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Politics

Politics

U.S. Political news and discussion. International news and politics also welcome.

9082 members
Posted byFate_Axyomin/politics-Jan 14 at 11:39 PM

John Lewis is the last person Donald Trump should be picking a fight with right now

  • Opinion
  • Editorial

John Lewis is the last person Donald Trump should be picking a fight with right now

This is not how Trump will lift his 37% approval rating.

vox.com
Comments14
  • nachdenkenJan 15 at 12:21 AM

    Help me to understand this as a non-US-citizen, please: who voted for Trump if the majority is disapproving the way he handles his future job?

    • zhemaoJan 15 at 12:35 AM

      It's because of our winner-takes-all electoral college system. Basically, the presidential election is decided by electoral votes. Each state is given a number of votes equal to the number of representatives and senators it has (2 senators + representatives according to population). But other than Maine, all of the states give all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins a plurality in the state election. That's how you can have a race in which a candidate wins by a solid electoral majority, but loses the popular vote by 2 million+ votes. So if you just consider the people who voted for one of the two major party candidates, Trump already has >50% against him. But there are also people who voted third party, chose not to vote for a presidential candidate, chose not to vote at all, or were not allowed to vote (voter suppression was very high in some states this election due to overriding of some provisions in the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court). Add those all up and you get a lot of people who never wanted Trump to be president.

      • nachdenkenJan 15 at 2:16 AM

        Thank you for your explanation. Foregive me please for being sarcastic, but wasn't the US always claiming to have the best democracy in the world? 😊

        More serious: what you describe might very well be a valid reason for being 5% off, but it doesn't explain a 20 to 40 (!) % difference in the approval rates, compared to prior presidents. Could it be that people trusted simple but wrong statements during election campaign and are now waking up?

        Thx again!

      • carljoeJan 15 at 2:51 AM

        Couple things just to expand the conversation, while yeah it's a democracy, some of these safeguards like the electoral college, are in place as safeguards against the populace, a sad holdover from slavery (the institutions of which are still playing large parts in the discourse today). Obama is very right in pointing to the democracy of the US being problematic and constantly sorting itself out. Great principles and a people that struggle to live up to them (that's how I want to think about it anyway).

        Regarding that approval rating, I don't have any hard data on me about it, but my intuition is that some of it is buyer's remorse as you say, people realizing whoops. A large part of the win was the revenge vote, with people voting trump thinking it was a vote against the liberals or whatever, and it was a vote cast out of anger or spite. But people didn't really realize what they were voting. I'm thinking similar to the Brexit vote.

        Lots of ways to look at it. And I am just caught thinking about the global trends and, well, grasping for explanations. What's your read on it?

      • UncannyValleyForgeJan 15 at 3:23 AM

        I mean, the US school system is pretty terrible and civics aren't widely taught--usually it gets about as far as "DICTATORSHIP BAD, DEMOCRACY GOOD, AMERICA DEMOCRACY, THEREFORE AMERICA GOOD." So I think most Americans just kind of inherit the "best democracy" thing without thinking about it. :P

        (And I think you're probably right, in part, that a lot of it is people "waking up," but even moreso you have to bear in mind that less than half of the country voted this past November. I don't know where this approval rating is coming from, but if it includes people who didn't or couldn't vote, that might account for further differences.)

      • colbyklausJan 15 at 3:25 AM

        additional bit:

        Nebraska also splits its EVs. Winner gets 2, and then winner of each district gets 1 (there are three districts).

      • colbyklausJan 15 at 3:38 AM

        there were also some who voted because they truly, honestly believed Trump would bring a massive increase in jobs and restore coal and manufacturing to levels near their peak.

        which, of course, has various causes. part of it is certainly people with lack of access to education or information, specifically how the big drivers against coal are natural gas booming, automation reducing the need for human workers, and it being cheaper to build power plants that don't rely on coal. manufacturing, of course, has also seen a loss of jobs due to automation. that's why we have less people in those sectors but have continuously trended upwards as far as productivity goes.

        part of it is some of those job gains under Obama didn't affect rural areas, where farmers saw incomes decrease due to cattle and grain dropping in sale price while the cost of seeds for planting has kept increasing. there were some jobs gained in those areas due to the ACA creating a market where hospitals could expand or open up, but otherwise these are areas where you're not going to have many new jobs open up because new companies have no interest in moving there. so people voted for Trump because they felt democratic polices under Obama only helped the cities and they were left behind.

        part of it is certainly the messaging of the campaign. Hillary had a ton of policies to bring jobs back and help people, but little of it got any coverage on any news outlets, and people in smaller areas are more likely to watch local news channels which won't cover it at all. so the media kind of unintentionally assisted Trump by livestreaming his rallies where he promises jobs without specific policies, while Clinton tells people to visit her website or read her book. she talked a lot at her rallies, but they didn't get coverage, and if they weren't in an area people could access then they'd never hear anything she had to say.

        but, of course, there's a lot of overlap between people who voted for him on job promises, and people who voted for him because of bigoted and hateful comments he made as someone who held himself up as protector of the poor man against immigrants and change.

        there are still, though, trump voters who say it was just the jobs, they didn't like his comments on women and minorities, and maybe now they're realizing what a liar he is.

      • nachdenkenJan 15 at 7:32 AMΔ

        What's my read in it? I think it's a global and very frightening trend in western civilisations. The phenomena Trump in your country is called Le Pen in France, Kaszinski in Poland, Orban in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Wilder in the Netherlands, Johnson in UK, AFD in Germany etc. All of them are successfully collecting 2-digit shares of votes with aparently simple, but wrong answers to complex problems. All the major issues, our nations are facing are not solvable with a simple yes/no-answer. In all of them we have to balance values and interests and each possible solution has a rat-tail of consequences. People can't follow those paths or don't want to follow. Additionally we made a huge mistake by not listening to the 'men on the streets' who keep our countries running and provide them with the warm and fuzzy feeling that they are being heard and taken serious (a good example of this is the existence of the word "fly-over-states" in your country, we have similar expressions in Germany). Furthermore we all have become numb and take the freedom and liberty we have achieved in our societies over the past decades and centuries far too much for granted.

        The logical consequence is the raise of populists, the aparently 'strong men' who appear to be able to overrule the complexity of our world by simply taking some hard decisions. What really happens if they come to power is that freedom and liberty as we enjoy it is at jeopardy. It happened numerous times in history, e.g. 1933 in Germany.

        Do I have precise and simple answers to solve this problem? Nope, but i strongly believe that it's time to fight for our freedom and liberty, again.

      • zhemaoJan 15 at 12:20 PM

        The approval rating polls don't take into account if someone voted or not. If 50% of the voting age population didn't vote at all, and of those 50% voted for Clinton or a third party candidate, then less than 25% of the population the survey covers did not cast a vote for Trump. So a 37.5% approval rating is certainly possible under those conditions.

    • SleepymachineJan 15 at 6:24 AM

      Trump did about as well as the previous Republican (Romney). Clinton failed to perform as well as Obama.

      Both Clinton & Trump were the most unpopular candidates in that polling's history. So much for "democracy."

      (The US of course isn't a democracy. The founding fathers hated democracy. Elections aren't democratic; they're aristocratic. The US is somewhere in between democracy & dictatorship; there are limited ways people can legally participate.)

  • carljoeJan 15 at 2:54 AM

    My goodness. After reading this piece I was caught thinking, can't he even attack Lewis in an articulate manner? Lewis is such a hero, it's unbelievable.

  • BetaMaleBillJan 15 at 1:19 AM

    It would be a sound strategy to let him take as much rope to hang himself as he wants, but that's what I thought during the election too.

    Nothing makes sense anymore. 😔

    • carljoeJan 15 at 2:45 AM

      "Nothing makes sense anymore."

      So heartbreaking and true :( but hey all the world hasn't gone crazy. We gotta tie ourselves to the mast and weather the storm.

      • BetaMaleBillJan 15 at 3:40 AM

        Yeah you are right ultimately. It's just been a depressing few weeks reading headlines like this. But all things pass. It helps to remind yourself of this sometimes.

Politics

Politics

U.S. Political news and discussion. International news and politics also welcome.

9082 members
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