That's Fatal

First, let me say that this in no way means that I voted for or support Trump. This is merely to say why I’m not surprised he won, even if I honestly didn’t expect him to. I thought he’d get around 240 Electoral votes.

The first and most obvious was the Electoral College. Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral votes needed to win. I personally think the EC is stupid and should be abolished for reasons like this (and I’ve voiced this opinion numerous times), but it’s the system we had for this election, so we can’t exactly take backsies on the system. I’ve noticed that people only started complaining about the Electoral College after it was clear that it gave Trump the victory. If you only voice your concerns about something because it inconveniences you and not when it would help you, you have no right to complain at all.

The second was racist, sexist, transphobic xenophobes. Oh wait, it wasn’t. The overwhelming majority of Republicans are none of those, and hurling those invectives is simply the leftist way of bullying people for having a different way of thinking. It’s been shown that trying to shame people into voting for your candidate is not only manipulative, but also ineffective and possibly even counter-intuitive. Hillary claiming that half of Trump’s supporters fell into at least one of these categories (”This is what I like to call ‘the basket of deplorables’.”) really damaged her popularity among voters.

If you’ve spent any time on this website, you’ll notice that straight, white men are the butt of almost every joke here on tumblr. It’s become the left-wing way of thinking that these demographics are the biggest source of problems, but since whites (~61%) and men (~49-50%) make up a substantial voting bloc, a good portion of them will side with the party that doesn’t insult them at every turn. In short, in the last eight years, the Democratic Party has been alienating many voters at the cost of being ‘progressive’. 

Along that line, lumping demographics into different groups is dangerous because it comes off as pandering. ‘The black vote’, ‘the Hispanic vote’, and so on and so on. Trying to pander to every group means that there will be conflicting messages somewhere and it will damage your credibility. Clinton lost in West Virginia when her clean energy speech (typically one of the commandments of the democrats) stated that she’d shut down the coal mining industry…in a state full of coal miners. Oops. These miners are (presumably) not *insert buzzword*phobic nor *insert buzzword*ist, but instead voting for the candidate that will let them keep their jobs.

In politics, the saying ‘those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ is rather sound advice, and that was another thing that turned people off to Hillary. She called Trump a sexist–not saying he isn’t–yet she was the one who smeared the alleged victims of Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. Google ‘a bimbo eruption’ if you don’t believe me. She called Trump a racist yet she supported legislation signed by her husband that led to mass incarceration. She also referred to blacks as ‘superpredators’, but most here are too young to know such a thing. She called Trump a homophobe, but said she believed in the sanctity of marriage being between a man and a woman. Heck, even Obama said the same thing when he was first elected.

Let’s take tumblr for example. The anti-Trump rhetoric was so strong that it’s obvious that those who did support him here were afraid to speak up because tumblr never does well with dissenting opinions. This meant that the only thing people saw here were pro-Hillary propaganda in their echo chambers and had no idea that anyone had an opinion that went against their own.

Now, comparing the two as candidates, it’s obvious that Hillary was the better qualified candidate, but a lot of people saw that as a bad thing. With Hillary, people saw more of the same elitist bubble politics that have been plaguing America for a long time. She had experience gaming the system, and while perhaps the safest choice in the long-term, people didn’t want that. So 7 of the states that voted for Obama twice went red this election cycle.

It was proven that Hillary manipulated the Democratic National Convention to stack the deck in her favor against Bernie Sanders, and once those emails came out, even those who would normally vote Democrat were driven to third party candidates or even Trump. Such voters were called (pejoratively or otherwise) the ‘Bernie-or-bust’ crowd, and while you might criticize them for being childish that they refused to back a candidate that elbowed theirs out of the way, they have the right to their own opinion and can vote however they want. 

The email scandal isn’t the first one Hillary Clinton has, and most voters find her even less trustworthy than Trump. You might be tempted to say that they’re just mad that there was a chance that a woman could be president, but the majority of Republicans I’ve talked to said that they’d be fine with a female president, just not Hillary (or Palin, as some were quick to add). And since roughly an equal number of men voted for Trump as women voted for Hillary, can you truly claim that one is the result of sexism and the other one isn’t?

Trump is a very angry person and wears his heart on his sleeve. It might not be the most professional, but people saw that as an endearing trait, and saw him as someone they could relate to and rally their similar anxieties behind. To them, Trump is someone who doesn’t need to take monetary bribes from countries like Saudi Arabia which could create a conflict of interest.

The media was so quick to jump on anything that Trump or his supporters did–and the opposite toward Hillary–that people started to dismiss all the articles against him as more liberal media bias. That being said, I don’t remember a single story of a Trump supporter protesting or otherwise causing trouble at a Hillary rally. The opposite, not so much.

If you’re upset by this outcome, then get involved in your community and change it. Actually talk to people who have different views than you do instead of immediately treating them as if they’re wrong. Threatening to block and unfollow everyone who didn’t vote for Hillary (whether they voted for Trump or third-party, or abstained in protest) isn’t going to help anyone at all. Riots (sorry, protests) aren’t going to help anyone at all.