• Janx@piefed.social
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        3 days ago

        That’s literally not true. The current administration is in power because 86 million eligible people didn’t bother to vote.

        If “Did Not Vote” had been a candidate:

        • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          3 days ago

          The only difference is that the Democrats wouldn’t be threatening to end the civilization. AIPAC and thus Israel has our country by the proverbial testicles.

          • Janx@piefed.social
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            3 days ago

            AIPAC & Israel? This post is about domestic data centers. It’s easy to say “bOtH SiDeS” and that nothing would be different if we had successfully kept Trump from returning to power…

            • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              3 days ago

              Between work, here, and other things pulling at me, got confused what it was about. My apologies.

              For the actual topic, though, I still don’t see Dems are more than the control opposition party. You throw enough at most of them and they’ll let you do something.

        • qqq@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I’d be interested in an interactive version of this where you could assign a percentage of those votes to the person who lost the state as a naive proxy for “what would have happened if the people who thought their vote didn’t matter because [D|R] would win anyway”. I know it wouldn’t be an actual measure but it’d be fun to mess with anyway.

          In particular I find it kinda interesting that CA and TX are both didn’t vote and both historically considered “easy wins”.

          This image is just generally interesting because it also turns the idea of swing states around a bit. If neither candidate motivated enough people in all of those states could we consider them swing states?

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            I think you are on to something, but I’d say it actually largely deflates the ‘people didn’t vote and if they had, maybe the outcome would have been different’ narrative.

            “Did not vote” rules in non-swing states. I wager that, for example, most people didn’t vote in california not because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know “their” candidate has carried the state for sure.

            So in a shift to proportional electoral vote or popular vote, you’d probably get a lot more voters engaged in California, Hawaii, NY, and pick up democrat votes but you’d also get more red voters from Alaska, Texas, Utah, Kansan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabamba, Tennesse… etc… I’m not sure which group manages to bring out more non-voters in that scenario…

            • qqq@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              I wager that, for example, most people didn’t vote in california not because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know “their” candidate has carried the state for sure.

              That’s a natural interpretation as well. I wonder if it’d be possible to at least guess at whether it was that or “my person won’t win so what’s the point”. There are probably so many other factors. For example the “did not vote map” looks surprisingly similar to the SOVI map: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/place-health/php/svi/svi-interactive-map.html. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that, my knee jerk thought is that you could see more “what’s the point they’re both the same” or “neither side actually cares about my needs” among disenfranchised people in general combined with maybe more voter suppression efforts in disenfranchised areas? Would voting being a federal holiday or easier to vote by mail make those areas specifically better?