It’s only close because of our broken electoral process that gives land more influence than citizens. He didn’t even win the popular vote for his first term.
National polling has Kamala up by +6 at best. Seems like 44%+ of Americansthose polled seem comfortable and supportive of Trump. The fact it is that close at a national level, with all Haitians eating cats rhetoric, still seems insane to an outsider.
Edit: Updated to appease those saying 44%+ of those polled who say they support Trump is not an accurate reflection of Americans at-large. For reference, Trump won 46.1% of the popular vote in 2016 and 46.8% of the popular vote in 2020.
It's not 44 percent of Americans. It's 44 percent of the people poled. I can guarantee that number is skewed because a ton of left leaning people wouldn't bother wasting their time not getting paid to answer some pole. I know my friends and I are in that boat.
Wait until you find out that 30-40% of Americans believe god magicked the universe into being as is less than 10k years ago and fossils are from noahs flood in which he saved 2 of every animal in a boat the size of texas.
The fact that it's close shows that there is a problem with our voting populace.
Rarely do more than 40% of eligible voters turn out for an election. On top of that, the Electoral College - our representative voting body - can cause the popular vote to be overturned in favor of the representative vote - Al Gore in 2000, Trump in 2016 are examples. Relative to this, in order to win, Democrats have to be polling at 6 to 9% above the Republicans to be a real contender.
The day a Republican loses via Electoral College but wins the popular vote is the day this will change. Frankly, though, it's almost impossible for that to happen due to the way the EC distributes votes to the less populated states.
Fuck our rigged system and fuck this orange baboon.
Gerrymandering out the wazoo, purging voter rolls, closing polling stations, literally taking away a ballot box as a photo op, passing insane “election ‘integrity’ commission” laws that upend everything else - and that doesn’t account for voter intimidation and outright straight-up fraud that can happen.
All that stuff is easy to do when you’re already in power. And wrong.
Trump is a criminal, a fascist, a literal traitor twice over (Jan 6 + loyalty to Putin over America), and fucking senile. Anything less than 99% unfavorable is ridiculous!
It's absolutely nuts to a lot of insiders here too. I can't imagine a worse candidate, yet about 1/3 of the country seems to think that the choice in this election is a no-brainer, but in the exact opposite way that you would expect. The war on education led us here.
Our system has a vital flaw. The electoral college. It was a necessity at one point given the technology of the time it was adopted, but now it is a relic and needs to go away.
He still got 63 million votes in 2016 (46.1%) and 74 million in 2020 (46.8%). More people voted for trump even after that disaster of a presidency.
Even though he never got over 50%, 74 million is still way too much for anyone to be comfortable with. It clearly indicates that something is wrong with many Americans.
It clearly indicates that something is wrong with many Americans.
Sadly I think it indicates systemic failures and Americans are the effect and much less the cause.
What I mean is that a combination of:
Electoral college & Money in Politics
Diminishing education standards (e.g., critical-thinking skills, civics, US History)
"News" media-entertainment that legally spreads disinformation (combined with foreign operatives).
... All culminates in a society that is very easily duped. I talk to Trump supporters all the time and while sure many are simply greedy psychopaths... Many are also just "nice, but kinda dumb" in that they have no capacity to parse fact from fiction and so are easily-grifted targets for lies and choir-preaching (sometimes quite literally from Sunday church).
Oh for sure. No doubt does Lead exposure (firing ammunition elevates levels), boomer-era leaded gasoline (and modern aircraft), paint, etc. + Traumatic Brain Injuries (CTE) from football + Substance abuse —namely alcohol play a part. Microplastics may very well be the next thing...
74 million is still way too much for anyone to be comfortable with. It clearly indicates that something is wrong with many Americans.
To put a finer point in it, even just one million is way too much! The fact that 22% of the total population is suffering some sort of mass delusion and is in cult-like thrall to a demented fascist is unfathomably catastrophic.
He most definitely does not speak for us, but I share your pain that he has a following as large as it is. Years of unchecked indoctrination and the dismantling of the public schools and human nature giving is the authoritarian personality (which seems to be about 30% of people everywhere)
Except there isn't even a way to get water from BC to LA. They'd be better off getting it from the Great Lakes, at least they wouldn't have to build a pipeline through thousands of miles of mountains.
Huh. For some reason I thought you could go around the south end without hitting too much, but yah, it's probably easier to go down the central plateau.
Yeah you could probably find a path through New Mexico and Arizona that's not too mountainous, like along I-10.
But really where the US "needs" more water is where all the farms are. The cities don't use much in comparison. It's just a lot in a small area compared to the farms distributed in the big valleys.