Sure and the voters who did not participate in the election would all have voted the democratic party. I think the election showed that there are real people who apparently don't agree with the democratic party and it would probably be good to listen to these people instead of telling them what to do. (I see the same phenomenon in the Netherlands by the way. The government seems to have decided that they know better than the general public because voters who disagree are "uninformed" or "uneducated". This is absolutely the opposite of democracy. You do not just brush whole swats of the population to the side when they don't agree. It breaks the feedback loop that democracies should have.)
We have an electoral college that essentially disenfranchises any voter that is not voting with the majority unless your state is so close that it could be called a swing state. This affects red state democratic leaning voters just as much as blue state republican leaning voters…their votes are all worthless. For example, the state with the largest number of Trump voters is California, but none of their votes helped decide the election because California as a whole chose Kamala. And let’s not forget that we have one of the largest metropolitan areas and several territories that legally can’t vote for the president or have representation of any kind in the federal government.
A lot of people try to claim the popular vote as a measure of who won over the country’s opinion, but that’s simply not possible because the incentives and structure of the electoral college make it impossible to use as a measure of that.
The best we have for measuring who won over the hearts and minds of the country are polls. Polls are full of faults, but if executed correctly, they don’t disenfranchise by structurally underrepresenting entire classes of people. And the results of polling over the last hundred years suggest that Americans generally lean to the left of how our votes play out. You can call bullshit all you want on that, and there are very fair criticisms of polling as a measure of who would vote for what, but the fact of the matter is that the Republican Party knows this. That is why they oppose any attempt to get rid of the electoral college and also why they refuse to entertain enfranchisement of DC and US Territories. They know they’ll lose.
You can not at the same time count non-voters entirely as opponents and then discount the fact that half of them lean more conservative than progressive.
Sure and the voters who did not participate in the election would all have voted the democratic party. I think the election showed that there are real people who apparently don't agree with the democratic party and it would probably be good to listen to these people instead of telling them what to do. (I see the same phenomenon in the Netherlands by the way. The government seems to have decided that they know better than the general public because voters who disagree are "uninformed" or "uneducated". This is absolutely the opposite of democracy. You do not just brush whole swats of the population to the side when they don't agree. It breaks the feedback loop that democracies should have.)
We have an electoral college that essentially disenfranchises any voter that is not voting with the majority unless your state is so close that it could be called a swing state. This affects red state democratic leaning voters just as much as blue state republican leaning voters…their votes are all worthless. For example, the state with the largest number of Trump voters is California, but none of their votes helped decide the election because California as a whole chose Kamala. And let’s not forget that we have one of the largest metropolitan areas and several territories that legally can’t vote for the president or have representation of any kind in the federal government.
A lot of people try to claim the popular vote as a measure of who won over the country’s opinion, but that’s simply not possible because the incentives and structure of the electoral college make it impossible to use as a measure of that.
The best we have for measuring who won over the hearts and minds of the country are polls. Polls are full of faults, but if executed correctly, they don’t disenfranchise by structurally underrepresenting entire classes of people. And the results of polling over the last hundred years suggest that Americans generally lean to the left of how our votes play out. You can call bullshit all you want on that, and there are very fair criticisms of polling as a measure of who would vote for what, but the fact of the matter is that the Republican Party knows this. That is why they oppose any attempt to get rid of the electoral college and also why they refuse to entertain enfranchisement of DC and US Territories. They know they’ll lose.
My favorite stat about this is that more people voted for Trump in California than either of Texas or Florida
No, they just don't care / too lazy / whatever. We get one minority's preferences over a slightly smaller minority.
You can not at the same time count non-voters entirely as opponents and then discount the fact that half of them lean more conservative than progressive.
> It is not and has never been half. 2024 voter turnout was 64%
He said half of voters, those who didn't vote aren't voters.
When I replied, the comment said "Americans", per the edit