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Comment by sensanaty | Hacker News Reader

You ever stop to think that maybe calling ~50% of the population of your country "a bunch of redneck retarded bigots" could perhaps have some part in it? The media pushing that narrative everywhere certainly doesn't help either.

I'm not a Yank nor do I vote or care to ever vote, but if I were and all I ever saw was every mainstream source of news and media, including sites like Reddit and apparently even HN, calling me a retard (which funnily enough is a pretty bigoted insult coming from the supposed moral & good side) and a bigot non-stop I'd probably say "fuck it" and vote for the guy too.

From where I'm sitting across the pond, the Republicans want stricter border control, smaller government, lower taxes, free speech (which itself is a loaded term that means different things depending on who's saying/hearing it), which is basically what the populist parties across the EU are promising as well.

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Yep exactly, this is what won him the 2016 election and the meltdowns were amazing. This time around the dems have also had the economy making them look bad, not to mention the illegal immigration issue finally making it to "big blue" cities like New York.

So it's not really surprising he won, and the margin isn't surprising either.

The us economy has grown at an unprecedented rate over the last few years. I wish my home of Australia had such a dynamic economy.

(I suspect the problem, of course, is that the newfound prosperity is not shared evenly amongst the population.)

You suspect correctly. Its been a great economy for yuppies with college degrees, not so much for everyone else. And everyone else is the majority.

I suppose but I'm not really sure if the GOP has anything on offer that will actually help. I hope they do because we're gonna be living in it but nothing thus far proposed has been said to be good for the economy.

Can't wait for America to become the coal mining capital of the world. Such a forward thinking strategy.

See this is what surprises me. I would have thought voting for a more regular market with higher taxes to the elite would be favourable to the majority non-tech workers, rather than the billionaires which play the puppeteers to trump

Not a single penny of that "extra tax money from tech workers" would go to the average Joe. That's the problem. It would go straight for the lowest classes or overseas.

I would hope you realize that the average joe is a member of the lowest classes; but yes, neaeshoring certainly would’ve continued under Harris.

Actually i think it's the bottom fifth that have benefited the most from wage growth, with the low-six figure crowd getting the short end of the stick and having to pay more for burgers with the tight service labor market.

Yes, and it appears the non-college folks in the suburbs (who've been having to pay more for their burgers) were the biggest shift this election, not the burger flippers themselves.

It's also the (trying to be) misleading mainstream media. Stuff like "he wants to deport all immigrants" being uttered until the last day - without specifying it's just the illegal ones, which is a very important distinction.

And there are many examples like these, where he's quoted WAY out of context, and that kind of stuff. If you believe that for years and at one point learn that it's actually bs and he didn't say that or the context reveals he was quoting someone else, or negates the comment the next sentence, etc, you start to question ALL your beliefs.

They pushed too far, fabricated just a BIT too much, and people caught on.

Just so you know, i wasn't quoting what I think but what mainstream media says 'indirectly' here in Europe.

Obviously I don't buy it, hence the reason I asked if studies had been made.

It surprises me that I see so many different reason here in the comment why people think others chose trump, when it's clearly their own reasoning.

You say they voted trump because they are fed up of being called bigot, just like YOU would do. Well that's the issue, some Americans might have say fuck them I vote trump but I honestly believe it is marginal.

I believe most cared about the election economy first, but I could be biased and that's literally the reason I asked if studies had been done, beyond the usual blablah.

> You ever stop to think that maybe calling ~50% of the population of your country "a bunch of redneck retarded bigots" could perhaps have some part in it? The media pushing that narrative everywhere certainly doesn't help either.

Yep, it's an own goal. Similar shit has led to the rise of right-wing populism all across the world, time and again. Yet they never learn. They never realize that shitting on the average Joe is not how you get power in a democratic setup.

Turns out, the average Joe is a poor, working dude. He is not a sexist colonialist or any other -ism. Yet the Democratic Party will not stop alienating men.

That's not what the said. They said the opposite.

> and a bigot non-stop I'd probably say "fuck it" and vote for the guy too.

And most people would say that would categorize you as mentally deficient. Voting against your own best interests because you feel people are mean to you isn't usually seen as very intelligent.

Namecalling and shit slinging is exactly what Trump and his supporters do and it seems to work out well for them. They love thinking about people crying over their insults and whatnot. But they also complain loudly if anyone turns the same against them.

Trump is namecalling mostly politicians. The Dems are namecalling voters.

those people don't care, in fact they embrace the identity

You're experiencing an illusion. The few who do embrace the identity of "redneck retarded bigot" will wear the identity openly. The majority who do not embrace that identity will diplomatically avoid discussing their true political opinions with you and you'll just assume their democrats because they're intelligent and sensible, and then you'll be flabbergasted when things like last night happen.

what? plenty of intelligent and sensible people have told me point blank that they're voting for Trump. I'm not surprised in the slightest that he won.

It's not 50% though; in 2020, only ~240 million people were eligible to vote (out of 330 million, so about 72% of people); only ~158 million people actualy voted (48%). Oversimplifying, only 25% of the population of the US voted for Trump, and it's probably even less due to the system of electors.

This is why democracy is broken, because not everyone gets a voice.

I've never understood this argument. When performing scientific studies, there is a sample size of n = x hundred/thousand, and we then generalise the result across the entire population. Having 48% of the population participate in this "study" is likely to be very indicative of the likely voting choice for the remainder of the population, right? You really think that the proportion of votes for each party for those people that haven't voted would be any significant difference from those that did?

You're assuming the population is homogeneous

> Having 48% of the population participate in this "study" is likely to be very indicative of the likely voting choice for the remainder of the population, right?

That isn't how statistics work. Sample size reduces your error relative to the population you are randomly sampling from.

When you don't have a random sampling, then you sampling method is what determines how generalizable your findings are. A good sample size with a bad sampling method tells us little to nothing about the general population and only informs us about the specific sub population for which the sample can be considered a random selection from.

With significant differences in voting rates across many different demographics, votes are absolutely not a representative sample of the overall population.

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