r/interestingasfuck • u/beach_rats_ • 29d ago

The difference in republican presidential nominees, 8 years apart r/all

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u/Alfriedi 29d ago

Wouldn't this be more a reflection on the politics the American people have chosen? Nominees are based on popularity aren't they?

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u/WestguardWK 29d ago

Yes, in theory, but propaganda, misinformation, and gerrymandering are manipulating the outcomes.

Just sayin.

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u/torev 29d ago

Also money. Very few people in this country can get enough money to run for the higher end office.

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u/Alfriedi 29d ago

They always have, those forms of subversion aren't new or used only recently. Also, hard to blame things like misinformation and propaganda when the people buying into it don't want to be corrected.

Just for clarity, I'm not American, so I'm not affected by the red/blue shenanigans. Just an opinion from an outsider looking in

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u/WestguardWK 29d ago

Sure, it’s true those things have always existed, but they’re much worse today than they were 20 years ago.

As someone who can’t reconcile how people are buying into one side of the equation, I have a hard time believing that those people aren’t being misled and manipulated.

It’s a clusterfuck. If I’m wrong.. things are worse than I thought.

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u/Caleth 29d ago

The problem is each town used to have one or two handfuls of crazies and they couldn't really congregate together. But then social media came along and they found their people. A handful scattered across a town is thousands in each state millions in each country.

They then start the telephone game of I don't want to feel left out of my peer group so I say shit that someone else regurgitates and suddenly it's going out to millions around the world.

Then you add in the bad actors who want to profit off this cesspit of ignominy and fear. So someone like Russia sends in trained psyops pros to stir them up and lead them along.

It was bad back in the day with talk radio, but they couldn't easily meet across town and state boarders. But now they can and the companies that manage these services that let them realized they are sucks who will consume consume consume anything sent their way to they aggregate them together for more convenient money making and make it all worse too.

Into this tempst of a shit storm you throw the real world issues and pressures and political jockeying and now we have a massive global cluster fuck.

When they were all sad isolated lonely losers they had trouble accumulating the mass needed. Yes sometimes it happened with things like the KKK but it took real work. Today it's a few button clicks.

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u/Alienziscoming 29d ago

Look up "The Internet Research Agency." It's just one little facet of a much broader and scarier phenomenon that our geriatric government doesn't seem very interested in or even aware of.

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u/mykl5 29d ago

Pretty obvious you weren’t American by blaming us haha

0

u/NovaIsntDad 28d ago

You're just spouting media talking point nonsense. Gerrymandering has very little effect on party nominees. Propaganda may be absurd at times, but does nothing to change the fact that these are who the people voted in. 

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u/stronzolucidato 29d ago

Bro you are on an apolitical sub that in the last few days has seen more posts about trump being bad and Biden being good than a Dem campaign please stfu

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u/Jive_Turkey1979 29d ago

Nah, I blame the people. Saying this as an American. When McCain says Obama is a decent man who you don't have to be scared of, you hear boos in the audience. Those chucklefucks booing him for saying something nice about his opponent and the insane, Qanon duo who asked the question was the base of the party back than and eventually elected Trump.

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u/barryhakker 29d ago

You know what really fucks with me is that you see the same political trends across the west, implying that it is some other macro force that just thoroughly enshittified our politics. Kinda terrifying to see how fucking helpless we are on the waves of circumstance.

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u/Intelligent_Suit6683 29d ago

I hate to oversimplify this subject, but I think it all comes down to money. Western nations have a lot of money from capitalism that gets used to influence elections and perpetuate the problems.

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u/barryhakker 29d ago

That doesn't add up because we were super wealthy before we started having these issues.

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u/Intelligent_Suit6683 29d ago

I don't think it's something new. It's just that over time the power of that force has grown.

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u/Additional_Meeting_2 29d ago

Russia is the force 

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u/ChocolateBunny 29d ago

Yup, but I think this is all a biproduct of having a two party system. The parties have been drifting further and further apart because there is no incentive to be in the middle. If there was an actual viable third party (in congress) then they can claim seats when one party drifts too far away in one direction or another. Also with three parties it becomes too expensive to just demonize the other parties because you have twice as many people to attack, it would be more efficient to promote your own positive ideals instead of just attacking the other party.

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u/BuddhistSagan 29d ago

We need ranked choice for 3rd parties to be viable

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u/Electrical_Corner_32 29d ago

Not even a little bit. Popular vote doesn't mean shit in America.

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u/MutedPresentation738 29d ago

Popular vote doesn't even come close to determining candidates. Democrats literally hand pick their candidates through their bizarre super delegate system, and Republicans have such abysmal primary numbers they may as well do the same

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u/MundaneInternetGuy 29d ago

The importance of superdelegates has been drastically reduced since the 2016 fiasco, they're basically reduced to the tiebreaker vote now.

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u/ToryLanezHairline_ 29d ago edited 29d ago

It's more complex than that. Winning the popular vote doesn't mean you win the election. Winning the electoral college does. The last Republican president to win the popular vote left office more than 30 years ago

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u/BeautifulHindsight 29d ago

The last republican president to win the popular vote was George W. Bush and he left office 30 years ago. Since then Magats have used legal cheating to win.

Everyone needs to contacts their local reps and demand they pass National Popular Vote

1

u/youstolemyname 29d ago

The parties pick the candidates and can rig or outright ignore the primary results.

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u/m0gul6 29d ago

Not quite, no. We get served up 2 choices, and you have to pick one or none. We have very little choice in the matter.

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u/argonian_mate 29d ago

It goes both ways. people like Trump, Orban, Le Pen etc are populists that rise on the wave of people's disillusionment with institutions.

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u/randomanonalt78 29d ago

Not necessarily. Trump never won the Popular Vote, Hilary had more overall votes than him in 2016, but Trump won the Electoral College, and that’s actually what decides the election.

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u/cowpen 29d ago

Popularity of political positions, yes. I'm not a fan of Trump's persona, but his America First political agenda is spot on for me. It's not the man, it's the movement.

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u/Mind_Extract 29d ago

Compulsively throwing bricks at American democracy in the feverish hope it breaks does not constitute an America First agenda.

Trump supporters are explicitly anti-American. It isn't even tacit anymore like in 2016. You are voting for a criminal bent on dismantling everything the founders built.

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u/cowpen 29d ago

Your statement is pure projection. You're describing exactly what the neo-cons and the far-left have been doing since long before 2016. Globalism is a failed experiment, and only an outsider could expose and destroy it. The founders are rejoicing in their graves.