Amusingly, upthread you and I are talking about whether encouraging more people to vote leads to better outcomes, and this is an example where the answer is yes: a candidate can be both an extremist and receive 50% of the vote if, as in is true in the US, less than half the eligible electorate actually votes. The current president was elected on the backs of 25% of eligible voters; does that make him an extremist candidate even by the standards of the US electorate? If we had more data on account of more Americans asserting their preferences, then we could actually determine that.
Yes, but only a small demographic that actually votes.
If only 1% of the population actually votes, elected representatives will tend to represent that 1%. If you cede the centre ground you get extremists.
Say what you like about Trump, he managed to get his target demographic fired up and out to vote. $boring_reasonable_politician doesn't have the same ability by their nature to get people fired up, but we still need to vote for them.
In the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, roughly 63 million votes, of a population of 325 million, were cast for #45.
That is 19% of the total population. Reliable sources inform me that this may in fact be significantly less than half of all Americans.
The notion of the nutcase fringe in politics has been around for a while -- there's about 20% of the vote you've got to be very aware of. Where other voters are insufficiently motivated, or actively discouraged by various means (voter suppression efforts, media, uninspiring candidates), the fringe can win.
That said, there's a range of types throughout the country, and a worrying fraction are worrying. Or worse.
However, since the post to which you're replying specified more people voting, not more votes, your vacuous statement is not on point. Stop fear mongering and being a pointless pedant.
66.8% in the last USA presidential election. But even so, that still isn't enough. People would be amazed how much a difference it would make if everyone voted.
How many people did actually bother to vote in Germany?
Here in France, the "extremists" got a bit over 30% of votes. But turnout was only 51%.
According to [0] average turnout is 51%. Some countries have very high numbers (IIRC voting is mandatory in Belgium?), others ridiculously low. This, to me, means pretty much that "voters don't care".
Well voting for president in the US only 57% vote of available voters[1], even lower in non presidential votes or midterms at 40% [2], so is that also not valid since everyone doesn't vote? People choose to vote, if people don't vote to have their say that is their own bad.
In the US, if only 57% of people vote, you could say our president is only elected by less than about 30% of the people with the popular vote, half the eligible voters or about a third of the country.
You can make that claim about most US elected officials. It's broadly understood that nowhere near 100% of the US voting-eligible population votes in elections, and that when someone says "50% of the population voted for...", it means that 50% of those who bothered to vote at all. It's the same thing as the stories you see citing a study that finds that X% of Y's have Z trait. Everyone understands that it's referencing a percentage of those included in the study, not the entire population.
Will you point me to a dataset that demonstrates this? I've looked at state level data for a few states, and while I have seen higher turnout in Presidential elections, I see very low and declining turnout in those Primaries which I think just causes the same problem and allows the general election turnout to mask this problem.
Then, looking at off year and congressional elections, the data is much less hopeful. It's almost _always_ the case that you see less than 50% eligible, and even less than 50% _registered_ turnout.
in almost any election in every European country the voter presence is 50% or below. I think that's what the comment was about... is just a small % of people that participate in voting and even smaller percentage that votes for the winner.
>> Is there actually evidence that higher poll numbers in favor of X lead to higher voter turnout from supporters of X? It seems like everyone takes that for granted but I've never seen any evidence that it's true.
I'd like to see some raw evidence, too.
But since we're forced to speculate at the moment, my bet would be that the relation to voter turnout and a candidate's chances of winning isn't linear. It's probably more of a parabola: the more extreme a candidate's chances of being elected (or being defeated), the less likely anyone is to come out and vote, because it feels impossible to make a difference. On the flip side, I'd suspect that the closer and more contested a race is, the more likely people are to feel obligated to vote.
When people say "half the country supports X candidate" I like to point out polls only count registered voters who are likely to vote, which is closer to half the eligible voting population (which of course doesn't include any of the non-adults).
It's more like each candidate has support from less than a quarter of the population and most people don't support either.
What is the threshold for determining whether an election is valid? If I don't like the choices can I also boycott? Would it have any effect if another 6% of the population did likewise?
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