It’s probably best to disregard what I said here. I didn’t realize that the West Coast states were still being counted; at least they were as of three hours ago when @Sage_Rat posted it.
This whole thread is a boondoggle of people failing to confirm the underlying assumption of the discussion.
And for a little perspective, if Harris had picked up just 8% more votes in every state, that’s 5.6M votes right? She also sweeps ALL of the swing states except possibly Arizona.
Your numbers are wrong. Trump is now pretty much tied with 2020. Harris is 11 million behind 2020.
I don’t expect this will be a popular take, here or anywhere, and I’m not sure how much I would advocate it yet, but I’ll throw it out there. Covid has made broad swaths of Americans considerably less intelligent.
Even mild first infections can result in a loss of three IQ points and subsequent infections lose another 2 points. Since we’ve had a “let it rip” strategy for the last four years, how many millions of people are on their fourth infection or more? That’s ten lost IQ points. I’m not one to think IQ maps directly to smartness, but it does mean there are a lot more people thinking less rationally and more primally or impulsively.
Much like lead poisoned a generation or two into making bad decisions, Covid infections may be causing collective American decision-making to regress significantly. Ironically, Donald Trump’s disastrous handling of covid may have inadvertently led to his re-election.
At least, that’s the theory.
In general, I’d put his disastrous handling of most things with his re-election.
Tariffs → Inflation → Re-elected because of inflation
Weakening security posture → Emboldened enemies → War in Eastern Europe → Oil prices go up → Inflation → Re-elected because of inflation
Weakening security posture → Emboldened enemies → Wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East → Sense of security lowers → Re-elected because of sense of global insecurity
Pulls nearly all the troops out of Afghanistan → Biden is forced to complete the pull-out that Trump set the stage for → Biden ends up looking incompetent when that falls apart
In general, Trump made changes that all had a delayed effect. Those effects screwed us all over, and made people want to change the leadership. They failed to notice that they already had done that.
The difference is down to <11M, and California is still less than 2/3 counted. There are probably another 6.8M left in CA, and another million or two elsewhere.
People aren’t realizing that millions of ballots have been counted over the past few days, with several million more to go. There in fact have been 70.3 million popular votes for Harris as of this writing, with more to come (CA, OR, and WA are taking their time).
That oft-repeated “16 million votes lost!!” Is going to end up being seven or eight million. Still a hit, yes, but less than half of the false narrative making the rounds.
Clinton, Biden, and Harris all ran a campaign based on “don’t vote for the other guy, he’d be a terrible president”. Only Biden had the advantage of running against Trump while he was an incumbent. Running as the challenger while one / one’s party is the incumbent doesn’t work as well as running as the challenger while one is actually the challenger.
In other words, there are apparently 15 or so million people who are willing to vote against a President Trump, but not for a Democratic president. They had that opportunity in 2020, but not in 2016 or 2024.
It’s kind of funny how the conspiracy theorists are incapable of seeing Trump as capable of increasing his support. Their guy just had the biggest victory for a Republican presidential candidate in two decades and their reaction is that it’s impossible and fraudulent for him to have won anyone over. I wish.
Do you think it will get close to Biden’s 81M? And remember Harris only needed less than 200K in each of the swing state.
So Dems can’t remember life 4-8 years ago?
Why are we all acting like it’s a given all those people were Democrats, though? As opposed to many or even most being otherwise Whateverer types who in 2020 had time on their hands in the middle of an ongoing emergency that was in their faces.
Right. And likewise, many of the “whateverer types” probably voted for Trump this time around, because - no matter how much better than Europe we handled the crisis (these whateverer types don’t know that) - they feel the pain of inflation.
Not all of them. But for the 15 million or so that didn’t turn out this time, yes, they likely have forgotten their emotional state that was contributing to their decision making 4 years ago. The emotions of wanting to vote against Trump are a lot easier to experience when Trump is actually POTUS.
You really think Republicans voted for Biden in any non-miniscule number?
Did I say that anywhere?
Then who voted for Biden and didn’t vote this election if not Republicans or Democrats?
Speaking of that an interesting video from Mick West,
Except that apparently, iirc more republicans died that Democrats.
Inflation was the reason most voters gave.
Yep, Snopes even weighed in-
Neither claim was true, for a very simple reason: The millions of “missing” votes weren’t actually missing — they simply hadn’t been counted yet.
Not Dems, mostly independents, and yeah, everyone’s memories dim. The point is- prices increased almost 25% due to inflations, and honestly, few people understand economics.
Right.
Independents. Also people who didnt vote in 2016.
Overall, one-in-four 2020 voters (25%) had not voted in 2016.
As of March 2024, 45 million registered voters in these areas identified themselves as Democrats. At 38.28%, Democrats represented the single largest share of registered voters in the states and territories that allow voters to indicate partisan affiliation on their registration forms.
A total of 35.7 million registered voters identified themselves as Republicans, representing 30.35% of registered voters in these areas.
a total of 32.5 million registered voters identified themselves as independents or unaffiliated with any political party. This amounted to 27.67% of registered voters in these areas.
So almost a third of voters are Independents.