I believe Russia did meddle in American politics, at least in the sense of assisting Republican propaganda. I could easily accept that their tinkering, and partisan influence from what should be non-partisan bureaucracies (like the FBI) shifted the vote margins by a percentage point or two. You can even argue with me by how much of a percentage and I’d just shrug and go along with it.
But what made an even bigger difference, what really made Trump possible, was an incompetent, smug, conservative Democratic party that bumbled the election at every point. It looks like Matt Taibbi shares my opinion.
Did the Russians do it? Very possibly, in which case it should be reported to the max. But the press right now is flying blind. Plowing ahead with credulous accounts is problematic because so many different feasible scenarios are in play.
On one end of the spectrum, America could have just been the victim of a virtual coup d’etat engineered by a combination of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which would be among the most serious things to ever happen to our democracy.
But this could also just be a cynical ass-covering campaign, by a Democratic Party that has seemed keen to deflect attention from its own electoral failures.
The outgoing Democrats could just be using an over-interpreted intelligence “assessment” to delegitimize the incoming Trump administration and force Trump into an embarrassing political situation: Does he ease up on Russia and look like a patsy, or escalate even further with a nuclear-armed power?
Emphasis is mine. All the news about Russian interference is just playing to the media and giving the DNC an excuse, all while distracting the party from actually confronting their deep internal problems and doing something about it.
Because, I fear, they don’t want to do anything about it.
Sorry, but it is not possible for the “Democratic Party” (which is a complex and amorphous agglomeration, not a single sentient entity) to persuade the CIA, FBI and NSA to make up a story about Russian interference in order to cover for their purported ineptitude. That is nonsensical.
Whether you think the Democratic party is inept is a separate issue. It isn’t really a thing — campaigns of Democratic politicians are pretty much independent entities that get help from central fundraising operations. But in any case, I would put much more blame on the corporate media than Democratic campaigning for the success of the Comey and Russian interference.d
At last the obvious gets published.
I read a while ago befuddled discussion wondering why Putin wants Trump and what would Trump do for Putin.
Completely dismissing that possibly Putin was sabotaging Clinton, not pushing Trump. Clinton was a real threat to Putin and his regime, with Trump being such an incompetent buffoon that Trump represents zero danger and could be nudged into performing *shit* for Putin. Trump is the “useful idiot”, for Putin to demolish our status on the world stage.
What cervantes said.
Like, yeah, I have my disagreement with the Democratic Party, but their nominee got nearly 3 million more votes and that’s despite rampant open disenfranchisement in key states, Russian hacks, media collusion to create horse-race out of the most clear-cut election, and wide-spread sexism and racism among angry leftist men.
And Clinton as a candidate took some risks that the party as a whole has been hesitant about for a long time and likely won’t take ever again or at least not for another 20 years, openly talking about the rise of fascism using online radicalization, the extralegal murder of black men by police officers, and including trans people as part of the Convention.
This isn’t on the Democratic Party, but on a whole machine of Republican evil that has openly abandoned even the pretense of democracy as they know that there is no way they would hold power without massive disenfranchisement and cheating. It’s the old tricks pulled out during Segregation all brought out into the open again and buying the bullshit just means we let that go out the wayside in place of what is frankly frequently sexist diatribes about this disappointing Democrat somehow being more disappointing for some odd reason despite a lot of liberal positions that I’m sure had nothing to do with her gender.
Like at this point, any bullshit opinion piece that whines about “Democratic electoral failures” or tries to autopsy this election without acknowledging the massive increase in disenfranchisement or the open attempt by conservatives to argue that the votes of POC and city folk are actually illegal is to miss the actual heart of how Trump was able to steal this election.
The summary of this election is that despite the whines of White leftists, the Voting Rights Act mattered and its dissolution by the courts is something we’ll have to deal with and fight for if we ever want to have a real democracy again.
Cerberus also. Voter suppression is also part of the story. And, of course, the electoral college which is undemocratic, gives more weight to voters in small, ergo conservative states. Clinton won by a substantial margin, in fact.
I think all fingers point heavily pretty much everywhere except the DNC. Oh sure, they fucked up, they always do, but they are hardly the heavies here.
Seems some people haven’t quite noticed yet, but democracy in this lost country is already dead, and that’s not the fault of the DNC. The republicans are already busy getting everything in place to gut the government. Maybe it’s time people focused on the actual bad guys here.
Yes. The back biting and circular firing squad instincts of people to the portside are not helpful at this point. Please PZ, distinguish between your friends and your enemies.
cervantes- Yup, and the electoral college making only certain states count also makes it easier to target disenfranchisement. All the “surprising” states that went to Trump that went to Obama last time had massive disenfranchisement efforts in place to try and block as many Democratic voters as possible reaching and voting in the polls.
Overall, this feels like no one really wanting to acknowledge we no longer live in a democracy and so wants to pretend this is a simple matter of the Democratic Party not “being good enough” to win the fair elections that will totally happen in the future.
I don’t think Our Gracious Host was doing anything other than saying “everyone who was at fault needs to share the blame, and the DNC has been shirking its share.” It’s a different demographic shift: The DNC is run by us Boomers, and we need to get out of the way. The Boomer Generation lasted 18 years (officially), but will have been in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for 28 years by the time of the next election. Something is wrong there… and it’s reflected precisely in the blindness of the parties’ leadership to:
* The contemporary concerns of the people actually struggling with student debt, childrearing, and getting on to a career track (as opposed to a dead-end-job carousel);
* The contemporary concerns of people who grew up after being brought to this country as children with no control over their own “documentation”;
* The contemporary concerns of kids who grew up in households with one parent (or more) in jail due to racially discriminatory sentencing schemes and ill-used prosecutorial discretion;
* And more other issues than I could list conveniently that are age-demographically selected. (Even the “white factory-worker rage” subset is, if you unwind it, concentrated among Boomers.)
This is compounded by the DNC and RNC reliance on ideology instead of considering facts in context, but that’s for another time…
This isn’t about “circular firing squads” — at least not here, it isn’t! — so much as it’s about “fix the whole problem, not just the easy part.”
Cerberus … @ # 4: … any bullshit opinion piece that whines about “Democratic electoral failures” or tries to autopsy this election without acknowledging the massive increase in disenfranchisement …
And any piece that omits the jack-squat which the Democratic Party actually did about such disenfranchisement… ?
I don’t know if I’m just reading this wrong, but I’m having the hardest time seeing how “I believe Russia did meddle in American politics,” can be read as “the CIA, FBI and NSA” were persuaded “to make up a story about Russian interference in order to cover for their purported ineptitude.”
I hope the US manages to rediscover the concept of democracy in the next four years, and that the Democrats find their way to, at least, the center of the political landscape. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all too eager for the US to lose its empire status, but not the way that Trump or the rest of the absurd right would bring it about. If you can hold it together long enough to find an elect a candidate who’ll make America respectable a̶g̶a̶i̶n̶, that would be great. A collapse won’t do the world any favours.
Athywren @ 11:
That’s not going to happen. Take a few, click the link @ 6, and read.
As I’m sure people in this thread will happily demonstrate, they would rather nitpick or argue any idiocy than pay attention to what the fuck is happening, right now. That will tell you, more than anything, that there isn’t going to be much of a fight when it comes to any attempt to resurrect democracy.
Pierce @10
There was a lot of fight, but it was mostly happening among the folks of color and dismissed as “unimportant identity politics” by the same folks who want to lay the blame on the DNC.
Caine @ 12
Probably sadly true. Hell, I even recognize the problem as is, but still feel paralyzed about what I can do to help reinstate democracy in this country. And a lot more don’t even want to admit the problem exists.
Mostly I’m just scared.
So like, are the Democrats simultaneously too inept to win what should have been a slam dunk election, while being competent enough to prop up a huge conspiracy spanning multiple intelligence agencies?
Sorry, that reeks of infowars bullshit where vast worldwide shadow governments are smart enough to engineer every country’s government, but dumb enough that anyone who watches alex jones can find obvious evidence of their existence.
Cerberus:
Yeah, me too. I used to think things would never get bad enough for me to actually leave, but I was wrong. Even so, can’t get out for at least three years, and man, I don’t even want to think about it.
Pierce @ 10: And any piece that omits the jack-squat which the Democratic Party actually did about such disenfranchisement… ?
They did everything they could, actually. They pursued numerous lawsuits, they opposed the relevant legislation, but the Supreme Court fucked us over and the gerrymandering put them in the minority. The problem is a much deeper one of long term failure to invest in municipal and state elections, and party building. The certainly did everything they could about disenfranchisement given the resource they had at the time.
I am weary of news pundits blaming the DNC for losing a rigged election. There are multiple reasons for the theft of the office of POTUS but most of them boil down to misogyny and white supremacy. The death of truth in broadcasting had no small role in allowing foreign media conglomerates to run 24/7 propaganda for decades. It was instituted by Scalia under Reagan, under the same free trade laws that sent american manufacturing into a tailspin.
Shock jocks have been normalizing the most horrible misogyny and behavior they could come up with for their gaddammned amusement for decades now. Hey, remember how there was an enormous sex scandal involving one of those network owners just a few months ago? No? Roger Ailes resigned, but it got drowned out somehow in the white rich men’s mad rush to gang-up and crucify an actual highly qualified woman who dared to reach for power.
Sure, the DNC needs to improve it’s game, but it is a minor factor in comparison to foreign collusion from MULTIPLE sources, all of whom seem to have a few traits in common.
White. male. narcissists, obscene wealth and entitlement. rapists.
The head of our very own FBI violates the hatch act with pure propaganda episode 2illion about f-ing e-mails, but sure, yeah, lets blame the woman/DNC rather than noticing the giant stinking pile of Manshit.
You may have difficulty with this, but I’m actually agreeing with most of you.
Big problems: gerrymandering, voter suppression, the electoral college, incompetent news media.
Small problem: Russian interference.
Non-problem: Hillary Clinton. She’s more conservative than I like, but this should have been a cakewalk.
Which one dominates the news right now? Which ones should the DNC be howling about and demanding reform?
Me thinks America protests too much (about Russian interference). As the whistleblowers have shown us, if the USA is complainging about the unacceptable behavior of other countries we can presume the USA is engaged in that same behavior. American intervention in determining the government of other countries is well documented. Heck, I believe the US had a strong influence on the Russian elections of only 20 years ago.
Geez, people who complain about the Russians — which includes Obama — are definitely engaged in trying to distract our attention from more important things.
Consider: nobody claims that the Russians actually hacked the voting machines. Not even the most partisan, evidence-free Russophobe suggests this. The phrase “the Russians hacked the election”, which is being used freely by the press (and Democratic tribalists), suggests otherwise, but the accusation being made (without evidence) is that the Russians hacked DNC servers and leaked documents from them.
(The claims, incidentally, seem to suggest not the high-tech hacking operation you would see in a bad movie, but rather a phishing attack which DNC membership was stupid enough to fall for — one of those e-mails saying “we need to verify your login, please go to this website and type in all your information”. The ones which everyone has been warned not to pay attention to for over a decade, now.)
Wikileaks, which supposedly was the means by which the documents were leaked, continues to deny that the Russians gave them anything; on the contrary, they says that they received the documents from a disgruntled member of the DNC itself.
Furthermore, aside from one claim (which turned out to be a piece of deliberately faked news), nobody is saying that the leaked documents were falsified, including the people who wrote the originals. Anything in them which may have turned off voters was accurate.
And, finally, there is very little suggestion that anyone was actually influenced by the contents of the leaks. Although of course I may have missed a poll somewhere, I have yet to see anyone locate any voters who were pro-Clinton until they saw the contents of the leaks, and then changed their minds.
All of this, together, suggests that the purpose of this entire discussion is mostly to try and discredit whistleblowers (and Wikileaks in particular) by suggesting that they are pawns of the Russian government. Both the major parties are very much anti-whistleblower to an extent which is really kind of astonishing — Obama has been an anti-whistleblower, anti-journalist extremist, using the 1916 Espionage Act for more prosecutions than all previous presidents combined, Clinton has repeatedly suggested that unlimited government spying on U.S. citizens is a good thing and should be expanded, the Republicans of course put the spying apparatus into place, and the Democratic Party is now manned top to bottom with people who agree with Obama and/or Clinton. It’s one of those bipartisan issues, like using drones to murder brown-skinned foreigners.
PZ @ 20:
Perhaps they should be howling about REINS before it takes hold, because if it does, and it probably will, it will effectively render the DNC toothless. It won’t matter what they howl about.
I’m not sure what any of us should be discussing, given that we will shortly be dealing with tyrants who have little interest in a democracy or a republic.
The problem here is that intelligence organisations have pulled off lies and half-truths before, to the detriment of the middle-east in particular. Now that they are making another serious allegation, there is quite simply a need for evidence before belief. Granted, the nature of intelligence work means that the evidence can’t simply be blurted out willy-nilly, but something needs to be shown when making a serious allegation.
But as PZ points out, there are other concerns that have a proven impact on the outcome of the election; most serious of them all in my estimation is the electoral college having a visible conservative bias.
This is similar to Matt Bors take on things.
Voter suppression? HA! I moved to a state with heightened requirements to vote, guess what? Got it done, there was no disenfranchisement. Spotlighting the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown as the result of racism? HA! those 2 guys were legally killed because they were committing serious criminal acts. Could care less about Transgenders.
Hillary Clinton chose to use a private email server and legal or not, it looked bad, looks count. Hillary Clinton chose to make the implicit promise of access as President to get vastly more money for the Clinton foundation, the hacked emails merely highlighted that public fact. Clinton needed to have Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as VP, the far closer than predicted primaries made that clear. You’d think being a loser in 2008 and a number of primaries would provide insight that you lack charisma.
The Democrats should have had the Senate, yet blew it, oh my, how did that naughty bad Electoral College cause that?
Trump was campaigning about fixing job loss among the white middle class, that got him a lot of votes. Perfectly constitutional to keep out Muslims, don’t care about them, nor do lots of white people seeing the terrorist nuts that religion spawns. Whites are fine with keeping out Mexicans coming into the country illegally and taking jobs, dislike sanctuary cities, they voted for Trump. As for the idiots whining about white supremacy, how’s that working out for you? WHITE POWER RULES!
Kal Kriese, you might wish to go elsewhere. Your racism will not be popular here.
Another asshole to be dismissed with prejudice *snicker*.
Sorry, forgot my link in #28.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_(legal_term)
My main sliver of hope right now is that so many people seem aware of what we’re facing so early on.
In that way, this won’t be exactly like 1930s Germany. We’ve heard all the excuses, we know what they are, we’ve fought with a wannabe tyrant in GW Bush too recently to forget. We weren’t all asleep when they hit us this time.
It’s grandiose to say we need to build a state within the state, but with the entire federal government soon to become an enemy of the people and democracy, our only source of protection and strength will be each other.
Of course, a good place to start is the existing cities and states themselves. Hopefully the ‘woke’ parts of the country will start having each other’s backs before everything goes completely to shit. It’s anybody’s guess how this will play out, but even just slowing the disaster down will have been worth it.
cervantes @ # 18: They did everything they could, actually.
Yeah, I remember Hillary C reciting the relevant local stats in each campaign speech, with all the area Democratic elected officials marching to county election offices with a selected group of recently stricken-from-the-rolls voters to demand explanations and restorations.
Ah no wait, that was on the other side of the last chrono-synclastic infundibulum I went through … in this dimension things seem to have happened a little differently.
Anyone assuming Donald Trump is the biological epitome of humanity has essentially only demonstrated Trump’s superiority to them, personally.
If Trump’s your idea of the Kwisatz Haderach, I can only feel sorry for you. But aspire away, don’t let me stop you.
@#32, Anri:
You know, that’s true. But is there anyone who actually believes Donald Trump is the best humanity has to offer, other than Donald Trump himself? I’d be willing to bet that even the soon-to-be-banned idiot above would still think there are better people than Trump, and would classify himself as one of them. I find it difficult to believe that anyone looks at Trump and says “this is it, the best humanity can do”.
While there we issues with a highly complacent campaign and definite angst over Clinton, we do have another problem.
A foreign nation utilized a military warfare group to influence our election. The use of military resources by one nation against another is very, very serious.
As for the press not knowing about what happened, that’s simply laziness and the refusal to read an unclassified report:
https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/JAR_16-20296.pdf
I happen to have some familiarity with APT28 and APT29, they’re Russian military and one attack in the past cost the DoD billions of dollars to clean up in 2008.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_cyberattack_on_United_States
Yet, our press can’t figure the problem out. Sheer incompetence.
Oh well, enjoy Trump branded nukes, as he’s decided that 4000 aren’t enough.
Cold War II, here we come!
Points at Kal, as I noted “rise of fascism”.
And if we’re talking about what we should be focusing on, it’s that. Stopping the fascists killing folks on the bottom like me.
But what made an even bigger difference, what really made Trump possible, was an incompetent, smug, conservative media that bumbled the election coverage at every point.
We (The CIA, FBI, Henry Kissinger) have been rigging elections, enabling coups of democratically-elected leaders, destabilizing governments, supporting dictators of other countries since— forever. The US can hardly feign outrage or take the moral high ground here.
@ 34 wzrd1
Oooooohhh. Scary.
And this “military warfare” consisted of releasing genuine, non-incriminating Clinton campaign emails, and (allegedly) planting “fake news” (which is perfectly legal).
Your link actually says, “It was suspected that Russian hackers were behind it because they had used the same code that made up agent.btz before in previous attacks”. Suspected. Because they used the same code.
In fact, it is only “suspected” that Cozy Bear and Fozzie Bear or whatever the fuck their names are are even Russian state actors in the first place.
PZ — Another big mistake: The DNC has not competed aggressively for control of state governments. Republicans hold 31 governorships, versus 18 for the Democrats, plus about 100 more other state executive offices than Democrats. In addition, Republicans control 68 state legislatures out of the 99 total. Needless to say, because of their dominance at the state level, Republicans essentially control voting in this country. If you want to stop voter suppression, you have to control the state governments. If you want to make sure funny things don’t happen in key “swing state” elections, you have to control the state governments.
flange — While what you say is true, I think the people of this country who do not support those actions by our government have as much right to be outraged as the people of, say, Guatemala, Chili, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and even the USSR. My father, who was a life-long conservative Southern Democrat, was appalled when he learned about the US governments involvement in manipulating elections and staging coups in other countries.
To those defending Russia — You’re right. We shouldn’t worry about Russia. It’s a huge country with lots of people who hold a great many divergent opinions, but mostly just want to live peacefully and happily, work, raise their children, etc. However, we might worry about Putin and his gang of kleptocrats because the combination of their kleptocrats with our kleptocrats is kind of just a little scary.
Kal — If you’re right about Trayvon Martin, then the cops should arrest my son because almost every night he walks to the corner store, purchases junk food, and then walks home. This makes him a serious, repeat offender. Or perhaps some concerned citizen should accost him and then shoot him. Of course, my son isn’t guilty of the one crime that mattered to Zimmerman…he’s not black. PINK COWARDS DROOL!
wzrd1@#34:
The JAR is a stinking gutload of incompetence. It utterly fails to convince this information security practitioner who has worked those salt mines for nearly 3 decades. It’s the most feeble attribution attempt I’ve seen since the FBI said “we know it’s Korea because we’re the FBI!” regarding Sony. I’ve deconstructed the tiny bits of substance in the report over at stderr.
PS – those APT attacks only cost huge amounts of money because the tagets are blithering idiots with pathetic security. The incompetence of the US in cyberwar is obvious and painful. Basic phishing attacks are not “advanced” – it’s kiddie stuff.
“…sounds rough.”
-Sincerely, most of the rest of the world
“foreign nation”, “military warfare”.
Both compound terms are amusing, if for different reasons.
—
Duh. Been obvious for some time now — the Muslim Menace just doesn’t have what it takes to sustain the military industrial complex’s gravy train.
We did this to ourselves. Putin just brought the marshmallows to make s’mores.
@#39, robro
If, after seeing that your government is doing those actions, you continue to support that government, then you lose the right of outrage. “Lesser of Two Evils” voting has brought us to the point where the supposed victim went on national television to talk about a country we destroyed, unleashing all kinds of chaos, specifically on the advice and authority of this person, while claiming that we were only going to enforce a no-fly zone, and laughed about how the former leader of that country was sodomized to death by a bayonet. And then all the members of that person’s party refused to admit that this was sociopathic, even downright evil, behavior — and even attempt to deny that it happened, despite all kinds of records showing that it did. If the Russians carried out sabotage against that campaign, I suggest that if there is any moral high ground, the Russians had it.
Was this before or after the gulags?
again, I won’t even bother with the pre-amble.
fuck you Vicar.
you, are a complete asshole and NOTHING you have ever said makes any sense, except to you.
you inevitably ruin good threads with your nonsense trolling.
fuck. you.
Wow.
I’m just floored by how many of the so-called “liberals” here have drunken the right-wing Kool-Aid.
Let me remind you what really happened not two months ago: ELECTION. FRAUD. Catchwords: Voting Rights Act. Voting roll purges. Voter ID. Mass imprisonment. Electronic voting machines. Russia. This election was as fair and open as that of the one or other third-world banana republic. And in spite of everything they couldn’t steal the popular vote.
If this election had been actually democratic, Clinton would’ve won by a two digit million lead.
And you really fellate the fascists by pushing their narrative?!?
The Vicar @ #45 — Thanks for straightening me out. Now I don’t have to feel outrage because I can’t fix the US and make the world perfect.
I’ll also wait to find out who the saint is before I vote next time.
As for Libya, I’m sure Putin would have done great things for those people if given the chance, much as he’s doing in Syria now.
This is a minor point but the problem with the electoral college isn’t its mere existence. It’s that the number of representatives was capped at 435 back in the 20’s (30’s?). This greatly distorts states’ power in deciding the presidency. Like a Wyoming vote is worth ~3.76 CA votes at the moment. Add 100 representatives and the power balances out enough to recalibrate the states.
I mention this because the college does make a perverse sort of sense as a check on majoritarianism and forces the one national office to be involved in more than big cities.
And for the record the two smallest states have been reliably Democratic for decades.
Congratulations to The Vicar.
You’ve won. You are officially declared the most Purely Pure Purest person in any of these threads.
Now of course we just need an adequate Medal to pin you t…to pin to you.
Perhaps something in this vein?
Fucking waste of amino acids.
@John Morales
I’m guessing military warfare because it’s redundant. Milis/militis = warrior.
Foreign nation, natio is from (place of) birth – I think, foreign is something like fuera in Spanish, that is, outside.
So, outside place of birth. Not seeing much in the way of humour there.
I’m not particularly clever, what’s the joke?
@Brian E
I’m guessing too, but: all nations except your own are by definition “foreign nations”, so I guess it’s redundant to mention their foreignness? You can’t be attacked by a non-foreign nation (“native nation”?). The phrase seems designed to make them sound extra menacing — “another nation” would have done.
Brian E:
A nation is a nation. Everything depends on perspective, doesn’t it? That means all nations are foreign.
#20 / PZ: Thanks for the clarification. Since you wrote ‘incompetent, smug’ DNC I assumed you meant the same as Taibibi (and all those other 20/20 hindsight navel gazers), that the DNC was out of touch with people and Clinton a weak candidate, etc., etc.
I’m absolutely with you that, in the US, disenfranchisement and gerrymandering have a lot more of an impact than Russian hacking. At the same time, I’m astounded as an ex-USian at how blase people have been on both sides ever since the first news came out. But maybe that’s because we look at Putin a bit differently here in Europe.
The winner take all of almost all states in the electoral college means that basically the president is the person who accumulates wins in a number of states that have more population that the states won by the loser. The states Trump won have a higher total population than the states Clinton won. That is how our Presidents are now selected once people vote. You could win California in a massive landslide and have a big popular vote margin and still lose if your opponent wins by smaller margins in a lot of other states. Winning California and New York by large margins simply doesn’t help you.
The process of getting to that vote includes all the points mentioned on this thread. But the basic point is the same. In order to be President you have to figure out how to win a number of states that have higher population in total than the ones you lose.
The Democrats ignored a lot of people who used to vote for them and they lost all the way down the ballot. This comment thread is a microcosm of why they will continue to lose. Taibbi and PZ are correct.
Shorter @millssg99 : Apartheid via gerrymandering is OK by me. It’s all the Dems fault for not winning a big enough popular vote to overcome even the most egregious gerrymandering, whether done by the constitution (via electoral college weighting in favor of sparsely populated rural states) or done by Rep controlled state govt.
Q. How many votes would HRC have to have won by for you to stop saying it was the her or the Dems fault? 10M? 100M? I ask because, obviously, someone winning by ~3M in both the primaries and the general isn’t enough for you to call it an anti-democratic result. So do you have a number in mind? Or is any degree of gerrymandering irrelevant to you for the purposes of blaming the victim.
P.S. Your statement “In order to be President you have to figure out how to win a number of states that have higher population in total than the ones you lose.” is incorrect. You have to win the electoral college, not any particular distribution of actual votes. The most extreme example will suffice to prove this: Suppose 1 person lives in each of 49 states, and they all voted for Trump. The other 300+M people live in CA and voted for HRC. Trump wins the EC and so the presidency.
There’s a difference, however, between Russian interference/Comey and Democratic bumbling.
Russian interference and Comey’s letter were both illegal and should be sufficient to consider the results of this election invalid. It saddens me greatly that we have no system in place to deal with this fact.
The Democratic party not being quite as adept at politics as we would like to hope is hardly in the same category as outright election fraud.
eggmoidal, the electoral college votes are distributed by population + Senate – the same as congress. So it is a particular distribution of population. It is only slightly skewed by the two senate seats for every state – population distribution + 2. I was not trying to be technically correct as there are scenarios where it wouldn’t be true but it is roughly correct. Funny how you went off the deep end with your “extreme example”. In your “extreme example” California would have more electoral college votes than the other 49 states combined. In your extreme example HRC wins only California, the EC, and the presidency. Which is exactly my claim. In your “extreme example” to prove me wrong HRC would have won a number of states (one) that contained more population than the ones she lost (forty-nine). In your haste to intentionally misunderstand you goofed big time and gave a most “extreme example” that fit my point.
Good grief.
Secondly,
Once again in fact the point of my comment was completely the opposite of winning a big enough popular vote. Because of the winner take all approach you can win a huge popular vote and still not win the electoral college. I think I actually said exactly that – “and have a big popular vote margin and still lose “.
Finally, please show where I said it wasn’t an anti-democratic result? In fact the whole point of my comment was that it was NOT a purely democratic process. It is in fact in the electoral college process where it is necessary to win a combination of states that have a higher population than you lose – roughly. That is because those states will have a majority of the electoral college votes.
Good grief again.
“The Democrats ignored a lot of people who used to vote for them and they lost all the way down the ballot. ”
The truth is the exact opposite. Dems didn’t ignore the WWC. The thoroughly Fox-washed WWC ignored the Dems.
Did she make tactical mistakes? Yes. She followed the polls which were consistently wrong by 2-5% and made tactical choices based on them. What else was she supposed to do? Would you have gone against those numbers?
Media malpractice, sexism, racism, Foxwashing. Put it all together and you get what we got.
For evidence, please read: https://twitter.com/yottapoint
or for an easier read of the major arguments, please read: http://electionado.com/
@millsg99
You are right about the example I gave. It was awful. My mistake. But the statement “In order to be President you have to figure out how to win a number of states that have higher population in total than the ones you lose” is still incorrect. It is possibly correct if you don’t have that +2 for each state (as you noted). But the +2 per state weighs on the EC count and is not population based. I wrote a rexx exec to show one case. It isn’t as simple as the bad example, but all I need to do to prove the statement wrong is come up with one counter example. Here it is:
TOTAL # ELECTORS………………………………… = 538
TOTAL # POPULATION BASED ELECTORS…………………. = 438
TOTAL # SMALL STATES FOR TRUMP……………………. = 40
TOTAL # SMALL STATES FOR CLINTON + DC + CA…………. = 11
POPULATION OF EACH SMALL STATE OR DC………………. = 3500000
POPULATION OF CA………………………………… = 133000000
POPULATION OF ALL STATES + DC…………………….. = 308000000
# POPULATION BASED ELECTORS FOR A SMALL STATE OR DC…. = 4.97727
# POPULATION BASED ELECTORS FOR CA………………… = 189.13636
# POPULATION BASED ELECTORS FOR ALL STATES + DC…….. = 437.99986
WHOLE # ELECTORS FOR DC……………………….. = 5
WHOLE # ELECTORS +2 FOR EACH SMALL STATE…………… = 7
WHOLE # ELECTORS +2 FOR CA……………………….. = 191
WHOLE # ELECTORS +2 FOR ALL STATES + ELECTORS FOR DC… = 539
REDUCTION IN TRUMP ELECTORS DUE TO FRACTIONS……….. = 1
TOTAL POPULATION FOR ALL TRUMP STATES……………. = 140000000
TOTAL POPULATION FOR ALL CLINTON STATES + DC……….. = 168000000
TOTAL # ELECTORS FOR ALL TRUMP STATES……………. = 279
TOTAL # ELECTORS FOR ALL CLINTON STATES + DC……….. = 259
TOTAL # ELECTORS………………………………… = 538
My apologies for misinterpreting your point. In my defense, you closed with “Taibbi and PZ are correct.” which to me meant that it was all the Dem’s fault for fielding a flawed candidate. I’m just so tired of refuting that bogus claim I imputed it to you. Again, sorry.
And to be even more fair to you, even if there were no +2 for the states, Trump would have still won the EC, thanks to other factors like population shift since the last census. So though the +2 makes it more likely to have undemocratic results, it is really the EC itself that is the culprit this time.
My point, and you seem to agree with it, if I understand correctly now, is that the EC is a disgrace. It’s justification was that it was supposed to protect us from a Trump. In exchange we had to swallow anti-democratic results periodically. Well, we was had. Time to get rid of it.