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This timeline is fucking _wild_.
Nixon literally won his election by promising national price controls. The people love economic relief, even just the promise is enough to win elections.
(and his approval would be the same mid 40s it always was if gas prices were reasonable)
This is the problem when your entire identity and principles boil down to "doing what the social superior tells you to".
Trump won the popular vote in 2024 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Those people voted for the lies, knowing full well that they were lies, and then are acting surprised that the lies are lies.
Yes. Then the party that did that got trounced. Then nobody learned any lessons.
Biden’s inflation peaked worse than anything Trump has done. But telling voters you’re only slapping them after the other guy punched them is about as effective as you’d think. (There is zero sense of urgency from the White House around this either.)
And how did that work out for Biden?
Voters don’t like inflation. Blowing up energy prices by launching a war of choice while shutting down domestic production because windmills isn’t smart policy.
Current inflation is a fuckup [1]. Pretending it doesn’t exist is a fuckup. They aren’t unprecedented fuckups. But they are consistently punished.
Inflation is exceptionally high right now for a developed country. It’s feeding into cost-of-living issues that are animating voters.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/ 7.2 annualized in September
He’s a pariah everywhere on earth, most especially at home. The sad part is the democrats couldn’t mount a successful campaign against someone so unfit to lead. Now there’s nothing left to do but clean up the mess and undo the terrible harm he has caused and repair what can be once he’s finally out of our hair.
"We did vote". Except that an extraordinary number of people that could vote, didn't. So when somebody says "vote, people", they're obviously talking to those people that chose not to vote.
This would think out the representation significantly, and applied to presidential voting would be rather dificult. The highest share of eligible voters in US history to support a US President is 42.6% for Ulysees S. Grant (Harrison and McKinley both close behind with +40%). Not one President has ever broken the 50% of eligble voters mark, and even those presidents that won in relative landslides in the EC (Washington, Monroe, Roosevelt, Reagan, Nixon) all had shares of the eligible votes that were in the 30%’s.
In Australia where there is compulsory voting (and fines for not voting) the turn out in the most recent national election was about 91%. If you have to get 50% of the eligible voters this means attracting about 55% of the ones who do turn up and vote.
In that same country, only 1 (Sydney) of the 172 seats in the House of Represenatives was won by a candidate with more than 55% of the vote but turnout in that district was ‘only’ 87.4%. Even though the candidate won 55% of the 87% of eligible vote, she fell 3700 votes short of winning 50% of all eligible voters.
Australia make it compulsory to vote and easy to vote, too, and they still can’t get everyone to the polls. And even in the safest seat in the country, you still have the clear winner - the second place candidate was 34 points back! - falling short of the 50% of eligible voters mark.
Grandted, Australia is a different system to the US, but I would be interested to understand how you imagine you could get people to vote when the threat of fines and prosecution still sees countries like Australia fall 10% short of perfect attendance, and then why setting a higher bar than 50% + 1 vote results in a better system.
I suspect one way might be to make it very easy to vote, expensive (in fines or in criminal penalties) to not vote, and then to restrict the number of candidates to a two. But the downsides to that (forcing people to make a political choice or be fined, offering only two options in a complex world) seem significant, too.
And what if there are, say, ten candidates?