Presidential election, 2016

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-20-2016, 07:21 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-20-2016, 07:49 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-20-2016, 02:51 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: President-elect Donald J. Trump has claimed he won the electoral vote in a “landslide,” but he ranks below most presidents in the electoral vote and popular vote margins.

Somebody is confusing 'truth' and 'big lie'.  I'm not quite sure who...

What would you call it if the situation was reversed? I'd call it and see it as a landslide victory regardless of who had won the election. As I've told you before, the term Democrat and the term Republican represent  little value to me as an American voter.

Nixon once took every state in the Union except Massachusetts.  That would seem to count as an electoral landslide.  Still proud to have been from Massachusetts that year.  Nixon was also forced to resign in disgrace.  Even a true landslide is an ephemeral thing if one hasn't got one's head on straight.  I'm not sure Trump's head is on straight.

We could hold a lengthy discussion on the meaning of the word 'landslide', I suppose.  If someone doesn't get a majority of the popular vote, I don't think the word should apply, but then I'm not Noah Webster or Humpty Dumpty.

But my concern is that if either party wins narrowly then tries to pretend that they had a landslide majority, a mandate, and tries to transform the culture as a result, they are riding for a fall.  Through the extended unravelling, since Nixon, the White House has swung back and forth with regularity.  Arguably, both sides are forcing extreme transformation on a lot of people who don't like the government forcing culture change, and both sides lose power at regular intervals as a result.  You understand quite well why the red folk are unhappy with a blue White House, but seem unable to comprehend that blue folk are equally happy a red White House, and with equally good reason.  Eric has the opposite biases.  Neither of you seems able to open minds sufficiently to comprehend the other, and you two are hardly alone.

From my point of view, Trump did not win a landslide, does not have a mandate for profound change.  If things had played different, if the FBI and/or Putin hadn't done their things, if severals states had gone the other way, Hillary's win wouldn't have been a landslide, a mandate either.

Not to say she wouldn't have tried to govern as if she had a mandate.