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Comment by MobiusHorizons | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe the meaning is unclear. The OP asserts that a large number of minority voters and women voted republican in the last two trump elections. Do you take issue with the premise? Do you consider the finding not to be meaningful?

FWIW as far as I can tell, the OP is correct in that 55% of white women, 36% of hispanic men, and 30% of hispanic women voted for trump. It was also telling that in the 2020 election support for the republican party from all minority groups increased by a few percentage points. I think that counts as "SO many". It's not a majority, but I don't think the OP claimed that.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54972389

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Only counting white women is misleading but I can see the point there. But 36% is definitely not "SO many": it doesn't win an election of two parties, and that was the whole premise of GP.

>Do you take issue with the premise? Do you consider the finding not to be meaningful?

Just wanted some elaboration. It's a bold claim given with no data.

I never claimed that "SO many" equaled a majority. 36% is more than one-third, which seems like a lot of people to me, and not really that far from a majority; it doesn't take that much to get (1/2 - 1/3) (one-sixth) to change their minds.

>and this is a democratic system

"SO many," if defined as less than 50%, is irrelivant given a democratic sysyem with only two parties. Therefore "SO many" must refer to more than 50%.

I feel like I always have this argument with American liberals: in your mind, a minority of voters can simply be ignored, even if they're 49.9% of the vote, because "there's only 2 parties so those voters don't matter". And then when things change slightly, you get a fascist elected into power and you're shocked because you preferred to ignore those voters.

36% knowingly voting for a known fascist and attempted insurrectionist is pretty scary, no matter how you slice or pendanticize it. What else do they support, fascists tend to turn to violence when they can't win elections.

Yep, this is exactly my point. But any time I talk to American liberals, they just hand-wave it away because that group of people is less than 50%. "They're not a majority of the population, so they're nothing to worry about!!" Talk about the 2016 and 2020 elections and American liberals will claim that Trump voters were a tiny, tiny minority (rather than less than 2% difference as it was in reality).

Hitler was elected by a minority of the population, but American liberals seem to have forgotten that. It's becoming easy to see how leaders like Hitler come into power. If Trump had been much more competent and destructive than he really was, the US would be really screwed right now, while American liberals would still be sitting around whining about how "gerrymandering" got him elected by a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. (Yes, I know gerrymandering only affects elections for the House members. American liberals don't: they routinely blame gerrymandering for governor's elections and Senatorial elections.)

30% of a large population group is a very large number! It's just US first-past-the-post politics that somehow convinces people that anything less that 49.9% is somehow insignificant, and 50.1% is somehow a vast majority (I exaggerate, but you get my point).

Aren't these proportions of the voting population, not the actual population?

Seems like a bit of a jump to assume they're distributed the same way and start making conclusions based on that.

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