8 ms·

A lot of Americans believed the guy they wanted to believe in, because they didn't want to believe the people they didn't want to believe in. You're assuming t

A lot of Americans believed the guy they wanted to believe in, because they didn't want to believe the people they didn't want to believe in. You're assuming that modern politics across most of the World has something to do with rational, logical thought. Russia, China, Europe, the US, the Middle East - they are all in a quagmire of irrational fractures between the public and the political classes who want power/control for benefit of themselves rather than for the benefit of that public. It's not unique to the US, it's just that they look like they are speed running it from outside.

BanAntiVaxxers 9mo ago
[flagged]
- pinnochio 9mo ago
  What's the intersection of Americans who won't vote for a woman presidential candidate and Americans who support MAGA? I imagine it's fairly high. That said, I don't believe there's a single factor that determined the election. A flip in any of a dozen or more factors could have resulted in a different outcome.
  - wat10000 9mo ago
    I’m sure it’s only a small percentage of voters who would have voted for a male Democrat. But that’s all it would take to flip that election. Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense.
    - pinnochio 9mo ago
      > Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense. Not sure if that's specifically directed at me, but that's exactly what I said.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- nathan_compton 9mo ago
  I don't buy this - Harris had a big bump in the polls as soon as she entered the race and I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything. This bullshit that American's won't vote for a woman is just an excuse not to run women and to deflect blame towards a culture war issue and away from the fact that the democrats don't actually have popular policies. I voted for Harris, I even canvased for her, but I think its a sexist oversimplification to suggest she lost because she is a woman. She lost because her campaign was lame.
  - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
    I will confirm what the person you replied to said. I have had white collar colleagues and blue collar truck drivers (one who is a family member) say the same thing, that they wouldn’t vote for a women. You severely underestimate racism and misogyny in the US electorate imho. I did not bother canvassing or donating to the Harris campaign for this reason, for the same reason I did not help pro vaccine non profits during the pandemic trying to convince antivaxxers. You aren’t changing someone’s belief system and mental model on timelines that matter for election outcomes. Mamdani was able to win NYC because young people and women turned out in force and ranked choice voting. The electoral college overweights rural, lower education parts of the country in US voting influence. Based on the above, it will be a long time before enough of the US electorate has turned over before you can run a women presidential candidate imho. 78% of farmers voted for him, and still support him, even as he destroys their way of life, for example. Progress occurs one funeral at a time (Planck). I recommend the recently released book “The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us” by Ryan P Burge (ISBN13 9781587436697) as a contributor to understanding this topic, as well as “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (ISBN13 9780062390851). Edit: This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681760 touches on this as well.
  - Marazan 9mo ago
    > that the democrats don't actually have popular policies. Democrat policies polled better than Republican policies at the last election.
- dominicrose 9mo ago
  Women have had the right to vote for a long time. Women could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President. People talk a lot about Trump but I think a lot of people just voted against the other option so it didn't have much to do with Trump to begin with.
  - tzs 9mo ago
    Harris beat Trump by 10 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Harris by 10 percentage points among men voters. Clinton beat Trump by 15 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Clinton by 11 percentage points among men voters.
    - dominicrose 9mo ago
      Interesting. The Electoral College made the difference then.
    - belorn 9mo ago
      Something that may be worth to know, women and men vote different in other countries and especially when it comes to left vs right. Women in Sweden votes with about 10 percentage points more towards left than men, and men vote 11 percentage points more towards right. Looking at the specific parties at far right and far left, around the 2/3 of the far right votes are from men while 2/3 of the far left is women. A lot of research has been made on this subject and it should be noted that its primarily young voters that create this voting pattern.
  - psychoslave 9mo ago
    Having right vote when you belong to some category doesn’t mean having possibility to elect someone in that category. It could be that legally the category of people is not illegible, or are bared from being elected by other practical considerations. Also being part of a social category doesn’t mean one will be immune to bias against this very category if it’s heavily pushed in the dominant social constructs. Actually women able to reach top level political function in a patriarchal system will more likely do so by being doubly virulent against feminist standpoints. Look at Tatcher or Takaichi for a more recent example.
- MisterTea 9mo ago
  I know women in NYC who voted Trump because they believed Harris was not tough enough to handle the geopolitical stage. I know Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who voted Trump because they believe they are being replaced by a wave of new immigrants who will vote Democrat. My friends, an interracial couple who voted democrat, voted Trump because the schools were going to give their kids hormone pills without their consent. The amount of crazy and not so crazy shit I hear for voting for this idiot is incredible. Though the Dems do themselves no favors either.
  - CalChris 9mo ago
    People don’t always tell the truth about themselves, even to friends, even to family.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - LtWorf 9mo ago
    I don't understand why you're downvoted. People vote against their interest all the time. Which is why the 1% even exists.
  - bobtheborg 9mo ago
    > who voted Trump because they believed Harris was not tough enough No, they voted for Trump because he was their guy then later made up a rational justification. We know that people generally do NOT make decisions by rationally evaluating things, their subconscious makes a decision and their conscious makes plausible rational arguments. (Yes, citation needed.)
- WillPostForFood 9mo ago
  this is a classic "nice story, bro".
- nancyminusone 9mo ago
  This is unfortunate but probably more true than anyone wants to admit.
- neogodless 9mo ago
  Elections are kind of an "average" / pulse of the ~236 million eligible voters. The reasons people vote a certain way or can't be bothered to show up at the polls are going to vary significantly across the nearly quarter billion humans making those choices. So any attempt to "single issue" explain election results are going to be wrong, particularly in a close election like this one. (49.8% vs 48.3%, and Electoral Votes in battleground states often in the tens of thousands of voters, out of tens of millions. But many of the issues certainly contribute to flipping voters between one candidate, another, or staying home. So sure, totally, gender and race played a role. The economy (and steep inflation) played a role. Biden being an increasingly disliked incumbent, staying in the race too long, and Harris being too conservative to distance herself from him played a role. News and propaganda played a role (and I suspect this is a big one. Remember when Trump was all like Deep State, Democrats and Epstein, let's get those files released! And then it came time to do it, and for some reason he was like... oh that's a bad idea?) No doubt individual state politics play a role, too - an unpopular governor might give the opposing party a boost. But yeah, if the Democratic nominee was a) nominated, and b) a white male, the odds probably would've shifted in their favor enough to flip those few battleground states.
  - nine_k 9mo ago
    It seemed like the D. did not want to win. They wanted to make a point. The R seemingly also wanted to make a point. The current administration also strives to make an point here and there, against anyone's best interest (including themselves): the silly tariffs, the insane ICE, the irrational play around Greenland, etc. Both parties are quite disconnected from the interests of the "ordinary people", and the "ordinary people" voting from them are often quite disconnected from the reality; instead they want someone who would approve their preconceptions, and would stick it to "them" in the endless political sports match. Which may not be that endless: if the political climate of the US deteriorates enough, some authoritarian populist could just get elected and never leave. The current administration likes to hint at that, but they seem to inane to actually pull this off. Somebody less theatrical and more cold-blooded could, though :(
- Glyptodon 9mo ago
  Much like I think if any Dem other than Hillary Clinton ran against Trump for his winning term 1, I think if the Dems had a proper primary process for this last election they'd probably have picked somebody who'd also have won. That said, I'm not sure being a woman was worse than being from CA or black with a solid chunk of the electorate. (I'm reminded of how some of my own relatives seemed to want to avoid visiting us in CA growing up because they had such a strong notion of how "communist," "liberal," and dangerous it ostensibly was.) In some ways this also illustrates that propaganda likely had a significant role, too, IMO.
  - transcriptase 9mo ago
    They didn’t even have a proper primary with Hillary. She was anointed by the DNC to start and the party itself worked against other candidates any way it could to make sure she “won”. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the opposite of any candidate that might snag a single vote from the republicans, and unlikable among most dem voters themselves. Throw in the fact that they were so convinced of a victory that Trump flipped blue states by virtue of showing up versus ignoring them on the basis of “who cares, they’ll vote for me anyway”, and it was a recipe for disaster. Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.
    - JohnMakin 9mo ago
      I don't really disagree with this but my opinion is that basically no one is capable of winning a US presidential campaign in the modern era in a matter of ~100 days. The fact Harris was a uniquely bad candidate that weirdly refused to differentiate herself from Biden, just exacerbated that problem. If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.
- brightball 9mo ago
  I don’t usually bother reacting strongly to anything on HN but that is a complete fabrication.
  - LexiMax 9mo ago
    Is this a bot? Is this someone telling an unpopular truth on an alt account? Is this someone telling a fabrication on an alt account? The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.
    - brightball 9mo ago
      Real person. Live in the south. Kamala being a woman had no impact on her election chances. Most people in my circles were big Haley fans. Claiming that half the country wouldn't vote for a woman because Kamala didn't win and couldn't possibly have had any other faults as a candidate is very bot like, however.
      - Jensson 9mo ago
        The funny part is that most female world leaders are right wing, since right wing voters are more likely to vote for a woman than left wing voters. There are many more left wing female candidates, but those that win elections are mostly right wing.
        nobody9999 9mo ago
        In the US, the far-right party elects many fewer women than the center-right party[0] [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-account-for-28-of-lawmakers-in-the-119th-congress-unchanged-from-the-last-congress/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-acc...
    - immibis 9mo ago
      HN is more tightly controlled than it lets on. User moderation tools are suspended if a user doesn't use them in accordance with a pro-corporate right-wing bias.
- cael450 9mo ago
  I have spent my whole life intimately involved with southern Republicans. They will never ever not vote Republican, let alone vote Democrat. It is an identity marker. It doesn’t even really matter what the policies are. They’ll complain for a while, but they will always internalize a Republican policy shift no matter what it is. They used to treat “free market economics” as a religion just 10 years ago. Secondarily, they love to define their identity as opposition to the northeast (a stereotypical fictional version of northeast). Democrats and “coastal elites” are the same to them. Once they elected a black man, they all got more racist. They nominated a woman, then they got more sexist. They campaigned on social programs, fuck the poor (even if they are poor). And there is a cognitive dissonance between their beliefs and their experience. They’ll say “deport them all” but be personal friends with immigrants from church. They simply don’t connect their political beliefs to their reality. I’m a southerner and I don’t see a future for this country. I used to think if they felt enough pain, then they would take politics seriously, but then a whole bunch of them died of COVID and it changed nothing. If I was a non-American, I’d be telling my government to do what they can to remove all dependence on this country as possible because it won’t get better.
  - bee_rider 9mo ago
    I don’t really know how we’d get there, but the US would be better structured as an EU of regions, IMO. The states are too small, but we’ve got regions with definite noticeable cultural differences (Northeast vs Southeast, etc etc). These areas have more similar values than the country as a whole, and are big enough to handle 99% of their issues. Like, we should not have done the ACA, just merged all the various already successful Northeastern healthcare systems. Then the South could decide to copy it if they wanted, after they saw it working. Or not. What can you do? Trying to impose it seems to have drastically backfired. Since these regional governments would be picked from the inside, hopefully there wouldn’t be as much of a contrarian reflex to oppose everything they do.
    - yardie 9mo ago
      The EU is moving in the opposite direction and trying to become more cohesive. The politicians and technocrats see the Euro as hamstrung with weak fiscal policies.
- bigbadfeline 9mo ago
  > They could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President. That's nothing new... Don't blame me for bothsiderism but I and many others knew full well that Harris would lose after the midsummer switcheroo. Sorry, the Dem party knew it too and they wanted to lose, that's not the only evidence for it and there's no other rational conclusion.
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    tangent but: I can't believe "bothsidesism" is an actual dictionary word. It had to have been a recent addition. I had some hopes that Trump's deterioration, court case results, and general insurrection of the country would do something to impact his standing. Especially if "sleepy Joe" was the standard Biden was being held to. But I learned from 2016 and knew not to dismiss the possibility. The real downside here isn't just the fact that trump's voted didn't decrease. It's that Harris' did. A lot of people staying home arguably cost the election almost as much as those who voted.
    - bigbadfeline 9mo ago
      Re: "bothsidesism" It's "bothsiderism", learned it on this thread, haven't checked the dictionary, I guess, there's still time to vote on which spelling should go there.
boarsofcanada 9mo ago
Yeah I am not sure where I read the article recently, but there was a nice write-up about how all politics everywhere is turning into tribalism with little or no actual consideration for policy beyond ideology. Not that it’s necessarily as bad everywhere, but time and time again I talk to people from various countries who say the current leader never could have been elected back when they were living there. A lot of this, as in the case of Trump, seems like legitimate dissatisfaction that voters have which is funneled into finding alternatives to the people that are currently representing them, without deep thought about the outcomes of the policies the replacement is pushing for. In the case of Trump voters in particular people seem to very frequently be willing to overlook statements they would otherwise disagree with just because there are other statements that align with their thinking, or that seem like “change” that they are willing to support to see where it leads.
mothballed 9mo ago
Well when we look at rational economic policies take a look at top ~10 in terms of GDP, purchase parity adjusted, per capita: monaco, liechtenstein, singapore, luxembourg, ireland, macau, qatar, bermuda, norway, switzerland Monarchy: monaco, liechtenstein, qatar One party state w/ elections: singapore, macau direct democracy: switzerland represented democracy: Norway, Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg Multi-party representative democracy is less than half. And none of the top 3. An interesting, but uncomfortable, fact. The people are not good at picking economically rational leaders in adversarial elections.
- omneity 9mo ago
  Also worth noticing the size of these countries. Mostly on the small/tiny side, besides Norway (an oil exporter) and Ireland (a corporate tax haven) Perhaps making good economic decisions grows exponentially in difficulty with the population size, especially for “conventional” economies that do not have another cash cow.
  - gopher_space 9mo ago
    I can’t help but notice the absence of a “how shitty is this country for the average person” dimension. E.g. which of these countries has any kind of youth culture to speak of?
    - TimorousBestie 9mo ago
      Ireland, but the worsening economic inequality is wearing away at the edges of it from what I could tell on my last visit.
    - stackghost 9mo ago
      If you're the outdoorsy type, Switzerland.
  - notahacker 9mo ago
    The reality is to you get way more benefit from attracting a multinational company to shift its revenue to you for tax purposes when you're a (very) small state. This strategy simply isn't available to you when you're the US (which already has major bases for all these companies, it's just not that big a deal compared with their population and govt budget)
MonkeyClub 9mo ago
> A lot of Americans believed the guy they wanted to believe in, because they didn't want to believe the people they didn't want to believe in. It's sad but true. Deep down, political thinking is influenced by tribal thinking, a rigid us versus them mentality. This is, after all, how the "divide and conquer" method gets to be so effective. A house divided amongst itself and all that.
- CalChris 9mo ago
  That’s a clever bothsiderism. However, these two tribes are not alike.
  - MonkeyClub 9mo ago
    True, they're not alike, nor are the subtribes that are funneled into the two quasi-distinct groups. But I think the methods by which they're being manipulated are quite alike, and ultimately forced to side with the current tribal figurehead simply because it's not the other tribe's figurehead, even if there are many, and legitimate, contentions.
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      >many, and legitimate, contentions. When one chess player chooses to suddenly say that a pawn can move 3 spaces, and you insist on calling a ref to call out cheating, I don't think it's just "two tribes" anymore. You agreed on the rules of engagment at the beginning of the match and one side is objectively breaking them. Saying post haste that "well maybe a pawn should move 3 spaces" does not negate what you agreed upon. That's why it's tiring to head the "but you're being manipulated" argument. Being manipulated by the very rules of your government is different from a bunch of war mongerers, billionaires, and corrupt politicians continually ignoring the rules and saying "no it's okay".
      - MonkeyClub 9mo ago
        It is different, but it serves to elucidate that the rules we're living under aren't set in stone, they're only there because we, unlike the "no it's okay" bunch, can't or don't want to shirk them. They operate under the "might is right" mentality, and by getting away with it prove in a sick and contorted way that the rules of social order aren't universal.
bparsons 9mo ago
Things aren't perfect in a lot of countries, but what is happening in the US right now is absolutely unique. Things are careening out of control, and the political system seems completely incapable of getting a handle on it. Most people I speak to in Canada, Europe and Central America seem perplexed why Americans they know do not seem more alarmed.
- js2 9mo ago
  > Seem perplexed why Americans they know do not seem more alarmed. It's because we live in the beginnings of a dual state: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/opinion/renee-good-ice-immunity.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FlA.9fcA.iH2kMs3IjKrI&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/opinion/renee-good-ice-im... Quoting the key point: > The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.” > “The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.” > It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.” More at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-executive-order-lawlessness-constitutional-crisis/682112/?gift=3qx5DAUwXOU-zo0uuMqXXXBdr-lY__ZS3Hup3wCAyzA https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-e...
  - jjav 9mo ago
    Excellent article, thanks.
- Muromec 9mo ago
  >Things aren't perfect in a lot of countries, but what is happening in the US right now is absolutely unique It's not unique. If anything, it's inevitable regression to the mean. Entropy rises eventually and does this
onlyrealcuzzo 9mo ago
You are using "believed" - past tense. Facts change nothing. This report means nothing. These people still believe. The report is wrong. They are right. The truth is whatever they want it to be, not something out of their control.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- riffraff 9mo ago
  I have a friend who works with american tourists visiting europe, mostly older folks, mostly to religious sights. They are, for the vast majority, indoctrinated beyond any chance of reasonable change of opinion. Talking with him makes _me_ worry about my own beliefs, because if these people can be so blind, maybe I am too.
  - dboreham 9mo ago
    The Americans visiting Europe are a sample very skewed towards sanity due to their socioeconomic situation and interest in history/culture. So this is either not true or highly troubling.
    - multiplegeorges 9mo ago
      > mostly to religious sights [sic] Don't be so sure.
      - wood_spirit 9mo ago
        Sightseers see sights at sites? So perhaps not sic in this case?
    - Sharlin 9mo ago
      Agreed, though the "religious sights" part likely does a lot of work here.
  - jkaplowitz 9mo ago
throw0101d 9mo ago
> A lot of Americans believed the guy they wanted to believe in, because they didn't want to believe the people they didn't want to believe in. "Feelings don't care about your facts." — not Ben Shapiro
gravifer 9mo ago
Funny how the Chinese general public is like so too. We call it 'accelerationism'. Trump... this ghoul is some .5c booster tho

BanAntiVaxxers 9mo ago

[flagged]

pinnochio 9mo ago
What's the intersection of Americans who won't vote for a woman presidential candidate and Americans who support MAGA? I imagine it's fairly high. That said, I don't believe there's a single factor that determined the election. A flip in any of a dozen or more factors could have resulted in a different outcome.
- wat10000 9mo ago
  I’m sure it’s only a small percentage of voters who would have voted for a male Democrat. But that’s all it would take to flip that election. Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense.
  - pinnochio 9mo ago
    > Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense. Not sure if that's specifically directed at me, but that's exactly what I said.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
nathan_compton 9mo ago
I don't buy this - Harris had a big bump in the polls as soon as she entered the race and I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything. This bullshit that American's won't vote for a woman is just an excuse not to run women and to deflect blame towards a culture war issue and away from the fact that the democrats don't actually have popular policies. I voted for Harris, I even canvased for her, but I think its a sexist oversimplification to suggest she lost because she is a woman. She lost because her campaign was lame.
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago
  I will confirm what the person you replied to said. I have had white collar colleagues and blue collar truck drivers (one who is a family member) say the same thing, that they wouldn’t vote for a women. You severely underestimate racism and misogyny in the US electorate imho. I did not bother canvassing or donating to the Harris campaign for this reason, for the same reason I did not help pro vaccine non profits during the pandemic trying to convince antivaxxers. You aren’t changing someone’s belief system and mental model on timelines that matter for election outcomes. Mamdani was able to win NYC because young people and women turned out in force and ranked choice voting. The electoral college overweights rural, lower education parts of the country in US voting influence. Based on the above, it will be a long time before enough of the US electorate has turned over before you can run a women presidential candidate imho. 78% of farmers voted for him, and still support him, even as he destroys their way of life, for example. Progress occurs one funeral at a time (Planck). I recommend the recently released book “The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us” by Ryan P Burge (ISBN13 9781587436697) as a contributor to understanding this topic, as well as “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (ISBN13 9780062390851). Edit: This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681760 touches on this as well.
- Marazan 9mo ago
  > that the democrats don't actually have popular policies. Democrat policies polled better than Republican policies at the last election.
dominicrose 9mo ago
Women have had the right to vote for a long time. Women could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President. People talk a lot about Trump but I think a lot of people just voted against the other option so it didn't have much to do with Trump to begin with.
- tzs 9mo ago
  Harris beat Trump by 10 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Harris by 10 percentage points among men voters. Clinton beat Trump by 15 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Clinton by 11 percentage points among men voters.
  - dominicrose 9mo ago
    Interesting. The Electoral College made the difference then.
  - belorn 9mo ago
    Something that may be worth to know, women and men vote different in other countries and especially when it comes to left vs right. Women in Sweden votes with about 10 percentage points more towards left than men, and men vote 11 percentage points more towards right. Looking at the specific parties at far right and far left, around the 2/3 of the far right votes are from men while 2/3 of the far left is women. A lot of research has been made on this subject and it should be noted that its primarily young voters that create this voting pattern.
- psychoslave 9mo ago
  Having right vote when you belong to some category doesn’t mean having possibility to elect someone in that category. It could be that legally the category of people is not illegible, or are bared from being elected by other practical considerations. Also being part of a social category doesn’t mean one will be immune to bias against this very category if it’s heavily pushed in the dominant social constructs. Actually women able to reach top level political function in a patriarchal system will more likely do so by being doubly virulent against feminist standpoints. Look at Tatcher or Takaichi for a more recent example.
MisterTea 9mo ago
I know women in NYC who voted Trump because they believed Harris was not tough enough to handle the geopolitical stage. I know Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who voted Trump because they believe they are being replaced by a wave of new immigrants who will vote Democrat. My friends, an interracial couple who voted democrat, voted Trump because the schools were going to give their kids hormone pills without their consent. The amount of crazy and not so crazy shit I hear for voting for this idiot is incredible. Though the Dems do themselves no favors either.
- CalChris 9mo ago
  People don’t always tell the truth about themselves, even to friends, even to family.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- LtWorf 9mo ago
  I don't understand why you're downvoted. People vote against their interest all the time. Which is why the 1% even exists.
- bobtheborg 9mo ago
  > who voted Trump because they believed Harris was not tough enough No, they voted for Trump because he was their guy then later made up a rational justification. We know that people generally do NOT make decisions by rationally evaluating things, their subconscious makes a decision and their conscious makes plausible rational arguments. (Yes, citation needed.)
WillPostForFood 9mo ago
this is a classic "nice story, bro".
nancyminusone 9mo ago
This is unfortunate but probably more true than anyone wants to admit.
neogodless 9mo ago
Elections are kind of an "average" / pulse of the ~236 million eligible voters. The reasons people vote a certain way or can't be bothered to show up at the polls are going to vary significantly across the nearly quarter billion humans making those choices. So any attempt to "single issue" explain election results are going to be wrong, particularly in a close election like this one. (49.8% vs 48.3%, and Electoral Votes in battleground states often in the tens of thousands of voters, out of tens of millions. But many of the issues certainly contribute to flipping voters between one candidate, another, or staying home. So sure, totally, gender and race played a role. The economy (and steep inflation) played a role. Biden being an increasingly disliked incumbent, staying in the race too long, and Harris being too conservative to distance herself from him played a role. News and propaganda played a role (and I suspect this is a big one. Remember when Trump was all like Deep State, Democrats and Epstein, let's get those files released! And then it came time to do it, and for some reason he was like... oh that's a bad idea?) No doubt individual state politics play a role, too - an unpopular governor might give the opposing party a boost. But yeah, if the Democratic nominee was a) nominated, and b) a white male, the odds probably would've shifted in their favor enough to flip those few battleground states.
- nine_k 9mo ago
  It seemed like the D. did not want to win. They wanted to make a point. The R seemingly also wanted to make a point. The current administration also strives to make an point here and there, against anyone's best interest (including themselves): the silly tariffs, the insane ICE, the irrational play around Greenland, etc. Both parties are quite disconnected from the interests of the "ordinary people", and the "ordinary people" voting from them are often quite disconnected from the reality; instead they want someone who would approve their preconceptions, and would stick it to "them" in the endless political sports match. Which may not be that endless: if the political climate of the US deteriorates enough, some authoritarian populist could just get elected and never leave. The current administration likes to hint at that, but they seem to inane to actually pull this off. Somebody less theatrical and more cold-blooded could, though :(
Glyptodon 9mo ago
Much like I think if any Dem other than Hillary Clinton ran against Trump for his winning term 1, I think if the Dems had a proper primary process for this last election they'd probably have picked somebody who'd also have won. That said, I'm not sure being a woman was worse than being from CA or black with a solid chunk of the electorate. (I'm reminded of how some of my own relatives seemed to want to avoid visiting us in CA growing up because they had such a strong notion of how "communist," "liberal," and dangerous it ostensibly was.) In some ways this also illustrates that propaganda likely had a significant role, too, IMO.
- transcriptase 9mo ago
  They didn’t even have a proper primary with Hillary. She was anointed by the DNC to start and the party itself worked against other candidates any way it could to make sure she “won”. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the opposite of any candidate that might snag a single vote from the republicans, and unlikable among most dem voters themselves. Throw in the fact that they were so convinced of a victory that Trump flipped blue states by virtue of showing up versus ignoring them on the basis of “who cares, they’ll vote for me anyway”, and it was a recipe for disaster. Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.
  - JohnMakin 9mo ago
    I don't really disagree with this but my opinion is that basically no one is capable of winning a US presidential campaign in the modern era in a matter of ~100 days. The fact Harris was a uniquely bad candidate that weirdly refused to differentiate herself from Biden, just exacerbated that problem. If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.
brightball 9mo ago
I don’t usually bother reacting strongly to anything on HN but that is a complete fabrication.
- LexiMax 9mo ago
  Is this a bot? Is this someone telling an unpopular truth on an alt account? Is this someone telling a fabrication on an alt account? The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.
  - brightball 9mo ago
    Real person. Live in the south. Kamala being a woman had no impact on her election chances. Most people in my circles were big Haley fans. Claiming that half the country wouldn't vote for a woman because Kamala didn't win and couldn't possibly have had any other faults as a candidate is very bot like, however.
    - Jensson 9mo ago
      The funny part is that most female world leaders are right wing, since right wing voters are more likely to vote for a woman than left wing voters. There are many more left wing female candidates, but those that win elections are mostly right wing.
      - nobody9999 9mo ago
        In the US, the far-right party elects many fewer women than the center-right party[0] [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-account-for-28-of-lawmakers-in-the-119th-congress-unchanged-from-the-last-congress/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-acc...
  - immibis 9mo ago
    HN is more tightly controlled than it lets on. User moderation tools are suspended if a user doesn't use them in accordance with a pro-corporate right-wing bias.
cael450 9mo ago
I have spent my whole life intimately involved with southern Republicans. They will never ever not vote Republican, let alone vote Democrat. It is an identity marker. It doesn’t even really matter what the policies are. They’ll complain for a while, but they will always internalize a Republican policy shift no matter what it is. They used to treat “free market economics” as a religion just 10 years ago. Secondarily, they love to define their identity as opposition to the northeast (a stereotypical fictional version of northeast). Democrats and “coastal elites” are the same to them. Once they elected a black man, they all got more racist. They nominated a woman, then they got more sexist. They campaigned on social programs, fuck the poor (even if they are poor). And there is a cognitive dissonance between their beliefs and their experience. They’ll say “deport them all” but be personal friends with immigrants from church. They simply don’t connect their political beliefs to their reality. I’m a southerner and I don’t see a future for this country. I used to think if they felt enough pain, then they would take politics seriously, but then a whole bunch of them died of COVID and it changed nothing. If I was a non-American, I’d be telling my government to do what they can to remove all dependence on this country as possible because it won’t get better.
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  I don’t really know how we’d get there, but the US would be better structured as an EU of regions, IMO. The states are too small, but we’ve got regions with definite noticeable cultural differences (Northeast vs Southeast, etc etc). These areas have more similar values than the country as a whole, and are big enough to handle 99% of their issues. Like, we should not have done the ACA, just merged all the various already successful Northeastern healthcare systems. Then the South could decide to copy it if they wanted, after they saw it working. Or not. What can you do? Trying to impose it seems to have drastically backfired. Since these regional governments would be picked from the inside, hopefully there wouldn’t be as much of a contrarian reflex to oppose everything they do.
  - yardie 9mo ago
    The EU is moving in the opposite direction and trying to become more cohesive. The politicians and technocrats see the Euro as hamstrung with weak fiscal policies.
bigbadfeline 9mo ago
> They could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President. That's nothing new... Don't blame me for bothsiderism but I and many others knew full well that Harris would lose after the midsummer switcheroo. Sorry, the Dem party knew it too and they wanted to lose, that's not the only evidence for it and there's no other rational conclusion.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  tangent but: I can't believe "bothsidesism" is an actual dictionary word. It had to have been a recent addition. I had some hopes that Trump's deterioration, court case results, and general insurrection of the country would do something to impact his standing. Especially if "sleepy Joe" was the standard Biden was being held to. But I learned from 2016 and knew not to dismiss the possibility. The real downside here isn't just the fact that trump's voted didn't decrease. It's that Harris' did. A lot of people staying home arguably cost the election almost as much as those who voted.
  - bigbadfeline 9mo ago
    Re: "bothsidesism" It's "bothsiderism", learned it on this thread, haven't checked the dictionary, I guess, there's still time to vote on which spelling should go there.

boarsofcanada 9mo ago

Yeah I am not sure where I read the article recently, but there was a nice write-up about how all politics everywhere is turning into tribalism with little or no actual consideration for policy beyond ideology. Not that it’s necessarily as bad everywhere, but time and time again I talk to people from various countries who say the current leader never could have been elected back when they were living there. A lot of this, as in the case of Trump, seems like legitimate dissatisfaction that voters have which is funneled into finding alternatives to the people that are currently representing them, without deep thought about the outcomes of the policies the replacement is pushing for. In the case of Trump voters in particular people seem to very frequently be willing to overlook statements they would otherwise disagree with just because there are other statements that align with their thinking, or that seem like “change” that they are willing to support to see where it leads.

mothballed 9mo ago

Well when we look at rational economic policies take a look at top ~10 in terms of GDP, purchase parity adjusted, per capita: monaco, liechtenstein, singapore, luxembourg, ireland, macau, qatar, bermuda, norway, switzerland Monarchy: monaco, liechtenstein, qatar One party state w/ elections: singapore, macau direct democracy: switzerland represented democracy: Norway, Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg Multi-party representative democracy is less than half. And none of the top 3. An interesting, but uncomfortable, fact. The people are not good at picking economically rational leaders in adversarial elections.

omneity 9mo ago
Also worth noticing the size of these countries. Mostly on the small/tiny side, besides Norway (an oil exporter) and Ireland (a corporate tax haven) Perhaps making good economic decisions grows exponentially in difficulty with the population size, especially for “conventional” economies that do not have another cash cow.
- gopher_space 9mo ago
  I can’t help but notice the absence of a “how shitty is this country for the average person” dimension. E.g. which of these countries has any kind of youth culture to speak of?
  - TimorousBestie 9mo ago
    Ireland, but the worsening economic inequality is wearing away at the edges of it from what I could tell on my last visit.
  - stackghost 9mo ago
    If you're the outdoorsy type, Switzerland.
- notahacker 9mo ago
  The reality is to you get way more benefit from attracting a multinational company to shift its revenue to you for tax purposes when you're a (very) small state. This strategy simply isn't available to you when you're the US (which already has major bases for all these companies, it's just not that big a deal compared with their population and govt budget)

MonkeyClub 9mo ago

> A lot of Americans believed the guy they wanted to believe in, because they didn't want to believe the people they didn't want to believe in. It's sad but true. Deep down, political thinking is influenced by tribal thinking, a rigid us versus them mentality. This is, after all, how the "divide and conquer" method gets to be so effective. A house divided amongst itself and all that.

CalChris 9mo ago
That’s a clever bothsiderism. However, these two tribes are not alike.
- MonkeyClub 9mo ago
  True, they're not alike, nor are the subtribes that are funneled into the two quasi-distinct groups. But I think the methods by which they're being manipulated are quite alike, and ultimately forced to side with the current tribal figurehead simply because it's not the other tribe's figurehead, even if there are many, and legitimate, contentions.
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    >many, and legitimate, contentions. When one chess player chooses to suddenly say that a pawn can move 3 spaces, and you insist on calling a ref to call out cheating, I don't think it's just "two tribes" anymore. You agreed on the rules of engagment at the beginning of the match and one side is objectively breaking them. Saying post haste that "well maybe a pawn should move 3 spaces" does not negate what you agreed upon. That's why it's tiring to head the "but you're being manipulated" argument. Being manipulated by the very rules of your government is different from a bunch of war mongerers, billionaires, and corrupt politicians continually ignoring the rules and saying "no it's okay".
    - MonkeyClub 9mo ago
      It is different, but it serves to elucidate that the rules we're living under aren't set in stone, they're only there because we, unlike the "no it's okay" bunch, can't or don't want to shirk them. They operate under the "might is right" mentality, and by getting away with it prove in a sick and contorted way that the rules of social order aren't universal.

bparsons 9mo ago

Things aren't perfect in a lot of countries, but what is happening in the US right now is absolutely unique. Things are careening out of control, and the political system seems completely incapable of getting a handle on it. Most people I speak to in Canada, Europe and Central America seem perplexed why Americans they know do not seem more alarmed.

js2 9mo ago
> Seem perplexed why Americans they know do not seem more alarmed. It's because we live in the beginnings of a dual state: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/opinion/renee-good-ice-immunity.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FlA.9fcA.iH2kMs3IjKrI&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/opinion/renee-good-ice-im... Quoting the key point: > The two components of the dual state are the normative state — the seemingly normal world that you and I inhabit, where, as Huq writes, the “ordinary legal system of rules, procedures and precedents” applies — and the prerogative state, which is marked (in Fraenkel’s words) by “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.” > “The key here,” Huq writes, “is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.” > It’s the continued existence of the normative state that lulls a population to sleep. It makes you discount the warnings of others. “Surely,” you say to yourself, “things aren’t that bad. My life is pretty much what it was.” More at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-executive-order-lawlessness-constitutional-crisis/682112/?gift=3qx5DAUwXOU-zo0uuMqXXXBdr-lY__ZS3Hup3wCAyzA https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-e...
- jjav 9mo ago
  Excellent article, thanks.
Muromec 9mo ago
>Things aren't perfect in a lot of countries, but what is happening in the US right now is absolutely unique It's not unique. If anything, it's inevitable regression to the mean. Entropy rises eventually and does this

onlyrealcuzzo 9mo ago

You are using "believed" - past tense. Facts change nothing. This report means nothing. These people still believe. The report is wrong. They are right. The truth is whatever they want it to be, not something out of their control.

deleted 9mo ago
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riffraff 9mo ago
I have a friend who works with american tourists visiting europe, mostly older folks, mostly to religious sights. They are, for the vast majority, indoctrinated beyond any chance of reasonable change of opinion. Talking with him makes _me_ worry about my own beliefs, because if these people can be so blind, maybe I am too.
- dboreham 9mo ago
  The Americans visiting Europe are a sample very skewed towards sanity due to their socioeconomic situation and interest in history/culture. So this is either not true or highly troubling.
  - multiplegeorges 9mo ago
    > mostly to religious sights [sic] Don't be so sure.
    - wood_spirit 9mo ago
      Sightseers see sights at sites? So perhaps not sic in this case?
  - Sharlin 9mo ago
    Agreed, though the "religious sights" part likely does a lot of work here.
- jkaplowitz 9mo ago

throw0101d 9mo ago

> A lot of Americans believed the guy they wanted to believe in, because they didn't want to believe the people they didn't want to believe in. "Feelings don't care about your facts." — not Ben Shapiro

gravifer 9mo ago

Funny how the Chinese general public is like so too. We call it 'accelerationism'. Trump... this ghoul is some .5c booster tho