Hillary won New York City, (City, not State) by 1,508,755 votes. (1,969,920 to Trump’s 461,175) NYC consists of Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn.
She won the City of Chicago by 757,967 votes. ( 890,705 to 132,738).
She won Los Angeles County by 694,621 votes. (2,464,364 to 769,743)
She won these 3 areas by a total of 2,961,343 votes.
She won the nationwide popular vote by 2,654,600 votes.
In other words, her whole margin of victory in the popular vote is only from three small areas and we should allow the individuals who live in NYC, LA and Chicago to choose the President of the entire USA.
No wonder the Founders wanted the Electoral College to choose the President.
I agree. As a person from Kansas, we would have NO SAY in national politics. Can you just imagine if Hillary HAD been elected? Those persons in those counties you mentioned would be able to pass any damn law they wanted for the whole country.
This is why Hillary should have actually gotten out and campaigned more. Reach out to areas outside the major cities.
There are also a lot of other places that she won, and a lot of other places that Trump won. That’s the way votes work. You could pick any three million Clinton voters from anywhere in the country and similarly say that they elected her.
Under a popular vote, Kansas would have exactly as much say as any other part of the country with the same population. Would you argue that Chicago would have no say in a popular vote? Because Kansas has a greater population than Chicago. Or is it OK for Kansas to pass laws for Chicago?
A few years ago someone here linked to a color coded map showing where 50% of the US population lived. The vast majority of the U.S. geographically is sparsely populated to put it mildly. That map would perfectly illustrate the OP’s flawed logic, but I don’t have it handy. Anyone remember such a map?
Arguably, we should allow a majority of the nation’s voting citizens to choose the president. Where they live shouldn’t be especially relevant since (to me anyway) a US citizen in New York City should have the same value as one in Kansas.
Under our current system, Republicans have no reason to waste time and money trying to reach people in NY/LA/CHI because a 1pt loss is the same as a 55pt loss. And Republicans in those areas have little incentive to go out and vote. So the current results from NY/LA/CHI aren’t truly representative regardless.
The tyranny of the minority is obviously superior. Just look at Apartheid or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Why should a citizen’s vote count less based on geography? The president doesn’t set regional policy, weighted separately for Idaho or NYC… Why are governors elected by popular vote even though the cities have more voters than the rural towns. Shouldn’t we have an idiotic electoral college for counties too?
So you can selectively choose certain places where the vote difference for one candidate adds up to a certain number. You can also selectively choose other places where the vote difference adds up to a larger number for the other candidate.
So freakin’ what???
Note that this vote total nonsense applies to almost all other elections in the US!
You can play the same pointless trick with Senate, governor, alderman, etc., races.
Is the OP arguing that direct election with the largest vote getter winning an inherently bad idea since some votes might be unevenly distributed geographically?
Thereby completely disenfranchising Kansas and most of the rest of the states in ‘flyover country’, whose concerns would no longer draw any attention whatsoever from presidential candidates.
It’s also likely that under a popular vote only system the nature of campaigns would change such that a wily candidate like Trump would tailor and focus his campaign to draw votes more effectively in heavily populated areas and a lumbering traditional campaign such as Hillary’s would still fall short. It isn’t a given that switching to a popular vote only system would result in everything else that impacts an election staying the same.
But can you choose only three other places where the votes add up that way? I don’t think so. You’d have to come up with a conglomeration of votes from wider and more disparate parts of the country in order to arrive at a similar difference in voter majority. Everyone has known since long before the election that the country’s heavy population centers tend liberal. It’s neither a surprise nor semantic wordplay to credit the areas mentioned in the OP as being the ones primarily responsible for Hillary Clinton’s larger popular vote count.
By that logic, Clinton’s 4 million votes in Florida gave her the lead.
Or her 2.8 million votes in Pennsylvania.
Or the 1 million in Indiana, plus the 1.8 million Georgia
If she hadn’t gotten those votes, her popular vote count would have been less that Trump.
Ultimately, though, your argument is that voters in New York and California are inferior to voters in Kansas. In other words, all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others…
Republicans have a knee-jerk reaction against the popular vote because they think it only benefits Democrats, but that’s patently false. In order to win it, the republicans would have to move closer to the center, like the Democrats have, and that would be a good thing. Theyshould have to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate, rather than being propped up by an undemocratic institution that subverts the will of the people.
Under the current system, the 671,000 people who voted for Trump in Kansas had their voices heard because their votes translated into all of Kansas’s 6 EC votes. But the nearly 4.5 million votes Trump got in California don’t mean jack shit. Does that make any sense?
Look at what Clinton got in California: 55, or 10.2% of the EC’s 538 votes, yet those Democratic voters in CA only account for 6.4% of the total, national electorate (8.75 million out of 136.3 million.)
If all votes are counted, then all votes matter. Candidates would have to appeal to voters nationwide, which should be the point when you are choosing someone to lead a nation.
Also the metro area of NYC, LA & Chicago is 43 million people, which is about 13% of the entire country living in the metro area of these 3 cities.
Even if you only count the cities themselves and exclude the metro areas, that is still 15 million people, which is 5% of the country.
Claiming a vote margin of 3 million votes doesn’t count because it came from cities/counties that make up 15-43 million people is not very persuasive.
The electoral college is based on population, so states with large cities get more votes. Also another reason the founders wanted an electoral college is they had little faith in the voters and figured if the voters were scammed by a dangerous and authoritarian con man, the electors could override the public’s gullibility.
You are talking about states, I’m talking about two cities and a county. I’m not talking about the state of New York or the state of California, I’m talking about the cities of Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles County…
But those votes are completely arbitrarily chosen. There’s nothing special about those three cities.
As for the EC in general, right now California, NY, and TX voters essentially have no influence. That seems wrong to me. There’s no perfect system, but at least with a popular vote system, every individual American would have the exact same influence per vote. Some states might have less collective influence, but isn’t it wrong that the three biggest states in the country have essentially none?
