Sincerely, I am confused by this analysis. All the media outlets have talked ad-infinitum about how Trump supporters are predominantly uneducated whites, typically from rural areas, and how college educated whites support Clinton.
Hillary without question had Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the DC circuit behind her, which are large epicenters of wealthy white, elite people.
There is without doubt a terrifying aspect of white nationalism behind Trump, but unless you have statistics I am not aware of, the white elites, maybe outside of Texas, were not behind Trump.
EDIT - to add what I believe is a hopeful note, Trump's election isn't a great reading of the pulse of the nation; Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect. The DNC selected the less competitive candidate as the result of a dishonest primary.
I think there are many hidden Trump voters. They might never disclose at work or among friends their choice, but I suspected many did. I was watching both the Hillary and Trump Reddit channels, and on Trumps' channel there was a constant stream of educated people (doctors, programmers, lawyers), a large number of non-whites, LGBT, ex-Bernie people there and so on.
On Hillary's side there was a constant -- "Ah look at those stupid sexists, hating us for wanting a a woman President" type of complacency.
So the result was surprising, but not too surprising at the same time.
> Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect
Bernie would have wiped the floor with Trump, no doubt.
Yet a significant portion of the hidden Trump voters were more anti-Hillary than happy about Trump. Sam Altman declared support for Hillary because he was anti-Trump; likewise people supported Trump because they were anti-Hillary. I believe if you have no identity politics affiliations, if you read WikiLeaks, it is challenging to keep supporting Hillary, unless you have strong beliefs that Trump is still the worse of the two.
It's a general portrait. I'm speaking as a Bernie supporter. Probably most salient, which I think was Peter Thiel's decisive issue, is her seeming to be pro-war and the enthusiastic support of the arms industry (biggest arms deal in history to Saudi Arabia, exports doubled under tenure, etc.), and probably the worst here was showing how she, even against the wishes of many Obama insiders, pursued regime change in Libya to have an 'accomplishment' to campaign on. Then, it would probably be the connections with corruption, via "pay-to-play" as they referred to it through the Clinton Foundation while SOS (particularly with Gulf States), and, after revelations of DWS's corrupt actions in the DNC, the seeming impunity to promote her. Maybe a final concerning image to a Bernie supporter was her position as a cog among the big banks (most poignant here was Wall Street's list for Obama's cabinet, who in fact came to be the cabinet). Arguably it's more about the DC establishment than HRC, and this characterization of her should be taken to task, but this was, in my opinion, the portrait left by WikiLeaks.
My point is that almost none of those positions are backed up by any Wikileaks evidence. It's just comforting to know that there's a big pile of "something" out there, and in it is probably something that supports what you believe.
Then surely you wouldn't mind linking me to emails which conclusively show, e.g. some evidence of a pay-to-play scheme involving State, CF and Gulf Arab states.
It's a summary of the emails from the creator of WikiLeaks, if you don't believe him than to you WikiLeaks isn't credible. You're asking me to spend 20-30 minutes retrieving and linking when you are probably the only person who would ever see it.
I do vote; what I don't do is let my imagination and bias run wild with insinuation, and I'm not lazy about my evidence. When I have confronted others about what's actually in the Wikileaks dump, nobody has failed to get past the "produce a link to primary evidence supporting your claim" step. Intellectually honest people at least reason from primary evidence when it's available to them.
It's pretty amazing that you can't even do that, and yet you want to lecture and condescend me.
No sorry, I linked you what you asked for. The "most damaging wikileaks" link has all the links to the emails organized by offense. In just the first 20 or so from my skimming there was pay-to-play evidence with the emails they were found in.
You've demonstrated a closed mind about this, and were not willing to look into it yourself, so I think that counts as being willfully ignorant.
I got as far as #3, wherein they cite an emailed article as being one of the key quotes from the email. That's nakedly pushing an agenda, there's no intellectual honesty in that -- it's like me asking you to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and then telling everyone how you casually refer to black people using the N-word.
To be frank, it's as honest as I'd expected it to be, and exactly why I wanted you to build your case from primary sources. Anyone can quote trash sources and force the other person to do the fact-checking; you should be able to build the case up from primary sources if there's any there there.
> Arguably it's more about the DC establishment than HRC
I think many problems WikiLeaks revealed were related to her being beholden to the entrenched interests (including controversial allies, like Saudi Arabia). But yes, :) I considered making this caveat in my original post, because I think you're 70% right. I doubt much will change re banks, but I also doubt he would appoint his cabinet based on a list emailed to him from banking execs. Re war, it's probably best to refer to Peter Thiel on why he so strongly thinks Trump will avoid war. We are currently bombing 7 countries and I'd like to think his not being beholden to the arms industry means he could change that if he wanted, and while he may not, I am more certain he would not do another $80 billion arms export to Gulf States or push for a regime change in a ME country. I don't think anyone who read WikiLeaks and decided to abandon Hillary thought highly of Trump, just the feeling that one is no longer defensible and the other is unknown but at least not beholden.
I was a Bernie supporter who switched to Trump after reading Wikileaks stuff. I can summarize really quickly what the problem was, in all the thousands upon thousands of emails that I personally looked at alongside others in dialog online, while combing through them could I could not not find even a single shred of evidence of any discussion about what is best for America. Every discussion of policy in every email was not picking and choosing which positions were the best positions for the country, but which polled the best and basing their platform sporadically on that.
A campaign should be ran with a candidate sitting down with their advisers and team, stating plainly what their policy positions, overarching themes, and plans are. Then it is the advisers job to market popular positions to the public, and spin unpopular positions or complex policy to make them more sell-able to the public.
That is absolutely not what was going on in these emails, they literally show the campaign making up positions on the fly to fill a near-empty husk containing nothing but globalization. She is the literal definition of everything that is wrong with modern politics. This is not how policy decisions should be created.
I don't even actually like Trump.
-midwestern rustbelt 'non-bachelors-holding' voter in a state that went red for the first time in years.
> Every discussion of policy in every email was not picking and choosing which positions were the best positions for the country, but which polled the best and basing their platform sporadically on that.
Agreed. But didn't you knew that already? Didn't everyone knew that?
It's naive to think that the reps and Trump don't act this way. He might not have used an army of focus groups, but he knew what people wanted to hear and went for it.
I agree with you that Bernie would have been the best for America, but 5-10 years from now the US is going to end up a worst place with Trump than with Clinton, and it's not the rich or the city folks who will suffer more, but the rural voters who will realize that they did had something to lose =/
That sentiment I understand however voting Trump because you really like the guy and his views is weird imho. Like you I suspect many many votes were just anti Hillary and the hope Trump will just be a marionette.
My highly unscientific analysis of the numbers is that Trump won in many rural and less populous districts, whereas Hillary won the more densely populated districts. This by itself probably isn't much of a surprise, and the less populous districts have significantly fewer votes – but there are more of them. Combine a strong Trump performance in these small districts with an underperforming Hillary in the others, along with a number of flipped districts, and it becomes clear how Trump won. (Note: how, not why.)
Check the results for Wisconsin for instance, and you'll find a lot flipped districts. In Michigan, the Detroit stronghold saw a drop of 8,6 points compared to the 2012 vote. To be fair, it looks like Wayne County (where Detroit is) according to that map isn't fully counted so this may very well change, but it's at 98.9% reporting so that'd have to be a pretty significant chunk of votes to widen that margin.
Again, this is armchair analysis so I may very well be writing bullcrap, but it looks to me that the Trump campaign where confident in keeping the red states and focused pretty hard on flipping some of the states the Democrats really didn't think they could possibly win, along with a strong push to win Florida. Those 29 electoral votes from the sunshine state really opened things up for Trump.
Electoral votes from working class, rust belt states - Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin - are arguably the main reason Trump won, as Michael Moore predicted.
"College educated whites" and "working class rust belt voters who are unemployed/under-employed" are largely overlapping groups in places like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.
Hillary without question had Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the DC circuit behind her, which are large epicenters of wealthy white, elite people.
There is without doubt a terrifying aspect of white nationalism behind Trump, but unless you have statistics I am not aware of, the white elites, maybe outside of Texas, were not behind Trump.
EDIT - to add what I believe is a hopeful note, Trump's election isn't a great reading of the pulse of the nation; Bernie Sanders could have been in my opinion, easily, the president elect. The DNC selected the less competitive candidate as the result of a dishonest primary.