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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

The problem is even if they had values, American voters chose to elect someone without values.

I do not understand this griping about rolling over when over half the nation votes for a treasonous leader. At that point, the only option left is war.

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Over half the nation did not vote for Trump. 77M people of a total population of 340M did, which is around 23%. Trump didn’t even get over half of the total votes cast (49.8% vs. 48.3%). You are free to be dismayed by these numbers, but please stop supporting the notion that “more than one out of every two people you meet in the US voted for Trump”, it is wildly untrue and really misrepresents the strength of the movement.

When the stakes are this high, not voting is voting for the winner.

By not voting, they are signaling they are fine with the situation, and will not stand with any opposition to the winner.

Edit to respond to below comment due to hitting posting limit:

>98M of the 185M total population of non-voters had the pretty rock solid excuse of not being eligible to vote, right? Almost a third of the country can’t vote (permanent residents, children, ex-cons in certain states, etc.)

Children seem irrelevant to consider, especially with voting trends of the youngest generations. Same with permanent residents and ex-cons, I don't see any reason these would have cast votes in different proportions. The most damning thing is this is after already seeing the evidence of 2017 to 2020 and the response to Jan 6, 2021.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...

>55% of White naturalized citizens voted for Trump in 2024, compared with 41% in 2020.

>51% of Hispanic naturalized citizens voted for Trump, up from 39% in 2020.

>46% of Asian naturalized citizens voted for Trump, an increase from 35% in 2020.

>This is without needing to get into the very real voter suppression effort that took place (we’ll assume every one of those “stands” with the winner).

I am assuming the number of people whose votes were prevented were negligible in comparison to the number of people who were apathetic (or boycotting).

>They also probably skew more to your position given their demographics.

A valuable lesson I have learned from 2016 and 2024 elections is that this is not true. What is most important is that people's feelings about their status relative to others not be disturbed (i.e. man over woman and white over non white), and the candidate willing to preserve that, no matter how horrible, is likelier to win more votes.

>I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition

Obviously, the measure of the size of the opposition is subjective, and people are free to make bets as they see fit. However, based on the aforementioned "rolling over", it seems others are making the same bet I am.

You’re aware that, just for starters, 98M of the 185M total population of non-voters had the pretty rock solid excuse of not being eligible to vote, right? Almost a third of the country can’t vote (permanent residents, children, ex-cons in certain states, etc.) This is without needing to get into the very real voter suppression effort that took place (we’ll assume every one of those “stands” with the winner). These people may not be able to vote, but they’re still people, and able to participate in the political process in other ways, and thus not worth ignoring (for example, they can donate). They also probably skew more to your position given their demographics.

I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition. If there’s some sort of underdog psychology you are trying to tap into, you should maybe also consider the possibility that staunchly presenting the current situation as “we’re outnumbered and most of our population stands with these abhorrent values” may actually be more demoralizing than invigorating as a battle cry, which is even more of a shame when it isn’t true.

Australia has compulsory voting at 90%+ participation and elects conservatives, by the standards of their politics, all the same. The opposite of what you're saying is probably true: if Democrats would focus less on the demographics-turnout based election model that has lost them 3 presidential and many, many congressional elections, they would win more often.

I'm not making a demographics-turnout based election model argument?... I'm simply stating the, IMO objective fact, that dividing the number of people that voted for Trump by the total population is 23% and not 51%, and even dividing that number by the number of people that voted is 49.8%. I've made no statements whatsoever about what Democrats should focus on. I don't know where this is coming from, my only critique is that it is unnecessarily demoralizing to state as fact that the majority of the population voted a certain way when it simply isn't true. Look, you are allowed to believe that if everyone voted the result would have gone that way, you can also like OP assign blame to non-voters if you so choose, but just say that instead of misstating a voting percentage.

Separately, I honestly don't even know what possible strategy could be inferred from my statement. That I think that ~70% of the population might be open to your message? That I think we should tell people that more people are on their side than they know? Does that sound like a turnout-based strategy?

that's an insane pov.

is it really your sincere proposition that after an American presedential election, there should be no expectation of anyone to criticise the winner, no matter what they do? really?

The context of this discussion is a university doing what it needs to gain access to money from the federal government.

>approximately everyone has rolled over

I did not say anything about not criticizing the winner. An "elite" can criticize all they want, but for day to day actions, when the opposing side has all 3 branches of government, willingly given to them by the majority of the population, I can't blame someone for not sacrificing themselves.

My point is this isn't some small group of radicals that weaseled their way in, this is more than half the "country" (if you can call it that), seeing the first term and really his whole life, and saying we want more of this chaos.

Edit: Yes, I know the nominal votes do not add up to half the voters, but practically, if you are to bet on the level of support you would get from opposing the winner, surely you are going to assume the non voters will be fine with however you are treated by the winner, especially this winner with his well known track record.

Effectively, I would expect support of far less than half of my fellow citizens. If you can't be bothered to vote, you're definitely not going to be bothered to do anything more.

> more than half the "country"

2024 voting-eligible population: 244.6M

Voted for Trump: 77.3M

Voted for Harris: 75M

Voted for other candidates: 2.6M

Eligible to vote, but didn't vote: 90M

Unfortunately, the largest constituency continues to be the "can't be fucked to vote" party.

> the largest constituency continues to be the "can't be fucked to vote" party.

It's not that straight-forward as it's not a popular election. Why bother to vote if you live in a deep red or blue state? You can make some sort of abstract argument about civic duty or whatnot, but ... the end result is your vote doesn't matter except for "candidate X got more votes!" type internet arguments.

> You can make some sort of abstract argument about civic duty or whatnot

I wouldn't say it's terribly abstract. If we don't do anything, we probably shouldn't expect results.

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