You're elite surrounded by elites with great and powerful minds. Wave your wand and make it "right" then. Or change the system you seem unable to grasp.
We have now reached the point where looking at two integers and being able to tell which is greater than the other makes people not just an intellectual elite, but so hyperbolic an elite as to be considered out of touch with reality.
This thread covers it quite well. Disconnect between what is, and what you all wish it was. The fact that millions of people (such as e.g. myself) would've acted differently if things had been different. Also, millions upon millions and millions of historically marginalized right leaning voters, e.g., on the two left coasts.
And yet as often as you might go on to repeat it, the bigger number is still the bigger number, no matter what you wish it was.
To this day, many Germans are anxious to remind you that in the March 1933 election, the Nazis got somewhat over 17.1 million votes (44%) while the non-Nazi parties got almost 21 million votes. A consolation of sorts. Facts are facts after all.
It certainly is. The difference is some of you guys are arguing over the sets of numbers that don't matter(popular vote) while the rest of us are looking at the sets of number that actually do matter. (electoral vote). But if it will make you guys feel better, here's a participation trophy.
Tuttle actually had a decent point about that. Props to him for hitting that twice in a decade. We don't know why they didn't vote or how they would have voted had they gone to the polls. Note Anna's decision due to a local issue. Many feel (and rightly so I'm afraid), that they do not have a meaningful vote in the Presidential election due to the Electoral College. I'm in that boat. I vote anyway, mainly because I do think the popular vote means something, regardless of how it impacts the final result.
I've seen people using Hillary's win of the popular vote for a couple of reasons: 1) To argue Trump has no mandate 2) To defend the Democratic platform (it wasn't the message, it was the tactics) 3) Comfort themselves and others that a majority of Americans, or even just those that voted DIDN'T vote for a candidate that they feel represents some of the worst of America. I've listed these out couple times now but they have been ignored. Almost like some people can't respond, so just fall back to comfortable strawmen instead.
Exactly. That Trump won the election is undisputed. However, there are still many good reasons to remind people that Americans actually rejected the disgusting piece of trash.
That your country is held up as a democracy and that Americans so easily throw around the words freedom and liberty, but have a system that has so far elected a President no less then five times contrary to the popular vote? How about that? Clinton's loss is legitimate in the sense that she participated in the contest knowing the rules. She lost. Trying to find mechanisms to unravel the election is silly for that reason (subject to Russian influence being proven), but you don't nonetheless think that this result, and the previous times the popular vote has been lost be elected Presidents, means the electoral college system is worth review? By saying "what difference does it make?" you're effectively saying "what difference does it make what the majority of Americans wanted?". There is credible argument that the electoral college system is a historical holdover that is no longer suitable for modern, free elections.
I agree. It wasn't the election itself but what followed that is shameful. Anyway, the point is that things can go awry pretty badly on the basis of not much in electoral terms. And here, now, you have a guy about to take office though trailing by millions in the popular vote. Something's far wrong in your system. The comparative number of people voting this way or that has a great deal of significance, or ought to.
The electoral college can be amended. The only provision in the constitution which cannot be amended is the rule that each state has equal representation in the Senate. But the concept of the electoral college could be amended any way you want. It would even be possible in theory (though it could never happen in practice) to replace the very concept of the states electing the president with a national "popular vote" election. Personally, I think that would be unfortunate, because I am a strong believer in the principle of a federal system (even though, in this case, it got us the worst president in my lifetime and perhaps even in the history of the country, instead of a candidate who would merely have been bad). But one aspect of the presidential election I would like to see amended is the very concept of the electoral college, which has no justification in modern times. It was put in place in a society where the average people would not have any real idea who the candidates were, so each state was allowed to choose a number of "electors" who would actually elect the president. (Without the means whereby the states would make that choice. New York did not vote in that election, because of a deadlock at the state level in deciding the means of choosing the electors.) Today, that is not the case; the people have access to plenty of information about the candidates and are probably as qualified to make such a choice as the hugely partisan "electors". I wouldn't mind seeing the December 19th election eliminated and a state's electoral votes tallied directly on the basis if the November election. The process of certification of the results of a state's vote would count as that state's participation in the election of the president.
All of which are valid reasons, provided they are kept in the context of the very nature of the electoral-vote system: Democrats are currently more popular than Republicans in terms of the country as a whole, but their popularity is concentrated in a limited number of states. Part of that is due to the mentality of banding together in a few areas of the coutry and disdaining two-thirds of the country as "fly-over states." If democrats spread out more, instead of dominating California so strongly, they would control the whole country.
California is more purple than people give us credit for. Yeah, Sacramento, San Francisco, LA and San Diego are predominantly liberal areas but during my recent drive home across state, I saw plenty of Trump signs in the central California area, and even Orange County has historically voted Republican (they actually went for Clinton, this go around). I think this is evidence of the idea that this was less a fight between states or between different coast, but between urban and rural areas.
It seems that there was a serious attempt at it with the Nixon backed Bayh-Celler amendment in 1969/1970. While it died, it's not impossible to imagine a situation whereby specific demographic shifts could lead to a similar concept getting support. Doubt it would happen in at least the next couple of decades though.
What is unfortunate, and a stain on the country's honor nevertheless, is that not enough Americans rejected the disgusting piece of trash. I seriously condemn the Republicans for voting for Trump, but I also think the Democrats share some of the blame, for not having a better candidate. Trump was easily beatable in enough states to give the Democrats a resounding electoral win.
Only by the uninformed. America is not and never was a democracy, nor was it intended to be. Like the European Union, it is a federation of democracies, and that distinction is extremely important.
Or any time after that. To have three-qaurters of the states ratify such an amendment would require a very large number of small states to vote away their ability to have a meaningful voice in the presidential election, and that just isn't going to happen.
Another way to put it is that any amendment to the Constitution can be blocked by only 4.4% of the people... the 4.4% whose votes currently count far more than anyone else's.
But in a country that champions the weak not being dominated by the strong, that is perhaps appropriate at the state level, no?
NY is purple also. Without the mass of blue in NYC ny would be very rural. if you cut ny at the Hudson you would have a large red state with lower population and a dense blue state. One of the problems the ny states government has is balancing the needs of rural communities and farmlands with the needs of the urban center which contributes much more of the state's budget than the rest. You get into northern ny and you have lots of churches, lots of farmers, lots of hunters, and lots of guns. There are hill people, a few cults, and there is a separation of white and black that starts to happen. One of the reasons this becomes noticeable is the college system pulls a lot of college kids and administrators out of the city. The black population of upstate ny comes a lot from the city and is not like your black populations of the south who are more relatives of settled slaves or segregated populations. Some of the black families in rural ny are sitting on some money, and they pull the kids out of the urban areas into the country because there is less violence, but there is more racism. Oh, and ny has mountains. I know northeast states have a strip running down their west side of some decent mountain areas. Ny and some of the northern states are almost a steeper mountainous areas. That is not to say places like Michigan and Ohio do not have them, but your southern and southwest states have areas and rolling hills are not mountains. You see a lot more horizon in other states. Yes I know, I targeted into a tldr
Well, one thing I wonder is whether what state you live in is such a fundamental thing as to require that kind of protection. But I think the biggest reason I'm skeptical of arguments that state power is important for liberty is that, ever since 1860, our history is full of places where federal power was used to expand individual liberty over the objections of states that wanted to quash it.
A lot of that is bullshit chest thumping. It also comes a lot from whitewashing of history and government. Kids are taught about democracy and told that the US is one because we vote. This 's drilled into their heads while the reality of the electoral college is barely mentioned until college, and it is never really explained we have a representative government in the legislature. It is said but then they beat down that point with we are democracy. Our high school elections were supposed to give us an idea how government works, but they never included an electoral college. Even as Adults most people are too busy with their own lives to care. Still, the founding fathers were never for the ignorant and poor masses voting. It is a total lie they wanted democracy. They wanted power for themselves, and to make it look like people had a direct input. They did not think highly of your uneducated common person. The US also does not have freedom and liberty. The founding fathers had slaves. They were about freedom and liberty for themselves, and not for everyone. Yes, there is a lot of romantic speeches of equality, but their actions never reflected their words. Today it is blind nationalism and patriotism that makes people whitewash and ignore real history. It is selfish and ignorant, but you have to have a certain amount of that in other countries? Why is the British monarchy still around? They are no longer ruling, but you are whitewashing a brutal history of all sorts of violence and oppression. It is because you live in a place that has amazing advancements and really great things and people tend to not want to. E interrupted by the bodies they were built on. Oh, and yes America is not even one of the best in history.
State rights often seem to be involved in oppression and taking away what freedoms we have. But there are some cases of the reverse happening. We see it right now with marijuana becoming legal.
as I posted a week or more ago on Facebook, the various "why she lost" explanations are not mutually exclusive 1. Clinton's campaign badly fucked up in MI, WI, and somewhat in PA 2. Comey 3. Russians 4. GOP voter suppression 5. the white supremacist factor 6. mobilized evangelicals and probably some other - probably more than one of these may have lost it for her by itself but they all served some part in contributing- about the only excuse that seems to fail to align with the facts is "economic anxiety" (because the median income of Trump voters was over $70k a year) and the one most easily identifiable factor (as Silver describes) is the late deciders which points back to Comey primarily.
