Hacker News Reader

> nationalist xenophobia the true most important priority for this administration

It is a little more complicated than that. It is what around 40% of American population want. (Then another 9.5% or so voted for Trump based on the price of eggs, the fact that the other candidate was a woman, and so on).

View on HN

40% of the voting population*

Actually, it was ~30% of the voting population.

According to Wikipedia[0]:

Trump/Vance received 77,302,580 votes (49.8% of votes cast)

Harris/Walz received 75,017,613 votes (48.3% of votes cast)

Total votes cast: 152,320,193.

Those in the US eligible to vote[1]: ~250-260 million.

77,302,580/250,000,000 == ~0.3 or 30%.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...

[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2020/... [PDF]

That's worse, though. It implies that 40% of the "electorate" was (in some combination) either prevented from voting or not bothered enough by the difference between plausible electoral outcomes to actually try to influence said outcome.

Just because the people voted for Trump does not mean that the people don't want visa laws followed. Also, voting for someone does not give that someone carte blanche to do whatever the hell they please.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com