What About Trump? His Most Effective Strategy.

So, in the first post I mainly focused on the geography of Trump’s campaign and how that turned the tides of mainly Democratic states to his side. The previous one was based on the electoral college which everyone was complaining about immediately after the election. Now for this post, there’s a little homework required: watching about 3 minutes of a John Oliver video to help introduce my point for this blog.

Hopefully it starts around 6:15 but if not that’s where we’re heading with this.

 

So as John Oliver points out, since Trump has been elected, a lot of news surrounding the (many) controversies has been discussed about, with the simple phrase of “what about” added on branching us to a completely different topic. Now, like Oliver said in the clip, it’s not really a “new” revelation that this is a way to divert attention, we see it all the time. When we try to bring up gun control, there’s always the “What about if someone had a gun during the shooting?” or “What about knives, those are dangerous yet we don’t ban those?” And this type of discussion is in no way only seen from the right side, topics like abortion also have it in their discussions: “What about rape victims, should they be allowed to get abortions?” And while ‘Whataboutism’ is a fun word to say, I decided to take this down a different road: and look at deflection.

These two topics technically go hand in hand together, but if I’m being 100% truthful and honest, it’s what Trump is the best at, so it’s worth looking at. Deflection is all about turning what you’ve been asked into a completely different conversation. In this case, the ‘what about’ is simply a bridge when being directly talked to. But, we don’t just get our news straight from the mouth of Trump. We get it from the tweets. I decided to go onto Trump’s twitter (his personal one not the official @POTUS since we all know the real news comes from his own twitter), scrolled all the way down to January 1st of this year, (this is the first tweet of the new year from him for reference https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/947802588174577664), and pressed Ctrl+F and typed in key words that he commonly uses for deflection purposes, and counted up how many times he uses them in a tweet, from January 1st to March 28th.

(*the Fox search includes hyperlinks with fox in them and the times he has specifically @ foxandfriends)

Those were my results, and while there is no time frame for how often these were spread out, it’s safe to assume some words like Hillary and Wrong were phased out of his Twitter Vocabulary early on. Words like Democrat makes sense to stay around, since he needs to call them out every time they block a policy of his, and Obama is fine considering the previous administration. What I found interesting was the word ‘Fake’. We’ve all been drowned in the amount of times we’ve had to talk about ‘fake news’ before, be it from other blogs or just in life, so details are being spared here. But, that just makes his tactic of deflection so much easier. As of me writing this, he has 49.6 Million followers on his personal account for Twitter, and we all know whenever something comes up his fingers go right to the phone for some nice 280 character action, so that’s about 50 million people getting updated from Trump. If he sees something he doesn’t like, say (insert news about one of probably a dozen controversies here) he just has to add the magic 4 letter f-word and millions will believe him.

This part is an aside that I found interesting while on his twitter feel free to skip.

So I saw that his personal account only had 24 liked posts. So me being curious I looked at them. His most recent liked post is from December 23, 2017 (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/944667102312566784). Also interesting is that he has a liked post from his son on November 8th, 2016, then they go blank until Easter of last year. Just a fun fact that I thought was interesting since that’s probably the only time in my life I’ll look through his twitter.

Back on Track

So, wrapping us all the way back to 2016 when we thought Trump running for president was just a nice joke and there was no way he could win, there could be many arguments made on how exactly he won. I’m going to stick my proverbial foot and say he won because of his deflection abilities. Trump says ‘grab ’em by the pussy,’ yeah, but what about Hillary and the Democrats running Pizzagate, the underground sex trafficking business run out of a pizzeria. Trump won’t release his tax returns? Yeah, but what about Clinton’s e-mails? His own ploy of making his issues, some bad some harmless to be fair, seem either: On the same level as some mistakes, or less terrible, led him to effectively con-manning America. As much as Trump can be criticized for his actions, knowledge, whatever, it takes a hell of a man to make it seem like someone in politics for as long as Clinton was the worst options between her and a reality TV host.

#NotMyPresident(ial Election System)

Well, last time on my blog I discussed how Trump’s campaign process succeeded over Hillary’s because he knew exactly where to focus his rhetoric. This time, we’re gonna look at arguably the first real outrage many people had when the results about the election came out: The voting.

And luckily for me this one is extra topical since Pennsylvania is working on fixing the Congressional Districts (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/21/17032936/pennsylvania-congressional-districts-2018) (link for more in-depth discussion on this since that’s not the topic of this just some fun coincidence for myself), and I’ll be talking about the Electoral College, Popular Vote, and Gerrymandering.

Now, it’s probably no secret that the fact about a whole movement surrounding #NotMyPresident means people had something wrong with the way the election happened. Pending Russian investigations aside, people were (understandably) outraged that Trump won. Like I said, I went over last week why he won certain states, but the overall victory Trump had was plagued by one blot.

This is the official results of the 2016 election (source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/14/blog-posting/no-donald-trump-not-beating-hillary-clinton-popula/), and the results are relatively clean. You need 270 *electoral* votes to win, and Trump beat that amount by 20. So that’s it, he wins, he become President, and we get 4 years under a complete Republican Government. But, (hard to see I admit), if we look down to the *popular* vote, it has Trump at around 60 million and Clinton at 61 million. So, if one million people voted for Clinton over Trump, how did he get the 20 vote deficit over the amount needed to win?

The difference lies in the types of votes. Sure, Clinton won the popular vote, but as much as high school elections and homecoming votes would want you to believe, the popular vote means basically nothing when it comes to elections. It’s a sad affair but, that’s not the way the election system works. The real way we “vote” people into office is based on the electoral college.

Now, the electoral college, to be absolutely blunt, is completely confusing and if you asked a normal person who has a basic high-school level understanding, they probably don’t know how it works. (Hell, I hardly knew how it worked until I took AP Gov Senior Year so…) Trying to boil it down to the most basic terms, each state has a set amount of electoral votes, determined by the members each state has in Congress. So they get a certain amount for the House, +2 from being in the Senate. So, (because I’m from CT we’re using them for the quick maths), CT has 5 members of the House currently, and with the +2 Senator bonus, we would have 7 Electoral Votes. Now, how we determine how each vote gets sent to Trump or Clinton is based on Districts.

(This way of explanation is shamelessly stolen from my AP Gov teacher last year because I think it works well)

In this scenario, we have a random State with 5 Electoral votes, so we have 5 districts. The letter ‘D’ means a Democrat and ‘R’ is Republican. So, with 15 Democrats and 10 Republicans, it would make sense for a majority of the votes to go towards Democrats in a 3-2 split. So, you can make the districts like so.

And there, we have our 3-2 Democrat:Republican vote and everyone is happy. The Districts look nice and even, and no problems right?

At least until the political parties get involved.

So say, Democrats control the state. When it comes time to re-district (like in the article I linked above about Pennsylvania), they get to redraw the District lines and change how it looks. So, we would go from our nice and colorful and neat districts above to something like this

Now, the color still looks nice and organized, but each District itself has a 3-2 ratio of Democrats:Republicans, so each district vote would go towards the Democrats, leaving them a 5-0 clean sweep of the state. And that’s not representative of the whole state is it?

Now say in an alternate universe, the Republicans have control of the state and redistricting time comes around. They get to draw their own maps and we end up with something like the following

Wow doesn’t that look ugly right? If you look closely, the Democrats have complete control over District 1 and 2. District 3 and 4 have a 3:2 ratio of Republicans:Democrats, so right now we’re at a 2-2 vote split. District 5 has 4 Republicans and 1 Democrat, so they get the final point and we end in a 3-2 vote with Republicans coming out on top.

This is what is (legally) referred to as Gerrymandering. It’s when you redraw district lines to fit one specific outlook. It mostly happens during redistricting time, and there are a whole host of rules (in depth analysis on them http://redistricting.lls.edu/where-state.php), surrounding what you can and cannot do.

Now, there are a ton of rules surrounding redistricting and gerrymandering, but the only one I can reasonably showcase with my Made in Excel is about Contiguity. What that rules means is that you all areas of a district have to be in reasonable proximity to each other. Each of the 3 examples above have relatively good contiguity (though fail in other remarks which is a whole other issue).

This (aside from looking like a 1st grade art project made by me) is a perfect example of no contiguity among the districts. District 1 is in the top left and bottom right, District 5 has a random one in a wave of 2,3, and 4, and it just looks like a mess.

Now, redistricting only happens after the Census so you can determine population and change the representation based on that. And we’re 2 years out from the next Census, so this might not be a big issue at the current time, it shows a big flaw in our election system if it can be easily manipulated in this way. Because who cares if you voted for Hillary in a district that’s full of other Democrats when the vote would really matter more in a close district?

So, this whole debacle leaves us with whether or not the archaic electoral college should still be in place. It’s not been a big point of contention since for the most part, (fringe cases aside), the person who won the Electoral Votes ends up winning the Popular Vote. This past elections left us with the questions of which voice we should listen to more: Politicians or the People. And if you don’t have an opinion about this thing, don’t worry, it can change with the times just like any other opinion!

(source: https://www.thewrap.com/electoral-college-donald-trump-fix-disaster/)

(source: https://www.elitedaily.com/news/politics/donald-trump-popular-vote-electoral-college-tweet/1692341)

 

Trump Puts on a Rust Belt

It’s just a few days after the one-year anniversary of the 46th President Donald Trump being inaugurated. And it’s safe to say a lot has happened in this one year.  Rather than focus on the number of things that fall into that category, I’m going to look at everything that led UP to the first week in November of 2016. And going to try to see whether Trump actually won the election or if Hillary just lost. That doesn’t make much sense right now, but this is basically a question of whether or not Trump’s rhetoric appealed to the masses  more than Hillary seemed to be a worse candidate. To start this, we’re looking at a very specific part of the country that helped propel Trump to his victory.

 

(image from https://www.realclearpolitics.com/incls/ap_results/2016_general/live_map_president.png?1514851200040)

This is a map of the results for each state from the 2016 election. Not too much to explain about it, it’s easy enough to understand on it’s own. Now, we compare this map to the one of the 2012 Presidential Election.

(Image taken from https://www.270towin.com/historical_maps/2012_large)

Now, generally everything looks as it should, save for Florida being the lovely swing state it is. But, some states near the northeast went through a change for this election. Those states being Wisconsin, Idaho, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. This area was commonly referred to as “The Rust Belt”, by many, and the fact that it swapped from Democratic to Republican in such a historical election is interesting to say the least.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/2016_election_speeches.php?candidate=70&campaign=2016CLINTON&doctype=5000

With the assistance of this website, I looked through both Hillary’s (the link above) and Trump’s speeches given from late 2015 all the way up to election day to see where they all went.

I formatted it as such, and we can see (with the exception of Idaho), that Trump held more rallies/speeches/etc in all of the states that switched to vote for him in the election compared to Hillary. But, just holding more speeches in these areas doesn’t guarantee votes heading in either direction. Obviously, what the candidates say in these speeches have the greatest impact. So it means we have to look through the speeches and see what was said in each that would lead to this change in voting patterns.

Taken from a Trump remark on August 16th 2016, in Wisconsin (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119165): “Last week, I laid out my plan to bring jobs back to our country.”

Taken from a Trump remark on August 19th 2016, in Michigan (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=123197): “And we are going to the White House and we are going to bring jobs back to our country and we are going to bring jobs back to Michigan.”

Taken from a Trump remark, September 1st 2016 in Ohio (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119198): “Come November, we are going to win this state, we are going to win the White House – and we are going to bring back your jobs.”

And finally, Trump remark from September 7th 2016 in Pennsylvania (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119177) “We will bring back our jobs.”

Seems pretty straight forward for all of them, his entire rhetoric for each of these states is founded upon “Let’s bring back jobs!”

For the sake of brevity I won’t show specific quotes from Hillary speeches, but with them being few and far between in these states should say enough about how many times she would have brought up bringing jobs back for these states.

So, if Trump is parading around rhetoric about bringing jobs back, then surely something like unemployment was a big issue during the election time.

(taken from https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000)

So, unemployment hit a peak around 2009 and 2010, but then went on a steady decline and was at its lowest around the time of the election (not counting past the 2017 record). But that leaves the glaring question for this: why was Trump using his rhetoric in such a way that jobs were actively leaving and making the unemployment be a larger issue than it is seen from the graph? But, if Trump won these states, then obviously it resonated with people in this area the most since they switched. So what did Hillary do wrong with these states? Did she not campaign enough in them, or did she just not say the right things? Jobs will always be a talking point for any election, but for this historical one, it just seemed like a much bigger issue that Trump exaggerated. So did Trump actively know his target audience in these states, or was his rhetoric just general enough to work just about anywhere?

 

 

 

 

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