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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

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Unless poll after poll is contacting and registering answers from 100% of people in the country, that's only 35-40% of the people who answered the poll, which is a much, much smaller number.

Statistical sampling has been an accepted technique for over a century now

None of that changes the fact that the statement that half the country is MAGA because half the country voted for Trump is untrue.

Significantly less than half the country voted for Trump. This is objective fact.

Significantly less than 100% of Trump voters identify as MAGA. This is objective fact.

Approving of Trump as President is also not the same thing as being MAGA, though the overlap is quite likely reasonably high at this point.

You can make an argument that there are more MAGA people than I estimated, but the argument I was referring to was basing it all off of voters for the 2024 election. If you want to make a different argument, we can look at it on its merits.

I gave an analogy earlier that if you have 10 friends and asked them where they wanted to eat dinner and six said let’s get Italian and the other 4 said “Let’s kill Ralph and eat him”, you still have a shitty friend group.

If 40% of the country still supports everything that’s going on, that tells you a lot about this country. Especially seeing that because of the 2 Senators per state regardless of population, gerrymandering and to a lesser extent the electoral college, they have outsized influence on the government.

Exactly how can you approve of what Trump is doing and not be MAGA?

A surprising amount of people are single issue voters and will vote for and support someone that supports that single issue. They might not care at all about the entire rest of the issues at all as long as their single issue is fine, and a lot of those single issues, like guns, long predate maga or the tea party.

I'm not saying that makes them good people, I'm just saying I don't think it's the same thing as maga.

2 senators per state isn't really the issue, but the cap on the house is. The senate was built to be population independent, and the house was built specifically to be population dependent, where yes if you had more people you had more power. Then they... voted to cap it, because it was going to give too much power to states with more people. Dumb. EV also tied to the house, so uncapping it unfucks a lot of that, too.

The Senate though also decided the cabinet and the Supreme Court. Thats the major issue - especially the Supreme Court.

To your other point, I’ve met some Bush/Romney type Republicans who hold their nose and voted for Trump because the Democrats did go to far on social issues and I say that as a Black guy.

When I was at BigTech in 2020 I thought all of the videos we had to watch on “micro aggressions”, continue announcements on “ally programs”, “Latinx” instead of Latino/Latina (that every single Latino person I spoke to thought was ridiculous), the “how do we feel” meetings about Floyd, and the kind of liberals I met when I flew out to Seattle and other west coast offices (I worked remotely the entire time) were just weird. Not to mention being chastised if you didn’t put your preferred pronouns under your name.

I was like can I just do my damn job?

Part of the problem is we changed the senate selections to votes. Originally state legislature picked their senators. That's an amendment that I think is a mistake and should be reverted.

The different chambers are supposed to represent different interests and instead we've made both halves of congress effectively the same thing.

There's deeper rot with the system besides these things - like the apparent lack of safeguards against the executive branch just... ignoring everything, including sometimes even the supreme court... but I don't think the framer's original intentions for the house and senate are fundamentally incorrect.

How would taking away voting power from the people have been better? Especially now that while the state houses can get super majorities via gerrymandering but Senators have to appeal to a much wider base. There is a reason that you have more crazies in the house than the Senate.

You're looking at how things are now with a situation totally fucked from the things being set up to be totally fucked for decades.

The House and Senate fundamentally do not operate in the way the founders intended them to at the moment. Both are elected based on popular votes within their district/state with the expectation that they are representing their constituent voters, all while population capped. There's a fundamental disconnect between how they are selected, how that power balance lies, and what their intended purpose is.

The House is supposed to represent the people. That's the job. Being answerable to their constituents makes sense. The Senate is supposed to represent the States - including as long-lasting entities that will exist before and after the current constituents. The legislature selected them because they were supposed to be more knowledgeable about the issues pertaining to the state, etc. They were to be tasked with doing the necessary thing and not necessarily the popular thing - people can always vote out the state legislature if the senators truly are hated, but having some insulation from the ever changing whims of the general public was a feature.

A lot of the rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric around the electoral college - preventing humans, which can be very dumb en masse, from doing dumb things. That has obviously not been the case, since unfaithful electors just haven't been a thing in quantities that have mattered, but I would argue that when we have found that things didn't work the way the founders intended, the correct option would generally be to make them work the way the founders intended and then only move away from that if we find that it doesn't work. Instead, we've frequently moved away from those things even when they were working.

Gerrymandering is an issue that doesn't have to exist either - it already doesn't in some states, and there's no reason it couldn't be implemented in all of them in this scenario where we're just wholesale changing how the government works.

You’ll have to forgive me as a Black guy whose still living parents grew up in the segregated South and seeing that four of the southern states still consider “Confederacy Memorial Day” a state holiday and two others combine “Confederacy Day” with MLK day for not trusting the good will of the state governments - especially with gerrymandering.

If enough people in any state are bad actors then no solution under democracy is going to resolve the issue without moving away from a system that invests so much power in the states.

But then if enough people in the overall country are bad actors you're back to square one.

I don't have any proposals on how to fix some people just deciding they want to be shitty people. But all of this discussion involves a significant amount of hand waving solutions into place - discussions on getting them implemented, the likelihood of that happening, etc., are all separate and not anything we've talked about from any of the positions.

I am only arguing that state legislatures can gerrymander districts that give them more votes than the population voted for. But it is really hard to gerrymander an entire state and split it up so two Senators can win of their preferred party.

Would GA have two Democratic Senators with a Republican control state government? On the other hand would Susan Collins be a Senator from Maine?

Given the choice of trusting the people of Mississippi to do the right thing and the electorate of the US to do the right thing. The entire US has been more on the side of the angels than the southern states - yes that’s a very low bar.

It's easier (or as easy) to change gerrymandering as it is to change the senate back to it's intended purpose. If you want to argue that an amendment to make gerrymandering unconstitutional should be a prerequisite to returning to state legislatures selecting senators, I'm fine with that - because it's also a much more likely amendment to pass. A big chunk of Americans dislike gerrymandering. Only a tiny fraction of Americans know or care about the different chambers of Congress being intended to serve very different purposes.

Stating objective facts is not "copium".

It is simply false that "half the country [voted] for Trump".

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