Trump gained 3 million votes post 2020; the Democratic Party lost 6 million. At best, you could say 3 million swung to Trump, and 3 million stayed home. Combine that with the first popular vote victory in 20 years (edit: for a republican candidate), and the quality or perception of the candidate is a statistically likely cause.
You brought up completely unrelated voter turnout of other political figures completely irrelevant to any discussion of Reality TV and when reprimanded have brought up explicit vote counts, completely derailing into the political.
This is not appropriate for hacker news, by your own estimation. For shame: your behavior is hypocritical.
Even Hilary got a higher percentage of the popular vote in 2016, by earning 2.1% more over Trump [3]
After you consider Republicans have been pushing for voter suppression and purging voter rolls in states for _decades_ [4]. We are just now seeing the effect. I suppose you can say it worked in the 2000 election and subsequent recounts in FL.
The laws and regulations around voter rights are not _constitutionally_ guaranteed. So unlike gun rights, voting rights can easily be taken away by the state. [5]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_president...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_president...
[4] https://www.salon.com/2000/12/04/voter_file/
[5] https://hartmannreport.com/p/democracy-undone-the-texas-plac...
Democrats, correctly or not, see voter roll clearing as a vote suppression tactic. (Salon and Wikipedia would certainly say so.) Democrats argue there is no evidence of a large scale organized fraud (no death by machete), so the worry is purely suppressive.
Republicans, correctly or not, see voter roll clearing as an election integrity measure for preventing fraud. All it takes is 2% fraud, as you yourself admit, for a victory. Republicans are concerned about slow, minor, unorganized fraud in lots of little places, that might add up to 2% (death by paper cuts).
Until a narrative wins, this will continue; and any election victories will be ignored by the other side.
Please remember that this entire sub thread was precipitated from you saying that the mention of a reality TV star in the context of the effects of reality TV is too political and now you are actually discussing politics.
It still can cause problems, but the problems are usually not "I don't have a reasonable way to get to my new polling place" problems. They are "Can I fit a trip to the polling place in with my Tuesday schedule?" problems.
People in poor urban areas in cities with little public transportation are often actually much less mobile than people in rural areas. For them it is more likely to be a "I don't have a reasonable way to get to my new polling place" problem.
But the biggest reason closing polling places correlates well with hurting Democrats is that the people who decide which ones to close tend to pick ones that they will be more likely to hurt Democrats. E.g., from 2012 to 2018 Texas closed 542 polling places in the counties that had the biggest growth in Latino and Black populations (both of which are more likely to vote Democrat) and only 34 in counties with the least growth in those populations.
You claimed the passing mention of a reality TV star in the context of the effects of reality TV on society was too political for Hacker News, and now you have descended into Democrat versus Republican percentage based figures on voting.
Barely gets to 0.0001% fraud[0] (and the only 0.0001% finding is an estimate.) Even if you add up all the frauds on the link, I think you'd barely get past 0.002% fraud and that's over a multi-decade period.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud_in_the_United_...
The Democratic Party needs to accept that 6-7 million voters either switched sides or stayed home; and if they want to win again, they must change tactics accordingly.
This is true, but it doesn't invalidate grandparent's idea either. Maybe Dems should run a reality show star.
They only need to change policy enough to keep from pissing off deep blue states and to flip a few swing states.
You were the first to say that something was too political for Hacker News and yet here you are in this thread, engaging in the most political discussion.