2016 US ELECTION: Official Results Thread

[His Divine Shadow]

I guess it's simply that they value themselves over other people they don't know personally.

[Khaat]

I guess it's simply that they value themselves over other people they don't know personally.

How very Christian....[/sarcasm]

[The Romulan Republic]

I'm seeing two points being made:

1. Make it about issues, not identity.
2. Let's nominate a white man specifically.

This is inherently contradictory, FireNexus. You literally are making this about identity the first moment you say "we should ignore any potential candidate who is not a straight white man".

If we really want to focus on the issues, trying to look for the nearest "most qualified" white male candidate is tunnel vision and madness. Believing in your view of realpolitik will only get you so far until you realize the party you're telling to be more "realistic" is supposed to be the one fighting against the conservative party, not adopting even more of their views. The Democrats would water down or outright alienate whatever base they have left, and it would so very much reinforce the progressive base's views of it being spineless to the establishment and to the right.

"But a straight white man has the best mathematically objective chances to beat Trump in 2020!", you may say. I remember metric tons of people saying Obama had absolutely no chance almost a decade ago, 2008. History, as it would seem, proved them wrong. Would it really behoove you to step into the same fallacy? Hasn't the last week already proven that trying to make a prediction using any models without looking them over is destined to have you walk off a cliff?

I know you despise TRR, but he is right in that Hillary had much more than uber-conservative misogyny against her. Progressives within the base did not like her right-leaning beliefs, especially regarding foreign policy. Conservatives had everything Fox News and co. have been telling them for years. Both ends especially did not receive her close ties to the establishment / corporates well. There were plenty of progressives who did not see that she would be an improvement over Trump, or saw that she would lead the country into a different brand of worse direction from Trump.

I vehemently disagreed with those views--I thought they ranged from innocently or terminally naive to utterly moronic--but they are what they were. I voted for Hillary in spite of my dislike for her as I saw her leagues better than Trump, but others in the base did not see it that way and chose not to vote. Looking at the charts for the 2008 and 2012 elections, it is very likely if Hillary had been a much stronger candidate with a better image among the base and a better character and history, we would have seen turnout much closer to those.

I'm going to be perfectly honest: You come off as the person within the bubble. Your singular focus on Hillary's loss because of her vagina and only her vagina is completely ignoring the other hundreds of factors that played into people either not voting for her, or deliberately voting third party or, god help us all, Trump. Ironically, your berating of TRR is just making me scream internally at you to take a look in the fucking mirror. Shit, I don't agree with what he says sometimes but having also personally received your brand of smug back during the NCGOP discussion (oh, abandoning your high and mighty higher ground now that it's inconvenient? That's so cute!), I can say you're the type of person you speak against.

Thank you. This sums it up much more succinctly than I did.

Anyway, in other news, Martin O'Malley says he will not pursue DNC Chair after all.

Quoting his Facebook page:

On November 8, the Democratic party and our country suffered a major setback. Now more than ever, we need to listen to one another and work to repair what has been torn apart.
While I'm grateful to the supportive friends who have urged me to consider running for DNC Chair, I will not be seeking our Party's Chairmanship. The DNC needs a Chair who can do the job fully and with total impartiality. The national interest must come first.
In the days ahead, my family and I will continue to do everything in our power to fight for the Democratic Party, and for the more compassionate and inclusive country that we carry in our hearts.
"We are one, our cause is one, and we must help each other if we are to succeed."

[aerius]

I think a lot of folks here still don't understand how a political campaign is won these days. It's not just about addressing important issues or having a clear identity/image for the leader, it's both of the above along with having a clear message and communicating it to the voters in a way that connects with them. We in Canada learned about this the hard way in our 2011 federal elections. We learned that you could have all the issues right but if the leader has the charisma of a cardboard cutout, does not have a message, and fails to connect with the voters, his party will get flushed. And a leader with charisma and a clear message will enjoy strong support even if his platform is pretty questionable. We learned from this, which is why the Liberals with Justin Trudeau as their leader cleaned up in the 2015 election.

The Dems will have to learn this because Trump obviously did. He knew which States he'd need to win and identified key issues for each of them along with how to pander to them (eg. stop outsourcing, bring jobs back, fuck China & illegal immigrants). He integrated this and the rest of his platform into his overall message (Make America Great Again) in a way that's catchy, optimistic, and connects with people. At the same time he cultivated his image as the brash asshole who'd tell DC government to fuck off so that he could get shit done and make America great, and by extension make everyone's lives better. Trump has basically taken Obama's campaign methods and adapted it for his audience with a few extra tweaks and better focus, like Obama, he knows how the game is played.

So whoever the Dems nominate next will have to be a charismatic leader who can connect with his audience and deliver a clear message. The issues matter, but not as much as most of you think. For the average person, politics shit works on the lizard hind brain and not the rational monkey brain. You need to think of it as advertising where you're working to get the emotional hooks and subconscious associations locked in, that's how the sale is made unless the product is outstandingly exceptional or complete shit. And this is why it wasn't surprising to me when Clinton lost. Same reason Trudeau and Jack Layton have done well up here in Canada in the last couple elections, and why Dion and Ignatieff did poorly. You need a party leader who can condense the platform down to a simple message (Hope & Change, Make America Great Again, etc.) and sell the shit out of it to the people.

[Dragon Angel]

Which is precisely why nominating on identity alone is destined for failure. People doing that are intentionally overlooking any other candidates that have a charismatic outreach regardless of race, gender, or creed, which includes, yes, Bernie Sanders. The man may or may not have had a better chance against Hillary, but you can't deny that he had charisma in his primary. Perhaps not "Change has come to America!" levels of charisma like Obama in 2008/2012, but certainly charisma.

I'm not going to try to make claims of whether Sanders would have campaigned better in the general election, so anyone trying to debate me on this point is just going to talk to a void.

[The Romulan Republic]

Bernie Sanders is Bernie Sanders. He has a particular persona and style, and I don't think he really knows how to change it. That sense of authenticity took him far, but I don't think he'll ever be very good at tailoring his message to specific states or demographics.

In short, he's not a good panderer. Either enough of the country wants what he's selling right now for him to win, or they don't.

Edit: I think what the Democrats really need, in a nutshell, is someone who combines Bernie Sanders' progressive platform, energy, and sense of authenticity with an ability to connect better with older black and latino voters.

[Simon_Jester]

Agreed.

I also think we should declare a moratorium on saying "Clinton lost because of this one thing, so we need to make [sweeping change to how we pick candidates]!"

There are several interlocking problems that gave rise to Clinton (rather narrowly) losing:
1) She did not target key swing states that Trump was trying to flip in his favor.
2) Voter suppression, not that we can really do anything about that except to plan ahead and organize so that we have as many unchallengable, unblockable, determined voters available as possible in 2018 and 2020.
3) Complacency, which probably exacerbated (1) and (4) and maybe created other issues. I think we can safely say the complacency issue is gone.
4) She did not go out of her way to win people over personally as a candidate. She may have had a great ground game, or not, I wouldn't know since I live in a solidly blue state, but if she'd really wanted to win, she shouldn't have sealed herself off from the press. This amounts to a lack-of-charisma issue.
5) The media gave Trump an enormous amount of free coverage early in the process during the Republican primaries, did a less-than-stellar job of investigating and publicizing his records. Not much we can do about that except to lend our support to the best media outlets we can find, while remembering that much of the country still watches crappy media.
6) Sexism was clearly in play, or the orange "grab 'em by the pussy" candidate would probably not have won out, regardless of whether his opponent was male, female, or neuter.*
7) Youth and minority turnout was lower than we would have liked to see, which ties into (2) and (3) but also (1) and maybe other things.

Dealing with any single one of these issues would probably have secured Clinton the election. Pretending that any of these issues is not in play is taking grave risks.

But conversely, saying "just run the anti-Clinton next time" is ignoring a lot of issues here that aren't all about race and sexism.

_____________________________________

*One wonders what the odds of success would be for a female candidate who was quotable as saying "grab 'em by the balls."

[K. A. Pital]

Media actually excruciated Trump and painted him as a total shitbag.

It did not help because his shitbag image wasn't a problem for his voters.

Remember, the anti-Clinton narrative of Trump was that the media are "even more crooked than Crooked Hillary".

[Chardok]

Ricky (my boy) has been aware of this election quite a bit, disliked Trump because he has a lot of Hispanic friends (his Bestie is the son of Mexican immigrants) and "I would never like someone who wants to build a wall like that - how is Pancho going to visit his family?" (ahh, the wisdom of a child) - anyway, APPARENTLY his friend is being told by people at school that he's going to be deported and his family is, too. My boss has also told me that this is happening to her niece and nephew, all U.S. Citizens of Mexican descent...

I should also say that at my house we do not discuss politics generally speaking (aside from good-natured ribbing) and I asked him point blank the night of the election - do you like Hillary just because your mom and I like her? which is when he told me about the wall thing.

Back to the issue at hand - WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?! I THOUGHT WE WERE MOVING BEYOND THIS INSANITY! TO FIND OUT THAT IT HAS APPARENTLY BEEN QUIETLY BOILING BENEATH THE SURFACE OF AT LEAST 50% (probably more) OF THE WHOLE GODDAMNED COUNTRY IS DISGUSTING!

I'm the SON of an admitted bigot/borderline racist so how am I not....brainwashed? Am I smarter than I realized? Am I simply more compassionate? Or am I a product of not so much my home environment as a child, but my outside interactions (I was an Army Brat, constantly surrounded by a diverse population)

[Dragon Angel]

Let me propose to you, a paradox:

My mom is Jewish. My cousin is also Jewish, is engaged/married to a Jewish man, and lives in a Jewish community.

My mom couldn't vote, but she approved of Trump. My cousin and her partner both voted for Trump. According to my cousin, her community also voted for Trump.

?????

The reasons they all gave is "Trump is very pro-Israel". Every time the neo-Nazis and associated white supremacists, and Trump's dog whistling is mentioned, those are neatly handwaved.

I don't understand.

[Flagg]

Let me propose to you, a paradox:

My mom is Jewish. My cousin is also Jewish, is engaged/married to a Jewish man, and lives in a Jewish community.

My mom couldn't vote, but she approved of Trump. My cousin and her partner both voted for Trump. According to my cousin, her community also voted for Trump.

?????

The reasons they all gave is "Trump is very pro-Israel". Every time the neo-Nazis and associated white supremacists, and Trump's dog whistling is mentioned, those are neatly handwaved.

I don't understand.

Simple cognitive dissonance or they are racist and don't want to admit it. The fact is that Hillary Clinton is as pro-Israel as it gets and Pedophile Rapist Donnie Douchebag's stance depends on who made him get a sad on Twitter the night before.

[houser2112]

"Trump is very pro-Israel"

I've found that even JINOs (non-devout Jews, ethnic Jews, whatever you want to call them) will circle the wagons where Israel is concerned. They may have never set foot in the country, or even a synagogue in years, but will vehemently defend Israel. The Jews I know supported Hillary because she's a woman, so it wasn't enough this time, but it doesn't surprise me that you've noticed this.

[ArmorPierce]

May I also add that this election demonstates why affirmative action programs are necessary?

Very rarely are candidates chosen based on objective ability. Rather the candidate is selected on gut feelings. The recent presidential election is a dramatic example of this. Folks voting on filling a position based on gut feelings and show and us vs them mentality.

[TheFeniX]

I guess it's simply that they value themselves over other people they don't know personally.

Or, they are single-issue voters. I have two homosexual family members who vote Republican. When asked why: "Getting married is great, but I'd rather have a gun to fight off gay bashers." They are huge supporters of Stand Your Ground. Gay rights aren't as important to them because they believe all the laws in the world can't protect them from bigots nearly as much as a handgun.

Or voters think Trump is bluffing and using rhetoric to drum up crazies and they have to ride it out with the crazies. Or they feel left out of the process and Trump at least acknowledges their existence. I'm in Texas: I have Black and Hispanic friends who voted for Trump. Many of them don't believe he's racist, only using that as an edge to drum up easy votes. I have white friends with the same reasoning.

I think a lot of folks here still don't understand how a political campaign is won these days. It's not just about addressing important issues or having a clear identity/image for the leader, it's both of the above along with having a clear message and communicating it to the voters in a way that connects with them. We in Canada learned about this the hard way in our 2011 federal elections. We learned that you could have all the issues right but if the leader has the charisma of a cardboard cutout, does not have a message, and fails to connect with the voters, his party will get flushed. And a leader with charisma and a clear message will enjoy strong support even if his platform is pretty questionable. We learned from this, which is why the Liberals with Justin Trudeau as their leader cleaned up in the 2015 election.

I agree, with the exception of "these days." Charisma has always been a major factor in candidates. My mom used to talk about Nixon vs JFK and how JFK carried the television crowd but Nixon fared much better on radio. Bush vs Gore: the good ol' boy vs the stick in the mud. Hell, Clinton vs Obama in the primaries.

Trump is the anti-Charisma where people equate "strong opinions" with the "right opinion." People can be dumb like that. And this is also likely an overreaction to what people view as PC gone out of control. Lives being destroyed over a single comment or tweet. Trump has shown that when you tell your detractors to fuck off, you can still come out on top. That makes him look strong and capable, no matter how vile his message actually is.

[Flagg]

"Trump is very pro-Israel"

I've found that even JINOs (non-devout Jews, ethnic Jews, whatever you want to call them) will circle the wagons where Israel is concerned. They may have never set foot in the country, or even a synagogue in years, but will vehemently defend Israel. The Jews I know supported Hillary because she's a woman, so it wasn't enough this time, but it doesn't surprise me that you've noticed this.

It's the bullshit "never again" that gets drilled into them. But what the really mean is "never again to Jews".

[Simon_Jester]

Media actually excruciated Trump and painted him as a total shitbag.

It did not help because his shitbag image wasn't a problem for his voters.

Remember, the anti-Clinton narrative of Trump was that the media are "even more crooked than Crooked Hillary".

Trump's entire life, long history of bankruptcy, tax evasion, and fraud received roughly equal time with Clinton's email scandals, as far as I can determine.

[Ralin]

The reasons they all gave is "Trump is very pro-Israel". Every time the neo-Nazis and associated white supremacists, and Trump's dog whistling is mentioned, those are neatly handwaved.

I don't understand.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists these days have more pressing things to worry about than Jews. That's why you even get the odd story about that one neo-Nazi group somewhere in Europe that came out as pro-Israel because the Jews are such a strong race and shit.

I mean, if you hate Muslims and Muslim immigrants and immigrants who you assume are Muslim what country do you hear about in the news that is always giving Muslims grief and misery?

And don't say America because America is normal and doesn't count. That's like saying Americans have accents.

[Flagg]

Media actually excruciated Trump and painted him as a total shitbag.

It did not help because his shitbag image wasn't a problem for his voters.

Remember, the anti-Clinton narrative of Trump was that the media are "even more crooked than Crooked Hillary".

Trump's entire life, long history of bankruptcy, tax evasion, and fraud received roughly equal time with Clinton's email scandals, as far as I can determine.

Not really. Mostly it was coverage of what rotten shit he said on Twitter or at a rally that day. Plus there is almost literally nothing positive about the man and he has no real achievements to his name unless you want to count number of bankruptcies. And really, giving "balanced" coverage between the 2's "scandals" (I don't consider a settled matter like emails a scandal, unless the scandal is the Donnie Douchebag cabal in the FBI screwing around with the election) is in itself media bias for Trump.

It's rather sad/funny/nihilistic that there is SO MUCH negative about Donnie Douchebag that to actually cover it all with even minute detail it would require the entire 1/2 hour of the national nightly news from just the nomination until the day before the joke of an election to scratch the surface.

Even a 24 hour news network like MSNBC that (aside from Morning "dead intern" Joe, Chuck Turd, and Chris "Thank God for Hurricane Sandy" Matthews) was totally (and rightly) in the tank for Clinton never got to the bottom of the cesspool that is Trumps depravity.

[Simon_Jester]

That... was kind of my point.

[K. A. Pital]

Equal time does not mean "equally problematic".

I thought that after "grab them by the pussy" Trump was out. Apparently not.

Or at the very least, e-mail leaks are much worse than openly sexist comments in the eyes of the common US man.

This is just the harsh reality we are dealing with. Decrying stupidity and malevolence is nice, but it won't solve the underlying problem. Media are also just a reflection of the society, after all.

[Alferd Packer]

Or at the very least, e-mail leaks are much worse than openly sexist comments in the eyes of the common US man.

And woman. Never forget that he won a majority of white women.

[Wild Zontargs]

YOU ARE STILL CRYING WOLF (archived link because Scott deletes stuff if the Wrong People link to it)

Not quoting the entire article because it's full of links and charts, but here's the punchline:

I am a psychiatrist. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of more. Like Snopes, I am not sure if the reports of eight transgender people committing suicide due to the election results are true or false.

But if they’re true, it seems really relevant that Trump denounced North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom law, and proudly proclaimed he would let Caitlyn Jenner use whatever bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower, and is by far the most pro-transgender Republican president in history.

I notice news articles like Vox: Donald Trump’s Win Tells People Of Color They Aren’t Welcome In America. Or Salon’s If Trump Wins, Say Goodbye To Your Black Friends. MSN: Women Fear For Their Lives After Trump Victory.

Vox writes about the five-year-old child who asks “Is Donald Trump a bad person? Because I heard that if he becomes president, all the black and brown people have to leave and we’re going to become slaves.” The Star writes about a therapist called in for emergency counseling to help Muslim kids who think Trump is going to kill them. I have patients who are afraid to leave their homes.

Listen. Trump is going to be approximately as racist as every other American president. Maybe I’m wrong and he’ll be a bit more. Maybe he’ll surprise us and be a bit less. But most likely he’ll be about as racist as Ronald Reagan, who employed Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan as a senior advisor. Or about as racist as George Bush with his famous Willie Horton ad. Or about as racist as Bill “superpredator” Clinton, who took a photo op in front of a group of chained black men in the birthplace of the KKK. Or about as racist as Bush “doesn’t care about black people!” 43. He’ll have some scandals, people who want to see them as racist will see them as racist, people who don’t will dismiss them as meaningless, and nobody will end up in death camps.

Since everyone has been wrong about everything lately, I’ve started thinking it’s more important than ever to make clear predictions and grade myself on them, so here are my predictions for the Trump administration:

1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
2. Total minority population of the US will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]
3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 95%]
4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority.
5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]
6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].
7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].

If you think differently than me, come up with a bet and see if I’ll take it.

And if you don’t, stop.

Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

Stop crying wolf. God forbid, one day we might have somebody who doesn’t give speeches about how diversity makes this country great and he wants to fight for minorities, who doesn’t pose holding a rainbow flag and state that he proudly supports transgender people, who doesn’t outperform his party among minority voters, who wasn’t the leader of the Salute to Israel Parade, and who doesn’t offer minorities major cabinet positions. And we won’t be able to call that guy an “openly white supremacist Nazi homophobe”, because we already wasted all those terms this year.

Stop talking about dog whistles. The kabbalistic similarities between “dog whistling” and “wolf crying” are too obvious to ignore.

Stop writing articles breathlessly following everything the KKK says. Stop writing several times more such articles than there are actual Klansmen. Remember that thing where Trump was a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?

Stop responding to every time somebody says they’re worried about globalists or Wall Street or the elite with “YOU MEAN JEWS? JEWS ARE THE ELITES! ALL GLOBALISTS ARE JEWS! IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT THE ELITE, IT’S DEFINITELY JEWS YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT. IF YOU FEEL SCREWED BY WALL STREET, THEN WHAT YOU MEAN IS YOU WERE SCREWED BY JEWS. IT’S THE JEWS WHO ARE SCREWING YOU. MAKE SURE TO REMEMBER THAT. DEFINITELY TRANSLATE YOUR HATRED TOWARDS A VAGUE ESTABLISHMENT INTO HATRED OF JEWS, BECAUSE THEY’RE TOTALLY THE ONES YOU’RE THINKING OF.” This means you, Vox. Someday those three or four people who still believe the media are going to read this stuff and immediately join the Nazi Party, and nobody in the world will be able to blame them.

Stop saying that being against crime is a dog whistle for racism. Have you ever met a crime victim? They don’t like crime. I work with people from a poor area, and a lot of them have been raped, or permanently disfigured, or had people close to them murdered. You know what these people have in common? They don’t like crime When you say “the only reason someone could talk about law and order is that they secretly hate black people, because, y’know, all criminals are black”, not only are you an idiot, you’re a racist. Also, I judge you for not having read the polls saying that nonwhites are way more concerned about crime than white people are.

Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout “IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!” at everyone, and then when the right wing finally says “Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?” you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK. You know, a week before Election Day, Lena Dunham, who gave a speech at the Democratic Convention this year, produced and tweeted a video called How Are You Feeling About The Extinction Of White Men? which featured giant feet stepping on cartoon white males in a very-definitely-endorsed-by-the-author way. I am sure you are very well-educated and understand that this is a completely harmless letting-off of steam with no racial overtones; whereas when a Republican says he opposes the corrupt establishment, this is an anti-Semitic dog whistle which proves that his entire life philosophy is based on nothing but hatred and bigotry. But I worry that the non-college-degree-having white working class is not as well-educated as you, and is too ignorant to grasp this simple and obvious point. And maybe they starts thinking of America’s ongoing tribal/partisan conflict through a race-based lens, which is surely an unpredictable testament to their own bad character and not the exact thing you’ve been encouraging every second of every day since the turn of the millennium.

Stop calling Trump voters racist. A metaphor: we have freedom of speech not because all speech is good, but because the temptation to ban speech is so great that, unless given a blanket prohibition, it would slide into universal censorship of any unpopular opinion. Likewise, I would recommend you stop calling Trump voters racist – not because none of them are, but because as soon as you give yourself that opportunity, it’s a slippery slope down to “anyone who disagrees with me on anything does so entirely out of raw seething hatred, and my entire outgroup is secret members of the KKK and so I am justified in considering them worthless human trash”. I’m not saying you’re teetering on the edge of that slope. I’m saying you’re way at the bottom, covered by dozens of feet of fallen rocks and snow. Also, I hear that accusing people of racism constantly for no reason is the best way to get them to vote for your candidate next time around. Assuming there is a next time.

Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be added later”, and all you can do is repeat again and again that he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for almost an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.

Stop attempting suicide. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince people that Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.

[Thanas]

That author is debating a strawman. Yes, Trump may be less loathsome. OTOH, he employs racists and misogynists and so far seems to meander between "crush them" and "minorities? Love them" any given day.

Nobody is scared about Trump being the mastermind of some evil KKK organization.
Everybody is scared about Trump being able to be influenced by his advisors to do heinous stuff.

[Dragon Angel]

YOU ARE STILL CRYING WOLF (archived link because Scott deletes stuff if the Wrong People link to it)

Not quoting the entire article because it's full of links and charts, but here's the punchline:

Stop talking about what's happening and let's pretend everything is just normal and everyone is just as bad as each other!!!!

FTFY.

Oh, and if Trump really cared about the LGBTQ segment, he probably should've chosen a better running mate than Mike "I Really Hate Gays" Pence, for one.

[Ralin]

Oh, and if Trump really cared about the LGBTQ segment, he probably should've chosen a better running mate than Mike "I Really Hate Gays" Pence, for one.

Well, they probably weren't going to vote for him in large numbers anyway. I'm still holding out hope that Pence will have minimal influence, because I can totally buy that Trump will decide that the vice-president's job is to stand around looking stupid and ineffectual so the president seems better by comparison.

That said, I wouldn't call Trump's record pro-transgender people. Though admittedly I had thought myself that he was at a slight net positive myself after the North Carolina by virtue of the fact that I couldn't remember anything else he'd ever said or done on the subject until someone reminded me.