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Normally in Democracy the majority or popular vote wins, however due to the electoral college America has, it doesnt necessarily mean the majority voted for the winner. This was the case for Bush, and some other moments in the past.
FYI: it looks like Trump is going to win the popular vote on this one as well.
How in the fuck.
Like what drives a majority of Americans to vote for a demented toddler. It's insane.
As a kid I always wondered how on Earth did Hitler ever make anyone follow himself, how did those people not realise. Turns out a majority of people are just fucking morons.
Yep and the slow gutting of the education system isn't making it any better.
You have an entire generation coming of voting age who are rabid Trump supporters. They don't care about policies or democracy or public institutions. They don't care about healthcare, social securities, or the stability of the economy.
They don't care about any of the things that have been built up through generations. They lack critical thinking ability.
The recipe works. If you make dumb kids they will vote for dumb people. It works so well that part of the future plan for a trump presidency is to get rid of the department of education. Solidifying the Republican party indefinitely.
Without critical thinking and with mass media it's so easy to say every problem that people deal with is because the "other side" made it so. Even if the other side has been doing everything possible to achieve the opposite.
Americans aren't special. They're just as vulnerable to fascism as anybody else.
The MAGATs might as well be wearing brownshirts and saluting like Mussolini.
Blaming young people is up their with blaming immigrants and "gays" ect for [insert topic]. I would be very surprised if this was the case.
I think it's a little more nuanced.
They don't blame young people. They blame lack of education.
You sure about that?
It goes on.
Anecodtally (at this point, this is all these discussions are), I think that Apathy, fear campaigns or outright money and campaigns ect become powerful levers where voting is non-mandatory.
I used to think Ukrainian politicians were fucking clowns. I guess we got outclowned.
For all practical purposes, about 30% of people are unfeeling morons - basically psychopaths. That’s the number that consistently opposes abortion, for instance. Add to that all the dumbasses who don’t know any better (the undecideds on any extremely obvious moral issue), et voila. That’s how you get slavery, nationalism, genocide, theocracy, you name it.
Unless people are willing to screen for psychopathy and remove it from the gene pool, the human species will keep fucking around until it finds out. Might be nuclear apocalypse or environmental collapse, but at this rate it’s inevitable.
Can we please not start arguing in favor of eugenics?
“Oh no, we wouldn’t want the psychopaths with the broken brains not to exist. That’s eugenics.”
You’re all fucking idiots.
The rise of the NSDAP has been studied quite a bit. Also, the psychological aspects are really interesting. Basically normal people can make all of this possible as long as the conditions are just right.
Hate.
Well they're making plenty more of that to go around
There are many leftists and minorities that have "voted strategically" time and time and time again only for things to get worse and worse.
This kind of disenfranchisement leads to apathy and low turnout.
We are told from a young age that our vote matters, and then when we are older we are told you can only vote for red fascist or blue fascist and many choose not to participate.
There are more who did not vote than who voted for Trump. This is not what the majority wants, but with the system as it is, it is not possible for the majority to voice what they actually genuinely want and have a chance to get it.
The votes do not have to be rigged at the ballot box for voting as a whole system to be rigged.
Americans voted in Reagan twice. They also elected Bush twice. This is not surprising.
It's the low turn out. Too many of us are nonparticipants
Non mandatory voting wouldnt help, being that its more susceptible to eroding a merit process from campaigns of fear or otherwise.
American politics isnt about choosing the best candidate its about choosing the one u hate least. The dems spent too much time playing identity politics that they forgot to play actuall politics.
And I was so loving Lina Khan's FTC, ~~asking~~ among other things...
Edit: autocorrect
And Harris has done worse than Biden in every county in America.
Not every state. Every county.
It's actually incredible how they tried to copy Hilary Clinton's campaign tactics of endorsements and warnings about Trump.
That didn't work last time. Why would it work now?
Or just talk about her policies: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50802-harris-vs-trump-on-the-issues-whose-policies-do-voters-prefer
Whether it's 48 or 52 % is an immaterial difference. Every other American who voted, voted for Trump. The rest don't seem to care either way. He has very broad popular assent and is as popular as Harris give or take a margin of error.
Everyone is lasered-focused on the EC because it makes all the difference for the practicalities, but if one is to make a broad judgement of whether Trump won fair and square the answer is "yeah, mostly". Further proof is the fact that the House is probably going to be his as well.
Americans now bear the collective responsibility for the horrors of the next 4(+?) years. Do not make the mistake of blaming the popular will of outright fascism on institutional failures, because institutions didn't force half of Americans to vote for the fascist, again.
I'll wait 72 hours before settling with it, in case any shenanigans were involved. I expect it's legitimate, but I want that window open if it's needed.
Trump is winning the popular vote by a pretty decent margin. The electoral college isn't the issue here.
They haven't finished counting that's why. Rural areas are faster to count and skew conservative.
A republican hasn't won the popular vote in 20 years. Trump is projected to win but like last time he'll lose the popular vote and win by virtue of the electoral college.
All the projections I'm seeing him show him almost certainly winning the popular vote. There's a gap of 6 million votes and almost every state is over 90% reported in. That gap is going to likely shrink a bit, but unfortunately it almost certainly won't be enough for him to even lose the popular vote.
Lets face it, we're (assuming you're american) apparently just a country of facists. It looks like GOP is going to have majority in both houses too so here comes project 2025 I guess.
Sorry bud, not a yank. You have my sympathies though.
If it turns out that he does indeed win the popular vote then yeah I'm sorry for your loss. A nest of at least 50% fascists or fascist enablers.
Heart aches for those that did their civic duty and yet have to suffer the repercussions :(
It looks like turnout is way down compared to last election. Trump is pulling about the same amount he did last time ( maybe a few million down, but there are still results to get). Harris is currently down 15M from where Biden was.
Trump's support is no larger than it was last time. Harris' supporters just didn't show up
Anyone who didn't show up is not a Harris supporter.
Wasn’t he ahead in 2016 around this time, but then once all was said and done he was a few mil behind?
But Trump won the popular vote this time
I believe the states responsible for those silly outcomes have since passed laws to prevent it happening again.
Could be wrong, but I listened to a podcast last week with an American professor who's pretty much written the book, explaining the history of the Electoral College and how it really works. I'm sure he said those states since fixed those loopholes.
Either way, the damage is done today. Another four years of stupidity in charge.
This is not correct. The electoral college is exactly as susceptible to giving the win to the person with fewer votes as it was in 2000 and 2016. It's also not an issue that's due to any state in particular and is not an issue that can be solved by individual state action. The NPVIC would fix it but requires the cooperation of many states and is not in effect, and has stalled pretty hard in recent years.
Nah - it's at least partly correct.
Faithless electors have never once affected the outcome of a US election.
Seriously - the whole thing is such a befuddling mess to us non-Americans.
How exactly can one win the popular vote but not the actual election? From the outside, the reporting I've seen always talks about the faithless elector problem (not in those words - just in describing the problems). Is it more to do with how many votes (electors) each state gets, based on population size?
That's it, yes - each state gets as many electoral votes as it has congressmen, including senators. Most states award all of their electoral votes to whoever wins the state, with no proportionality to it at all - only two states (Nebraska and Maine, neither one large) do anything proportional with their votes.
With a system like that it's easier to see how things can end up with the less popular candidate winning - they can, for example, sneak by with 50.1% of the vote in just enough states to win, but bomb it out with 20% of the vote in all the other states. That's an extreme example specifically for the purpose of illustration, but less extreme versions of that are usually what happens.
The electoral votes also aren't distributed entirely fairly - the number of electoral votes per person tends to be larger for less populated states. The less populated states also tend to be Republican states. So in a very real sense, each person's vote counts for "more" in those states, and "less" in states with high populations. I don't believe it's really possible to fix this problem without vastly increasing the number of electoral votes, but congress currently has its size capped at 535 members for what I consider not very good reasons.
Yes, the whole system is trash from the ground up. But much of its structure is defined in the constitution itself, which is very difficult to change.
You think laws matter to the privileged?
u̇nfoṙtcėnetlı, H ſımz t bı ƿinıŋ ð pȯpyulṙ vot æz ƿel.
spoiler
Unfortunately, he seems to be winning the popular vote as well.