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How is ~8% (eyeballing) of the popular vote a narrow majority in politics? It's a pretty substantial majority. Apathetic non-voters don't really count because t
by j0hnyl 2y ago
How is ~8% (eyeballing) of the popular vote a narrow majority in politics? It's a pretty substantial majority. Apathetic non-voters don't really count because they don't care.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago> Apathetic non-voters An important thing to keep in mind in American politics is the massive amount of voter suppression. Not voting doesn't inherently mean you were lazy or apathetic. It may well mean your vote was suppressed by any of a hundred tactics. Closing polling places in blue regions, requiring in-person voting on-the-day, restricting early voting, restricting vote by mail, failing at sending people ballots, spuriously dropping voter registrations...
- blodstone 2y ago20M is too much of a number to be attributed to voter suppression alone. I think the main issue here is still apathetic non-voters.
- yonaguska 2y ago20M ballots is not the same as 20M voters. I don't understand where those 20M people went. Kamala checked a lot more boxes than Biden.
- bhelkey 2y ago> requiring in-person voting on-the-day Exactly three states don't offer early voting to all voters [1] and none of those three were battleground states. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/map-early-voting-mail-ballot-states/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/map-early-voting-mail-ballot-st...
- xg15 2y agoAll that is true, and to a great degree the reason why the concept of "swing states" (or rather the "non-swing states") even exists. It does not explain however why almost all the swing states aligned with Trump this time.
- jmpetroske 2y agoIt would be a tall feat to suppress close to a third the population from voting!
- ubermonkey 2y agoWhat you forget, or may not appreciate, is that (for example) Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home, because their vote won't really count. I've voted Dem all my life (since 1988), and while my preferred candidate has won several of those races, my actual VOTE never helped them because I voted in Mississippi (88), Alabama (92), and Texas (96 & thereafter) -- all of which have been GOP strongholds for a long, long time. (Texas, for example, hasn't gone for the Democrats since Carter v. Ford in 1976.) It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.
- leereeves 2y ago> It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home. That's true, but I don't think Democrats had a feeling of despair before the results came in. It seems like most Democrats are shocked that the election turned out this way.
- lupusreal 2y agoIf true, their media diet betrayed them. This outcome was obvious.
- Ancapistani 2y agoIf it helps, the right seems shocked it turned out this way, too. Personally, I realized last week that I had no reliable way to know what to expect. There was ample data to support predicting any outcome.
- xnx 2y ago> Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Blue may also stay home.
- dead_gunslinger 2y ago[dead]
- jmyeet 2y agoBecause there was never a real choice. Put it this way: someone could give a choice between drinking arsenic and fertilizer. One of those options will win, probably by a wide margin. It doesn't mean it reflects the will of the people because, hey, people would rather drink neither. 2016 had the DNC force a terrible candidate down our throats because the establishment was more concerned in measuring offices in the West Wing that listening to voters. It was a spectacular failure and we got Trump as a result. The DNC did their utmost to ensure people didn't get a voice in the process. 2020 was unique for many reasons. Many, including me, said choosing Biden was a bad idea. He was even then so old that the DNC was giving up the incumbents advantage in 2024, partly driven by Biden alluding to him not wanting to run for re-election. Did the people choose Biden? Well, not really. Jim Clyburn did [1]. People didn't choose Biden's "bearhug strategy". Biden, against all the cries not to, decided to seek re-election despite showing signs of cognitive decline a year ago. So there was no real primary process, no chance for the people to have a voice. The people also didn't choose for the DNC to burn to the ground young voter support (eg college protest response), the Arab-American vote (ie Gaza) or the Latino vote (with an immigration policy to the right of Ronald Reagan). If the DNC had listened to the voters, Bernie Sanders would've handily beat Donald Trump in 2016 and we wouldn't be here. [1]: https://archive.is/qSpNF https://archive.is/qSpNF
- tengbretson 2y agoIs apathy the only explanation for the non-voting?
- School-Cotton 2y agoIt is not. I care a lot about who becomes president, but choose not to vote as a form of protest against our broken system. If I lived in a swing state, I would probably vote.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoThat seems like an insane assumption to me. Maybe there’s nobody worth voting for. If you don’t interpret a non-vote that way what’s the point of democracy?
- ultrarunner 2y agoI wish people would probe this question a little more. It certainly seems to me, what with the party-based system (and all their rules, requirements, and other methods of disincentivizing non Republican/Democrat participation), the point is not democracy at all, but political power brokering. That's not a system I'm comfortable interacting with.
- kenjackson 2y agoI'm seeing 3.5% -- where are you getting 8%.
- j0hnyl 2y agoTrump is at 71.8 million votes compared to Harris at 66.9 million votes according to AP. That's somewhere between 7% and 8%
- kenjackson 2y agoOK, you're doing Trump has 7% more votes than Harris. Which is valid -- I think that's not the way most people report it though. I think most people say that Trump won by 3.5%.
- j0hnyl 2y agoYou're probably right, but I think the popular vote stats tell a more realistic story of how the population actually sees things.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoThis number doesn't count non-voters, though, which pollutes the whole metric. Ideally we would look at the holistic figures of margin as a percentage of total potential voters.