Not a majority of Americans, a plurality of voters. They won power, barely, but they don’t have a mandate.

In states like Kentucky a d Oklahoma? Think again. These places are overwhelmingly trumpy. The nation as a whole barely voted him in, but in many red states his numbers are very high. My home county in Tx voted 80% Trump.

But you're focusing on small counties, essentially "land that votes".

One metro area generally outweighs 90% of the counties in a state.

Take Oregon for example. Look at eastern Oregon where trump ran away with like 80% of the vote. But then you look at population numbers for those counties and you'll quickly realize that ONE NEIGHBORHOOD in Portland has 5x as many residents as that entire county. One neighborhood in Portland actually has more people than most of Oregon counties. It's kinda wild how empty they are.

The fact is that conservatives are pretty outnumbered. Which is why conservatives disenfranchise voters and rely on gaming the electoral college. It's also why conservatives tend to move to where other conservatives live, among other reasons. If people showed up to vote then Republicans would lose elections way more often.

But looking at a map and seeing red counties is not "more people voted trump". It's just "sparsely populated counties voted trump" which is not the same thing.

There's a subreddit called "People Live in Cities" that makes fun of this misinformation tactic. It's just maps that show where people live, but cite other metrics.

Every county in Oklahoma, including the ones containing their cities, went for Trump in 2024. What you’re saying is often true, but GP is exactly right about some of the midwestern states.

The popular vote went ~2/3 in OK to Trump.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...

Of all the states Oklahoma is certainly one of them, however its 4 million people aren't even 2% of the total US population.

Cherry-picking aside, the victory margin in the 2024 election was the smallest in over five decades, only the 2000 and 2020 elections (where the loser of popular vote was able to seize power on technicalities, they had negative victory margins) were smaller.

Antipathy for the innocent and a pleasure in collateral suffering and death is a key tenet of conservatism. Maybe clean up your soul a bit.

Unfortunately, a lot of liberals live in these states too. This entire country would be blue if we didn't have the electoral college.

But if you're in the mood for not feeling sympathy, because most cities have heat domes that tend to "push" storms away from them, storms tend to leave the more-liberal cities alone and instead wreak havoc through more rural towns.

To me, it's more of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" situation

>This entire country would be blue if we didn't have the electoral college.

And if immigration law hadn't been intentionally unenforced for the last 70 years the entire country would be red. What's your point?

Politics aside, it’s odd how often the entire debate misses the real bottleneck: assigning blame doesn’t restore operational capacity or re-architect the warning pipeline. If the system depends on 24/7, highly skilled human decision-makers, and you cut those positions, the outcome is predictable—slow, brittle responses.

ANY critical pipeline that can be broken by one missing seat is overdue for technical reinforcement