply hazy. Small dataset. I think a lot of Gary Johnson supporters would fall into the same camp, at least, but that’s because Libertarianism’s first agenda is usually not to dismantle the military-industrial complex or get rid of regressive taxation or draconian drug laws, but rather to get rid of laws that protect minorities.
They knew Trump was a mysogynist, a racist, a hatemonger. They still threw in their vote with him. They are responsible for that vote, just as, if HRC won and started a war somewhere or invited a banker to be head of the committee in charge of auditing banks or whatever, I’d be responsible for that.
You don’t get to look away from the violence you help cause.
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Said it better than I could manage.
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It’s worth mentioning that while the Klan is probably irrelevant, the reported numbers are lower than they probably are in reality.
Most racists either won’t admit that they are, or don’t really understand that they are. The KKK and it’s ilk is exceptional because they do, though even a lot of folks close to them are smart enough to lie on poll responses. There are places where, at least at the local level, these yahoos basically still run everything, even if it doesn’t look like that on paper.
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For over 150 years, the party leaders got together and picked the presidential candidates. And in all that time, I do not think we ever got a choice as bad as Trump versus Clinton. I would be willing to get rid of the primary system for a couple of cycles.
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I’m not bringing up the KKK because the organization itself is still a major political force. I bring them up as a demonstration of just how much racism is on display by Trump and his supporters.
The Klan’s glee over a Trump victory isn’t the driving force at play here, more like a terrifying barometer.
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Too true. My Trump-supporting relatives listed their reasons for going against the establishment and it sounded just like Bernie’s reasons for running. As soon as I tried to point this out, their reactionary hind-brains would kick in and suddenly the “Faux News” soundbites would vomit forth denying that Socialism could ever work in 'merica.
I’m starting to see Anarchy as being more than just a response to the tyranny of the state and bureaucracy. It’s starting to look like the only rational response to the tyranny of the stupid and the self-defeating.
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We’ve got President Trump. She didn’t make good enough use of it. Or it
failed to work in the national in the same places it failed to work in
the primary, and she didn’t learn from that failure.
Come on. She killed Sanders in plenty of those swing states (FL, NC, OH, PA, etc.). But, for whatever reason, just enough people in just enough swing states really like Trump.
It’s an embarrassing and tragic loss, especially to a fuckup like Trump. But up until the night of the election, all respectable polling was telling us that she had it in the bag. In hindsight, polling was dead wrong (and that’s what we need to learn: polling is currently broken). If polling had been better, we all would’ve seen her weak spots better, and maybe she could’ve worked to fix them. But how was she to fix something the best polling told her wasn’t broken?
Sanders got the Trump result.
The primary isn’t the national election. And there’s no data about Sanders running against Trump. Maybe he would’ve done better than she did. But, that’s all hypothetical.
As long as we’re playing Let’s Make Believe, I’m going to say that a grumpy, old, Jewish, atheist, self-proclaimed socialist doesn’t fare well against a charismatic, TV-celebrity tough-guy.
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The irony that the response to neoliberalism and corruption is to make things much, much worse. I suppose that’s partially how the Republican party has stayed alive - by tapping into that rage while making worse the conditions that people rage against and blaming everyone else.
But it’s the best we’ve got, unless we’re going to have a completely state-controlled economy. People are blaming outsourcing for the loss of jobs, but the reality is that shifting markets and automation played a much bigger role. The US lost seven million manufacturing jobs during the same period when it doubled the number of goods it made. Trump can talk about bringing back coal, but he can’t recreate the demand that’s gone away with all the long-ago decommissioned and replaced coal-fired power plants. The real problem is that retraining isn’t enough - those good-paying manufacturing jobs got replaced with minimum-wage warehouse work, and no one is going to hire unemployed 50-year olds with bad backs over 18 year olds. (And those former industrial workers with high school diplomas aren’t exactly going to get hired to write code, either.)
The problem is, I don’t think we’re talking about low-information voters anymore. I think we’re talking about no-information voters, thanks to internet news bubbles created by Facebook and an explosion of reactionary fake news sites. (And I don’t even mean reactionary slanted news sites, but complete fabrications, which apparently took off during this election.) The result may be a section of the population locked into their own reality that no one outside that bubble can ever hope to reach, i.e. the death of American democracy.
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I get very bored about all the analysis about how the thing is not racism, misogynia, homophobia, etc.
Yes, we are now here worldwide due to the crisis and the corruption and all that.
And huge numbers of voters everywhere are choosing the most repugnant shit as a way to demonstrate their anger.
What that tells us is that is not the crisis or the corruption that is the underlying problem. Those are important and yes, need to be solved. But those are just the cracks from where the dark shit that we have left lingering in our societies for too long is oozing back to the surface.
Pretending it is all because people are not racist or homophobic or … no, they are. They are just fed up enough now to forget about niceties anymore. They are energized enough in their anger to go back to the more basics form of it when presented by a demagogue.
This is America. This is England. This is all the other places where this shit is going to start to pour. We though we had won the battle for civilization, and we were wrong. We are entering, in the West, a culture civil war with enemies we thought banished for good. And they have been much more cunning than us - not difficult, considering how many of us didnt even realize the war was going on.
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With a capital T that stands for Trump! I have also noticed a significant increase is the use of “gee” and “swell” and “grab her by the pussy” and “mexicans are rapists” and “lock her up” this election.
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The voting-eligible turnout in PA in 2012 was 59.5% compared to 61.4% this election. That’s not 10% higher. It’s more like 3.2% higher. Even though Pennsylvania had 3% higher turnout this election, the US voting-eligible turnout was down 2.6% overall.
Also, Trump won PA with 48.8% of the popular vote, and Romney lost with 46.6%. The Republicans gained 2.2 percentage points, but the Democrats lost 3.6 (47.6% in 2016 as compared with 51.2% in 2012). Even if those 2.2% of the electorate that Trump gained came from Democrats (and lifelong big-D Rah Rah Team Blue Democrats at that… good luck proving that), where did the other 1.4% run off to? Had they stayed, Clinton would have won a squeaker in PA.
I’m unsure you understand how polling works - the results were within the margin of error. Stop accepting numbers from statistics as fact and include the error bars and you won’t be shocked. Oddly Nate Silver was blasted for almost a week for giving Trump a 30% chance to win based on the very idea that error could happen. Trump won by 1 in 100 voters. If just 1 out of every 100 voters in the swing states went Clinton - she would have won every single one of them.
1 in 100.
That’s not polls being wrong - that’s people not wanting to admit that +/- 4% means exactly that, and if your lead is only 4% … well… that means you can loose.
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I was accused of that. My write in vote for Rand Paul was called out as a marker that I needed very strongly to engage in some self-criticism about my unexamined racism, as indeed any action other than voting for Hillary would have.
The funny thing about overt (or covert, or unaware) racists is that you can ban them from boingboing, or ban them from Twitter or Facebook, but you can’t ban them from the voting booth. You want to change their votes, you gotta change their minds.
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That’s kind of the point: the polling was broken in the Primary, too. She should’ve seen the break and addressed it’s root. She failed to - the polls didn’t tell her to. She relied too much on broken polling when she should’ve been looking at where she failed and figuring out why.
It’s just a starting point - Sanders did well where Trump did well. What do they have in common? How can we build on what they have in common to make the next election less of a shitshow.
And I think one of the silver linings of this ominous hate-cloud is that Trump proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that America doesn’t give two shits about who you are before the election or during the election. At the moment, the only thing that matters is what you’re going to offer them after the election.
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Thank you, I mean it, and I do mean that Trump voters are okay with the existence of racism… but my quote needs context.
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Just click the pull-down arrow on the quote and the context will be there. 
I just wanted to highlight that phrase as being particularly insightful.
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By your own link, the estimated voting-eligible population turnout rate for 2016 [56.5%] is lower than 2012 [58.6%], 2008 [62.2%], and 2004 [60.7%], though higher than 2000 [55.3%]. “3rd highest turnout since 1968”? It’s not even third highest out of the last 4 elections.
Going back further, we’ve got to translate the 2016 results into percentage of voting-age population, as that’s what the Census Bureau uses. While Elect Project provides that data for 2012-2000, the column for 2016 is blank. Thankfully they’ve still provided us with the absolute number for voting-age population for 2016, so we can calculate it:
- estimated 2016 percentage of voting-age population: 130,840,000/251,107,404 = 52.1%
For comparison, this is less than the voting-age population participation rate for:
- 2012 [Elect Project: 53.6%]
- 2008 [EP: 56.9% / Census Bureau: 57.1%]
- 2004 [EP: 55.4% / CB: 55.7%]
- 1992 [CB: 55.2%]
- Every presidential election between and including 1952 and 1984. [1952: 61.6%, 1956: 59.3%, 1960: 62.8%, 1964: 61.4%, 1968: 60.7%, 1972: 55.1%, 1976: 53.6%, 1980: 52.8%, 1984: 53.3%]
In the post-war era’s 17 presidential elections, it’s the fifth lowest, ahead of only 1948 [51.1%], 1988 & 2000 [50.3%], and 1996 [49.0%].
(Disclaimer: the Census Bureau data gives a slightly higher VAP participation rate than Elect Project when both are available. The differences are: 0.2% for 2008, 0.3% for 2004, and 0.3% for 2000. As the 6th lowest is 52.8%, or 0.7% greater than 2016, then this would not change 2016’s ranking assuming the estimated vote total is roughly accurate.)
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