“The overall turnout of eligible voters in the 2024 general election was 63.7%. This was lower than the 2020 record of 66.6% but higher than every other election year since at least 2004.”
People did vote. Constantly blaming the small group of disillusioned voters is just weird.
mandatory voting looks like a small price to pay for a (more) healthy democracy, Australia seems to be doing a lot better than the other British colonies right now
of course with the US, something like that would have to be combined with an extensive overhaul of public education (moving away from the “breed compliant factory workers”-goal), because healthy democracy also requires an educated population capable of knowing when they’re being lied too
Argentina has mandatory voting and they have Milei. How healthy is that?
Argentina also votes on Sunday (a change way simpler than reforming education) and last elections they had 77% turnout. A lot of people simply don’t participate in the democracy and there’s no way around it. No one serious expect 100% people to vote and blames the 30% that doesn’t for the outcomes.
That’s probably accurate but not unusual, it still had some of the highest turnout in history and the data backs this up, we didn’t have as much of turnout problem as an attention span and informed voter problem.
The problem was more revealed in exit polling determining that people largely didn’t see a difference between candidates, saw no difference between Harris and Biden (kinda true) but saw Trump as a “lets see how he does” option because he wasn’t in charge when egg prices went up.
Studies have shown the Trump beat out Dems in all categories and it has a lot to do with people largely losing interest in politics and just marginally paying attention to social media propaganda, which skews heavily right. Financial uncertainty often pushes populations towards conservatism and authoritarian leaders, and Dems are very, very bad at this kind of populism.
Almost everything has become media entertainment, media is about capturing attention-spans because attention is monetized via commercials and clicks on affiliates and the like. This has led to an arms-race in grabbing attention faster and faster, so now the general population, and I mean MOST people, pay less attention to anything that requires patience or does not provide immediate dopamine hits.
This is just the state we’re in, it’s widespread and it’s a massive problem and AI is making it even worse every day.
The average grade-school teacher reports they have to design curriculums around 3 - 7 minutes maximum attention-spans, that anything more than a few minutes at a time and kids will start fidgeting, looking around and acting disinterested, nor can teachers even give kids homework anymore because they use ChatGTP to finish it most of the time. Adults aren’t in much better shape. About a full quarter of America’s adult population are functionally illiterate, meaning while they can usually work out words and text messages via context, they can’t read an article or a book, they can’t assemble paragraphs to form narration in their minds.
This is why we’re in this mess right now, because many people are exploiting this trend and only a handful of people are raising awareness about it and trying to get us broadly to put the electronic devices down. Which nobody wants to do, nor can we all do because of the need to use smartphones and computers in our daily lives.
I think you’re right on most things here. But I do think there have been studies showing that attention spans have never really been that high to begin with. Not that catering to that is good or bad, necessarily. But I just wanted to point that out.
I think it’s a natural tendency for natural systems, including human minds, to seek the easiest paths and short attention spans are a consequence of not needing longer attention, but it still does our society harm when products and entertainment exploit this ingrained tendency or function to make the problem worse.
It’s natural to want high-calorie food because we have millions of years of survival and struggle wired into us, and only about a century or two of plentiful pastries and chicken nuggets whenever want. Same deal and we need to start looking at our minds the way we look at our diets.
To that end, some places have restricted access to social media for youth, which is a good start. But we really need to push the idea that consuming slop at an early age is as bad as consuming junk food. Since we don’t really have a handle on obesity and childhood medical issues due to diet despite being well aware of the dangers… I don’t have a lot of hope for our mental diets, being less understood and more socially acceptable to consume mental slop constantly.
It’s possible things will crash really bad and we will have to correct a problem, post-hoc and figure out how to make better outcomes well after we suffer a lot of harm, IE: leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, etc. But it’s also possible that we won’t make that correction and we will have a societal setback as the class-war becomes very different, a division between people who can hold a thought and those who can’t.
We may also see AI radically change the landscape entirely. There is going to be less incentive to even try to correct the problem if each of us has an AI agent or tool that gives us the outcomes we want or provides answers no matter how fried we are. Or maybe better AI systems will become better tutors and companions and we will see the situation improve. It’s way too soon to say how that’s going to pan out. It might be our most pivotal and least predictable period in human history right now.
I don’t mean to be mean, but you need to talk to more people.
A lot of people in America simply do not believe they can change anything. Either because they don’t know how, they’ve never shown up to a town hall, or because the only politics they hear about are from states and federal buildings they’ll never live or work in, or because the only politics they hear about outside of Trump being a dipshit is some 2% thing that will do something which might lead to something else maybe, or because South Park taught them that caring about anything is cringe and, actually, the smartest people spend all day making fun of anyone with an idea.
I mean, let me ask another question: how the fuck do you lose interest in unions? And yet, the US lost interest a looong time ago.
There is an element of people wanting their fast food and being displeased that civil rights took multiple decades to build.
That said, it isn’t just their fault. The Democrats, generally, do not know how to be exciting. As much as people say they’re not interested, it’s not entirely true; there is a spark that has yet to be ignited.
Also, even if you’re not counting the large swath of the population who are chronically attention-span handicapped, the average middle-class American family has to work 6 - 7 days a week to support the increasing costs of raising families and having homes.
Most of these people don’t watch the news, they barely have time to watch a disney movie with their kids Sunday night before browsing social media for 30 minutes and going to bed to start the week all over. People are incredibly overworked and distracted. Politics doesn’t seem to touch you in this kind of life because the US protects the middle-class to some degree, as long as you’re putting in your 80 - 100 hours of work each week between yourself and your partner, you will just barely make the bills and expenses, you will have just enough for expenses and never enough to stop or take a break.
These families are good people, they just don’t have a margin in their life to care about politics. This is the system that’s been engineered to keep people from mobilizing and working together.
At some point we need to tell the “internet people who tell us who to blame” that hillary would have won in 2016 if not for the electoral college. At some point people just give up and that was the entire democratic party in 2024.
Not a single person in the democrats has a plan to fix democracy in the US and until they do the gerrymandering, electoral college and republican rule by minority will continue
I’m sure all the finger pointing at neighbors will help, instead of, you know, taking 5 minutes to understand how we got here and why its going to continue.
That’s exactly it. Dems keep throwing winnable elections and when they do get power they don’t attempt to implement any reforms to make it harder for republicans to hold power both electorally and monetarily so their voters get poorer and disenfranchised and leave.
I voted for Harris in California. I didn’t like it and it didn’t impact much, but I did. She still lost because she didn’t make herself different enough from Biden, who had low polling rates, plus courted Republicans who got us into this mess.
The party didn’t even hold a primary and said you have to vote for who we tell you to vote for. “Ugh fine, what is she running on?” … “Nothing! Do you want Trump to win?”
Amazing how they refuse to blame the people with more data, money, and people instead of the people who are in states that didn’t matter (solid blue or solid red).
You’re so right, support for genocide was just a minor mark against perfection. Keep compromising, soon you’ll be agreeing that democrats shouldn’t fight for marriage equality because some other issue is on the table and we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of slightly better than rabid nazis.
2020 was only winnable for biden because trump fucked up covid so bad. The media hole is so assymmetric that a solid 25% of the US population (including donald trump, because this shit works on him too) believe biden was president in 2020. The fabricated immigration crisis was also extremely successful. Democrats keep trying to meet halfway on whole lies and it never worked.
Dems did nothing to break up the media/tech oligarchs during that time and now we’re paying for it. Dems have to be willing to play hard ball democracy. And most likely ICE and the FBI will make a bunch of crazy arrests during election season to try and hamper elections and smear candidates.
All the people who did vote for the cheeto are responsible as well. And I think that was the point, marriage equality was on the ballot 14 years after the supreme court ruling
The point I think is that this was largely preventable from within our own ranks. Because we didn’t turn out, the minority was allowed to rule. Yes, the minority is responsible but they were a forgone conclusion. Inaction on the left allowed a preventable outcome to occur.
Hey, guys, I found that comment! You know, the one where some smug prick tries to remind everyone how correct they were… ::checks watch:: 11 months ago.
Thank goodness they showed up. I was afraid there was going to be a political post that didn’t devolve into liberals and leftists screaming at each other about lesser evils and supporting genocide.
I guess someone needs to do the important work of making sure those who oppose christo-fucking-fascists never find common ground.
Lol. Imagine thinking you have any idea what the fuck you are talking about. It really shouldn’t matter so god damn much but I voted, for Harris. I’m just not an immature shitbird that can’t empathize and can’t move on.
They messed up, sure. Get over it and solve today’s problems instead of constantly, repeatedly, over and over again, bring it up and lording it over them. Infighting keeps Trump in power. You have no moral high ground.
All the people that didn’t vote are partly responsible for this.
“The overall turnout of eligible voters in the 2024 general election was 63.7%. This was lower than the 2020 record of 66.6% but higher than every other election year since at least 2004.”
People did vote. Constantly blaming the small group of disillusioned voters is just weird.
“The small group” of more than one in three people that didn’t vote.
Oh, you were actually aiming at 100% turnout. Well, that’s just silly.
mandatory voting looks like a small price to pay for a (more) healthy democracy, Australia seems to be doing a lot better than the other British colonies right now
of course with the US, something like that would have to be combined with an extensive overhaul of public education (moving away from the “breed compliant factory workers”-goal), because healthy democracy also requires an educated population capable of knowing when they’re being lied too
Argentina has mandatory voting and they have Milei. How healthy is that?
Argentina also votes on Sunday (a change way simpler than reforming education) and last elections they had 77% turnout. A lot of people simply don’t participate in the democracy and there’s no way around it. No one serious expect 100% people to vote and blames the 30% that doesn’t for the outcomes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/upshot/turnout-2024-election-trump-harris.html
NYT reported that data suggests that nonvoters would have given Trump a larger win.
Last presidential election had the highest turnout of voters and youth voters in American history.
Our problem is much more depressing and much more deeply baked-in.
More than 1 in 3 people didn’t vote.
That’s probably accurate but not unusual, it still had some of the highest turnout in history and the data backs this up, we didn’t have as much of turnout problem as an attention span and informed voter problem.
The problem was more revealed in exit polling determining that people largely didn’t see a difference between candidates, saw no difference between Harris and Biden (kinda true) but saw Trump as a “lets see how he does” option because he wasn’t in charge when egg prices went up.
Studies have shown the Trump beat out Dems in all categories and it has a lot to do with people largely losing interest in politics and just marginally paying attention to social media propaganda, which skews heavily right. Financial uncertainty often pushes populations towards conservatism and authoritarian leaders, and Dems are very, very bad at this kind of populism.
Excuse me, but HOW THE FUCK do you LOSE INTEREST in politics?!
Is there too much lead in people’s food or something?
Almost everything has become media entertainment, media is about capturing attention-spans because attention is monetized via commercials and clicks on affiliates and the like. This has led to an arms-race in grabbing attention faster and faster, so now the general population, and I mean MOST people, pay less attention to anything that requires patience or does not provide immediate dopamine hits.
This is just the state we’re in, it’s widespread and it’s a massive problem and AI is making it even worse every day.
The average grade-school teacher reports they have to design curriculums around 3 - 7 minutes maximum attention-spans, that anything more than a few minutes at a time and kids will start fidgeting, looking around and acting disinterested, nor can teachers even give kids homework anymore because they use ChatGTP to finish it most of the time. Adults aren’t in much better shape. About a full quarter of America’s adult population are functionally illiterate, meaning while they can usually work out words and text messages via context, they can’t read an article or a book, they can’t assemble paragraphs to form narration in their minds.
This is why we’re in this mess right now, because many people are exploiting this trend and only a handful of people are raising awareness about it and trying to get us broadly to put the electronic devices down. Which nobody wants to do, nor can we all do because of the need to use smartphones and computers in our daily lives.
I think you’re right on most things here. But I do think there have been studies showing that attention spans have never really been that high to begin with. Not that catering to that is good or bad, necessarily. But I just wanted to point that out.
Do you have any proposed solutions?
I think it’s a natural tendency for natural systems, including human minds, to seek the easiest paths and short attention spans are a consequence of not needing longer attention, but it still does our society harm when products and entertainment exploit this ingrained tendency or function to make the problem worse.
It’s natural to want high-calorie food because we have millions of years of survival and struggle wired into us, and only about a century or two of plentiful pastries and chicken nuggets whenever want. Same deal and we need to start looking at our minds the way we look at our diets.
To that end, some places have restricted access to social media for youth, which is a good start. But we really need to push the idea that consuming slop at an early age is as bad as consuming junk food. Since we don’t really have a handle on obesity and childhood medical issues due to diet despite being well aware of the dangers… I don’t have a lot of hope for our mental diets, being less understood and more socially acceptable to consume mental slop constantly.
It’s possible things will crash really bad and we will have to correct a problem, post-hoc and figure out how to make better outcomes well after we suffer a lot of harm, IE: leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting chemicals, etc. But it’s also possible that we won’t make that correction and we will have a societal setback as the class-war becomes very different, a division between people who can hold a thought and those who can’t.
We may also see AI radically change the landscape entirely. There is going to be less incentive to even try to correct the problem if each of us has an AI agent or tool that gives us the outcomes we want or provides answers no matter how fried we are. Or maybe better AI systems will become better tutors and companions and we will see the situation improve. It’s way too soon to say how that’s going to pan out. It might be our most pivotal and least predictable period in human history right now.
I don’t mean to be mean, but you need to talk to more people.
A lot of people in America simply do not believe they can change anything. Either because they don’t know how, they’ve never shown up to a town hall, or because the only politics they hear about are from states and federal buildings they’ll never live or work in, or because the only politics they hear about outside of Trump being a dipshit is some 2% thing that will do something which might lead to something else maybe, or because South Park taught them that caring about anything is cringe and, actually, the smartest people spend all day making fun of anyone with an idea.
I mean, let me ask another question: how the fuck do you lose interest in unions? And yet, the US lost interest a looong time ago.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. Things don’t change because they don’t participate. They don’t participate because things didn’t change.
90% of things people claim are the reason they don’t vote could be changed if they fucking voted.
There is an element of people wanting their fast food and being displeased that civil rights took multiple decades to build.
That said, it isn’t just their fault. The Democrats, generally, do not know how to be exciting. As much as people say they’re not interested, it’s not entirely true; there is a spark that has yet to be ignited.
Also, even if you’re not counting the large swath of the population who are chronically attention-span handicapped, the average middle-class American family has to work 6 - 7 days a week to support the increasing costs of raising families and having homes.
Most of these people don’t watch the news, they barely have time to watch a disney movie with their kids Sunday night before browsing social media for 30 minutes and going to bed to start the week all over. People are incredibly overworked and distracted. Politics doesn’t seem to touch you in this kind of life because the US protects the middle-class to some degree, as long as you’re putting in your 80 - 100 hours of work each week between yourself and your partner, you will just barely make the bills and expenses, you will have just enough for expenses and never enough to stop or take a break.
These families are good people, they just don’t have a margin in their life to care about politics. This is the system that’s been engineered to keep people from mobilizing and working together.
At some point we need to tell the “internet people who tell us who to blame” that hillary would have won in 2016 if not for the electoral college. At some point people just give up and that was the entire democratic party in 2024.
Not a single person in the democrats has a plan to fix democracy in the US and until they do the gerrymandering, electoral college and republican rule by minority will continue
Cool story, would still have been nice to avoid the transgender genocide or killing health insurance.
I’m sure all the finger pointing at neighbors will help, instead of, you know, taking 5 minutes to understand how we got here and why its going to continue.
65 million don’t vote. “But Trump” is not a legit platform to run on. You have to give voters something to vote for. Dems fucked up
That’s exactly it. Dems keep throwing winnable elections and when they do get power they don’t attempt to implement any reforms to make it harder for republicans to hold power both electorally and monetarily so their voters get poorer and disenfranchised and leave.
Yeah all that “reform” is really happening now, isn’t it?
I mean Zorhan is a good sign things might finally be changing.
Donald Trump is the president you fucking moron. Happy to vote for Biden in 2020 but not Harris, essentially just a younger Biden.
Two options. You’re phony or you’re stupid.
I voted for Harris in California. I didn’t like it and it didn’t impact much, but I did. She still lost because she didn’t make herself different enough from Biden, who had low polling rates, plus courted Republicans who got us into this mess.
Democratic VOTERS fucked up, the party did not. So many pathetic excuses for such a stupid decision in November.
The party didn’t even hold a primary and said you have to vote for who we tell you to vote for. “Ugh fine, what is she running on?” … “Nothing! Do you want Trump to win?”
Amazing how they refuse to blame the people with more data, money, and people instead of the people who are in states that didn’t matter (solid blue or solid red).
That’s why I voted for Biden and it was much better than this. I never liked him. Still don’t.
I can do both, don’t worry.
That’s EXACTLY what OP is doing.
Why? They won in 2020…
Did you all fucking forget or something?
Keep waiting for perfection, dumbass. Meanwhile, Republicans are destroying the country.
You’re so right, support for genocide was just a minor mark against perfection. Keep compromising, soon you’ll be agreeing that democrats shouldn’t fight for marriage equality because some other issue is on the table and we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of slightly better than rabid nazis.
2020 was only winnable for biden because trump fucked up covid so bad. The media hole is so assymmetric that a solid 25% of the US population (including donald trump, because this shit works on him too) believe biden was president in 2020. The fabricated immigration crisis was also extremely successful. Democrats keep trying to meet halfway on whole lies and it never worked.
Dems did nothing to break up the media/tech oligarchs during that time and now we’re paying for it. Dems have to be willing to play hard ball democracy. And most likely ICE and the FBI will make a bunch of crazy arrests during election season to try and hamper elections and smear candidates.
Every non-voter in California is responsible for this /s
All the people who did vote for the cheeto are responsible as well. And I think that was the point, marriage equality was on the ballot 14 years after the supreme court ruling
The point I think is that this was largely preventable from within our own ranks. Because we didn’t turn out, the minority was allowed to rule. Yes, the minority is responsible but they were a forgone conclusion. Inaction on the left allowed a preventable outcome to occur.
Democrats aren’t “left.”
Silence, online contrarian!
And those who refused to vote against.
Hey, guys, I found that comment! You know, the one where some smug prick tries to remind everyone how correct they were… ::checks watch:: 11 months ago.
Thank goodness they showed up. I was afraid there was going to be a political post that didn’t devolve into liberals and leftists screaming at each other about lesser evils and supporting genocide.
I guess someone needs to do the important work of making sure those who oppose christo-fucking-fascists never find common ground.
Imagine thinking you have the moral high ground after helping bring Trump to power.
Lol. Imagine thinking you have any idea what the fuck you are talking about. It really shouldn’t matter so god damn much but I voted, for Harris. I’m just not an immature shitbird that can’t empathize and can’t move on.
They messed up, sure. Get over it and solve today’s problems instead of constantly, repeatedly, over and over again, bring it up and lording it over them. Infighting keeps Trump in power. You have no moral high ground.