5 ms·

Democracy lets you change laws in congress AND elect a new president.

• cdrnsf 5mo ago
  Or at least it used to.
  • percivalskunk 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • rayiner 5mo ago
    Said about a man that was literally voted out of office, left, and won the popular vote to go back into office.
    • lenerdenator 5mo ago
      He wouldn't have been in office in the first place had there been a higher emphasis on the popular vote in his first election. He also would be less likely to be in office the second time had the judicial system of New York State respected the outcome of another democracy - a jury in a criminal trial - and sentenced said man to actual punishment instead of not sentencing him at all.
      • Helloworldboy 5mo ago
        The US doesn’t, and has never, elected their president on the popular vote
        • lenerdenator 5mo ago
          And that contradicts my point how? My point is that if we took democracy more seriously, we'd be in a better spot right now.
          • deleted 5mo ago
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      • rayiner 5mo ago
        We don’t know what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario where the popular vote mattered in 2016. Campaigns spend their money trying to turn out voters to win the electoral college, because that’s what counts. That’s especially true of Republicans, whose voters are spread out across rural areas. The smallest PA city Harris visited the last week of the election was Scranton, which has 76,000. In the last week, Trump was in Lilitz PA, which has under 10,000 people. Butler PA has 13,500. In 2024, Trump made a deliberate play for the popular vote, holding rallies in California and New York City. And there was a major swing in his direction in both states. E.g. Biden won California by 29 points. Harris won California by only 20 points. Trump also targeted immigrant communities in blue states. Biden won foreign born voters by 26 points. Trump won them by 1 point. That swing alone accounts for half the 2020-2024 swing. It came out later that the internal polling available to both campaigns had Trump ahead the entire time. So he likely felt comfortable taking a risk and spending time in California and New York. But you’ll notice that he parked his surrogates in places like Pennsylvania the entire time. The popular vote has marketing value but it doesn’t count and nobody is trying to win it.
        • cdrnsf 5mo ago
          I'm not as concerned with internal polling as I am with him attempting to undermine elections and his history of sexual assault.
          • rayiner 5mo ago
            [flagged]
        • Forgeties79 5mo ago
          > We don’t know what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario where the popular vote mattered in 2016 You can’t brag about his popular vote for one election then disregard it for another. He lost if by a lot more in 2016 than he won it by in 2024. Both elections were decided by the electoral college and the popular votes we are comparing both happened in that context. 2.7% margin vs. 0.5% is a stark difference. Republicans had the stones to call his victory margin “a mandate” yet they would never say Hillary Clinton had one. You’re playing funny with numbers here.
    • cdrnsf 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      • rayiner 5mo ago
        [flagged]
        • cdrnsf 5mo ago
          It's not as though the GOP is doing anything with congress other than forcing their unpopular values on everyone, paying for an absurdist ballroom and funding a paramilitary. Oh, I guess they did start another unpopular war in the Middle East and drove up gas prices to help drag the economy down.
          • deleted 5mo ago
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      • BeetleB 5mo ago
        Whether he cares about democracy or not is irrelevant to the fact that democracy worked in electing him.
        • Forgeties79 5mo ago
          >Whether he cares about democracy or not is irrelevant to the fact that democracy worked in electing him. The US election system is not democratic at all. I'm not being flippant here. The electoral college + a winner-takes-all approach is a very odd, unique system that quite literally silences millions of voters per state every election because of a difference in votes that can be as low as 5 figures in some cases. That's absolutely insane and not democratic. Georgia was decided by ~11,000 votes in 2020 out of ~5,000,000 votes cast. 0.23% margin. That means ~2.5mill voting republicans functionally were not represented despite showing up and voting, because every single district is awarded to the winner of the state. Now apply this to any state you want with any party. This wildly changes the calculus for elections (creating flyover states) and voter turnout. Yes there can only be one winner, but in this system it's very hard to say "every vote counts" when candidates can win the popular vote by 2-3% and still lose. This is why we are once again watching the country rip itself apart over redistricting. We are literally choosing who gets to be represented and who doesn't in a very literal, granular sense.
    • Forgeties79 5mo ago
      > and won the popular vote to go back into office. By the smallest margin since 1968 (one of the smallest in history) with the aid of a rough economy he helped create but got no blame for and a terribly mismanaged Democratic primary/election.
    • SaucyWrong 5mo ago
      You omitted an important stage between “voted out of office” and “left”
      • TimorousBestie 5mo ago
        I’m pretty sure GP doesn’t believe anything out of the ordinary happened during that interval.
• jackmott42 5mo ago
  It did until oligarchs bought it.
• harimau777 5mo ago
  Can you expand on this? It's not clear to me how it is related to the article.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]