Holy!Goodness! America.
This can’t end well.
xxx
Notes:
I’m no Hillary fan – she’s far, far too right wing for my tastes.
As a feminist I’m opposed to the idea that I should support a woman because of her gender if I vehemently disagree with her conservative politics.
I’m very pleased we have the electoral (and multi-party) system we have here – and that even our extreme right wingers look like communists in comparison to the “left wing” in the US.
It’s kind of poor form not to address your devoted supporters when you’ve conceded (and to send out a dude to tell everyone to go home).
Holy fuck politicians everywhere, just engage with actual people, be plugged into your constituencies, respond to their concerns, and this sort of crazy shit won’t happen.
It was awful.
It was like (I imagine, since I have thus far been spared this in real life) gradually becoming aware that a horrible diagnosis is real.
We (HC voters) did not realize how deep the visceral hatred for her runs.
If you get a chance, check out a map of California results by county. It is overwhelmingly urban v. rural, not even coastal v. inland since Sacto and Fresno counties went for Hilary.
Your husband can tell you why certain counties went the way they did just from looking at it. Interestingly, Orange County south of LA went blue as well. Traditionally the OC was a Republican stronghold, but the split is now professional degrees v. small business/farming/ranching/self-employed people. OC is overwhelmingly the former.
I can’t even imagine!
Well I suppose I can a bit, we had our own brand of embarrassing, unhinged conservative macho Prime Minister a couple of years ago. We’re fortunate though that his party replaced him after a few too many really idiotic decisions (and comments) and they worried they’d lose government.
We’re a tiny backwater though – this is a whole other scary thing entirely!
Here is the link to CA results by county.
http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/california-president-clinton-trump
Joan has been regaling us over the past months with choice quotes from Don’s dad’s facebook feed – which was rabidly anti-Hillary. His dad and step-mom are quite (very) conservative, but at Christmas they were pretty anti-Trump too. That stance seemed to have done an about-face in recent times!
So I was really surprised to see Sutter County reasonably pink and not a very dark, glowing red.
Though I know what you’re saying, she won the popular vote and therefore should be President. Everyone in the media keeps focussing on the messages/candidatures, but I think there should be a focus on a flawed electoral system. The electoral college favours conservative candidates/states in the same way it did in Queensland until the gerrymander was removed. If the system was different, we would have had Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary in 2016.
I see what you’re saying, but I really don’t think we can know if Hillary would’ve won if the system had been based on popular vote – because it isn’t.
We probably have seen quite different campaigns focussed on winning under those parameters rather than working to win within the existing system. Not saying that Trump would have won, but who knows what would have happened?
To use a really lame sporting analogy – this is like saying AFL team should have won a match because they kicked more balls through the posts, even though they only kicked behinds and no goals (warned you it was a lame analogy, but hey, it’s early in the morning).
I have seen the argument presented that the primaries are flawed at that Bernie Sanders should have been the Democratic candidate, which is also pretty compelling.
This is an article worth reading if you haven’t already.
Yep, the system is flawed, but there are really a lot of really unhappy people out there globally. There is a big move generally away from the status quo toward the completely and utterly mental (Brexit, Clive Palmer, Pauline Hansen, Duterte, Modi). Mostly this seems to be because people feel like no-one in power is listening and change is needed. I find it quite infuriating that my side of the political fence does nothing to present a compelling argument to not vote for bonkers candidates and against your self-interest.
I think it is pretty easy to see how the Dark Ages happened! We pretty much learn nothing from history.