Three Trumpian thoughts
1. Electoral systems are borken
Clinton’s delegates got ~59,923,000 popular votes; Trump’s, ~59,693,000. So, Clinton got ~0.39% more than Trump. Clinton should win the presidency.
However, it is estimated that Trump will get 306 delegates, and Clinton 232. There will be 24% fewer delegates voting for Clinton than voting for Trump.
Electoral districts, colleges, delegates, indirect election are borken. In the US as in other countries. I wonder if the historic rationale for such systems is still applicable today. The US being a federation, it could easily reform its electoral law to grant equal value to each citizen’s vote, and forget about delegates. (Spain should do the same, as a few new parties have been advocating in recent years.)
2. Attempts to understand voting patterns are naïve
As in other occasions, surveys failed miserably to predict this outcome. Now, to unpack what really happened and understand the demographics behind each candidate… we naïvely look at surveys again.
The only way to know the demographics of the support for each candidate would be to examine ballots themselves and identify who cast them. That is impossible and wrong for many reasons.
Thus, let’s stop pretending that we now understand that Trump won because such-and-such segment of the population lied to pollsters and ended up supporting him in greater numbers than initially expected. Those statements are guesses, at best.
3. We live in political bubbles
For all I know, nobody among my American friends, workmates and acquaintances supports Trump. Nobody. If I extend that to my friends and acquaintances who are not even American citizens, who don’t live or vote there, the result is the same. The homogeneity within my bubble is so perfect, that every person I can think of has either condemned Trump in the strongest terms for the past months, or at the very least agreed/nodded to the usual negative comments about him.
The mere idea of someone within my circle defending Trump, or choosing him over Clinton, seems so bizarre to me. It feels as if a friend of mine admitted that they believed the Earth is a flat disc.
That is a very bad sign.
The new president-elect of the US is loved by no-one of the Americans I know, and hated by most people I know. Yet nearly half of voters elected him.
An yet, somehow, that imbalance is no obstacle for most of us to feel righteous about our political views, and to despise the depressing illiteracy and unfathomable choices of half the population.
I live in a political island. I bet so do you.
