When the stakes are this high, not voting is voting for the winner.

By not voting, they are signaling they are fine with the situation, and will not stand with any opposition to the winner.

Edit to respond to below comment due to hitting posting limit:

>98M of the 185M total population of non-voters had the pretty rock solid excuse of not being eligible to vote, right? Almost a third of the country can’t vote (permanent residents, children, ex-cons in certain states, etc.)

Children seem irrelevant to consider, especially with voting trends of the youngest generations. Same with permanent residents and ex-cons, I don't see any reason these would have cast votes in different proportions. The most damning thing is this is after already seeing the evidence of 2017 to 2020 and the response to Jan 6, 2021.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...

>55% of White naturalized citizens voted for Trump in 2024, compared with 41% in 2020.

>51% of Hispanic naturalized citizens voted for Trump, up from 39% in 2020.

>46% of Asian naturalized citizens voted for Trump, an increase from 35% in 2020.

>This is without needing to get into the very real voter suppression effort that took place (we’ll assume every one of those “stands” with the winner).

I am assuming the number of people whose votes were prevented were negligible in comparison to the number of people who were apathetic (or boycotting).

>They also probably skew more to your position given their demographics.

A valuable lesson I have learned from 2016 and 2024 elections is that this is not true. What is most important is that people's feelings about their status relative to others not be disturbed (i.e. man over woman and white over non white), and the candidate willing to preserve that, no matter how horrible, is likelier to win more votes.

>I am not sure why you insist on going out of your way to dramatically overrepresent the size of your opposition

Obviously, the measure of the size of the opposition is subjective, and people are free to make bets as they see fit. However, based on the aforementioned "rolling over", it seems others are making the same bet I am.

Australia has compulsory voting at 90%+ participation and elects conservatives, by the standards of their politics, all the same. The opposite of what you're saying is probably true: if Democrats would focus less on the demographics-turnout based election model that has lost them 3 presidential and many, many congressional elections, they would win more often.

The context of this discussion is a university doing what it needs to gain access to money from the federal government.

>approximately everyone has rolled over

I did not say anything about not criticizing the winner. An "elite" can criticize all they want, but for day to day actions, when the opposing side has all 3 branches of government, willingly given to them by the majority of the population, I can't blame someone for not sacrificing themselves.

My point is this isn't some small group of radicals that weaseled their way in, this is more than half the "country" (if you can call it that), seeing the first term and really his whole life, and saying we want more of this chaos.

Edit: Yes, I know the nominal votes do not add up to half the voters, but practically, if you are to bet on the level of support you would get from opposing the winner, surely you are going to assume the non voters will be fine with however you are treated by the winner, especially this winner with his well known track record.

Effectively, I would expect support of far less than half of my fellow citizens. If you can't be bothered to vote, you're definitely not going to be bothered to do anything more.