ajax18 wrote:
Well if young and getting started in my career and working for Some Schmo, do you think I want him knowing I voted for Trump? What if I'm older, more established or even retired? It's a little more difficult for people like Schmo to destroy my career at that point is it not?
The correlation in Trump support and age is extremely strong and linear. The older you are, the more likely you are to support Trump. What you are suggesting is that America secretly has a robust approval of Trump. This is delusional.
Let's simplify this a bit and I'll let you fill in the gaps. The polls and everyone on this board in all their wisdom were certain that Hillary Clinton would be the 45th president in 2016, like all the way up to 4pm on 11/7/16. So why exactly were they so wrong? You're a smart man. Why were you and everyone else on your side unable to see this coming?
The polls were off by about a little under two points. Clinton had a polling lead of about 4 points and only won the popular vote by a little over 2 points. That's smaller than the historical average of polling averages being off and really close in the big scheme of things. For contrast, Obama had a 2 point lead over Romney going into election night and won by about 4 points. A 2 point error cannot explain the kind of gap you are attempting to explain where people at retirement age approve of Trump at around 55% (and will vote for him in higher numbers) and people 18-29 approve of him at around 20%. That's more than two points. A lot more. A 2 point, nor a 5 point, nor even a 10 point error makes up that gap.
As for why Clinton seemed like a shoe-in, that was pre-Comey letter. It was a very late development, if you recall. If you search my posts at that time, my opinion of her prospects looks a lot shakier after that happened. One of the fun things about the conspiracy theory you believe in which the FBI frames Trump is that the FBI during the actual election refused to tell the American people about the on-going investigation into Trump, allowed the press to print that the FBI saw no link between the Trump campaign and Russia even though the truth was the opposite, and then violated DoJ policy to expose Clinton over something that turned out to be nothing. This was enough to shift a close win for her into a close loss.
If it was just deplorable racists coming down out of the woods to vote, where were these people in 2012?
Trump didn't get very many more votes than Romney did, nor was he running against Barack Obama in 2012 conditions as opposed to Clinton in 2016 conditions. Each election is its own thing. For one, you are aware that Presidential incumbents are heavily favored, right? A Presidential incumbent has not lost without their being a recession in the election year or an unpopular war in over a century. Trump was not running against one of those.
That said, Trump was more appealing to people who express high racial resentment in 2016 than Romney was in 2012 or McCain was in 2008. The studies on this are quite clear. Why? Trump's overt racism is more appealing than voting against Obama would be my guess.
