I admit that Dukakis and McGovern were trounced all over the map, not just in the south. But being that the south is a bit more conservative than the rest of the country, I don’t believe a Democrat can win any southern electoral votes without (a) being from the south or (b) having more conservative views on social issues and a “tough on defense” image. Since having more conservative views on social issues is a recipe for not getting the nomination, I think that to win the White House the Democratic nominee must get 70% of the non-southern electorate. Mind you, Kerry came close (actually in my book he did better than that), but it is still an uphill battle.
John, it appears you still enjoy keeping your head in the sand:
Apparently, some of us believe that fair and open elections are a keystone of a democracy, while others would just rather poo-poo concerns about election fraud as “tired old canards”…
And the rest simply assume, as did the OP, that any election that the Democrats lost must have been unfair.
It must have been! All the liberal blogmeisters say so!
:shrugs:
If you had had any credible evidence, you would have produced it already. But you haven’t, so you don’t.
Keep trying, though. Maybe you will win the 2000 election yet!
Regards,
Shodan
By the by, Shodan, have we taken the time to thank you and yours for the perfectly splendid situation we find ourselves in today. Gee, what a swell job you guys have done, supporting The Leader and all. You must be simply bursting with pride at what all you’ve accomplished!
Don’t know what the heck to think about all this dark conspiracy stuff. Inclined to dismiss it out of hand simply on the grounds that dark conspiracy on that scale would be almost impossible to keep concealed. On the other hand, the very implausibility of it would help in that regard, must be lots of folks like me who take the same attitude, and that would work in the conspiracists favor.
And there is that nagging question about the exit polls. Its very hard to account for, unless we want to believe that people voted for Bush but were ashamed to admit it, so lied and said they voted for Kerry. And keep it mind, had it not been for exit polls, we would never have found out about the Jews for Buchanan fiasco in Florida.
So, got to come down firmly in the “Dunno!” camp. As usual.
You keep reading those blogs, rjung. That’s what you’re good at.
Not for anyone who took the time to read the analysis from the very news agencies, like CBS, that had the problems. Really, this stuff was all over the news in the days right after the election. There is no “nagging question about exit polls” unless one wants there to be one.
Unc:
Thanks for the invite, but I’m afraid I have another engagement and can’t attend your party. Do let me know how it went, though.
S
PS: Y’all havin’ fun? Glad I could provide.
Everytime this thread gets bumped, I keep reading the title as I did the first time:
Democrats are whining, the system is just screwing them.
Quack quack quack. 
Why didn’t that echo?
That’s the most intelligent post you’ve made in weeks.
Hey, sorry about the link to a legitimate news site in my responce to elucidator, but I don’t read blogs.
I’d be more sympathetic to the whole “the Dems are really winning, but the system’s screwing them” canard if Dem candidates for the House of Representatives, nationwide, had won more votes than the GOP House candidates in just one of the past few elections.
One can argue over whether the Senate should have been designed the way it is, but it’s been a fact of life since the beginning of the Republic. Ditto the electoral vote formula. But the House was intended to roughly reflect the population as a whole. If the Dems were winning more votes than GOPers in House races, and were still the minority party in the House, we’d have a legitimate argument, IMHO, that we’d been screwed by GOP gerrymandering. But not until then.
Fucking pathetic. Engage your topic.
I think Lib’s point is that the Democrats were complicit in gaming the system against third parties (and that the new gaming of the system against them is thus karma coming home to roost). The LP was cited as an example, but that doesn’t mean the issue is specific to them.
Equal represenation of the states in the Senate is specifically excluded from the amendment process.
OK, here’s my 2 cents:
(1) Single-member districts with first-past-the-post voting discriminate against third parties, and in favour of the party that has a plurality of the popular vote. An extreme example is last month’s election in the UK, where Blair’s party was relected with just 36% of the vote. The fact that the opposition is divided up into several smaller parties helped Blair in sdpite of the fact that Labout voters tend to be concentrated in particular areas. The same thing helped Thatcher when the Tories were outpolling Labour, but still not getting 50% of the popular vote.
(2) The Democrats have always supported the basic system of electing the House, because it favours them over third parties, and sometimes favours them over Republicans. And without some major shift in party support, for pragmatic reasons I suspect they always will.
(3) The system of electing the Senate favours small states over large states, and that is exactly what was intended by those drawing up the Constitution. They also made it extremely hard to change the system: so hard, that without a political revolution that overthrows the whole Constitution, it is hard to conceive of how the system could change.
(4) The system of electing the President has biases towards smaller states because of the number of senators, but it also has a bias towards larger states because of the winner-take-all system. In an extreme case, if one state had about 60% of the population, I suspect that the candidates would only campaign in it, because winning that state would be all that mattered. But in practice, the candidates campaign in the states which are worth campaigning in, because of the right combination of size and closeness in the likely vote. So they spent a lot of time in Florida and Ohio, because they are large stated that were always going to be close; they spent less time in Illinois and New York, even thoughh they are larger, because they weren’t going to be close; and they spent less time in smaller states, regardless of how close they were going to be.
(5) A big problem with systems like those used in the US is that some votes are worth a lot more than others, so you campaign harder for those votes than you would for voters in electorates that don’t matter so much (usually because they are safe for one party or another). In PR systems, every vote counts pretty much the same.
Oh, now you’ve got ME doing it. Thanks a lot!
Why? Others seem to be doing fine without me, (or were, they seem kinda done) what difference does it make whether I participate further, apart from it being a peeve of yours that I don’t?
Just think of me as Linda Richman…“talk amongst yourselves, here, I’ll give you a topic…Democrats are winning, the system is jsut screwing them. Discuss.”
You really need to chill a little, Unc. You get much too het up about trivial stuff.
Then those of us who imagine GD might have some useful purpose ask that you please forego the snarky, unproductive drivebys.
Wow! I just read through the whole thread and I’m ecstatic. I’m an Independent who leans more right than left, but has never voted for Bush. I respect the level of discourse here on GD, so I was pleasantly surprised to see where some libs are expending their energy. As John Mace recommended, please keep focusing on the problems with the election process. It’ll be be a good '06 and an even better '08. And for now, I’m gong to sleep a very peaceful sleep thinking of all those voting machines being programmed as I rest. Goodnight.