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Comment by jghn | Hacker News Reader

> when the majority of people who decided to vote voted for the person

You're not wrong. However the portrayal of a mandate is a bit of a media fiction. He didn't have notably more votes than any other recent president.

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Also, the House can't claim a public mandate due to gerrymandering.

But the people who did vote for him explicitly voted for all the stuff he's doing right now. Nothing that he's currently doing is surprising, except maybe for the fact that a politician actually followed through on so many campaign promises.

I don’t recall “we’re gonna kill science research, cancer research, we’re gonna make a million poor children die of AIDS and tuberculosis” in any campaign ads.

His actions were outlined in Project 2025 throughout his candidacy. Surprised all it took was a simple statement of ignorance for people to completely dismiss what was plainly written what was going to happen (and currently is).

"I love the poorly-educated!" was not empty rhetoric. Only a country that gives slow-witted people the same political power as those on the right side of the IQ bell curve could elect a Trump democratically.

So would you would take the vote away from " those on the right side of the IQ bell curve"? (That has been done before, you know. You might be somewhat uncomfortable sitting with those who once did it, however).

Both parties actually target a bimodal IQ distribution. The D distribution covers most of the left tail and the upper-mid, and the R distribution covers the lower-mid and most of the right tail. You generally expect interleaved affiliation like this; it's just a question of how many bands there are. R avg is actually slightly higher, although that doesn't tell the full story. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

I don't think it's a partisan question, although it'd be interesting to repeat the survey today given how the makeup of the Republican party has changed since 2014. Keep in mind Trump could not have won re-election with the support of Republican constituencies alone.

You had to be genuinely gullible to vote for Trump this time, but that wasn't the case in 2016. I'm thinking of the blue-collar union members who voted for the Trump '24 ticket, for example, bitching to everybody who would listen about the price of eggs under Biden. In 2014 they would have been dragging down the Democrats' collective IQ, and now they've switched sides. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are still registered Democrats.

> You had to be genuinely gullible to vote for Trump this time

It seems like he's mostly doing what his coalition was hoping he would do? Certainly to a greater degree than in 2016. I have not seen any credible indications of post-election regret from his coalition.

I have not seen any credible indications of post-election regret from his coalition.

They believed that things were bad and that Trump would make them better rather than worse. If that's not gullibility, I don't know what is.

His voters will ultimately be among his greatest victims... but he'll blame Biden for whatever goes wrong, and they'll lap it up like a dog with a dish of antifreeze, just like they always do.

I remember warnings of all this bullshit going around the socials. Kinda funny how it's playing out *exactly the fuck like those warnings portrayed*.

For those who voted for him I understand the people who are happy about what's happening. Those who claim they didn't "vote for this": they don't deserve to have a vote. The writing was on the wall in clear script.

He repeatedly stated he knew nothing about Project 2025. So arguably he's not following through on his campaign promises. Some of his voters I'm sure saw through his bullshit, but many were conned.

It's a far stretch to say that this is what the majority of his voters wanted. Certainly many Republican voters have seemed very upset about this stupid blitzkrieg dismantling of core services.

People love being conned. And he has been conning people a long time, and is very good at it. I expect most of the money he and Melania made on their meme coins were from his followers.

I disagree. In particular, the complete disrespect with which he and Elon are going about "cutting costs" and the way he's handling Ukraine would likely have lost him the election were they known beforehand.

More people voted against Trump than voted for.

• 77,302,580 voted for this administration (49.8%)

• 77,935,722 voted against this administration (50.2%)

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43191410

Out of curiosity, how many weeks/months of late vote counting did that take? At the time the election was called, and for at least a couple weeks after iirc, he was ahead.

The anti-administration votes are split across many candidates, this isn't a tally of Trump vs Kamala.

Out of curiosity, why does this matter?

Why does it matter how long it took to count all the votes?

If you want to allege election fraud, don't beat around the bush.

No, what the previous poster said is that more people voted for other candidates than for Trump, and that's always been pretty clear. 49.8% of the votes went to Trump. That means 50.2% went to other candidates (Harris, Jill Stein, Chase Oliver, etc.)

IMHO it's kind of meaningless to count the popular vote as it's not a popular election, which influences the results. Why vote in Texas or California? You already know who will win. Will that balance each other out? Unclear.

That said, I do agree with the broader point that a narrow victory shouldn't give full control of the complete (federal) government, especially considering how they're going about things. But fixing that requires serious changes to the democratic system and good luck with that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(politics)

I'm not responding to a lazy condescending Wikipedia link dump where I have to guess what you could perhaps mean with it. If you have something to say, then say it. Otherwise don't post.

> But fixing that requires serious changes to the d̶e̶m̶o̶c̶r̶a̶t̶i̶c̶ s̶y̶s̶t̶e̶m̶

the United States of America's electoral system.

The Heath Robinson contraption in the US is hardly synonomous with Democracy, at best it's the oldest, creakiest example of a modern democracy.

> Why vote in Texas or California

For example because it’s not only president on the ballot. While I don’t think these results are perfectly representative of the support/opposition (for the reasons you describe) they are still representative.

You're being a little deceptive here, by summing votes for all candidates combined as "against".

What really matters is Trump v Harris, and Trump won that both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.

The point is that the media immediate glommed on to a "popular mandate" with Trump. Yet, it was very much not true.

He arguably won a popular vote. That's barely a pop;lar vote mandate.

I couldn’t get half of my liberal friends to even vote. And, it wasn’t because they didn’t like Kamala - I sensed that they were just tired of globalism.

> I sensed that they were just tired of globalism.

With what, a compass? This is an absurd statement, I bet they weren't wearing clothes manufactured in America, or using a phone that was built domestically.

The easiest way to fatigue a nation of nationalists is to let the world move on. The Axis forces might have been tired of globalism, but the globalists sure as hell weren't.

There is no deception, those numbers are what they say they are, if you click through the link you can see the source document.

More people voted for a candidate other than Trump.

In fact, he had less margin than any election since 2000. Even Hillary in 2016 had a larger popular vote margin of victory than Trump 2024 despite having lost the electoral college.

So, Trump in 2016, not 2024, was actually the lowest (negative, in fact) margin for a winning candidate since 2000 (and was actually lower—more negative—than 2000’s also-negative margin.)

Indeed. And yet with certain previous presidents we've been told that because the margin of victory is so slim, they're already a lame duck. But here, it's a mandate.

You seem to be fixated on a vote system that we do not use.

Despite what people say, land does vote. And you're right: land voted for Trump.

But that's not what's being discussed in this subthread. The media portray Trump as having a popular vote mandate. That's not true

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