Politics in the U.S.

The craziness of the U.S. 2016 election season:

2017-JAN:
Why Trump won & Clinton lost.
U.S. adults lack confidence in
Trump. Censorship imposed.

Part 16 of sixteen parts

This topic is continued here from the previous essay

Some reasons why Trump won & Clinton lost the election:

SurveyMonkey conducted a post-election poll that shows that the registered voters who did not vote on NOV-08 were more Democratic-leaning than Republican-leaning. If equal percentages of voters from both parties had actually bothered to vote, then Hillary Clinton would almost certainly have won both the national vote count and the Electoral College by a large margin.

The survey showed that registered non-white voters, and younger voters, were more likely to skip voting. ₁

Australia and many countries in South America require voters to cast their ballots. They are typically allowed to either go to their polling place or mail their vote in. If the U.S. adopted this policy, Clinton would certainly have won by a large margin. ₆

Religious groups had a major effect on the vote:

• President Obama had won a majority of the Roman Catholic vote during the elections of 2008 and 2012. But Hillary Clinton lost among Catholics by seven percentage points. An article by Thomas Groome in the New York Times suggested that Clinton might have won if the Democratic Party ceased being the "Abortion party." ₇
  
  
• Sarah Pulliam Bailey, writing for the Washington Post, noted that white evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. by a ratio of 80 to 16% -- a margin of 64 percentage points! The previous highest margin was in 2004 when they voted 78 to 21% -- a margin of 57 percentage points. The record-breaking margin was in spite of Trump's crude comments about women, and the negative reactions towards his candidacy by two leading evangelical Christian magazines. ₈

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Franklin Graham believes that God assured Trump's win:

Franklin Graham is the son of the well-known evangelist, Billy Graham, and is president of Samaritan's Purse. He was interviewed on "Fox & Friends."

 ₂

Within 16 hours, viewers of the above interview on You Tube posted 347 comments. Some were:

• "Anna B" posted:

  "This election brought me back to God. The SJWs are all so completely lost and miserable."

• "Whit U. Forever" posted:

  "I completely agree with Graham. We were ALL praying, even people who had never prayed before. ... and Trump was God's answer! Let's keep praying. I don't think the Clintons should be at Trump's inauguration. They don't deserve it."

• "WY Chinsg" posted:

  "PRAISE the Lord and thank God for Franklin Graham urging people from all 50 states to pray for His mercy on America. God heard our prayers and did not turn His back on America even though it had turned away from Him. Christians must continue to pray for the Lord's wisdom and protection on Trump and Pence."

  To which "ZERO" responded:

  "God just love [sic] billionaires, and so does Jesus. Jesus would definitely be in favour of stopping people have free health care for all, cos that's how Jesus is. He was always hanging out worth the filthy rich who love oil and the damage it does, and not paying people a decent wage, and foreclosing when you miss a dollar payment. Yep, Jesus loves the bankers and billionaires."

• "stop asking me to change my name!" posted:

  "So it was God's fault !? I believe Satan was responsible for this one. Where was God during the Holocaust ? Oh yea,he works in mysterious ways."

• "gary lons" posted:

  "I knew it, God's a Republican!"

  To which "mzimmerman12" responded:

  "He must be since He hates abortion, same sex marriage, not to mention the Dems voted to remove Him from their platform."

• "kazzicup" posted:

  "Crook Hillary and her criminal associates despise Catholics and people of faith. Crook Hillary does not care about ordinary Americans. Bye Hillary, go to Chappaqua and get some rest. President Trump's work is just beginning."

  To which "Edd P." responded:

  "KAZICUP YOU ARE PERFECT RESULT OF THIS NEW RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA EXPERIMENT. HILLARY IS AGAINST AMERICA , PRESIDENT OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE IS A FAKE, THE EARTH IS FLAT, HILLARY CLINTON IS AGAINST THE SECOND AMENDMENT, PIZZAGATE .... KEEP BELIEVING IN THIS CRAZY STUFF."

• Tina Alvarado posted:

  "1/2 the country are satan worshipers. But God will win."

₃

Polls show a major lack of confidence in President Trump:

Only a minority of American adults believe that Trump, as President, will be capable of preventing major scandals, handle an international crisis or use military force responsibility. Gallup polled 1,028 adults between 2016-DEC-07 and 11, about one month after the election. The margin of error is ±4 percentage points. Some results of the poll:

During this poll, "Previous presidents" included President George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. ₄

2017-JAN-20: Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States:

Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court issued the oath of office to Donald Trump on the West Front of the United States Capitol Building in Washington DC. Trump was sworn in on two Bibles: his own childhood Bible and one that had been owned by Abraham Lincoln. A total of 67 Democratic members of the House of Representatives stated that they would not attend the inauguration because of:

"... what they described as his alarming and divisive policies, foreign interference in his election and his criticism of civil rights icon [Rep.] John Lewis, a congressman from Georgia."₅

Perhaps minutes after Trump became president, -- the exact timing is unknown -- two major changes were made to the White House web site at www.whitehouse.gov:

• All references to the LGBT community vanished from the site. An internal search for "LGBT" returned an error message:

  "Sorry, no results found for 'LGBT'. Try entering fewer or broader query terms. "

• The section of the web site that dealt with climate change disappeared. An internal search for "climate change" returned an error message:

  "Sorry, no results found for '"Climate change"'. Try entering fewer or broader query terms."

Fortunately, the earlier contents of the web site are still available because they were copied to https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/

2018-AUG-13: Poll showing support for members of Congress by party:

As the half-way point to the midterm elections approaches, FiveThirtyEight.com assembled polling data from 64 public opinion polls that had asked U.S. adults for which party they would support in the next election. Results were:

• 61 polls showed that the largest number of voters support Democrats.
• 3 polls resulted in a tie.
• 0 polls showed that the largest number of votes support Republican.

The average results of all 64 polls were:

• 47.4% suppport Democrats.
• 38.2% support Republicans.

If these data hold until election day in 2018-NOV, there could be a major upset in favor of Democrats in Congressional elections. At that time, the voters will select all 435 members of the House and about one-third of the members of the Senate.

References used:

The following information sources were used to prepare and update the above essay. The hyperlinks are not necessarily still active today.

1. Harry Enten, "Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election," FiveThirtyEight, 2017-JAN-05, at: https://fivethirtyeight.com/
2. "Franklin Graham: God had a hand in this election," Fox News, 2017-JAN-08, at: https://youtu.be/
3. Image from Pixabay at: www.pixabay.com, released under Creative Commons CC0.
4. Jeffrey M. Jones, "Many in US Skeptical Trump Can Handle Presidential Duties," Gallup, 2017-JAN-02, at: http://www.gallup.com/
5. "Inauguration of Donald Trump," Wikipedia, as on 2017-JAN-21, at: https://en.wikipedia.org/
6. "Compulsory voting," Wikipedia, as on 2017-MAR-24, at: https://en.wikipedia.org/
7. Thomas Groome, "To Win Again, Democrats Must Stop Being the Abortion Party," New York Times, 2017-MAR-27, at: https://www.nytimes.com/
8. Sarah Pulliam Bailey, "White evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, exit polls show," Washington Post, 2016-NOV-09, at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/

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Copyright © 2016 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Original posting: 2017-JAN-03.
Latest update : 2017-AUG-14.
Author: B.A. Robinson

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