States don’t vote. People vote. So when you said urban vs. rural I figured you meant urban people vs. rural people.
People in Wyoming get a vote that’s over three times as large as the one people in California get. Wyomingites is running over Californians not the other way around.
I support the Electoral College as an institution, but my opinion on whether this country is a Democratic Republic is not necessarily contingent on a gap between the national popular vote for President and the actual election results.
I support the Electoral College as an institution, but I also would support district-by-district voting or even a Constitutional guarantee of district-by-district voting instead of the state at-large system prevalent now.
I already have legitimate concerns about the (long-term) integrity of the Union.
~Max
Political accessibility, for one. It’s easy(ier) to get your concerns heard when you live in a densely packed metropolis with a million other like-minded individuals, next to an international airport, with 4 star hotel accommodations.
Live on a farm out at the end of a dirt road, 4 hours away from a city? Maybe its good policy to give an extra incentive for a politician to come visit your otherwise completely neglected area of the country.
That’s true for the Senate as well, and to a much lesser extent for their one House seat also.
Part of it may be that I’m still with the Founding Fathers and somewhat afraid of the popular vote. I tend to think there are too many loons, wingnuts, low information voters and general all around idiots out there for us to get anything useful out of it. I’d be all for some sort of voting qualification other than being older than 18 and able to read, if it meant that we’d get better considered votes.
Wyoming gets all the help it needs by its fantastically overpowered Senate delegation. Giving them 80x the Senate power of California, and then also giving them outsized electoral / house power is setting the people of Wyoming as superior to everyone else.
If it were the other way around, with city dwellers having outsized power for their population, the red states would start another civil war over it.
You don’t need 100% of the vote to win just over half.
There are lots of land issues that the federal government deals with every day. They even have a whole bureau named for it. Heck, most of the functions of the DOI are land based. Where we stick those missile silos in North Dakota is a land issue as well since the people in NY couldn’t care less.
As a rural American, and a Wyomingite to boot, I feel I should step in and say…
We don’t really deserve our outsized power.
I should also say, only those that are in line with the rest of the state have that outsized power. Because as a LIBERAL DEMO(N)CRAT, I don’t have ANY power. My vote counts for absolutely nothing. I was part of the whopping 7% in my county to vote Clinton in 2016. Part of the 22% statewide (thank you, Jackson Hole!) If we ran a straight popular vote? My vote would count.
Some sort of full-on popular vote would be the absolute best free-market solution, wouldn’t it? Instead of having to rely on dirty tricks and gerrymandering, politicians would have to actually PRODUCE. Have a platform and ideas that people actually want.
@Kron already answered this, but I’ll weigh in as well.
I grew up on a farm on a dirt road in Kansas, but am the offspring of two Democrats. Believe me, there was absolutely no incentive for a politician to come visit our house. My vote in almost all of the presidential elections has meant absolutely nothing.
While this thread has a number of well-reasoned posts, I have yet to be convinced that any form of the Electoral College is better than the popular vote.
The state is assigned a number of electoral votes for the EC by the constitution. The state can do whatever they want with those EV. Most states have chosen to adopt a winner-take-all approach, and delegated the actual voting decision to the people. This is in the state’s interest because the people get to vote on who makes up the state government, and aren’t going to take too kindly to a state government that overrules the people. But the state’s electors are still ultimately the ones casting votes for the state, most of the time as one unified block.
This presumes that somehow the urbanites have more loonies and idiots than the rural areas.
The problem with having voter qualifications is that it is the party in power that would set them. And if the party in power sets them, then you have a situation where the government is choosing its voters, rather than the voters choosing the government.
For all its flaws, democracy has the advantage of being better than anything else we’ve come up with.
Yes, they could do that. Indeed it’s possible for Republicans to win even in heavily Democratic areas. Republican Charlie Baker is governor of deep blue Massachusetts. Phil Scott is governor of Vermont. They were able to win the popular vote in their respective states despite not having an “electoral college” type system that gives rural counties more weight relative to their population size.
Great, then they should have nothing to complain about needing the advantage to win.
I get it. Sorry.
But I never said there weren’t land issues, just that the vast majority of issues are people issues. That remains true, and trumps, pardon the expression, the importance of land issues. The government can certainly do both, but the priority must be on people.
We can survive slighting land issues, but we’re dying slowly and hideously because far too little attention is given to people issues, mostly because rural people don’t consider many urban people to be people.
States are doing all of these things? Not the people who live in those states?
Could you explain to me how states are doing things without people?
Why the fuck would we want to do that?
This is kind of what democracy is. “Electoral affirmative action” is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever run across.
I mean sure. While we’re at it, the army doesn’t go to war. People go to war.
Apple didn’t release the iphone. People did.
I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I think we spend too much time on people and not enough on ‘land’ I’d like to see the wealth concentrations leave our cities and be more dispersed across the country. The Navajo Nation still has 30% of it’s homes without running water, more than 1 million people in California do not have access to safe drinking water, over 21 million rural people have no access to broadband internet, there is a severe lack of healthcare in rural Colorado and there are many more about people in the rural areas being left behind. The federal government should be putting in the infrastructure to encourage a more geographically diversified population. Most of the people problems can be better handled at local levels while the land problems need a federal hand.
As I understand it the overall political system was designed to try to balance the power of population with state rights. Montana could never compete with the voting power of California if there was no Senate giving 2 votes per state. Of course, California also has 2 votes in the Senate so Montana’s still at a disadvantage but at least they have a chance of getting their way in one of the three branches of government.
I agree with not divvying up political power based solely on population. And I believe the country would be worse if everything was decided only by popular vote. The idea of a Republic is for everyone to vote for the person they believe will be the best leader i.e. picking someone smarter and better than they are to make the tough decisions. If everything was determined by popular vote we could just vote away income taxes and change other laws which would have very unfortunate consequences. I don’t believe people in the U.S. are unselfish enough to not do this if given the chance.
No need to fight the hypothetical. The research is already been done with RI containing not just 51% of the US population, but 2400% of the US population:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/
Isn’t that what we are doing?