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That said, I don't believe there's a single factor that determined the election. A flip in any of a dozen or more factors could have resulted in a different outcome.
Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense.
Not sure if that's specifically directed at me, but that's exactly what I said.
Since these regional governments would be picked from the inside, hopefully there wouldn’t be as much of a contrarian reflex to oppose everything they do.
I don’t know CA well but I know it’s blue with very deep red pockets.
So what you actually kind of miss is a nobility that has common sense and class-consciousness of the leading class.
Graphs About Religion: The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026
15,000 churches could close this year amid religious shift in U.S - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484284 - January 2026 (5 comments)
Gallup: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World - https://news.gallup.com/poll/697676/drop-religiosity-among-l... - November 13th, 2025
I don't agree here, but I can seen in this lens if needed.
But that's not what Trump voters miss. And that's the issue. What they want is a "return to good times", aka times where anyone else who wasn't a white male did in fact not have good times. But they don't care about the non-white non-males.
They are smart enough to not say the quiet part out loud, and even now there's signs they are trying to backtrack internally on all of this[1]. But this is always what's in their minds. I don't know what needs to be done on that end, but the positive thing we can do is hyper-energize the country to come out in droves and not let this sneak back in again (or at least, have way more guardrails for next time).
1: https://www.salon.com/2026/01/19/some-trump-voters-are-sneak...
This kind of resonates with the idea, that populations education and governing regime beget each other. When the people don't care about their freedom, they eventually loose it, if they do care a lot about it, they will eventually gain it.
Honestly, the current events (as in last 100years) make me think, that maybe monarchy was in fact the best option for some kind of population. I mean a good democracy is a lot better than an average monarchy, but monarchy is also better than a bad democracy that leads to authoritarianism. Even in the worst time of absolutism, the king had a budget, that nobility needed to vote on. So when the king said "I want a bigger palace" and the nobility says, my bridge is old and my workers are hungry, then that's it. Same with war. I mean when your nobility wants to play warlords, that sucks, but a elite that has their richness in real estate and agriculture has a lot to loose in a war. And what happens when your elite wants to play warlord regardless, can be seen in the USA currently.
In other words, they're stupid.
(You could call this depressing I suppose, but I prefer to laugh).
As someone who grew up in the south, I know many people who left the GOP over Trump. Obviously not enough people have, but there is a glimmer of hope.
That's nothing new... Don't blame me for bothsiderism but I and many others knew full well that Harris would lose after the midsummer switcheroo. Sorry, the Dem party knew it too and they wanted to lose, that's not the only evidence for it and there's no other rational conclusion.
I had some hopes that Trump's deterioration, court case results, and general insurrection of the country would do something to impact his standing. Especially if "sleepy Joe" was the standard Biden was being held to. But I learned from 2016 and knew not to dismiss the possibility.
The real downside here isn't just the fact that trump's voted didn't decrease. It's that Harris' did. A lot of people staying home arguably cost the election almost as much as those who voted.
It's "bothsiderism", learned it on this thread, haven't checked the dictionary, I guess, there's still time to vote on which spelling should go there.
The amount of crazy and not so crazy shit I hear for voting for this idiot is incredible. Though the Dems do themselves no favors either.
No, they voted for Trump because he was their guy then later made up a rational justification. We know that people generally do NOT make decisions by rationally evaluating things, their subconscious makes a decision and their conscious makes plausible rational arguments. (Yes, citation needed.)
The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.
Claiming that half the country wouldn't vote for a woman because Kamala didn't win and couldn't possibly have had any other faults as a candidate is very bot like, however.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-acc...
The buttons are still there, but they don't do anything.
It's fine to disagree with how we run HN. Plenty of users do. In fact, HN users love disagreeing with us and we take it as a sign of their attachment to this place. Complaining about / objecting to mod decisions and admin practices is part of the life of the forum.
How do we respond? By patiently answering questions, explaining how the site works, listening to objections, and addressing them as best we can—over and over and over. Anyone who wants to can verify this. We've done it over 200,000 times, on the site and by email. (I just checked.)
What's not fine is to misleadingly misrepresent what we've told you to other users, thereby poisoning the community. That's seriously over the line and is a reason for banning someone if they do it repeatedly as part of a pattern. (Fortunately, this is rare.) Readers have a right to know how HN is actually administered, and admins have a right not to have their words distorted.
When I explained to you why we removed flagging privileges from your account, the reason was no different than what I've publicly stated in countless comments, e.g.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051024 (Feb 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46592822 (Jan 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46521819 (Jan 2026)
You can find 2,700 other past comments I've made about flagging at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... In not one of those, nor in any email I've ever sent, will you find any reference to us disabling flags because someone "flagged things [dang] agreed with".
To that end, I've actually been avoiding the downvote and flag button entirely. It's handy to close off an avenue of admin retaliation, but on a deeper level I feel like the reflexive race to downvote people you disagree with is the "game" part of gamified engagement.
Besides, if an HN user says something horrendous, I feel like other HN users deserve to know the kind of company they have on this site, instead of tone-policing it under the rug.
If you read some of those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. What you shouldn't do is take commenters' claims about it un-skeptically, because sometimes (as in this case) they are false.
But I don't trust you either, and my reasons for being reluctant to flag and downvote are genuine. This is because I've also seen moderation teams who swear up and down that they're not biased, but who later get caught out when they put their finger on the scale through action or deliberate inaction.
But there's another dimension to the unfrustworthiness, because I have also seen moderation teams who don't put their finger on the scale per se, but are so invested in their own rules that they let their community rot beneath their feet from people who have figured out how to manipulate them.
What I've said, and believe, is that of course we're biased, because it's impossible not to be and because unconscious bias is a thing, but that we at least try to mitigate the effects of it, and have a lot of practice at doing so. Are those efforts negligible? I doubt it. I think HN would be a different place if we weren't trying to do that.
You also don't explain how 2 posts per 3 hours constitutes a "ban".
I don't understand your second statement.
You deleted a comment from me where I said that drugs don't let you access extra dimensions or planes of existence, just alter your mental processes so you feel like you do. Care to explain that one?
Other moderated comments included: "HN has word-based flagging" and "flags should not be used to indicate disagreement".
You seem to be asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46694184 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46691754. Those comments were killed by user flags. That was before we banned you.
The distinction between moderation done by users (votes, flags, etc.) and moderation done by admins (killing posts, banning accounts, etc.) is long established and well understood by the community. It's not about blaming.
I voted for Harris, I even canvased for her, but I think its a sexist oversimplification to suggest she lost because she is a woman. She lost because her campaign was lame.
But she did offer voters lots of things if you spent 30 seconds listening to her and stepped out of the faux news and Twitter echo chambers.
And basically every last bit of it would’ve helped the average American. She just didn’t lie and claim she had a magic wand to fix price gouging her first week in office.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris...
*And to be clear, it’s rather interesting that both Kamala and Hillary were blamed for “not having a platform” which seems to be the go-to for people who refuse to vote for a woman but can’t actually attack them on their platform. Just claim they don't have one or didn’t do a good enough job explaining it!
Democrats who believe in "realistic" political campaigns are why awful people keep winning.
Now you’re criticizing her for “giving in to political resistance” - and by that you mean not getting up on stage and just knowingly and blatantly lying to the American public by claiming she would single handedly drop the price of groceries and gasoline in her first week in office while also ending the war in Ukraine?
I think you’re both moving the goal posts and claiming that the rest of us are looking for a presidential candidate that has no moral compass. I’m good.
This is the lamest bullshit policy which almost seems calculated to alienate voters who it doesn't put to sleep.
Please don't act like democratic politicians are losing because they have a moral compass. Ridiculous.
This is part of Trumps genius and preys on many American's ignorance. Ask random people on the street if they understand the inflation rate for example. Most issues are complex and require nuance and complex fixes. Trump distills them down to simple problems when they are not, and lies with impunity that there are simple solutions. People believe him because it's too much work to believe anything else.
Similarly, AOC should visit the south, eat some grits, volunteer with some Black churches, and do a little skeet shooting with some good ole boys.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/186248/quarter-voters-say-candi...
But I don't think that one performative step would help, it would require like decades of change on the platform of the Democratic party.
Ideas and modeling no longer matters? What matters is that you're doing a TikTok eating a southern specialty?
Spectacles actually matter too. You need to know which one to perform and that requires certain understanding of your audience
What the democrats need is an aggressive economic policy that actually will manifestly improve regular people's lives. If they cannot articulate such a thing and credibly convince the voter that they will fucking fight for it, they will never win.
People say this but Democrats lost by like 1% in 2024. If that had gone the other way by 1%, people would be talking about what political geniuses they are (as has happened in the past). Winning in this environment just means playing long enough that the noise goes your way eventually, and then everyone talks about what a political mastermind you are. Or if it goes against you then you're forever lost in the political wilderness. Until the next election when it eventually, randomly goes your way again.
No one at a gun range is changing their vote.
Both parties already know which voters change their votes depending on the situation. The data's already told strategists in both parties that the hotspots are, generally speaking, a few counties in a few states in the midwest, Pennsylvania, and more and more Arizona. So they don't really need to do more than pay lip service to any others. Because the data's already told them that the others won't change their votes in any case.
I did not bother canvassing or donating to the Harris campaign for this reason, for the same reason I did not help pro vaccine non profits during the pandemic trying to convince antivaxxers. You aren’t changing someone’s belief system and mental model on timelines that matter for election outcomes. Mamdani was able to win NYC because young people and women turned out in force and ranked choice voting. The electoral college overweights rural, lower education parts of the country in US voting influence.
Based on the above, it will be a long time before enough of the US electorate has turned over before you can run a women presidential candidate imho. 78% of farmers voted for him, and still support him, even as he destroys their way of life, for example. Progress occurs one funeral at a time (Planck).
I recommend the recently released book “The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us” by Ryan P Burge (ISBN13 9781587436697) as a contributor to understanding this topic, as well as “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (ISBN13 9780062390851).
Edit: This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681760 touches on this as well.
Democrat policies polled better than Republican policies at the last election.
A Republican candidate could be a Muslim, a women, or trans, but that's not a good reason to vote for them. It should be about what they stand for. Voting for a Kristi Noem would be terrible, for example.
Similarly, the Democratic Party, if they're to win, should not depend on the opposition failing or on identity, but instead on solid ideas and the ability to communicate it well. Kamala wasn't that.
Only when nothing else is on the line will they say "I won't vote for a woman."
Not anymore.
Three more years to climb out of the dumpster fire though. Then, maybe?
But right now? No.
In this moment, the political reality in the US is that Democrats would have to lose. Republicans, male or female, can't really win without that help. Especially in light of MAGA.
I would have thought Wisconsin would have been a wake up call for Republicans. But it hasn't happened yet.
So far both of these parties are sleepwalking into disaster and the world outside the US will pay a portion of that cost. Which is sad.
And Democrats aren't so broadly driven by identity politics that a Republican candidate merely being a woman would attract significant Democratic defectors. She would still have to be somewhat inspiring/charismatic, fairly centrist, and probably pro-choice.
Even in the peak-"woke" Democratic primary of 2020, all the women lost to two old white men.
The election was always going to be 50/50 come election day no matter who the candidates were. The consternation about polling over the summer was especially frustrating for this reason, because 50/50 is exactly how it played out despite whatever temporary polling boosts she got. If she hadn't replaced Biden, his poor polling also would have reverted to the 50/50 by November.
The fact Biden said he wouldn't back out then suddenly did at the 11th hour made the whole thing far more bizarre and was a massive erosion of confidence in any semblance of a plan for the presidency by the Democratic Party. I ended up voting for a 3rd party because both campaigns were run so horribly to the point I couldn't even imagine either side managing a mayor's office let alone the country.
Im gonna put a theory out that I havent seen here yet, a lot of people voted for Trump because they got dunked on by leftist Twitter, told they were racist/fascist/whatever for having an opinion like "communism is bad", and now comes a guy who wont back down and who legit makes them cry liberal tears. Ever been pissed off at someone with no recourse? Of course they want that kind of satisfaction.
Because if that is true, you're re-writing the rules of your "personal voter math" to fit your narrative, and if it isn't true, your "personal voter math" === your opinion, which isn't really useful.
It's just that if in front of you, you have a weirdo who gives some stupid "with me, everything is free, and there's no problem" line, that is provable completely bullshit, but that your population is too uneducated (or too in a cult) to understand, then this happens...
What did you want Democrat to do? Give the same lies that GOP does? then what's the endgame?
The orange idiot is pretending that it is "free everything"
I hope I'm wrong.
This was about all thosw isms and hierarchies we pretended dont exisr anymore.
“As we move into the endgame of the 2022 election, the Democrats face a familiar problem. America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support.”
“This year, Democrats have chosen to run a campaign focused on three things: abortion rights, gun control, and safeguarding democracy—issues with strong appeal to socially liberal, college-educated voters. But these issues have much less appeal to working-class voters.”
“They are instead focused on the economy, inflation, and crime, and they are skeptical of the Democratic Party’s performance in all three realms.”
You conveniently left out that the author (Ruy Teixeira[0]) of the piece you quoted is a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank that authored the Project 2025 roadmap.
Should we ask Stalin to critique US Cold War policies? Or maybe ask Xi Xinping to publicly assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan's defense posture too?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/democra...
Quote: The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump’s second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.
I live in coastal CA, and a healthy majority of my “working class” friends are Trump supporters.
The ones in the trades, who are relatively high earners, are all Trump supporters.
That said, I'm not sure being a woman was worse than being from CA or black with a solid chunk of the electorate. (I'm reminded of how some of my own relatives seemed to want to avoid visiting us in CA growing up because they had such a strong notion of how "communist," "liberal," and dangerous it ostensibly was.)
In some ways this also illustrates that propaganda likely had a significant role, too, IMO.
Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.
If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.
Especially when it became so untenable to continue the lie that they had to implicitly admit to it along with falsely accusing everyone else of misinformation.
People talk a lot about Trump but I think a lot of people just voted against the other option so it didn't have much to do with Trump to begin with.
Also being part of a social category doesn’t mean one will be immune to bias against this very category if it’s heavily pushed in the dominant social constructs.
Actually women able to reach top level political function in a patriarchal system will more likely do so by being doubly virulent against feminist standpoints. Look at Tatcher or Takaichi for a more recent example.
Clinton beat Trump by 15 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Clinton by 11 percentage points among men voters.
A lot of research has been made on this subject and it should be noted that its primarily young voters that create this voting pattern.
The reasons people vote a certain way or can't be bothered to show up at the polls are going to vary significantly across the nearly quarter billion humans making those choices.
So any attempt to "single issue" explain election results are going to be wrong, particularly in a close election like this one. (49.8% vs 48.3%, and Electoral Votes in battleground states often in the tens of thousands of voters, out of tens of millions.
But many of the issues certainly contribute to flipping voters between one candidate, another, or staying home.
So sure, totally, gender and race played a role.
The economy (and steep inflation) played a role.
Biden being an increasingly disliked incumbent, staying in the race too long, and Harris being too conservative to distance herself from him played a role.
News and propaganda played a role (and I suspect this is a big one. Remember when Trump was all like Deep State, Democrats and Epstein, let's get those files released! And then it came time to do it, and for some reason he was like... oh that's a bad idea?)
No doubt individual state politics play a role, too - an unpopular governor might give the opposing party a boost.
But yeah, if the Democratic nominee was a) nominated, and b) a white male, the odds probably would've shifted in their favor enough to flip those few battleground states.
Both parties are quite disconnected from the interests of the "ordinary people", and the "ordinary people" voting from them are often quite disconnected from the reality; instead they want someone who would approve their preconceptions, and would stick it to "them" in the endless political sports match.
Which may not be that endless: if the political climate of the US deteriorates enough, some authoritarian populist could just get elected and never leave. The current administration likes to hint at that, but they seem to inane to actually pull this off. Somebody less theatrical and more cold-blooded could, though :(