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Why People Voted For Trump – For Those Who Don't Get It

Meadmaker said:
It occurred to me that two Democratic candidates have been torpedoes by campaigns of half-truths, out of context accusations, and occasional outright lies. The whole email "scandal" wasn't worth a hill of beans, but it almost certainly cost her the election. Similarly, John Kerry was "swiftboated".

I don't know what to do in the face of this sort of attack. I think that the lesson that should be learned is that future campaigns are going to get ugly, and trying to "go high" when they go low doesn't seem to be very effective. I hate to see things get nasty, and I hate to see nastiness rewarded with votes, but it happened. It works. I'm pretty sure we'll see more of it.
Click to expand...

...you've nearly got it. But you are not quite there yet.

Donald Trump follows 40 accounts on Twitter. Robert Mackey created a Twitter account that shows exactly what Trump sees every day when he logs into twitter.

https://twitter.com/RobertMackey/lists/trump-s-twitter-timeline

Just scroll down the feed for a while. This is where the next President of the United States of America gets his view of the world from. Not from the daily intelligence briefings. But from Drudge. And Ann Coulter. And Fox Nation. And if that doesn't scare the **** out of you, then nothing will.

Trump has personally curated his feed to show him only the news that agrees with him. Everything else is excluded. There isn't anything particularly nasty there. But just imagine getting all of your news from these sources. Donald Trumps supporters get their news from the same sources. That feed is the complete opposite of what my twitter timeline looks like. I've done the same thing. My news sources are also heavily personally curated. My view of the world is completely different to Trump's and Trump supporters.

People no longer get news from balanced sources. They don't see the same news that we see. Technology has left us all behind and most of us haven't noticed.

The Trump campaign realized this. They told bold-faced lies because they knew that for a small percentage of people they would never ever be confronted with the truth. As Karl Rove back in 2004:

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Click to expand...


Everyone has curated their own news sources now. Everything is personalised. They didn't need to convince everyone. America is such a polarised nation that many Republicans vote Republican and Democrats vote Democrat regardless of what candidate got put up. So Trump was alway going to get a heck of a lot of votes. To push them over the top they just needed to communicate with a few voters. And they did. By basing their campaign on a bunch of lies.

I live on the other side of the world: and even over here someone said to me "Clinton shouldn't be President because she had a private email server." All it took was a few rallying catch-phrases to do Clinton in. The interviews with people that voted Trump all said the same sort of things. You and me: we spend our lives on messageboards: it is very easy for us to be able to figure out the truth. But for a farmer who works a 12 hour day 6 days a week: it isn't so easy. They aren't going to search google for ten minutes to find an article written by a reporter on Medium that takes 15 minutes to read that explains in depth why Clintons email server isn't a big deal. Which is what I had to do when the subject of the email server first came up.

The take-away from this election shouldn't be "lets get nasty." Whoever runs for President next time for the Democrats needs to be someone who can roll with the punches, who understands how the game is played but also will not play as dirty as Trump. My pick would be someone like Jon Stuart. Mike Moore picks someone like Tom Hanks. Bill Mahar's pick is Gavin Newsom. Charisma is important. They need to roll an 18 on charisma. Heck, even Joe Biden might work. It needs to be someone to rally behind, and I think the Democrats have to make their pick earlier than normal and they need to not have a divisive race to pick this person.
 
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Trump voters really are like little children who broke their parents car and now need them to understand why they did it.

Man up and own that you voted for the least qualified candidate in the history of the US !
 
banquetbear said:
...you've nearly got it. But you are not quite there yet.

Donald Trump follows 40 accounts on Twitter. Robert Mackey created a Twitter account that shows exactly what Trump sees every day when he logs into twitter.

https://twitter.com/RobertMackey/lists/trump-s-twitter-timeline

Just scroll down the feed for a while. This is where the next President of the United States of America gets his view of the world from. Not from the daily intelligence briefings. But from Drudge. And Ann Coulter. And Fox Nation. And if that doesn't scare the **** out of you, then nothing will.

Trump has personally curated his feed to show him only the news that agrees with him. Everything else is excluded. There isn't anything particularly nasty there. But just imagine getting all of your news from these sources. Donald Trumps supporters get their news from the same sources. That feed is the complete opposite of what my twitter timeline looks like. I've done the same thing. My news sources are also heavily personally curated. My view of the world is completely different to Trump's and Trump supporters.

People no longer get news from balanced sources. They don't see the same news that we see. Technology has left us all behind and most of us haven't noticed.

The Trump campaign realized this. They told bold-faced lies because they knew that for a small percentage of people they would never ever be confronted with the truth. As Karl Rove back in 2004:




Everyone has curated their own news sources now. Everything is personalised. They didn't need to convince everyone. America is such a polarised nation that many Republicans vote Republican and Democrats vote Democrat regardless of what candidate got put up. So Trump was alway going to get a heck of a lot of votes. To push them over the top they just needed to communicate with a few voters. And they did. By basing their campaign on a bunch of lies.

I live on the other side of the world: and even over here someone said to me "Clinton shouldn't be President because she had a private email server." All it took was a few rallying catch-phrases to do Clinton in. The interviews with people that voted Trump all said the same sort of things. You and me: we spend our lives on messageboards: it is very easy for us to be able to figure out the truth. But for a farmer who works a 12 hour day 6 days a week: it isn't so easy. They aren't going to search google for ten minutes to find an article written by a reporter on Medium that takes 15 minutes to read that explains in depth why Clintons email server isn't a big deal. Which is what I had to do when the subject of the email server first came up.

The take-away from this election shouldn't be "lets get nasty." Whoever runs for President next time for the Democrats needs to be someone who can roll with the punches, who understands how the game is played but also will not play as dirty as Trump. My pick would be someone like Jon Stuart. Mike Moore picks someone like Tom Hanks. Bill Mahar's pick is Gavin Newsom. Charisma is important. They need to roll an 18 on charisma. Heck, even Joe Biden might work. It needs to be someone to rally behind, and I think the Democrats have to make their pick earlier than normal and they need to not have a divisive race to pick this person.
Click to expand...

Yeah. I suppose it isn't so much how to counter the message, as it is how to get people to listen to you when you do. If they never even hear the response, what chance is there?

Still, somehow it must be countered. How to do it is a very important challenge.
 
No need to steer this into a "Bernie would've won" thread, but here are some of the reasons I think the election could've gone quite differently:
1) DNC clueless to the collective eyeroll of millions of liberals/progressives when Clinton announced her candidacy.
2) Clinton trounced Sanders in the primary of course, because the DNC preordained her as their nominee back in 2008.
3) Sanders tapped into the same populism and anti-establishment message that Trump did, without all the racism, misogyny, and celebration of ignorance. As we keep being reminded in these political threads, Trump voters are all about peace and love for fellow human beings. The only thing they hate is bad trade deals, i.e., the same ones Bernie opposed. If provided with a non-racist non-idiot non-groping candidate who opposed the trade deals that are so important to them, of course he would've won! Amirite?



More to the point of the thread though, I'm waiting to learn about all this power that's being taken from me and given to black guys. Chris, can you help me understand what I've got to lose if a black guy in America has the same opportunities to succeed as I do?
 
Hungry81 said:
Well maybe working class rural folks could take advantage of the "free" education and broaden their horizons so they can help themselves and stop blaming the left for complex economic circumstances that are not soley the fault of one segment of society and will not be fixed because an (alleged) con man tells you he will fix it without a viable plan.
Click to expand...
I've said the same thing, they should educate themselves better.
Especially so when it's people LIKE Trump that shift the jobs offshore and exploit and purchase foreign labour in the first place, so they can maximise their profits at the expense of working class rural folks like you.
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Trump is in real estate, not much offshoring there?

Working class rural folk like me? You're assuming. ;)
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Trump voters really are like little children who broke their parents car and now need them to understand why they did it.

Man up and own that you voted for the least qualified candidate in the history of the US !
Click to expand...

Actually, the left looks more like children running around protesting refusing to accept the results, nice try!

Trump is the most qualified to straighten this country out. He brings new ideas that both parties are unwilling to move forward on. I realize that the left worships at the feet of established losers, but thankfully we aren't going that way.
 
banquetbear said:
...you've nearly got it. But you are not quite there yet.

Donald Trump follows 40 accounts on Twitter. Robert Mackey created a Twitter account that shows exactly what Trump sees every day when he logs into twitter.

https://twitter.com/RobertMackey/lists/trump-s-twitter-timeline

Just scroll down the feed for a while. This is where the next President of the United States of America gets his view of the world from. Not from the daily intelligence briefings. But from Drudge. And Ann Coulter. And Fox Nation. And if that doesn't scare the **** out of you, then nothing will.

Trump has personally curated his feed to show him only the news that agrees with him. Everything else is excluded. There isn't anything particularly nasty there. But just imagine getting all of your news from these sources. Donald Trumps supporters get their news from the same sources. That feed is the complete opposite of what my twitter timeline looks like. I've done the same thing. My news sources are also heavily personally curated. My view of the world is completely different to Trump's and Trump supporters.

People no longer get news from balanced sources. They don't see the same news that we see. Technology has left us all behind and most of us haven't noticed.

The Trump campaign realized this. They told bold-faced lies because they knew that for a small percentage of people they would never ever be confronted with the truth. As Karl Rove back in 2004:




Everyone has curated their own news sources now. Everything is personalised. They didn't need to convince everyone. America is such a polarised nation that many Republicans vote Republican and Democrats vote Democrat regardless of what candidate got put up. So Trump was alway going to get a heck of a lot of votes. To push them over the top they just needed to communicate with a few voters. And they did. By basing their campaign on a bunch of lies.

I live on the other side of the world: and even over here someone said to me "Clinton shouldn't be President because she had a private email server." All it took was a few rallying catch-phrases to do Clinton in. The interviews with people that voted Trump all said the same sort of things. You and me: we spend our lives on messageboards: it is very easy for us to be able to figure out the truth. But for a farmer who works a 12 hour day 6 days a week: it isn't so easy. They aren't going to search google for ten minutes to find an article written by a reporter on Medium that takes 15 minutes to read that explains in depth why Clintons email server isn't a big deal. Which is what I had to do when the subject of the email server first came up.

The take-away from this election shouldn't be "lets get nasty." Whoever runs for President next time for the Democrats needs to be someone who can roll with the punches, who understands how the game is played but also will not play as dirty as Trump. My pick would be someone like Jon Stuart. Mike Moore picks someone like Tom Hanks. Bill Mahar's pick is Gavin Newsom. Charisma is important. They need to roll an 18 on charisma. Heck, even Joe Biden might work. It needs to be someone to rally behind, and I think the Democrats have to make their pick earlier than normal and they need to not have a divisive race to pick this person.
Click to expand...

Lol
Please pick your next candidate from the fools you just posted, pretty please?

Your side still doesn't get it.

Hers a clue, if your side wants to ever win again, the extreme leftists will have to hold their nose and pick a person like Jim Webb.
 
After Trump starts a new nuclear arms race, defends Israeli settlement policies, does not end Obamacare, does not indict Hillary, does not build a huge wall on the Mexican border, threatens to not increase our debt limit or tries to renegotiate our Treasury interest rates, many will wonder why they voted for Trump.
 
Seismosaurus said:
People voted for Trump because he conned them into thinking he would make their lives better.

There's really nothing more to it than that.
Click to expand...

That begs the question: are things so bad that people let someone like Trump con them? That sounds like things are desperately bad, and I think they are in parts of the country. The opioid/heroin epidemic doesn't happen in a vacuum.
 
Fudbucker said:
That begs the question: are things so bad that people let someone like Trump con them? That sounds like things are desperately bad, and I think they are in parts of the country. The opioid/heroin epidemic doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Click to expand...

Yes I believe for some people, especially in the Rust Belt, things are so bad that they were willing to try anything to get change.
 
logger said:
Lol
Please pick your next candidate from the fools you just posted, pretty please?

Your side still doesn't get it.

Hers a clue, if your side wants to ever win again, the extreme leftists will have to hold their nose and pick a person like Jim Webb.
Click to expand...

Actually the issue isn't broad rejection of the left. The political center is what is disappearing the most rapidly.

Where there is a credible left-wing (not neo-liberal) party or candidate, they are in control (SNP) or showing incredibly strong momentum (Podemos). Where there is not a credible left-wing party, ethno-nationalist demagogues are coming to power. Screaming 'bigots' at the nationalists doesn't work, but neither does screaming 'socialists!' at the genuine left-wing figures.

These kinds of verbal hand grenades sound like a distraction to people who want their long, slow slide into impoverished misery to be addressed. A candidate or campaign that relies on accusations of shameful behavior comes across as just playing a political game for sport. Some targeted lines of attack that portray the opponent as an insider or who shirks personal responsibility for things amidst a lot of talk about bad policies that need to go away seems to be the formula. Broad, unspecified accusations of amoral behavior and a cautious embrace of the status quo won't work.

The absolute worst possible thing to do right now if one wants to win is to stay in the center. There is no center anymore.
 
logger said:
Lol
Please pick your next candidate from the fools you just posted, pretty please?

Your side still doesn't get it.

Hers a clue, if your side wants to ever win again, the extreme leftists will have to hold their nose and pick a person like Jim Webb.
Click to expand...

Lol

You voted for *********** Donald Trump.
 
Meadmaker said:
Still, somehow it must be countered. How to do it is a very important challenge.
Click to expand...

...you mentioned before that you knew some people who were voting Trump: and that they seemed like reasonable people. Here is how you break the bubble.

You talk to them. You engage them directly. You go say "Hi!"

You talk to them about what? I dunno. Thats for you Americans to figure out. You've got four years. I know its harder than leaving up to the media to "talk to them." But the media stopped doing their job a while ago: and even if they chose to step up their game now it is just too late anyway.

I see it a bit like the game Overwatch. To defeat Bastion you need Tracer. If you want to beat Junkrat you send McCree or the Widowmaker. The Trump Empire is going to be doing some very wacky things over the next four years. To counter it you don't try and match them at their own game. You don't spread fake news. You don't go dirty. You match them with the correct counter. The diehard Republicans are always going to vote Republican. You need to get into the ear of the people on the fringes. You need to push them out of the bubble.

I no longer bother engaging people on the internet who are "indoctrinated." There isn't any point. They exist to get a reaction. You engage you loose. I just point and laugh at them now. There is no point in debating them.

I'm more interested in interacting with people like you. You can actually make a difference. You just need to re-align your targets. We live in a different world now. You can't stop people from calling something racist. You can't stop people from being perceived as "politically correct." I can hop on twitter now and express my opinion and millions of people will read it. I can write a Medium post and have it go viral. If I write an essay where I call "Stop and Frisk" racist: how are you going to stop me from doing that? You can't.

People are going to say and do what they say and they do. You can't stop them.

And the alt-right media is going to exaggerate and outright lie about what people say. Lauren Duca was in an interview with Tucker Carlson yesterday. The alt-right right now are lying about what she said on the interview. Tucker Carlson claimed she told Donald Trump to eat "faeces". She denied saying this because she didn't: she actually told Donald Trump to eat ****. But the alt-right media have spun a story that she lied about telling Trump to eat **** and they are claiming that she deleted the tweet when she didn't. And she is getting attacked on twitter by a bunch of morons who are claiming that she deleted the tweet and then put it back.

All because Tucker Carlson couldn't bring himself to say the word ****. It was the most pitiful moment I've seen on TV all year.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/teen...carlson-youre-actually-being-a-partisan-hack/

This is the new normal. Duca is a hero. There are many more heroes out there. They deserve your support. She is now a target of the Trump Empire and their evil minions. Do what you can to support them. Its how the game is played now. People are going to put themselves on the line. They are going to speak out. And those people are going to get attacked. They will have their social media feeds brigaded. They will get "swatted" and doxxed and have their personal details leaked.

How do you stop the alt-right from telling outright lies and having their supporters run rampant over the internet? I don't know which side of the "goobergate" debate you were on: but the goobergaters used the same tactics as the alt-right media and their supporters are using now. For many of us who had to experience it as it happened we are just watching it happen all over again.

We fought back using block lists and rationality and ignoring gish gallops and addressing the issues and supporting each other: and eventually goobergate ran out of steam. That isn't going to happen here. Bannon has the ear of the most powerful person on the planet. I think the goal needs to be to marginalise the alt-right media and to hold the mainstream media to account. How you do that? Buggered if I know.
 
logger said:
Lol
Please pick your next candidate from the fools you just posted, pretty please?

Your side still doesn't get it.

Hers a clue, if your side wants to ever win again, the extreme leftists will have to hold their nose and pick a person like Jim Webb.
Click to expand...

No, we just have to adopt some populist policies, like renegotiating free trade agreements and tariffs on nations that discriminate against our products.

You people forget that Hillary only lost by about 100,000 votes.

Out of 100 million cast. That's .1% This can very easily flip in 2020.
 
logger said:
Yes

Lol
You voted for the *********** old bag?
Click to expand...

...Lol

What word did the auto-censor edit there? I don't know what "old bag" you are refering too. I don't live in the United States. And I'm not American. And you would have known that if you had actually bothered to read my posts.
 
banquetbear said:
...Lol

What word did the auto-censor edit there? I don't know what "old bag" you are refering too. I don't live in the United States. And I'm not American. And you would have known that if you had actually bothered to read my posts.
Click to expand...

Your in the USA politics thread and I've got better things to do than read all your posts.
 
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