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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

What's more surprising is how close this was given the past four years.

Close in the Electoral College, where it matters; quite distant in the popular vote. The gap is estimated to be about 4 million more votes for Biden at this time, it is also the most votes for a president in US history.

e: I will concede that it is not "quite distant", though it may not end up close in the EC when it's all said and done either.

4 million is not a lot in country of 330 million. The popular vote was close to 50/50.

According to Nate Silver:

> Biden is likely to wind up with one of the higher percentages of votes as a share of the U.S. population that we’ve seen in a long time

Referencing this tweet, text copied below as well https://twitter.com/jtlevy/status/1324408585590329345

[credit: Jacob T. Levy]

  vote share * turnout

  Reagan 1984: 53.3*58.8= 31.3%

  W Bush 2004: 50.7*56.7=28.7%

  Obama 2008: 52.9*58.2=30.8%

  Biden 2020, estimated: 51*66 = 33.7%

  counted so far: 50.5*60.3=30.4% (as of 2020-11-05)

It's probably going to be quite a bit more than 4 million. There are still several heavily blue states that have a lot of votes left to count.

California, for example, has only counted 77% of their votes. New York has counted 84%. Illinois has counted 89%.

I just caught the end of some discussion of this on NPR. Based on the number of votes left to count in the various states and how they are expected to turn out, there is a good chance it will end up at around 8 million.

Also, it probably makes more sense to look at it out of the number of voters, or the number of people who could have voted, rather than out of the whole population.

The impressive thing is how the election is going to be decided by a measly -100k to +170k (mean +35k) Biden lead in Pennsylvania !

It's currently 4 million of 145 million votes, since not all 330 million people are voters, and that number will go up since the outstanding votes are in large, overwhelmingly Democratic states.

As if 50% of the US population is going through some kind of collective psychosis. Just looking at how a significant portion of his fans act and look on those rallies. Dressing up with jumpsuits having flags and his face allover or wearing stupidly huge hats with a motto printed on it. As if they are on some comic con where Trump is some sort of super hero. Carrying assault rifles like they can't wait to save the world from imagined threats, dressing up like Romans with shields and helmets. Totally delusional. This level of celebrated infantilism I've never seen anywhere else so far. There are nuts everywhere but that many?

That's because, despite all the "it's Russia's fault" hysteria, Trump more or less represents about 50% of Americans- as these elections have just shown. The scary part (to me, as a European) is that this means that a good chunk of the other 50%, while certainly despising Trump, cannot be ideologically that distant- they live in the same country and immersed in the same culture after all.

Or alternatively, the team that chose Trump has disenfranchised so many of the other team (and relied on the ancient electoral college) that their undersized votes have outsized effects.

Actually about 30% of America voted for Trump so I wouldn’t rush to give him another 20%+.

Also he is a sitting president with a decent economy. It takes a lot for an incumbent to not win re-election at that point. Somewhat sane coronavirus response and Trump would have an easy victory.

It's probably impossible for Trump's coronavirus response to have been seen as sane or reasonable, regardless of what he did. For example, Biden very publicly claimed without basis that Trump's China travel ban actually made things worse, whilst meanwhile here in the UK one of the avenues of attack on our government (which is seen as Trump-like) is that our scientists reckon that not introducing a ban on travel from China almost exactly like Trump's made things worse. Trump gets attacked for not imposing a centrally-mandated lockdown, ours gets attacked for imposing too much centralized command and control and not leaving things up to regions. And so on and so forth. Also, no matter how much Covid testing either the UK or US does, it's always described as though it's falling behing the rest of the world regardless of facts. (I wonder if that will magically fix itself once Biden takes office.) And as for hoping to get good outcomes overall... look at what's been happening throughout Europe. It would take something more like a miracle than a basic, workable response of the kind you could expect from a government of typical competence to get good enough results that it wouldn't be seen as a failure. France, run by someone the entire media spun as basically the anti-Trump, has been reporting about half as many cases a day as the entire US with a rather smaller population and they don't seem to be slowing down.

The coronavirus pandemic seems close to a no-win scenario. Even most of the success stories (which, I should note, always seem to be countries very different to Europe and the US) are a lot messier and more ambigious than they look from the million-mile foreign press view.

It's one thing to put the best minds in charge of a no-win response and for it to fail. If Trump had put the best minds in the CDC and the NIAID in charge of the Covid response and just allowed them to do their thing (instead of undermining them at every turn), that would be one thing.

Instead he puts his son in law in charge of the Coronavirus response, so we are all left to wonder how it could have been if the experts were in charge. Maybe it would be different, maybe it's a no win situation like you said. But at least then we would know there was nothing more to do. No one would be wondering "Maybe things would have been different if Jared Kushner were put in charge of this..."

We all see the pandemic and how it affects our lives. When Trump tells us that it's no big deal, that it's a media hoax that will go away with the election, that doesn't make him look good. That's a choice he's making to do that. It didn't have to be this way.

The US is a very large country and a lot of legal powers are left to individual states. It's like saying that Poland represents the same views as Germany in Europe because they're both in the EU.

Look at a county by county election map. You find the divide is starkly rural versus urban. The cultures are extremely different.

It's actually way worse than that. About a quarter of eligible voters voted for each. Half the population sat and watched the last four years, and still couldn't be bothered.

Yeah, no new wars in the middle east and troops are coming home. How can a president win reelection with that kind of record? Luckily CNN will save democrazy.

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