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Galef wrote: How about I choose the option to not let ANY money get taken out of my wallet?
There is no such option. You can choose to have $100 taken, $50 taken, or you can choose to offer no opinion and let it be $50 or $100 according to someone else's choice. It is indisputable fact that either Trump or Clinton will win. Your only choice is whether you want to make an attempt to influence the choice (with Clinton being the obvious correct choice) or just give up and take whichever president the other voters pick.
In the past I have not voted because I was so "out of the loop" that I didn't even know an election was coming until a few days after it was over.
Sorry, but what? How can anyone live in the US and not know that an election is happening?
There is no such thing as a hobby without politics. "Leave politics at the door" is itself a political statement, an endorsement of the status quo and an attempt to silence dissenting voices.
Gee, a Clinton bashing story in a rag owned by Rupert Murdoch, and written by the same guy who wrote "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington".
You genuinely deserve that clueless nob Gary Johnson as your candidate.
Doesn't matter who printed it, all that matters is whether they're telling the truth. Are they?
Gee, a Clinton bashing story in a rag owned by Rupert Murdoch, and written by the same guy who wrote "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington".
You genuinely deserve that clueless nob Gary Johnson as your candidate.
Doesn't matter who printed it, all that matters is whether they're telling the truth. Are they?
WHAT!? Sources don't matter? Spin doesn't matter? Bias doesn't matter? HUH? As far as the "truth" being told, once again I'll reference FBI investigation and reiteration of previous findings, conclusion and their validity.
wuestenfux wrote: Florida can be decisive. If HC gets Florida and Pennstate, she will be through.
But what I've learned is that Ohio is always on the winner's side.
The this year will be the exception. Ohio looks incredibly strong for Trump.
I just heard on the radio that one pollster has the Senate coming in at 50/50. This means whomever becomes Vice President will be casting tie-breaking votes. It also means any legislative effort will require significant deal-making.
wuestenfux wrote: Florida can be decisive. If HC gets Florida and Pennstate, she will be through.
But what I've learned is that Ohio is always on the winner's side.
They also have the guy I wanted to be POTUS as governor! But they also have the Indians , yeah Cubbies!
Necros wrote: Best part of this election is work lets us leave 2 hours early. Yay!
Well, I could come in 2 hours late, or take a 2 hour lunch, but it's more fun to leave early.
Lucky you. I work at a place were people are going to vote and have to work the full day.
I'm just getting up at 6 to get in line asap. Hopefully things won't be too crazy and I'll get in to work on time. Better yet if I can stop at a diner along the way to get breakfast.
Utterly insane that Pennsylvania seems to be important every four years, and yet we don't have any system of early voting.
Sorry, but what? How can anyone live in the US and not know that an election is happening?
This is the first election year that I have been "connected" to the world via smart-phone, regular internet access, etc. It's actually pretty easy to "avoid" certain issues if you don't have internet (or only go to certain websites), don't have a smart phone, don't have cable and generally just watch older movies. I am only old enough to have voted in the past 3 elections. I was in college for my 1st time, so obviously political $h!+ was everywhere, so I voted. The next 2 elections I was working in "below-degree" level jobs and couldn't be bothered with the "political" process as I was more worried about paying loans and, ya know, eating. At these times, I can be an escapist and therefore prefer to "shut out" the parts of the outside world that I don't need, can afford to ignore, etc.
This is the first election since college which my life is actually together and where I want to be. And feth is this election a mess. Not only do I have "catching up" to do, but I have to sort through all the current BS. If it wasn't so impractical/too easy to manipulate, I'd prefer online voting. Just send me to a website so I can click and move on. But no, I have to go somewhere out of my daily routine to vote for someone I have no fething clue how it will affect me, just because I know the "other guy" will be worse.
Oh, and I live in TX, which is a Republican state anyway, so are there really any chances that my single vote will swing anything? or rather, will me not voting actually make Trump win? Cuz I doubt that.
I don't harp on people that Vote. I actually appreciate the interest you all have in "the system". But not voting is a valid pov too and I don't like it when people say that is "unacceptable" or "un-American", because really the only thing I find truly "un-American" is being told you have to do something because "reasons"
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This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2016/11/07 21:37:14
I remain on the #TeamJohnson bandwagon, this author makes a convincing argument as to the "whys" people are voting for Trump.
The writer offers 3 rational reasons (all of which he ultimately rejects... as I did) for voting Trump, and they are all rooted in the binary nature of the election, which is that one of the two bad candidates will win. He describes the reasons as instrumental (Trump will be better on policy), structural (the structure of the D.C. apparatus will resist Trump), and the “drain the swamp” argument.
He then describes how low-information voters would end up voting for Clinton or Trump in a great exposition:
Voting for Trump may be wrong, but it’s not crazy.
Spoiler:
One of the popular sports these days among Clinton supporters — and sometimes among Never Trump Republicans (of whom I am proudly one) — is bashing the people voting to make Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States. A common refrain is to list the various awful things associated with Trump — e.g., groping women, stirring up bigotry, toadying to Putin — and suggesting that anyone who votes for Trump must be embracing all of this.
A recent Pew survey found that 58 percent of Clinton supporters “have a hard time respecting someone who supports Donald Trump for president,” almost a third more than the proportion of Trump voters who view Clinton supports with similar disdain. (That figure is markedly higher among Hillary’s white supporters, and rises to 66 percent among Clinton supporters with college degrees.) Undoubtedly, Hillary Clinton’s own description of half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” has only encouraged this attitude by her own followers.
I have many grave concerns about Trump, both as a potential president and as leader of the Republican party, and intend to cast a protest vote for Evan McMullin for those reasons. And I have my own bones to pick with voters who chose Trump over better Republican candidates in the primaries, when we had a choice. But in the context of an American general election, the rancor and scorn directed at his voters is unreasonable and uncharitable, in ways the critics would never direct at themselves or (in the case of liberal criticisms) at their own allies.
There are rational arguments for supporting Trump in the general election against Hillary Clinton, even if I regard those arguments as naive or blind to the realities of Trump. And there are other legitimate reasons that don’t fit neatly into polite, rational, educated debate.
Let’s look first at the sophisticated, reasoned justifications offered for voting to Make America Great Again, and then at why the lower-information Trump voters might reasonably decide to support him. We will find that both are rooted, however misguidedly, firmly in defense of the American system.
There are a variety of arguments raised in favor of voting for Donald Trump. Some of these assume that you agree with a neo-Buchananite direction for the GOP, and these make a certain amount of sense only if you start with that premise. For example, I personally don’t believe that continuing our current immigration policy presents an existential demographic threat to American culture and democratic institutions; if you do, you’re probably voting for Trump. Others are just plain delusional or require inventing a kind of Ideal Trump with little relationship to the actual man. I’ll stick to the three main arguments for why normal Republican voters would actually want to vote for Trump.
Those arguments are wrong, in my view, but they’re not crazy, and they are ones that many Democrats deploy regularly to justify their own choices. All rational arguments for voting Trump begin with the binary nature of elections. If two candidates are running for office and you see one of them as significantly worse than the other, you have a moral obligation to vote for the other one, or else you own some responsibility for the worse candidate’s winning.
If you live anywhere but in Utah (and even there, the McMullin insurgency seems likely to fall short), either Trump or Clinton will win your state. In that case, a third party vote or staying home isn’t meaningless — it’s a visible statement of protest — but it effectively abdicates responsibility for the result.
I’ve resisted this argument when presented as a condemnation of Never Trumpers, but I don’t disagree with the logic — it’s a weighty moral decision for an informed voter to refuse to choose between the binary choices. People who think that both Clinton and Trump are awful should vote for one of them anyway if they really believe the other is worse. My only disagreement is that I think both of them are equally bad (albeit in somewhat different ways), and thus I can’t in good conscience support either one. And as a writer, even if I was going to vote for Trump, I couldn’t compromise my integrity enough to face the daily chore of trying to defend and justify him.
All rational arguments for voting Trump begin with the binary nature of elections. The first of the three rational arguments for Trump is the instrumental argument. This is the argument that Trump may not mean anything he says or even know what he’s talking about half the time but that electing him would still cause better public-policy results, from a conservative perspective, than electing Hillary. Maybe Trump wouldn’t keep all his promises to appoint conservative judges, but he’d appoint some, and Hillary would appoint none. Maybe Trump would do more to sign parts of Paul Ryan’s legislative and budget agenda than Hillary would. Maybe Trump would hire a lot of Steve Bannon types to work in his White House, but eventually he’d run out of those and have to staff the rest of the executive branch with normal, essentially sober Republicans. Maybe Trump’s basic laziness and lack of understanding of the workings of the system would cede power to Mike Pence, his basically conservative and fundamentally responsible vice president. Maybe, as I’ve speculated before, the Democrats would refuse to do business with Trump, leaving him no real choice but to work with the people who elected him. That’s a lot of maybes, and a lot of faith placed in a guy who is so renowned for being beyond anyone’s control or influence that the RNC is reduced to arguing in court filings that it literally can’t control Trump when he ignores a consent decree placed on the party years ago. It’s a lot of hope for conservative outcomes from a 70-year-old con man whose instincts have always been those of a big-government statist and social libertine, and who seems to delight in humiliating those who support him. And it underestimates the extent to which weighty foreign-policy decisions are often made by the president almost alone, with little input from Congress and less from the courts.
But for more than a few conservatives, the risks of Trump outweigh the certainties of Hillary. That’s not irrational. Neither is the decision of some conservatives to support Hillary, having made the assessment that the risks of Trump to national security are just too high — although given how terrible Hillary’s foreign-policy record is, I can’t agree with them either.
The past few decades have taught us that control of the Supreme Court carries vastly more power over how we are governed than the political branches do; that accumulation of power has been driven mainly by social-issue liberalism, so liberals can’t really blame anyone but themselves for convincing voters that no price in the degradation of the elected branches is too much to pay in order to claim that prize. Democrats may pour scorn on Trump voters for the things they are willing to swallow in order to support a candidate they agree with on public-policy issues, but what would it take for those Democrats to vote for a conservative Republican for president?
Democrats make the instrumental argument for ignoring their own side’s scandals and faults on Election Day all the time. The people ranting about Trump’s mistreatment of women spent the 1990s lecturing us about the irrelevance of any kind of sexual misconduct to public-policy debates, and many of them are now arguing that even Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of sensitive national security information should be ignored, or at any rate outweighed, by the instrumental arguments for her — as the subtitle of a Matt Yglesias piece at Vox puts it, “If you agree with her on policy, vote with a clear conscience about the server.”
That’s exactly what Trump’s instrumental voters are doing: They think they agree with him more on policy than with her, and they are casting their ballots accordingly. That doesn’t mean they are necessarily embracing everything about Trump, any more than Hillary’s voters are.
The second rational argument for voting Trump, advanced most forcefully by Glenn Reynolds, is the structural argument. The structural argument is that, sure, Trump might be as bad as Hillary or even worse but that he’d actually be a much less serious threat to do harm because the vast and nominally non-partisan apparatus of official Washington — the bureaucracy and civil service, the courts, the press — would come together to thwart him at every turn, whereas they would be force multipliers that amplify all of Hillary’s misdeeds and bad policy ideas. Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru have explored in detail in NR how Hillary’s liberalism presents a mortal threat to our democratic institutions, a threat that is all the more insidious because it is incremental, mainstreamed, and normalized by our elites, and painted in bland tones in contrast to Trump’s carnival barking. One of the great frustrations of a lot of Trump supporters is that Trump gets lacerated in the press for saying things bluntly that Democrats have been saying and doing for years, but in the polite language of the legal profession and the Beltway insider.
In its extreme version, the structural argument asserts that if Trump is really that bad, he can always just be impeached and removed from office by bipartisan consensus. Of all the arguments for Trump, this is the one that tempts me the most. Its diagnosis of how D.C. operates is, in fact, a big part of why I argued in the primaries that Trump wouldn’t be effective at “burning it all down.” It doesn’t outweigh the other reasons for opposing him, and indeed it relies on a mechanism that is both dangerous and defeatist for conservatives: the empowerment of an official Washington unified to undermine an elected president on a scale previously unprecedented. We have seen how this game plays out before. Ever since Watergate and Vietnam, the media have used their roles in those controversies to justify a more aggressively partisan and ideological right to decide what the public should be told. Ever since the civil-rights era, liberals have used its necessary expansions of federal power to justify permanent expansions of federal power in every walk of life. Media that have become more openly biased against Trump — because he deserves it — already won’t easily put that genie back in the bottle.
The structural argument goes a way toward explaining how some people have reasonably rationalized voting for Trump, but it carries a whirlwind all its own.
The third rational argument for voting Trump is the moral-hygiene argument, also known as “throw the bums out” or “drain the swamp.” This is specific to the current Clinton scandals involving Hillary’s e-mail server and the Clinton Foundation, but also more broadly to the Clintons’ long career of scandal as well as the general air of immunity and insulation from popular accountability that has grown around official Washington under President Obama. This is the argument that Democrats and liberal elites have basically reached the point where they feel confident being above the law, eroding longstanding norms of democracy, and getting away with almost anything, and that nothing would shock them out of that complacency quite like the voters electing an obviously unqualified blowhard whose main selling point is that he’s not an acceptable member of the club. Like everyone elected on a “throw the bums out” ticket, Trump can always be thrown out himself later. This, too, is a strong argument for voting against Hillary, and an emotionally tempting one for voting Trump.
But it is counterbalanced by the cost in moral hygiene in rewarding Trump’s own behavior, encouraging similar candidates in the future, and encouraging those in our society who would imitate Trump by rehabilitating open racial bigotry and adding to our society’s sexual crassness. Trump could humble the Democrats for a while, and maybe even accelerate their own internal tensions toward a crackup, but in victory he would do almost certainly permanent damage to the Republican party (if he hasn’t already) as a vehicle for any kind of conservative principle. In the end, reasonable people can differ on which of the two sides of each of these three coins presents the more serious threat; you don’t have to ignore the cost of one to value the other. It should not be that hard for critics of Trump’s voters to understand that every choice in this election is a fraught one, and that Republicans who end up pulling the lever for the Donald are not necessarily indifferent to the costs; they just see tradeoffs with other evils of great gravity differently.
THE STANDARD-BEARER
All of that is why informed, rational political actors might end up making a different choice from that of Never Trumpers. But for many voters, the answer is even simpler, even if their votes reflect the same essential calculus, and we should resist the urge to sneer at them. The simple reality of democracy is that lots of voters are a lot less well informed about political issues and candidates than the typical pundit or political junkie.
Those voters process the information they do receive quite differently from people who consume a lot more news, and they’re also going to rely on the party-line identification of a candidate to deliver information about the candidate that they’re not personally committed to gathering. Inevitably, such voters will sometimes cast party-line votes for candidates who are individually horrible people. This is not limited to voters who are stupid and/or ignorant, although there will always be more than a few of those around. (A candidate who wins all the voters with below-average intelligence starts off with 50 percent of the vote.) It also includes voters (ranging from surgeons to soldiers in war zones to mothers with a bunch of small children) who may just be busy with other things, or elderly, or not proficient in English. Some of these people probably shouldn’t vote — but if they choose to, their choices are just as legitimate as anyone else’s. Indeed, there’s an entire body of political-science research dedicated to arguing that voters may choose to be rationally ignorant about a lot of things that are a waste of their time to learn.
Consider the “birther” story. If you paid close attention to the reported facts, it was ridiculous to believe that Barack Obama’s mother, a white woman from Kansas living in Hawaii in 1961, made a secret trip to Kenya just to give birth to him and then conspired with the local authorities to cover up the location of his birth. National Review laid out those facts in an editorial on the topic back in 2009. It’s fair to argue that prominent people who pushed birtherism, and voters who studied the topic obsessively without changing their minds, were crazy, racist, or both — Donald Trump included. But not everybody devotes that much attention to these things.
If you were an ordinary citizen who didn’t spend a ton of your daily routine reading the national news, and you knew that Obama’s father was Kenyan, and that Obama spent much of his formative years outside the United States, it’s not that big a leap to think that maybe the guy was born somewhere else. If you were cynical about politicians in general and Chicago Democrats in particular, it’s also not that big a leap to think he was hiding his real birth certificate. Obama’s own book publisher, relying solely on information provided by Obama himself, listed him as Kenyan-born on promotional materials back in the early 1990s.
Things that may seem insane to believe or disbelieve if you know all the facts may not be all that illogical if you simply have a few of the key facts wrong. That makes you uninformed on the topic; it doesn’t make you a racist loon.
Is Trump inconsistent in his views, and mostly self-interested? Has he treated women as disposable sex objects? Has he said irresponsible things and played on people’s racial and cultural resentments? Does he sometimes bluster his way through things when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Has he played the system to get rich? Or has he been falsely or unfairly accused of some of those things?
To a lot of Americans, you could say much of the same about most politicians. It’s enormously frustrating to get people to accept that Trump is different in the scale and degree of these things, but if you talk to people who think the whole political system is a racket full of terrible people (and it’s not crazy to think of it that way), you can see why many of them just tune a lot of the negatives out.
They see the things that people like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy got away with for years — and were defended for — and write off the predations of powerful men on women as a part of the system.
They see Barack Obama embrace Al Sharpton and bend his knee at a preacher who denounced America in nasty racial terms, and they figure what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. They remember, if they are old enough, open segregationists being a routine part of the Democratic party. They hear every Republican candidate of their lifetimes denounced as racists, and they tune that stuff out — ask literally anyone in Republican politics how often they’ve heard “they say that about everybody” raised as a defense of Trump in the past 18 months.
Trump’s crude, blunderbuss rhetoric strikes a lot of people as “straight talk” simply because he’s doing bluntly what people have seen politicians of both parties doing obliquely for years. To lawyers and political insiders, he’s crossed a lot of lines — but a lot of voters don’t see the lines, or think they are drawn to keep ordinary people out of the conversation. Partisan tribalism on the part of the less-informed segments of the electorate is a component of how a rational democracy functions.
A significant number of people will vote for Donald Trump for president because they’ve come to the conclusion that the Republican party is more on their side than the Democrats are, or because they think it’s due time to change parties controlling the White House, or because they think it’s worth trying a political outsider in the presidency, or because Trump is a really rich guy who seems to get his way a lot and must therefore be a strong leader, and they’ve tuned out the bad stuff because experience has taught them cynicism about our political class.
Voting for a bad man for those reasons doesn’t make them bad people, it just makes them ordinary people who were offered only bad choices.
MALICE TOWARD FEW, CHARITY TOWARD MOST
Trump does, of course, have some very noisy supporters who are indeed deplorable, by any use of the term. The “alt-right” white “nationalists” he’s attracted to his banner are a blot on his campaign and a problem for the Republican party so long as he’s associated with the party. But we should not be so eager to use them to disparage some 60 million people, and we should recognize that Democratic partisans are doing so mainly out of opportunism.
There’s a cottage industry these days of maligning Republican voters for late-night TV laughs and Twitter snark based on the party’s most ignorant, resentful, or bigoted supporters. Yet there are large contingents of voters in the Democratic party, too, who are some or all of those things, and who don’t much distinguish between honorable public servants and corrupt, inept, and abusive hacks so long as they have a D after their names. Who do you think voted to send Alvin Greene to the Senate or make truck driver Robert Gray the governor of Mississippi? Voters who will vote for literally anyone they see as on their side. Attention to these voters is asymmetrical for a bunch of reasons, ranging from liberals’ inability to see their own sides’ prejudices to the fact that it’s more politically acceptable to make fun of ignorant and resentful white people (who are likelier to be Republicans) than ignorant and resentful black people (who are likelier to be Democrats). Educated white liberals consider it a virtue to share a party with the poor, ignorant, and resentful — but only if it’s their voters.
Some of what Trump represents is white voters embracing (or re-embracing) racial-identity politics of precisely the type we’ve long seen in municipalities and congressional districts with overwhelmingly African-American electorates, jurisdictions that are frequently notorious for reelecting corrupt and ignorant politicians (a dynamic common to racial and ethnic enclaves that vote on identity-politics lines, and by no means exclusive to black communities).
That’s a bad thing and not to be encouraged on either side of the partisan or racial divides, but liberals are hasty to be more charitable to the people who keep sending Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee and Hank Johnson and Charlie Rangel back to Congress, and electing even worse people as their mayors. The liberal critics of Trump voters certainly don’t accept willingly the idea that the most ignorant elements of the Democratic party represent all of its voters.
Trump himself and his true deplorables deserve no mercy from anyone, and there are many recriminations still due over how he got nominated. But many millions of Trump’s general-election voters don’t deserve to be lumped in that same basket. In general, the American family could use a lot less malice and a little more charity toward our fellow voters all around.
Sorry, but what? How can anyone live in the US and not know that an election is happening?
This is the first election year that I have been "connected" to the world via smart-phone, regular internet access, etc.
It's actually pretty easy to "avoid" certain issues if you don't have internet (or only go to certain websites), don't have a smart phone, don't have cable and generally just watch older movies.
I am only old enough to have voted in the past 3 elections. I was in college for my 1st time, so obviously political $h!+ was everywhere, so I voted. The next 2 elections I was working in "below-degree" level jobs and couldn't be bothered with the "political" process as I was more worried about paying loans and, ya know, eating. At these times, I can be an escapist and therefore prefer to "shut out" the parts of the outside world that I don't need, can afford to ignore, etc.
This is the first election since college which my life is actually together and where I want to be. And feth is this election a mess. Not only do I have "catching up" to do, but I have to sort through all the current BS.
If it wasn't so impractical/too easy to manipulate, I'd prefer online voting. Just send me to a website so I can click and move on. But no, I have to go somewhere out of my daily routine to vote for someone I have no fething clue how it will affect me, just because I know the "other guy" will be worse.
Oh, and I live in TX, which is a Republican state anyway, so are there really any chances that my single vote will swing anything? or rather, will me not voting actually make Trump win? Cuz I doubt that.
I don't harp on people that Vote. I actually appreciate the interest you all have in "the system". But not voting is a valid pov too and I don't like it when people say that is "unacceptable" or "un-American", because really the only thing I find truly "un-American" is being told you have to do something because "reasons"
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Yes, your vote matters, Texas is moving towards being a blue state and your vote could be the one that puts it in the blue. It was brought up earlier that clinton could win texas, so never give up, never surrender, go vote.
Early voting data released by the Florida Department of State’s Division of Elections reveals the statistics of the final results of Florida’s early voting system and there is a big difference between 2016 and 2012.
The results reveal that Democrats edged out Republicans in the voting by less than 100,000 votes. Final results show that Democrats received 2,558,000 votes while Republicans received 2,471,000 votes. Typically Democrats do much better in Florida in early voting and Republicans come out in higher numbers on actual election day.
Democrats received 39.85% of the vote while Republicans got 38.49% of the vote, which is a major difference than the 2012 election where Obama received 43% of the vote and Romney received 40% of the vote.
IT BEGINS
Amidst the mists and coldest frosts he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
Breotan wrote: A day and a half and counting. The question is, will this election be called early in the evening or will the results be unknown until a week later as recounts are done?
Hinges on Florida. If Trump clearly loses Florida, the election is functionally over at 9PM EST, but for the shouting.
lord_blackfang wrote: Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.
Flinty wrote: The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
Early voting data released by the Florida Department of State’s Division of Elections reveals the statistics of the final results of Florida’s early voting system and there is a big difference between 2016 and 2012.
The results reveal that Democrats edged out Republicans in the voting by less than 100,000 votes. Final results show that Democrats received 2,558,000 votes while Republicans received 2,471,000 votes. Typically Democrats do much better in Florida in early voting and Republicans come out in higher numbers on actual election day.
Democrats received 39.85% of the vote while Republicans got 38.49% of the vote, which is a major difference than the 2012 election where Obama received 43% of the vote and Romney received 40% of the vote.
IT BEGINS
But hey, what does one little vote matter? This election will hinge on the wasted third party votes and the apathetic.
You don't have to vote, similarly you don't have to stand up for the pledge of allegiance, tip at a restaurant, etc. Some things you don't do out of personal benefit but out of respect for the society you live in, you can not do those things but it always catches up to people in the end. Turns out that viewing yourself as part of something bigger is a better way to be happy in life than viewing things strictly from an individual lens. For each of us YMMV but for me I see not voting as a sheer lack of personal responsibility and respect for the country I am a part of. And I owe it to myself not to give such people any more association then I have to.
Some people around here have been getting fake texts with false information about where to vote. Well they are actually texts but you know what I mean.
Amidst the mists and coldest frosts he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
The thing about voting is you are not just voting for potus. There are always other things to vote on like local proposals/measures, judges, and other city officials. You are in part voting for what you want to happen in your community. Vote for who you want for potus, but remember there is more to vote on than just that. Frankly I did like Whembly and went 3rd party. Can't stand Trump and I think Hillary is worse. So I voted for neither as I don't want either one of them as potus. Granted I think Trump would have less power as he would be an instant lame duck with both parties hating him.
Twinkle, Twinkle little star.
I ran over your Wave Serpents with my car.
Ahtman wrote: Some people around here have been getting fake texts with false information about where to vote. Well they are actually texts but you know what I mean.
That's really despicable. Seriously, how do these people justify this?
skyth wrote: For the Florida voting, that only looked at what party the person was. In this election, I could see a lot of R's voting against Trump.
That's certainly possible. They never release the votes from early voting until after the polls close, the only information released is demographics which allow for educated guesses but isn't ideal in terms of predictive accuracy.
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NorseSig wrote: The thing about voting is you are not just voting for potus. There are always other things to vote on like local proposals/measures, judges, and other city officials. You are in part voting for what you want to happen in your community. Vote for who you want for potus, but remember there is more to vote on than just that. Frankly I did like Whembly and went 3rd party. Can't stand Trump and I think Hillary is worse. So I voted for neither as I don't want either one of them as potus. Granted I think Trump would have less power as he would be an instant lame duck with both parties hating him.
Down ballot races are in many respects more important than national races as the people that get elected will have more direct influence on your lives on a regular basis than PotUS and Congress.
Even with that fact there's nothing wrong with abstaining from voting. No candidate or party is entitled to your vote and there's no sense in voting for people you are opposed to or uninformed about just for the sake of showing up and voting for somebody. If nobody in any race on the ballot earns your vote or is somebody you want to support then you shouldn't just guilt yourself into voting just because. Everyone who wants to vote should vote their conscience and if you don't want to vote then you don't have to, the obligation to do so is a self imposed one.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/11/08 00:03:25
Apologies for not making my original post clear, but I have no problems with parties working together in Congress or Parliament for the national good, it's when it comes to national or local elections, then you shouldn't be voting for the GOP if you're a D and vice versa. Otherwise, what was the point of joining a party in the first place if you're going to vote for the other party?
If you're a GOP member and don't like Trump, then don't vote on Tuesday, abstain - that's what I would do....
One of the side effects of a 2 party system is that, barring a few key issues, most candidates are drawn from the middle of the Left/Right spectrum. As are many/most voters.
I'm a registered Republican, but am middle of the road on some issues, left on some, right on others.
I can see a candidate that's too far to the right or left on some issues, and find myself voting for the other candidate. I choice we all have to make from time to time. There are candidates that may support 3/4 of my beliefs, but the other one is only about 1/2 of what I'm for. So, again, you make your choices.
Not voting, to me, is not acceptable. But I'm not one to tell someone else how to live their life. I'll just stand here and judge.
Speaking from the other side of the aisle, I agree completely.
Maine has a moderate Republican senator - there have been two occasions where I have voted for her over a Democratic candidate that I disagreed with on many issues.
There were people that really wanted a previous Republican senator from this state to become Clinton's running mate - likewise, Olympia Snow was a moderate.
Joining a party does not mean putting either your conscience or your wits on a shelf.
The Auld Grump
Kilkrazy wrote:When I was a young boy all my wargames were narratively based because I played with my toy soldiers and vehicles without the use of any rules.
The reason I bought rules and became a real wargamer was because I wanted a properly thought out structure to govern the action instead of just making things up as I went along.
skyth wrote: For the Florida voting, that only looked at what party the person was. In this election, I could see a lot of R's voting against Trump.
That's certainly possible. They never release the votes from early voting until after the polls close, the only information released is demographics which allow for educated guesses but isn't ideal in terms of predictive accuracy.
Especially in this election. Things are screwey. Obama versus Romney, it was probably more predictive.
whembly wrote: I remain on the #TeamJohnson bandwagon, this author makes a convincing argument as to the "whys" people are voting for Trump.
The writer offers 3 rational reasons (all of which he ultimately rejects... as I did) for voting Trump, and they are all rooted in the binary nature of the election, which is that one of the two bad candidates will win. He describes the reasons as instrumental (Trump will be better on policy), structural (the structure of the D.C. apparatus will resist Trump), and the “drain the swamp” argument.
He then describes how low-information voters would end up voting for Clinton or Trump in a great exposition:
Voting for Trump may be wrong, but it’s not crazy.
Spoiler:
One of the popular sports these days among Clinton supporters — and sometimes among Never Trump Republicans (of whom I am proudly one) — is bashing the people voting to make Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States. A common refrain is to list the various awful things associated with Trump — e.g., groping women, stirring up bigotry, toadying to Putin — and suggesting that anyone who votes for Trump must be embracing all of this.
A recent Pew survey found that 58 percent of Clinton supporters “have a hard time respecting someone who supports Donald Trump for president,” almost a third more than the proportion of Trump voters who view Clinton supports with similar disdain. (That figure is markedly higher among Hillary’s white supporters, and rises to 66 percent among Clinton supporters with college degrees.) Undoubtedly, Hillary Clinton’s own description of half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” has only encouraged this attitude by her own followers.
I have many grave concerns about Trump, both as a potential president and as leader of the Republican party, and intend to cast a protest vote for Evan McMullin for those reasons. And I have my own bones to pick with voters who chose Trump over better Republican candidates in the primaries, when we had a choice. But in the context of an American general election, the rancor and scorn directed at his voters is unreasonable and uncharitable, in ways the critics would never direct at themselves or (in the case of liberal criticisms) at their own allies.
There are rational arguments for supporting Trump in the general election against Hillary Clinton, even if I regard those arguments as naive or blind to the realities of Trump. And there are other legitimate reasons that don’t fit neatly into polite, rational, educated debate.
Let’s look first at the sophisticated, reasoned justifications offered for voting to Make America Great Again, and then at why the lower-information Trump voters might reasonably decide to support him. We will find that both are rooted, however misguidedly, firmly in defense of the American system.
There are a variety of arguments raised in favor of voting for Donald Trump. Some of these assume that you agree with a neo-Buchananite direction for the GOP, and these make a certain amount of sense only if you start with that premise. For example, I personally don’t believe that continuing our current immigration policy presents an existential demographic threat to American culture and democratic institutions; if you do, you’re probably voting for Trump. Others are just plain delusional or require inventing a kind of Ideal Trump with little relationship to the actual man. I’ll stick to the three main arguments for why normal Republican voters would actually want to vote for Trump.
Those arguments are wrong, in my view, but they’re not crazy, and they are ones that many Democrats deploy regularly to justify their own choices. All rational arguments for voting Trump begin with the binary nature of elections. If two candidates are running for office and you see one of them as significantly worse than the other, you have a moral obligation to vote for the other one, or else you own some responsibility for the worse candidate’s winning.
If you live anywhere but in Utah (and even there, the McMullin insurgency seems likely to fall short), either Trump or Clinton will win your state. In that case, a third party vote or staying home isn’t meaningless — it’s a visible statement of protest — but it effectively abdicates responsibility for the result.
I’ve resisted this argument when presented as a condemnation of Never Trumpers, but I don’t disagree with the logic — it’s a weighty moral decision for an informed voter to refuse to choose between the binary choices. People who think that both Clinton and Trump are awful should vote for one of them anyway if they really believe the other is worse. My only disagreement is that I think both of them are equally bad (albeit in somewhat different ways), and thus I can’t in good conscience support either one. And as a writer, even if I was going to vote for Trump, I couldn’t compromise my integrity enough to face the daily chore of trying to defend and justify him.
All rational arguments for voting Trump begin with the binary nature of elections. The first of the three rational arguments for Trump is the instrumental argument. This is the argument that Trump may not mean anything he says or even know what he’s talking about half the time but that electing him would still cause better public-policy results, from a conservative perspective, than electing Hillary. Maybe Trump wouldn’t keep all his promises to appoint conservative judges, but he’d appoint some, and Hillary would appoint none. Maybe Trump would do more to sign parts of Paul Ryan’s legislative and budget agenda than Hillary would. Maybe Trump would hire a lot of Steve Bannon types to work in his White House, but eventually he’d run out of those and have to staff the rest of the executive branch with normal, essentially sober Republicans. Maybe Trump’s basic laziness and lack of understanding of the workings of the system would cede power to Mike Pence, his basically conservative and fundamentally responsible vice president. Maybe, as I’ve speculated before, the Democrats would refuse to do business with Trump, leaving him no real choice but to work with the people who elected him. That’s a lot of maybes, and a lot of faith placed in a guy who is so renowned for being beyond anyone’s control or influence that the RNC is reduced to arguing in court filings that it literally can’t control Trump when he ignores a consent decree placed on the party years ago. It’s a lot of hope for conservative outcomes from a 70-year-old con man whose instincts have always been those of a big-government statist and social libertine, and who seems to delight in humiliating those who support him. And it underestimates the extent to which weighty foreign-policy decisions are often made by the president almost alone, with little input from Congress and less from the courts.
But for more than a few conservatives, the risks of Trump outweigh the certainties of Hillary. That’s not irrational. Neither is the decision of some conservatives to support Hillary, having made the assessment that the risks of Trump to national security are just too high — although given how terrible Hillary’s foreign-policy record is, I can’t agree with them either.
The past few decades have taught us that control of the Supreme Court carries vastly more power over how we are governed than the political branches do; that accumulation of power has been driven mainly by social-issue liberalism, so liberals can’t really blame anyone but themselves for convincing voters that no price in the degradation of the elected branches is too much to pay in order to claim that prize. Democrats may pour scorn on Trump voters for the things they are willing to swallow in order to support a candidate they agree with on public-policy issues, but what would it take for those Democrats to vote for a conservative Republican for president?
Democrats make the instrumental argument for ignoring their own side’s scandals and faults on Election Day all the time. The people ranting about Trump’s mistreatment of women spent the 1990s lecturing us about the irrelevance of any kind of sexual misconduct to public-policy debates, and many of them are now arguing that even Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of sensitive national security information should be ignored, or at any rate outweighed, by the instrumental arguments for her — as the subtitle of a Matt Yglesias piece at Vox puts it, “If you agree with her on policy, vote with a clear conscience about the server.”
That’s exactly what Trump’s instrumental voters are doing: They think they agree with him more on policy than with her, and they are casting their ballots accordingly. That doesn’t mean they are necessarily embracing everything about Trump, any more than Hillary’s voters are.
The second rational argument for voting Trump, advanced most forcefully by Glenn Reynolds, is the structural argument. The structural argument is that, sure, Trump might be as bad as Hillary or even worse but that he’d actually be a much less serious threat to do harm because the vast and nominally non-partisan apparatus of official Washington — the bureaucracy and civil service, the courts, the press — would come together to thwart him at every turn, whereas they would be force multipliers that amplify all of Hillary’s misdeeds and bad policy ideas. Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru have explored in detail in NR how Hillary’s liberalism presents a mortal threat to our democratic institutions, a threat that is all the more insidious because it is incremental, mainstreamed, and normalized by our elites, and painted in bland tones in contrast to Trump’s carnival barking. One of the great frustrations of a lot of Trump supporters is that Trump gets lacerated in the press for saying things bluntly that Democrats have been saying and doing for years, but in the polite language of the legal profession and the Beltway insider.
In its extreme version, the structural argument asserts that if Trump is really that bad, he can always just be impeached and removed from office by bipartisan consensus. Of all the arguments for Trump, this is the one that tempts me the most. Its diagnosis of how D.C. operates is, in fact, a big part of why I argued in the primaries that Trump wouldn’t be effective at “burning it all down.” It doesn’t outweigh the other reasons for opposing him, and indeed it relies on a mechanism that is both dangerous and defeatist for conservatives: the empowerment of an official Washington unified to undermine an elected president on a scale previously unprecedented. We have seen how this game plays out before. Ever since Watergate and Vietnam, the media have used their roles in those controversies to justify a more aggressively partisan and ideological right to decide what the public should be told. Ever since the civil-rights era, liberals have used its necessary expansions of federal power to justify permanent expansions of federal power in every walk of life. Media that have become more openly biased against Trump — because he deserves it — already won’t easily put that genie back in the bottle.
The structural argument goes a way toward explaining how some people have reasonably rationalized voting for Trump, but it carries a whirlwind all its own.
The third rational argument for voting Trump is the moral-hygiene argument, also known as “throw the bums out” or “drain the swamp.” This is specific to the current Clinton scandals involving Hillary’s e-mail server and the Clinton Foundation, but also more broadly to the Clintons’ long career of scandal as well as the general air of immunity and insulation from popular accountability that has grown around official Washington under President Obama. This is the argument that Democrats and liberal elites have basically reached the point where they feel confident being above the law, eroding longstanding norms of democracy, and getting away with almost anything, and that nothing would shock them out of that complacency quite like the voters electing an obviously unqualified blowhard whose main selling point is that he’s not an acceptable member of the club. Like everyone elected on a “throw the bums out” ticket, Trump can always be thrown out himself later. This, too, is a strong argument for voting against Hillary, and an emotionally tempting one for voting Trump.
But it is counterbalanced by the cost in moral hygiene in rewarding Trump’s own behavior, encouraging similar candidates in the future, and encouraging those in our society who would imitate Trump by rehabilitating open racial bigotry and adding to our society’s sexual crassness. Trump could humble the Democrats for a while, and maybe even accelerate their own internal tensions toward a crackup, but in victory he would do almost certainly permanent damage to the Republican party (if he hasn’t already) as a vehicle for any kind of conservative principle. In the end, reasonable people can differ on which of the two sides of each of these three coins presents the more serious threat; you don’t have to ignore the cost of one to value the other. It should not be that hard for critics of Trump’s voters to understand that every choice in this election is a fraught one, and that Republicans who end up pulling the lever for the Donald are not necessarily indifferent to the costs; they just see tradeoffs with other evils of great gravity differently.
THE STANDARD-BEARER
All of that is why informed, rational political actors might end up making a different choice from that of Never Trumpers. But for many voters, the answer is even simpler, even if their votes reflect the same essential calculus, and we should resist the urge to sneer at them. The simple reality of democracy is that lots of voters are a lot less well informed about political issues and candidates than the typical pundit or political junkie.
Those voters process the information they do receive quite differently from people who consume a lot more news, and they’re also going to rely on the party-line identification of a candidate to deliver information about the candidate that they’re not personally committed to gathering. Inevitably, such voters will sometimes cast party-line votes for candidates who are individually horrible people. This is not limited to voters who are stupid and/or ignorant, although there will always be more than a few of those around. (A candidate who wins all the voters with below-average intelligence starts off with 50 percent of the vote.) It also includes voters (ranging from surgeons to soldiers in war zones to mothers with a bunch of small children) who may just be busy with other things, or elderly, or not proficient in English. Some of these people probably shouldn’t vote — but if they choose to, their choices are just as legitimate as anyone else’s. Indeed, there’s an entire body of political-science research dedicated to arguing that voters may choose to be rationally ignorant about a lot of things that are a waste of their time to learn.
Consider the “birther” story. If you paid close attention to the reported facts, it was ridiculous to believe that Barack Obama’s mother, a white woman from Kansas living in Hawaii in 1961, made a secret trip to Kenya just to give birth to him and then conspired with the local authorities to cover up the location of his birth. National Review laid out those facts in an editorial on the topic back in 2009. It’s fair to argue that prominent people who pushed birtherism, and voters who studied the topic obsessively without changing their minds, were crazy, racist, or both — Donald Trump included. But not everybody devotes that much attention to these things.
If you were an ordinary citizen who didn’t spend a ton of your daily routine reading the national news, and you knew that Obama’s father was Kenyan, and that Obama spent much of his formative years outside the United States, it’s not that big a leap to think that maybe the guy was born somewhere else. If you were cynical about politicians in general and Chicago Democrats in particular, it’s also not that big a leap to think he was hiding his real birth certificate. Obama’s own book publisher, relying solely on information provided by Obama himself, listed him as Kenyan-born on promotional materials back in the early 1990s.
Things that may seem insane to believe or disbelieve if you know all the facts may not be all that illogical if you simply have a few of the key facts wrong. That makes you uninformed on the topic; it doesn’t make you a racist loon.
Is Trump inconsistent in his views, and mostly self-interested? Has he treated women as disposable sex objects? Has he said irresponsible things and played on people’s racial and cultural resentments? Does he sometimes bluster his way through things when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Has he played the system to get rich? Or has he been falsely or unfairly accused of some of those things?
To a lot of Americans, you could say much of the same about most politicians. It’s enormously frustrating to get people to accept that Trump is different in the scale and degree of these things, but if you talk to people who think the whole political system is a racket full of terrible people (and it’s not crazy to think of it that way), you can see why many of them just tune a lot of the negatives out.
They see the things that people like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy got away with for years — and were defended for — and write off the predations of powerful men on women as a part of the system.
They see Barack Obama embrace Al Sharpton and bend his knee at a preacher who denounced America in nasty racial terms, and they figure what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. They remember, if they are old enough, open segregationists being a routine part of the Democratic party. They hear every Republican candidate of their lifetimes denounced as racists, and they tune that stuff out — ask literally anyone in Republican politics how often they’ve heard “they say that about everybody” raised as a defense of Trump in the past 18 months.
Trump’s crude, blunderbuss rhetoric strikes a lot of people as “straight talk” simply because he’s doing bluntly what people have seen politicians of both parties doing obliquely for years. To lawyers and political insiders, he’s crossed a lot of lines — but a lot of voters don’t see the lines, or think they are drawn to keep ordinary people out of the conversation. Partisan tribalism on the part of the less-informed segments of the electorate is a component of how a rational democracy functions.
A significant number of people will vote for Donald Trump for president because they’ve come to the conclusion that the Republican party is more on their side than the Democrats are, or because they think it’s due time to change parties controlling the White House, or because they think it’s worth trying a political outsider in the presidency, or because Trump is a really rich guy who seems to get his way a lot and must therefore be a strong leader, and they’ve tuned out the bad stuff because experience has taught them cynicism about our political class.
Voting for a bad man for those reasons doesn’t make them bad people, it just makes them ordinary people who were offered only bad choices.
MALICE TOWARD FEW, CHARITY TOWARD MOST
Trump does, of course, have some very noisy supporters who are indeed deplorable, by any use of the term. The “alt-right” white “nationalists” he’s attracted to his banner are a blot on his campaign and a problem for the Republican party so long as he’s associated with the party. But we should not be so eager to use them to disparage some 60 million people, and we should recognize that Democratic partisans are doing so mainly out of opportunism.
There’s a cottage industry these days of maligning Republican voters for late-night TV laughs and Twitter snark based on the party’s most ignorant, resentful, or bigoted supporters. Yet there are large contingents of voters in the Democratic party, too, who are some or all of those things, and who don’t much distinguish between honorable public servants and corrupt, inept, and abusive hacks so long as they have a D after their names. Who do you think voted to send Alvin Greene to the Senate or make truck driver Robert Gray the governor of Mississippi? Voters who will vote for literally anyone they see as on their side. Attention to these voters is asymmetrical for a bunch of reasons, ranging from liberals’ inability to see their own sides’ prejudices to the fact that it’s more politically acceptable to make fun of ignorant and resentful white people (who are likelier to be Republicans) than ignorant and resentful black people (who are likelier to be Democrats). Educated white liberals consider it a virtue to share a party with the poor, ignorant, and resentful — but only if it’s their voters.
Some of what Trump represents is white voters embracing (or re-embracing) racial-identity politics of precisely the type we’ve long seen in municipalities and congressional districts with overwhelmingly African-American electorates, jurisdictions that are frequently notorious for reelecting corrupt and ignorant politicians (a dynamic common to racial and ethnic enclaves that vote on identity-politics lines, and by no means exclusive to black communities).
That’s a bad thing and not to be encouraged on either side of the partisan or racial divides, but liberals are hasty to be more charitable to the people who keep sending Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee and Hank Johnson and Charlie Rangel back to Congress, and electing even worse people as their mayors. The liberal critics of Trump voters certainly don’t accept willingly the idea that the most ignorant elements of the Democratic party represent all of its voters.
Trump himself and his true deplorables deserve no mercy from anyone, and there are many recriminations still due over how he got nominated. But many millions of Trump’s general-election voters don’t deserve to be lumped in that same basket. In general, the American family could use a lot less malice and a little more charity toward our fellow voters all around.
Not crazy but a lack of intelligence and common sense.
RCP, who called the winner of 49 out of 50 states correctly in 2012, missing only Florida, has this final no tossup state estimate a clinton win at 272/266
Really freaking close. However, they have NV as Trump, which I don't see how....
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/11/08 01:49:39
As far as the "truth" being told, once again I'll reference FBI investigation and reiteration of previous findings, conclusion and their validity.
, yeah Cubbies!
