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Comment by colemannugent | Hacker News Reader

As someone who also has friends and family in middle America I honestly believe that the best way to ensure that Trump gets re-elected again in 2020 is maintaining the "only redneck bigots voted for Trump" argument.

Roughly half of Americans voted for Trump, to insinuate that they are all bigots is to insult half of the country. Obviously most of the bigots voted for Trump, but they are still a very small minority. To win the next election Democrats need to convince Trump voters to switch sides by demonstrating that they care about middle America, which is 95% of what Trump's campaign was.

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I normally avoid arguments about this, but factually you're incorrect.

There was approximately 61.4% adult voter turnout. Not only that, trump LOST the popular vote with only 46.1% of the ballots.

What this comes out to is that roughly 30% of eligible voting adults supported Trump. This is _nowhere near_ "roughly half of Americans".

(I'd add the additional factor that only ~130[EDIT: 250] million of the ~323 million US population is even eligible to vote. I don't mean this in terms of "Oh secretly all infants liked Hillary" but that it seems disingenuous to portray the numbers as an overwhelming popular mandate in the way you're suggesting. The data is simply not that comprehensive.)

EDIT: As newlyretired correctly pointed out I conflated the total eligible # (250m) with total voted # (130m) That being said, I still stand by the crux of my post.

The actual number of eligible voters was about 250 million in the last presidential election, up from 235 million in the 2012 race.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...

I wasn't trying to suggest that Trump won by popular vote, I meant that of people who voted about half of them voted Trump.

True Trump only had 46%, but Hillary only had 48%. If the entire US population was only 100 people all lined up on opposite sides of one room you'd have a hard time telling them apart by their numbers alone.

My point was more like this: A lot of people voted for Trump. Incumbents typically have an easier time getting re-elected than their challengers. If Democrats want to stop a second Trump term they need to get voters on their side. Pidgeonholing the entire right side of the American political spectrum as redneck bigots is a surefire

> I honestly believe that the best way to ensure that Trump gets re-elected again in 2020

That all depends on how the Mueller investigation will end. Chances are Trump will not be able to get on a ballot by then.

Considering that over half the country chose to field these two terrible candidates in the election, I'm perfectly fine with insulting half of the country.

Have you seen the left as of late? They have just as many bigots if not more. They're universally completely intolerant that the person they didn't vote for won the election. They also have rather interesting opinions on white people on the country. If that's not bigotry I don't know what is.

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