Or was it?
Here is a chart showing voter turnout for the last few presidential elections.
Doesn't seem like there were more voters out in 2016.
If you look at votes by party (graph is from HERE) it tells the story.
Republican turnout is essentially flat, but for Democrats, the turnout dipped drastically.
Trump did not win.
Clinton lost.
My theory is there were a couple of factors.
It seems that a lot of Democrats who turned out for Obama did do so for Clinton, which would seem to indicate that maybe Clinton did not appeal to the same block of voters that Obama did.
I had also commented to my girlfriend while watching the returns that I did not like that projections from the east were released while polls in the west were open, thinking that the feeble minded people in the west would go with the crowd (I'm in AZ-if you've been here, you get the joke).
A lot of people, myself included, were predicting Clinton would win big. For the record, I am happy I was wrong.
My theory is that a lot of Democrats stayed home, thinking it was in the bag.
To me, this election cycle told the story that Americans are sick of the same old crap. That is why Trump won the nomination, and why Bernie Sanders almost won his before the Clinton Machine put a stop to it.
And while the low Democratic turnout may not all have been dissatisfied voters, I believe much of it was.
People did not vote against Hilary because they are sexist-we voted against her because she is corrupt and scary.
Johnson and Stein did not cause Clinton to lose-my suspicion is that Johnson diverted far more votes from Trump, and Stein was far less of a factor.
Trump won in part because people wanted true change and that was worth the gamble in spite of his often damning sound bytes.
And mainly because prognosticators gave Democratic voters a false sense of security.
So because I have been saying for months that Clinton would win big, Trump won.
Doesn't that entitle me to a cabinet post?
Two things: First like Beck said: Trump supporters took him seriously, but not literally. His opponents took him literally, but not seriously.
ReplyDeleteSecond, Dems pander to the minorities, and with a rich white woman being supported by big money, the black voters no longer had a dog in the hunt, the hispanics were split at best, and the women didn't have the oomph to push her over the top. Or maybe the last two reversed, whichever way you want to analyse. Bottom line was, Hillary didn't have near enough to interest the hand-out crowd. Makes you wonder how a Bernie v. Trump campaign might have gone.
I think we're saying the same thing. I would have found the Bernie v. Trump scenario far more interesting because I think they would have had to sling less mud and actually (gasp) talk about what they would bring to the table.
ReplyDeleteThe sour grapes from the left in the wake of this thing cracks me up-I heard that some colleges are staging....wait for it...CRY-INS for students who are distraught over the Trump victory.
Roughly fifty years ago, college students would face national guardsmen armed only with FLOWERS, but now they need classes cancelled (Yale), cry-ins (Cornell) and the president of the University of Washington, a lesbian Latina immigrant, held a "gathering o healing."
Which begs the question...what the heck happened to the backbone of America?