No, they don't. Most people don't seem to get beyond 1st order thinking. At best, it's cause and effect - 3rd/4th/5th order effects are just not computable. If X then Y is the best they can manage.

Canada has this problem too. We’ve been coddled for a long time and many Canadians think they’ve got the government’s boot on their neck. The reality is the inverse. The worst things our leadership has done in the last ten years are, all things considered, very bearable.

I’ve been thinking for some time that both our countries need some kind of wake up call. I’m very sad that we seem to be getting one simultaneously, yet it might not be a reversible event. At least not on any short order.

But yeah, the lack of truly bad experiences seems to have made us all very soft. I know some of us experience poverty or immigrated from horrible governments so we know firsthand how much worse things can be, but on average I get the sense that people typically have no idea.

Nope. "Nothing could be worse than this" is really common even though it's a complete failure of imagination.

Sure, and not even a quarter of Americans voted for Harris.

But if you really want to be pedantic: there are around 75M non-citizens living in the US, so that means there are only 265M Americans in the US. A quick search suggests that the number of American citizens living outside the US is under 5M. 77M out of 270M is 28%, so Trump did get more than a quarter of Americans to vote for him.

(For the record, I said "of the country", and didn't restrict my comment to only US citizens as you did.)

At any rate, I don't find these sorts of takes all that useful when it comes to electoral math. 77M people voted for Trump. Around 100M people in the US are ineligible to vote (under 18 years old, non-citizens, felons denied voting rights, etc.). That leaves around 90M people left who could have voted, but didn't: to me, that's either "I'm fine with what the people who vote decide" (so a tacit vote for Trump) or "I don't care at all, screw this".

So that's 167M votes either explicitly for Trump, or implicitly for watching things burn. That's about half the country.

But sure, if you must be pedantic, amend my comment to "nearly half the people who voted in the election". It doesn't change the meaning or outcome or implications of the rest of what I said.

So let's stop playing dumb number games. Half of the country either actively wanted this, or was fine with it.

This is normal in every election so you can use the same logic to dismiss any president. Do you only respect 100% sampling rates in other statistical situations?

At a certain point this line of thinking is just saying you don’t think elections work, or that there should be some non-democratic supervisor to undo bad ones.

There is also an older idea that getting people out to vote is part of the game. An election is when citizens back leaders from their community. It’s not taking a survey of every 18+ human life form with a pulse.