Stunner.  :-O

Well at least the exchange rate has improved a bit >.<

Ah fuck.

I'm starting to think the world is full of apathetic plebs who just want to watch the world burn.

 

I think it's safe to say polling looks to have had its day in modern-day politics. Many Trump voters keeping quiet about that fact.

Polling drives a great deal of 'news reporting' (and the ad revenues that come with it) so no, I don't think we've seen the last of it. I bet it's going to be a lot more carefully crafted, around stuff like twitter and facebook. And it will still frequently fail.

At least in the US, we see a lot of supposed polls used to try to sell you on an idea, rather than ask your actual feelings and views.  There are so many polls and phone calls to people that they start to push back by providing misleading information.

It is also very difficult to estimate voter turn out.  The weather was very mild, both candidates were very divisive in their politics, and both are very well known figures.  You can see by looking at the numbers that the difference in votes is quite small both nationally and in many states.

People gave a lot of thought to their votes and turn out was quite high.  The candidates very much targeted their audience and won their audience.  Sanders might have actually won if he were the candidate, since he had a wider political appeal to centrist, but Hillary simply could not expand past her core audience. 

Personally, I think that at least part of the voter push back was that Michael Bloomberg of NY is funding so many campaigns and issues across the country, and he is particularly unpopular outside of his very narrow base.  He funds a lot of democrats (including Clinton) and requires them to take certain positions on issues, even if it costs them votes, or in this case, the election.

I still have not really figured out the value of twitter.

It makes perfect sense for a candidate to use twitter to communicate to the audience / potential voters, but what is the value in reading this information unless you are already are interested in the candidate?  

Why would a casual democratic voter follow a republican candidate, or frankly, why follow even the democratic candidates?  I would think that most people make up their minds years in advance on how they will vote.

This is actually an issue that has been discussed a lot on social media lately, especially after the EU Referendum result, and earlier after the 2015 UK General Election.

Many people (on the left) on social media essentially exist within an echo chamber, where they only follow/interact with people who are the same political persuasion as themselves. This results in people having a skewed view of reality because all they're reading/consuming is based around their personal views, because they've created the stream of content by following people with similar views.

I think it would be fair to say this place is similar. We're mainly a load of centre-left/left liberals and it does show.

I often think I should make an effort to seek out the opposite opinion of my own more often, but at the moment that pushes you towards the alt-right, and frankly I don't want to read that shite.

The trouble with all this is by all means we can go read other people's opinions but then what? Reasoning with them does not generally change anybody's mind. As a lot of people are saying, we seem to be in a post-truth society now, people believe what they want to believe. And the majority of people want to believe in  racist, sexist horrible stuff. Ho hum.

I think if the 'left' want to do anything in the west now they have to some serious soul-searching about why they don't have more popularity. And that probably means not accusing racist sexist horrible people of being racist or sexist or horrible. Hmm.

Like, if you voted for Trump and Pence. You voted for all the things we know Trump is. Pence supports things like electro-shock therapy to 'cure' gay people. The list gets mighty long. And apparently that's OK?

Thought I was a few more stages down the path than this, but I guess it's still shock/disbelief for me despite at least half expecting it to happen!

You're absolutely right. We're beyond being able to assume people will vote for the person/team/side/party with the better morals.

The echo chamber thing is more a case of being in a bubble assuming everyone is thinking the same as you, which means little is done to attract more people and being oblivious to the reality. But as you say, it's often a waste of time to reason with a lot of people at the moment.

People want change, irrelevant of what that change brings. Brexit and Trump seemed to offer that over the "establishment". Facts and consequence seem to be irrelevant to the majority at the moment, how do you compete with that.

I think the only person on the left who managed to secure some proper widespread support was Bernie Sanders. I guess he was viewed as being a real chance for positive change which people could get behind, but there's no chance of that now.

Jeremy Corbyn could have been that over here, but his inability to lead the opposition properly plus the media's issue with him have ruined it.

This is as good an explanation as any I've so far read:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate

 

The only hope I have for Corbyn is that the polls continue to be very wrong and he starts to get some better press somehow to complete the job. Beyond the bollocks in the press (including 'left' papers like the Guardian) I think a lot of what he says would be agreed with by a lot of people if it was somehow given to them in a neutral way. Don't really see it happening. Labour themselves have mostly seen to that.

I don't think most people who voted Trump are (actively) racist, sexist, etc. etc.. I think it's the same as Brexit - there's a huge proportion of the population who feel like they've been left behind by globalism and neoliberal economics.

Those people *should* be the left's core demographic but the left embraced neoliberalism and trickle-down bullshit along with the centre-right so those people are left with no compelling narrative to follow.

So when some (apparently in the eyes of some) charismatic character who "tells it like it is" and "talks tough", whether it be Trump or that UKIP cunt, comes along they jump on that shit. *Especially* uneducated white men who are *particularly* alienated since their self identification - their idea of what masculinity is - is now seen as offensive and they don't *really* get why (imagine a whole tangent here about the fact that, again, the left has failed to provide an alternate conception of masculinity - particularly *white* masculinity - so, surprise fucking surprise, we get a surge in superficial fascism, 'meninism' and the alt-right).

Sanders was able to speak to those people while *also* genuinely representing progressive ideas, albeit in a very incremental way. But the Democrats pulled out all the stops to get status-quo neoliberal Hillary Clinton the nomination instead of him.

So, like always, we get a lesser-of-two-evils election and it becomes entirely about turnout. Even those who dislike Trump found it hard to vote for Clinton and turnout was unsurprisingly extremely low - Trump got a *slightly* lower number of votes than GOP candidates in the last two elections and Clinton's was *far* **far** lower.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cw1RUvqWgAATypw.jpg:large

Which is unsurprising when you've given two shitty options to vote for.

The left *really* needs to work on providing a counter-narrative to whatever Trump and UKIP represent and the alt-right. But I don't expect they actually will because they're fucking useless.

This tweet pretty much sums it all up for me: https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/794204785742266368

Also I think the "post-fact" idea is overblown. There's *some* truth in it but we've been there for decades, it's just that it's ok when it's *our* bullshit that's being promulgated.

The people who voted for Brexit, for example, weren't voting on the economy. They don't give a shit about the economy because it has no perceptible bearing on their lives, at least relative to those in the middle classes who do *very much* benefit. It's not that they don't recognise facts it's that the facts we care about are irrelevant to them.

I don't think the echo chamber / hyper-normalization affect is something that only people on the left of the political spectrum do and likewise I don't think it is a phenomenon found only on The Internet. I would bet it occurs also on the right and in the "real world" too.

Facebook, Twitter, et al have made it incredibly easy to slip into a state of hyper-normalization, especially when they seem to actively reinforce and encourage it by suggesting similar pages, groups and users to follow based on your existing subscriptions.

This here BBC 2 moving-picture-thing covers the topic and is a really good watch.

But how many knuckle-dragging banjo players even heard of the internet?

He blames facebook.

Ehhhhh. I am glad you have weighed in, I wanted to know what you thought. I think I actually disagree with a good amount of it but I'm not really typing this on the right device to do it properly. *saves thoughts*

The part of the article that I am not so sure is correct is the assumption that Sander's followers were entirely "in" on the majority of his beliefs.  My perception is:
- Many of his followers were democrats and independents who simply didn't like Clinton's policies, history, and personality.  Not just men, but also many women.
- His biggest push was toward the 18-25 age group, which is really suffering from lack of jobs for educated, but non technically educated people carrying heavy college debt loads.  I suspect that many of these people reluctantly or never did vote for Clinton, simply avoiding to vote at all.
...
I actually donated to Sander's campaign (not a lot, but some) because if we were going to end up with a democrat as President, it would be better to have him than Clinton - for my own personal priorities of how I see life.  That doesn't mean I agree with him on everything, but more so than I did Clinton.  His tax and spend policies were far away from how I prefer, but I liked some of his social / individual rights positions, and he is exactly correct that we are over criminalizing trivial crimes, for example, being 20 years old and drinking a beer is a serious crime in many states - ridiculous.
...
I don't see people in the US fitting so neatly and cleanly into liberal / conservative boxes, but rather they hold a range of opinions on social funding, medical funding, religion, abortion, marriage, money management, military, rights of the individual, gun rights, trade deficit, police actions, etc.  Political campaigns spend a great deal of effort to slice and dice these preferences into getting people to vote for them, by talking to the ones with the highest priority for them individually.
...
No one in the US believes that Trump will actually follow through on more than 50% of what he spoke, similar to every politician.  What Mr. Trump successfully did, was clearly state that he would try to work on the correct set of priorities in order to get elected, and Mrs. Clinton and her financial backer, Bloomberg, picked the wrong ones, and not just a little bit, but the ones that aggravated people enough to go out and vote against her.
.....
Trump is a business man who has given donations to a wide range of politicians of every type in order to make pragmatic progress on business projects.  I would not worry about any particular social issue all that much.  Does anyone really think that a New York luxury property developer cares if someone is gay?  Most likely many of his customers in large cities are gay and their money is the same color as everyone else.
...
In simple terms, it is nearly impossible for a republican candidate to win California and New York, so there is no point in spending a lot of time supporting their issues during an election.  He had to win the midwest and Florida, so he figured out what their core issues are and talked to those.
......
Clinton has too much political history and ties to New York to reach the people in the midwest on their core challenges and concerns, especially on trade with China and ties to bankers.  The banks stiffed the taxpayers out of nearly $3 trillion during the last 10 years, so while popular in NY, that doesn't work well in Ohio and Indiana.