Because I actually gave links to the other stuff Uccisore …
I read scientific journals all the time…
Sorry if I got a pop culture sentence wrong !!
Honestly!
This is misleading. Just as you have (correctly) pointed out that we can’t read too much into Trump’s unprecedented (and frankly embarrassing 
loss in the popular vote, due to the fact that they weren’t running a popular vote race, we can’t read too much into electors being faithless against Clinton, because they were doing so in the context of Trump having won the majority of the electors based on the vote. It was low-cost for electors to defect from Clinton, because they did not expect her to win in the first vote. Most were defecting to try to entice Trump electors to vote for a compromise candidate who could win if it went to the House; three of the five voted for Colin Powell.
In other words, you seem to be presenting the faithless Democratic electors as votes against Clinton, and that does not seem to be the best supported interpretation.
We can’t read too much into Trump’s popular vote loss - except that it’s embarrassing, apparently. But you know what? People lose the popular vote all the time. Somebody loses the popular vote in every single election- usually multiple people! For example, Hillary Clinton lost her party’s popular vote when Obama beat her ass for the nomination. So embarrassing! John Kerry must have been deeply humiliated and embarrassed when he lost the popular vote to W.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton had more faithless electors than any presidential candidate in American history- or just since 1808, if you don’t count the two that tried to vote against her but were blocked by the courts. So now you go on and tell me how that’s no big deal. And you can go on to tell me, while you’re at it, all about how you’d STILL think it was no big deal if it was Trump that had record-breaking faithless electors.
And yet it doesn’t seem to happen to other losing candidates for whatever reason. Best not to think about it too much.
And the Trump electors didn’t do so! It’s almost like the left was huffing it’s own farts to think that something like that was a plausible scenario in the first place.
Wasn’t the Clay-Van Buren election something like the entire state of PA refused to back their voters? I heard it passing on the news, haven’t researched it cause surprise to probably everyone here, I just don’t care about Van Buren, it may well be that presidency your referring to, but I don’t know.
Given the strong rift in electors in Washington State doing their own independent thinking, I would say they are most ripe for a third party split. They wanted Colin Powell (why?) so guessing their outlook is left of that if they saw him somehow as a compromise candidate. We could obviously do worst than him, just… his strategy in Iraq/Kuwait didnt have a obvious pullout nechanism for Iraq,and we ended up staying multiple presidents for no good reason. It was a good idea for the most part, save for that nasty oversight. I dont recall Powell ever standing up and saying that shit should of fucking ended by now, and just make peace, cause it was pointless bombing them to oblivion. We kept them in a anaconda like strangle for years, alot died, many more developed birth defects. I hold Powell responsible for not considering this shit. You only do that uf your a imperial power seeking to absorb a state directly into yourself,but cant initially cause they are too strong to digest directly. Unless we wanted to make Iraq the 51st state, we really should of sought peace, and treaty with earnest. The outcome was absurd… this is what the left in Washington thinks is a fucking compromise candidate. No, not till at the very least I hear Powell digested his mistajes and came to terms with it, advising a very different take in the future. Desert Shield and Storm okay, the utter lack of vision afterwards genocidal.
There were a couple instances like that, but they were all Vice Presidential candidates that were rejected. Hillary is the first presidential candidate to get 7 faithless electors. if you don’t count the 2 that tried to vote against her but were blocked by the courts, 5 still makes gives her the most faithless electors since 1808.
Read what I wrote, then read the link you posted. Like I said, VP candidates.
Electoral college back then voted differently. Wasn’t together, you had to elect them both. Why we never developed the Chancellor-Prime Minister/President deal, we eventually chucked that system. Biden or Pierce couldn’t run around doing their own thing for long.
I’m aware. Like I said though, Hillary is the first Presidential candidate to get 7 faithless electors, or the first since 1808 if you count it as 5. The only people to get more than that have been vice presidential candidates, not presidents.
Fine.
I’m surprised at how hard it is to get these numbers. Granted, I know that the MSM will try to bury what a hideous failure HRC ultimately was, but I figured I’d at least get some major stories on DailyCaller or whatever talking about it. Maybe it’s just too far in the past already.
News is too busy following Obama’s temper tantrums in trying to systematically fuck Trump’s administration over at every turn to take notice of their still quite current failures.
Don’t forget, Trump could be just as big of a fuck up as Obama was, I know your all in this for party loyalty, but I’m not. We can be seeing Trump as a single term president with a even worst return than Hillary had. We are a democracy of the sovereignty of states in a union, not a demogogery of a few metropolis to elect a president. He can easily lose several states fast if he doesn’t show results. We get it won’t be overnight, but will bail on him if he can’t perform. We’re smart enough to see Democrats are being obstructionists, we get that guys like Carleas hate America, but also know Trump can’t just blame them, he can modify the political spectrum enough to succeed. It’s why we elected him, he straddles both parties, not progressives, but he is equally for liberal ideas as conservative ideas. He needs to find his 60/75 in the Senate.
Trump is certainly an unknown and could be a disaster- like I’ve said before, I preferred almost all the GOP candidates to Trump. But I’m not going to stress out over things we don’t know yet, when I could be celebrating the fact that HRC is done as a politician, and that she wasn’t rewarded for the horrible crap she and the DNC pulled over the past few years. As far as Trump being a one-term president, it’s possible. Both the GOP and DNC will have to run on Trump’s record in four years, and of course we don’t know what that’s going to be. So much of the campaign and media coverage was/is about Trump as a person and not his policies that now that he’s in there, we just have to wait and see how his policies play out, because all the previous crap about him being Hitler was made irrelevant by his victory. He’s like Obama in that sense- Obama won because being the first black president (along with being so articulate) is all anybody talked about, and a moral obligation was created to vote for him. Once he was elected and the “You’re obligated to vote for him” argument was no longer relevant, there was that awkward period where the press had to admit they actually had no idea what kind of leader he was going to be or what his agenda was.
That’s one thing you can say for HRC that was not true of Trump or Obama- at least with HRC you knew what her agenda was going to be, despite the media and even Hillary herself being unwilling to talk about it during the campaign.
Either Trump will do the things he said he would, or he’ll reveal himself to be some sort of charlatan. But as I’ve also said before, if he just appoints a conservative to the Supreme Court, that alone will justify my vote.
I do like the insistence on Scalia like judges. I could tolerate TedCruz even. Trump’s liberal sister likewise is in line to be a justice as well via her own merit, which is gonna be awkward given trump doesn’t officially lean her direction, left might champion her, but also threaten him for nepotism, but flip out for not choosing EVEN her. I’m looking at that potential situation shaking my head.
Yeah, Ted Cruz has the right positions on the important issues, and it’s not like as a Supreme Court justice we have to see him much or listen to speeches from him or anything.
I think he will stand out, we will see him a few times a year for decades. There are no natural born citizen requirements like for the presidency.
Sorry, that was meant to be a joke, somewhat at your expense. While I do think Trump is embarrassed by his loss of the popular vote, you’re absolutely right that it would have been a different race had it been a contest for the popular vote instead of the Electoral College, and the popular vote might have come out very differently. And though Trump is embarrassed, he needn’t be.
But thinking about it for any length of time makes the reasons pretty clear. It’s just not a plausible explanation for Clinton’s faithless electors that they prefer Colin Powell to Clinton. Colin Powell isn’t a Democrat, he’s a Democrat’s version of a Republican. The most plausible explanation is that they were offering a Republican that they could stomach better than Trump, not that they were voting for a Democrat that they liked better than Clinton (which, correct me if I’m wrong, is what you seem to be suggesting). Look at the strategic choices the electors were faced with:
- They could vote for Clinton. That was very unlikely to produce a majority (and they were right that no Republican would defect to Clinton).
- They could vote for their preferred Democrat. That was even more unlikely to produce a majority (and they were right that no Republican defected to a Democrat, and no other Democrat made the top three).
- They could vote for Trump. But a Trump presidency is presumably the worst case scenario, so why would they?
- They could vote for a compromise Republican. And they were right that some Republican electors did defect, so voting Colin Powell may have secured him as the third highest electoral vote getter, sending him as a compromise candidate to the House.
So it just doesn’t look like a good explanation for what happened that Clinton was so disliked that lots of Democrats refused to vote for her. Perhaps it’s most clear to put it counterfactually: from the evidence we have, it does not seem likely that Clinton would have had nearly as many faithless electors if she had won the Electoral College based on the vote. Clinton losing the delegate count was a necessary condition for their defection [EDIT]: but not a sufficient condition, which is why it doesn’t usually happen. For that, it took a particularly scary winning candidate (whether that fears is justified or not).
Maybe, I don’t know. If I had to make a completely honest guess, I think he’s too shocked that he actually won to be embarassed. I think he had basically resigned himself to losing in October. If had been expecting to win the whole time, then yeah, losign the popular vote would probably be embarassing.
If you don’t count the three who voted for Powell, she would still have more faithless electors than any president since 1808 and most importantly, more than Trump. There are ones who voted for Bernie and ones who voted for Bohemian Sunrise Eagle Scout or whatever her name is.
That would make sense if they were in communication with GOP electors who were supposed to be voting Powell as well, but do we have any evidence that happened? The other possible reason is that they did it to spite Hillary- Powell is after all one of the many people she threw under the bus during the campaign. I get what you’re saying though, Democrats voting for a “Republican” certainly does smack of some effort to get Powell elected in the last moment, but where are the GOP electors that went along with it? At the very least, what we see here is that Republican electors were not nearly as conflicted as what the MSM wanted us to believe.
But It was supposed to be the GOP electors doing all that. They’re the ones voting for Literally Hitler, remember? They’re the ones the media was telling us over and over again were defecting in mass numbers, who had all these concerns, were demanding to be briefed about Russia. They are the ones Hollywood was talking to when they made their shameful “steal the election for justice” PSA. Without some collusion with GOP electors, DNC electors sticking to their guns and voting Hillary makes the most sense, because she’s the closest person to winning other than Trump, and the smartest person for an “Never Trump” person to vote for if they actually want to make a difference. Why give an electoral vote to some guy who has zero when you could give it to the woman who has 230 or so?
I mean, of course in reality the whole thing was fucking stupid. “Best” case scenario, neither candidate gets 270 and the Congress picks the President- and that would have been Trump anyway. But as long as we’re pretending that there’s some sort of point to the electoral college defecting and trying to elect somebody else, the only somebody else available to them is Hillary.
At the end of the day, the GOP electors were NOT conflicted about Trump, it was all DNC spin disguised as news again and it was Hillary who had the problem with faithless electors.
In other words, if you spent any time at all thinking about this ‘faithless electors’ thing as if it was a real concern, you were duped by the DNC via their mouthpieces in CNN, MSNBC, and so on. The election is over so nobody cares enough to dig at this point, but if they did I’m sure they’d find more emails of Politico/CNN/etc. writers clearing their ‘faithless electors’ stories with DNC operatives if not outright having the talking points mailed to them.
That may be. If Democrat electors get their news from the same places as other kinds of Democrats, they were probably hoodwinked believing all the shit about GOP faithless electors just like other liberals were. But Hillary’s huge number of faithless electors is still only half the story- the other half is Trump’s lack thereof.
So the story goes like this: DNC pushes to the media a bullshit story about GOP electors being on the verge of dumping Trump. The media (news + Hollywood) work together to make that part of the national conversation. It’s not even a little bit true, but DNC electors aren’t clued in enough to realize that their favorite media sources lie to them, so they take the bait and and a few of them hatch up some zany scheme to steal the election from Trump. Sadly for them, it was all smoke and mirrors, the GOP electors voted the will of their districts more or less as always, so we ended up with DNC electors defecting from Hillary for no reason. It doesn’t explain the Hillary defectors that voted for Bernie or that Indian Chief, though.
This isn’t what the article you linked in the OP says. If we don’t count the three for Powell, then we have two Dem electors who voted for alternative Democrats, and two Republican electors that voted for alternate Republicans. Is that source out of date?
As I understand it, if enough GOP electors had defected to send it to Congress, they could pick from the top three electoral vote getters. So I think what the Dem electors were thinking was that their best case scenario is that Trump, Clinton, and a third candidate go to the House. The House, being solidly Republican, is not going to go for Bernie or Faith, so voting for them is a waste. But if the House was nervous about Trump (which is a reasonable hypothetical in a world where 36 GOP electors had defected), it might pick a more mainstream Republican over Trump.
And if the GOP electors split between their preferred alternatives, the Dem electors might have made the difference. 36 needed to defect, and three alternate Republicans actually got votes, and I heard at least three other names suggested in the run-up to the vote (Ryan, Romney, and McMullin). If the 36 were split evenly among six candidates, then the Dem’s three extra votes could have meant Powell going to the House instead of Kasich, which I think Dems would prefer.
All this is of course a multiply-nested hypothetical that didn’t pan out at all, but I think it’s the most reasonable interpretation of what the Powell electors were up to. The Bernie and Faith electors, like the Kasich and Paul electors, were more likely voting against their pledged candidate.
You raise an interesting point about the need for collusion between the GOP and Dem electors. I don’t know nearly enough about how the process actually works to know whether and to what extent they can lobby the GOP delegates directly. I don’t know who my electors are or how they were chosen, I don’t know how much the electors interact, or if they’re actually political operatives or just favored insiders and other nepotistic honorees (which seems like a major problem with the Electoral College).
I think this is right, and I think you’re right on your points about the media and Hollywood narratives that were spread in the lead up to the EC vote. It was a combination of trying to sway electors to a position by exaggerating the extent to which their peers agreed with that position, and of wishful thinking by liberal-dominated industries.
I’ve come to the conclusion recently that a lot of the ‘fake news’ hand-wringing is the mainstream media projecting. Most cynically, it’s an intentional way of lowering the credibility of smaller news sources to offset their own loss of credibility. Most charitably, it’s a bunch of people who feel like they must have been lied to in order to get the story so wrong in the lead up to the election. Either way, the mainstream narrative of how the election was going to go turned out to be effectively fake news, and suddenly those same venerable sources see fake news everywhere (while they continue to make the same mistakes and produce the same false expectations).
There’s another two DNC electors that tried to vote for somebody else, but were blocked by the courts/replaced by a different electors, so I was counting them as well. One of them was here in Maine.
Oh, I thought Congress could pick anybody, same as the electoral college. If that’s true, then giving electoral votes to a back up Republican makes more sense.
You mean electors? The electors are just people with day jobs. I know they were getting bombarded with phone calls, emails, threats and so on to change their votes, that was in the news quite a bit. I would imagine anybody can talk to them about anything, and probably did. But no GOP electors voted for Powell. In your scenario though, they wouldn’t have to, exactly; Even one DNC elector picking Powell creates a situation where a Republican other than Trump got electoral votes. If that’s enough to make him a choice for Congress, then mission accomplished even if no GOP electors go along.
Which are all perfectly natural ways to behave. But in a world in which the press was doing it’s job, there would be other reporters within these networks combatting these tendencies. It’s not the existence of bias that’s the issue, it’s that you have entire media corporations that seem to all lean the same way, and so nobody is checking their biases. I know I won’t win any accolades for saying this, but Fox News seemed to me to do a very good job covering the election fairly, in the sense that they had just as many people critical of Trump as they had supporters. Sure, only their token liberals had anything positive to say about Hillary, but as long as Trump is going to dominate the news cycle, it’s nice to hear the ups and the downs.
That’s certainly what the smaller news sources are saying it is, yeah. In a perfect world, I’d be taking the mainstream media’s side in a debate like this. I’d much rather be getting my news from some large, well-known institution that has been winning awards for journalism and covering politics for a century or more than from some guy on YouTube. But what choice have I? The mainstream media obviously just operates as propaganda arms for the parties they favor. For me the turning point was journolist, which didn’t really seem to pick up steam as a story. But GamerGate woke a lot of people up to what the MSM is doing, and the Trump coverage woke up a whole lot more.
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Well, an interesting thing to note is that the ‘fake news’ angle was NOT the immediate reaction to Trump’s victory. It took a few days for that narrative to develop. There were a solid few days there where the mainstream media was doing honest, public introspection- you could actually find sources like New York Times admitting that they were so anti-Trump it had blinded them, and that they had seriously fucked up. As I remember it, that lasted for a couple days, until the flood of “Trump’s transition in shambles!” stories hit and it was clearly back to business as usual. There were a few days, perhaps a week where the media tried to convince everybody that the transition team didn’t know what they were doing, was in disarray, appointments were behind schedule, and etc. It was a perfect example of a complete falsehood based on nothing that was nevertheless picked up and broadcasted by the Usual Suspects, then simply dropped without retraction when it was revealed to have been bullshit all along. The fake news narrative dropped (somewhat ironically) right after that, I think.
That is why I argue so vehemently about the Russia thing- it seems likely Russia had a hand in the wikileaks leaks from the DNC, but the fact that the media jumped all over this very damning information that the DNC didn’t even bother to deny and used it to attempt to tie Trump to the source instead of actually covering what was in the leaks is the kind of media behavior conservatives have commented on for years.