Well, since you asked about the view from the USA.
- There are about 300 million people, and about that many opinions

- My personal politics are closer to libertarian / independent, with a big belief in personal responsibility, fair (not free) trade, personal privacy, and strong on the rights of the individual.
- Current tax and business policies in the US are driving companies and small business completely under and only strengthening those that don't need it.

- Candidates wise, looking at all of the political parties and candidates that ran vs my political beliefs, the closest to this was Rand Paul, furthest from this is Hillary Clinton.  That does not mean that I am impressed by any of the others, but honestly, it has never been about voting "for" a candidate, we nearly always vote "against" a candidate.

- Each State runs it's own election, largely under it's own election laws.  These individual state laws can have a large impact on who is elected, not just for President, but also in the congress and other races.

- The number of electoral votes (the ones that actually matter) are distributed to the states using census population information.  They are not distributed by "numbers of citizens", just total numbers of people who are in the state when the census is taken.  You could actually alter these results substantially by just having a bunch of Canadians visit their friends in MI for the right week.  This is actually much easier than it sounds, as Winsor and Detroit are virtually joined at the hip business wise.

- IMHO, CA, NY, and TX are "over represented" in both the congress and electoral votes.  This rather dramatically skews the elections, at least locally.  I feel confident saying this as I live in CA, but am originally from another state.

- My vote here in CA is nearly worthless from a "Presidential election" perspective.  CA nearly always votes for a democrat for president due to the way the voting districts are arranged.  You can vote for really anyone from Libertarian, republican, democrat or communist and it will have no impact on the outcome.





 

Just adding a bit more on to the posting:
- It is possible that Clinton will have clear victories in enough states to be declared the winner, but it seems more likely that there will be a lot of very close counts.

- In the past, voting by mail meant that we used to send in our ballots and most election offices actually never even opened them, instead just statistically assumed that the votes were similar to the voters at the actual ballot stations.

Of course, none of this knew that until the Bush / Gore election, so these are now more thoroughly counted.

There are some states where the voting can be done earlier than election day (example Sunday).  This used to be rare, now it is more common.

Don't be surprised if the final voting results, and legal battles go on for several weeks.

Regardless of who wins, the next 4 years will be one political battle after another.  There is literally no ability to create consensus here, as voters nor the representatives in congress.

In general this is probably good, because the last time we had a consensus of President and Congress, two wars were started.

Mike Pence, Trump's VP is from Indiana.  It would be a big slap if Pence could not bring Indiana in.

Kentucky is full of auto workers who have lost jobs to China, Japan and Mexico.  That was a big target of Trump's campaign and really the "center piece" of the whole concept.

New Hampshire - Probably not important.

States that will make or break the election:
- Michigan
- Nevada
- Colorado
- Florida
- Maybe AZ, but it is hard to believe that it will vote for such a strong anti gun candidate as Hillary.
- Possibly Ohio, but it seems likely that it is going to vote similarly to Kentucky

 

Just to calm any nerves:
- There will be nearly no difference between these two candidates as far as Europe / UK / Middle East are concerned, business, politics, or wars.

- The only country that will really feel any difference is China.  Clinton will embrace it, Trump will not.

- There are some minor differences in how domestic policies are run, but less than you might think, as congress is a glacier, and lobbies still run the country.

It's a republic, not a democracy, so the voters can shift a lot and it matters little for many years.

 

Out of those only Florida and Ohio have anything in.
Ohio is 49.1 vs 47.2 at 25.2% to Hilly Billy.
Florida is 49.1 vs 47.8 at 73.6% to Donald Duck.

Yay exciting numbers and stuff! (bounce)

Boo for bedtime being the wrong side of now. :(

Well it looks like what most people outside of the US feared is happening.

Stunner.  :-O

Well at least the exchange rate has improved a bit >.<

Ah fuck.

I'm starting to think the world is full of apathetic plebs who just want to watch the world burn.

 

I think it's safe to say polling looks to have had its day in modern-day politics. Many Trump voters keeping quiet about that fact.

Polling drives a great deal of 'news reporting' (and the ad revenues that come with it) so no, I don't think we've seen the last of it. I bet it's going to be a lot more carefully crafted, around stuff like twitter and facebook. And it will still frequently fail.

At least in the US, we see a lot of supposed polls used to try to sell you on an idea, rather than ask your actual feelings and views.  There are so many polls and phone calls to people that they start to push back by providing misleading information.

It is also very difficult to estimate voter turn out.  The weather was very mild, both candidates were very divisive in their politics, and both are very well known figures.  You can see by looking at the numbers that the difference in votes is quite small both nationally and in many states.

People gave a lot of thought to their votes and turn out was quite high.  The candidates very much targeted their audience and won their audience.  Sanders might have actually won if he were the candidate, since he had a wider political appeal to centrist, but Hillary simply could not expand past her core audience. 

Personally, I think that at least part of the voter push back was that Michael Bloomberg of NY is funding so many campaigns and issues across the country, and he is particularly unpopular outside of his very narrow base.  He funds a lot of democrats (including Clinton) and requires them to take certain positions on issues, even if it costs them votes, or in this case, the election.

I still have not really figured out the value of twitter.

It makes perfect sense for a candidate to use twitter to communicate to the audience / potential voters, but what is the value in reading this information unless you are already are interested in the candidate?  

Why would a casual democratic voter follow a republican candidate, or frankly, why follow even the democratic candidates?  I would think that most people make up their minds years in advance on how they will vote.

This is actually an issue that has been discussed a lot on social media lately, especially after the EU Referendum result, and earlier after the 2015 UK General Election.

Many people (on the left) on social media essentially exist within an echo chamber, where they only follow/interact with people who are the same political persuasion as themselves. This results in people having a skewed view of reality because all they're reading/consuming is based around their personal views, because they've created the stream of content by following people with similar views.

I think it would be fair to say this place is similar. We're mainly a load of centre-left/left liberals and it does show.

I often think I should make an effort to seek out the opposite opinion of my own more often, but at the moment that pushes you towards the alt-right, and frankly I don't want to read that shite.

The trouble with all this is by all means we can go read other people's opinions but then what? Reasoning with them does not generally change anybody's mind. As a lot of people are saying, we seem to be in a post-truth society now, people believe what they want to believe. And the majority of people want to believe in  racist, sexist horrible stuff. Ho hum.

I think if the 'left' want to do anything in the west now they have to some serious soul-searching about why they don't have more popularity. And that probably means not accusing racist sexist horrible people of being racist or sexist or horrible. Hmm.

Like, if you voted for Trump and Pence. You voted for all the things we know Trump is. Pence supports things like electro-shock therapy to 'cure' gay people. The list gets mighty long. And apparently that's OK?

Thought I was a few more stages down the path than this, but I guess it's still shock/disbelief for me despite at least half expecting it to happen!

You're absolutely right. We're beyond being able to assume people will vote for the person/team/side/party with the better morals.

The echo chamber thing is more a case of being in a bubble assuming everyone is thinking the same as you, which means little is done to attract more people and being oblivious to the reality. But as you say, it's often a waste of time to reason with a lot of people at the moment.

People want change, irrelevant of what that change brings. Brexit and Trump seemed to offer that over the "establishment". Facts and consequence seem to be irrelevant to the majority at the moment, how do you compete with that.

I think the only person on the left who managed to secure some proper widespread support was Bernie Sanders. I guess he was viewed as being a real chance for positive change which people could get behind, but there's no chance of that now.

Jeremy Corbyn could have been that over here, but his inability to lead the opposition properly plus the media's issue with him have ruined it.

This is as good an explanation as any I've so far read:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate

 

The only hope I have for Corbyn is that the polls continue to be very wrong and he starts to get some better press somehow to complete the job. Beyond the bollocks in the press (including 'left' papers like the Guardian) I think a lot of what he says would be agreed with by a lot of people if it was somehow given to them in a neutral way. Don't really see it happening. Labour themselves have mostly seen to that.

I don't think most people who voted Trump are (actively) racist, sexist, etc. etc.. I think it's the same as Brexit - there's a huge proportion of the population who feel like they've been left behind by globalism and neoliberal economics.

Those people *should* be the left's core demographic but the left embraced neoliberalism and trickle-down bullshit along with the centre-right so those people are left with no compelling narrative to follow.

So when some (apparently in the eyes of some) charismatic character who "tells it like it is" and "talks tough", whether it be Trump or that UKIP cunt, comes along they jump on that shit. *Especially* uneducated white men who are *particularly* alienated since their self identification - their idea of what masculinity is - is now seen as offensive and they don't *really* get why (imagine a whole tangent here about the fact that, again, the left has failed to provide an alternate conception of masculinity - particularly *white* masculinity - so, surprise fucking surprise, we get a surge in superficial fascism, 'meninism' and the alt-right).

Sanders was able to speak to those people while *also* genuinely representing progressive ideas, albeit in a very incremental way. But the Democrats pulled out all the stops to get status-quo neoliberal Hillary Clinton the nomination instead of him.

So, like always, we get a lesser-of-two-evils election and it becomes entirely about turnout. Even those who dislike Trump found it hard to vote for Clinton and turnout was unsurprisingly extremely low - Trump got a *slightly* lower number of votes than GOP candidates in the last two elections and Clinton's was *far* **far** lower.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cw1RUvqWgAATypw.jpg:large

Which is unsurprising when you've given two shitty options to vote for.

The left *really* needs to work on providing a counter-narrative to whatever Trump and UKIP represent and the alt-right. But I don't expect they actually will because they're fucking useless.

This tweet pretty much sums it all up for me: https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/794204785742266368