11 ms·

I think the recent election demonstrated that money doesn't matter that much. Voters actually have power. That's the silver lining to the depressing reality tha

by drewrv 10y ago

I think the recent election demonstrated that money doesn't matter that much. Voters actually have power. That's the silver lining to the depressing reality that voters don't care if industry writes regulations, the executive branch tortures people, and the rich pay even less in taxes.

mi100hael 10y ago
> voters don't care if industry writes regulations, the executive branch tortures people, and the rich pay even less in taxes. The irony in your statement is that it's pretty much impossible to tell which candidate those voters you're referring to supported.
- glhaynes 10y ago
  Seems pretty easy to me.
  - mi100hael 10y ago
    Clinton? - Revolving door: https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/two-big-reasons-hillary-clinton-isnt-taking-elizabeth-warrens-revolving-door-dare/ https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/two-big-reasons-hillary-... - Torture: http://www.salon.com/2016/03/24/the_neoliberal_fantasia_of_hillary_clinton_why_we_cant_afford_to_forget_her_disturbing_track_record/ http://www.salon.com/2016/03/24/the_neoliberal_fantasia_of_h... - Taxes: http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-sanctioned-tax-breaks-for-wealthy-charity-donors-2015-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-sanctioned-ta...
    - glhaynes 10y ago
      Clinton speaking against torture because it's ineffective even though Salon (and I!) would have preferred she'd publicly made the case against it for additional reasons doesn't make it any harder to figure out which candidate one should vote for if they want industry to write regulations, the executive branch to torture people, and the rich to pay even less in taxes. False equivalence is fun until, say, the 2000 or 2016 elections happen.
YCode 10y ago
> I think the recent election demonstrated that money doesn't matter that much. Can you elaborate on that? I'm unaware of how it was demonstrated.
- tbirrell 10y ago
  I think he meant that despite all the big money and power behind the Clinton campaign, enough of the electorate chose to vote against the establishment to render it ineffectual.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    Trump is a multibilionaire. Not quite the big money vs underdog story.
    - Amezarak 10y ago
      The Trump campaign as massively outspent by the Clinton campaign almost 2-1. It also received much less outside money - 60 million versus 190 million. [1] According to OpenSecrets, Trump spent 56 million on his own campaign. [2] In historical US election terms, that is quite the underdog story, even if it's still a lot of money. [1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ [2] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864 http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864
      - andrepd 10y ago
        For me, an underdog story would be a common citizen getting elected with little money, and 100% crowd funded money from the people, at that. A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions, and "only" 60 million from someone else, leaves absolutely no sense of being an underdog, even if he did spend less than his rival (100mil instead of 200mil. Big whoop)
        Amezarak 10y ago
        > A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions I don't think that's an accurate way of describing his campaign. The campaign funding includes donations to the campaign in those figures. Only 22% of Trump's campaign funding was from himself, while 27% was from small individual contributors and 15% from large individual contributors. Clinton obviously had much less self-financing (0.27%), while 18% was small individual contributions and 53% was large individual contributions. The 'someone else' in my post is money spent outside the campaign altogether from superpacs. SuperPACs are associated with 'big money' but to my knowledge there's nothing stopping normal people from donating to them. Unfortunately, your underdog story is just not viable in a democracy of three hundred million. A common citizen, as you put it, simply has no means of getting the attention of enough people, and standing out from the crowd, without money, or to raise that much money. Even wealthy, well-known non-politicians have trouble with that - you see them pop up sometimes in the primaries. There's a reason most American Presidents were already politicians. If you add your email to your profile, maybe we can talk about it offline? I'm interested but I have a hard time seeing how we can have national politics without money playing a big role.
bduerst 10y ago
I think the election proved the opposite - that if you can manipulate headlines, you can suppress voters from even coming out. If you look past all of the fake news, twitter faux pas, etc., I think that FBI Director Comey's manipulation in the last week really did do a number on the voter base, and it's disappointing that nobody is enforcing the Hatch act.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  When was the last time you spoke to people in towns of less than 10k people about their most serious issues? It's so odd to me that Silicon Valley simply can't comprehend that their values aren't shared by the rest of the country. Literally the only explanation they can produce to explain Trump votes is that everyone must have been brainwashed by Facebook news (despite the fact that millions of voters probably don't even have social media). There was a time when democrats represented the blue collar working class -- who have watched helplessly as their jobs and security has been outsourced to china and Mexico. Now it's Trump who represents their values and clearly they're not alone.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    I grew up in an unincorporated town in WI, so to answer your accusatory question: Sunday was the last time I talked to people in a town <10k. I'm also not sure what "silicon valley sentiment" has to do with wanting enforcement of the Hatch act either. The idea that rural white america is a victim and needs protecting is one of those being spread by the alt-right, and it's wrong to think it justifies manipulating the election. >Have you tried to start a business before? Are you familiar with the debilitating beauracracy and taxes associated with running a small business (15-50 people) that doesn't take venture capital funding? Nope. I'm a computer engineer and everyone should care about what I care about or they're brainwashed. Yes. Yes. And that last remark is uncalled for, since I'm not a computer engineer or think that.
    - kefka 10y ago
      > I'm also not sure what "silicon valley sentiment" has to do with wanting enforcement of the Hatch act either. The idea that rural white america is a victim and needs protecting is one of those being spread by the alt-right. I would agree with that, but not for the reasons what the Neo-Nazis would say (seriously, "alt right" is nazis and skinheads). Most small towns had one or 2 companies that propped them up. Vehicles, parts, steel, coal, mining. Good strong stable stuff. Making things, and knowing that the sweat of your brow made that. And they paid well. Real well. $25/hr, $30/hr. And as we went to this "service economy", with many manufacturing jobs eliminated by companies closing, automating, or going elsewhere, it left crappy jobs for these workers. Crappy means working for $8.25/hr, or $10 if you're lucky. And no benefits. No 401k. No insurance. And yeah, Trump has ignited the neo-nazis. But in the end, what matters more: "some democrat love-relationship with LGBT, environmental stuffs, SJWs, or whatever" -or- "food on your plate, and a place to live in with your family"? Because what Trump said is he's going to bring back those jobs. Hope, that these people can get back on their feet. But, well, that won't happen. Too bad it will take 4 years to find out.
siavosh 10y ago
I think that was indeed a silver lining, but the scary question is does that make any difference in terms of inequality in America? His economic cabinet is mostly old faces of industry, his tax plan is a continuation of trends since the 1980's (when inequality in America started increasing). We can all wait and see what happens in the next four years, but if inequality increases even more, the people will lose even more faith in democracy.
kzrdude 10y ago
Are you ignoring all the congress member races and looking at just the presidential election? The problem is biggest in congress; the influence of money is making the institution wholly nonfunctional.
gdulli 10y ago
Is it really a silver lining if the voters can be so easily manipulated into exercising that power to vote against their own interests and to magnify (or at least maintain) the same problems the demagogue claimed to want to solve for them? Is it possible the former status quo, while far from optimal, was at least being stewarded by adults who knew how to keep it from going off the rails? A given Democrat or Republican has to at least preserve their party's ongoing reputation. Donald is a nihilist who doesn't even have that constraint.
- devoply 10y ago
  They did not vote against their own interests. They voted for their interests in the only choice available that claimed to represent their interests. The point is the voters don't have an actual choice and never did, most of the consent is manufactured. The ultimate point I guess is that liberal democracy, which often does not represent mass opinion is becoming more direct and the system does not really support that sort of decision making because only people like Trump can get up there to be voted for, demagogues. The elite now don't know how to put the genie back in the bottle. This article is crying out HALP!
Brakenshire 10y ago
Well, Trump is a multi-millionaire, perhaps a billionaire. His level of spending may not be remarkable by American standards, but it is by the standards of most other countries. It still means that to get into power in America you either have to be an extremely wealthy businessman, or you have to be supported by big-business.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  We see hints in the Trump campaign (and concrete evidence in the Obama campaign) that a lot of the cost for running is interfacing with entities that expect a lot of money to play ball. It may be that a canny candidate with a good but small PR department can do just as well. Certainly Twitter, YouTube and Facebook seem to be having outsized impact and they're relatively inexpensive.
  - guildwriter 10y ago
    It's worth noting that Trump's campaign was also deeply invested in using data to drive campaign strategy. Here's a relevant excerpt from an interview with Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law, who apparently masterminded the campaign strategy. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#1137f0472f50 http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi... "This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface. Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.” For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors."
devoply 10y ago
Voters have always had power, they have just not been able to organize the "unenlightened" masses: http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/ http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/
lifeformed 10y ago
The election didn't show that money or voters has the power, it showed that the media has the power (and doesn't know how to wield it).
- golergka 10y ago
  The media? After all the push against the Trump?
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Insofar as there was a late push against Trump by some of the mainstream media, it was after they spent many months fawning over him and giving him a multi-billion dollar free media advantage that was never erased. Given that people rarely change their view once it is well-established (rejecting new I formation which conflicts with it), even if there was quantitative balance, the fawning early coverage would be more significant in effect.
dragonwriter 10y ago
It proved that billions of dollars in free media advantage overwhelms tens of millions of dollars advantage in direct campaign spending. Which isn't exactly an indication that money is weak.

by drewrv 10y ago

mi100hael 10y ago

> voters don't care if industry writes regulations, the executive branch tortures people, and the rich pay even less in taxes. The irony in your statement is that it's pretty much impossible to tell which candidate those voters you're referring to supported.

glhaynes 10y ago
Seems pretty easy to me.
- mi100hael 10y ago
  Clinton? - Revolving door: https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/two-big-reasons-hillary-clinton-isnt-taking-elizabeth-warrens-revolving-door-dare/ https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/two-big-reasons-hillary-... - Torture: http://www.salon.com/2016/03/24/the_neoliberal_fantasia_of_hillary_clinton_why_we_cant_afford_to_forget_her_disturbing_track_record/ http://www.salon.com/2016/03/24/the_neoliberal_fantasia_of_h... - Taxes: http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-sanctioned-tax-breaks-for-wealthy-charity-donors-2015-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-sanctioned-ta...
  - glhaynes 10y ago
    Clinton speaking against torture because it's ineffective even though Salon (and I!) would have preferred she'd publicly made the case against it for additional reasons doesn't make it any harder to figure out which candidate one should vote for if they want industry to write regulations, the executive branch to torture people, and the rich to pay even less in taxes. False equivalence is fun until, say, the 2000 or 2016 elections happen.

YCode 10y ago

> I think the recent election demonstrated that money doesn't matter that much. Can you elaborate on that? I'm unaware of how it was demonstrated.

tbirrell 10y ago
I think he meant that despite all the big money and power behind the Clinton campaign, enough of the electorate chose to vote against the establishment to render it ineffectual.
- andrepd 10y ago
  Trump is a multibilionaire. Not quite the big money vs underdog story.
  - Amezarak 10y ago
    The Trump campaign as massively outspent by the Clinton campaign almost 2-1. It also received much less outside money - 60 million versus 190 million. [1] According to OpenSecrets, Trump spent 56 million on his own campaign. [2] In historical US election terms, that is quite the underdog story, even if it's still a lot of money. [1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ [2] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864 http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864
    - andrepd 10y ago
      For me, an underdog story would be a common citizen getting elected with little money, and 100% crowd funded money from the people, at that. A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions, and "only" 60 million from someone else, leaves absolutely no sense of being an underdog, even if he did spend less than his rival (100mil instead of 200mil. Big whoop)
      - Amezarak 10y ago
        > A billionaire heir getting elected by spending his millions I don't think that's an accurate way of describing his campaign. The campaign funding includes donations to the campaign in those figures. Only 22% of Trump's campaign funding was from himself, while 27% was from small individual contributors and 15% from large individual contributors. Clinton obviously had much less self-financing (0.27%), while 18% was small individual contributions and 53% was large individual contributions. The 'someone else' in my post is money spent outside the campaign altogether from superpacs. SuperPACs are associated with 'big money' but to my knowledge there's nothing stopping normal people from donating to them. Unfortunately, your underdog story is just not viable in a democracy of three hundred million. A common citizen, as you put it, simply has no means of getting the attention of enough people, and standing out from the crowd, without money, or to raise that much money. Even wealthy, well-known non-politicians have trouble with that - you see them pop up sometimes in the primaries. There's a reason most American Presidents were already politicians. If you add your email to your profile, maybe we can talk about it offline? I'm interested but I have a hard time seeing how we can have national politics without money playing a big role.

bduerst 10y ago

I think the election proved the opposite - that if you can manipulate headlines, you can suppress voters from even coming out. If you look past all of the fake news, twitter faux pas, etc., I think that FBI Director Comey's manipulation in the last week really did do a number on the voter base, and it's disappointing that nobody is enforcing the Hatch act.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago
When was the last time you spoke to people in towns of less than 10k people about their most serious issues? It's so odd to me that Silicon Valley simply can't comprehend that their values aren't shared by the rest of the country. Literally the only explanation they can produce to explain Trump votes is that everyone must have been brainwashed by Facebook news (despite the fact that millions of voters probably don't even have social media). There was a time when democrats represented the blue collar working class -- who have watched helplessly as their jobs and security has been outsourced to china and Mexico. Now it's Trump who represents their values and clearly they're not alone.
- bduerst 10y ago
  I grew up in an unincorporated town in WI, so to answer your accusatory question: Sunday was the last time I talked to people in a town <10k. I'm also not sure what "silicon valley sentiment" has to do with wanting enforcement of the Hatch act either. The idea that rural white america is a victim and needs protecting is one of those being spread by the alt-right, and it's wrong to think it justifies manipulating the election. >Have you tried to start a business before? Are you familiar with the debilitating beauracracy and taxes associated with running a small business (15-50 people) that doesn't take venture capital funding? Nope. I'm a computer engineer and everyone should care about what I care about or they're brainwashed. Yes. Yes. And that last remark is uncalled for, since I'm not a computer engineer or think that.
  - kefka 10y ago
    > I'm also not sure what "silicon valley sentiment" has to do with wanting enforcement of the Hatch act either. The idea that rural white america is a victim and needs protecting is one of those being spread by the alt-right. I would agree with that, but not for the reasons what the Neo-Nazis would say (seriously, "alt right" is nazis and skinheads). Most small towns had one or 2 companies that propped them up. Vehicles, parts, steel, coal, mining. Good strong stable stuff. Making things, and knowing that the sweat of your brow made that. And they paid well. Real well. $25/hr, $30/hr. And as we went to this "service economy", with many manufacturing jobs eliminated by companies closing, automating, or going elsewhere, it left crappy jobs for these workers. Crappy means working for $8.25/hr, or $10 if you're lucky. And no benefits. No 401k. No insurance. And yeah, Trump has ignited the neo-nazis. But in the end, what matters more: "some democrat love-relationship with LGBT, environmental stuffs, SJWs, or whatever" -or- "food on your plate, and a place to live in with your family"? Because what Trump said is he's going to bring back those jobs. Hope, that these people can get back on their feet. But, well, that won't happen. Too bad it will take 4 years to find out.

siavosh 10y ago

I think that was indeed a silver lining, but the scary question is does that make any difference in terms of inequality in America? His economic cabinet is mostly old faces of industry, his tax plan is a continuation of trends since the 1980's (when inequality in America started increasing). We can all wait and see what happens in the next four years, but if inequality increases even more, the people will lose even more faith in democracy.

kzrdude 10y ago

Are you ignoring all the congress member races and looking at just the presidential election? The problem is biggest in congress; the influence of money is making the institution wholly nonfunctional.

gdulli 10y ago

Is it really a silver lining if the voters can be so easily manipulated into exercising that power to vote against their own interests and to magnify (or at least maintain) the same problems the demagogue claimed to want to solve for them? Is it possible the former status quo, while far from optimal, was at least being stewarded by adults who knew how to keep it from going off the rails? A given Democrat or Republican has to at least preserve their party's ongoing reputation. Donald is a nihilist who doesn't even have that constraint.

devoply 10y ago
They did not vote against their own interests. They voted for their interests in the only choice available that claimed to represent their interests. The point is the voters don't have an actual choice and never did, most of the consent is manufactured. The ultimate point I guess is that liberal democracy, which often does not represent mass opinion is becoming more direct and the system does not really support that sort of decision making because only people like Trump can get up there to be voted for, demagogues. The elite now don't know how to put the genie back in the bottle. This article is crying out HALP!

Brakenshire 10y ago

Well, Trump is a multi-millionaire, perhaps a billionaire. His level of spending may not be remarkable by American standards, but it is by the standards of most other countries. It still means that to get into power in America you either have to be an extremely wealthy businessman, or you have to be supported by big-business.

KirinDave 10y ago
We see hints in the Trump campaign (and concrete evidence in the Obama campaign) that a lot of the cost for running is interfacing with entities that expect a lot of money to play ball. It may be that a canny candidate with a good but small PR department can do just as well. Certainly Twitter, YouTube and Facebook seem to be having outsized impact and they're relatively inexpensive.
- guildwriter 10y ago
  It's worth noting that Trump's campaign was also deeply invested in using data to drive campaign strategy. Here's a relevant excerpt from an interview with Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law, who apparently masterminded the campaign strategy. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#1137f0472f50 http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi... "This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface. Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.” For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors."

devoply 10y ago

Voters have always had power, they have just not been able to organize the "unenlightened" masses: http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/ http://thefutureprimaeval.net/the-overton-bubble/

lifeformed 10y ago

The election didn't show that money or voters has the power, it showed that the media has the power (and doesn't know how to wield it).

golergka 10y ago
The media? After all the push against the Trump?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Insofar as there was a late push against Trump by some of the mainstream media, it was after they spent many months fawning over him and giving him a multi-billion dollar free media advantage that was never erased. Given that people rarely change their view once it is well-established (rejecting new I formation which conflicts with it), even if there was quantitative balance, the fawning early coverage would be more significant in effect.

dragonwriter 10y ago

It proved that billions of dollars in free media advantage overwhelms tens of millions of dollars advantage in direct campaign spending. Which isn't exactly an indication that money is weak.