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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Calling everyone who voted for Trump a supporter isn’t accurate. I know people who strongly dislike him and voted for him over Biden. As a lower bound you can estimate around 8% of voters will donate to each campaign which clearly marks them as supporters. Perhaps as many as 40% of those 74 million votes come from strong supporters who might not donate but will advocate for him among friends and family etc.

However, mostly it’s based on party affiliation where people voting against him in a primary would vote for him in a general election.

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Can casting your one-every-four-years vote for a presidential candidate not be accurately construed as showing support?

"I do not support this man but I did want him to be President, and cast my ballot for him" is a concept I can't understand at least.

There are 3 options vote for A, vote for B, or abstain in one way or another.

When you have such a limited number of options their isn’t an obvious reason for the choice. Both loving A or hating B more than you hate A can result in an A vote. With millions of voters some people are going to vote based on silly crap like a candidates name being similar to someone they know, or a coin flip. Hell, you can expect at least a few mistakes.

PS: 1,865,620 people voted libertarian, presumably a few felt the way you do but when you know someone isn’t getting elected that opens up even more options.

If a person were so concerned about not being a Trump supported, like you mentioned they could have abstained or voted for some other person that's not Trump. At the end, voting for Trump is support for Trump no matter what convoluted logic was used to arrive at that decision.

Good point.

To kind of latch onto what you said, I'd say that there is 60% of those 74 million who would have benefited from a Twitter ban which was well justified. They are more on the fence and can be persuaded by the tides of big business and what seems like an over reaction on their part. The 40% are probably hopelessly convinced of anything that Republicans say.

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