(November 12, 2016 at 11:11 am)A Theist Wrote: Trump was able to flip rust belt states that hadn't voted Republican since the 1980s. I was just as shocked as everybody else when I saw, first, Wisconsin going to Trump after Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. Then Pennsylvania, and now, looks like Michigan may just, by the narrowist margin , go for Trump too.
I think the margins are an important part of the story. He won by pretty big margins in Ohio and Wisconsin and he won Florida by something like 150,000 votes. And turnout in some of those battleground states was higher than 2012, sometimes by large amounts. The idea that a low turnout hurts the GOP might still be true in a general sense, but the additional voters who showed up in those states were voting for Trump.
If Michigan goes to Trump, then it was indeed those northern midwest states that did it. Even without Florida, if she carries OH, WI, MI and PA she wins. Not coincidentally those are states where she was seen as indifferent to job losses and the risk of additional losses going forward, whereas Trump is offering the possibility of reversing the job losses and the overall revenue by turning the spigot on for more fossil fuel production.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
