No, half of Americans are not actually so attached to Donald Trump.
Stop repeating MAGA troll propaganda that's not true about half of Americans as hopped up Trumpies. Think of all the toddlers who don't follow politics – they're Americans too!
I was listening to Conspirituality Podcast from very recently about Curtis Yarvin, and they ended the episode saying something that's absolutely not true, and is actually MAGA bs propaganda line! The line was something like, “Around half of Americans still think Donald Trump is their guy.” This doesn't even make sense, the math just is so wrong on this because half of America never even voted for Donald Trump. But recently Kristi Burke had a youtube episode on just this that I'd listened to right before the Conspirituality Podcast. Burke really took a deep dive into many compelling reasons she insists it's so not true. But she said a lot of the people saying this in the comments are very likely MAGA troll bots posting comments, and I believe it since a lot of youtubers get trolled with overly rosy pro-Trump claims, and considering we live on The Internet of Fakes. There's no excuse though for a podcast that debunks right-wing misinformation to be repeating this MAGA lie, do better guys.
And this kind of shorthand bad math about Trump support is a political propaganda lie and it’s meant to exaggerate the idea of the "mandate" that the Trump administration has used to push all sorts of things that Donald Trump never campaigned on, such as offshoring prison jobs to a little country in Central America, deporting legal residents who immigrated the right way, or going to war with Denmark by invading Greenland, or annexing Canada, or even insulting Canada or going to war with anyone. So much of this “mandate” is being used to push things that were never there.
But it's math, and we have the numbers, lots of numbers are known. I can’t believe this needs to be gone over again, but I think it does, and I think I have no choice but to hope to add to others trying to make sure this misinformation zombie is put to rest.
Trump got less than 50% of the votes cast in the 2024 election. So right there once you take into account that a lot of people don't even vote, you know that it can't be half of America that still thinks Donald Trump is their guy because 50% of the actual voters didn't even vote for him, and many Americans don't vote at all. Joe Biden got more actual individual votes in 2020 than Trump got in 2024. In absolute numbers, despite the fact that the population grows every year and has been aging every year, the 2024 election didn't even have the highest amount of people voting – more people voted 4 years earlier in 2020, in absolute terms. The voter turnout as a percentage of voting eligible population (for example, children are ineligible to vote) – that percentage in 2024 was 63.9% – It was 65.3% in 2020. And it was just 59.2% in 2016 — lower than when Obama ran in 2008.
And voila, less than ⅓ of voting eligible citizens of the United States of America voted for Trump. Just 31.59% of the voting eligible population of Americans voted for Trump. That's less than one third. And about 22% of Americans are children, and again, are not even included in voting eligible citizens — but children are Americans too!
So you're not even at a third, even before you get to the fact that there are people who voted for Donald Trump who have no particular attachment to the man other than that they're conservative and him being a Republican, and a lot of people vote like it's team sports and of course they're not an Eagles fan so they’re rooting for the Steelers.
And this is also even before you even start considering that a few swing states had some pretty egregiously aggressive and expensive voter suppression efforts. I'm not even talking about hacking rumours or stuff like that. I'm talking about the documented voter suppression efforts Elon Musk's PAC did with dishonest propaganda in Michigan and Pennsylvania. And even worse, the highly questionable "voter challenges" stuff that Greg Palaste covered in a documentary showing that there were organized efforts to target non-white voters in the South to prevent even eligible citizens from voting under the claim that they were just trying to find cheaters or mistakes. I'm not even claiming that any of this actually changed the outcome of the election with the electoral college system as kooky as it is, but it could've meant a popular vote loss, or a lesser percentage at least, because of the voters who didn’t vote because of stuff like this.
After all is considered, it's actually more likely that about a quarter of Americans are actually "on the Trump train" as it were. It may not even be that high if you’re talking about die hard fans, but it’s really probably not much higher than 25%. And this sounds right because I have heard many times that Richard Nixon continued to have about 25% support even after he resigned in the midst of a scandal. Until recent years I had always found that number surprising. I don’t anymore obviously. I've read about studies that have been done and they say that apparently all things considered, about 25% of any population at a given time might favour authoritarianism, actively dislike democracy, and would even distinctly prefer to be ruled by a king or even a dictator. And obviously to the point that they're even willing to go out and vote for one apparently. And I have always heard about how many Trump voters have said themselves that they never voted in their life before Trump came along and ran for office, so that number actually doesn't seem that outlandish to me. The Pew Research Center had a study that said the median number was about 31% across nations. That makes sense, and it doesn’t change my mind about the quarter because I’m pretty sure there are a not insignificant number of authoritarian leaning Americans who are nevertheless not Trumpies — they want somebody else in there with a different plan for totalitarianism.
The question about whether Donald Trump has a mandate is a separate issue. Obviously Trump, his loyal staff, die hard MAGA supporters, and a bunch of likely paid sock puppet accounts on social media, say he has a mandate. But there have been numerous arguments against that idea from the get go. Only time will tell if around a quarter to a third of the population who’s hopped up on MAGA will actually manage to keep power over the majority for anything long-term. But at the very least the fact that they've been able to take any control at all with so few actual strong supporters should give the opposition some ideas. We don't need to wait for everybody to get on board to make progress.