5 ms·

He holds wide appeal despite what most sources would tell you, he was as popular with elites as Bernie Sanders. He would not have made it this far without recei

• freyir 10y ago
  > he was as popular with elites as Bernie Sanders So... not popular with elites.
  • zdkl 10y ago
    What the hell is an elite in this context? I keep hearing this but can't figure out wat it means concretely
    • cheez 10y ago
      People who have more rights than you.
    • delazeur 10y ago
      Whichever rich and/or powerful people you don't like, as far as I can tell.
      • freyir 10y ago
        I love elites. But by definition, they're small group of people that have disproportionate influence over an entire population. There's nothing inherently unlikeable about that in principal. In practice, the drive to amass enormous wealth and power and exert control over others doesn't seem to correlate well with being particularly likable.
• mmanfrin 10y ago
  Trump had 10% more votes than the next, but there has been a 9% jump in population since the last open election primary cycle. Using absolute numbers is pretty disingenuous. Additionally, the record number of competitors all split the vote against him, leading to an early point where his competitors had -- mathematically -- a very difficult uphill battle. I disagree with you that he has 'wide appeal'. I think he holds zealous appeal among the demagogic and ideological crowd, but I vehemently disagree that he has wide appeal.
  • jazzyk 10y ago
    You may be missing a lot of just regular folks (including educated ones), who will be holding their vomit bags while voting for Trump, because they can't bring themselves to vote for the ethically challenged, "extremely careless" other candidate.
• whatever_dude 10y ago
  > As a result Trump has more votes than any candidate in Republican history. Without context, that doesn't mean much. Did he receive more votes than any primaries candidate in Republican history? Yes. But given the fact that these primaries received more votes than any other primaries, that loses significant power. When you look at numbers, it's easy to pick the result that makes a specific case. That's what the author is doing here. In fact, as an exercise, it's easy to make the opposite case - that he had extremely low support compared to previous primaries - by using the same numbers. Look at the table right under that quote. In 2012, Romney had 10,048,134 votes, compared to Trump's 13,406,108. Advantage Trump? Well, if you take a look at the total numbers - 19,272,346 vs 30,335,825, respectively - it means Trump had 44% of the votes, while Romney had 52%. Similar lower percentage numbers repeat when you compare him to other candidates from that table. He ended up winning by getting the right delegates, but not the number of votes. So while saying "Trump has more votes than any candidate in Republican history" is correct, saying "Trump received the lowest winning percentage of votes from any Republican candidate since 2000" is also correct (the table stops at 2000 so not sure about other years).