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>Trump voters are old and unsophisticated (on average; of course there are exceptions); they take their instructions from TV not online sources. White people v

>Trump voters are old and unsophisticated (on average; of course there are exceptions); they take their instructions from TV not online sources. White people voted for Trump in a majority in both the educated and uneducated categories. People making more than 50k voted more for Trump and people making less voted for Hillary. Trump pulled in more independents than Hillary. Don't repeat the trope that Trumps supporters are 'old and unsophisticated'. It does a disservice to any actual debate and results in completely incorrect analyses of why he won (e.g. your assessment that only tv-watching morons voted for him). https://verdict.justia.com/2018/02/16/trumps-base-broadly-speaking https://verdict.justia.com/2018/02/16/trumps-base-broadly-sp...

akhilcacharya 8y ago
Also the election was decided by ~70k votes in 3 states. All that matters is who was convinced to stay home or submit a blank ballot.
jessaustin 8y ago
That synopsis of my argument is a bit simplistic. The "TV morons" are the reason that he is on TV news all the time. His being on TV news all the time is one of the various reasons he got elected. Thread hypothesis is that such reasons exist in addition to the obvious Russian Army vote-machine hacking, and that it would be good to examine those other reasons. You may disagree, but if so I hope you're not determining Democratic strategy... This "white people" argument looks silly as soon as you do some arithmetic. Whites' preference for Trump was less than nonwhites' preference for Clinton. If either was a bad thing, they were both bad things. In fact, there was nothing wrong with either one of them. Candidates adjust to the electorate. When Don Jr. runs against Chelsea, he'll be saying awful things about someone besides Mexicans. TV news dominance is a contingent thing, not important for the long term. Even now, TV news is almost more important in how it steers the online conversation than in what it directly reports. In the long term, TV news will cease to exist as such, and the desultory performance over the last three years will be one reason why. (again, not the only reason why...) Right now, however, Trump is still on TV...

akhilcacharya 8y ago

Also the election was decided by ~70k votes in 3 states. All that matters is who was convinced to stay home or submit a blank ballot.

jessaustin 8y ago

That synopsis of my argument is a bit simplistic. The "TV morons" are the reason that he is on TV news all the time. His being on TV news all the time is one of the various reasons he got elected. Thread hypothesis is that such reasons exist in addition to the obvious Russian Army vote-machine hacking, and that it would be good to examine those other reasons. You may disagree, but if so I hope you're not determining Democratic strategy... This "white people" argument looks silly as soon as you do some arithmetic. Whites' preference for Trump was less than nonwhites' preference for Clinton. If either was a bad thing, they were both bad things. In fact, there was nothing wrong with either one of them. Candidates adjust to the electorate. When Don Jr. runs against Chelsea, he'll be saying awful things about someone besides Mexicans. TV news dominance is a contingent thing, not important for the long term. Even now, TV news is almost more important in how it steers the online conversation than in what it directly reports. In the long term, TV news will cease to exist as such, and the desultory performance over the last three years will be one reason why. (again, not the only reason why...) Right now, however, Trump is still on TV...