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billvon

Russia swayed US election

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billvon

>No. CA indicated a preference for HRC. The rest of the country picked Trump.

The most uneducated, racist people in the country chose Trump. The rest of the country chose Clinton.

(just as accurate.)



I've spent enough time around the "educated" to know I prefer the deplorables.
Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

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I've spent enough time around the "educated" to know I prefer the deplorables.




I'd have to say I'm neither. But we'd probably get along just fine. I'd only laugh about your Racer behind your back. Or you might think I'm deplorable.
Always remember the brave children who died defending your right to bear arms. Freedom is not free.

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gowlerk

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I've spent enough time around the "educated" to know I prefer the deplorables.




I'd have to say I'm neither. But we'd probably get along just fine. I'd only laugh about your Racer behind your back. Or you might think I'm deplorable.


:P
Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

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rushmc

Now you resort to trolling.



What do you call what you're doing? When you say, in effect, "Take away a massive block of Hilary's strongest supporters and Trump wins the popular vote!" you're not stupid enough to think that you're making a real point, are you?:S

Honestly, I hope you're trolling, otherwise damn!:D
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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billvon

>Now you resort to trolling.

You excluded Californians from your count.

I excluded the least educated from my count.

Why am I trolling, but you are not?



My comment is backed by fact. Yours is backed by opinion.
"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

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gowlerk

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I've spent enough time around the "educated" to know I prefer the deplorables.




I'd have to say I'm neither. But we'd probably get along just fine. I'd only laugh about your Racer behind your back. Or you might think I'm deplorable.



Racer, now thats funny.

I detest the term deplorables. trump can't deliver the legacy steel mill jobs that pay $100k a year. For plants that were never upgraded during their entire history. The old tire plants that hired any American who could drive a forklift and still pay $100k a year. Whether they could read or write, or not. They all still deserve a vote.

The question remains if they recognize the mistake they made by voting trump in 2017 or if it takes till 2018.

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As long as Trump says things that have them feeling good about themselves, they'll like him, regardless of what happens behind the curtain. Unlike Reagan (who apparently really was as sunny and cheerful as he appeared), Trump is focused more on immediate public opinion, with him as the number one member of the public, than on longer-term results. So if that takes making sure that someone is more miserable than the dispossessed middle Americans, he's up to that, whether it's by tweeting how they're fat, ugly, disloyal, Muslim, whatever, or other means. Because as long as his numbers are up in relation to the base, he's good. Depressing the base is just as effective as raising his numbers.

Wendy P.
There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

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rushmc

My comment is backed by fact. Yours is backed by opinion.


Yeah, your fact is that if you take out California the rest of the contry voted for Trump - by a fraction.

My fact is that if you take out any of the states Trump won, the rest of the country voted Clinton by a landslide.

And my other fact is, if you take out no states at all, the entire country voted Clinton, by quite a sizeable margin.
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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jakee

***My comment is backed by fact. Yours is backed by opinion.


Yeah, your fact is that if you take out California the rest of the contry voted for Trump - by a fraction.

My fact is that if you take out any of the states Trump won, the rest of the country voted Clinton by a landslide.

And my other fact is, if you take out no states at all, the entire country voted Clinton, by quite a sizeable margin.

Sizable?

Laughable.

In any event, the EC is in place to make sure one state does not elect the president.
Worked as intended.

Secondly, you have no idea how the vote count would have went had the candidates been campaigning for the popular vote and not the EC.
Now, we know these same candidates DID work for the EC votes and Hillary failed, Trump won.
All the rest is just crybaby spilled milk.

And to think, it was the same whimpering baby lefties that condemned Trump about his comments about accepting the vote.

Do you realize how damned silly you all look?

Do you?
"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

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I may be in the minority here but I agree with the point of the electoral college as it relates to balancing against the popular vote. It's a pretty fundamental principle of protecting the minority from the mob. You can't have every state in the country affected by only what a couple of states want. If that were the case then the problem of pandering to a couple of states would only get worse.
"I encourage all awesome dangerous behavior." - Jeffro Fincher

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DJL

I may be in the minority here but I agree with the point of the electoral college as it relates to balancing against the popular vote. It's a pretty fundamental principle of protecting the minority from the mob. You can't have every state in the country affected by only what a couple of states want. If that were the case then the problem of pandering to a couple of states would only get worse.



The issue is, that was the idea of why it was created, but the unintended consequences of the how it happens in practice fixes nothing since we still have the exact same issue.

Rather than a few states with the largest populations having more power, it shifts the power to a few "swing" states. It fundamentally breaks the system it was put in place to fix and ultimately fixes nothing.

If you don't think the current system panders to a few select states and has an unfair distribution of electoral power, you simply have not been paying attention to how elections spend their money and in which states.
quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

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In any event, the EC is in place to make sure one state does not elect the president.



No it isn't. If the Presidency was decided by popular vote California would not have elected Clinton - the entire country would have.

Quote

Worked as intended.



Would you have accepted the result if enough EC members who weren't bound by the results of their state's popular vote had switched sides and elected Clinton?

That would have been the EC working as intended.

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Secondly, you have no idea how the vote count would have went had the candidates been campaigning for the popular vote and not the EC.


Then why the fuck are you arguing about where the popular vote majorities for either side were concentrated? You're trying (unsuccessfully!) to use those concentrations to argue against the popular vote but you're also arguing that no-one knows if those concentrations would exist if the popular vote was used!

Why are you arguing against yourself?:D

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And to think, it was the same whimpering baby lefties that condemned Trump about his comments about accepting the vote.



No-one is refusing to accept the results except you. You won and yet you're still too much of a crybaby to accept the vote without first pretending the US only has 49 states:D
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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DJL

I may be in the minority here but I agree with the point of the electoral college as it relates to balancing against the popular vote. It's a pretty fundamental principle of protecting the minority from the mob.



No it isn't, it has nothing to do with that. If you're saying the minority needs to be protected from the majority in a presidential election then you're saying the minority needs to be protected from the president. Well guess what - you get a president either way. So you've just swapped inflicting an unwanted president onto the minority for inflicting an unwanted president on the majority.

So who the fuck are you protecting?

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You can't have every state in the country affected by only what a couple of states want.



A) You would never that in a popular vote.

B) You have more of that with the EC than with the popular vote.

C) Why is it about states instead of people? Why is one American's opinion less valid because they live within an arbitrarily created political division that has lots of people in it?
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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Hi jakee,

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If the Presidency was decided by popular vote California would not have elected Clinton - the entire country would have.



While rushmc is the poster child for this; I have yet to understand why others on here cannot grasp this concept.

One person, one vote. Eazzy - peezy,

Jerry Baumchen

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https://amash.house.gov/press-release/amash-and-jones-request-evidence-russia%E2%80%99s-alleged-interference-presidential-election

December 19, 2016

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

Recent reports citing anonymous administration officials suggest that some intelligence agencies believe the Russian government interfered in the U.S. presidential election with the intention of aiding the campaign of President-elect Donald Trump. The reports do not detail specific evidence to support these assertions, and some reports suggest there are disagreements among intelligence officials.

Shortly after the initial reporting, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence requested an urgent briefing to resolve contradictions between these new allegations and information previously provided to the committee. The chairman’s request was quickly denied, followed by a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that Congress will not be briefed until a review you requested has been completed. Less than two days later, with no congressional briefing scheduled, you took to NPR to announce retaliatory action against Russia for “impacting the integrity of our elections.”

It is incumbent upon the executive branch to keep Congress apprised of hostile foreign actions in a timely manner, and once an allegation has been made public, it is reckless to allow evidence-free assertions to serve as Congress’s and the public’s only source of information. Members of Congress must be briefed on any evidence the intelligence community has gathered so that we may weigh the evidence and evaluate the conclusions of the separate agencies. Although the ODNI claims the administration has previously briefed members and staff on this issue, those briefings were provided only to a select group, and the information was not disseminated to most of Congress.

In light of the conflicting information coming from your administration, the lack of public evidence, and the retaliation against Russia that is apparently already under development, Congress cannot wait to be briefed on this matter. Accordingly, we request that a classified briefing on the evidence being used to support these claims be made available to all members of Congress immediately.

Sincerely,

Justin Amash (MI-03)
Member of Congress

Walter Jones (NC-03)
Member of Congress

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>I've spent enough time around the "educated" to know I prefer the deplorables.

So you'd prefer to hang out with people who burn black churches and paint "VOTE TRUMP" on the side? Paint swastikas on Jewish homes? Switch to Nazi salutes? Attack children who look Muslim?

OK then; I guess you have different tastes in friends than I do. Fortunately there are still places in the south where you'd be welcomed with open arms.

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>My comment is backed by fact. Yours is backed by opinion.

Mine is backed by just as much fact as yours is.

======================
Nov 22, 2016 at 2:53 PM
Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump

538

Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page. Here’s one example of the latter.

I took a list of all 981 U.S. counties with 50,000 or more people and sorted it by the share of the population that had completed at least a four-year college degree. Hillary Clinton improved on President Obama’s 2012 performance in 48 of the country’s 50 most-well-educated counties. And on average, she improved on Obama’s margin of victory in these countries by almost 9 percentage points, even though Obama had done pretty well in them to begin with.. . .

Now here’s the opposite list: The 50 counties (minimum population of 50,000) where the smallest share of the population has bachelor’s degrees. . . .

These results are every bit as striking: Clinton lost ground relative to Obama in 47 of the 50 counties — she did an average of 11 percentage points worse, in fact. These are really the places that won Donald Trump the presidency, especially given that a fair number of them are in swing states such as Ohio and North Carolina. He improved on Mitt Romney’s margin by more than 30 points (!) in Ashtabula County, Ohio, for example, an industrial county along Lake Erie that hadn’t voted Republican since 1984.


How do we know that education levels drove changes in support — as opposed to income levels, for example? It’s tricky because there’s a fairly strong correlation between income and education. Nonetheless, with the whole country to pick from, we can find some places where education levels are high but incomes are average or below average. If education is the key driver of changes in the electorate, we’d expect Clinton to hold steady or gain in these counties. If income matters more, we might see her numbers decline.
. . .

In short, it appears as though educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016. You can come to that conclusion with a relatively simple analysis, like the one I’ve conducted above, or by using fancier methods. In a regression analysis at the county level, for instance, lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump once you control for education levels.11 And although there’s more work to be done, these conclusions also appear to hold if you examine the data at a more granular level, like by precinct or among individual voters in panel surveys.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/
====================

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jakee

C) Why is it about states instead of people? Why is one American's opinion less valid because they live within an arbitrarily created political division that has lots of people in it?



Because of the original sin of the US, slavery. Pure and simple, that IS the reason. That IS how the "electoral college" came to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

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I meant why is the modern argument about states. When discussing the merits of either system there is no reason to be stuck framing the discussion in the same way it was framed 250 years ago.

(And by people who would have been quite happy if the EC had rebelled and chosen Clinton, I might add.)
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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jakee

I meant why is the modern argument about states. When discussing the merits of either system there is no reason to be stuck framing the discussion in the same way it was framed 250 years ago.

(And by people who would have been quite happy if the EC had rebelled and chosen Clinton, I might add.)



Because it would require a US Constitutional Amendment to change it directly. That is extraordinarily unlikely to ever happen since it would require a 2/3rds vote in Congress and an additional 3/4ths state ratification.

Look, it's pretty clear that if the US were starting from scratch in 2016 we'd NEVER decide on the Electoral College as a system. We've never pushed for it in any other country on the planet when "helping" them to set their own governments up. As far as I can tell, we're the only country that has anything even remotely like it. It was a flawed system from day one and will continue to be until changed, but as I've said, that's highly unlikely.

That said, I think if we care about the Electoral College so damn much, we really ought to free the electors to vote however they want, as originally intended, or stop with the "winner take all" nonsense we have at the state level. The current system is completely out of whack.
quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

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So who the fuck are you protecting?



Um, fucking chill the fuckety-fuck out!!

Continuing,,,,

Quade:

In regard to swing states, I agree, it's something that should be more directly reflect a balance. But good luck changing that.

As I said, the issue would only get worse, meaning it doesn't work well right now. Worse would be the heavily populated states having the only say in how the country is governed. There are issues more closely related to the densely populated areas than there are to the more sparse areas, that doesn't mean that they're more important to country's health. This is a very large country and it's difficult to make one shoe fit it all but unless we become regionalized it's how it'll need to be.


For Angry Jakee:

A) You would never that in a popular vote.

What you would have is areas with higher population densities controlling the vote. There's nothing wrong with a certain degree of that but it needs to be balanced with the needs of the more sparse areas. Just because Northern Virginia thinks the school system is A-OK, doesn't mean that SW Tennessee is OK.

B) You have more of that with the EC than with the popular vote.

I disagree.

C) Why is it about states instead of people? Why is one American's opinion less valid because they live within an arbitrarily created political division that has lots of people in it?

They're imaginary lines, but for the context of this conversation, that's what we're talking about. The answer is because eventually you have power migration to those city centers and the good people of Dubuque are left with no educational funding or business incentives because the people in Newark or SanFran all have good jobs after good schools and don't see that as a priority.

A popular vote can be the result of a mob mentality. Ironically, the concept of electors is supposed to protect against that but I guess we're shit out of luck.
"I encourage all awesome dangerous behavior." - Jeffro Fincher

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Um, fucking chill the fuckety-fuck out!!
...For Angry Jakee:



Haha, don't worry dude, when I swear it doesn't mean I'm worked up, it's just how I talk. Especially for emphasis when someone says something particularly dumb. I'm not angry that you're saying dumb things, I'm just pointing it out. Cool?:)
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What you would have is areas with higher population densities controlling the vote.



No you wouldn't. But if you did, at the level of government the President is responsible for, so what?

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Just because Northern Virginia thinks the school system is A-OK, doesn't mean that SW Tennessee is OK.



And the current electoral system ensures that the President ensures that his staff weigh up the desires of both Northern Virginia and South West Tennessee when instructing his department of education on policy direction, does it? No, obviously it doesn't. That's ridiculous. Never mind that Northern Virginia and South West Tennessee are not homogeonous blobs of hive mind people that all want the same things anyway:S

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I disagree.


I know, but you're wrong.

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The answer is because eventually you have power migration to those city centers



Instead of keeping the power where it belongs, in the hands of fewer people in smaller towns? That's a good thing why?

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and the good people of Dubuque are left with no educational funding or business incentives because the people in Newark or SanFran all have good jobs after good schools and don't see that as a priority.



Good example. Dubuque senior high school looks fucking amazing. If I had kids I'd enrol them right now. I'm betting it would come out on top against the vast majority of inner city schools in any of America's major urban areas.

So where are the priorities now?

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A popular vote can be the result of a mob mentality.



So what? That has nothing to do with whether the result is of the vote is an example of mob oppression. Because once again, if it is, then the result of any Presidential election is oppression, except that sometimes it's inflicted by the minority instead.
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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There's nothing to understand from your point of view. We are not a democracy! We are a republic. Big difference. One person one vote doesn't count the way you would like it to in this case. Trump won get over it.
"America will never be destroyed from the outside,
if we falter and lose our freedoms,
it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

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rushmc

There's nothing to understand from your point of view. We are not a democracy! We are a republic. Big difference. One person one vote doesn't count the way you would like it to in this case. Trump won get over it.



If the electoral college had decided to vote for Clinton instead of Trump, as they were perfectly entitled to do, would you say the same thing?
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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