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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

It's what America wanted. I've decided to stop caring. It's all a joke now. We'll try again in 44 months.

I don't think the minority of Americans who voted for him really thought about this situation.

And the mother that didn't check on her baby in the bath didn't mean for them to drown. In real life there's consequences for being negligent and careless.

If you take US eligible voters who did not vote, and put them on Trump's side of the vote tally, then he gets more than 50% of all eligible voters.

To me, staying home and not voting in an election is a silent vote for whoever the winner ends up being. These people soft-voted for Trump.

This was explicitly predicted by Democrats and loudly expressed. Enlightened centrists insisted we were being hyperbolic.

Nobody has any right to claim surprise. If you couldn't see this coming, you are stupid, full stop.

You're mistaken. This is no joke.

It's not what America wanted. It's what the felon-in-chief wants, but he doesn't represent most Americans.

That becomes harder to believe in light of the most recent electoral result where he won the popular vote. I do want to believe that he doesn't represent most Americans, however.

It seems clear that non-MAGA people who voted for Trump did so because they believed his BS promises to make the economy better and fast, and secondarily because of the immigration issue. Most of them didn't think Trump would actually do all of the horrible things he and others said he was going to do.

And even then, he only barely won the election. It was the slimmest margin since the 1800s.

Not at all clear. Are voters really that stupid? Seems more likely there are more evil people around us than we expected, and they knowingly voted for evil.

He won 49% of the votes cast. He did not get a majority, but a plurality. The turnout was ~64%, so he got ~30% of the possible votes. His main opponent got about ~28% of the possible votes.

He doesn't have the mandate he thinks he does, but he's a megalomaniac led by his nose ring by the psycopathic megalomaniacs behind Project 2025, which ~90% (more?) of Americans said that they didn't like when they saw it.

All speculation and the non voters said: I do not care

Sorry, but I don't think these percentages, turnouts, and other technicalities matter, at all.

This is how the American people has chosen to represent themselves. The American people created the system, and the Americans knew their own system. The system produced this guy.

Now, why does it matter which percentage did he get? He got enough, did not he? And obviously he does have the mandate, because he is able to do things his way.

It represents most Americans who voted.

I disagree entirely.

That's not even factually correct. He won less than 50% of the popular vote.

But isn't the voting system wrong then?

There is precisely one way in which the will of the American people is measured. When we talk about "what America wants", it doesn't include the opinion of people who didn't show up in November. People who choose not to vote throw away their right to be included in the "what America wants" bucket. This shouldn't be a controversial statement.

Trump barely won the popular vote, so even ignoring the rest of the citizenry, it's a real stretch to say that he represents "the will of the people" in any significant way. At best, he represents "the will of half of the people who voted" -- and even that's a stretch, because a lot of the people who voted for him opposed his stance on most things.

I agree, but until you have large crowds doing a general strike, shutting major and minor cities, it's going to continue and observers abroad are going to conclude that the population is OK with it.

Well, he won the popular vote.

And yet, polling so far shows that 90+% of Trump voters are still fine with what he's been doing to the executive branch, and I expect most of those people don't particularly care about Ukraine or understand the nuances of diplomacy or soft power.

Stop. This is our president. This is our face to the world. By democratic vote. We can't weasel out of this. This IS who we are as a nation right now. Don't 'this isn't us' on HN. Do something in real life to change things so that this stops being us. But today, this is us. You and me.

> I've decided to stop caring.

This is a problem because if you stop caring about Ukraine falling, you will start to care when Poland, baltic countries, etc., get overrun next. Zelenskyy wasn't joking when he mentioned American shores.

I'm tempted to join a monastery.

exactly the wrong instinct

Why? I can't do shit to stop Trump.

> It's what America wanted.

Yeah…

    Egg shortages.  
    Fatal measles outbreaks.
    Airplane crashes.
    Crypto scams.
    Tariffs.
    Betrayal of allies. 
    Pardons and special favors for insurrectionists, crooked mayors, and online pimps.
    The American people voted for change!

* https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1895150416738033992

• 77,302,580 voted for this administration (49.8%)

• 77,935,722 voted against this administration (50.2%)

With an estimated population of 341M, there were approximately 90M people who were eligible to vote (over 18, and not prevented from voting from a conviction) that did not vote.

The American people DO NOT support Trump. He only won due to voter suppression and a massive amount of ad money.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43191410

Democrats vastly outspent republicans. https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-sp...

I don't think we can look at it that simply.

Of the voters who didn't vote for Trump or Harris, certainly some of them would have voted for Trump (or not voted at all) if their third-party candidate didn't exist. Put another way, if we had universal approval or ranked-choice voting, it's plausible that Trump would have ended up with a popular vote majority (but it could have gone either way, certainly).

> there were approximately 90M people who were eligible to vote that did not vote.*

Whenever an election is decided, I generally move all of those uncast votes over to the tally of whoever won. Staying home and not voting is the same thing as a soft-vote for whoever wins.

> voter suppression

I wish we could really quantify this. Not that it would change MAGA minds about anything, but it could be useful to know.

> a massive amount of ad money

Harris had a similarly massive amount of ad money, too, and it didn't help.

Honestly, I think the failures of the Democratic party machine as a whole are just as responsible for Harris's loss as GOP underhandedness is.

You said I was looking at simply. I reported the election results. The majority of the voters did not vote for this administration.

> Democratic party machine as a whole are just as responsible for Harris's loss as GOP underhandedness is.

This we agree on.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-spent-290-million-2...

It isn't just the money, but whom it benefits. Someone almost no discretionary income, 100 or 300 is a ton of money. Musk won't even notice the 290M.

Just because I didn't vote does not mean my vote was "suppressed".

It is a statistical measure, did I say your vote was suppressed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_efforts_to_di...

This is just an article where Wikipedia editors cry about the election. There's not even any real allegations of voter suppression in here. If the Republican party is suppressing voters, they are doing a pretty poor job of it in light of record turnout, and probably to their detriment.

I don't think that is why he won.

Dems basically handed this election to Trump; Biden running when he had memory issues, then handing it to Harris whose numbers were questionable against Trump(with the braindead excuse that only she could get the funds), along with generally not responding to issues voters obviously care about(border), trying to ignore issues like excessive wokeness/DEI instead of admitting it is a problem.

Trump is going to lie and obviously only cares about himself, some % of rubes will vote for that, but you don't have to make it so damn easy for him.

Once Biden waited so long to fact reality and drop out, there was no time for a proper primary. The mistake was not really the handing of it to Harris, it was dropping out so late that there wasn’t really any better option.

Also he was basically AWOL for months beforehand while Trump was campaigning. Trump’s economic plan was absurd but he was out there talking about it without any real pushback, while Biden seemed to be hoping that people would recognize how the IRA had helped them on their own. Harris might not have been the best candidate but I’m not sure anyone other than Obama could’ve gotten a national coalition together in that short a time – it’s like putting off studying for months and trying to pull an all-nighter before the exam.

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