A plurality of Americans voted for this government, for better or worse. The courts are one of the primary avenues for the minority to express their will, but they move slowly, although slightly faster than congress.
He won under the conditions the election was performed under. That’s clear.
I’m not sure I could call those fair after years of attacks on people’s voting rights.
Tangent: A new attack on voting rights just succeeded in the Eighth Circuit. An individual citizen or non-governmental group can no longer sue a state government for racial discrimination under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
> Until a few years ago, everyone agreed that private citizens and groups could bring Section 2 lawsuits.
...
> The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of voters in Section 2 cases numerous times, including just two years ago in Allen v. Milligan.
...
> However, some opponents of the Voting Rights Act have promoted a fringe notion that because Section 2 doesn’t say the words “private right of action” — the legal term for the ability of impacted individuals or groups to sue — such lawsuits cannot be filed. This is part of a pattern of attacking the procedures underlying Voting Rights Act litigation to make it virtually impossible to enforce the law’s important protections in court.
...
> The Department of Justice can still bring Section 2 cases, but that alone is not enough to prevent voting discrimination. Individuals and groups have brought nearly 93 percent of Section 2 cases over the last 40 years. Justice Department attorneys have explained that the department relies on citizen-led lawsuits because it doesn’t have the resources to handle all these cases on its own even if it wanted to.
> That desire is not present in the current administration’s Justice Department, which shed 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division staff and has already been ordered to dismiss almost all of its Section 2 cases.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/appe...
Extensive post-election voter surveys showed that if everyone had voted, Trump would’ve won by 4.8 points: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202...
For instance, how many Democrat supporters just don't show up to the polls in Texas because they feel that their vote doesn't matter due to gerrymandering in the state?
I think the issue here is that we are trying to apply logic when the American voter tends to be very emotional.
Also, Trump is the one who performs better among your supposedly “disenfranchised” voters. The folks who didn’t vote in the last 3 elections were more likely to vote for Trump in 2024: https://amac.us/newsline/elections/trump-victory-explained-n.... The only group Harris won were super voters (who voted in all four of the most recent elections).
Just because someone didn't vote doesn't immediately mean the reason was disenfranchisement.
Given you live in Maryland, how can you claim voting is easy in the the entire US? Are you familiar with voting laws in every state and how elections can be weaponized by the state governments against certain populations?
Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.
I think you are taking your lived experiences and applying it to everyone. Are you elderly, disabled, a single parent, or are you living in poverty? Do you have immediate access to your birth certificate or a passport? Do you have a government ID at all? Do you have access to transportation? All these factors play into how easy it is for someone to vote.
"Disenfranchisement" means legally or physically people from voting. Activists repurposed that term to attack any sort of rules and regulations around voting, with the specific purpose of making Voter ID seem akin to laws requiring a grandfather eligible to vote. The whole point is to muddle the facts rather than clarify them.
> Easy voting would mean drive thru voting, mail in voting, automatic voter registration, not weaponizing polling locations, etc.
No, voting is a civic ritual and should be treated with an appropriate level of solemnity to engender trust in the voting system. Look at how Taiwan counts votes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUZa7qIGAdo. What's the purpose of the ritual? Surely a machine could count all the votes easily. But that's not the point. The point is to have a public exercise that people can see and easily understand, to build civic trust.
I don't even know what you're going into with the civic ritual portion of the comment. You originally said voting in the US is easy, which I countered, and you seemingly did not respond to it.
Gerrymandering doesn't affect the presidential election? Surveys show how everyone would have voted? Do you even hear yourself?
Which means it does :-) just not by much.
If either a) or b) impacts voter turnout then it could impact the presidential election even though the districts themselves don't matter.
I found some evidence both for and against voter turnout impacts from redistricting[2] or from gerrymandering[3] but it didn't seem conclusive.
[1] https://stateline.org/2022/05/20/check-your-polling-place-re...
[2] https://da.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/da/kernel/90008864/90008864.pdf
[3] https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/gerrymandering-turnout-...
It is more tenuous than the others in the list, but I suspect it could be used.
And either way it had the psychological effect of people knowing their vote may not count because they vote for the wrong party in their district and have no chance of their candidate winning.
Gerrymandering is not just used on its own. The legislators that use their authority to disenfranchise voters use gerrymandering to dodge accountability. When Republican state legislators, congressmen, and senators do this, they do it to disenfranchise the same voters that would vote for a non-Republican president.
So yes, it's technically indirect, but gerrymandering obviously affects presidential elections. It couldn't not.
(I otherwise 100% agree that Republicans engage in various forms of voter suppression and disenfranchisement. Not sure what fantasy world GP lives in where they don't.)
The intense high quality polling that’s been done since Trump won in 2016 has completely dismantled the notion of “voter suppression.” It’s the left’s version of illegal immigrants voting.
Nobody is saying that the Republicans in congress cannot set tariffs. We're just saying the _president_ cannot singularly do it. If elected Republicans congress critters want to pass a law establishing the tariff rates and have the elected Republican president sign it; go ahead.
Because that's the law ratified by a majority of states which is much more than plurality of Americans.
I mean, we have two options here - one is that voters memory-holed the last eight years and had never even heard of Donald Trump until like a year ago and believed he was an honest an sincere man of character... or they voted for exactly the thing everyone said was going to happen to happen and are only disappointed because the consequences weren't what they expected. They didn't think the leopards would actually eat their faces.
And now they're pretending like they're shocked that Trump would do such terrible things, just like they were shocked that Trump would have anything to do with January 6th... after the consequences of that weren't what they expected, either.