What's the intersection of Americans who won't vote for a woman presidential candidate and Americans who support MAGA? I imagine it's fairly high.

That said, I don't believe there's a single factor that determined the election. A flip in any of a dozen or more factors could have resulted in a different outcome.

I’m sure it’s only a small percentage of voters who would have voted for a male Democrat. But that’s all it would take to flip that election.

Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense.

> Our elections have been so close that there are numerous single factors determining the outcomes, if that makes sense.

Not sure if that's specifically directed at me, but that's exactly what I said.

I don’t usually bother reacting strongly to anything on HN but that is a complete fabrication.

Is this a bot? Is this someone telling an unpopular truth on an alt account? Is this someone telling a fabrication on an alt account?

The best part about Hacker News is that you can't really know. It's a problem inherent to the kind of social space HN is trying to be; open registration, and lax control over abuse of user moderation tools.

Real person. Live in the south. Kamala being a woman had no impact on her election chances. Most people in my circles were big Haley fans.

Claiming that half the country wouldn't vote for a woman because Kamala didn't win and couldn't possibly have had any other faults as a candidate is very bot like, however.

The funny part is that most female world leaders are right wing, since right wing voters are more likely to vote for a woman than left wing voters. There are many more left wing female candidates, but those that win elections are mostly right wing.

In the US, the far-right party elects many fewer women than the center-right party[0]

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/21/women-acc...

HN is more tightly controlled than it lets on. User moderation tools are suspended if a user doesn't use them in accordance with a pro-corporate right-wing bias.

Do you have personal experience with this? I was under the impression that abuse of moderation tools was common due to the fact that user moderation tools and open registration do not mix well.

Yes, I asked dang by email, and he told me flags from my account have been disabled because I flagged things he agreed with. I think votes are also disabled.

The buttons are still there, but they don't do anything.

It's funny, because I had been feeling this in my gut - the idea that they do have oversight over flagging and downvoting, and they just pick and choose who they go after based on biases.

To that end, I've actually been avoiding the downvote and flag button entirely. It's handy to close off an avenue of admin retaliation, but on a deeper level I feel like the reflexive race to downvote people you disagree with is the "game" part of gamified engagement.

Besides, if an HN user says something horrendous, I feel like other HN users deserve to know the kind of company they have on this site, instead of tone-policing it under the rug.

It's not like you're worse off it your fl-gging is sh-dow-disabled, than if you never fl-g at all.

There is also word-based fl-gging. I don't know whether HN itself is doing it or some users.

There's no aspect of this that we haven't publicly explained over and over again. Here's one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818. Here are countless others: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If you read some of those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. What you shouldn't do is take commenters' claims about it un-skeptically, because sometimes (as in this case) they are false.

You don't explain the aspect where a certain political group generates way more flaggable content, and then you flag-ban those who flag it, which promotes that content because it is no longer flagged.

You also don't explain how 2 posts per 3 hours constitutes a "ban".

Re your first statement: certainly I've addressed that issue many times, but I can do it again: I don't believe that claim is true. It merely feels true to people with strong political passions, because everyone always over-weights the contributions of their enemies and under-weights the contributions of their own side. The significant thing—I was going to say "the ironic thing", but it isn't ironic—is that this class of politically passionate users all have the same perception even though they may have entirely opposing beliefs. In this they resemble each other more than they do anyone else.

I don't understand your second statement.

We definitely banned you, for the reasons I gave at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46699941. Banned accounts can still post to HN but their posts are killed by default.

You seem to be asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46694184 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46691754. Those comments were killed by user flags. That was before we banned you.

The buck always stops with the platform owners. You don't get to blame users for moderation decisions.

By that argument, it's we who are doing all the upvotes, downvotes, and flags on the site. I don't think most HN readers would look at it that way.

The distinction between moderation done by users (votes, flags, etc.) and moderation done by admins (killing posts, banning accounts, etc.) is long established and well understood by the community. It's not about blaming.

I do not take their claims un-skeptically. I've been lied to one too many times by users who claim, "Oh I totally didn't do anything to get banned, bro."

But I don't trust you either, and my reasons for being reluctant to flag and downvote are genuine. This is because I've also seen moderation teams who swear up and down that they're not biased, but who later get caught out when they put their finger on the scale through action or deliberate inaction.

But there's another dimension to the unfrustworthiness, because I have also seen moderation teams who don't put their finger on the scale per se, but are so invested in their own rules that they let their community rot beneath their feet from people who have figured out how to manipulate them.

If you can find an instance of me saying we're not biased, I'd love to see it, because I'm pretty sure I've never said that.

What I've said, and believe, is that of course we're biased, because it's impossible not to be and because unconscious bias is a thing, but that we at least try to mitigate the effects of it, and have a lot of practice at doing so. Are those efforts negligible? I doubt it. I think HN would be a different place if we weren't trying to do that.

This is unfortunate but probably more true than anyone wants to admit.

I know women in NYC who voted Trump because they believed Harris was not tough enough to handle the geopolitical stage. I know Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who voted Trump because they believe they are being replaced by a wave of new immigrants who will vote Democrat. My friends, an interracial couple who voted democrat, voted Trump because the schools were going to give their kids hormone pills without their consent.

The amount of crazy and not so crazy shit I hear for voting for this idiot is incredible. Though the Dems do themselves no favors either.

I don't understand why you're downvoted. People vote against their interest all the time. Which is why the 1% even exists.

> who voted Trump because they believed Harris was not tough enough

No, they voted for Trump because he was their guy then later made up a rational justification. We know that people generally do NOT make decisions by rationally evaluating things, their subconscious makes a decision and their conscious makes plausible rational arguments. (Yes, citation needed.)

People don’t always tell the truth about themselves, even to friends, even to family.

Much like I think if any Dem other than Hillary Clinton ran against Trump for his winning term 1, I think if the Dems had a proper primary process for this last election they'd probably have picked somebody who'd also have won.

That said, I'm not sure being a woman was worse than being from CA or black with a solid chunk of the electorate. (I'm reminded of how some of my own relatives seemed to want to avoid visiting us in CA growing up because they had such a strong notion of how "communist," "liberal," and dangerous it ostensibly was.)

In some ways this also illustrates that propaganda likely had a significant role, too, IMO.

They didn’t even have a proper primary with Hillary. She was anointed by the DNC to start and the party itself worked against other candidates any way it could to make sure she “won”. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the opposite of any candidate that might snag a single vote from the republicans, and unlikable among most dem voters themselves. Throw in the fact that they were so convinced of a victory that Trump flipped blue states by virtue of showing up versus ignoring them on the basis of “who cares, they’ll vote for me anyway”, and it was a recipe for disaster.

Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.

I don't really disagree with this but my opinion is that basically no one is capable of winning a US presidential campaign in the modern era in a matter of ~100 days. The fact Harris was a uniquely bad candidate that weirdly refused to differentiate herself from Biden, just exacerbated that problem.

If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.

That’s a good point. The fact that the administration and media spent nearly 6 months telling the world not to believe our own eyes did that campaign no favors.

Especially when it became so untenable to continue the lie that they had to implicitly admit to it along with falsely accusing everyone else of misinformation.

Hillary had 3M more votes than Trump.

That doesn't mean a different candidate wouldn't have had a better electoral map or more votes.

Dems broadly want Trump-esque policies to be enacted. They don't care if it's them or the republicans enacting those policies. They do need to fill both slots to prevent any danger of a left wing person getting elected.

Elections are kind of an "average" / pulse of the ~236 million eligible voters.

The reasons people vote a certain way or can't be bothered to show up at the polls are going to vary significantly across the nearly quarter billion humans making those choices.

So any attempt to "single issue" explain election results are going to be wrong, particularly in a close election like this one. (49.8% vs 48.3%, and Electoral Votes in battleground states often in the tens of thousands of voters, out of tens of millions.

But many of the issues certainly contribute to flipping voters between one candidate, another, or staying home.

So sure, totally, gender and race played a role.

The economy (and steep inflation) played a role.

Biden being an increasingly disliked incumbent, staying in the race too long, and Harris being too conservative to distance herself from him played a role.

News and propaganda played a role (and I suspect this is a big one. Remember when Trump was all like Deep State, Democrats and Epstein, let's get those files released! And then it came time to do it, and for some reason he was like... oh that's a bad idea?)

No doubt individual state politics play a role, too - an unpopular governor might give the opposing party a boost.

But yeah, if the Democratic nominee was a) nominated, and b) a white male, the odds probably would've shifted in their favor enough to flip those few battleground states.

It seemed like the D. did not want to win. They wanted to make a point. The R seemingly also wanted to make a point. The current administration also strives to make an point here and there, against anyone's best interest (including themselves): the silly tariffs, the insane ICE, the irrational play around Greenland, etc.

Both parties are quite disconnected from the interests of the "ordinary people", and the "ordinary people" voting from them are often quite disconnected from the reality; instead they want someone who would approve their preconceptions, and would stick it to "them" in the endless political sports match.

Which may not be that endless: if the political climate of the US deteriorates enough, some authoritarian populist could just get elected and never leave. The current administration likes to hint at that, but they seem to inane to actually pull this off. Somebody less theatrical and more cold-blooded could, though :(

I don't buy this - Harris had a big bump in the polls as soon as she entered the race and I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything. This bullshit that American's won't vote for a woman is just an excuse not to run women and to deflect blame towards a culture war issue and away from the fact that the democrats don't actually have popular policies.

I voted for Harris, I even canvased for her, but I think its a sexist oversimplification to suggest she lost because she is a woman. She lost because her campaign was lame.

> I think she could have won if she had offered voters anything.

But she did offer voters lots of things if you spent 30 seconds listening to her and stepped out of the faux news and Twitter echo chambers.

And basically every last bit of it would’ve helped the average American. She just didn’t lie and claim she had a magic wand to fix price gouging her first week in office.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/30/kamala-harris...

*And to be clear, it’s rather interesting that both Kamala and Hillary were blamed for “not having a platform” which seems to be the go-to for people who refuse to vote for a woman but can’t actually attack them on their platform. Just claim they don't have one or didn’t do a good enough job explaining it!

Politicians should not preemptively give in to political resistance and tell their voters they can't solve their problems because its "unrealistic." You'd think we would have figured this out in the Clinton campaign. Politicians should have a set of goals they fight for rabidly and when political resistance manifests they should point their fingers at it and say "Those assholes over there kept me from forgiving student loans."

Democrats who believe in "realistic" political campaigns are why awful people keep winning.

I thought you said she didn’t have a platform?

Now you’re criticizing her for “giving in to political resistance” - and by that you mean not getting up on stage and just knowingly and blatantly lying to the American public by claiming she would single handedly drop the price of groceries and gasoline in her first week in office while also ending the war in Ukraine?

I think you’re both moving the goal posts and claiming that the rest of us are looking for a presidential candidate that has no moral compass. I’m good.

Like I said, I canvassed for and voted for Harris, but when I think of her campaign, all I can think of is "wiping the debt of Pell Grant recipients who start successful businesses that benefit disadvantaged communities."

This is the lamest bullshit policy which almost seems calculated to alienate voters who it doesn't put to sleep.

Please don't act like democratic politicians are losing because they have a moral compass. Ridiculous.

> She just didn’t lie and claim she had a magic wand to fix price gouging her first week in office.

This is part of Trumps genius and preys on many American's ignorance. Ask random people on the street if they understand the inflation rate for example. Most issues are complex and require nuance and complex fixes. Trump distills them down to simple problems when they are not, and lies with impunity that there are simple solutions. People believe him because it's too much work to believe anything else.

She’s known to own firearms. I wonder what would happen if one of these Democrat candidates released a video like “A girl and her Glock: Kamala goes John Wick”.

Similarly, AOC should visit the south, eat some grits, volunteer with some Black churches, and do a little skeet shooting with some good ole boys.

It would be perceived as pandering bullshit from either of them.

What the democrats need is an aggressive economic policy that actually will manifestly improve regular people's lives. If they cannot articulate such a thing and credibly convince the voter that they will fucking fight for it, they will never win.

She can articulate the policy at the shooting range while eating some grits. And drinking some Keystone Light. That is when they will be receptive to the ideas.

That won't do anything.

No one at a gun range is changing their vote.

Both parties already know which voters change their votes depending on the situation. The data's already told strategists in both parties that the hotspots are, generally speaking, a few counties in a few states in the midwest, Pennsylvania, and more and more Arizona. So they don't really need to do more than pay lip service to any others. Because the data's already told them that the others won't change their votes in any case.

I don’t care about the US anymore but it seems to me it’s always up to the Democrats to be responsible, while Republicans can literally end democracy and turn the country into a pay to play kleptocracy where you can even be intimate with children without consequences or backlash.

But the democrats are right wing as well…

> If they cannot articulate such a thing and credibly convince the voter that they will fucking fight for it, they will never win.

People say this but they lost by like 1% in 2024. If that had gone the other way by 1%, people would be talking about what political geniuses they are (as has happened in the past). Winning in this environment just means playing long enough that the noise goes your way eventually, and then everyone talks about what a political mastermind you are. Or if it goes against you then you're forever lost in the political wilderness. Until the next election when it eventually, randomly goes your way again.

So you're confirming that EVERYTHING about politics in the US is just... spectacle? a show?

Ideas and modeling no longer matters? What matters is that you're doing a TikTok eating a southern specialty?

It's not like the dems did either of those things.

Spectacles actually matter too. You need to know which one to perform and that requires certain understanding of your audience

It shouldn't. We should have a society where we treat politics with more deference. But for that, we would need to have long-form content, actual balanced debates on public television, and fight the "attention-span economy" of social networks...

I dunno if that would move the needle. Maybe?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/186248/quarter-voters-say-candi...

But I don't think that one performative step would help, it would require like decades of change on the platform of the Democratic party.

The Zohran model is to not pretend to be someone different, and exclusively focus on what you believe the core problem to be with a few clearly definable solutions (and no slogans).

She lost for the same reason Hillary lost. She came across as Marie Antoinette. Oblivious to the anger of the working class. Touting how great the economy was going and ignoring the resentment felt by those who believed the “liberal elite” betrayed them.

Frankly, bullshit. This was not about working class in the slightest. Working class as such supported and voted for democrats. The thing is, women are working class too, not just men. And farmers are frequently effectively rich owners - in unstable business bu owning a lot.

This was about all thosw isms and hierarchies we pretended dont exisr anymore.

From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-...

“As we move into the endgame of the 2022 election, the Democrats face a familiar problem. America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support.”

“This year, Democrats have chosen to run a campaign focused on three things: abortion rights, gun control, and safeguarding democracy—issues with strong appeal to socially liberal, college-educated voters. But these issues have much less appeal to working-class voters.”

“They are instead focused on the economy, inflation, and crime, and they are skeptical of the Democratic Party’s performance in all three realms.”

>From https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-...

You conveniently left out that the author (Ruy Teixeira[0]) of the piece you quoted is a senior fellow at the right-wing think tank that authored the Project 2025 roadmap.

Should we ask Stalin to critique US Cold War policies? Or maybe ask Xi Xinping to publicly assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan's defense posture too?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruy_Teixeira

False analogy. The Atlantic is a Democratic mouth piece and they posted his message because we Democrats will keep losing if we don’t wake up. Here is an article from another author with a similar message.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/democra...

Quote: The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump’s second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.

> Working class as such supported and voted for democrats.

I live in coastal CA, and a healthy majority of my “working class” friends are Trump supporters.

The ones in the trades, who are relatively high earners, are all Trump supporters.

You know what’s interesting though is I think that a Republican woman would be unbeatable. Many Democrats would be salivating at the historical opportunity.

Identity politics is not the way.

A Republican candidate could be a Muslim, a women, or trans, but that's not a good reason to vote for them. It should be about what they stand for. Voting for a Kristi Noem would be terrible, for example.

Similarly, the Democratic Party, if they're to win, should not depend on the opposition failing or on identity, but instead on solid ideas and the ability to communicate it well. Kamala wasn't that.

I think you're right in the sense that people, when given some kind of muscular policy or attitude, don't really care about gender per se.

Only when nothing else is on the line will they say "I won't vote for a woman."

>You know what’s interesting though is I think that a Republican woman would be unbeatable

Not anymore.

Three more years to climb out of the dumpster fire though. Then, maybe?

But right now? No.

In this moment, the political reality in the US is that Democrats would have to lose. Republicans, male or female, can't really win without that help. Especially in light of MAGA.

I would have thought Wisconsin would have been a wake up call for Republicans. But it hasn't happened yet.

So far both of these parties are sleepwalking into disaster and the world outside the US will pay a portion of that cost. Which is sad.

Haley would have been that person.

That would have required the Republican Party to not have been infested and eaten out from the inside by the Trump party.

A woman would never win the Republican primary as long as MAGA dominates the right.

And Democrats aren't so broadly driven by identity politics that a Republican candidate merely being a woman would attract significant Democratic defectors. She would still have to be somewhat inspiring/charismatic, fairly centrist, and probably pro-choice.

Even in the peak-"woke" Democratic primary of 2020, all the women lost to two old white men.

> Even in the peak-"woke" Democratic primary of 2020, all the women lost to two old white men.

The main reason for that was all of the candidates throwing their support behind the non-socialist when it looked like the socialist was going to win.

Most likely the first Republican female president will be a former Democrat.

Harris was shitcanned post haste when she actually primaried, so the party already knew she was non-viable. She got put in as VP as the best token non-white woman from a large population state they could shove in there and then Democrats got caught with their pants down because they hid Biden's physical state past the point they could have an actual primary to vet the proper candidate.

The fact Biden said he wouldn't back out then suddenly did at the 11th hour made the whole thing far more bizarre and was a massive erosion of confidence in any semblance of a plan for the presidency by the Democratic Party. I ended up voting for a 3rd party because both campaigns were run so horribly to the point I couldn't even imagine either side managing a mayor's office let alone the country.

A third-party vote is a vote for Trump.

The more I think about this, the more it pisses me off.

You voted to make a contrarian statement. Now, mothers are getting shot in the face.

You made an extremely selfish choice. American deaths are on you. Fascism is on you.

This kind of purity test is why the left cant win right now. Anyone who does a wrong-think is shitcanned and othered.

Im gonna put a theory out that I havent seen here yet, a lot of people voted for Trump because they got dunked on by leftist Twitter, told they were racist/fascist/whatever for having an opinion like "communism is bad", and now comes a guy who wont back down and who legit makes them cry liberal tears. Ever been pissed off at someone with no recourse? Of course they want that kind of satisfaction.

That's not a purity test, it's just math.

Curious how it was a vote for trump and not harris. If harris had won, would a 3rd party vote have been for harris?

Because if that is true, you're re-writing the rules of your "personal voter math" to fit your narrative, and if it isn't true, your "personal voter math" === your opinion, which isn't really useful.

They edited the post, it used to say OP was a fascist for voting third party.

The risk those people took is radicalizing people like me, who were previously on their side for whom Trump was an absolute red line. Now Trump is charging them extra taxes, and when he falls their reputation will be dumped even further into the gutter - hope the temporary satisfaction was worth the costs.

I dont 100% understand what you're saying, who got the temporary satisfaction? The leftists doing online dunks, or the trump voting moderates who just dont like the way the left does discourse? Its unclear to me from your post.

The Trump voting moderates. Their lives will now be permanently worse, both from the immediate effect of Trump's policies and the backlash from Trump opposing moderates who didn't and don't care about online dunks.

Most of us vote in states where it doesn’t matter if you make a statement with your ballot.

> that the democrats don't actually have popular policies.

Democrat policies polled better than Republican policies at the last election.

Its more accurate to say that leftist policies polled well, which they always do. I think the main issue is that people don't really trust democrats to do anything they say they want to do.

Remember that one guy who promised to close guantanamo prison?

Hilary and Kamala also polled well... Pretty sure all these polls prove is that polls are not reliable.

Nobody trusts the polls now. They have been comically wrong for a while.

I will confirm what the person you replied to said. I have had white collar colleagues and blue collar truck drivers (one who is a family member) say the same thing, that they wouldn’t vote for a women. You severely underestimate racism and misogyny in the US electorate imho.

I did not bother canvassing or donating to the Harris campaign for this reason, for the same reason I did not help pro vaccine non profits during the pandemic trying to convince antivaxxers. You aren’t changing someone’s belief system on timelines that matter for election outcomes. Mamdani was able to win NYC because young people and women turned out in force and ranked choice voting. The electoral college overweights rural, lower education parts of the country in US voting.

Based on the above, it will be a long time before enough of the US electorate has turned over before you can run a women presidential candidate imho. 78% of farmers voted for him, and still support him, even as he destroys their way of life, for example. Progress occurs one funeral at a time (Planck).

I recommend the recently released book “The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us” by Ryan P Burge (ISBN13 9781587436697) as a contributor to understanding this topic, as well as “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (ISBN13 9780062390851).

I think that's wrong. The Democrat platform offered a lot.

It's just that if in front of you, you have a weirdo who gives some stupid "with me, everything is free, and there's no problem" line, that is provable completely bullshit, but that your population is too uneducated (or too in a cult) to understand, then this happens...

What did you want Democrat to do? Give the same lies that GOP does? then what's the endgame?

But... Mamdani offered free childcare and affordable housing and won. It's not that far from feee everything.

I wouldn't read too much into Mamdani's success bearing in mind the other candidates represented scandal or the party that had no chance in New York...

Mamdani might be the reason the next mayor of NYC is trump 2.0...

I hope I'm wrong.

No, it's not "free everything", he said it clearly: it's going to be paid with taxes on the richest.

The orange idiot is pretending that it is "free everything"

The Democrats ran a campaign that managed to lose to a liar and a felon. They couldn’t have been more out of touch if they had immigrated from Antarctica.

> Harris had a big bump in the polls as soon as she entered the race

The election was always going to be 50/50 come election day no matter who the candidates were. The consternation about polling over the summer was especially frustrating for this reason, because 50/50 is exactly how it played out despite whatever temporary polling boosts she got. If she hadn't replaced Biden, his poor polling also would have reverted to the 50/50 by November.

Women have had the right to vote for a long time. Women could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President.

People talk a lot about Trump but I think a lot of people just voted against the other option so it didn't have much to do with Trump to begin with.

Having right vote when you belong to some category doesn’t mean having possibility to elect someone in that category. It could be that legally the category of people is not illegible, or are bared from being elected by other practical considerations.

Also being part of a social category doesn’t mean one will be immune to bias against this very category if it’s heavily pushed in the dominant social constructs.

Actually women able to reach top level political function in a patriarchal system will more likely do so by being doubly virulent against feminist standpoints. Look at Tatcher or Takaichi for a more recent example.

Harris beat Trump by 10 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Harris by 10 percentage points among men voters.

Clinton beat Trump by 15 percentage points among women voters. Trump beat Clinton by 11 percentage points among men voters.

Interesting. The Electoral College made the difference then.

Something that may be worth to know, women and men vote different in other countries and especially when it comes to left vs right. Women in Sweden votes with about 10 percentage points more towards left than men, and men vote 11 percentage points more towards right. Looking at the specific parties at far right and far left, around the 2/3 of the far right votes are from men while 2/3 of the far left is women.

A lot of research has been made on this subject and it should be noted that its primarily young voters that create this voting pattern.

this is a classic "nice story, bro".

I have spent my whole life intimately involved with southern Republicans. They will never ever not vote Republican, let alone vote Democrat. It is an identity marker. It doesn’t even really matter what the policies are. They’ll complain for a while, but they will always internalize a Republican policy shift no matter what it is. They used to treat “free market economics” as a religion just 10 years ago. Secondarily, they love to define their identity as opposition to the northeast (a stereotypical fictional version of northeast). Democrats and “coastal elites” are the same to them. Once they elected a black man, they all got more racist. They nominated a woman, then they got more sexist. They campaigned on social programs, fuck the poor (even if they are poor). And there is a cognitive dissonance between their beliefs and their experience. They’ll say “deport them all” but be personal friends with immigrants from church. They simply don’t connect their political beliefs to their reality. I’m a southerner and I don’t see a future for this country. I used to think if they felt enough pain, then they would take politics seriously, but then a whole bunch of them died of COVID and it changed nothing. If I was a non-American, I’d be telling my government to do what they can to remove all dependence on this country as possible because it won’t get better.

I don’t really know how we’d get there, but the US would be better structured as an EU of regions, IMO. The states are too small, but we’ve got regions with definite noticeable cultural differences (Northeast vs Southeast, etc etc). These areas have more similar values than the country as a whole, and are big enough to handle 99% of their issues. Like, we should not have done the ACA, just merged all the various already successful Northeastern healthcare systems. Then the South could decide to copy it if they wanted, after they saw it working. Or not. What can you do? Trying to impose it seems to have drastically backfired.

Since these regional governments would be picked from the inside, hopefully there wouldn’t be as much of a contrarian reflex to oppose everything they do.

The EU is moving in the opposite direction and trying to become more cohesive. The politicians and technocrats see the Euro as hamstrung with weak fiscal policies.

There’s probably a nice spot in the middle somewhere. The EU has smart folks, I hope they are studying exactly what went wrong over here.

I think pissing off technocrats is a good thing, given what they are doing with "the free market" in the US.

Kind of, but also it’s complicated. For example, Chicago is blue blue blue. 500 miles in every direction outside the city is red. 90% of the area of Illinois is red. But Chicago is so much more massive that Illinois votes blue in the end. So what the heck region is Chicago in, and the red part of IL?

I don’t know CA well but I know it’s blue with very deep red pockets.

50 miles out of Chicago will get you to red counties.

Right so what region is that? There aren’t really shared cultural values across 50 miles.

Except for nearly all of them, sure.

This really sounds like the population just isn't ripe for democracy yet. We also had that, this is a major reason why our 1848 revolution failed and why we didn't become a democracy between 1848 and 1918.

So what you actually kind of miss is a nobility that has common sense and class-consciousness of the leading class.

Great comment. To have democracy, you must have an educated, informed electorate. Religiosity is still very high in the US, and religiosity is negatively correlated with intelligence. Perhaps “democracy ready” levels can be inferred from other countries with more functional governance systems and their lower levels of religiosity as a sort of baseline.

Graphs About Religion: The Generational Collapse of American Religion - https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-generational-colla... - January 19th, 2026

15,000 churches could close this year amid religious shift in U.S - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46484284 - January 2026 (5 comments)

Gallup: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World - https://news.gallup.com/poll/697676/drop-religiosity-among-l... - November 13th, 2025

>So what you actually kind of miss is a nobility that has common sense and class-consciousness of the leading class.

I don't agree here, but I can seen in this lens if needed.

But that's not what Trump voters miss. And that's the issue. What they want is a "return to good times", aka times where anyone else who wasn't a white male did in fact not have good times. But they don't care about the non-white non-males.

They are smart enough to not say the quiet part out loud, and even now there's signs they are trying to backtrack internally on all of this[1]. But this is always what's in their minds. I don't know what needs to be done on that end, but the positive thing we can do is hyper-energize the country to come out in droves and not let this sneak back in again (or at least, have way more guardrails for next time).

1: https://www.salon.com/2026/01/19/some-trump-voters-are-sneak...

What I meant with "what you actually kind of miss" is what would be needed to have a stable state despite your population, not what the population actually desires.

This kind of resonates with the idea, that populations education and governing regime beget each other. When the people don't care about their freedom, they eventually loose it, if they do care a lot about it, they will eventually gain it.

Honestly, the current events (as in last 100years) make me think, that maybe monarchy was in fact the best option for some kind of population. I mean a good democracy is a lot better than an average monarchy, but monarchy is also better than a bad democracy that leads to authoritarianism. Even in the worst time of absolutism, the king had a budget, that nobility needed to vote on. So when the king said "I want a bigger palace" and the nobility says, my bridge is old and my workers are hungry, then that's it. Same with war. I mean when your nobility wants to play warlords, that sucks, but a elite that has their richness in real estate and agriculture has a lot to loose in a war. And what happens when your elite wants to play warlord regardless, can be seen in the USA currently.

>... It is an identity marker. It doesn’t even really matter what the policies are....They simply don’t connect their political beliefs to their reality.

In other words, they're stupid.

Hilariously enough, people with a higher IQ are actually much better at rationalising these sorts of contradictions.

(You could call this depressing I suppose, but I prefer to laugh).

> They will never ever not vote Republican

As someone who grew up in the south, I know many people who left the GOP over Trump. Obviously not enough people have, but there is a glimmer of hope.

> They could not bring themselves to vote for a woman for President.

That's nothing new... Don't blame me for bothsiderism but I and many others knew full well that Harris would lose after the midsummer switcheroo. Sorry, the Dem party knew it too and they wanted to lose, that's not the only evidence for it and there's no other rational conclusion.

tangent but: I can't believe "bothsidesism" is an actual dictionary word. It had to have been a recent addition.

I had some hopes that Trump's deterioration, court case results, and general insurrection of the country would do something to impact his standing. Especially if "sleepy Joe" was the standard Biden was being held to. But I learned from 2016 and knew not to dismiss the possibility.

The real downside here isn't just the fact that trump's voted didn't decrease. It's that Harris' did. A lot of people staying home arguably cost the election almost as much as those who voted.

Re: "bothsidesism"

It's "bothsiderism", learned it on this thread, haven't checked the dictionary, I guess, there's still time to vote on which spelling should go there.