It's looking like it might be a Brexit moment for the USA. The filter bubble echo chamber of social media and 24/7 coverage of celebrities stumping for Clinton is going to leave a lot of people shocked tomorrow when/if it's officially given to Trump.
I had a feeling this was going to happen today when I saw that virtually everyone in my Facebook feed and everyone on the streets of NYC was supporting Hillary. Every extra +1 in NYC is pretty much going to be -1 in a swing state.
As one of the hundreds of folks banned from DailyKos for being too liberal, I've been spending some time reading the Trump subreddit, and I have to say that Hillary has run perhaps the worst campaign in memory:
- Rigged the primaries against Bernie, disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters, and cheated during the debates.
- Spent 5x more on paid media advertising, and got all the social media sites to censor pro-Trump messages.
- Paid shills to attack anyone who disagrees with her policies on social media.
- It looks like there is a good chance her campaign was behind the attempt to frame Assange for pedophilia.
- Made gender her primary selling point with her #imwithher slogan. (Imagine if she had gone with something like #TheNextAmerica instead, to contrast with MAGA.)
- Accusing Trump of saying and doing tons of things he didn’t actually say or do.
- Characterizing Trump supporters as racists, bigots, deplorables, etc.
- Paying people to incite violence at Trump rallies
- Accusing Russia of hacking her campaign’s emails when in fact it was oedesta who gave out his password to a phishing site… twice… without two-factor enabled.
- Having Bill meet with Loretta Lynch during the email investigation. Then appointing Podesta's close friend to run the email investigation which resulted in a last minute FBI coup forcing Comey to make a statement.
I didn't vote for Trump, I don't support Trump, and I'm as horrified that he's going to be President as anyone else. But I have to say the actions of the DNC, Hillary, her campaign, and many of her supporters have been egregiously bad.
And now everything is super fucked.
edit: For everyone downvoting me, go turn on The Young Turks livestream and hear it from Cenk.
Yep. Trump is a monster, but this feels sort of good knowing how Clinton and her supporters acted. If only people could have seen the light about the Clintons a year ago, then maybe there would've been better choices today.
And remember! The blame for a Trump presidency lies with none other than Hillary Clinton. She's the one that cheated a popular opponent in the primaries, that strategized to promote Trump during the Republican debates, that infiltrated the media and turned journalists into self-admitted "hacks", and she's the one that interjected herself into the presidential race despite knowing that her "scandals" -- electoral corruption, mishandling of classified information, pay-for-play at the Clinton foundation, Bill's history of child rape, etc. -- all disqualify her as a viable opponent to Trump.
Well, to be Machiavellian for a minute, Trump is the only candidate that Clinton has a prayer against. The other Republicans consistently outperform Trump in the polls. On the other hand, this has been a bad year for pollsters.
If she really believed in her causes and not her career, she could have decided not to run and backed a promising successor a long time ago.
Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that the Democrats wanted to ensure that the Republicans would nominate someone more extreme. Look at the PDF attachment here. There's more than just this quote, too:
Operationalizing the Strategy Pied Piper Candidates
There are two ways to approach the strategies mentioned above. The first is to use the field as a whole to inflict damage on itself similar to what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more “Pied Piper” candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
Is there anyone else that could have secured a majority in the House and potentially (as of 1247am EST) the Senate? I doubt that, DC politics is more about trading wins like potheads passing the joint around. I don't mean that pejoratively but literally -- Republicans and Democrats trade wins and losses to curry favor with one-another, meanwhile the interests of the American people are secondary to this political snobbery.
Furthermore, who else could have rallied the masses to vote so thoroughly? A Jeb vs Hillary election would have been very dull, almost depressingly so, meanwhile a Cruz vs Hillary election would have bordered on hopelessly disinteresting.
My hopes are that 1) the media will keep a better eye on Trump (going off the last 8 years, they'll ignore any atrocity as long as it's committed by the blue team), 2) that Trump is not as smart as Clinton, and therefore less able to deceptively achieve his goals and 3) that 4 years of Trump will mobilize Americans to fix their electoral system and seek out real alternatives to the Democrat / Republican duopoly.
Oh please, stop the rhetoric. There will still be an election in 2018 and even in 2020. More importantly there will still be redistricting after the 2020 census and using a Trump backlash the Democrats might actually be able to redistrict in their favor along demographic lines, shutting out the Republicans from majority control of national and state houses for ever.
And you realize that Clinton is actually a Republican too? I'm not calling it our Brexit moment, nor am I remotely excited about the next 4 years. I don't know what kind of moment it is, but let's not pretend that Clinton was a safe alternative. She is as dangerous as Trump, if not more so.
I personally would have liked to see Jill Stein hit 5%, but that looks unlikely.
Clinton may have been a centrist and not helped the Poor. Trump won't help the poor, so it's at best a toss-up.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who are not white, male, Christian, heterosexual, natural-born. And it's gonna get difficult for all those people. Clinton would've left them alone, Trump is fanning the flames of xenophobia.
Nope. I don't think John McCain or Mitt Romney would ever want a dictatorship. Heck, I think 90% of Americans would take up arms if a president didn't give up power peacefully and the military didn't peacefully stop listening and push him out the door.
I meant in terms of this election being a reaction against the moral decadence of the establishment rather than being about economic independence. I didn't mean that the US was going to become a dictatorship. (And in fact Iran itself still has elections.)
Not surprised; a day of reckoning was bound to come for the left. Consider that even if Trump had lost, his power base would still have existed afterward. Trump is not the problem, Trump is a symptom.
The American left took its eyes off of what's important, namely the working class, and instead spent its time and political capital on frivolous[0] causes. This is a wake-up call to refocus.
[0] Lots of things some might consider important are frivolous when you're living paycheck-to-paycheck.
This isnt a day of reckoning for the Left. He hijacked the GOP against its own will and destroyed the DNC. That's a collapse of two establishment parties, not one.
Stop. The. Name. Calling. Stop it right now. Even if your demographic breakdown were correct[0], those are your fellow citizens your're referring to. That tone is why the left is in the state it is right now.
Trump is, perhaps, not going to help "those people" but neither, in their minds, was Clinton. They are simply going with the "perhaps" rather than (again, in their mind) certain no.
Arguing to stop the name-calling is about as effective on HN as it would be on the YouTube comments for a John Oliver video. HN is decidedly slanted on this matter. It's business as usual for democrats to call people names if you don't agree with them. Has been for as long as I can remember.
You'd be surprised. The left is no more unified that the right, in many ways, and members of the mainstream left have been cautioning against this derisive labeling issue for quite some time now. See, for example, Rensin's "The smug style in American liberalism" linked to on HN at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106004
Sorry, I don't get it. Which part is the name calling?
I also am not sure what you mean by 'fellow citizens' or 'the left'. I'm not American. And Hillary Clinton is not a left candidate, she's centre-right.
I put the racist in parenthesis, so clearly I don't mean all of them. But I think a lot of the sort of poor/working class Mid-Western people are in fact racist. If you listen to some reports of Trump rallies; or if you listen to how a lot of these people viewed the 'black lives matter' movement, I don't think its inaccurate. Or if you look at the very strong undercurrent of racism that permeates all of the US.
Racism has been shamed for many decades, and Trump made it 'in' again.
Racism was a major issue in this election. The SNL's 'black jeopardy' skit was surprisingly observant in this respect [1]. I didn't expect people on HN to just dismiss it like that. Or completely ignoring an argument about how people cutting their nose to spite their face, because it included the word 'racist'.
It's kind of ironic, like I tickled somebody's PC funny bone, when Trump's campagin was all about the freedom to say whatever you want.
My apologies, I had assumed that you were American.
Since this is a thread on an American presidential election, on the American political spectrum, Mrs. Clinton would be considered to be on the left or center-left.
I imagine at the very least he won't treat them with open contempt and hostility. That probably goes a long way for some of these voters.
I'm not a Trump supporter, but I do live in coastal California, and the absolute derision with which I see relatively privileged, affluent, college educated people treat or talk about the working/rural poor in "flyover" country makes me question whether, despite my current views, I too wouldn't vote Trump if I found myself on the receiving end of such hostility.
For starters he didn't walk around calling them uneducated idiots like many on the left have and continue to do.
Bernie and Trump are touching into the same underlying problem that a lot of people have been left behind. They have felt screwed by the system for awhile and this is what we get. Heck, Bernie supporters got screwed again during the primary.
This is also only the start. Wait until we automate all fast food and driving jobs to see what a angry, jobless populace looks like.
Remember when she called them a "bag of deplorables"? Not that trump was exactly statesman like, but I don't remember him insulting Clinton supporters, just Clinton herself.
Trump has words ("the best words"). The words will inspire Congress to pass laws. The laws will (in theory) help the people. Trump will continue traveling around the country, and report back to Congress what is or is not working.
Beyond that it's difficult to say, Trump has promised little but hinted at a lot.
One person who has been clear-headed about this for weeks is Michael Moore. Michigan and Wisconsin were supposed to be in the bag for Hillary, but that looks like where the surprise swing is coming from. Moore said from on the ground it felt like white working class people suffering from deindustrialization felt Hillary would do little for them, and might pick up the Molotov cocktail of Trump to throw into the system. His comments have been in lots of pro-Trump videos for weeks. Looks like he was right.
Where is there to "get out" to though? Economically the US has been outperforming the rest of the world recently.
I'm especially worried because the developer job market is a lot worse outside the US than inside it. I genuinely don't know where to go (recession seems inevitable).
I'm not particularly well informed on the actual logistics of mounting a secession from the rest of the US, although at the very least I would imagine securing water rights would itself be a significant challenge for SV, but I very much doubt the "disruptors" in SV have the wherewithal to stomach such an endeavor.
I'm not super familiar with the geography there but I'd imagine everything west of the rockies (is that the right mountain range) would go with California and I thought that this was the source of the water.
I believe a large part of Northern California's, and by extension Silicon Valley's, water comes from the Sierras. The communities of the Sierras, as well as those of the Central Valley which separates Northern and Southern California, tend to be fairly conservative. They also have high rates of firearms ownership. I don't think they would be too keen to join in on a hypothetical SV secession.
Yeah, have fun with that. I don't think putting money in the markets right now is a great move unless you can afford to lose it all. Granted, that's always the case to some extent.
We were already looking rough before Trump, the UK has Brexit, the EU is struggling, China is... who the hell knows. I think we could be in for some historically bad times, and all of this while the Middle East and Northern Africa are burning.
If not for nuclear detente, I'd be pretty concerned about WWIII right about now.
It won't happen, but it'd be hilarious if the Democrats planned to rig future elections by importing millions of immigrants to vote for them, and they instead end up emigrating by the millions to Canada thus swinging it in the opposite direction.
At this point I'd almost welcome a truly rigged system, or even a secret service member who doesn't mind a lifetime in prison. Eight years of W. Bush was bad, and frankly I doubt the economy could withstand whatever Trump has in "mind".
As someone who very much dislikes the prospect of a Trump presidency, and is in fact well to the left of the Democratic party and Hillary Clinton on most social and economic issues, I find this line of thinking quite troubling.
Perhaps rather than hoping for assassinations or voter fraud, those of us who identify as "progressive" could instead channel that mental energy into finding ways to better appeal to large groups of working class people who are imo justifiably angry at the state of things in this country.
You know what? People as a group are just too stupid and easily manipulated to be helped, and given that Trump now gets to pick (probably) 3 SCOTUS seats? We're cooked.
Basically, for most of us here, the rest of our lives will have this election hanging over us, for the implications on the SCOTUS alone. As I said, people who can afford it are going to leave in droves.
No, Evangelicals and uneducated whites are how we get President Trump, along with a majority of people who don't even vote, and a minority who "vote their conscience" with a fool like Johnson despite the lessons of 2000.
If you think that your "I'd almost welcome" weasel wording makes what you're implying acceptable, you need to reconsider the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy.
To be fair, the polls were consistently in the opposite direction. 538 had clinton at 70%, PEC at 99%, everyone else somewhere in between. It's a black swan event, bubble or no.
A 30% probability event coming to pass isn't a black swan event. This term is unfortunately overused for anything unexpected but that isn't what it means.
LA times had it for trump. They had their own weighting. Their results when adjusted for commonly accepted weighting matched the common poll average. So it is in the weighting.
