If they have won seats and are significant (i.e. can qualify for recieving official funding from state run campaign finance offices) then only they should be listed...
Someone should edit the Electoral College section — specifically, the part where it says the years where a president lost the popular vote but won the election; they should add 2016 to that.
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It's probably held off because the Electoral College hasn't voted yet, and they will do so on December 19th. So while Trump did win the projected EC votes, officially, no winner is declared yet.
Edited by Adenav
"On those occasions when a loser of the popular election gains office through this process — thankfully rare, but it's happened four times: in 1824, 1876, 1888 and 2000"
Add 2016 to that
Re the section "Political Parties": there are two sub-sections which describe the Democrats as "centre-left" and the Republicans as "centre-right". These descriptions suffer from a point-of-view problem in terms of America vs. Rest of the World, in that they are only valid from an American perspective.
From the point of view of Britain, and indeed most other so-called "Western democracies", the Democrats are a right-wing party, and the Republicans are a far-right party with shades of "right-wing extremist" and "looney right". The various "test which party most closely represents you" websites that spring up around American elections show this quite well. If you get a bunch of self-identified moderate-to-right-wing British voters to take these tests the party that comes out on top is the American Green party, even though those same voters do not care about environmental matters and would never vote for the British Green party in a million years as it is considered "looney left". The reason is that the American Green party's position on non-environmental matters is largely free of those policy elements which appear so right-wing as to be unacceptably extremist or just plain mental from a British viewpoint, whereas the Democrats have plenty of such elements and the Republicans appear to have little else.
The point I am trying to make is that both sides of the Atlantic see the definition of "centre" on the other side as being a looong way either left or right of centre by the standards of their own side. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, ignoring non-mainstream parties, Americans perceive Britain as having no right-wing politics and Britons perceive the US as having no left-wing politics. But there is no mention of this on the page at all.
Since a significant part of the purpose of the page is to allow both Americans and non-Americans to obtain a more balanced perspective of American politics in a global context, there is need for at least a sentence or two to point out this difference in viewpoint, and it seems to me that the most appropriate place for it would be immediately following the two paragraphs in which the Democrats are described as "centre-left" and the Republicans as "centre-right", since that is where the concept of "centre" appears as a basis for laying out the American political spectrum.
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That has been discussed in the forum threads as well. As a non-American troper I have to note that it's a myth that the US Democrats are right-wing; the differences between the American "centre" and the non-American "centre" are seldom large enough.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
However the Republican party is further to the right than most mainstream conservative parties. For instance David Cameron would probably be better off running as a Democrat than a Republican in the US. While I don't know if Dems are ouright "right-wing" they are right-leaning centrists by international standards even since Clinton pulled them to the right and the progressives have been weakened in the House. At the very least we should mention the GOP is to the right of most center-right parties for most countries (and to even many Americans they are increasingly extreme), or that they have a strong right-wing populist constituency.
Edit requests have to be filed here
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After the tectonic shift in the nineties, the political "centre" in many European countries are being adjusted to the right, mostly because "true socialism" is almost non-existent, and the Thatcher parole of "no alternative" is almost a dogma. Thus, many earlier social democrats, like in Norway and in Great Britain, or France, have shifted their policies to match the democrats more than the old social democratic standards. I wager this has been an American wish for many of those countries for years. The result of this shift of "political centre" has placed the Norwegan Labor party square in the middle, as they state in the coming election this year. I guess we are modeling our systems more and more on the american two-party idea.
Time to change the following sentence:
"So yes, one night a year, there's a chance that the Secretary of Education or the Secretary of Agriculture could end up as President."
It should be rewritten as such:
"So yes, one night a year, there's a chance that the Secretary of Education, the Secretary of Agriculture, or the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development could end up as President."
Whoever is authorized to edit Locked Topics needs to update the Supreme Court section since there are currently (although temporarily) only eight justices.
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And here we have a perfect example as to why I have been begging for this page to be unlocked for months.
I serve at the pleasure of President Pritchart.
It's now unlocked.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Thank you, good sir!!!
I serve at the pleasure of President Pritchart.
It might be interesting to note, in the section on the Twenty-Year curse, that since elections are held once every four years, there's a 1 in 5 chance that any randomly selected president was elected in a year divisible by twenty. 2 in 5 if they got reelected for a second term.
A few errors regarding the section on election timing: - Presidential elections weren't held on a single nationwide day until 1848, so it wasn't the Founding Fathers' decision to choose a fixed date. Even then, many states held elected their congressmen on different days until the 20th century. - The British convention of holding elections on Thursdays didn't take hold until the 1930s.
Since the "nuclear option" discussed in the section on the Senate has now actually been invoked (at least as relates to presidential appointments), could we get the page unlocked for long enough to update that portion?
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The Designated Survivor section seems extremely politically biased.
"The Secret Service designates one member of the line of succession the "Designated Survivor" to stay behind at any event where the entire line could be zapped. That's right. If DC is nuked during a State of the Union address, the country will be run by a person designated by cops. 'Nuff said. "
It implies that the Secret Service are essentially police officers, and that they choose Designated Survivors supportive of a police agenda. Neither of those implications has any support.
Hey, now that Senator Byrd has died, someone really should change the person listed as "President Pro Tempore of the Senate" to Daniel Inouye.
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Er, I wrote a snarky "do it yourself" comment at first, but then I noticed the page was locked. Sorry.
Edited by Filby Groovy.
The bloat here is getting way out of hand, and it is starting to read like a Wikipedia article, a long recitation of dreary facts.
Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty
Does someone need to update third parties by the membership size as for 2017?
Because sources are dated and an importance of Libertarian Party some successes since last year election.
Edited by Franco-America2018 Hide / Show Replies