just as is true of a lot of the newer ideas being thrown on the table this primary season, expect this one to be picked up in some form by other prospective candidates.
just as is true of a lot of the newer ideas being thrown on the table this primary season, expect this one to be picked up in some form by other prospective candidates.
That's what I like the most about this announcement. Warren bringing it up as a campaign point means other candidates will likely start seriously talking about it as well.
That's what I like the most about this announcement. Warren bringing it up as a campaign point means other candidates will likely start seriously talking about it as well.
If you're just going to go wild and try and get votes with moonshots, might as well go big and propose eliminating work on Fridays. I'd vote for that candidate.
If you're just going to go wild and try and get votes with moonshots, might as well go big and propose eliminating work on Fridays. I'd vote for that candidate.
this is nowhere close to a moonshot, though. we're literally halfway to already possibly rendering the electoral college irrelevant through the national popular vote interstate compact. warren...
If you're just going to go wild and try and get votes with moonshots,
this is nowhere close to a moonshot, though. we're literally halfway to already possibly rendering the electoral college irrelevant through the national popular vote interstate compact. warren (and everybody else who wants this who is a presidential candidate) is actually behind the curve on this, because that's been a thing for over a decade now.
Accept we're not, most state reps will not vote to make their states suddenly irrelevant in campaigns because they don't have enough of a population to have their needs represented, all the focus...
Accept we're not, most state reps will not vote to make their states suddenly irrelevant in campaigns because they don't have enough of a population to have their needs represented, all the focus would go to a few states. All the states that do things like provide food for the majority populace would have policies dictated on them by people who do not live where they do or deal with the problems they do. Mississippi, the place she said this, would be left out and politicians would have little reason to listen to them or pander to them.
Is there a better system than the electoral college? Probably. Is it a straight popular vote? No. Also, we're a Republic not a democracy. It's done that way for a reason, so the needs of the minority aren't ignored.
Edit: Wasn't this horse beat to death after the last election?
i'm going to let you in on a little secret: most states are already irrelevant under the electoral college. have you ever seen anybody seriously campaign in alaska recently? how about arkansas?...
Exemplary
Accept we're not, most state reps will not vote to make their states suddenly irrelevant in campaigns because they don't have enough of a population to have their needs represented, all the focus would go to a few states.
i'm going to let you in on a little secret: most states are already irrelevant under the electoral college. have you ever seen anybody seriously campaign in alaska recently? how about arkansas? mississippi? new york? of course not, because they're locked into their voting patterns. there's no point in campaigning in most states because you'll either win them handily or lose them handily, and your campaigning will make no difference in the outcome because all the votes after 50% + 1 for you or your opponent in those states in a two person race are wasted since they cannot materially make a difference in how the state votes.
under a popular vote, people might campaign in only a few states--but they'll probably lose. you know why? because then, every margin matters everywhere. 70-30 in alabama under the electoral college means nothing for the winner or the loser--in a popular vote, though, both numbers mean quite a lot, because every vote that makes up that margin could be the one that decides the presidential election. it's also quite likely, actually, that parties would develop policies to represent people of the sort you describe pretty quickly, since now their votes actually mean a lot and are up for grabs in a way that matters!
All the states that do things like provide food for the majority populace would have policies dictated on them by people who do not live where they do or deal with the problems they do.
...imagine having your national policies dictated by someone who lost the popular vote by close to 3% but won because the electoral college! the reality is this is an inherent aspect of any democratic system because democracy is majoritarian. you cannot eliminate tyranny of the majority, you can only minimize it. and if we were smart about minimizing it, we'd have blown the electoral college up when it first swung a result in 1824 to someone who wasn't the choice of the people.
Mississippi, the place she said this, would be left out and politicians would have little reason to listen to them or pander to them.
see my point about margins. a democrat losing 55-45 in mississippi or a republican winning mississippi 55-45 would matter a whole hell of a lot more in a popular vote system than in the electoral college, for the vote wasting reason. mississippi would actually be a great place to shore up the vote for both parties, incidentally. massively racially polarized population that could be swayed to either side by changes in policies.
Also, we're a Republic not a democracy. It's done that way for a reason, so the needs of the minority aren't ignored.
if i had a quarter for every time this stupid cliche was trotted out for why we can't just entrust people to decide what they want because the founding fathers said so 220 years ago, i'd be rich as fuck and i'd use it to overturn the electoral college.
I just don't see it happening short of a revolution. Too much political power is already concentrated in high population areas leaving middle America out. It's the unacknowledged reason Trump got...
I just don't see it happening short of a revolution. Too much political power is already concentrated in high population areas leaving middle America out. It's the unacknowledged reason Trump got elected, because free trade agreements, while a net positive left middle America out of jobs while wealth concentrated around the high population states and cities, meanwhile middle America suffers from unemployment and drug addiction. Him an Bernie were the only two candidates who would even address the issue that globalism and free trade has negatively and disproportionately impacted certain regions. Sure the economy recovered from the free trade agreements, but the economic recovery wasn't in the areas that suffered the loss.
I don't see how a pure democracy system will work for Presidential elections to fix or balance that.
You say stupid cliche, well blame public schools and higher education, because that's where I got my stupid cliches, not some random people on the Internet. I need something credible from a source that's credible that says pure democracy is a good system for promising equitable representation at mass scale.
my friend, we're like 67% of the way there and things have gone just fine. there are a lot of things that might cause revolution--this, however, is probably not going to be one of them! i mean...
I just don't see it happening short of a revolution.
my friend, we're like 67% of the way there and things have gone just fine. there are a lot of things that might cause revolution--this, however, is probably not going to be one of them!
Too much political power is already concentrated in high population areas leaving middle America out.
i mean yeah, that's... kinda how it should be? why should political power be allocated on the basis of land and not population?
It's the unacknowledged reason Trump got elected, because free trade agreements, while a net positive left middle America out of jobs while wealth concentrated around the high population states and cities, meanwhile middle America suffers from unemployment and drug addiction.
it's one reason. it's not the reason, and there is no singular reason trump got elected. i can make just as much of a case for james comey being why he won as you can for why what you describe got trump elected. this is kind of a wash.
I don't see how a pure democracy system will work for Presidential elections to fix or balance that.
we use "pure" democracy in the context of this conversation in 536 congressional races (2 use RCV), and that works pretty well. we use it 49 gubernatorial races (1 uses RCV) and it works just fine. we use it in basically every state senate and state house seat and it works just fine. why wouldn't it also work for the presidency?
Because the high population areas don't grow their own food. But the fact you dismiss people in low population areas so snidely shows the problem. The congressional races are for single districts,...
why should political power be allocated on the basis of land and not population?
Because the high population areas don't grow their own food. But the fact you dismiss people in low population areas so snidely shows the problem.
The congressional races are for single districts, not an entire country. Not a whole lot of geographic spread there.
Let me put it another way, say a major city is dumping pollutants and sewage into the water, and its flowing down river to a rural area and poisoning their water sources. In a pure democracy, the problem gets ignored because the city, to which the current system benefits can out vote and ignore the problems of the people living down stream, under the electoral college, at least they have enough of a vote for politicians to pay attention to the issue. Under the pure democracy, the problem gets ignored because it doesn't effect those with the voting power.
with respect: that is probably the worst justification i have ever heard for the allocation of power based on land and not people, not least because a lot of home-grown food in america is produced...
Because the high population areas don't grow their own food.
with respect: that is probably the worst justification i have ever heard for the allocation of power based on land and not people, not least because a lot of home-grown food in america is produced by california (a blue state which has its power diluted by the electoral college) or is imported from overseas (so should we allow the rest of the world to vote in our elections?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadbasket#North_America The rural areas that grow food in California are more than likely red. Why are you gaslighting me, I never said overseas people should vote....
The rural areas that grow food in California are more than likely red.
Why are you gaslighting me, I never said overseas people should vote. That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.
I'm saying if you ignore the economic situation of those that produce food, you're going to have a crisis at some point, whether that's an outright strike, to supply food to their oppressors, or just an inability to operate because they're encountering problems that politicians ignored for too long because their isn't enough voter base to pay attention to those regions.
perhaps, but for one thing you need county data to prove that, and you can't really ascertain why they vote that way without a much deeper analysis: it could be that those people are simply...
The rural areas that grow food in California are more than likely red.
perhaps, but for one thing you need county data to prove that, and you can't really ascertain why they vote that way without a much deeper analysis: it could be that those people are simply republicans and always have been for cultural reasons, because their areas are rural and they feel obligated to vote accordingly, because they're farmers and they feel they are better represented by republicans currently (remember that many midwesterners voted for obama barely a decade ago), etc...
Why are you gaslighting me, I never said overseas people should vote. That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.
that's... not gaslighting? what?
I'm saying if you ignore the economic situation of those that produce food, you're going to have a crisis at some point, whether that's an outright strike, to supply food to their oppressors, or just an inability to operate because they're encountering problems that politicians ignored for too long because their isn't enough voter base to pay attention to those regions.
this administration literally ignored the economic situation of farmers in the midwest to start an ill-advised trade war with china, and promptly fucked those farmers over and lost them a shit ton of money last year in doing so, so i don't think this follows even under the electoral college you suppose better represents them, much less a popular vote system where their votes count exactly the same as mine since they're not tied to how their state votes as a sum.
And yet under the current system where the current president has been voted into power by a minority of voters from a rural coalition, the EPA has been gutted. 🤔🤔🤔
Let me put it another way, say a major city is dumping pollutants and sewage into the water, and its flowing down river to a rural area and poisoning their water sources. In a pure democracy, the problem gets ignored because the city, to which the current system benefits can out vote and ignore the problems of the people living down stream, under the electoral college, at least they have enough of a vote for politicians to pay attention to the issue. Under the pure democracy, the problem gets ignored because it doesn't effect those with the voting power.
And yet under the current system where the current president has been voted into power by a minority of voters from a rural coalition, the EPA has been gutted.
What does that have to do with anything? The low population areas don't manufacture their own farming equipment. You're just describing economic specialization.
Because the high population areas don't grow their own food.
What does that have to do with anything? The low population areas don't manufacture their own farming equipment. You're just describing economic specialization.
What about respecting the rights of marginalized minorities? Should we have an electoral college where candidates must be LGBT, african american, asian american, hispanic american, european...
What about respecting the rights of marginalized minorities? Should we have an electoral college where candidates must be LGBT, african american, asian american, hispanic american, european american, etc.? Shouldn't we be offering them disproportional representation if you are worried about rural areas being misrepresented?
What about the specific needs of what these minorities provide for the country?
Your argument of
Because the high population areas don't grow their own food. But the fact you dismiss people in low population areas so snidely shows the problem.
Makes no sense in a globalized economy. Guess what, high population areas still need to buy food and I can guarantee you that if those prices go up because of shitty policies, they are going to start voting in favor of policies that benefit rural farmland.
But lets ignore that for a second and consider whether tyranny of the majority has ever effected anything in the US. Remember slavery and oppression of the minorities and how we had to have a civil war to fix a problem exacerbated by the electoral college? Not a great track record if you ask me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism There's probably more evidence that those minorities would be further marginalized under a popular vote (again its one of the major criticisms of pure...
There's probably more evidence that those minorities would be further marginalized under a popular vote (again its one of the major criticisms of pure democracies and populism). Need a case in point, Nazi's were a populist movement, the Jewish community was outvoted, they had no voice in the political system, and their rights were stripped, and we all know how that ended.
An argument for the removal of the electoral college is not an argument to protect marginalized minorities. Historic evidence suggests the opposite would occur. If populism was the rule, none of those minorities would have gotten the rights to free speech, cases in supreme courts, and other checks the system had in place to eventually evolve to the point where they were heard and protected.
I personally advocate for reforming the electoral college, not removing it. Doing so seems very naive and knee jerk reaction. It's throwing the baby out with the bath water. There are cons to it (see last election), but there are far more pros, most of them invisible and taken for granted.
You are comparing proportional representation based on location to proportional representation based on ethnicity. The two are not the same. 100% agreed. And yet here we are. It took ages for gay...
Nazi's were a populist movement, the Jewish community was outvoted, they had no voice in the political system, and their rights were stripped, and we all know how that ended.
You are comparing proportional representation based on location to proportional representation based on ethnicity. The two are not the same.
An argument for the removal of the electoral college is not an argument to protect marginalized minorities.
100% agreed.
If populism was the rule, none of those minorities would have gotten the rights to free speech, cases in supreme courts, and other checks the system had in place to eventually evolve to the point where they were heard and protected.
And yet here we are. It took ages for gay marriage to be written into law and it had to happen at a state level because the electoral college suppressed the will of the majority.
And now we have the minority dictating a lot of policy and polarizing the country. It's causing a lot of problems.
there are far more pros, most of them invisible and taken for granted.
and I think these pros are imagined. I live in a populous state where my vote counts for less than someone in Wyoming, and yet, for some weird reason I care about whether the president of the united states has policies that would negatively affect other states. I have this weird thing called a conscious and this weird idea of caring about the welfare of everyone in my country.
This whole idea of 51% of the population ruling over 49% of the population and suppressing them does not make sense when you consider the human and I'm sick and fucking tired of it being used to justify bad policy.
These "invisible" proofs are what you tell yourself at night to justify a shitty system. There are a plethora of governments around the world that do not do disproportional representation that are doing perfectly well.
there was no need to invoke godwin's law here, but in any case: by most definitions, the nazis were not a particularly populist movement. they won a solid plurality of the vote in 1932, but they...
Need a case in point, Nazi's were a populist movement, the Jewish community was outvoted, they had no voice in the political system, and their rights were stripped, and we all know how that ended.
there was no need to invoke godwin's law here, but in any case: by most definitions, the nazis were not a particularly populist movement. they won a solid plurality of the vote in 1932, but they only really came to power through a mixture of luck (by way of other people's miscalculations), hitler's charisma as a speaker, and the effective propaganda of goebbels. without hitler, the NSDAP collapsed; prior to the great depression, they weren't especially powerful. most people were not especially fond of them, and they pretty openly demonstrated their lack of care for democracy repeatedly prior to 1932, such that their intentions weren't exactly unknown to people by then.
If populism was the rule, none of those minorities would have gotten the rights to free speech, cases in supreme courts, and other checks the system had in place to eventually evolve to the point where they were heard and protected.
this does not follow from your point at all. moreover, if populism decided, we'd already have had a popular vote system starting in the 60s (when the popular vote became more popular with the general public than the electoral college); the biggest advancement of civil rights was done by a man who ascended to the presidency because of an assassination and not election (and the second biggest was a court ruling); and in any case the electoral college is so wonky and unrepresentative that no matter how many people vote for their opponent in the 39 other states and DC, someone can theoretically win a presidential election with exactly 22 votes in the largest 11 states.
but there are far more pros, most of them invisible and taken for granted.
uh, not really. all democratic systems are subject to tyranny of the majority in varying degrees, and the american electoral college actually manages to have both tyranny of the majority and a...
uh, not really. all democratic systems are subject to tyranny of the majority in varying degrees, and the american electoral college actually manages to have both tyranny of the majority and a concept of tyranny of the minority since it can lead to a minority dictating all policies against the will of the majority with no real recourse for the majority because all the checks and balances on it are partisan. this makes it markedly worse than like... any other democratic system of any kind in the world.
It would be far worse without it, which has been my point this entire time, its a mitigation, not a cure. I don't know what else to say, most of this was taught in political science. There are...
It would be far worse without it, which has been my point this entire time, its a mitigation, not a cure.
I don't know what else to say, most of this was taught in political science. There are problems with it, but its the best known fix to problems that occurred in the past with pure democracies, and there have been some improvements since then, which is why I advocate for reform of the current system, not repeating past mistakes because a populist politician wants to raise money on a platform that likely won't ever take place since it needs an amendment to the Constitution.
For a person elected to represent the entire country, it seems appropriate to me that they should give their attention and effort to support the needs of the many. Only 15% of the population lives...
For a person elected to represent the entire country, it seems appropriate to me that they should give their attention and effort to support the needs of the many. Only 15% of the population lives in rural counties. But the nice thing about a federated system is that even if the president were to give 15% of his/her attention to rural citizens, your US senator/representative, state senator/rep, or other local representatives can give much more of their attention to your needs.
/u/alyaza addressed this in their comment but this is such an uninformed talking point it's absolutely mindboggling that people still pull it out in arguments. Those two things are not mutually...
Also, we're a Republic not a democracy.
/u/alyaza addressed this in their comment but this is such an uninformed talking point it's absolutely mindboggling that people still pull it out in arguments. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
But seriously, if the United States isn't a democracy, then what is your definition of democracy that excludes the US?
Wikipedia: Merriam-Webster: or Oxford: Do you think any of these are not true for the USA? Or do you have an equally reputable source saying something different?
Wikipedia:
a system of government where the citizens exercise power by voting
Merriam-Webster:
government by the people
or
a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
Oxford:
A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
Do you think any of these are not true for the USA?
Or do you have an equally reputable source saying something different?
Civics 101 is that we're not a pure democracy, we're a Republic or hybrid system that has democratic values, but we do not operate as a pure democracy. The issues with pure democracies have been...
Civics 101 is that we're not a pure democracy, we're a Republic or hybrid system that has democratic values, but we do not operate as a pure democracy. The issues with pure democracies have been tried and repeated throughout history. There are better systems, other countries that learned from ours implemented better hybrid systems of democracy, so that would lean towards reform of the current system, not for populism to take root and repeat the mistakes of the past.
Do Americans not vote, and do their votes not decide who sits in the government? America is a republic, yes, but that doesn't mean it isn't a democracy.
Do Americans not vote, and do their votes not decide who sits in the government? America is a republic, yes, but that doesn't mean it isn't a democracy.
It isn't a pure democracy, which is what a popular vote is. Its a republic system of government, where democracy is integrated. There are inherent problems in pure democracies and the US started...
It isn't a pure democracy, which is what a popular vote is. Its a republic system of government, where democracy is integrated. There are inherent problems in pure democracies and the US started as a loose alliance of separate colony states, the whole thing was to make sure that one colony/state didn't have too much power over the others because it had a higher population. The states managed things on the local level in a more democratic fashion, then the states voted who wanted to represent them as a whole based on what the majority in each state voted for. The Federal government has grown in size and power since then but some of the concerns from the past still exist now.
I know. What about that makes it stop being a democracy? The government is decided by people's votes. Period. Edit: Sorry if I sounded harsh, that wasn't my intention. I guess what I'm wondering...
I know. What about that makes it stop being a democracy? The government is decided by people's votes. Period.
Edit: Sorry if I sounded harsh, that wasn't my intention. I guess what I'm wondering is: What is your definition of a "democracy"?
You didn't say "not a pure democracy" (although sidenote: a better term would be direct democracy). You said the US was not a democracy full stop. That's just wrong, there's no way around it. I...
You didn't say "not a pure democracy" (although sidenote: a better term would be direct democracy). You said the US was not a democracy full stop. That's just wrong, there's no way around it. I would highly recommend you go read the definitions of direct democracy, indirect democracy (or representative democracy), and republic. You'll see that ancient Athens would actually be considered a republic as well as a direct democracy and the US would be considered a republic and a representative democracy. It may help you to have more constructive discussions in the future if you actually understand what words mean.
Why should I trust this play list/channel to give an honest analysis of it? Do you have something by a neutral third party comparing the two systems? Sorry, but this runs counter to everything I...
Why should I trust this play list/channel to give an honest analysis of it? Do you have something by a neutral third party comparing the two systems? Sorry, but this runs counter to everything I was taught about civics from public school through college, so I'm going to need a bit more than a YT channel. Is there something by an economist who analyses all the possible side effects of such a system. Are there other similar sized countries that operate under such a system?
A common definition of “republic” is, to quote the American Heritage Dictionary, “A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and...
Also, we're a Republic not a democracy.
A common definition of “republic” is, to quote the American Heritage Dictionary, “A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them” — we are that. A common definition of “democracy” is, “Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives” — we are that, too.
Switching to a popular vote system would swap one set of critical campaign stops with a different set, yes. But there would be two key differences: Under a popular vote system, the critical stops...
Switching to a popular vote system would swap one set of critical campaign stops with a different set, yes. But there would be two key differences:
Under a popular vote system, the critical stops would be less critical, c.f. @alyaza's point about margins that you're ignoring
The critical states would be the most populous ones, which for obvious reasons is more democratic than having the critical states be the ones where the population exhibits the narrowest partisan divide
Both of these changes would mean the result of the vote would more closely reflect the will of the people.
just as is true of a lot of the newer ideas being thrown on the table this primary season, expect this one to be picked up in some form by other prospective candidates.
That's what I like the most about this announcement. Warren bringing it up as a campaign point means other candidates will likely start seriously talking about it as well.
If you're just going to go wild and try and get votes with moonshots, might as well go big and propose eliminating work on Fridays. I'd vote for that candidate.
this is nowhere close to a moonshot, though. we're literally halfway to already possibly rendering the electoral college irrelevant through the national popular vote interstate compact. warren (and everybody else who wants this who is a presidential candidate) is actually behind the curve on this, because that's been a thing for over a decade now.
Accept we're not, most state reps will not vote to make their states suddenly irrelevant in campaigns because they don't have enough of a population to have their needs represented, all the focus would go to a few states. All the states that do things like provide food for the majority populace would have policies dictated on them by people who do not live where they do or deal with the problems they do. Mississippi, the place she said this, would be left out and politicians would have little reason to listen to them or pander to them.
Is there a better system than the electoral college? Probably. Is it a straight popular vote? No. Also, we're a Republic not a democracy. It's done that way for a reason, so the needs of the minority aren't ignored.
Edit: Wasn't this horse beat to death after the last election?
i'm going to let you in on a little secret: most states are already irrelevant under the electoral college. have you ever seen anybody seriously campaign in alaska recently? how about arkansas? mississippi? new york? of course not, because they're locked into their voting patterns. there's no point in campaigning in most states because you'll either win them handily or lose them handily, and your campaigning will make no difference in the outcome because all the votes after 50% + 1 for you or your opponent in those states in a two person race are wasted since they cannot materially make a difference in how the state votes.
under a popular vote, people might campaign in only a few states--but they'll probably lose. you know why? because then, every margin matters everywhere. 70-30 in alabama under the electoral college means nothing for the winner or the loser--in a popular vote, though, both numbers mean quite a lot, because every vote that makes up that margin could be the one that decides the presidential election. it's also quite likely, actually, that parties would develop policies to represent people of the sort you describe pretty quickly, since now their votes actually mean a lot and are up for grabs in a way that matters!
...imagine having your national policies dictated by someone who lost the popular vote by close to 3% but won because the electoral college! the reality is this is an inherent aspect of any democratic system because democracy is majoritarian. you cannot eliminate tyranny of the majority, you can only minimize it. and if we were smart about minimizing it, we'd have blown the electoral college up when it first swung a result in 1824 to someone who wasn't the choice of the people.
see my point about margins. a democrat losing 55-45 in mississippi or a republican winning mississippi 55-45 would matter a whole hell of a lot more in a popular vote system than in the electoral college, for the vote wasting reason. mississippi would actually be a great place to shore up the vote for both parties, incidentally. massively racially polarized population that could be swayed to either side by changes in policies.
if i had a quarter for every time this stupid cliche was trotted out for why we can't just entrust people to decide what they want because the founding fathers said so 220 years ago, i'd be rich as fuck and i'd use it to overturn the electoral college.
I just don't see it happening short of a revolution. Too much political power is already concentrated in high population areas leaving middle America out. It's the unacknowledged reason Trump got elected, because free trade agreements, while a net positive left middle America out of jobs while wealth concentrated around the high population states and cities, meanwhile middle America suffers from unemployment and drug addiction. Him an Bernie were the only two candidates who would even address the issue that globalism and free trade has negatively and disproportionately impacted certain regions. Sure the economy recovered from the free trade agreements, but the economic recovery wasn't in the areas that suffered the loss.
I don't see how a pure democracy system will work for Presidential elections to fix or balance that.
You say stupid cliche, well blame public schools and higher education, because that's where I got my stupid cliches, not some random people on the Internet. I need something credible from a source that's credible that says pure democracy is a good system for promising equitable representation at mass scale.
my friend, we're like 67% of the way there and things have gone just fine. there are a lot of things that might cause revolution--this, however, is probably not going to be one of them!
i mean yeah, that's... kinda how it should be? why should political power be allocated on the basis of land and not population?
it's one reason. it's not the reason, and there is no singular reason trump got elected. i can make just as much of a case for james comey being why he won as you can for why what you describe got trump elected. this is kind of a wash.
we use "pure" democracy in the context of this conversation in 536 congressional races (2 use RCV), and that works pretty well. we use it 49 gubernatorial races (1 uses RCV) and it works just fine. we use it in basically every state senate and state house seat and it works just fine. why wouldn't it also work for the presidency?
Because the high population areas don't grow their own food. But the fact you dismiss people in low population areas so snidely shows the problem.
The congressional races are for single districts, not an entire country. Not a whole lot of geographic spread there.
Let me put it another way, say a major city is dumping pollutants and sewage into the water, and its flowing down river to a rural area and poisoning their water sources. In a pure democracy, the problem gets ignored because the city, to which the current system benefits can out vote and ignore the problems of the people living down stream, under the electoral college, at least they have enough of a vote for politicians to pay attention to the issue. Under the pure democracy, the problem gets ignored because it doesn't effect those with the voting power.
with respect: that is probably the worst justification i have ever heard for the allocation of power based on land and not people, not least because a lot of home-grown food in america is produced by california (a blue state which has its power diluted by the electoral college) or is imported from overseas (so should we allow the rest of the world to vote in our elections?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadbasket#North_America
The rural areas that grow food in California are more than likely red.
Why are you gaslighting me, I never said overseas people should vote. That's a straw man if I've ever seen one.
I'm saying if you ignore the economic situation of those that produce food, you're going to have a crisis at some point, whether that's an outright strike, to supply food to their oppressors, or just an inability to operate because they're encountering problems that politicians ignored for too long because their isn't enough voter base to pay attention to those regions.
perhaps, but for one thing you need county data to prove that, and you can't really ascertain why they vote that way without a much deeper analysis: it could be that those people are simply republicans and always have been for cultural reasons, because their areas are rural and they feel obligated to vote accordingly, because they're farmers and they feel they are better represented by republicans currently (remember that many midwesterners voted for obama barely a decade ago), etc...
that's... not gaslighting? what?
this administration literally ignored the economic situation of farmers in the midwest to start an ill-advised trade war with china, and promptly fucked those farmers over and lost them a shit ton of money last year in doing so, so i don't think this follows even under the electoral college you suppose better represents them, much less a popular vote system where their votes count exactly the same as mine since they're not tied to how their state votes as a sum.
And yet under the current system where the current president has been voted into power by a minority of voters from a rural coalition, the EPA has been gutted.
🤔🤔🤔
What does that have to do with anything? The low population areas don't manufacture their own farming equipment. You're just describing economic specialization.
What about respecting the rights of marginalized minorities? Should we have an electoral college where candidates must be LGBT, african american, asian american, hispanic american, european american, etc.? Shouldn't we be offering them disproportional representation if you are worried about rural areas being misrepresented?
What about the specific needs of what these minorities provide for the country?
Your argument of
Makes no sense in a globalized economy. Guess what, high population areas still need to buy food and I can guarantee you that if those prices go up because of shitty policies, they are going to start voting in favor of policies that benefit rural farmland.
But lets ignore that for a second and consider whether tyranny of the majority has ever effected anything in the US. Remember slavery and oppression of the minorities and how we had to have a civil war to fix a problem exacerbated by the electoral college? Not a great track record if you ask me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
There's probably more evidence that those minorities would be further marginalized under a popular vote (again its one of the major criticisms of pure democracies and populism). Need a case in point, Nazi's were a populist movement, the Jewish community was outvoted, they had no voice in the political system, and their rights were stripped, and we all know how that ended.
An argument for the removal of the electoral college is not an argument to protect marginalized minorities. Historic evidence suggests the opposite would occur. If populism was the rule, none of those minorities would have gotten the rights to free speech, cases in supreme courts, and other checks the system had in place to eventually evolve to the point where they were heard and protected.
I personally advocate for reforming the electoral college, not removing it. Doing so seems very naive and knee jerk reaction. It's throwing the baby out with the bath water. There are cons to it (see last election), but there are far more pros, most of them invisible and taken for granted.
You are comparing proportional representation based on location to proportional representation based on ethnicity. The two are not the same.
100% agreed.
And yet here we are. It took ages for gay marriage to be written into law and it had to happen at a state level because the electoral college suppressed the will of the majority.
And now we have the minority dictating a lot of policy and polarizing the country. It's causing a lot of problems.
and I think these pros are imagined. I live in a populous state where my vote counts for less than someone in Wyoming, and yet, for some weird reason I care about whether the president of the united states has policies that would negatively affect other states. I have this weird thing called a conscious and this weird idea of caring about the welfare of everyone in my country.
This whole idea of 51% of the population ruling over 49% of the population and suppressing them does not make sense when you consider the human and I'm sick and fucking tired of it being used to justify bad policy.
These "invisible" proofs are what you tell yourself at night to justify a shitty system. There are a plethora of governments around the world that do not do disproportional representation that are doing perfectly well.
there was no need to invoke godwin's law here, but in any case: by most definitions, the nazis were not a particularly populist movement. they won a solid plurality of the vote in 1932, but they only really came to power through a mixture of luck (by way of other people's miscalculations), hitler's charisma as a speaker, and the effective propaganda of goebbels. without hitler, the NSDAP collapsed; prior to the great depression, they weren't especially powerful. most people were not especially fond of them, and they pretty openly demonstrated their lack of care for democracy repeatedly prior to 1932, such that their intentions weren't exactly unknown to people by then.
this does not follow from your point at all. moreover, if populism decided, we'd already have had a popular vote system starting in the 60s (when the popular vote became more popular with the general public than the electoral college); the biggest advancement of civil rights was done by a man who ascended to the presidency because of an assassination and not election (and the second biggest was a court ruling); and in any case the electoral college is so wonky and unrepresentative that no matter how many people vote for their opponent in the 39 other states and DC, someone can theoretically win a presidential election with exactly 22 votes in the largest 11 states.
just out of curiosity, can you name those?
The most basic is it avoids to some extent, this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
uh, not really. all democratic systems are subject to tyranny of the majority in varying degrees, and the american electoral college actually manages to have both tyranny of the majority and a concept of tyranny of the minority since it can lead to a minority dictating all policies against the will of the majority with no real recourse for the majority because all the checks and balances on it are partisan. this makes it markedly worse than like... any other democratic system of any kind in the world.
It would be far worse without it, which has been my point this entire time, its a mitigation, not a cure.
I don't know what else to say, most of this was taught in political science. There are problems with it, but its the best known fix to problems that occurred in the past with pure democracies, and there have been some improvements since then, which is why I advocate for reform of the current system, not repeating past mistakes because a populist politician wants to raise money on a platform that likely won't ever take place since it needs an amendment to the Constitution.
it really wouldn't. ask the entire rest of the world, lol.
For a person elected to represent the entire country, it seems appropriate to me that they should give their attention and effort to support the needs of the many. Only 15% of the population lives in rural counties. But the nice thing about a federated system is that even if the president were to give 15% of his/her attention to rural citizens, your US senator/representative, state senator/rep, or other local representatives can give much more of their attention to your needs.
/u/alyaza addressed this in their comment but this is such an uninformed talking point it's absolutely mindboggling that people still pull it out in arguments. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
But seriously, if the United States isn't a democracy, then what is your definition of democracy that excludes the US?
Ancient Athens if you're talking about a pure democracy.
Wikipedia:
Merriam-Webster:
or
Oxford:
Do you think any of these are not true for the USA?
Or do you have an equally reputable source saying something different?
Civics 101 is that we're not a pure democracy, we're a Republic or hybrid system that has democratic values, but we do not operate as a pure democracy. The issues with pure democracies have been tried and repeated throughout history. There are better systems, other countries that learned from ours implemented better hybrid systems of democracy, so that would lean towards reform of the current system, not for populism to take root and repeat the mistakes of the past.
Do Americans not vote, and do their votes not decide who sits in the government? America is a republic, yes, but that doesn't mean it isn't a democracy.
It isn't a pure democracy, which is what a popular vote is. Its a republic system of government, where democracy is integrated. There are inherent problems in pure democracies and the US started as a loose alliance of separate colony states, the whole thing was to make sure that one colony/state didn't have too much power over the others because it had a higher population. The states managed things on the local level in a more democratic fashion, then the states voted who wanted to represent them as a whole based on what the majority in each state voted for. The Federal government has grown in size and power since then but some of the concerns from the past still exist now.
I know. What about that makes it stop being a democracy? The government is decided by people's votes. Period.
Edit: Sorry if I sounded harsh, that wasn't my intention. I guess what I'm wondering is: What is your definition of a "democracy"?
You didn't say "not a pure democracy" (although sidenote: a better term would be direct democracy). You said the US was not a democracy full stop. That's just wrong, there's no way around it. I would highly recommend you go read the definitions of direct democracy, indirect democracy (or representative democracy), and republic. You'll see that ancient Athens would actually be considered a republic as well as a direct democracy and the US would be considered a republic and a representative democracy. It may help you to have more constructive discussions in the future if you actually understand what words mean.
Why should I trust this play list/channel to give an honest analysis of it? Do you have something by a neutral third party comparing the two systems? Sorry, but this runs counter to everything I was taught about civics from public school through college, so I'm going to need a bit more than a YT channel. Is there something by an economist who analyses all the possible side effects of such a system. Are there other similar sized countries that operate under such a system?
A common definition of “republic” is, to quote the American Heritage Dictionary, “A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them” — we are that. A common definition of “democracy” is, “Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives” — we are that, too.
Ah yes, Mississippi, a well-known critical campaign stop under the electoral college.
My state is, I can tell you right now it wouldn't if it were not.
Switching to a popular vote system would swap one set of critical campaign stops with a different set, yes. But there would be two key differences:
Both of these changes would mean the result of the vote would more closely reflect the will of the people.