cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/27878542
After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.
Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion.
Military alliances and foreign policy no longer command the cross-party consensus of the cold war era, when politics could be relied upon to “stop at the water’s edge”, in the famous formulation of the Truman-era senator Arthur Vandenberg.
Now the politics don’t stop at all, for any reason. And alliances are for chumps.
So did a lot more people turn of age between 2016 and 2020? Because the numbers I see go like this:
2016
Clinton: 65Mil
Trump: 62Mil
2020
Biden: 81Mil
Trump 74Mil
2024
Harris: 70Mil
Trump: 74Mil
If you look at 2016 to 2020, there’s a sudden jump of 28 million voters. But only the democrats lost voters between 2020 and 2024. Trump likely had the exact same people voting for him in 2024 as 2020.
But, again, where did that innitial 28 million voters come from???
There’s a huge pool of non-voters to pull from since voter turnout never a high percentage, so perhaps a lot more turned out after Trump’s term to make sure he didn’t have a second. Then the question is, where’d they go this time around?
There’s also population growth, but I doubt that’s a huge factor.