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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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I don't believe Texas is one of those states that requires electorates to keep their votes the same, though, so the lawsuit he threatened wouldn't hold up in a court of law anyway. At any rate, this whole thing is uncharted territory.
use political terms to describe, not insult
But can it be said that it is working properly when it hands the presidency to a guy that lost by about 2.7 million votes? At which point does it just turn into just sticking to the statu quo for it's own sake, even when things are blatantly not working?
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV
The idea that someone could be elected to the Presidency with a minority of the popular vote wasn't an unintended consequence of the electoral college, the whole point was to not tie the Presidential election to the outcome of the popular vote.
In fact, the Constitution doesn't mandate Presidential elections at all. If a state government wanted to start automatically assigning it's electors to the tallest candidate, there's nothing in the Constitution that says they can't.
None of this means we shouldn't get rid of the electoral college, just that the system was never meant to award the Presidency to the winner of the popular vote 100% of the time.
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
True but the discrepancy here is absolutely massive
Oh really when?
@Dr Dougsh: Because Americans take everything lying down. And even when there are protests, they accomplish almost nothing, because the media doesn't report on them, and the powers that be just ignore them because there is no threat of force behind them. There's no "or else" to put any reasonable fear into the elites. It's just noise.
edited 9th Dec '16 8:32:21 AM by BrainSewage
How dare you disrupt the sanctity of my soliloquy?
I'd rather take straight up popular vote than what happened now. Which was "handful of aging white voters in 4 specific states" deciding the Presidency.
use political terms to describe, not insult
One thing people mention is that this is something that goes both ways.
If you're a Republican in New York or California, you have a much smaller incentive to vote because "the state's gonna go blue anyways". If every vote counts, it creates a much bigger incentive for political engagement for the general population, which I view as generally a good thing.
Oh, bother.
That is a question many Americans have been asking for a while now, long before this election. Problem is, actually getting rid of the EC is really really difficult since it's part of our Constitution.
Yeah, even though I strongly disagree with the GOP, I believe their voters should feel like their votes matter even in a state like California. And of course, the same should apply for Democratic leaning voters in Red states.
edited 9th Dec '16 8:42:08 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
See, the purpose of the EC is to stop a populist demagogue from being ellected as tyrant of America or anything of the sort. That is its major and pretty much only actual function: to stop a Hitler-ish figure from ascending on the shoulders of the guillible masses. That's its premise.
Problem is, the EC is now the one ellecting the populist demagogue in question while the "guillible masses" are the ones doing everything in their reach to stop him. So not only has the system failed to do what it is supposed to do, it is serving the flipside opposite of what it is supposed to do: It is enabling the populist demagogue and giving him power.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
That's good, but like many political issues it could just be ended by "lack of evidence". Or Trump could get a favor if he did anything horrible, just like how Nixon got pardoned. Besides, it is unlikely he would have lost the popular vote if Russian hacking was effective in this case.
edited 9th Dec '16 8:53:43 AM by Wildcard
You know...the more I think about it the more I think the 2020 Dem primary is gonna be a complete shitshow.
New Survey coming this weekend!
American primaries are kind of inherently shitshows. It's part of the reason incumbent presidents have such a big advantage.
The more I think about it, the more I think everything in the foreseeable future is gonna be a total shitshow.
edited 9th Dec '16 8:56:56 AM by TrashJack
@Tactical Fox: Like I said, 2020 Democrat primary winner's slogan will be "Better Dead Than Red".
Seriously tho, how the fuck did Democrats not train its voter base to fall in line? How many times has that bitten us in the ass?
New Survey coming this weekend!
Unless you intend to foster the same authoritarian mindset and moral panic in the democratic base that has been used time and time again to turn out the Republican base, I don't see how you can do that.
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
It did fall in line. Our victory was overwhelming. It's just a bullshit electoral system and a few people in the Rust Belt who refuse to acknowledge reality possibly just cost us the country.
Oh really when?
I don't think this is entirely accurate, but:
Republicans hate the Democrats so much they're gonna vote against them no matter what. Even Obama said as much where anything he says gets torn apart by the republican establishment even if it's exactly in line with most republican policies.
Democrats seem to have very high moral/policy standards so if the candidate isn't sufficiently "inspiring" or morally pure they're just gonna sit it out.
edited 9th Dec '16 9:45:27 AM by Draghinazzo
I don't know if it's just me, but I'm one of those people who believes that the partisanship and mutual enmity that used be simply theatrics a decade or so back, really now is deeply personal. The politicians genuinely hate the other side just as much as their base does.
Been reading about this for a while. In Congress, there is definitively some new antipathy during the Obama administration.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
What books, Sept?
Oh, bother.
Hostility during the Obama administration? Gee, I can't imagine why.
Okay, in all seriousness, it was building up for a while since the Clinton administration. Fuck you very much, Newt Gingrich. But it's hard to deny that a certain "something" increased the antipathy.
edited 9th Dec '16 9:52:56 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
Tactical, you have a frustrating tendency towards authoritarianism in your posts that would prove pointlessly obstructive to attaining our actual goals. Like, seriously, calls for purging Sanders supporters and such, and now this "train people to fall in line" when that tends to be what people on the more Democratic side of things would prefer to avoid in favor of actually cooperating with each other. Why do you keep going towards these rather autocratic solutions that would, in the end, solve nothing?
In any case, at part of the problem was lack of voter turn out. Democrats tend to do better with a larger turnout, I think.
Also, can we please reel in some of the hyperbole? It's getting fucking frustrating to come into this thread and see people constantly posting about the absolute worst thing as if they are not only plausible but a sure thing. Too much cynicism can sometimes make a conversation utterly impossible to have.
