Democrats vastly outspent republicans. https://www.axios.com/2024/10/31/democrats-republicans-ad-sp...

I don't think we can look at it that simply.

Of the voters who didn't vote for Trump or Harris, certainly some of them would have voted for Trump (or not voted at all) if their third-party candidate didn't exist. Put another way, if we had universal approval or ranked-choice voting, it's plausible that Trump would have ended up with a popular vote majority (but it could have gone either way, certainly).

> there were approximately 90M people who were eligible to vote that did not vote.*

Whenever an election is decided, I generally move all of those uncast votes over to the tally of whoever won. Staying home and not voting is the same thing as a soft-vote for whoever wins.

> voter suppression

I wish we could really quantify this. Not that it would change MAGA minds about anything, but it could be useful to know.

> a massive amount of ad money

Harris had a similarly massive amount of ad money, too, and it didn't help.

Honestly, I think the failures of the Democratic party machine as a whole are just as responsible for Harris's loss as GOP underhandedness is.

You said I was looking at simply. I reported the election results. The majority of the voters did not vote for this administration.

> Democratic party machine as a whole are just as responsible for Harris's loss as GOP underhandedness is.

This we agree on.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-spent-290-million-2...

It isn't just the money, but whom it benefits. Someone almost no discretionary income, 100 or 300 is a ton of money. Musk won't even notice the 290M.

Just because I didn't vote does not mean my vote was "suppressed".

It is a statistical measure, did I say your vote was suppressed?

This is just an article where Wikipedia editors cry about the election. There's not even any real allegations of voter suppression in here. If the Republican party is suppressing voters, they are doing a pretty poor job of it in light of record turnout, and probably to their detriment.

I don't think that is why he won.

Dems basically handed this election to Trump; Biden running when he had memory issues, then handing it to Harris whose numbers were questionable against Trump(with the braindead excuse that only she could get the funds), along with generally not responding to issues voters obviously care about(border), trying to ignore issues like excessive wokeness/DEI instead of admitting it is a problem.

Trump is going to lie and obviously only cares about himself, some % of rubes will vote for that, but you don't have to make it so damn easy for him.

Once Biden waited so long to fact reality and drop out, there was no time for a proper primary. The mistake was not really the handing of it to Harris, it was dropping out so late that there wasn’t really any better option.

Also he was basically AWOL for months beforehand while Trump was campaigning. Trump’s economic plan was absurd but he was out there talking about it without any real pushback, while Biden seemed to be hoping that people would recognize how the IRA had helped them on their own. Harris might not have been the best candidate but I’m not sure anyone other than Obama could’ve gotten a national coalition together in that short a time – it’s like putting off studying for months and trying to pull an all-nighter before the exam.