6 ms·

From my memory Reddit was mainly pro Bernie Sanders. Trump essentially won because Democratic party pushed Hilary, this caused many people vote 3rd party and m

by takeda 9y ago

From my memory Reddit was mainly pro Bernie Sanders. Trump essentially won because Democratic party pushed Hilary, this caused many people vote 3rd party and many actually voted Trump (I even remember someone saying that he was voting for Trump, because things need to get bad before they can get good).

golergka 9y ago
Don't you think that more moderate Democrats would vote for any Republican candidate if Bernie would the primaries? Trump may be an assholes, but at he's not advocating any radical economical policies that a LOT of US voters completely disagree with. (Please note that this comment had no value judgements on any policies).
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Don't you think that more moderate Democrats would vote for any Republican candidate if Bernie would the primaries? No, and while Clinton supporters in the primary frequently made this electability argument, head-to-head polling consistently showed Sanders better than Clinton against Trump. This, I know, contradicts the naive idea that candidate policy positions and voter policy preferences can be nearly reduced to a simple left-right spectrum (or even a multidimensional one) and voting maps to “which candidates policy position is closest to the voters preferred policy position”, but that model is, intuitively attractive as it might be, completely wrong. For one thing character issues like perceived trustworthiness make a big difference.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I can't really see that. Even a moderate Democrat, it would be a pretty big stretch to push them toward Trump, I believe. I could, however, see many people like that staying home.
gkoberger 9y ago
Reddit was very pro-Bernie. A huge portion of it was legitimate support, but bots (both pro-Trump and pro-Clinton) pushed the Bernie-Bro narrative, harassing Clinton supporters with sexist comments. Russia isn't good enough to convince anyone of something they don't believe. A billion "Mickey Mouse for US President!" messages won't get a cartoon character elected. But they can take things we already believe in, and increase or catalyze those beliefs. For example, a minor preference for Bernie could be fanned into a belief that "you should vote for Trump since politicians suck!". Or, even if nobody is convinced, seeing that rhetoric can get Clinton supporters to turn on Bernie supporters. https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-bernie-bro-harassers-may-have-been-russian-bots/ https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-ber... (For the record, I did my best to make this post as apolitical as possible.)
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Russia is good enough to not try to persuade people to vote for Mickey Mouse. When I played football in high school, in some situations our blocking instructions were, "take him whichever way he wants to go". That is, if the defender tries to go around you to your right, take him right; if he tries to go around you to your left, take him left. Russia could do something similar if, say, it wants to remove support from Hillary: If a voter is somewhat to the left of Hillary, move the voter toward Bernie; if the voter is somewhat to the right of Hillary, move the voter toward Trump. That won't work with a dogmatic "I'm with her!" voter - nothing will. But it could work well enough to prevent a win by a candidate that Russia didn't want to win. But I don't think Russia's real goal was to prevent Hillary from winning. I think Russia's real goal was to undermine faith in democratic institutions. Russia seems scared to death of color revolutions - reasonably enough, since they are revolutions by the people against undemocratic regimes, and despite the presence of elections, Russia is rather undemocratic. Putin therefore wants to undermine the credibility of democracy in other countries, so that Russian citizens look at democracy and see just another empty promise, and therefore don't see any reason to pursue it at home.
  - WalterSear 9y ago
    > That won't work with a dogmatic "I'm with her!" voter - nothing will. So they antagonized those voters until they became a toxic force on their own and started convincing others for them.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  Agreed. Was on /r/politics, /r/news and /r/worldnews and posting anything critical of Clinton or pro-Bernie was immediately down-voted and called names. Even here posted about her husband's "gift" from Qatar for $1M with a link to Wikileaks and got called a Russian shill just the other day. One user started digging through my comment history found my post from 340 days ago to prove that I spoke Russian, therefore I am Russian, therefore I was working for them. Yes, it was pretty creepy. As for Bernie (an unknown leftist old white guy) and Trump (a TV personality) it is more interesting to look at it as a phenomenon. They are both a manifestation of the same thing -- a deep dissatisfaction with the current political establishment. On paper they don't have many common positions, but they do have that thing in common. I think Clinton lost many who would have voted for her because they just weren't excited enough to put their shoes on and go and vote. Mass media and friends were assuring them for months that Trump has no chance of winning. Here is the apparatus she relied on to get her elected which in the end I think was one of the main reasons she lost. It is really saddening to see how the Democrats turned immediately to anti-Trump rallies and the media is talking about how many scoops of ice-creams he eats and continues with their Russian narrative and wasting an opportunity to capitalize on that enthusiasm and energy of Bernie's followers. If you think about, the fascinating there is not that he didn't win, but how close he got despite the media blackout. Not realizing that, and capitalizing on it, will ensure another failure in the future and figures like Trump will keep winning the election.
s73ver_ 9y ago
I cannot imagine that many who were in favor of Bernie would switch to Trump. The positions of the two were so far apart, that you'd have to not actually believe in any of Bernie's positions in order to vote for Trump.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  I cannot imagine that many who were in favor of Bernie would switch to Trump. Believe it. People did not like the idea of voting for Hillary, and voting third party has its own issues. Also, there was the X factor. People didn't really know what they were going to get with Trump.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    Again, I need more than "not Clinton" to believe that. I find it quite difficult to believe that someone who was supporting Sanders would be able to vote for a border wall, repealing the ACA, a Muslim ban, someone who bragged about sexual assault on tape, and general deregulation of business.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    You don't think he was predictable? I bet this continues to hold up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12920911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12920911 (posted Nov 10 2016)
    - takeda 9y ago
      The thing about social media is that if after election Trump would turn out to be the best president in our history. Instead of you, someone else would now cited the post that they said that in November. The truth is, no one knew at the time. People had their theories, some were proved right, some were proven wrong. The people who you were responding to are example that your opinion was just one of many. There was hope that perhaps Trump's ego would motivate him to be better than previous presidents. Sadly that didn't happen.
      - 9y ago
thaumaturgy 9y ago
> Trump essentially won because Democratic party pushed Hilary, this caused many people vote 3rd party and many actually voted Trump I've heard this a lot, but have yet to find any analysis that finds that this is statistically true, especially in the critical states that ended up swinging wildly away from predictions early in the evening. Do you (or anyone else) have links to any real analysis on the voting behavior here?

by takeda 9y ago

golergka 9y ago

Don't you think that more moderate Democrats would vote for any Republican candidate if Bernie would the primaries? Trump may be an assholes, but at he's not advocating any radical economical policies that a LOT of US voters completely disagree with. (Please note that this comment had no value judgements on any policies).

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Don't you think that more moderate Democrats would vote for any Republican candidate if Bernie would the primaries? No, and while Clinton supporters in the primary frequently made this electability argument, head-to-head polling consistently showed Sanders better than Clinton against Trump. This, I know, contradicts the naive idea that candidate policy positions and voter policy preferences can be nearly reduced to a simple left-right spectrum (or even a multidimensional one) and voting maps to “which candidates policy position is closest to the voters preferred policy position”, but that model is, intuitively attractive as it might be, completely wrong. For one thing character issues like perceived trustworthiness make a big difference.
s73ver_ 9y ago
I can't really see that. Even a moderate Democrat, it would be a pretty big stretch to push them toward Trump, I believe. I could, however, see many people like that staying home.

gkoberger 9y ago

Reddit was very pro-Bernie. A huge portion of it was legitimate support, but bots (both pro-Trump and pro-Clinton) pushed the Bernie-Bro narrative, harassing Clinton supporters with sexist comments. Russia isn't good enough to convince anyone of something they don't believe. A billion "Mickey Mouse for US President!" messages won't get a cartoon character elected. But they can take things we already believe in, and increase or catalyze those beliefs. For example, a minor preference for Bernie could be fanned into a belief that "you should vote for Trump since politicians suck!". Or, even if nobody is convinced, seeing that rhetoric can get Clinton supporters to turn on Bernie supporters. https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-bernie-bro-harassers-may-have-been-russian-bots/ https://shareblue.com/watching-the-hearings-i-learned-my-ber... (For the record, I did my best to make this post as apolitical as possible.)

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Russia is good enough to not try to persuade people to vote for Mickey Mouse. When I played football in high school, in some situations our blocking instructions were, "take him whichever way he wants to go". That is, if the defender tries to go around you to your right, take him right; if he tries to go around you to your left, take him left. Russia could do something similar if, say, it wants to remove support from Hillary: If a voter is somewhat to the left of Hillary, move the voter toward Bernie; if the voter is somewhat to the right of Hillary, move the voter toward Trump. That won't work with a dogmatic "I'm with her!" voter - nothing will. But it could work well enough to prevent a win by a candidate that Russia didn't want to win. But I don't think Russia's real goal was to prevent Hillary from winning. I think Russia's real goal was to undermine faith in democratic institutions. Russia seems scared to death of color revolutions - reasonably enough, since they are revolutions by the people against undemocratic regimes, and despite the presence of elections, Russia is rather undemocratic. Putin therefore wants to undermine the credibility of democracy in other countries, so that Russian citizens look at democracy and see just another empty promise, and therefore don't see any reason to pursue it at home.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  > That won't work with a dogmatic "I'm with her!" voter - nothing will. So they antagonized those voters until they became a toxic force on their own and started convincing others for them.
rdtsc 9y ago
Agreed. Was on /r/politics, /r/news and /r/worldnews and posting anything critical of Clinton or pro-Bernie was immediately down-voted and called names. Even here posted about her husband's "gift" from Qatar for $1M with a link to Wikileaks and got called a Russian shill just the other day. One user started digging through my comment history found my post from 340 days ago to prove that I spoke Russian, therefore I am Russian, therefore I was working for them. Yes, it was pretty creepy. As for Bernie (an unknown leftist old white guy) and Trump (a TV personality) it is more interesting to look at it as a phenomenon. They are both a manifestation of the same thing -- a deep dissatisfaction with the current political establishment. On paper they don't have many common positions, but they do have that thing in common. I think Clinton lost many who would have voted for her because they just weren't excited enough to put their shoes on and go and vote. Mass media and friends were assuring them for months that Trump has no chance of winning. Here is the apparatus she relied on to get her elected which in the end I think was one of the main reasons she lost. It is really saddening to see how the Democrats turned immediately to anti-Trump rallies and the media is talking about how many scoops of ice-creams he eats and continues with their Russian narrative and wasting an opportunity to capitalize on that enthusiasm and energy of Bernie's followers. If you think about, the fascinating there is not that he didn't win, but how close he got despite the media blackout. Not realizing that, and capitalizing on it, will ensure another failure in the future and figures like Trump will keep winning the election.

s73ver_ 9y ago

I cannot imagine that many who were in favor of Bernie would switch to Trump. The positions of the two were so far apart, that you'd have to not actually believe in any of Bernie's positions in order to vote for Trump.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
I cannot imagine that many who were in favor of Bernie would switch to Trump. Believe it. People did not like the idea of voting for Hillary, and voting third party has its own issues. Also, there was the X factor. People didn't really know what they were going to get with Trump.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Again, I need more than "not Clinton" to believe that. I find it quite difficult to believe that someone who was supporting Sanders would be able to vote for a border wall, repealing the ACA, a Muslim ban, someone who bragged about sexual assault on tape, and general deregulation of business.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  You don't think he was predictable? I bet this continues to hold up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12920911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12920911 (posted Nov 10 2016)
  - takeda 9y ago
    The thing about social media is that if after election Trump would turn out to be the best president in our history. Instead of you, someone else would now cited the post that they said that in November. The truth is, no one knew at the time. People had their theories, some were proved right, some were proven wrong. The people who you were responding to are example that your opinion was just one of many. There was hope that perhaps Trump's ego would motivate him to be better than previous presidents. Sadly that didn't happen.
    - 9y ago

thaumaturgy 9y ago

> Trump essentially won because Democratic party pushed Hilary, this caused many people vote 3rd party and many actually voted Trump I've heard this a lot, but have yet to find any analysis that finds that this is statistically true, especially in the critical states that ended up swinging wildly away from predictions early in the evening. Do you (or anyone else) have links to any real analysis on the voting behavior here?