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Comment by throwaway4aday | Hacker News Reader

That should show up pretty clearly at the ballot box and yet the US remains divided and most other countries go back and forth between left and right leaning parties every election or two.

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The US Republican party hasn’t won the popular Presidential vote in the last 8 elections or so.

There is no such thing as a popular presidential vote though. Using a baseball analogy, scoring more runs in a series doesn't matter, winning more games does. So you build your strategy with the idea in mind that if you're going to lose California anyway, lose it big and use those resources elsewhere.

Also of note (and just as relevant), Republicans won the Popular vote for Congress by over 3 million.[1]

[1] https://www.cookpolitical.com/charts/house-charts/national-h...

The GGGP discusses how most people are oriented and how that influences the training data for ChatGPT which does make the popular vote relevant.

Republicans won the Popular vote for Congress by over 3 million.

So what does that tell us?

That less people show up to vote in midterm elections, those that do are usually motivated by opposition to the ruling power, and possibly that the less people allowed to vote legally is an advantage for Republicans.

Also historically the last mid terms should have given massive gains in both houses instead of the extremely slim majority in a single house.

Not really anything in a first past the post voting system where lots of people vote simply because they don't need to because their party will win the state already.

That the US is a divided country?

Sort of contradicts your original point though. But at this point we're entering Reddit-level discussion so there isn't much reason to go down that rabbit hole.

Over the last 40 years, a Republican has been president for 22 years, while a Democrat has been president for 18 years. Pretty even.

Right, but they haven’t won the popular vote. That strengthens the “outsized influence” point, right?

Right, because the right wing has an outsize influence on society even though most voters are left wing.

Being barely over 50% doesn't account for the amount of bias that ChatGPT shows.

The US electoral system is designed to favor rural, thus primarily conservative and Christian, votes over urban as a vestigial remnant of compromises to keep slave-owning states in the union, gerrymandering, etc.

The majority of Americans live in cities and have political views which would be considered "leftist" in US parlance - they support Roe V. Wade, gun control, health care reform, etc. That, in practice, the US appears "divided" at all is only due to the outsized influence of the right and rural voters.

It's not so much a bias of rural over urban, but lower population states versus larger states. You could be urban and just be smaller in size. This part of the "great compromise" was actually for smaller, non-slave states like Delaware. Virgina, the largest state in the nation at the time and a slave state, proposed the Virgina Plan, which proposed the creation of a bicameral national legislature, or a legislature consisting of two houses, in which the “rights of suffrage” in both houses would be proportional to the size of the state. Small states objected, because they'd had equal representation under the articles of confederation.

https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-...

The overall final compromise did include compromises to slave owning states, but this vestigial is not due to those compromises. In fact, they were against it.

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