8 ms·

77,302,580 Americans made it happen. 87,037,184 voting-elligible Americans sat it out.

by spankibalt 4mo ago

Rekindle8090 4mo ago
[flagged]
- OutOfHere 4mo ago
  Both sides had their "worst" candidate, but in different ways. One of them was a convicted felon. Democrats will continue to lose while they revel in their corruption by putting forward selfish candidates that are least likely to win.
  - mx7zysuj4xew 4mo ago
    Convicted rapist
    - xp84 4mo ago
      That’s not what he was convicted of, though?
      - FireBeyond 4mo ago
        No, true. He was "just" adjudicated in a court of law to have committed rape.
- WolfeReader 4mo ago
  That makes no sense whatsoever. Voting for Trump (or anyone with an R by their name) is wrong; sitting out a vote is wrong. Why save all the blame for the side that actually put up resistance, however ineptly?
  - inetknght 4mo ago
    > Why save all the blame for the side that actually put up resistance Resistance is one definition, I guess. A very loose definition. I'd call it what it was. Career sociopaths decided to put a career sociopath on the ballot instead of someone the left's citizens would actually like.
    - dayyan 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - manphone 4mo ago
        He’s sitting at 30% approval while starting wars and not releasing the Epstein files. You are saying pure cope right now.
    - Nasrudith 4mo ago
      I'll let you in on a secret. The main reason why nobody is catering to you isn't because what you want goes against the money, the status quo, or whatever big bad you imagine. It is because if you don't vote then you are about as good for them as nipples on a Breast Plate. There is a reason seniors get everything that they want: it is because they always show up to vote!
  - opsnooperfax 4mo ago
    I don’t think blue team good, red team bad is a very mature take on US politics. When it comes to substantive policy, voters do not get a choice. The same wars will be fought. The same lobbies will have their way. Just because one side will make tactless, self-deifying inaugural speeches about how the sea levels will cease to rise and the Earth will start to heal, that does not make it so. I think that if these sensors were providing useful, actionable information more valuable than their maintenance cost is not well supported.
    - tombert 4mo ago
      Yeah, no, it actually is mature enough. I hate divisive language like this, but Trump's only major concrete "policy" (if you can call it that) during his 2024 campaign was that he was going to somehow lower grocery prices by instituting tariffs, so basically "I'm going to lower prices by raising prices". That kind of idiotic quasi-doublespeak should have been a disqualifier for anyone with at least a two-digit IQ, but apparently it's not. The only scenarios that I can see for this: 1) People actually believed the idiotic notion that "other countries" pay the tariffs. This is so idiotic because even if that were true, which it's not, those costs would still be ruled into the price. "No such thing as a free lunch" is very literally the first thing I learned in high school economics. If people are that stupid then they can be blamed for their idiotic decisions to vote for a despot. 2) They didn't believe in the tariff rhetoric, and wanted to vote for Trump based on a nebulous "personality". This is stupid. If you really are voting for people because you think you'd "like to have a beer with them", then you should be blamed when bad things happen from that idiotic decision. ---- Kamala wasn't a great candidate, but I really hate this sort of "both sides"-ing people do to try and engage in apologetics for people's ridiculous decision to vote for the guy who, as far as I can tell, has literally no expertise in anything.
- root_axis 4mo ago
  Interesting how "the worst candidate in history" is not to blame.
- yoyohello13 4mo ago
  I choose to blame the people that actually voted for this. Fuck those people.
  - stldev 4mo ago
    Agree on cause, disagree on solution. I'd lean more towards education than fornication. No judgement.
    - sph 4mo ago
      Educating people in the social media age? Good luck with that.
  - tremon 4mo ago
    > Fuck those people Trump already called dibs.
- dyauspitr 4mo ago
  They share some blame but a transsexual dog would have been a better candidate than Trump.
- subscribed 4mo ago
  Somehow you blame these who not voted for the rapist and a cheat? (but I agree with you, Kamala wasn't a good candidate, at least in this moment, and the DNCs response to Israel genocide in Gaza might as well sink it alone).
egypturnash 4mo ago
Sat it out, or were forced out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict_voting_following_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...
- waterTanuki 4mo ago
  The GOP rigs elections in their favor and it's well known, but they don't have the power to throw out an additional 87 million votes if they don't go in their favor. The logical conclusion then if despite everyone voting D then getting their votes tossed out is either violent revolution or liberation with the aid of another nuclear-armed state.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - intended 4mo ago
    In our modern democracies, we are highly dependent on our information economies to build consensus. Those economies have essentially ceased functioning as competitive markets for ideas, globally. In general, newsrooms don’t make enough money to independently cover local news, and are consolidated under political/private parties. Journalism isn’t dead, but it is definitely on life support. America though, has a further metastasized issue, in that there exists market capture. Republicans and their media apparatus have effective agenda setting power over a large enough section of the populace. The short version of it is that in the right leaning media sphere, the rules of journalism have changed. A common through line for headline stories begins with a fringe theory on the internet. This fringe theory shows up on some podcast, which then gets repeated by a guest on a channel like Fox. This in turn gets alluded to by the White House, and then it can be reported on as a position that the Executive is considering, making it fact. The GOP didn’t need to throw out votes, provided it could muddy the waters effectively enough. The research by Roberts, Faris and Benkler, is what this is based on. Reality always wins in the end, so now with the increase in oil prices, the limits of information dominance are visible, and they will need to leverage their strength in other domains to gain advantage for the upcoming elections.
jimbokun 4mo ago
If those who sat out were forced to vote for one of the two major party candidates, Trump’s margin may have been larger. I think liberals and progressives have a higher propensity to vote, so you can’t assume the non voters are less likely to lean Trump.
- NewJazz 4mo ago
  How long were the lines to vote in black neighborhoods? https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/104/6/1341/97747/Racial-Disparities-in-Voting-Wait-Times-Evidence?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/104/6/1341/9774...
HEmanZ 4mo ago
So 164,339,764 made it happen? I don’t like any direction this administration has taken, but acting like it’s not the completely legitimate will of the people is BS.
- fnordpiglet 4mo ago
  The will of the plurality you mean? He didn’t win a majority of the votes. He is the legitimately elected office holder; but it was not the will of the people, it was the outcome of this particularly electoral process. Many American electoral processes require a run off without a majority for this reason, and it’s an intensely weak platform to claim a mandate from - not only did more people not vote for you than half the voters, if you add in the people who could vote but didn’t, it’s by far not “the will of the people”.
  - denismi 4mo ago
    > He didn’t win a majority of the votes Donald Trump plus candidates who withdrew from the race and endorsed Donald Trump DID get a majority of votes though.
    - fnordpiglet 4mo ago
      I apologize but I don’t understand this metric - you’re saying Trump would have gotten the majority if republicans who didn’t vote for him had voted for him ? That’s some serious squinting and if you do that I’ll just take everyone who voted for Biden in the primary and add it to Harris and now she won close to 70% of the votes? Maybe add in Obama’s last election results and every democrat that ever ran in any races and Trump then got about 0% of the votes. Sadly you can only count the votes the candidate who ran actually received. And he had a plurality - the weakest of all possible victories other than his victory of Clinton where she had more votes than him and still lost on an arcana.
      - denismi 4mo ago
        Coming from Australia, which has a more sensible electoral system, I instinctively think about "preference flows" of the minority candidates when I look at these numbers. Trump was 316,571 short of majority, Harris was 2,601,538. Neither party gained an absolute majority because 2.9 million out of 155.2 million voters picked third-party candidates: 862,049 Green, 756,393 RFKJr, 650,126 Libertarian, 171,786 PSL, and 477,755 "other". One of the many failings of the US electoral system is that it effectively ignores these 2,918,109 million voters. But, if forced to state a preference between the two majority candidates, how do you genuinely think they would've gone? I don't think there's any question that, even just among the 756,393 people who voted for a guy actively campaigning for Trump, there are 316,571 people who would prefer a Trump presidency over a Harris presidency. That in itself - if 100% of Greens and 100% of Libertarians, and 100% of PSL, and 100% of "other", and the other 58.14% of RFKJr voters ALL prefer Harris - is enough to grant an absolute majority to Trump. If you plug more realistic guesstimates into preference distributions for the minor candidates, I don't think there is a plausible run-off result below 50.5-49.5 Trump out of those numbers.
lithos 4mo ago
It was a scheduled Trump win, from how demotivating Harris was. Sure Trump demotivated a little over a million or two from bothering to show up to the polls for him, Harris was five to ten times that number (depending on whose numbers you use).

77,302,580 Americans made it happen. 87,037,184 voting-elligible Americans sat it out.

Rekindle8090 4mo ago

[flagged]

OutOfHere 4mo ago
Both sides had their "worst" candidate, but in different ways. One of them was a convicted felon. Democrats will continue to lose while they revel in their corruption by putting forward selfish candidates that are least likely to win.
- mx7zysuj4xew 4mo ago
  Convicted rapist
  - xp84 4mo ago
    That’s not what he was convicted of, though?
    - FireBeyond 4mo ago
      No, true. He was "just" adjudicated in a court of law to have committed rape.
WolfeReader 4mo ago
That makes no sense whatsoever. Voting for Trump (or anyone with an R by their name) is wrong; sitting out a vote is wrong. Why save all the blame for the side that actually put up resistance, however ineptly?
- inetknght 4mo ago
  > Why save all the blame for the side that actually put up resistance Resistance is one definition, I guess. A very loose definition. I'd call it what it was. Career sociopaths decided to put a career sociopath on the ballot instead of someone the left's citizens would actually like.
  - dayyan 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - manphone 4mo ago
      He’s sitting at 30% approval while starting wars and not releasing the Epstein files. You are saying pure cope right now.
  - Nasrudith 4mo ago
    I'll let you in on a secret. The main reason why nobody is catering to you isn't because what you want goes against the money, the status quo, or whatever big bad you imagine. It is because if you don't vote then you are about as good for them as nipples on a Breast Plate. There is a reason seniors get everything that they want: it is because they always show up to vote!
- opsnooperfax 4mo ago
  I don’t think blue team good, red team bad is a very mature take on US politics. When it comes to substantive policy, voters do not get a choice. The same wars will be fought. The same lobbies will have their way. Just because one side will make tactless, self-deifying inaugural speeches about how the sea levels will cease to rise and the Earth will start to heal, that does not make it so. I think that if these sensors were providing useful, actionable information more valuable than their maintenance cost is not well supported.
  - tombert 4mo ago
    Yeah, no, it actually is mature enough. I hate divisive language like this, but Trump's only major concrete "policy" (if you can call it that) during his 2024 campaign was that he was going to somehow lower grocery prices by instituting tariffs, so basically "I'm going to lower prices by raising prices". That kind of idiotic quasi-doublespeak should have been a disqualifier for anyone with at least a two-digit IQ, but apparently it's not. The only scenarios that I can see for this: 1) People actually believed the idiotic notion that "other countries" pay the tariffs. This is so idiotic because even if that were true, which it's not, those costs would still be ruled into the price. "No such thing as a free lunch" is very literally the first thing I learned in high school economics. If people are that stupid then they can be blamed for their idiotic decisions to vote for a despot. 2) They didn't believe in the tariff rhetoric, and wanted to vote for Trump based on a nebulous "personality". This is stupid. If you really are voting for people because you think you'd "like to have a beer with them", then you should be blamed when bad things happen from that idiotic decision. ---- Kamala wasn't a great candidate, but I really hate this sort of "both sides"-ing people do to try and engage in apologetics for people's ridiculous decision to vote for the guy who, as far as I can tell, has literally no expertise in anything.
root_axis 4mo ago
Interesting how "the worst candidate in history" is not to blame.
yoyohello13 4mo ago
I choose to blame the people that actually voted for this. Fuck those people.
- stldev 4mo ago
  Agree on cause, disagree on solution. I'd lean more towards education than fornication. No judgement.
  - sph 4mo ago
    Educating people in the social media age? Good luck with that.
- tremon 4mo ago
  > Fuck those people Trump already called dibs.
dyauspitr 4mo ago
They share some blame but a transsexual dog would have been a better candidate than Trump.
subscribed 4mo ago
Somehow you blame these who not voted for the rapist and a cheat? (but I agree with you, Kamala wasn't a good candidate, at least in this moment, and the DNCs response to Israel genocide in Gaza might as well sink it alone).

egypturnash 4mo ago

Sat it out, or were forced out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict_voting_following_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_efforts_to_restrict...

waterTanuki 4mo ago
The GOP rigs elections in their favor and it's well known, but they don't have the power to throw out an additional 87 million votes if they don't go in their favor. The logical conclusion then if despite everyone voting D then getting their votes tossed out is either violent revolution or liberation with the aid of another nuclear-armed state.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- intended 4mo ago
  In our modern democracies, we are highly dependent on our information economies to build consensus. Those economies have essentially ceased functioning as competitive markets for ideas, globally. In general, newsrooms don’t make enough money to independently cover local news, and are consolidated under political/private parties. Journalism isn’t dead, but it is definitely on life support. America though, has a further metastasized issue, in that there exists market capture. Republicans and their media apparatus have effective agenda setting power over a large enough section of the populace. The short version of it is that in the right leaning media sphere, the rules of journalism have changed. A common through line for headline stories begins with a fringe theory on the internet. This fringe theory shows up on some podcast, which then gets repeated by a guest on a channel like Fox. This in turn gets alluded to by the White House, and then it can be reported on as a position that the Executive is considering, making it fact. The GOP didn’t need to throw out votes, provided it could muddy the waters effectively enough. The research by Roberts, Faris and Benkler, is what this is based on. Reality always wins in the end, so now with the increase in oil prices, the limits of information dominance are visible, and they will need to leverage their strength in other domains to gain advantage for the upcoming elections.

jimbokun 4mo ago

If those who sat out were forced to vote for one of the two major party candidates, Trump’s margin may have been larger. I think liberals and progressives have a higher propensity to vote, so you can’t assume the non voters are less likely to lean Trump.

NewJazz 4mo ago
How long were the lines to vote in black neighborhoods? https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/104/6/1341/97747/Racial-Disparities-in-Voting-Wait-Times-Evidence?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/104/6/1341/9774...

HEmanZ 4mo ago

So 164,339,764 made it happen? I don’t like any direction this administration has taken, but acting like it’s not the completely legitimate will of the people is BS.

fnordpiglet 4mo ago
The will of the plurality you mean? He didn’t win a majority of the votes. He is the legitimately elected office holder; but it was not the will of the people, it was the outcome of this particularly electoral process. Many American electoral processes require a run off without a majority for this reason, and it’s an intensely weak platform to claim a mandate from - not only did more people not vote for you than half the voters, if you add in the people who could vote but didn’t, it’s by far not “the will of the people”.
- denismi 4mo ago
  > He didn’t win a majority of the votes Donald Trump plus candidates who withdrew from the race and endorsed Donald Trump DID get a majority of votes though.
  - fnordpiglet 4mo ago
    I apologize but I don’t understand this metric - you’re saying Trump would have gotten the majority if republicans who didn’t vote for him had voted for him ? That’s some serious squinting and if you do that I’ll just take everyone who voted for Biden in the primary and add it to Harris and now she won close to 70% of the votes? Maybe add in Obama’s last election results and every democrat that ever ran in any races and Trump then got about 0% of the votes. Sadly you can only count the votes the candidate who ran actually received. And he had a plurality - the weakest of all possible victories other than his victory of Clinton where she had more votes than him and still lost on an arcana.
    - denismi 4mo ago
      Coming from Australia, which has a more sensible electoral system, I instinctively think about "preference flows" of the minority candidates when I look at these numbers. Trump was 316,571 short of majority, Harris was 2,601,538. Neither party gained an absolute majority because 2.9 million out of 155.2 million voters picked third-party candidates: 862,049 Green, 756,393 RFKJr, 650,126 Libertarian, 171,786 PSL, and 477,755 "other". One of the many failings of the US electoral system is that it effectively ignores these 2,918,109 million voters. But, if forced to state a preference between the two majority candidates, how do you genuinely think they would've gone? I don't think there's any question that, even just among the 756,393 people who voted for a guy actively campaigning for Trump, there are 316,571 people who would prefer a Trump presidency over a Harris presidency. That in itself - if 100% of Greens and 100% of Libertarians, and 100% of PSL, and 100% of "other", and the other 58.14% of RFKJr voters ALL prefer Harris - is enough to grant an absolute majority to Trump. If you plug more realistic guesstimates into preference distributions for the minor candidates, I don't think there is a plausible run-off result below 50.5-49.5 Trump out of those numbers.

lithos 4mo ago

It was a scheduled Trump win, from how demotivating Harris was. Sure Trump demotivated a little over a million or two from bothering to show up to the polls for him, Harris was five to ten times that number (depending on whose numbers you use).