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Comment by jachee | Hacker News Reader

That’s some creative mathematic gymnastics you’re doing there. “Anyone who didn’t vote chose the one who gamed the electoral college best.”

But that still does NOT mean anywhere near half of Americans actively chose the current situation. To say so is wholly, maliciously, egregiously disingenuous.

EDIT - Showing my work:

US Census in 2020 - 331,449,281

2024 Trump votes - 77,284,118

Even skipping any possibility for growth since 2020, 77.3mil/331.5mil is not “>50% of Americans” by any possible mathematical definition.

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There was no electoral college gaming in 2024.

You're right that my numbers were of the voting eligible population, though, and not the total population. Okay, so let's work that out.

244,666,890 total eligible voters - 156,336,693 total ballots cast = 88,330,197 passive votes for Trump

88,330,197 passive votes for Trump + 77,284,118 active votes for Trump = 165,613,316 total votes for Trump / 331,449,281 total US population = 49.9% of the total population figure

That is, indeed, just shy of 50%. So I'll concede that Trump did not have >50% of Americans supporting him. Just >50% of American voters.

By your logic the “passive voters” would also support Harris if she were the winner. So you have to count them her way, too.

Which means they cancel out and no, “>50% of Americans” still don’t support the current regime.

No. Passive voters effectively for the winner, not the loser even if they don't know in advance who that will be. They're delegating their decision to their fellow actual voters, whatever that may be. Perhaps it's because they trust others to know better or perhaps because they don't care. I've tried to do this explicitly in a small club election submitting my vote as for "whoever gets the most votes" but the administrators didn't like that :P

Nobody gamed the electoral college this election. Trump won the popular vote too.

Many voters are voting for the lesser of two evils; they don't like either candidate. Non-voters are simply taking that to the next level: they can't decide between two evils strongly enough to value casting a vote.

Bikeshedding over the difference between active vs passive votes in a single-winner first-past-the-post election is fruitless.

If they're truly both evils, there's always the option to do a write-in vote for someone else. Futile? Sure. But hopefully headlines like "X won the election with 30% of the vote" would start to raise eyebrows in ways that "X won the election with 49% of the vote" doesn't.

Go back and read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212390

“voted for by >50%” is what I’m refuting. It’s literally, factually untrue.

I didn't argue that Trump received ≥50% of votes cast.

GP's point was that far less than 50% cared enough to vote against Trump, which was their only real option if they didn't like him.

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