Why were the nut-balls right this time?
Why did the GOP get stuck with Donald Trump, a man who is universally agreed upon by the left, the center, and even a good chunk of those on the right as completely off his rocker? Well, there are many reasons, two of the most primary being the ending of the Fairness Doctrine by Ronald Reagan (with no vote from Congress whatsoever), and the other being the deregulation of the radio airwaves under Bill Clinton. Both these changes allowed the consolidation and corporatization of all the radio stations until only three corporations owned most of the airwaves, and nearly all the talk radio stations were owned by just one, namely Newscorp, a.k.a. Clearchannel. Day and night they spewed nothing but hate rhetoric, and now the hate rhetoric candidate has won.
But that's just the fall of free media. There's also the math. I'm going to tell you about the math.
Trump insists the people chose him. But did they really? He points out that more people voted for him than ever voted for Romney in the primaries, and he's right - by a long shot. The Trump factor got people out to vote in a voting season where most people usually stay home. Primary season is rerun season, and your average voter, at least in elections of the past, has not bothered to really notice. Until now.
But even then, most registered Republicans voted against him. Here are the numbers:
Donald Trump did not outright win any states in the first 34 contests. In fact, in each of the 21 of those early states where he "won," he only scored more than the other guys with an average of only 33.1% of the vote. That's normally not enough to get you elected to a school board, much less a presidency.
But it gets worse. The Republican system awarded Trump with more delegates, even when he didn't secure a 50% majority of votes. In Florida, for example, he only got 45.7% of the votes, but took all the delegates. The majority of Floridians voted for someone else, but Trump took the entire state. Does that seem fair?
Trump finally won a state with a 50% majority with New York. He hasn't lost one below 50% since. Yet even then, that's only seven states out of the 41 which have voted so far. In the earlier states, people voted overwhelmingly for someone other than Trump, and the only reason they lost was because that vote was so divided.
In all, 10,654,918 Republicans have voted for Trump. And 15,909,112 have voted against him and for someone else. That's a 67% margin of registered republicans who would rather have had another candidate!
So let's everyone quit bitching about superdelegates supporting the Democratic candidate who is legitimately leading her rival by 2 million 700 thousand votes, shall we? It's the Republicans who have truly mastered vote theft. And we haven't even discussed the gerrymandering of Congress.
I am reminded of how democracy self-destructed in Egypt back in 2012. They won themselves a democratic revolution, then blew it in the elections. Why? Because the liberal majority could not coalesce around a single party, and so their field was flooded with dozens of candidates who fractured the vote. The Muslim extremist candidate, Mohammed Morsi, ended up winning. An American dignitary who visited Egypt around that time cautioned many Egyptian politicians about exactly that sort of thing happening. She warned them that unless they could forge political alliances and be pragmatic, that they would fracture and spoil the vote, thus allowing an extremist candidate to win, and forcing the Egyptian military to step in and institute a Junta.
In the end, that's just what happened. Oh, and that American dignitary? You guessed it: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Republicans got stuck with Trump because they couldn't compromise politically, and got stuck with the worst guy who could bully the most votes. Let's not make the same mistake on the Democratic Party side, and thus allow Trump to win the whole thing. Let's not ignore Hillary the way the Egyptians did.
Hell, we've been at this democracy thing far longer than they have. So you'd think we'd know better.
Eric
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