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Unless poll after poll is contacting and registering answers from 100% of people in the country, that's only 35-40% of the people who answered the poll, which is a much, much smaller number.
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Statistical sampling has been an accepted technique for over a century now
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None of that changes the fact that the statement that half the country is MAGA because half the country voted for Trump is untrue.

Significantly less than half the country voted for Trump. This is objective fact.

Significantly less than 100% of Trump voters identify as MAGA. This is objective fact.

Approving of Trump as President is also not the same thing as being MAGA, though the overlap is quite likely reasonably high at this point.

You can make an argument that there are more MAGA people than I estimated, but the argument I was referring to was basing it all off of voters for the 2024 election. If you want to make a different argument, we can look at it on its merits.

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I gave an analogy earlier that if you have 10 friends and asked them where they wanted to eat dinner and six said let’s get Italian and the other 4 said “Let’s kill Ralph and eat him”, you still have a shitty friend group.

If 40% of the country still supports everything that’s going on, that tells you a lot about this country. Especially seeing that because of the 2 Senators per state regardless of population, gerrymandering and to a lesser extent the electoral college, they have outsized influence on the government.

Exactly how can you approve of what Trump is doing and not be MAGA?

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A surprising amount of people are single issue voters and will vote for and support someone that supports that single issue. They might not care at all about the entire rest of the issues at all as long as their single issue is fine, and a lot of those single issues, like guns, long predate maga or the tea party.

I'm not saying that makes them good people, I'm just saying I don't think it's the same thing as maga.

2 senators per state isn't really the issue, but the cap on the house is. The senate was built to be population independent, and the house was built specifically to be population dependent, where yes if you had more people you had more power. Then they... voted to cap it, because it was going to give too much power to states with more people. Dumb. EV also tied to the house, so uncapping it unfucks a lot of that, too.

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The Senate though also decided the cabinet and the Supreme Court. Thats the major issue - especially the Supreme Court.

To your other point, I’ve met some Bush/Romney type Republicans who hold their nose and voted for Trump because the Democrats did go to far on social issues and I say that as a Black guy.

When I was at BigTech in 2020 I thought all of the videos we had to watch on “micro aggressions”, continue announcements on “ally programs”, “Latinx” instead of Latino/Latina (that every single Latino person I spoke to thought was ridiculous), the “how do we feel” meetings about Floyd, and the kind of liberals I met when I flew out to Seattle and other west coast offices (I worked remotely the entire time) were just weird. Not to mention being chastised if you didn’t put your preferred pronouns under your name.

I was like can I just do my damn job?

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Part of the problem is we changed the senate selections to votes. Originally state legislature picked their senators. That's an amendment that I think is a mistake and should be reverted.

The different chambers are supposed to represent different interests and instead we've made both halves of congress effectively the same thing.

There's deeper rot with the system besides these things - like the apparent lack of safeguards against the executive branch just... ignoring everything, including sometimes even the supreme court... but I don't think the framer's original intentions for the house and senate are fundamentally incorrect.

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How would taking away voting power from the people have been better? Especially now that while the state houses can get super majorities via gerrymandering but Senators have to appeal to a much wider base. There is a reason that you have more crazies in the house than the Senate.
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Stating objective facts is not "copium".

It is simply false that "half the country [voted] for Trump".

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