Genuinely curious, I know why the die-hard Republicans voted for him, but how did he get so many votes to win the presidential election? Did people genuinely think he would be a capable president or just better than Clinton? It’s just like being a Trump voter/supporter is already pretty controversial (at least for outside of the US), I wonder how he ever got elected at all.
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Hillary was incredibly unpopular in swing states, voters were tired of the current Administration as is normal after two terms, people didn’t know just how bad Trump would be, Hillary made a number of gaffes and failed to campaign in competitive states, and Trump struck a cord with working class whites.
All that combines into Trump winning the Electoral College.
Because many perceived he had no other wish but to see the U. S. prosper, they liked he was not a politician per se, they liked his business acumen, and they saw him as patriotic.
I don’t want to argue those points either way w/anyone. I am answering the OP question : “How did he get so many votes?”
He campaigned better than Hillary. He went to places where no Presidential candidate had ever been. An element of the population that rarely voted , voted for him. Many false promises later he did nothing for them. He woke up part of society with much needed patriotic talk , which also empowered an extremist element of our society.
Populism and generalized anti-establishment sentiment.
Clinton was also a wildly unpalatable candidate for many people.
Because Hillary Clinton was the alternative.
I personally know at least 10 people who only causally vote and are somewhat non political who all made it a mission to vote on the presidential election when those famous words were spoken by Hillary Clinton -“Basket of deplorables” . She shot herself in the foot; I have no doubt in my mind she would have been president if not for that sentiment
I’m just here for the TDS.
Different people wanted him for Different reasons, the two biggest factors were the fact it was him or Hillary who had a skeleton army in her closet as well as pushing Bernie, one of the few legitimately favored politicians to the side lines.
The 2nd reason was that he seemed like he would shake things up, everyone saw the career politicians as crooks while he was the outsider to change things he said words thet didn’t like when America was just starting to get tired of PC which gave him extra charisma points.
If there was another factor it was that the media and social media demonizing him was clogging the actual political debate with minor BS making fun of his hair, or that he said something mean. It ended up smoke screening his actual vices. This played a major part in his time as president well, because while everyone was posting images of the diaper float he bungled intelligence assets and personally got Kurds killed and no one was the wiser.
Both Hillary and Donald were extremely polarizing. As one gal friend of mine put it, “I hope we get a woman in the White House some day, but I can’t stand her. So I guess I’m for voting for ‘grab her by the pussy!'” That is verbatim what she told me.
My guess is that in general, most people either identify Republican or Democrat and that’s just how they vote across the board. So then it’s a question of those in the middle.
I know quite a few people who voted for him – professionals in science and engineering, accounting; not this image of just hillbillies casting a vote. And for them, there was an appeal of, “Well this guy might actually be enough of a bombshell to stir shit up in Washington and make some changes.”
Yeah- the general sentiment here is right: there was a nationwide frustration with the status quo and Hillary was the status quo politician.
Her gaffes and controversies didn’t help much- her and her husband are widely perceived as incredibly corrupt and Trump hammered at that to great effect.
It’s not so much that Trump won as that Hillary _lost_. The Trump movement was a reaction to all the “right” people hating Trump; it seems like the more the media, celebrities, and the mainstream of the culture hates him the more people who otherwise would have been lukewarm towards him dig in.
The “Trump movement” is a big middle finger to everyone from people who like giving the middle finger
For most people, it was a vote against the neo-liberal status quo, rather than a vote specifically for Trump.
The US working class had seen their lives devastated for 50 years by neo-liberal policy and would have voted for anyone who promised to tear it down (many of them wanted to vote for Sanders but couldn’t). Trump promised to stop the trade deals that many in the US saw as unfair, to stop paying for US military protection for our allies, to get the US out of foreign wars and to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US. He promised to make the lives of the US working class better.
The US media is sneeringly hostile to the US working class and Trump gave them the finger and that helped to.
The Trump election was really a class conflict. It was a rebellion by the working class.
Too many Republicans in the primary and Hillary was extremely disliked in the right states. Hillary Clinton also took for granted that she would win a few key states.
I was a Republican my entire adult life until 2016 and even ran for office as one before becoming a Democrat (Trumpism made the party unrecognizable to me). I was a delegate to a dozen county and state conventions, and was an alternate to the 2008 Republican National Convention.
I’ll give my insider input. It was a number of factors
* Trump was an outsider. People wanted an outsider. Republicans apparently more so than Democrats, but it was happening in both parties, particularly with white people (who supported Bernie in the Democratic primaries). A lot of white people felt left behind from the recession recovery.
* As an outsider, Trump could say what was on his mind (read: inflammatory shit) or what he thought people wanted to hear without personal repercussion. Folks like Jeb, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, etc., had to choose their words carefully. They’re career politicians. It’s all they know. If Trump lost, he could go back to Trump Tower with his billions of dollars. No harm, no foul.
* What surprised a lot of people was that a lot of people latched on to that inflammatory shit, both past and present. Calling Mexicans rapists, mocking disabled journalists, a history of sex offenses, etc.
* A lot of us knew of the dark undertow of the GOP. The racists, sexists, and homophobes have been there forever. But at least as far as the wackos go, we had until 2016 generally been able to keep them subdued to the margins of the party. Nobody took Michele Bachmann seriously, for instance. She was/is a loon. Today, the MTGs and Boeberts are on the fringes of the mainstream, but the mainstream nonetheless.
* Trump is charismatic. But to another degree his movement became more than about him. “Trump” became a brand — an identity. Even perhaps a personality cult. It’s questionable whether Trumpism will outlive anyone named Trump in the political arena. It will likely fracture among different camps (DeSantis, Cruz, Greene/Boebert, etc.). And Trumpers are politically belligerent people, vulnerable to conspiracy theories and lies about people they don’t like. I don’t see them coalescing around anyone in any cohesive manner.
Hilary Clinton is a dweeb, and honestly Trump just wasn’t that bad of a choice. Does he say weird shit? Oh yeah for sure. Would Americans choose someone weird over the nine millionth career politician? Apparently. All in all he really was an unremarkable president. He had plenty of good moves, mostly in international relations with select few other nations, and the economy did pretty good under him. A lot of people on Reddit make him out as a comically bad leader, which makes it confusing as to why people voted for him, but in reality he was just another president that will be forgotten about in a few decades.
Trump was seen as a political outsider who could shake things up. A lot of people just wanted anything but what was considered normal and this country generally has little fear of consequences with politics.
People gloss over that he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes and over two percentage points. Americans, as a whole, did not prefer him. He only won the election due to structural quirks in the electoral college not due to popular support. However the support he did have was in the right places to put him over the top in the electoral college.
Plus Hillary Clinton ran a bad campaign that assumed she had the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin , and Pennsylvania (the so-called “Blue Wall”) in the bag so she didn’t campaign there, losing them all by extremely narrow margins of less than 1% and therefore losing the election. That campaign error came straight from the top, her people on the ground in those states repeatedly tried to warn the campaign leaders that they were slipping away but were ignored.
I think him not being an entrenched politician was a big deal to a lot of people.
Because he was running against Hillary Clinton
Its very difficult for a party to hold POTUS for 3 terms. Last time was Reagan-Bush, and Bush got defeated in his re-elect in ’92.
It almost happened again in 2000 but…well, Florida gotta Florida.
a heady mix of populism, Clinton being a wildly unpopular candidate in general (lowering turnout), the Clinton campaign making no real effort for any sort of broader working-class appeal, and people thinking it was such a foregone conclusion for Clinton that they didn’t bother to go vote.
He won the Republican nomination largely because there were so many candidates and no one took him seriously. They spent the early portion of the campaign attacking each other and completely misreading how thoroughly disgusted a significant portion of the voters were with the status quo. By the time they realized how much momentum Trump had built up it was too late for them to stop him.
As far as why he beat Clinton…while she was probably the most qualified and experienced candidate for President in decades, she also had 3 decades of well documented political baggage and very large percentage of the population who would never vote for her for whatever reason, even ones who would be open to considering a Democrat. Some of those were probably motivated by sexism, but in todays world they were probably a very small minority. Clinton also fucked up by calling all Trump supporters “deplorables” and then the media piled on. Add in all the morons on social media claiming that anyone supporting Trump was a racist, etc and you swing the vote some more his way because most people don’t buy into that bullshit and it pissed them off.
Comey making that announcement about reopening the investigation into Clinton’s laptop right before the election also significantly hurt her, especially when it ultimately turned out to be nothing (after she lost.)
A lot of people bought into his story as being a genius businessman, which is way overblown. He is a genius at marketing himself and his brand, but when it comes to actually running a business he’s a failure and has a long history of avoiding paying his debts by suing everyone into submission and filing for bankruptcy.
Trump is very good at seeing an opening and exploiting it. He saw one in the Republican party with the rise of the Tea Party and jumped into that, starting with the Obama birther nonsense which was pure racism. He didn’t and doesn’t care about pissing off Democrats, or even alot of independents, because he knew they’d never vote for him anyway.
Trump likely got as many votes from people voting against Clinton as he did from people actually voting for him.
Everyone I know who voted for him the first time did so because they saw him as the lesser of two evils. Sort of like why everyone voted for Biden.
Trump didn’t win. The Democrats lost.
Clinton lost as much as Trump won.
I was angry at her for even running, because I knew how divisive and unliked she was, both personally and because of the baggage of her husband,’s presidency. The right-wing noise machine already had decades of practice stirring people up against her.
My opinions earned me the ire of many of my friends. And when Trump got the nomination against her I predicted that he would win, and those friends called me crazy, because Trump was a buffoon.
I’ve never been more unhappy to be proved right.
I was trying to figure this out myself.
I watched a few documentaries and they all seemed to say the same thing – ordinary people, who previously voted for Obama, had their living standards decline (jobs shipped overseas, etc), and no one would listen to them. Their stories never made the media and they weren’t crazy enough (left or right) to make the news.
So out of a kind of desperation they voted Trump.
True or not I don’t know, but it seemed to be a common theme that came up.
I just thought how damn scary this is, to have a lot of people with issues which we just never hear about. They can influence things and seemingly come out of nowhere. We really need a more well rounded media.
Clinton had 25 years of baked in political distrust. For what it’s worth I think she would have been a better president, but she was fighting an uphill battle before she even announced her campaign.
The Truth? The electoral College
​
Popular vote:
Trump: 62,984,828
Clinton: 65,853,514
​
The majority did NOT vote for Donald Trump
Because a bunch of people wanted him to win
Just to preface, my answer will be downvoted because I don’t treat Republican voters or the American electoral system with kid gloves.
The first thing to know is that even coming into office trump was extremely unpopular. Not only did he lose the popular vote, but he actually finished dead last out of the three major voting blocks: non-voters (1st), Hillary Clinton voters (2nd), then trump voters (3rd). Lucky for him that doesn’t matter. So the main reason trump was elected is because of our *unusual* (ie broken) electoral system.
It also helps that right around 2016, conservatism kinda went off the rails. And by went off the rails I mean modern American conservatism is closer to manic schizophrenia than an actual political ideology. So it didn’t matter than trump didn’t have any real political ideas, as long as he triggers the libs. Which he did really well.
The 2016 election had a lot of chaos but I think it really came down to bad campaign strategy from Clinton. Her team ran the campaign like a coronation which I think turned a lot of people off. Hillary had a career history as a reformer, but not only did they choose not to highlight it but it seemed that Hillary’s campaign actively distanced itself from that image and embraced “more of the same” type messaging.
The campaign’s most fatal error was taking the upper midwest for granted. Hillary didn’t even have a single campaign event in Wisconsin, a state she lost by a miniscule amount. Instead her team devoted assets to flipping states like Texas and Georgia, which would have been nice if they pulled it off but were completely unnecessary for a victory. Had the campaign played it safe and protected home field, Hillary would have won.
There’s plenty of explanations as to how Trump became the alternative, but as to how Clinton lost to Trump the explanation comes down to campaign strategy
So, as I start this, I have no idea how far I’m going to go.
To answer this question I will start with a question. I’ll try to avoid the “c” word.
How many major headlines were called truth by the mainstream media and the political establishment that we now know to be categorically false? And vice versa?
Shall we count a couple?
1. Russian collusion.
2. DNC spying (Durham)
3. Hunter Biden’s laptop
4. Covid
5. Vaccines
There are several more but are technically “unsolved” at the moment so I won’t mention.
Go back and look at the level of conviction the MSM & political establishment came onto living rooms, cars, offices, and classrooms and telling us and our children what we were supposed to believe. Now we know, all lies, a false narrative.
Now the SAME people are telling us what’s going on and why. Really? “Biolabs false” “Putin bad” “No nazi problems there”
Why in the heck would anyone believe suddenly they’re telling us the truth???
Spoiler alert… THEY’RE NOT!
Circling back. Hah!😀
Trump was chosen a long time ago. Well before the 2016 run. He was chosen first by ————? Because they knew “We the people ” had to have an incorruptible outsider. Not humanly infallible but corporately uncountable.
? Chose him first. We chose him because we were sick and tired. Sometime between now and 2024 we will put him back where he belongs.
Most fundamental: steady loss of manufacturing jobs for 50 years. After WWII, the US was the only country left with huge manufacturing infrastructure. A family could live a middle class lifestyle with one person working. The high point of middle class wealth occured in the mid-1970’s; it’s been downhill ever since.
He was the better choice when compared to Clinton. Particularly for the populists who disliked the establishment and thought he had a chance of actually changing some of what was going on in government at the time.