Poll Results: Who Is To Blame For Trump’s Election?

See the full results here

The results are in from our viewer poll asking who is to blame for Donald Trump’s election. In this segment, Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains those results and offers some more insight into what we can do going forward.

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Last week, we announced a poll on our Patreon page where we asked our viewers who they felt was responsible for Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victory. We had several choices on there, obviously Hillary Clinton's very weak campaign, the DNC's centrist platform, Bernie Sanders, his supporters, Trump himself. We had again several other options on there. By a huge option, 50% of the people who voted in this poll, which we had 246 people vote total, so thank you all, 50% said that the blame for Donald Trump's election and the Democrats' loss rests squarely on the shoulders of Hillary Clinton herself for running such a weak campaign.

The reason this is important is because last week, before we put this poll out, a study came out that said 12% of the Bernie Sanders primary voters switched to Donald Trump for the general election, did not vote for Hillary Clinton. The Hillary Clinton acolytes went out there and said that this electoral loss was 100% on Bernie Sanders supporters because they refused to vote for Hillary Clinton. The public doesn't see it that way. The numbers don't even see it that way, because 12% of Republican primary voters defected from Trump to Hillary in the general election, so it was essentially a wash at that point.

Here are some other interesting results from our poll here. 1% of the people who voted blamed the Bernie Sanders voters who defected to Trump. 10% actually blamed the people who stayed home and did not vote, which I have to agree on that one to an extent, as long as it wasn't somebody who didn't vote because they weren't able to, because they couldn't get a photo ID, or because they couldn't go stand in line for six hours. The people who just said, "Screw it, I'm not going to do it," yes, they do deserve a little bit of this blame. Not a ton. I think 10% is fair.

15% said the DNC was to blame for adopting a much too centrist platform in the primary. That's absolutely true, as well. The DNC refused to add a ban on hydraulic fracturing, fracking, to their platform, something that most people in this country, Republican and Democrat, actually agree with. The Democrats were far too centrist and didn't want to go that far. They didn't want to adopt a single payer. They didn't want to adopt really any of the positions that made Bernie Sanders so damn popular. It's no wonder that people turned on them. At the time, they saw no difference in the Republican platform and the DNC's platform. It wasn't a Donald versus Hillary issue. It was a party versus party, and the lines between the two are becoming increasingly blurred every day.

4% blamed the actual people who voted for Donald Trump. That's very fitting. 1% blamed James Comey. 5% blamed the media for giving Donald Trump billions of dollars worth of free airtime. Studies show that he got well over $2 billion worth of free airtime during the primary and during the actual campaign, something that Hillary Clinton obviously did not receive. I don't know if that was her choice or her campaign's choice or the media's choice, but nobody was out there talking to Hillary Clinton, and for the most part, she wasn't out there talking to anybody, either.

4% blamed Russian interference in the U.S. election, and another 4% blamed restrictive voting laws. All of these are great points, and I think to an extent most of the items on the list did play a very important role in the Democrats' loss in 2016, but I agree with the results of this poll, 50% who said absolutely this was Hillary Clinton's loss. She needs to own it.

I want to thank everybody who took the time to go vote in this poll, patreon.com/theringoffire. Support us in any way you can. We'll be doing many more of these public polls, so stay tuned. Follow the page. We love to hear from our viewers, so thank you very much for participating in this.