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Because Trump has nearly religious following that scares many many people on the left and right. They will do ANYTHING to stop him out of fear, anger, arroganc

Because Trump has nearly religious following that scares many many people on the left and right. They will do ANYTHING to stop him out of fear, anger, arrogance etc. The problem here is Trump is an expert at reflection. This HAS ALREADY empowered his base, and strengthened Ron Desantis. I think the hardest part to accept is nearly half the nation DOES NOT AGREE with progressive principles at their very core.

jshen 4y ago
The democratic nominee for President has won the popular vote in something like 7 of the last 8 presidential elections. A majority of Americans do have progressive principles, but America is a minority rule country at the moment.
- claytongulick 4y ago
  When you consider population clusters in the big urban areas, your point is diluted a bit. There's a reason we don't do popular vote; California and New York would pretty much pick the president every election. Take a look at the geographic distribution of red v blue by county in the 2020 presidential election [1]. Relying on only the popular vote could devolve the country into a hunger games type dystopian hellscape where 90% of the country is controlled by a few dense urban clusters. [1] https://brilliantmaps.com/2020-county-election-map/ https://brilliantmaps.com/2020-county-election-map/
  - vmladenov 4y ago
    Land doesn’t vote, people do. Your argument justifies federalism, not unequal voting power.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      The US is a republic of states, not a democracy. We vote by electoral college, and not directly by the population, for a reason. The electoral college is weighted using both the House (population-weighted representation) and Senate (equal state representation) so the small states don't get ignored and controlled by the large states.
      - bobsil1 4y ago
        States are artificial, national elections should be ranked choice, or at worst simple majority vote. Electoral college was a sop to slavers and should be deleted. It doesn't empower small states, it empowers large states which happen to be swing states.
        SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        On the other hand, if power in the US was as centralized at the time as you seem to suggest it should be, federal marshals would have simply enforced the escaped slaves act over abolitionist state's protests.
        bobsil1 4y ago
        Returning escaped slaves was in the constitution itself (fugitive slave clause). Founders’ intent is pretty irrelevant to today’s problems. They ran forced labor plantations, hadn’t mastered electricity or germ theory of disease, and the biggest city was ~30K people. 1 person = 1 vote, get rid of all the rural planter rigs.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        "States" are a fiction. There are only people. So to translate what you wrote into on-the-ground reality: the senate exists to make sure that the people who live in states with small populations are not subject to the will of the majority of people in the country. This is defensible, and I'm sure you would not balk at being called "anti-majoritarian", but lets be clear about what is going on. Also, post-Civil War, this "we're a republic not a democracy" stuff really changed significantly. While it may have been absolutely true in 1776, it became much less true in the 1800s, and has continued to become even less so in the 1900s. It may have been better if the Constitution had been amended to reflect this (since it was happening anyway), but it's burying your head in the sand to pretend that the original conception is reality on the ground today.
        Izkata 4y ago
  - peteforde 4y ago
    The disconnect here is that to many of us, it seems 100% rational that the majority of people (whether popular or representative) should pick the president. Not because of who people in cities tend to vote for, but because it makes no logical sense to allocate so much influence to so few people. The universe doesn't owe unpopular ideas equal footing. People who don't like what cities think might feel like the odds are stacked against them in a popular contest. They are correct. We don't give new chess players extra queens, either.
  - bobsil1 4y ago
    One person should = one vote, absurd that Wyoming gets 70× the Senate influence with the population of Modesto.
- claytongulick 4y ago
  Playing with numbers is fun! I'll do it too: Republicans have won 8 out of the past 14 elections, and won the popular vote as well as the electoral college in six out of eight [1]. Or, looking at it another way, of the past 14 elections, republicans won the popular vote by an average of 7.42%, while democrats only won by 5.28%, which if you took that pointless cherry picked data seriously could convince you that on average republican candidates are significantly more popular than democrats. The fact is, this country is split fairly evenly along the nonsensical left/right axis. A more interesting evaluation would be along the authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian axis. I think a much larger percentage of Americans fall along the antiauthoritarian axis, and that the noise in the left/right false dichotomy is a result of that more than anything. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
  - peteforde 4y ago
    This is only true if you evaluate votes by district. Historically, the only thing Republicans love more than picking judges is gerrymandering districts. If they didn't go to absurd lengths to chop up districts and make it harder for poor people to vote, it wouldn't even be a close fight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpamjJtXqFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpamjJtXqFI
  - jshen 4y ago
    “Republicans have won … the popular vote … in six out of eight” Your own link shows that Democrats have won the popular vote 7 out of the last 8.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    If the question was "Would you support a strong leader who might make some unpopular decisions that would make America great again?", and a lot of people said yes, would call them anti-authoritarians or authoritarians?
    - claytongulick 4y ago
      Well, that's a pretty simple question. Here are more complex ones: "[Party A] is actively censoring speech that they don't agree with, calling it misinformation, even though their 'fact checkers' have shown strong political bias. Do you support this?" and "[Party B] wants to restrict your right to your body and self-ownership by limiting access to healthcare like abortion and gender affirming care for adults. Do you support this?" These are the sorts of political "points" that both parties try to score. There are lots more examples. What's the common theme? There's an underlying message of "scary authoritarian government controlling me". I think that most Americans, regardless of political party, have fairly strong antiauthoritarian leanings. I think both political parties attempt to exploit this in political messaging, but neither actually mean it. By definition, a political party seeks power. Of course, no one wants to point out their own power-seeking, so the only option is to point out your opponent's.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton represent progressive principles? Hardly. Even Barack Obama, who opposed gay marriage when he ran for office was closer to being a Republican than a Progressive in his political rhetoric (though he is clearly a progressive at heart).
  - piva00 4y ago
    > Even Barack Obama, who opposed gay marriage when he ran for office Wasn't that just a political play? Given that America as a society at large is pretty conservative, even within the Democrats base, pandering to opposing gay marriage gives a net positive voting.
    - pengstrom 4y ago
      Well, this is politics so I fail to see the difference.
    - uxp100 4y ago
      Whether it matters that it was a political play aside, I guess I really don’t believe it was. Maybe there is some presidential historian who has dug into the documents, I’m just going on vibes I remember from the time.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Al Gore at least seemed to have some progressive appeal on the environmentalism front, but yes, as a non-American that was exactly my thought - there's been no real indication from federal elections in the US in recent decades at least that very many Americans could be considered genuinely progressive in their political leaning. Pretty much all the Democrats supported policies that would be considered quite conservative (or downright regressive) in many other Western nations. None of which has anything much to do with my dismay that Trump still has the support he does.
- esja 4y ago
  Those facts don't support your conclusion. The popular vote is not even close to "a majority of Americans". Something like 120 million American adults didn't even vote in 2016, versus around 66 and 63 million who voted for Clinton and Trump respectively. Clinton winning would still have been "minority rule" by this measure. Also, broadly speaking, being progressive means wanting change and being conservative means being more comfortable with the status quo. It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote, more of those would be latent conservatives. Or at least, it’s very hard to see a progressive majority in there.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote Could be true, but it's certainly not "obvious". There are myriad reasons (especially in the USA) why people might not vote that nothing to do with their political opinions (ideology or intensity). I am sure that a significant number of the 120 million non-voters were "not motivated", but not all of them. And of the "not motivated", it is hard to know the real reasons why and what it means. Some of them, for example, would never vote, regardless of who ran or what the platforms were. Maybe some of them would vote for radical progressive if there was one with credible chance of winning. Maybe some of them would vote for a blatantly Mussolini-inspired candidate. Either way, it isn't obvious that motivation was the reason to not vote for all of them and it certainly isn't clear that they are more likely to be "latent conservatives".
    - esja 4y ago
      You’re right, it’s not obvious. And perhaps to strengthen your point, countries with compulsory voting (e.g. Australia) don’t seem to show any particular skew. Regarding the original point, Pew published some interesting stats on voter preferences: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-v... According to this, progressives are a very small slice of the population, and nowhere near a majority even if you include adjacent groups.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  We don't have a popular vote for President. Candidates, campaigns, and voters would all behave differently if we did. It's like if your baseball team lost a game and saying "yeah, but they had the fewest batters struck out!" OK... but that's not how the winner is determined, and both teams would have played differently if it were. We can't know what the outcome would have been, in that case.
  - jshen 4y ago
    your comment has nothing to do with the topic we were discussing. The person I replied to made a comment about what a majority of people in America believe.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Aside from addressing the irrelevance of the single piece of evidence you supplied to support that, sure, it's got nothing to do with it.
      - jshen 4y ago
        Pointing out that we have the electoral college days absolutely nothing about what a majority of people believe which was the topic being discussed.
bobsil1 4y ago
"nearly half" — T•••• controls ~a quarter of the GOP, which is ~a third of US voters, so < 10% of US electorate.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> They will do ANYTHING to stop him out of fear, anger, arrogance etc ANYTHING, eh? Please tell me, what did they do? Trump won an election (thanks to the mechanics of the Electoral College), he served as president, he passed laws (some of which the courts overturned, as happens with most presidents), he handed out pardons (some wise, some not), and then he lost an election. What is this "ANYTHING" that has been done to stop him?
- jshen 4y ago
  Agree, and let's reverse it. Trump will do ANYTHING to stay in power, including the incitement of a violent coup attempt where they were chanting to hang his own VP!

jshen 4y ago

The democratic nominee for President has won the popular vote in something like 7 of the last 8 presidential elections. A majority of Americans do have progressive principles, but America is a minority rule country at the moment.

claytongulick 4y ago
When you consider population clusters in the big urban areas, your point is diluted a bit. There's a reason we don't do popular vote; California and New York would pretty much pick the president every election. Take a look at the geographic distribution of red v blue by county in the 2020 presidential election [1]. Relying on only the popular vote could devolve the country into a hunger games type dystopian hellscape where 90% of the country is controlled by a few dense urban clusters. [1] https://brilliantmaps.com/2020-county-election-map/ https://brilliantmaps.com/2020-county-election-map/
- vmladenov 4y ago
  Land doesn’t vote, people do. Your argument justifies federalism, not unequal voting power.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    The US is a republic of states, not a democracy. We vote by electoral college, and not directly by the population, for a reason. The electoral college is weighted using both the House (population-weighted representation) and Senate (equal state representation) so the small states don't get ignored and controlled by the large states.
    - bobsil1 4y ago
      States are artificial, national elections should be ranked choice, or at worst simple majority vote. Electoral college was a sop to slavers and should be deleted. It doesn't empower small states, it empowers large states which happen to be swing states.
      - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        On the other hand, if power in the US was as centralized at the time as you seem to suggest it should be, federal marshals would have simply enforced the escaped slaves act over abolitionist state's protests.
        bobsil1 4y ago
        Returning escaped slaves was in the constitution itself (fugitive slave clause). Founders’ intent is pretty irrelevant to today’s problems. They ran forced labor plantations, hadn’t mastered electricity or germ theory of disease, and the biggest city was ~30K people. 1 person = 1 vote, get rid of all the rural planter rigs.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      "States" are a fiction. There are only people. So to translate what you wrote into on-the-ground reality: the senate exists to make sure that the people who live in states with small populations are not subject to the will of the majority of people in the country. This is defensible, and I'm sure you would not balk at being called "anti-majoritarian", but lets be clear about what is going on. Also, post-Civil War, this "we're a republic not a democracy" stuff really changed significantly. While it may have been absolutely true in 1776, it became much less true in the 1800s, and has continued to become even less so in the 1900s. It may have been better if the Constitution had been amended to reflect this (since it was happening anyway), but it's burying your head in the sand to pretend that the original conception is reality on the ground today.
      - Izkata 4y ago
- peteforde 4y ago
  The disconnect here is that to many of us, it seems 100% rational that the majority of people (whether popular or representative) should pick the president. Not because of who people in cities tend to vote for, but because it makes no logical sense to allocate so much influence to so few people. The universe doesn't owe unpopular ideas equal footing. People who don't like what cities think might feel like the odds are stacked against them in a popular contest. They are correct. We don't give new chess players extra queens, either.
- bobsil1 4y ago
  One person should = one vote, absurd that Wyoming gets 70× the Senate influence with the population of Modesto.
claytongulick 4y ago
Playing with numbers is fun! I'll do it too: Republicans have won 8 out of the past 14 elections, and won the popular vote as well as the electoral college in six out of eight [1]. Or, looking at it another way, of the past 14 elections, republicans won the popular vote by an average of 7.42%, while democrats only won by 5.28%, which if you took that pointless cherry picked data seriously could convince you that on average republican candidates are significantly more popular than democrats. The fact is, this country is split fairly evenly along the nonsensical left/right axis. A more interesting evaluation would be along the authoritarian vs antiauthoritarian axis. I think a much larger percentage of Americans fall along the antiauthoritarian axis, and that the noise in the left/right false dichotomy is a result of that more than anything. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
- peteforde 4y ago
  This is only true if you evaluate votes by district. Historically, the only thing Republicans love more than picking judges is gerrymandering districts. If they didn't go to absurd lengths to chop up districts and make it harder for poor people to vote, it wouldn't even be a close fight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpamjJtXqFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpamjJtXqFI
- jshen 4y ago
  “Republicans have won … the popular vote … in six out of eight” Your own link shows that Democrats have won the popular vote 7 out of the last 8.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  If the question was "Would you support a strong leader who might make some unpopular decisions that would make America great again?", and a lot of people said yes, would call them anti-authoritarians or authoritarians?
  - claytongulick 4y ago
    Well, that's a pretty simple question. Here are more complex ones: "[Party A] is actively censoring speech that they don't agree with, calling it misinformation, even though their 'fact checkers' have shown strong political bias. Do you support this?" and "[Party B] wants to restrict your right to your body and self-ownership by limiting access to healthcare like abortion and gender affirming care for adults. Do you support this?" These are the sorts of political "points" that both parties try to score. There are lots more examples. What's the common theme? There's an underlying message of "scary authoritarian government controlling me". I think that most Americans, regardless of political party, have fairly strong antiauthoritarian leanings. I think both political parties attempt to exploit this in political messaging, but neither actually mean it. By definition, a political party seeks power. Of course, no one wants to point out their own power-seeking, so the only option is to point out your opponent's.
WillPostForFood 4y ago
Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton represent progressive principles? Hardly. Even Barack Obama, who opposed gay marriage when he ran for office was closer to being a Republican than a Progressive in his political rhetoric (though he is clearly a progressive at heart).
- piva00 4y ago
  > Even Barack Obama, who opposed gay marriage when he ran for office Wasn't that just a political play? Given that America as a society at large is pretty conservative, even within the Democrats base, pandering to opposing gay marriage gives a net positive voting.
  - pengstrom 4y ago
    Well, this is politics so I fail to see the difference.
  - uxp100 4y ago
    Whether it matters that it was a political play aside, I guess I really don’t believe it was. Maybe there is some presidential historian who has dug into the documents, I’m just going on vibes I remember from the time.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Al Gore at least seemed to have some progressive appeal on the environmentalism front, but yes, as a non-American that was exactly my thought - there's been no real indication from federal elections in the US in recent decades at least that very many Americans could be considered genuinely progressive in their political leaning. Pretty much all the Democrats supported policies that would be considered quite conservative (or downright regressive) in many other Western nations. None of which has anything much to do with my dismay that Trump still has the support he does.
esja 4y ago
Those facts don't support your conclusion. The popular vote is not even close to "a majority of Americans". Something like 120 million American adults didn't even vote in 2016, versus around 66 and 63 million who voted for Clinton and Trump respectively. Clinton winning would still have been "minority rule" by this measure. Also, broadly speaking, being progressive means wanting change and being conservative means being more comfortable with the status quo. It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote, more of those would be latent conservatives. Or at least, it’s very hard to see a progressive majority in there.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > It seems obvious that of the 120 million people who weren’t motivated to vote Could be true, but it's certainly not "obvious". There are myriad reasons (especially in the USA) why people might not vote that nothing to do with their political opinions (ideology or intensity). I am sure that a significant number of the 120 million non-voters were "not motivated", but not all of them. And of the "not motivated", it is hard to know the real reasons why and what it means. Some of them, for example, would never vote, regardless of who ran or what the platforms were. Maybe some of them would vote for radical progressive if there was one with credible chance of winning. Maybe some of them would vote for a blatantly Mussolini-inspired candidate. Either way, it isn't obvious that motivation was the reason to not vote for all of them and it certainly isn't clear that they are more likely to be "latent conservatives".
  - esja 4y ago
    You’re right, it’s not obvious. And perhaps to strengthen your point, countries with compulsory voting (e.g. Australia) don’t seem to show any particular skew. Regarding the original point, Pew published some interesting stats on voter preferences: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-v... According to this, progressives are a very small slice of the population, and nowhere near a majority even if you include adjacent groups.
yamtaddle 4y ago
We don't have a popular vote for President. Candidates, campaigns, and voters would all behave differently if we did. It's like if your baseball team lost a game and saying "yeah, but they had the fewest batters struck out!" OK... but that's not how the winner is determined, and both teams would have played differently if it were. We can't know what the outcome would have been, in that case.
- jshen 4y ago
  your comment has nothing to do with the topic we were discussing. The person I replied to made a comment about what a majority of people in America believe.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Aside from addressing the irrelevance of the single piece of evidence you supplied to support that, sure, it's got nothing to do with it.
    - jshen 4y ago
      Pointing out that we have the electoral college days absolutely nothing about what a majority of people believe which was the topic being discussed.

bobsil1 4y ago

"nearly half" — T•••• controls ~a quarter of the GOP, which is ~a third of US voters, so < 10% of US electorate.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

> They will do ANYTHING to stop him out of fear, anger, arrogance etc ANYTHING, eh? Please tell me, what did they do? Trump won an election (thanks to the mechanics of the Electoral College), he served as president, he passed laws (some of which the courts overturned, as happens with most presidents), he handed out pardons (some wise, some not), and then he lost an election. What is this "ANYTHING" that has been done to stop him?

jshen 4y ago
Agree, and let's reverse it. Trump will do ANYTHING to stay in power, including the incitement of a violent coup attempt where they were chanting to hang his own VP!