this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Maybe it's sad, sure, but it's far from unusual. In the US, average eligible voter turnout fluctuates between 50-65%. In 2020 it was 65.3% (the highest ever recorded), and in 2024 it was 63.5%, the second-highest. Eligible voters end up not voting for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest reason is usually because they (rightly) feel like the choice has little actual impact on their day-to-day life. Even if you're relying on the 'most important election of our lifetime' motivation (the same rhetoric that's been used for the last 5-6 elections at least), many of those people are white middle-lower-class adults - those people don't believe they'd be the ones targeted by mass deportations or political imprisonment anyway. Granted, that's a short-sided reason not to vote, but let's not act surprised by low-income americans having a bit of an optimism bias (since they are consistently the largest pool of eligible voters).
You simply cannot expect every eligible voter to turnout for you if you aren't giving them compelling reasons to do so. But even in relative terms, the 2024 election was still only 1.7% behind the highest-ever turnout for a presidential election in our lifetime - american voters certainly did turn out, and many who abstained from voting were engaged. The problem is that they no longer believe the democrats actually represent their interests, and so went shopping elsewhere or didn't vote at all (or split their ticket). Blaming those voters without asking yourself why there were more of them this election is nothing more than political masturbation.
And just a reminder that the democratic party does actually have members in its caucus that have a higher than 60% approval rating nationwide, but for some reason they chose not to run those candidates
Nah, maybe a little bit for the last trump election where he dipped his toes into autocratic territory, now that he got support again (even House and Congress) he can go full autocratic. Everyone that's at least a little bit educated politically and economically shakes their head about Trump, and did so before the election too. It's not a rhetoric that was used before that much. Electing republicans was always a little bit correlated with stupidity but not like: Go full Trumpler/Hitler, full on conspiracy, "anti-establishment" (the opposite seems to be true, thinking about that there were never more billionaires in political power than ever before). The stupidity for a lot of americans seems to be at an all time high too.
Nah I really don't understand why people were omitting this election, just because they were in slight disagreement with the democrats (over things, where trump is orders of magnitudes worse)...
Yeah and now take a close look at what Trump was "able" to do in just 4 months. Lets sum it up: it's not a good outlook for the economy (and especially poor people) in the USA. And it does hurt globally too. A single vote may not have much impact, but it can prevent this shitty state the US is in currently ("if everyone thinks like that...")
Ah common that's bullshit, I mean I'm mostly blaming republican voters that were for the most part voting against their own interests... The system is absolutely flawed, but people should at least try to prevent the worst (which they seemingly didn't).
Yeah there absolutely better candidates, and I really hope, that progressives like AOC gain much more power and the democrats are able to turn left. But then, there's still the question if there's an election again that is not a total shallow joke, so that democrats (or maybe even other parties) get a realistic chance for power again.
Seeing the downvotes here to something in my eyes obvious, really makes me want to block lemmy.ml. Are there really that much Trumpler-loving-Tankies around here? Such a contradiction: Hypercapitalism fueled autocracy, the only thing (I think) tankies and MAGAs agree with is probably autocracy.
You must not be old enough to remember the 2008 election, then. People were accusing Obama of being the literal antichrist, and was among the first to prominently feature conservative conspiracy theorists on national news (Don was calling in to talk shows to accuse Obama of being a Kenyan Muslim and demanding his birth certificate, then his long-form).
Maybe in hindsight it's hard to make a comparisons, but every election since then has represented the same choice between 'sane' democrats and 'crazy' conservatives. You can only have so many of those before they start to feel like the norm.
Oh I was old enough, I didn't follow the election that time that closely, as IMO it wasn't that important as the last 3 (and I wasn't that political either) Though something like the Project 2025 were just not existing that time, and while Trump maybe always a crazy person, that all of this is that socially acceptable (conspiracies, lies across all dimensions) is a concerning trend (towards fascism, as Hitler etc. used similar rhetoric).
Right, as I said, I don't promote what the policy of the democrats is, I'm just concerned what the alternative looks like...
Lol, libs love rewriting history