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Comment by jackmott | Hacker News Reader

That fact that we elected Trump indicates we have incredible control. What an awful mistake.

The thing is, half or nearly half the country disagrees with you on paper. I bet its not anywhere near that in practice, as in there is a range of political spectrum. If we had more choice we wouldn't have align to the poles of a bipartisan system.

Trump got 46% of the vote. Which is normally rather far from 1/2 in election terms, ~25% of registered voters, and about 19.5% of the total US population. So, yea the guy won, but it's hard to extrapolate that to much popular support.

At best you can say this is based on the electoral collage, but Maine and Nebraska split their delegates by district making it an even odder system than generally talked about.

>but it's hard to extrapolate that to much popular support.

Actually, it's pretty easy, given the ridiculously large sample size.

You're forgetting it was a volunteer sample size, there were active disenfranchisement campaigns, and his opposition garnered millions of more votes.

It's a biased sample, but even then for every 100 people that voted for him 117 voted for someone else.

Most striking the turnout as % of the population was down significantly presumably because many people could not bring themselves to vote for either candidate. http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/11/politics/popular-vote-turnout-... So, he would have gotten crushed by Bush, McCann, or Romney adjusting for population size.

It's not even half. Only ~25% of registered voters, voted for Trump[1].

It's a problem of how to drive turn out and get people to the polls. Trump is the result of apathy toward politics in this country.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/18/american-non...

As a non american I would have agreed if Sanders would have won against Shillary and then Trump.

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