Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/01/us/elections/nine-percent-of-america-selected-trump-and-clinton.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

by Dowwie • 10 years ago

160 262 10 years ago

nytimes.com

UnoriginalGuy• 10 years ago

Can I just say the visualisation on this article is fantastic. Worth checking out even if you have little interest in the topic in the title.

piva00• 10 years ago

NY Times has been impressing me a lot with their online editions. To the point I'm considering to actually pay for the content.

Another very good visualisation from them is the Panama Channel article http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/22/world/americas...

mavhc• 10 years ago

Bit buggy though, the animations stop if you scroll too fast, including the one that counts up to the number of million people in USA, if you scroll past too fast it ends up below the actual number, causing confusion

bad_user2• 10 years ago

These 9% are representing a majority, since a lot of people didn't go to vote.

bla2• 10 years ago

No that's not the primary cause. See article.

trolly2• 10 years ago

Considering both nominees have the highest disapproval rates I would say your statement is almost certainly incorrect.

If anything, these 9% are representing a fundamental flaw in our first past the post system.

bad_user2• 10 years ago

Why is it incorrect?

According to the statistic, 73 million did not vote in the primaries this year and about 88 million eligible adults do not vote at all. Add to that 103 million that are not eligible for voting. So if I'm not mistaken, only 18.5% voted in the primaries.

You mention they have the highest disapproval rates, but how is disapproval expressed if not by voting?

drabiega• 10 years ago

Maybe in the Trump case, since he had fewer than half of the people that bothered to vote, but Clinton won the majority of those who bothered to vote in the primary, so even if you think the choice of her as unrepresentative of those who could have voted in the primary, first past the post isn't really the culprit, political apathy is.

That said, I generally agree that first past the post is bad and should be gotten rid of.

thomasfoster968• 10 years ago

The article shows that this 9% does not represent a majority of expected voters in November.

jjawssd• 10 years ago

This isn't hacker news

jokermatt999• 10 years ago

You're getting downvoted because this article is actually not an example of the NYT's slanted coverage. Don't get me wrong, they've had some shamefully distorted articles (especially the infamous updated Bernie article), but this is just a short data visualization.

meritt2• 10 years ago

The primary reason many people don't vote is one of convenience. If every state allowed early voting online (home or public libraries) and through mail-in ballots we would see a massive increase in participation.

That's only going to happen through strong, reliable, accurate, and verifiable technology.

rwmj• 10 years ago

As I understand it, everyone could choose nominees (assuming you can hold your nose and join one of the two major US parties), so this isn't really interesting news? The only sad bit from my point of view is the number of disenfranchised felons.

rm_-rf_slash• 10 years ago

Most state primaries are closed, so you have to register for a particular political party within an appropriate timeframe to be eligible to vote for a potential nominee. Both Ivanka and Eric Trump were too late to register as republicans and vote for their father in the New York primary.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/04...

0xcde4c3db• 10 years ago

In states that have caucuses it can be fairly tough for people working full-time jobs to attend them. I don't think that represents a large share of the popular vote, but it is a barrier to participation that requires more than holding one's nose to overcome.

shah_s• 10 years ago

That's just an excuse. There is early voting and most, if not all states, legally mandate that a company give time off to employees to go vote.

benevol• 10 years ago

The poll number timeline of the 2 parties: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/ge...

laichzeit02• 10 years ago

I don't understand the problem. This is exactly what statistics addresses. Is that 9% a good enough random sample of the entire population, or not? If not, then what is the error 5%, 10%? Actually 9% is a really good sample.

valarauca1• 10 years ago

        I don't understand the problem.

Low particaptation in the democratic election process can cause people to not benefit from their government.

        This is exactly what statistics addresses. 
        Is that 9% a good enough random sample of 
        the entire population, or not?

You are implying it is indeed random. Voting isn't random sampling as people are not randomly selected to take part in the democratic process, people choice too, while everyone has the right too.

For a proper bayesian result like you are suggesting participation would have to be randomly decided, and representative proportioinally of demographics (economic background, ethnic, educational, age, etc.), which it isn't.

Voters are more often then not. Old, affluent (I.E.: Can afford to take time off of work to vote, or has a job that permits them to take time off to vote, or have time to research+register for absentee voting), black, educated. Under-educated, immigrant, and younger backgrounds are heavily under represented in the voting process currently, and for most modern records keeping. Furthermore some local governments have laws that discourage particaptation for some ethnic-minorities.

linuskendall• 10 years ago

Except I'd venture it would not be a good sample as it's not necessarily very statistically representative of the whole population (ie. random)?

Of whether the people choosing the candidates have to be or even should be statistically representative of the whole population can be argued. The choice of candidates or order on ballots in many countries is decided by various less-than-representative groups.

laichzeit02• 10 years ago

Except I'd venture it would not be a good sample as it's not necessarily very statistically representative of the whole population

That's pure conjecture as the article doesn't address the sample at all. It just basically says "The sample is 9%". It doesn't say why this is bad.

colanderman• 10 years ago

These 9% were not a random sample.

thomasfoster968• 10 years ago

It's 9% of the most politically active and engaged section of the population. It's not a random cross section of the entirety of the US population.

pessimizer4• 10 years ago

It's 9% consisting of the members of two private clubs who have thrown up massive barriers to the participation of people who don't agree with either of their programs and who don't have to be active or engaged to be counted, just to vote correctly. Ideally, I'd think that the parties would want to an even smaller percentage to make the choice for the rest of us. 9% of the population have proved very difficult to wrangle this time around, with a near total failure on one of the sides.

Either that, or the best candidate for president out of 300 million is the wife of the president three terms ago. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Clinton? This has nothing to with issues.

VLM3• 10 years ago

Certainly there exists a value X where 100-X percent of the population is not engaged at all and is little more than a source of random numbers or demographic counts.

If X is 10% then its an excellent measure of the will of the actively thinking electorate and its not the fault of the statistician that Americans don't care about politics.

If X is 50% or so then there's 4 semi-motivated voters per primary voter which is getting fuzzy.

Note that about 20% of the population vote in non-presidential elections and 50% vote in presidential elections. I'd propose that the delta is due to tradition and heavy social signalling to get out the vote, but that 30% don't really care and absent intense PR activity in support of voting, would not vote. Unfortunately 20% is too high to clearly support the first criteria and 20% is too low to support the second criteria.

I think its really annoying that there is no mathematically trustworthy answer to is 9% enough. Annoyingly its probably good enough to not be ridiculously far off and bad enough to not be correct a significant amount of time.

prof_hobart• 10 years ago

If you were using the primaries as a way of predicting the overall winner, the critical word would be "random".

The statistical idea that a small sample can accurately represent the whole is based on the assumption that the small number are largely indistinguishable from that whole. It's like taking a sample of

In this case, the people voting in primaries are a self-selecting group - people who are both relatively actively engaged with politics and members of one of the two main parties.

It's not unreasonable to think that the wider population (even the wider population of people who normally vote at an election) could behave vastly differently.

For instance, if you had a candidate who was so divisive that they were either loved or hated, then it wouldn't be overly surprising if the vast majority of their supporters had signed up to vote in the primaries, with little support outside of that core. Compare this to a more middle of the road candidate - they might struggle to get as many people out to vote in a primary, but might do far better in the wider population.

That theory is very relevant in the UK at the moment, with the leader of the Labour Party (Jeremy Corbyn) being very popular amongst grassroots party members, but with his enemies saying he could never win a general election as this level of support would never be reflected outside of party supporters.

evilduck• 10 years ago

I really doubt that 9% in the primaries looks anything like the general election, which itself probably diverges from a pure population demographic sample (voter ID laws, disenfranchisement, etc)

msravi• 10 years ago

I didn't know that felons weren't allowed to vote in the US - this was news to me. Looks like it varies by state: http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...

jacquesm• 10 years ago

This is especially cruel because it doesn't take much to be labeled a felon in the US.

brian_cloutier• 10 years ago

"The New Jim Crow" is an excellent book on this. There's a chapter about how this disproportionately affects young black men and disenfranchises them.

Someone12344• 10 years ago

That plus unlike in other countries convictions don't "expire." Take the UK for example, many convictions fall away after sentence duration + 2-4 years (obviously depends how serious it is, see "Rehabilitation periods for specific sentences" table in the link)[0].

The UK doesn't disenfranchise anyway (only if you're incarcerated can you not vote). But even in a world where the UK did disenfranchise, it would still be a fairer system as we don't hold people's convictions over their head forever.

The US is designed to keep people re-offending. Once you're convicted of a single crime you're effectively damaged goods forever, and have to report it (unless you get it expunged which is far harder if it occurred over 18).

[0] http://hub.unlock.org.uk/knowledgebase/detailedguideroa/

the_duke4• 10 years ago

This really shocked me when I found out about it a few years ago.

According to this statistic [1], 2.5 % of the electorate is disenfranchised.

2.5% is a HUGE amount for a 2 party system with elections often being very tight.

This is somewhat less severe due to fellons probably belonging to demographics less inclined to vote, but it's still a large number.

[1] http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...

meritt2• 10 years ago

Less inclined? Felons are disproportionately black and black people overwhelmingly vote democrat. There's a reason the red-states are the ones with the strictest felon-voting regulations: They don't want non-whites voting.

Take a look at the North Carolina Voter ID law that was just overturned if you need additional everyday evidence: http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/29/politics/north-carolina-voter-...

tanderson928• 10 years ago

There's a fascinating story in which Terry McAuliffe of Virginia tried to use an executive order to allow the 200,000 felons in Virginia to vote this fall (seen by some as a partisan move for the Democrats, others as restoring voter rights). The courts blocked him, so he instead is granting up to 200,000 individual clemency grants to allow each voter an individual exception.

thomasfoster968• 10 years ago

What astounds me the most is that party membership in the United States is actually very high compared to most other countries (except for India).

Fewer than 200,000 Australians would currently be members of any political party - representing less than 1.5% of the total voters (around 14 million) - and that's being very generous with estimates of party membership figures. Most AFL football clubs would have more members than the major political parties.

Perhaps Australia is too different to compare the United States - compulsory voting (90% turnout this year), shorter campaigns (this year's 8 week campaign was twice as long as usual), elections being held on a weekend, preferential voting (third party votes are still valuable) and the parliamentary system (you never actually vote directly for the leader of the country) obviously result in a very different attitude toward elections and politics.

icc972• 10 years ago

I definitely agree. The article appears to be painting a very dark picture that 91% don't want the candidates.

Where as this is just stating the obvious of what happens in every country that first puts forward a leader of a party that is contending to win the overall election.

mtgx• 10 years ago

It's a problem in the current context of how U.S. elections work, where those 91% of the people feel "forced" into voting one of these two parties or candidates, even though 50% of them are registered Independent.

If the U.S. electoral system easily allowed for other parties to exist and thrive (such as with a proportional representation voting system for Congress, which drastically increases how well people are represented in Congress, and could lead to much less "gridlock") then this wouldn't be an issue. Because those 91% of the people could easily ignore the Democratic and Republican candidates if they were terrible (which seems to be the case this year), and just vote for another party's candidate in the general election.

And they could very much still do that. The problem is there's both a legal and unofficial collusion between the two main parties to control the elections in various ways (such as making the rules for who gets to debate), and between them and the media, who normally completely ignore other candidates, and don't treat them nearly as fairly, so their chances greatly diminish.

There are a lot of things that could be done to fix this. But people need to support politicians willing to overhaul this system.

Larry Lessig (on who the DNC changed the rules mid-game so he doesn't get to make his case in a debate) had some great ideas [1], and so does the Green Party [2].

Jill Stein also supports ranked choice voting, and I believe multi-winner ranked choice voting, too, which is a form of proportional representation [3].

Unfortunately, you're not going to hear about all of these ideas from a media that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and you'd have to rely heavily on the Internet and social media to grow this movement (and do it before Google/Facebook/Twitter start ramping up their censorship to help their favorite candidates, as we've already started seeing them do).

[1] https://lessig2016.us/the-plan/

[2] http://www.gp.org/democracy#demFreeSpeech

[3] http://www.fairvote.org/proportional_representation

afarrell3• 10 years ago

How many people in the UK chose Theresa May as Prime Minister?

matwood3• 10 years ago

It is quite an interesting time. My liberal friends are all irked because Bernie got hosed by the DNC. My conservative friends are irked because the RNC did not do more to stop Trump. Talk about a role reversal with the party of the people and the party of the establishment.

Personally, I see so many problems with both candidates that it makes me sick that I have to vote for the least worst one.

pessimizer4• 10 years ago

According to the polls, it's more like 60-65%. Only somewhat fewer than 70-80% would be willing to vote for either, and less than half of those who would vote for either candidate are voting in support of that candidate, rather than in disgust with the other one.

The picture is dark. Voters are choosing between dynastic plutocracy and a carnival barker.

metaphorm3• 10 years ago

91% are not engaged supporters of the two candidates that were nominated. Each nominee can claim no more than 9% of the population as having demonstrated engagement with their campaign.

In addition to that it should be pointed out that the number of engaged voters who voted for a different candidate for nomination is almost as large as the number of engaged voters who voted for the winning nominee.

There is a fundamental problem with the nominating process. Neither nominee has solid ground to claim that they represent the preferences of anything besides a small fraction of the electorate.

pessimizer4• 10 years ago

In Australia or the UK, you can run without being a billionaire, and legislators who aren't members of major parties still have influence (sometimes disproportionate) on who is chosen as head of state.

thomasfoster968• 10 years ago

you can run without being a billionaire

It sure helps though, for example Clive Palmer in Aus in 2013.

legislators who aren't members of major parties still have influence (sometimes disproportionate) on who is chosen as head of state.

Australia and the UK still have the same monarch, so the head of state is not chosen by anyone in either country - but if you mean the Prime Minister, then you are correct.

toomanybeersies• 10 years ago

I most of the reason is that in a lot of countries, you don't get as much choice in who leads the country. The prime ministerial candidate isn't chosen by a primary, and the PM can be deposed by parliament without much trouble (as we've seen with Australia).

In New Zealand, you're considered a bit of a loon if you're a card holding party member. I think that a lot more of the population is flexible in who they vote for as well. An MP told me once that 1/3 of voters are independent.

thomasfoster968• 10 years ago

The prime ministerial candidate isn't chosen by a primary

Depends on the party. None of them have three or four months of primaries like America, but the Labour Party in the UK and the Labor Party in Australia both have the whole membership voting for the leader now. Others only have elected party members voting (equivalent to US super delegates).

In New Zealand, you're considered a bit of a loon if you're a card holding party member. I think that a lot more of the population is flexible in who they vote for as well. An MP told me once that 1/3 of voters are independent.

I'd agree to an extent with Australia as well. Those who are party members are, in my experience, older, well connected within the community, more upper class and often involved in some sort of non-partisan activism. Unless someone is trying to be elected, they do avoid showing their colours.

icc972• 10 years ago

I don't see how this would be different from any other election with new candidates from both parties.

j-c-h-e-n-g• 10 years ago

I was sort of thinking the same thing - though more about how I hope they extend this visualization to past presidential elections.

lintiness• 10 years ago

the implication is that given interest / participation of a greater percent of the population, the candidates would be different. unlikely.

ErrantX• 10 years ago

More depressing is the ~40% of the eligible electorate who don't vote at all.

afarrell3• 10 years ago

Even more depressing than that is the larger number of eligible electorate who don't bother to vote in elections that are only for local and legislative candidates.

awesomerobot2• 10 years ago

Our voting system really needs to change, it's completely absurd that it hasn't just moved to a weekend or received special treatment as holidays.

anthony_romeo• 10 years ago

I agree!

If I recall, employers are required to allow some time-off during the day for people to vote. Practically, however, this doesn't happen because a: some districts don't have nearly enough polling places and staff, resulting in hours-long wait times (around where I live, I've never had this problem, but it's a real issue in other (often more poverty-stricken) areas), and b: not many low-wage workers are willing to 'rock the boat' with their employer and would rather just not vote than face any hassle or retaliation.

At the very least, we need smoother process where people can go to their city hall and vote over a period of a week or so, or vote by mail/online

bluejekyll3• 10 years ago

Almost every state allows for early voting, and some like CA allow permanent voting by mail selection.

Do this on some weekend. Before the election date, why wait for the actual Election Day at all?

bickfordb• 10 years ago

OR and WA are exclusively vote by mail. It's really convenient.

Someone12344• 10 years ago

Both solutions are less effective than mail in ballots, online voting, or extending the vote duration (e.g. 7 days).

People just bring up a "voting holiday" because they want an extra holiday. The reality is that many people would use the holiday to relax, go out of town, or get stuff done and voting percentage wouldn't improve.

Ditto with weekends. People go out of town on the weekends, do you think they're going to stop because of a pesky vote? Even if they did for one year word would quickly spread that that is a "quiet" weekend and everyone would go for that reason.

If you really want to improve voting: Drive through voting, like McDonald's, that takes the same amount of time as McDonald's to do, and that you have a seven day week within which to do. Literally make it a 5 minute job where you don't even need to exit your vehicle.

People might scoff at that, call it lazy, but people ARE lazy. They want minimum hassle, minimum time, and maximum value. That's why drive-through places even exist.

humanrebar6• 10 years ago

People might scoff at that, call it lazy, but people ARE lazy.

Or they're just tired because they have two part time jobs (while looking for something more regular), kids, and a pile of chores they've been putting off.

awesomerobot2• 10 years ago

Good points. A 7-day duration would be hopefully flexible enough with everyone and would be the most easy to implement.

sp332• 10 years ago

It depends on the state. Some allow early voting and some encourage voting by mail which is pretty convenient. It will have to be up to the states because the federal government is pretty strictly disallowed from interfering with how the elections are run.

ajmurmann2• 10 years ago

I think what's absurd is that we have a highly polarized political landscape that combined wit the voting system leads to a two party system. That could be easily changed by switching to approval voting. Neither Hilary nor Trump would be close to being viable candidates, since they both had bad approval ratings. As it is now everyone is just voting against the candidate they are most scared of.

What's even more absurd is that the actual votes are being counted on a per-state basis. If someone where to design the system from scratch nowadays nobody would even come up with a system that dumb. Just count all the votes. What's the point of involving states at all in a federal election? It shouldn't matter in a federal election if I live in California or Georgia. It's absurd that it does!

seren• 10 years ago

The polarized political landscape is probably a result of the voting system though. In a winner take it all systems, you can get a vote at "any cost" since you won't have to make any coalition later.

The only thing in favor of the system is that it creates a clear winner, proportional systems might be more fair, but if parties fail to create a majority coalition you are back to square one.

An ideal system might need to mix these two approaches (and some other like vote ranking, lists, etc)

rbcgerard2• 10 years ago

pretty good piece on some possible changes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12202705

nkrisc• 10 years ago

Theoretically this isn't an issue as this is just two political parties choosing the candidate that want to support for the general election. Political parties may choose their candidate however they like; they could pick a name from a hat if they wanted to. The issue is these two parties are so entrenched in the government as to essentially be legitimized as the only viable parties.

the_duke4• 10 years ago

On a side note: I think this page is really well done.

It's rare that that much (programming) effort is put into a simple newspaper article.

Anyone agree?

zaphar• 10 years ago

I also really enjoyed the presentation of the information. The information was presented gradually in an easily digestible format.

jaflo• 10 years ago

Definitely, although the New York Times develops a lot more than other newspapers do: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/category/interactive/

the_duke4• 10 years ago

They are one of the few newspapers that can possibly afford it, I guess.

paradite• 10 years ago

Definitely the best I've seen in any online news media websites.

Their election tracker and real-time update of votes in the primaries were very well done.

Even the summary after the vote looks neat:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/primary...

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/california

After some digging, found out they have open-sourced this library:

https://github.com/sjwilliams/scrollstory

MIT license, so we can use it for ourselves!

jccalhoun3• 10 years ago

I don't see a problem. They are the Republican and Democratic party candidates. The members of those parties can nominate whomever they want. There's nothing in the constitution that says anything about how political parties chose their candidates. Primaries didn't always exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_pri...

eli_gottlieb2• 10 years ago

I don't see a problem. They are the Republican and Democratic party candidates. The members of those parties can nominate whomever they want.

If there's no legal constraint on how the parties select candidates for office, why should the parties have a legal monopoly on ballot-line presence?

chrisseaton9• 10 years ago

why should the parties have a legal monopoly on ballot-line presence

I didn't think they did. Do they? Can't anyone apply to be on the ballot as long as they demonstrate a reasonable level of support?

colordrops• 10 years ago

Monopolies are considered to be very bad in business, as they use their leverage to prevent competition and stifle innovation, ending up with negative consequences for the public. Monopolies in politics are far worse for the public, especially when the system is set up to make it nearly impossible for any other parties to break through. The First Past the Post voting system leads to monopolies (or a duopoly in this case).

I don't understand how business monopolies are considered bad, but political monopolies, which strongly affect the lives of over 300 million people who have little choice, are OK.

the_duke4• 10 years ago

Personally, being more familiar with European parliamentary systems, I find it quite astounding that the canidate selection is such an open an public process.

In many countries, the parties select candidates internally and then present them to the public. Letting non-party members vote or register just before voting would be unthinkable there.

Then again, this is probably a necessary result of the US political system: majority voting rules, therefore (basically) only two parties, and of course, the US is huge and diverse.

The whole process is ridiculously long and expensive. But it's also a way to get people familiar with the candidates early on.

kiiski• 10 years ago

Edit (re: reply by dagss): I seem to have misunderstood the comment, but can't delete anymore.

icebraining• 10 years ago

In Portugal it's just 7500, though our President doesn't really have that much power, he's more of a figurehead.

dagss• 10 years ago

This is referring to who becomes candidate og Republican or Democratic parties. I am sure anyone can become presidential candidate in just the same way in the US - but not representing those parties.

Mister_Snuggles• 10 years ago

Looking at things from Canada, I feel the same way.

These primaries, from what I can gather, are roughly the equivalent of the leadership selection process that happens with the political parties here. There is media coverage of those, but not to the extent that the US has. They're also run by the parties themselves, whereas the voting process seems to be handled by the individual states' election authorities.

In Canada, Elections Canada doesn't really get involved in the process that the parties use to select their leader. It just does the general election, by-elections, etc.

jccalhoun3• 10 years ago

But it's also a way to get people familiar with the candidates early on.

That is largely what it is all about. It is basically theater. All the rules are made by the political parties themselves whether their own rules or by the state laws they have voted for. In the 1800s they just nominated whomever they wanted (and this is basically what the smaller political parties do since they are so small they don't have the money to do these long extended campaigns) but then they started doing the primaries and caucuses to give people input.

sanderjd• 10 years ago

We did it that way until the early to mid twentieth century, when a populist backlash against that good ol' boys system led to more or less the primary setup we have now. It still varies a lot year to year and party to party.For instance, the Republicans' system was quite a bit more democratic than the Democrats' this year. (You can draw your own conclusions from that on the relative value of the two models.)

It's an odd hybrid where the parties are private organizations that can make their own decisions and rules, but their leadership elections are run by state apparatus. This (understandably) confuses people, to the point that most people seem to think of the parties as almost part of the governmental system.

As others have noted, this all goes back to our winner-take-all elections, which are a kind of original sin in our system, which we'll probably never be able to change. In other systems, which encourage more parties, it is much easier to abandon a party if you don't like the leaders they pick, so it is not as important to be invested in the actual process of picking those leaders.

The Atlantic had a really good article on some of these topics recently: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-amer...

equivocates• 10 years ago

The article implies an indictment of Clinton & Trump. As if they were nominated inspire of the will of the vast majority of the people. But it's actually an indictment of the American public for failing to vote.

stevenmays• 10 years ago

No, you have to be registered to a political party to vote in primaries in most states. If you're registered independent you don't get a chance to vote unless that state has open primaries.

coliveira• 10 years ago

That's why this is called "primaries", not election. The primaries are supposed to chose candidates, not the president. Assuming that they're not representative just because of that is trying to stretch reality.

sorokod• 10 years ago

Exactly zero people voted for the UK's new prime minister.

hammock• 10 years ago

I would expect it to be an order or magnitude smaller than the general, just on the pure physics of it. If it were <1% this would be a story.

kr72• 10 years ago

Trump got the most votes of any Republican candidate in history. It probably would have been lower than 9% if Trump hadn't run.

Eutow• 10 years ago

Is it pertinent to point out that he also garnered the most votes against him than any Republican candidate in history?

kr72• 10 years ago

How many people really voted against him, though?

The media thought that everyone not voting for him was voting against him. They assumed that once the field narrowed voters would rally around another candidate and defeat Trump. That never happened. If the voters' goal was to beat Trump, they would have done it.

By that logic, Obama had a record number of votes "against" him too, with 19,585,539 (53%) "against" him in a 3 man race, compared to Trump with 17,151,110 (55%) "against" him in a 5 man race.

curiousgal• 10 years ago

So what? if Americans focused more on congressional elections then things could change. There's only so much a president can do.

DefaultUserHN6• 10 years ago

That's true. People act like the President has all the power. But that's now how our government work. Power is divided between all the three branches of the government. The President does not have all the power.

Those that fear Trump will become a dictator does not understand the checks and balances of our government.

krapp3• 10 years ago

I'm opposed to Trump, possibly to an unreasonable degree, but I agree he's not going to turn into a dictator. He can still screw things up royally, and destroy what little civility in the political discourse there is in this country by pandering to the alt-right, conspiracy theorist, nihilist fringe and legitimizing them, but a President Trump would probably face more scrutiny and intransigence than even Obama has. Both parties would be trying their hardest to discredit him for a second term, and discredit his attempts at a legacy.

Of course people said the same thing about Obama... I'm still waiting for that inevitable socialist coup he's supposed to pull off. Unfortunately, both the Democrats and Republicans have made an art out of convincing people that the Presidency is the only part of the government they should be engaged with.

dragonwriter8• 10 years ago

Those that fear Trump will become a dictator does not understand the checks and balances of our government.

Or they recognize that the checks and balances of our government are not magic, and that Trump being elected as the nominee of a major party would also reflect a shift in the political landscape which would be reflected, particularly, in the actions of other politicians in that party, especially in the other elected branch -- and that those two branches together have the power to reshape the remaining branch.

pjc50• 10 years ago

I call this "agonizingly slow runoff voting", the opposite of instant runoff voting. The French presidential election is similar, although the first round all the candidates are considered as a single pool rather than two party-orientated pools.

IRV and proportional systems produce 'external' coalitions at the government level. FPTP produces 'internal' coalitions, which is why the Republican party looks so strange from the outside.

gotherewhere• 10 years ago

Don't see why folk don't vote for Gary Johnson. He appeals to both Bernie Sanders voters and disenfranchised Republicans.

jccalhoun3• 10 years ago

If people are like me they will probably not be voting for someone but against someone. I really don't want candidate Y to win so I'm going to vote for candidate X because that candidate has a better chance of winning than Johnson (or my pick Stein).

Although my state usually goes pretty solidly for one political party so I might vote for Stein anyway because my anti-vote won't be enough.

sbjustin2• 10 years ago

If more people were supporting Johnson he'd get on the debate stage and actually stand a shot. It's non-sense that people are saying they won't vote for him now when they don't have to decide till Nov 7th. Support him now and if he doesn't poll well enough after the debates go do your never X vote.

plandis• 10 years ago

Sanders and Johnson couldn't be more far apart on economic policy. It's a false equivalence to say that they are similar.

One is inherently for welfare the other vehemently against it in most forms.

omegaworks2• 10 years ago

Gary Johnson stated that he would eliminate the Board of Education. That is the opposite position from Bernie Sanders' push to expand access to public education. Don't take that as an endorsement of the status quo; right now schools are locally funded, with wealthier districts providing higher quality experiences and fighting vehemently against out-of-district access to those resources. [0] However, the market-based solution that GJ and the Libertarians propose looks like a step backwards, furthering the stratification between rich and poor. A stronger national education system is necessary to enable sensible resource allocation and equitable access to quality schools.

0. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

ciethrenn2• 10 years ago

i agree he is a brilliant middle of the road honest candidate with much to offer both sides https://www.reddit.com/r/GaryJohnson/comments/4vq33l/choose_...

scotty793• 10 years ago

There should be a way in the general elections to reject both candidates.

lostapathy• 10 years ago

Vote libertarian?

humanrebar6• 10 years ago

Johnson is not a very good libertarian, ironically.

scotty793• 10 years ago

I rather thought of:

- Clinton

- Trump

- None (give me someone else)

In case 3rd option gets most votes parties have to re-pick candidates in a week.

eximius5• 10 years ago

Can we just find someone reaaally moderate or even someone who contractually obligates themselves to doing literally nothing in office and then vote for them? Literally any 3rd party candidate we can all agree on to vote for instead of these two.

awinder• 10 years ago

I'm curious about what, in the current state of America, screams "we can just do nothing for the next 8 years and it'll all be good"

humanrebar6• 10 years ago

I think the argument is against doing something especially rash or corrupt because of the current state of America. What would happen if another Watergate occurred in the next few years?

eximius5• 10 years ago

I think nothing is objectively better than the results we'd get from either candidate.

We will not improve our situation, but I don't believe we'll devolve into chaos either. With Trump he might bomb someone or aggravate existing problems or something else unimaginably stupid. With Hillary we'll just see an increase in corruption and an expansion of the rights of corporations at the costs of the individual.

metaphorm3• 10 years ago

what is the appeal of "reaaally moderate" to you? 8 years of moderate, ineffectual government has been the Obama administration exactly.

just because Fox News accuses Obama of being a radical leftist doesn't make it even remotely close to true. Obama is precisely the kind of moderate you're asking for. It's gotten us nowhere.

eximius5• 10 years ago

Better than blatantly corrupt or blatantly racist?

jorgeleo2• 10 years ago

I found funny that there are more non-citizens than Hillary or Trump voters

VLM3• 10 years ago

Not very funny for them, because their polling stats are extremely skewed politically, resulting in amnesty turning into a political football. If illegals voted perfectly 50:50 D:R they would have gotten amnesty decades ago and everything would have been reformed and sensible for generations, but its seen as an automatic source of "D" votes therefore as long as we have "D" and "R" they'll fight over it rather than fix it. A one line summary of why our immigration system is all screwed up, is most people who want to come here want to vote "D" and that riles up both the "D" and "R" parties therefore nothing can ever be fixed.

jorgeleo2• 10 years ago

Except undocumented cannot vote

TimJRobinson• 10 years ago

So why does the USA still have first past the post presidential voting? Is someone, anyone, in the government pushing for this to change? It seems painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that switching to a better voting system where you can still vote for 3rd party candidates and not have your vote go to waste would be a huge improvement.

delecti2• 10 years ago

The electoral college is defined in the Constitution, and changing that is never easy. Anybody with the power to change things from the top is probably up there because of taking advantage of the way things currently work.

GarrisonPrime• 10 years ago

Friendly reminder: Not voting can be a vote in and of itself. A vote of "no confidence".

True, voting for an alternative candidate will take a percentage of the votes away from Clinton or Trump, and having them win by a lower percentage would be a satisfying way to sock it to the system and send a message. (Although, knowing the media, if the stats started to look bad they would probably start reporting Clinton and Trump vote percentages only as percentages of the Clinton+Trump votes, rather than as percentages of all votes...)

But wouldn't it be wonderful if one of them "wins" the job by receiving support from only a small fraction of eligible voters? I think having a President elected by only 15-17% of eligible voters would send a pretty good message.

sbuttgereit• 10 years ago

Agreed. Right now my vote is for a specific major party candidate as possibly the least terrible that could win vs. an empty ballot in the presidential race.

Many will say vote for a third party; but because that vote will be purely symbolic, any third party candidate that I might vote for has a higher bar to reach than a major party candidate: the party and candidate stand to gain more from a decent showing than any abstract message of protest disconnected from the party/candidate. So, a third party candidate is not a sensible default when the major party choices suck... not voting is the sensible default in that case.

odesian• 10 years ago

Send a message to who? The newly elected President from the 15% win? Some message. Get out and look for a candidate you believe in and spread the word.

ChrisLTD• 10 years ago

Even if the President was elected by only 15-17% of eligible voters, they would still wield 100% of the power of the presidency.

sbjustin2• 10 years ago

The politicians don't care. Vote third party and get someone in there who will actually enact change.

VT_Drew• 10 years ago

True, voting for an alternative candidate will take a percentage of the votes away from Clinton or Trump

No it won't. The only wasted vote is voting for someone you don't believe in. Google Gary Johnson.

President elected by only 15-17% of eligible voters would send a pretty good message

This would be largely ignored and not covered my mainstream media. It would go completely un-noticed by the vast majority.

dingaling2• 10 years ago

I'd argue that deliberately spoiling your ballot sends a more powerful message.

Not voting cannot be distinguished between abstinence on principle versus apathy. However making the effort to go to vote and then making a protest is much clearer.

dragonwriter8• 10 years ago

Friendly reminder: Not voting can be a vote in and of itself. A vote of "no confidence".

No, it can be a form of non-voting protest, which is very different from a vote, including a vote of no confidence where such is an actual, meaningful thing.

And its a fairly weak form of protest, given that its protesting by doing exactly what lots of political actors expend considerable effort to get people that disagree with them to do (if you can't be convinced to vote the way they want, not voting or voting for an irrelevant option is exactly what political campaigns try to get you to do.)

But wouldn't it be wonderful if one of them "wins" the job by receiving support from only a small fraction of eligible voters?

It likely would be almost completely unnoticed.

I think having a President elected by only 15-17% of eligible voters would send a pretty good message.

Sure, it would be a few percent less than Clinton in 1992 (23%) or Bush in 2000 (24%). So what? Why do you expect that there is a magic threshold where suddenly it would be a "strong message" somewhere below the sub-25% of those elections and 15-17%?

Kinnard2• 10 years ago

Great Data-Visualization Narrative, despite the bad news . . .

theorique• 10 years ago

Rephrased another way, relatively few voters actually (1) register and (2) vote in the party primaries. These registered voters apparently represent the "most politically involved" 10% of the overall population. (It's also somewhat misleading to include minors or non-citizen residents in the denominator when they aren't able to vote - it makes the result artificially small.)

The primary system, while still susceptible to party insiders, is a lot more democratic than a system where political parties pick their candidates and say to the electorate "these are your choices, take it or leave it". (I won't address whether "more democratic" is a good thing, as that's a whole different can of worms.)

elicash• 10 years ago

This is the same percentage that chose Obama and McCain.

circa• 10 years ago

T-shirt link is relevant to discussion. So i'll leave this here.

https://www.teepublic.com/show/496947-i-already-hate-our-nex...

ciethrenn2• 10 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/GaryJohnson/comments/4vq33l/choose_... vote gary johnson

vorotato• 10 years ago

Let's not forget it was embarrassingly painful to vote in the primaries this year. There were people who waited in lines for hours and never got to vote.

Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

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