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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

> If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this.

No, if you trust the election results, it's a legitimate election by defined process and there are no grounds to contest it.

But "The American people voted for this" is a distinct, strong, affirmative statement that doesn't hold.

The people that voted for this are the people that voted for it, and even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.

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> ... even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.

Yes it is. I understand the argument that this type of outcome wasn't their motivation for the ballot they cast. But it's also an entirely predictable outcome of their vote, which to me means this is exactly what they were voting in favor of happening.

I think one of the biggest issues with democracy in the US and probably democratic countries in general is infantilizing voters into being able to take credit for their intent rather than judging them based on the totality of the outcome of their choices. If you buy an Italian sports car because it's cool and your spouse is mad because it's also unreliable and can't fit your childrens' car seats, it's generally not considered a wise defense to say you only picked it based on the 0-60 time so it's not your fault it was less great by other metrics. Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.

> Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.

civic duty should be emphasized in school more. It's not a 10 second exercise every 4 years. It's something to be vigilant about indefinitely, and forever. Any change to laws, or any votes, require scrutiny, rational thought on the choices, and personal maximization.

Unfortunately, people are too lazy, or too dumb, to do this, and choose to listen to someone else's recommendation on votes.

So democracy represents somewhat of an averaged choice of the population. As the population becomes dumber due to lack of good education or cadence, their choices become increasingly worse.

Authoritarian regimes don't have this problem. The average person in one don't get to make many, if any, choices. The elites make them all - and if the elites are more altruistic, the country generally do better than average.

> this isn't what many of them were voting for.

So, Trump loses popularity over his original administration over lies and underdelivered promises, "we" vote him out. Then 4 years later we vote him back in?

At what point do we come and accept responsibility for falling for lies? And yes, there are in fact some people that voted against their best intertests because they fell into partisan politics; they still got their results, they just didn't read the fine print of the Devil's contract.

Fool me once… fool me twice.

Everyone's to blame - those who voted for this idiot and everyone else for not doing enough to stop it.

voter turnout was slightly low, but well within ballpark of every other Us election.

If this is your position, you must conclude no American election is a strong signal of anything.

Furthermore, this is just bad stats. We received a massive sample of the population, that sample is not without bias, but at least is geographically distributed. Do you think if had a 100% sampling rate the result would be dramatically different?

I suspect that missing portion is going bias towards low information population and immigrants who have no interest in US election. Democracy is not about finding every adult with a pulse. You must build a coalition of citizens with a vested interest in their community to get on your program, and take physical action to indicate that support you.

If this isn't what they were voting for, what did they think they were voting for? Did none of them believe that he would actually do the crazy shit he said he would? Did none of them pay attention to the insanity of his first term?

I have a simpler explanation: they all know what they were voting for, and none of them give a shit. It's the same as the mob cheering and applauding the sieg heil on Monday. They know it's deplorable and unamerican and they don't care. Because the only thing that matters is that their boy will stick it to the enemy.

Given the binary choice, much if the American people simply didn't vote. You can't present a false dichitomoty, and then act as if any downstream choice is full approval.

They always had the choice of not voting.

The people who voted for this actively engaged and endorsed it. It strains credulity for them to claim ignorance.

Plenty of Americans chose not to vote, many others did mainly out of massive social pressure.

Not voting is a choice. It's a choice for "I don't care how this train moves, I'm moving with it". So yes, those non-voters tacitly approved of the idea of Trump being elected. They didn't hate it enough to get to the polls.

Those who thought "nothing would change no matter what"... well nothing has changed I guess. I suppose Harris would have done mass deportation raids and cutting funding from science and healthcare at all, right?

I lived in New York during the election, nothing would have changed regardless of who I voted for, because New York went to Harris anyway. So in my case, “nothing would change no matter what” was objectively true.

Do you really believe that the majority of Americans — or even the majority of Trump voters — are applauding the use of Nazi symbols? That is completely divorced from reality. The only people openly supporting Nazism are the extreme fringe right which is fortunately still nowhere near the majority in the real world.

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How does that contradict what I wrote?

Social media and HN included is a magnet for people with extreme political views to voice them (presumably because it’s the only audience they have).

Trump won with an overwhelming mandate. He is popular with a majority of the country.

The fact that nobody on HN seems to support Trump should tell you about who is on HN.

I think you are wrong about the overwhelming mandate unless you are solely using the electoral college total as the yardstick. The popular vote is much closer.

You need to look at things in totality.

- won the popular vote by over 2M votes

- won by electoral college by 84 votes

That alone would be “a solid showing”.

But he also:

- carried the Republicans to maintain a majority in the House

- helped increased the margin of seats in the Senate to a majority

Many members of the Republican party had been against Trump. This election, most were pro-Trump. His popularity helped pull both houses.

And did this after the opposition tried every tactics possible to ruin him - a fake Russian dossier that was peddled unquestioningly by the media, a misdemeanor crime gets prosecuted as a felony in the hopes to bankrupt or disqualify him from running again.

Against those odds? That showing is remarkable. Oh and he was almost assassinated, twice.

Then add on top he increased Republican share in solid Blue states like NY and CA by double digits. He increased Republican votes with black and hispanic voters.

He basically increased every single voting group across the board.

In light of the challenges, the outcome is a clear showing that a significant percentage of the US voters support him and the people in his party that are aligned to him.

I'm not sure what else you'd need to show a clear mandate.

I never saw anything but a favorable GOP outcome in the Senate in 2024 predictions and no one thought that was possible except the Democrats running in red states sending out fundraising emails, I never saw any analysis saying the 2024 Senate election was favorable to the Democrats in the run up to 2024. Show me anything that was printed prior to the election in 2024 that is not from one of the 2024 Democratic campaigns. That just one of your points where you state that as a clear mandate.

The assassination stuff is just not germane to a discussion about mandate nor your purported fake Russian dossier.

This came out shortly after the election about the House and Senate and Presidential election, the USA is just very divided, almost evenly. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/2024-election-5-take...

Trump won with 49% of the popular vote vs Harris' 48%, with one of the smallest margins of victory ever - just 0.15% of eligible voters. He won just a handful more electoral votes than Biden in 2020, and far fewer than Obama or Reagan.

That is not an overwhelming mandate, nor does it represent a majority of the country.

But then Trumpists never let the truth get in the way of their own mythmaking. They said they had an overwhelming mandate and the support of most Americans even in 2016 when literally millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton. Hell, they didn't even think they actually lost in 2020. I'm surprised they can square the cognitive dissonance of Trump being elected to a third term.

> Trump won with 49% of the popular vote vs Harris' 48%, with one of the smallest margins of victory ever

Irrelevant, we don't elect presidents by popular vote.

> That is not an overwhelming mandate, nor does it represent a majority of the country.

He won the Senate as well. Increased the majority in the House. Increased his votes in NY, CA. And among blacks and hispanic voters.

All while almost being assassinated (twice!) and having the mass media peddling lies against him for the last 8 years (Russiagate!). He wasn't like Obama who had the media backing him.

It absolutely is a mandate. It's a clear mandate because his Party has both houses and the Presidency!

> Irrelevant, we don't elect presidents by popular vote.

How the details of the election process actually works is tangential to what kind of mandate they have.

If some bizarre election mechanism that a country followed meant that a party getting 1 vote more than the opposition gave it 100% of the power, that's how elections in that country would work, but that doesn't mean the winners would have a strong mandate from the electorate as a whole.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler made the argument that, well, since 33% of the voters (17% of the population) voted for him, far ahead of the runner-up (who only got 20% of the vote), and his party made up the majority of the ruling coalition (196 out of 267 out of a total 620 seats), he should have all the power.

The system certainly gave him power for all those reasons, but it's farcical to say that 17% of the population voting for him was an 'overwhelming' mandate for Germany to embark on their insane politics, and it's also farcical to say that +1% of the vote is a clear mandate. It's a mandate, but a slim one.

The system was also designed with a lot of checks and balances and social norms in places, but as it turns out, if you collude with what were supposed to be adversaries and break all the soft (and hard) rules, you can get a dramatically radical agenda implemented, disproportionate in its scale to the popular support you enjoy.

> Do you really believe that the majority of Americans — or even the majority of Trump voters — are applauding the use of Nazi symbols?

Did you not see the entire inauguration applaud and cheer him? Do you think they won't be heiling right back at him on the next rally?

The ones that wouldn't are bending themselves into pretzels to explain how it's just a weird autistic handwave.

Do you think people who were at the inauguration are representative of Americans as a whole?

Ask some trump voters about what they think of it, and you'll get your answer. I have, and I don't like the answers. They are too busy on cloud nine, cheering how their king is back and is signing hundreds of executive orders and getting rid of the deep state.

They simply don't care about the details. And the ones that do think it's hilarious that he's owning the libs.

More eligible voters didn't vote for any candidate then for Trump or Harris.

Trump won a slim majority of the people who did choose to vote, but it's hardly an endorsement by a majority of Americans, much less the American people as a whole.

Choosing not to vote is a vote for the status quo. That still is a choice.

There are BS loopholes we need to correct, but people who can't do the bare basics to reserve a morning to fill out a ballot fundamentally have themselves to blame.

Nonsense. If you live in one of the ~40 states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, who you vote for makes no more difference than it does in Russia. It’s reasonable to protest by refusing to participate in that unfair system, and doing so doesn’t mean you support one candidate or the other.

36% of eligible voters - 90 million people - likely had a similar attitude. The margin of victory was 2.3m votes. What's that phrase? Something about how no single raindrop thinking they're responsible for the flood.

Raindrops in New York, California and Mississippi are indeed not responsible for floods in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

43% of eligible voters in Mississippi didn't vote. 42% in NY and 38% in CA. That's a significant amount of people who could have swung the election either way despite them being "safe" states. Any state can be in play if turnout ever increased significantly. And even if your state voted your way federally, did every local/state race go to what would've been your preferred candidate? I doubt it.

while it's true that there's quite a few non-votes that far outweight the margin of victory, they're all spread out and not in states that held marginal votes. It may actually indeed be the case that their turnout would not affect the results.

However, turnout don't only affect the results, but future results.

Politicians look at votes to determine their future trajectory - those who don't turn out won't be seen at all, and would be treated as if they don't exist. After all, why hadn't the native indians got the vote until legislated, and why slaves too, until some compromise was reached?

So voting, regardless of your effect on outcome, is important. I only wish the vote was easier, as some people need to take time off work to vote, or have to trek far, or make arrangements which would be inconvenient. For example, making postal voting easier to get is a good starting point.

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