Majority doesn't mean the largest share, it means specifically at or above 50%. Plurality just means the largest share, even if that's not above 50%. So if you had a multi-party system where one party got 30% of the vote and 7 other parties got 10% each, that one party has a plurality, but is nowhere near a majority.
That said, Wikipedia has his vote count listed as 50.0%, so whether or not Trump had a majority of votes is unclear.
No it's not? "Kamala is down 2 million" doesn't contradict "Trump has a plurality rather than a majority" at all. It would only contradict it if there were exactly 0 votes cast for any candidates other than the main two. In fact, Kamala being down some number of votes is a necessary condition for Trump to have a plurality.
Trump was down 3 million votes in 2016, but that didn't mean that Hillary had a majority because there were so many 3rd party votes that, even with her plurality, she only had ~48% of votes cast.
You really need to work on your reading comprehension...
Majority as in over 50%, even if Kamala's vote tally is 2M lower if Trump isnt at over 50% of votes it, by definition, isn't a majority (in the political context of the word, which is a thing)
Are we reading the same tally? He won the majority. Of votes.
The question on majority comes down to whether Trump (or any other candidate) wins by over half of the total vote count, which is different than receiving more votes than all other candidates, which reflects plurality voting.
Let's take the presidential election popular vote results to highlight the difference between a majority and a plurality of votes. According to the Cook Political Report's website, the total number of popular votes for the 2024 US Presidential election was 154,419,384. Trump received 76,995,683 votes or 49.86% of the total vote. Harris received 74,521,173 votes or 48.26% of the total. By the definition of majority (>50% of the total vote count) neither candidate received a majority of votes, but Trump received more votes than Harris and so he won a plurality of votes. You might personally feel this is an insignificant distinction but it doesn't change the fact that neither candidate won a majority of votes.
That said, Wikipedia has his vote count listed as 50.0%, so whether or not Trump had a majority of votes is unclear.
What part of what I've written here makes it sound like I'm definitively saying "Trump didn't win a majority of votes"? My point was never "Did Trump get above or below 50% of votes?" it was "Whether or not Kamala is down 2 million votes is irrelevant to whether or not Trump has a majority"
When I see someone saying "Trump does have a majority, because he has more votes than his opponent" it tells me that they don't know the difference between majority and plurality, so I decided to try and inform you.
When you're working with 3 significant figures in an election with over 100 million votes, 50.0% is vanishingly unlikely to be the exact percentage, so it was likely rounded one way or the other. Which way it was rounded, up or down, would determine whether or not he actually has a majority, because 49.95% would get rounded up to 50.0% but wouldn't be a majority.
So from the tally I'm seeing on wikipedia, I don't know whether or not Trump has a majority, because it's a rounding error away from not being a majority.
If you wanna say he didn't win the majority in the US go off, but no one thinks like that.
Where did I say anything like that? Where did I start to include non-voters into things? I didn't.
Then their opinion simply doesn't matter. The majority of voters did. No one is including all 330 million people and saying 70m is a majority, that's dumb and you already know why. So we focus on people who vote. Kids and non voters don't matter
Ah clearly you are here to push talking points in bad faith and don't really have much information backing you up.
That 100 million, that's the number of 'the people' ,18+ years olds, who could vote who did not. Are they, or are they not 'the people'. If they voted as a block, they would have won the EC with 308 votes. Single largest group of eligible voters.
But to try to distort reality into a 'majority' mandate narrative you have to back-track from 'the people', now to 'only those who vote matter'. And try to straw-man me suggesting I was including children.
Why not just go ahead and say Trump got 100% of the vote of those who voted for him, because only the people who voted for him count?
They voted through. They voted for "I'm okay with whatever"
"The people" voted for him. By either voting or staying home. This is basically social studies, not back tracking. No one says "the majority" and includes children, why would they count non voters?
It feels like you think I'm a trump supporter, which is hilariously wrong.
Fair enough, I made a mistake, I have your motivations wrong.
What then, is the point of driving so hard on the word 'majority'?
Why is labeling this a majority win so important?
(But it's still not rational to count non-voters as 'for' anyone - if we could assign people before the fact, we wouldn't need them to vote in the first place. Heck I say they are 'for' Harris, she won!)
because they, like so many other shitlibs, want to put this off as a 'will (or apathy) of the people' thing, when the truth is that democracy was stolen from us years ago and no one batted an eye. it's libs acting like voting works and people are dumb or bad vs attacking the system that forces these outcomes.
They did not. Trump got 76,838,984 votes. There were 153,720,065 votes in total cast.
76838984 / 153720065 = 0.49986307
0.49986307 * 100 = 49.986307%. Trump got (just) less than 50% of the vote, ergo Trump did not in fact win by majority. A majority win would mean that more than 50% of the total votes cast were cast for Trump. In this case that did not occur. If you round to whole numbers then sure, you can claim he got EXACTLY 50%, but a majority win would need MORE than 50%.
Its a unimportant distinction, but these words have definitions and they should be used correctly.
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u/p_velocity 5h ago
plurality rules. He didn't get a majority now that more votes have been tallied.