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Popular vote has never meant anything in America in all it's existence. But the point is a person with zero political experience, completely outside the politi
by ProAm 10y ago
Popular vote has never meant anything in America in all it's existence. But the point is a person with zero political experience, completely outside the political echo chamber/insiders club just won the most powerful office on earth. Whether you are for him or against him I believe it does show that people can absolutely start a change.
- thesimpsons1022 10y agonothing changed. instead of a racist white old billionaire buying a candidate, they just decided to run themselves.
- ProAm 10y agoIm not making this a political argument, just stating the fact that people absolutely had a hand in this election.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoJust because you're surprised, doesn't mean it was "the people". You can't have an Electoral College system in which shuffling Toledo across state lines changes the electoral outcome and credit the people for political outcomes.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoAre Michiganders still angry about that?
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoNot that I know of, but the point is that our system ought to be robust against historical and statistical flukes. If you're going to decide elections via first-past-the-post at all, you should at least make the election pass a 95% likelihood hypothesis test for difference-of-means or something.
- wcarron 10y agoI''m of the same sentiment, but I feel that even more rigor and a smaller p value should be demanded from our election methods. 99% seems like a nice number.
- thesimpsons1022 10y agois that really true? this election more than ever most voters believed they had to choose the lesser of two evils and didn't like their choices. both candidates had record disapproval ratings. i understand trump isn't a typical politician but it didn't quite seem like people got what they want... more that they voted against hillary and for a republican supreme court.
- serge2k 10y agoHe's a billionaire and a TV star. Are you a billionaire and a TV star? No? Then you are not comparable to Trump. He's not an outsider. He's absolutely a member of the elite.
- ProAm 10y agoHe's not a politician. The last one not a politician was Dwight Eisenhower, and the list is real sparse before him. [1] But I never said I was compared to Trump, I was stating that common people absolutely made a significant impact to this election against the wishes of the incumbents [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_previous_experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unit...
- anigbrowl 10y agoYes, people can...in the aggregate. But aggregating people takes a lot of work. So unless you devote yourself to the task of saving social security (by mobilizing lots of people to fight with you) then you're not going to have much influence. The ~50 million Trump voters, how much influence do they have with him right now? fuck all. I don't mean that as a comment on him, just pointing out the huge asymmetrical power differentials. Voting does make a tiny difference, but that's like saying you can steer a boat by getting the passengers to rush to one side of the deck or the other. It's technically true but nobody actually steers a boat that way.