It's just the new and more powerful advertising medium. In the old days television filled that role, and it still does. Presidential elections in the US are always and only won by the candidates who spend the most money.
And before television radio had that role. There was an article here not long ago saying that radio brought external opinions to communities which were cut off from the world otherwise,and suddenly people who wouldn't otherwise care were influenced by people with agendas(not that it hasn't brought a lot of good too,but still)
Personally I think the causation mostly runs the other way on that one: that is, being perceived as winning causes money to be given to your campaign, rather than the other way around.
This explains most of the rare exceptions to the "winner spent the most" rule.
He absolutely dominated news coverage, with over twice the airtime devoted him than Clinton, 1144 minutes vs. 506. Andrew Tyndell produces an annual report of major commercial TV news coverage:
http://tyndallreport.com/yearinreview2016/
He gained insane amounts of "earned coverage" -- airtime obtained without paying for it. Over $2 billion.
however how much of his coverage was positive versus her positive coverage?
If anything the press's doubling down against him helped him because it also showed independents how in bed the press had become with one party.
Love him or hate he has a personality and he correctly realized that with a highly negative press it was best to portray them as the establishment as well.
The part I respect is he stomped on all three establishments which do their best to control Washington (RNC, DNC, and the Press).
This is an indirect measure, but shows major themes in discussion of news on Twitter, by Echelong Insights. Included, and pictured, is Twitter discussion of 17 major election-related stories. Three of these, the Electoral College, Fake News, and Steve Bannon, are principally or completely post election day phenomena, but the remaining 14 occur during the election cycle.
The two most dominant stories -- Wikileaks/Hacking (33.083m) and Clinton's Email (21.124m) stories dwarf the others (Deplorables, 5.989m being the runner-up). None of the Trump negative stories (Tapes, Taxes, Melania's speech, Paul Manafort, Trump University) come close, and several discussions which could have appeared quite notably don't: Donald Trump's live speech requesting that Russia hack his opponent's emails, or Clinton's claims that Trump would be Putin's puppet. These make absolutely no appearance here -- though whether that represents poor methodology or lack of actual impact isn't clear.
Keep in mind that Twitter isn't a public opinion survey, nor is it front-of-mind awareness of news. It's a proxy for both, and proxies can be useful or deceptive.
If there's an element here that's most powerful and useful, it's the relationship between leading and non-leading items: power relations are strong. Again, from first to third ranking here is a five-fold reduction in tweets. From first to 17th, a 25-fold reduction of interest and attention, at least on Twitter.
Given that the utterly misleading emails story dominated both Clinton coverage aand polling of voter awareness, whilst Trump's Russian connections and worse continuously were swept under the rug,vry much of it.
I was a bit inaccurate there. I meant only the candidates who spend on the order of republican and democrat nominees. Independents can't afford to and they don't get votes. Except one or two guys in the 90's/2000's who got a big share at a huge financial expense.
Who even knows the name of any independent candidate? They don't have advertising to tell us what they stand for or make us believe they're big enough to win.
The alternative explanation is that candidates who run as independent aren't popular enough to garner either donations or votes. If they were, they could have won the primaries for one of the major parties. Like Trump did, certainly no favourite of the Republican establishment.
If the election had been about the popular vote, both campaigns would have been run totally differently. So you can't really infer anything from her winning the popular vote.
Popular vote doesn't mean much because nobody optimized for it. It's like saying one soccer team won over the other because they touched the ball more times. But that's not the goal of the game, so it proves no point.
As others have already pointed out, the fact that Clinton won a plurality of popular vote in and of itself doesn't matter very much, other than to add support to the idea that the country is pretty divided and that neither side would have had any sort of mandate.
Debatable. Take these sites with grains of salt, but leave with the idea that the results of each in combination taken with salt still skew the results ALOT.
Would you expand on this? By most voters do you mean registered voters? Or that Clinton didn't win a majority? From the popular vote results I've seen, Clinton won a plurality of the votes. Not that the popular vote determines the outcome of the election.
From the point of view of how electoral votes are decided (excluding faithless electors), it is determined by plurality, not majority. A state's electoral votes go to the candidate who receives the most votes (a plurality), not the one who receives more than half (a majority).
Isn't losing an election by running it wrong worse than Win running it right? People are pointing Clinton and DNC incompetence as merit. California alone is responsible for this "magnitude", and it only proves how good was Trump' strategy.
