Trump is president; Who is to blame?

[GUBU]

The USA is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. It was designed to avoid the concentration of power in a centralized body or dense pockets of influence.

Actually Wooters you are wrong, but then again that's nothing new for you. The reason why the US electoral system is largely modelled on that of the Roman Republic (before they had to give into the plebs sordida and give them the tribunate) is to concentrate power into a small and dense pocket of influence, that of rich old white men. That is why the Senate is undemocratic, why the Presidential election undemocratic, why electoral officials are political offices and so on all the way down to the people who refuse your right to vote because you are black and you spelt your name slightly differently to what's on your birth cert.

[Faith No More]

I feel like it shouldn't have to be pointed out to such an incredible free thinker like yourself, EP, but being tired of someone's immature verbal diarrhea is not to equal to silencing someone.

[Tonus]

Thing about that is, the evangelical voting block in America has stridently crowed about family values and the importance of that sort of personal 'integrity' for decades and decades.  They skewered candidates on their personal 'immoralities' before, but suddenly with Trump everything is totally fine.  It was something that politicians had to care about for the last half century because it was always something that could get used against them.

Evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Trump, which means that he owes them a few political favors if he stands any chance of (1)getting anything done in his first term and (2)winning a second term.  And I think that's how they see it; his personal moral or ethical sensibilities won't matter if he can pay back their generosity at the polls.  The alternative was to let Clinton win, and that wasn't going to get them anything.

As for blame, "blame" the people who voted for Trump.  But there are a number of factors that led to his victory, and I don't think that there is one single factor that can be pointed to as "the" reason for his win.  A few that I can think of off the top of my head:

1- Evangelicals, as I said above.  There was a guy on Fox this morning claiming that he got upwards of 75-80% of the Evangelical vote.  I don't know if that number is accurate but it's clear he got a ton of support from them.  I think there's a good chance he'll do at least one thing to make them cringe and want to smack the back of his head, but if they can get his support on a few items on their agenda they might let him live.

2- Hillary was a poor candidate in a number of ways, and she was weakened by Sanders' campaign and the anger over the way super-delegates were used to make an end-run around him.  Sanders stayed in the race a long time, made the super-delegates an issue, and wasn't exactly an enthusiastic supporter once he dropped out.  Obama stayed out of the fray too long and tried to help when it was too late (shades of Bill Clinton's too-late and too-lukewarm support of Gore in 2000, so that might be a bit of karma coming back to bite them).  She was easy to portray as just another career (and corrupt) politician who would be More Of The Same.

3- Low turnout among key constituencies in key states.  At one point, CNN showed that the turnout among African Americans in certain districts in PA was much lower than in 2008 or 2012, to the extent that they might have swung the state in her favor if they had shown up.

4- Loss of support among Hispanics in Florida.  In most places, her support from Hispanics was well ahead of Trump's, to the tune of 65-20 or thereabouts.  In Florida, it was closer to 60-30 in some districts, and he won Florida by a relatively close margin.

5- Trusting the polling data too much?  Apparently, her campaign ignored Wisconsin, assuming that the polling numbers showing her ahead by 5-6% were accurate.  Those numbers also led the Trump campaign to ignore Wisconsin as a lost cause.  Both campaigns made a mistake, but Clinton's was the costly one.

And of course...

6- The GOP tried to neutralize Trump by "welcoming" him into the fold and scrambling to get rid of him when their plans went awry.  The GOP leadership must have a very bittersweet taste right now-- Hillary was so vulnerable that Donald Trump beat her.  Don't tell me that the entire Republican primary field isn't looking in a mirror this morning and thinking "I would've beat her... I COULD BE PRESIDENT-ELECT RIGHT NOW!"  The party will need to keep him on a short leash and hope that the worst that he ever does is embarrass the country a few times and stay out of the way long enough for them to enact some of their ideas before the 2018 mid-terms.

The USA has a history of balancing elections over time, and I think this one would ordinarily have left us with Clinton as President and a Republican majority in the House and Senate.  But enough things went wrong to leave us with a President Trump enjoying congressional majorities and a pocketful of IOUs made out to the Family Research Council.  The next four years hinge on the economy, IMO.  If things are going well in time for the mid-terms, the GOP could add to their majorities in congress.  If that doesn't happen but things improve in his third or fourth year, he'll be dealing with a tougher congress but should win a second term by a similar or better margin than this one.

[Whateverist]

I hear the Donald is all in for water boarding, Rayan. I'd keep a low profile if I was muslim or mexican or had a disability or was LGBT or liberal - *screen goes blank*

[FatAndFaithless]

My  point is simple and we can put this issue to bed.

Let Drich speak. That is all.

Literally nobody is preventing him from speaking.  Doesn't mean we have to listen.

[Sterben]

I hear the Donald is all in for water boarding, Rayan.  I'd keep a low profile if I was muslim or mexican or had a disability or was LGBT or liberal  -  *screen goes blank*

          The worst he can do is start camps to purge the undesirables out of society. History is repeating it's self again and their is nothing we can do about it. Just wait until we get our bio-chips implanted by force, that's when the real fun starts!

[GUBU]

Here was a great article on GM's struggle with this:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/201...18310962ce

Honestly Kingpin what suckered GM was a combination of a pensions black hole of their own making (like most companies in the 90s and early noughties they didn't pay their share of pension contributions, thinking the rising stock market would cover the gap) and the crash of 2008. While I'm not going to defend all union practises, 99% of the time when a company blames union policy for its problems the union is simply being used as cover for a company management that have engaged in idiotic short termist policy.

Oh and depending on a forbes article for citation? Not just the fact that they're behind a steep paywall, but the fact that if a forbes reporter told you it was raining you'd stick your head out the window to verify should clue you in that they are not to be trusted.

[Minimalist]

I wish this were less true.

http://www.theonion.com/article/report-t...aims-54665

Report: Things Finally As Bad As Trump Claims

WASHINGTON—Following Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the general election early Wednesday morning, political experts confirmed that conditions in the United States are now finally as bad as the Republican nominee has long claimed. “Though we had previously been able to dismiss Trump’s proclamations as mere hyperbole and scare tactics, the United States now definitively meets the criteria of being the declining superpower that Trump has described for the past 17 months,” said Georgetown University political science professor Ronald Leidecker, adding that, as of tonight, the nation no longer commands the same respect among world powers it once did, and our country’s greatest days most definitely lie in its past, just as the Republican has asserted.

[Excited Penguin]

The electoral college would work far better (not saying it'd be perfect) if we just got rid of the first-past-the post system.  The fact that someone can win a state by less than 1%, but then gets electoral votes equal to 100% of its population is like saying that half the state's desires don't matter.

It's probably done that way to differentiate between the state and the country at the political level. I don't really see how the results would be different , though, if only that were changed. Supposedly if a politician got the more majority votes from all the States then that means most people from all the states combined voted for him. 

What am I missing here?

[Excited Penguin]

I feel like it shouldn't have to be pointed out to such an incredible free thinker like yourself, EP, but being tired of someone's immature verbal diarrhea is to equal to silencing someone.

It's not equal, but that doesn't mean it can't be worse.