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I was pretty smug about Trump supporters until I started to see a couple things on/after election night: 1. Clinton underperformed Obama's numbers dramatically
by hacknat 10y ago
I was pretty smug about Trump supporters until I started to see a couple things on/after election night:
1. Clinton underperformed Obama's numbers dramatically in the Rust belt. You can certainly still be a racist if you voted for Obama, but it doesn't necessarily follow that you're a racist if you voted for Trump. There seems to be strong evidence that a number of people in the Rust belt have voted for both men.
2. 20% of exit polled Trump voters do not think he is qualified to be president.
This was a protest vote by many reasonable(ish) people who are telling the rest of us, "We're doing so poorly right now, it really doesn't matter to us if an incompetent narcissist is President."
I honestly don't know what to do next. I've never hated Republican voters, something I seem to be accused of doing by every underlying assumption in articles about division in our country. I suspect that many people are like me, I never hated the other side, but I lost respect for them long ago. I'm going to try to get it back somehow.
- GunboatDiplomat 10y agoA lot of areas around me that went for Obama in the last 2 elections went Trump this time around. And a lot of the areas that went Hillary around here went a lot less heavily Hillary than they did Obama 4 & 8 years ago. This is in suburban New Jersey.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoIm not sure there's much evidence of switching. There are large numbers of people who didn't vote relative to the numbers that separated candidates, so the likely explanation is that people who normally dont vote voted Trump and people who normally would vote Hillary didnt vote. A little bit of those two things would tip it. Which is what we see: high rural turnout; Hillary underperforming/low turnout in urban areas. There's just a group of white people who like Trump, and nobody liked Hillary.