Another way to read it is both parties put up candidates who were unliked by the majority of the population. Most people voted for the party they usually vote for. The Democrats have a baked in presidential year majority, so the Democratic candidate won the popular vote by a large margin. In a few states a concerted effort to keep the Democratic vote down worked combined with a campaign to convince some disaffected, poorly educated white voters to come out and vote Republican. These are people who either had given up voting, or were unenthusiastic Democratic voters. This small handful of voters made Trump president.
Biden is much more liked than Hillary ever was and especially in swing states the Democrats need to win. For the relative handful of swing voters who actually make the difference in electing the president what gets them to vote one way or the other often has much more to do with whether they like the candidate or not. And if they dislike both, they vote for who they dislike the least. It's hard for policy wonks to get their mind around that, but most Americans (and most people in all democracies) are not policy wonks.
I misremembered that detail about being proportional. It would still be unbalanced.
We have laws on the books that are unconstitutional, like the Patriot Act. But laws that are questionable constitutionality often get challenged. The ones that end up in front of the Supreme Court are those that are brought either by lawyers willing to take the fight to the mat pro bono or those who have the resources to mount a Supreme Court fight and have standing to bring a case. In the case of the wealth tax you have a class of people with both the resources and standing to challenge the law's constitutionality.
The conservative majority on SCOTUS isn't as pro-Republican as most people fear, but it is pro-business and pro-wealthy people. It would almost certainly shoot down any wealth tax.
Yes, the disengaged know very little about what's really going on.
I've looked at the internals of several presidential approval polls. Trump's 40% favorability is about 20% strong favorable and about 20% some favorable. His 50-55% unfavorable is almost all strongly unfavorable. One poll I looked at recently asked those who said they were favorable to Trump how much of his policies they liked. Only about 15% liked all or almost all of his policies. There was a fairly high percentage of people who didn't like quite a bit of his policies, but are favorable because of at least some things important to them they think he's done right.
The poll didn't ask, but for most of those people it's the economy. There are quite a few American, mostly low information, who answer those favorability questions based on what's happening in their own life. And for most of those people, their #1 issues are financial. If the economy is doing well, they answer favorable in those polls.
Historically presidential approval has tracked the economy fairly tightly. Political scientists who have studied the trends have said that a normal president would have about a 60% approval rating right now just on economic figures. Trump is under performing the economy by about 20%. Normal presidents usually have about a 40-45% approval rating during recessions, all else being equal. If we go into recession next year, that could drop Trump's approval ratings into the 20s as the "somewhat approve" people switch their opinions.
Normally the president has a lot less impact on the economy than people think. And what impact the president does have has a 2-4 year lag. Trump has been enjoying the economy created by Obama. The impacts from Trump's policy changes have been slow to appear, but they are coming. The Midwest farm sector is in a deep recession now. It contributed to big Democratic gains in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa in 2018.
Trump has also destabilized the Middle East and a war that stops the flow of oil is possible. While those of us championing moving away from oil would like to see a decline in supply, it would have a major impact on the economy.
Another thing that could destabilize the entire world economy is Brexit. One of the reasons Teresa May couldn't get it done was the experts estimated that a fast Brexit would range from economically bad to catastrophic. Boris Johnson is gung ho to leave the EU regardless of the agreement with the EU and he now has the majority to do it. The UK may do OK with Brexit, but there is a good chance that Scotland and possibly Wales will have a vote to leave the UK and join the EU. In Scotland it is almost certain to win.
Chaos in the UK economy would likely have ripples throughout the world economy. They are a G-7 economy and any of the G-7 taking a serious economic hit would hurt the rest.
The election pundits have been saying that the chances of anyone winning the presidency in effectively a one on one race (not a scenario like 1992 with H Ross Perot) is marginal at 47% (what Trump got) and goes to zero around 42%. Trump is very unlikely to get better than 47%. In presidential re-elections, the incumbent almost always gets their approval rating in vote percentage. GW Bush and Obama got almost exactly their approval rating on election day.
A lot of states, including the entire west coast are having government agencies pretty much automatically register people to vote. Washington state has more state agencies doing it than just about any other state. But if you look at the list of states doing it, it's almost all blue states.
Automatic Voter Registration
Why? High turnout almost always favors Democrats and so Republicans do all they can to suppress the vote.
A big win by Democrats could open the door for a wealth tax, but it will be challenged in court and it will almost certainly lose.
The next administration will be bogged down fixing Trump's messes. There would probably be quite a few Democrats in Congress who would be OK with trying a wealth tax, but would want to wait until the fires were put out which would delay it for a couple of years at least.
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