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Comment by j0hnyl | Hacker News Reader

How is ~8% (eyeballing) of the popular vote a narrow majority in politics? It's a pretty substantial majority. Apathetic non-voters don't really count because they don't care.

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> Apathetic non-voters

An important thing to keep in mind in American politics is the massive amount of voter suppression. Not voting doesn't inherently mean you were lazy or apathetic. It may well mean your vote was suppressed by any of a hundred tactics. Closing polling places in blue regions, requiring in-person voting on-the-day, restricting early voting, restricting vote by mail, failing at sending people ballots, spuriously dropping voter registrations...

20M is too much of a number to be attributed to voter suppression alone. I think the main issue here is still apathetic non-voters.

20M ballots is not the same as 20M voters. I don't understand where those 20M people went. Kamala checked a lot more boxes than Biden.

> requiring in-person voting on-the-day

Exactly three states don't offer early voting to all voters [1] and none of those three were battleground states.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/map-early-voting-mail-ballot-st...

All that is true, and to a great degree the reason why the concept of "swing states" (or rather the "non-swing states") even exists.

It does not explain however why almost all the swing states aligned with Trump this time.

It would be a tall feat to suppress close to a third the population from voting!

Because there was never a real choice. Put it this way: someone could give a choice between drinking arsenic and fertilizer. One of those options will win, probably by a wide margin. It doesn't mean it reflects the will of the people because, hey, people would rather drink neither.

2016 had the DNC force a terrible candidate down our throats because the establishment was more concerned in measuring offices in the West Wing that listening to voters. It was a spectacular failure and we got Trump as a result. The DNC did their utmost to ensure people didn't get a voice in the process.

2020 was unique for many reasons. Many, including me, said choosing Biden was a bad idea. He was even then so old that the DNC was giving up the incumbents advantage in 2024, partly driven by Biden alluding to him not wanting to run for re-election. Did the people choose Biden? Well, not really. Jim Clyburn did [1].

People didn't choose Biden's "bearhug strategy". Biden, against all the cries not to, decided to seek re-election despite showing signs of cognitive decline a year ago. So there was no real primary process, no chance for the people to have a voice. The people also didn't choose for the DNC to burn to the ground young voter support (eg college protest response), the Arab-American vote (ie Gaza) or the Latino vote (with an immigration policy to the right of Ronald Reagan).

If the DNC had listened to the voters, Bernie Sanders would've handily beat Donald Trump in 2016 and we wouldn't be here.

[1]: https://archive.is/qSpNF

Bernie Sanders is your answer to Trump? Thankfully Trump can’t run again because that kind of thinking would have him winning elections into 2030.

> Thankfully Trump can’t run again

Yet...

What you forget, or may not appreciate, is that (for example) Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home, because their vote won't really count.

I've voted Dem all my life (since 1988), and while my preferred candidate has won several of those races, my actual VOTE never helped them because I voted in Mississippi (88), Alabama (92), and Texas (96 & thereafter) -- all of which have been GOP strongholds for a long, long time. (Texas, for example, hasn't gone for the Democrats since Carter v. Ford in 1976.)

It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.

> It's easy to imagine that a feeling of despair about the efficacy of one's vote would drive someone to stay home.

That's true, but I don't think Democrats had a feeling of despair before the results came in. It seems like most Democrats are shocked that the election turned out this way.

If true, their media diet betrayed them. This outcome was obvious.

If it helps, the right seems shocked it turned out this way, too.

Personally, I realized last week that I had no reliable way to know what to expect. There was ample data to support predicting any outcome.

> Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Red may stay home

Blue voters in states that are absolutely going Blue may also stay home.

For some reason I’ve not heard this argument 8 years back when Clinton lost. At that time the fact that she won popular vote was used to critique the electoral college. Maybe at that time republicans stayed at home in the blue states?

As a foreigner it seems like the electoral college is obviously stupid. No matter who wins why. It is pure conservatism to keep it like doing something because the Bible says so. Given that it mostly helps one party it will never be changed but it cannot be argued from first principles in the 21st century.

It can totally be argued from first principles. If you acknowledge that USA is a union and not a single state then it makes sense that the votes do not necessarily reflect the population distribution and there is some form of rebalancing. Then its a wuestion how much and whether the current balance is the right one.

The US is a federal system. It serves the interests of the states, not the People.

The electoral college - and the Senate - were intended to explicitly put power in the hands of the states, as equals, without regard for population. The House of Representatives was intended to be the counterbalancing voice of the People.

I can totally understand disagreeing with the concept, but to say it's stupid tells me you likely don't understand its purpose and how it fits into the overall system.

This is circular reasoning -- "the system is the way it is because that's how it was set up".

US States are not meaningful cultural units -- people in Philadelphia are much more like people in NYC than either are like those of the rural hinterlands of their respective states.

> The US is a federal system. It serves the interests of the states, not the People.

Indeed, and that's a bad system that makes no sense in 2024. Disliking it doesn't mean one doesn't understand how it came to be this way.

(Tangentially related aside: plenty of federal systems have much fairer systems for election to federal office than the US does. For example Germany.)

> This is circular reasoning -- "the system is the way it is because that's how it was set up".

Maybe it's my lack of sleep from staying until until 7am watching election news, but I honestly can't see how this is applicable. My comment was explicit about why the system was set up that way.

> US States are not meaningful cultural units

I very strongly disagree.

The next time you meet a Texan, ask them if they think they are "meaningfully" culturally distinct from Californians.

> The next time you meet a Texan

Texas is a cherry-picked example of one of the states with the strongest specific identities. Most states are not like this.

Ask someone from Phoenix to explain how they are meaningfully different from someone from Denver and they will struggle.

The same could be said for Germany and Austria. States - as in "nations", not necessarily US states - can have shared culture and history.

Texas is the one that comes to mind as the strongest, but it's far from unique in that regard. Louisiana pops to mind next. Other examples of states with very strong cultural identities off the top of my head: Oregon, Utah, Tennessee, Florida, West Virginia, Michigan, Maine, Vermont, New York, Illinois... you get the idea.

I'd say about the half the states have a strong, unique identity. The remainder are similar to their neighbors but the farther you travel the more apparent the differences.

> The same could be said for Germany and Austria.

Well, yes. The differentiation is both dumb and well-reasoned, depending on your ethics.

However at least germany and austria have meaningfully distinct languages or dialects and many centuries more to marinade in their differences. Texan and californian aren't distinct enough to produce nationalities that are clearly distinct (aside from arbitrary pride!) and they regularly swap populations sufficient enough to provide cultural osmosis that keeps the two cultures tied together.

> The next time you meet a Texan, ask them if they think they are "meaningfully" culturally distinct from Californians.

Having lived in both places I can confidently say "not as much as either party would like to think". There are far, far, far more similarities than differences, especially because the population of either place doesn't tend to interact with their natural environment. Both simply have strong sense of nationalistic pride (however dumb this is).

I mean, I'll take a stab at it... the electoral college can be argued from first principles if you consider that the U.S. was supposed to be a federal union of sovereign states. There are certainly reasonable arguments for federalism and devolution of power.

The U.N. doesn't directly elect the general secretary.

The US is not, in practice, a union of sovereign states today, regardless of whether it was in 1789.

Is that an argument against the electoral college, or an argument for re-devolution of power? Because the latter is probably easier to do than getting rid of the electoral college, given the requirements to pass a constitutional amendment.

It exists to give outsized influence to small, rural (and, at the time, slave-holding) states -- which is also true of the Senate.

Honest question, Is it not somewhat similar in effect to a parliamentary system? My understanding, is generally a parliament is divided into districts, then after parliament is elected, the government is formed and the prime minister is selected by a majority of the members of parliament?

Not saying it's great, but maybe it's not too dissimilar from some other systems?

That’s how, for example, the British system works (but even it has some features that make it quite different in practice from the American one, for example the head of government needing to maintain the confidence of parliament).

It’s not how most of the actually well-run parliamentary systems work, because those have elements of proportional representation.

It's not a partisan argument. It's a fact of the mechanics of US Presidential elections.

If DJT ends up with a final popular vote advantage, though, it'll be the first time that a Republican has taken the Oval Office AND the popular vote since 1988.

Why doesn't this apply both ways? Red voters in Blue states are just as likely to stay home because they think their votes won't count. And ditto the other point, Red voters in Red states may not feel like it's worth the bother to vote when they already know their state is going their way.

Is apathy the only explanation for the non-voting?

It is not. I care a lot about who becomes president, but choose not to vote as a form of protest against our broken system.

If I lived in a swing state, I would probably vote.

I'm seeing 3.5% -- where are you getting 8%.

Trump is at 71.8 million votes compared to Harris at 66.9 million votes according to AP. That's somewhere between 7% and 8%

OK, you're doing Trump has 7% more votes than Harris. Which is valid -- I think that's not the way most people report it though. I think most people say that Trump won by 3.5%.

You're probably right, but I think the popular vote stats tell a more realistic story of how the population actually sees things.

This number doesn't count non-voters, though, which pollutes the whole metric. Ideally we would look at the holistic figures of margin as a percentage of total potential voters.

That seems like an insane assumption to me. Maybe there’s nobody worth voting for. If you don’t interpret a non-vote that way what’s the point of democracy?

I wish people would probe this question a little more. It certainly seems to me, what with the party-based system (and all their rules, requirements, and other methods of disincentivizing non Republican/Democrat participation), the point is not democracy at all, but political power brokering. That's not a system I'm comfortable interacting with.

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