Your original comment said: “Also a lot decided to not vote at all. That’s really what sank us.”

Clearly, the popular vote is not what sank us. The one trying to argue something different so you’d win the argument is you.

Whose votes lead to the EC results? Americans. The arbitrary distinction you are trying to make here is ridiculous.

Yeah, obv state and local elections are very important as well, although in some cases even those elections don’t really require people to vote due to district composition. Generally, I agree with you though. I was mainly pointing out that the popular vote for the presidential election basically does not matter.

My entire point was that the popular vote basically does not matter (and tbh shouldn’t matter since FPTP is terrible, although the EC is also terrible), so you saying that Trump being elected because people didn’t vote isn’t necessarily the issue here. Even if literally everyone in the country voted, as long as the states ended up the same way, Trump would still have won.

This is not strictly true, even if it’s repeated a lot. Because of our voting system, a large number of people likely didn’t vote because they didn’t need to vote. For instance, you pretty much know how things will end up in California or Idaho even before the votes are tallied. People who didn’t vote in swing states on the other hand…