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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

By pissing off half the country?

Keep in mind that the American election system is such that only 20% of Americans (or 30% of eligible voters) voted for Trump in order to get him into office. So it really does not follow that a move against Trump would anger half the country. Trump famously lost the popular vote as well, and he has one of the lowest approval ratings on entering office of any President in modern history.

Finally, who's more likely to use Lyft? Trump's support base is shockingly hard to truly pin down, but certainly a lot of his base resides in rural areas, not cities -- areas where Lyft (and Uber) may not even operate or, if they do, the volume of rides is far, far lower. My impression, in fact, is that there's almost an inverse correlation between number of heavy Uber/Lyft users and Trump support in the area -- it'd be interesting to see someone actually try to verify/debunk that impression with real data.

Using your math/logic, what percentage of Americans voted for Obama?

Good point.

30.79% in 2008 [0]

28.05% in 2012 [1]

[0] 0.582 x 0.529 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

[1] 0.511 x 0.549 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

Per http://bipartisanpolicy.org/library/2012-voter-turnout/ in 2008 there voted 62.3% of eligible voters in total; Obama won with 52.92% of this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Barack_Ob...), that makes 32.96% of all eligible voters.

In 2012, turnout was 57.5%, of which Obama won 51.06%. That makes 29.36% of all eligible voters.

The problem is that it's really, really hard to get numbers on the question "how many people did not register themselves for voting rights, even if they could legally have done so?".

You can usually get stats on turnout as both % of registered voters and % of voting age population. Neither of those is exactly % of legally-eligible population, but together they bracket it.

I can only comment anecdotally, but I went to like six bars in a conservative southern town last night (long bar hop, don't drink, so don't judge too harshly) - people were discussing this at every single one

If they had said "Hillary Clinton is the best thing ever", that would have pissed off half the country.

Trump wasn't popular; he was just popular enough, and it's for a variety of reasons, not just one.

By choosing the right half to piss off.

I'm wondering if that half is part of their demographic? It seems to me that it wouldn't be.

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