2016 Presidential Election Thread

I'll contribute this, and then other than specifically addressing numbers like these and what they imply, I resign myself from the election conversation. What's done is done, the chips will inevitably fall.
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for those who've not paid attention to the numbers...
DJT got almost 900,000 FEWER votes than Mitt Romney got.
The problem?
HRC got almost 5.5 million fewer votes than Obama.
2.75 times as many voted 3rd party, collectively.

HRC got, as of this writing, almost 425,000 more votes than did DJT

One of the states that swung was Wisconsin. DJT got ~1,500 more votes, as of this moment, than Romney got in Wisconsin 4 years ago. HRC lost ~240k votes off Obama's total, most of them in Milwaukee.(where there's a strong correlation between GOP changes in voter access and decreased minority vote, on the order of 300,000 voters, but that's too far in the weeds for this post)

Here are the five states that flipped - Trump / Romney // Obama / Clinton / all others in '16
(all as of the current posting on Dave Liep's election atlas)
Wisconsin - 1,409,467 / 1,407,966 // 1,620,985 / 1,382,210 / 151,262
Iowa - 796,350 / 730, 617 // 822,544 / 650,168 / 110,630
Michigan - 2,277,914 / 2,115,256 // 2,564,569 / 2,264,807 / 252, 501
Pennsylvania - 2,890,633 / 2,680,434 // 2,990,274 / 2,817,409 / 210,805
Florida - 4,607,146 / 4,163,447 // 4,237,756 / 4,487,657 / 295,721

Continuing re WI, if Clinton had gotten 28,000 more Obama voters to the polls, she'd have won. Alternately, 60% of the third party vote would have done it but it's difficult to argue those voters would have split that way.
In IA, Trump got 66K more voters which is a solid jump( 9%), but Clinton dropped over 172K from Obama (21%!) - again a big factor was his voters staying home more than wild popularity for Trump. In 4 of the 5 states here if she had matched Obama she'd have won the state. If she had gotten ALL the 3rd option voters it wouldn't have made up the gap. But Iowa is kind of irrelevant, it was always understood she didn't need it to win.
Michigan was up over 162K on the GOP side (7%) but down almost 300k (almost 12%) among Democrat votes. She lost, though , by a mere 13,107 votes (so far) so if a mere 0.6% more Dem voters turn out she wins this state. This is also the one case where the 3rd party vote might arguably have broken just enough to save her.
In PA she lost by 73,224 votes, Trump was up ~210,000 from Romney, Clinton was down ~170k. This was the "purest" flip among the Northern tier. Still, if she had gotten every vote Obama got she'd have won.

That leaves Florida. Trump jumped almost 444,000 over Romney, Clinton got more votes here than Obama did and still lost by almost 129k votes. The whole "Trump brought out the disenfranchised" meme applies almost entirely to Florida.

So if you give her JUST a few more votes in MI, and eliminate the shenanigans that likely cost her WI, she's still 12 EV short so she had to have either PA or FL

It can be argued that this election was lost as much on the "Obama voter who couldn't be bothered to come out for Clinton" (or who didn't make it due to GOP voter suppression efforts) as "the angry white guy who showed up out of nowhere" which is a bitter pill to swallow for the Democrats.

Other notes
Arizona was down for both parties, Obama got just a few more votes 4 years ago than Trump did this time
MN is another example, Trump only improved about 3k vote, but Clinton dropped almost 180k
In MS Trump actually got 33K fewer votes than Romney, but she got 100k less than Obama, probably most of that in less passionate black voters in Jackson and the delta.
In TEX Clinton went up 569k votes over Obama - still lost by over 800k


On the whole, the Republicans are acting like they have a mandate because they control both ends of the street (which is typical politics) but their candidate got fewer votes and it's probably going to be a very ugly 4 years where anything the Dems can obstruct, they will (which is fair play since that's what the GOP has done for the previous 8)

It will be an interesting case study in how the narcissistic Mr Revenge handles it when he can't get his way by fiat.

oh, one last thing - I'll say again, Gingrich, Gulliani, and the rest of the angry-old-men brigade are getting plu positions, most likely, but the scary thing is to see how many of the Pharisee crowd is already being named (Ben Carson, Ken Blackwell, and so forth - word is the FRC and Heritage are screening all appointments for worthiness and you know that means they will be checked for their allegince to Dominionist thinking. That's likely the one thing Trump gets done (other than killing the ACA) is to try and drown us in all the White Evangelical supremacy they can come up with.

Folks like me are completely fucked.

With that, I yield the floor in this thread - nothing more I can say.

And just where the fuck is he doing that? Come on, don't waffle on it, I want a fuckin' direct quote or shut the fuck up.

Anyway, what I really came in here to post was this:

How does it feel to be as wrong as a monkey with four asses?

Post 10,581, and others, where he justifies their activities on the basis that people have called them racists. They are fellow travelers with him and a fairly large percentage of Trump voters. Not all Trump voters are Kluckers and racists, but they all through there support behind a guy that the Kluckers love. That's not a flattering spot to occupy.

Yeah, and look how well that turned out.

Now you have to deal with all those homeless crazies in East Village because we don't have asylums to stick them in.

Also, AIDS of the ass.

Quote it. Direct quote or shut the fuck up.

"Obama voter who couldn't be bothered to come out for Clinton" (or who didn't make it due to GOP voter suppression efforts)
Really Nova? You're going to go there? I don't think anyone has brought up any incidents of voter suppression yet - bravo.
And yes, every white man must be angry or they would certainly have voted for Hillary. Maybe a lot of white conservatives just don;t fucking trust her and want to give some new ideas a chance since things could be even greater in our great country. And even if they don't get greater what have we got to lose? More importantly maybe we don't want her representing our nation on a world stage. And seriously - do you have some kind of psychological urge to play the paranoid helpless victim every second of the day? Damn that would depress the shit out of me. You are not "fucked" because we have checks and balances at every level of government. Oh and do you realize most "angry white voters" (which exists more in the paranoid liberal imagination than reality)
are evangelicals and can't stand them or dismiss them as rubes? I honestly know only one guy in my peer group of "deplorables" at work who even goes to church or believes in evolution. White people as a whole aren't as church going or religious in general as blacks - who sure as fuck didn't vote for Trump.

Hillary is still refusing to accept any responsibility and is running around trying to find people to blame for her failure.

Seriously, what a shallow piece of shit she is.

Half of Detroit votes may be ineligible for recount

Taken out of context that sounds like fraud. Here's the rest of the article:

Either way it's good they called for a recount to highlight the issue.

The recount begins.

^Seth Rogen?!

"caption this" on the grave yard picture: "dude! Check this out - I found Hillary's political career!"

I honestly don't get how in the land that gave the world the Apollo program, the Cray supercomputer and the frickin' iPhone, that we cannot come up with a system for elections that isn't a sadistic joke.

Here in NY you stand on the line with a truly gigantic sized ballot form contained in an equally big, but totally useless folder. You fill it out on the line so, you know, everyone can see how you're voting and just fuck that privacy nonsense anyway. You then need an election official to help you load the damn thing into the scanner (yay, another privacy breach!) and watch the machine promptly proceed to spit the form out for another try. Total clusterfuck.

Meanwhile, when we had the 70 odd year old machines, you stepped inside, pulled the large red lever and the privacy curtains closed behind you. You then toggled a series levers that selected your picks, pulled the red lever again, your vote was counted and the curtains opened and you were done. No help needed, less then 10-20 seconds, and complete privacy.

How, in this age where you can talk to your phone and it will talk back to you, and we almost have self driving cars, did we manage to make this process worse?

Because those entrusted with maintaining and improving the process apparently have a vested interest in making it worse?

Recount has ended and the numbers were off..

http://tribunist.com/news/wisconsin...-stein-was-right-they-are-off/?utm_source=CDH

Lol what a ride

I remember when I voted in Tyler, Texas in the 2002 midterm elections. Now Tyler, TX at that time wasn't that large a place. Just under 90,000 people. I went to vote and they handed me a little book. The book was the election form. Fully twenty six pages long!!! Voting on everything from congressman, to new state regulations, state, city, and country officials. No "dog catcher" but damned near everything else.

But if you didn't want to bother reading all through that and spending forever voting it had the option of voting "straight Republican" or "straight Democratic" which I did (straight Republican). Which given the complexity makes you understand why some people simply do the straight ticket stuff.

Wow, I had totally forgotten about this little laugher of a fiasco. Thanks for the necro.

Haha! He's worse!!

Pretty much what I foretold although I thought he would be corrupt I thought it would be more like U.S. Grant. I.E. incompetent, clueless, and personally disinterested thus letting special interests rob the nation blind. It turns out he is all of those things but also personally corrupt, immoral, and even less law abiding than Nixon.

Luckily, we will soon be having homeless crazies put in asylums. That will be a big positive course correct which is very badly needed and we know that is true because even far left San Francisco has figured out some crazies need to be locked up and not just left roaming the streets.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/voter-suppression-wisconsin-election-2016/


On election night, Anthony was shocked to see Trump carry Wisconsin by nearly 23,000 votes. The state, which ranked second in the nation in voter participation in 2008 and 2012, saw its lowest turnout since 2000. More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than in 2012. Turnout fell only slightly in white middle-class areas of the city but plunged in black ones. In Anthony’s old district, where aging houses on quiet tree-lined streets are interspersed with boarded-up buildings and vacant lots, turnout dropped by 23 percent from 2012. This is where Clinton lost the state and, with it, the larger narrative about the election.
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Three years after Wisconsin passed its voter ID law in 2011, a federal judge blocked it, noting that 9 percent of all registered voters did not have the required forms of ID. Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than whites to lack these IDs because they were less likely to drive or to be able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more likely to have moved from out of state. There is, of course, no one thing that swung the election. Clinton’s failings, James Comey’s 11th-hour letter, Russian interference, fake news, sexism, racism, and a struggling economy in key swing states all contributed to Trump’s victory. We will never be able to assign exact proportions to all the factors at play. But a year later, interviews with voters, organizers, and election officials reveal that, in Wisconsin and beyond, voter suppression played a much larger role than is commonly understood.
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A post-election study by Priorities USA, a Democratic super-PAC that supported Clinton, found that in 2016, turnout decreased by 1.7 percent in the three states that adopted stricter voter ID laws but increased by 1.3 percent in states where ID laws did not change. Wisconsin’s turnout dropped 3.3 percent. If Wisconsin had seen the same turnout increase as states whose laws stayed the same, “we estimate that over 200,000 more voters would have voted in Wisconsin in 2016,” the study said. These “lost voters”—those who voted in 2012 and 2014 but not 2016—”skewed more African American and more Democrat” than the overall voting population. Some academics criticized the study’s methodology, but its conclusions were consistent with a report from the Government Accountability Office, which found that strict voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee had decreased turnout by roughly 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drops among black, young, and new voters.
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In other states, the rollback of voting protections was aided by the Supreme Court, which in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that nine primarily Southern states—and cities and counties in six others—with long histories of voting discrimination no longer had to clear new election rules with the federal government. The 2016 election was the first presidential contest in more than 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.

A month after the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina passed a sweeping rewrite of its election laws, requiring voter IDs, cutting early voting, and eliminating same-day registration, among other changes, before the law was struck down in a federal court for targeting black voters “with almost surgical precision.” Ohio repealed the first week of early voting, when African Americans were five times likelier than whites to cast a ballot. Florida barred ex-felons from becoming eligible to vote after serving their time, preventing 1.7 million Floridians from voting in 2016, including 1 in 5 black voting-age residents.
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A few weeks earlier, US District Judge James Peterson, who oversaw the implementation of the voter ID law, had found that Wisconsin’s process for issuing IDs was a “wretched failure” that “has disenfranchised a number of citizens who are unquestionably qualified to vote.” Eighty-five percent of those denied IDs by the DMV were black or Latino, he noted in his ruling.
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https://www.jsonline.com/story/news...consin-because-states-voter-id-law/514628002/

MADISON - Attorney General Brad Schimel this week suggested Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 because the state had its voter ID law in place.

His comments drew a rebuke from liberals, who said they saw it as an admission by the Republican attorney general that the voter ID law suppresses Democratic turnout.

Voter ID is expected to play a prominent role in Schimel's re-election bid. He has fought in court to keep the law in place and his opponent, Josh Kaul, is the lead attorney challenging it and a host of other election laws.

"We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November '16 election," Schimel told conservative host Vicki McKenna on WISN (1130 AM) on Thursday.

"How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Senator (Ron) Johnson was going to win re-election or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?"
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http://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/01/08/voter-suppression-steve-almond

Republicans have been openly working to disenfranchise poor and minority voters for decades.

They do this using numerous tactics. Here are just a few outlined in the United Nations' recent report on poverty in the U.S.: “Artificial and unnecessary ID requirements, the blatant manipulation of polling station locations, the relocating of DMVs to make it more difficult for certain groups to obtain IDs.”

As the GOP has become a minority party, run by demagogues and plutocrats and increasingly driven by the racial grievances of aging whites, it has had to resort to attacking voter turnout in order to win elections.
Not only are these efforts verifiable, but many Republicans proudly admit to them.

“Of course it’s political,” veteran consultant Carter Wrenn told the Washington Post. “Why else would you do it?”

This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work, of course. The 1965 Voting Right Act was passed specifically to outlaw such efforts, which thrived in the Jim Crow South.

But four years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states could pass restrictive voting laws without federal approval. Fourteen states did so, all with legislatures controlled by Republicans. These measures did not make voting impossible, merely more difficult, especially for the urban poor.

As intended, voting rates dipped in all these states on Election Day 2016. In Wisconsin, where Trump won by 23,000 votes, new voter identification laws reduced turnout by 200,000 votes. Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods alone saw a drop of 41,000 votes.

In North Carolina, GOP lawmakers passed a voter ID law in 2013 that caused voter registration to plummet, before it was abolished in court for being racially discriminatory. Republicans then attempted to purge thousands from the state’s voting rolls, which a federal judge deemed “insane.” Another court noted that lawmakers had “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices” then crafted a law to disenfranchise African-Americans.

GOP-controlled election boards also slashed early voting sites and reduced their hours in particular counties, especially on Sundays, when African-American churches sponsored “souls to the polls” voting drives. The result was that early voting turnout was 20 percent lower in so-called “suppressed counties” than in other counties. None of these tactics was a secret. The state GOP in North Carolina put out a press release before Election Day bragging that African-American turnout was down by 8.5 percent in early voting.

The list goes on and on.

timely today.