Because, for some, it makes a neat, though completely bogus, little story.
Of course certain apologists like to think that the popular vote would have been completely different and their candidate would have “won” it if there was no Electoral College.
Funny how such assumptions only help one candidate and hurt the other, isn’t it? The possibility of the popular vote going the other way without the EC doesn’t seem to occur to them.
After all, how many people didn’t vote in CA for Clinton since the state was a lock? Let’s see the data on all points before someone starts asserting that Trump “would have won” the popular vote.
(Also note the inherent racism in these arguments. What color are the folk that “gave” Clinton the popular vote win as per the OP?)
I’m a little upset at the smaller states because of their greed here.
If your state has 2% of the country’s population, it should, IMHO justly have 2% of the say in the election of the president.
The whole mewling whine about, but they’ll steamroller us! is asinine. Small states get just as much representation in the Senate. That’s a huge amount of power.
Wyoming has 2 Senators, and California has 2. That’s like 80X the say in the Senate per citizen. That’s not enough? That’s fucking immense. But no, gotta give it to the house and presidential elections too.
The greed and smug sense of superiority that rural voters have is sickening.
Those numbers are out of date, but your point remains.
HRC: 8.75M
DJT: 4.5M
Add to that the self-destructive results of their decision. Losing health care, losing clear skies and clean water, losing workplace representation, losing any chance of a minimum wage increase, losing farmlands to drought, paying tax-money to enrich those who lend money to maintain the deficit and the debt, and so many others.
They put their own dicks in the sausage slicer!
Because it helps them. If it was the other way they would find the opposite arguments convincing.
I think they’re just looking forward to pointing and laughing at all those people getting their dicks sliced! Haw haw!
For some, it’s the simple pleasures.
(PS: I had never heard a deli meat slicer referred to as a sausage slicer, so I googled “sausage slicer” to see if this was something different. I found this, which would certainly do the trick.)
I think this is a more accurate depiction.
Those of us who live in NYC, Chicago, and coastal California are wiser and more judicious than you yokels out there amidst the cows and corn.
Don’t worry, though, we will consider your views with due benevolence. Just hand over all your guns and get gay-married, and we’ll get along just fine.
Completely disenfranchising? Nonsense. Relatively disenfranchising? Absolutely.
Our current system rewards people in rural states by making their votes worth a lot more than those of people who live in mostly urban states. A system that made the vote of a Kansan worth the same as the vote of a New Yorker would disenfranchise that Kansan relative to the outsized power her vote previously had; now her vote would only be worth the same as other folks’.
Would that mean that politicians would stop giving her outsized attention? Yeah, maybe. Would it mean that maybe politicians would stop giving short shrift to metropolitan voters? Yeah, maybe.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Wow, it’s so amazing how many people buy into this silly notion that, just because a plurality of voters able and willing to vote in the election vote for one of the candidates, that person should be elected. That fallacy was exactly the fallacy that the original founders of the country wanted to avoid. They knew at the time that, left to their own devices, the voters of the four states with the largest electorates represented half the people in the country, and could have their way. They specifically rejected this concept, for very valid reasons, none of which are ever remotely addressed by the Electoral College naysayers in these threads. No discussion of tyranny of the masses, no discussion of the effect of “faction” upon the structure set up by the Constitution, and most certainly, no reasonable discussion of whether, and to what effect, differences among us regionally have even in today’s society. The assumption that a voter in South Carolina (for example) is fungible with a voter in New York (for example) is simply a poor assumption.
We are NOT, nor have we ever BEEN a single polity. Nothing about how our system of government at the federal level is set up is even remotely based upon the notion that we are nothing more than one indivisible nation, whose people are just Americans, and nothing more. I’ve lived in California (where I grew up), New York (upstate, where I went to school), Ohio (where I lived for some of my middle-aged years) and now South Carolina (where I intend to live out my dotage). And while there are superficial similarities between these places, I can confirm that the people of each of these areas of the country have significant differences in outlook and agenda. And when they elect our Presiding Officer of the Executive Branch (which is what “President of the United States” means, after all), they most certainly are not electing their “representative” in the government (for which someone might be able to make a cogent argument national popular vote outcomes should be determinative). Rather, they are participating in a process by which their state, along with the other 49 states (and the D of C) select the person who will head our executive branch, and act as our “head of state.” Which does not work well, IMHO, should we simply let the urban dwellers of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, etc. be the dispositive determinors.
As for the OP: while it may be true that these three specially selected places managed to produce a large amount of the outcome involved, one can most probably pick three selected locations that produced a significant Trump margin instead (we know this must be true because we could easily add additional urban areas to the won-by-Clinton-overwhelmingly column, and obviously there must be won-by-Trump-overwhelmingly places to make up for them. So, for example, the rural/suburban Plains, the rural/suburban Midwest, and the non-urban Appalachians. The fact that your three locations are small in size, and my three are huge in size is essentially irrelevant. All that means is that lots of people are packed into small geographic areas, but are those people somehow less important to the understanding of how our country feels for that reason?
The argument for the Electoral College is much more nuanced than that; if you rely upon that as your reasoning, I would tend to agree with the detractors. Fortunately, I believe there is much more involved.
I think we shall soon discover that tyranny of the masses is preferable to tyranny of them asses.
A game of nine-ball is decided by who sinks the nine-ball, not who sinks most balls. Similarly, I do not blame the electoral college for the recent tragedy, despite that future historians are likely to rank it as the greatest global catastrophe since World War II.
BUT, the game OP plays is silly pretension. Instead of “Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory only based on 3 small areas of country,” any of the following would be at least as valid:
[ul][li] Donald Trump’s electoral vote victory only based on a few dolts who fell for obvious lies from Facebook or Sean Hannity.[/li][li] Donald Trump’s electoral vote victory only based on the same easily-gulled white trash like those who enrolled in “Trump University.”[/li][li] Donald Trump’s electoral vote victory only based on black votes suppressed by GOP shenanigans in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin.[/li][li] Donald Trump’s electoral vote victory only based on irrational bigots and anti-Muslim haters.[/li][/ul]
Harris County (Houston) has a larger population than about 30 states. We went for Clinton with a larger margin than we’d gone for Obama. (Down-ballot Democrats did well, too.)
Other Texas cities tend Blue (except for Fort Worth, this year). But we were outvoted state wide, so all our Electoral votes will go to Trump.
Our votes for Hillary are definitely part of her popular vote victory. Which does not decide the Presidency–but should stop any bleating about a “mandate.” (It won’t.)
Look, all this is about is you guys want to come up with some way to remove the barrier that’s keeping you from winning every election. You know you otherwise could because of high Democrat voter concentration in large and densely populated areas of the country. The electoral college was created specifically to prevent one side from monopolizing elections. Currently it’s working against you, and you don’t like it. I’m sure though that if the situation were reversed and your side was winning in the electoral battle but coming in second in the popular vote, you’d suddenly see great great value and wisdom in the existence of the electoral college.
But like it or not, and ‘fair’ or not, the EC is here to stay and it’s functioning as it’s supposed to. You’ll never get the flyover states that you’re so contemptuous of to vote against their self-interest and ratify a Constitutional amendment to abolish it. It just aint’ gonna happen. So you need to get your candidates to do a better job of campaigning in and addressing the concerns of the citizens of those areas and you might find the electoral college no longer works against you.
Of course your candidates will have to moderate their liberalism for this to work, because sanctuary cities, open bathrooms and unending accusations of racism/sexism/homotransMuslim-ophobia just don’t play that well outside your liberal strongholds, and that in itself is gonna cost you some big city votes, but that’s just the way it is.
If there’s anything you guys should have learned from this election, it’s that most of this country’s populace outside the left coast and upper east coast doesn’t like the way they’ve been governed. Through a combination of Democrat politicians, activist liberal courts and ineffective do-nothing Republicans, they’ve been governed against their will way too far and for way too long.
This is why you now find yourselves confronted with a big-dog alpha-male Republican president who people believe actually will start to make things happen their way for a change. And it’s why you also now find yourselves confronted with a Republican Senate, a Republican House, mostly Republican governors, and a soon-to-be Republican Supreme Court that will likely rule for a generation.
But of course you none of this because Hillary won more votes in your big city enclaves (and even there her margin of victory was surprisingly sparse) and you can comfort yourselves that ‘most’ of the people in the country voted for her and therefore your approach wasn’t wrong, you just got screwed by the electoral college.
But the fact is you’ve way overplayed your hand outside your big city echo chambers and you’re either going to have to learn to moderate your approach or sit and stew in Republican governmental dominance for decades because most of the country outside those echo chambers doesn’t want what you’re selling. Or rather what you’re demanding through insult and accusation that they had better buy.
The Republicans, based on their massive landslide total victory, propose to turn America inside out and remake it in their own image. And you tell them to “moderate your approach”?
“Please stop doing the right thing; people don’t like it”.
I love how your line-one items involve open bathrooms and accusations of transphobia. As if these issues are both suuuuuper important*, and it isn’t a straight-up acknowledgement that the accusations of transphobia are entirely justified. Similarly, so-called “sanctuary cities” are hated by rural conservatives for some reason or another… Despite the fact that they’re clearly not taking their jobs, because if they were they wouldn’t be in sanctuary cities any more… But we shouldn’t worry about racism or racial resentment. Of course not.
*Make no mistake, it is important for trans people to be able to use the bathroom. But if you’re cisgendered and “I’m worried about being raped by a tranny in the bathroom” was one of your biggest worries this election, you might as well start wearing a fucking lightning-proof suit wherever you go.
The main problem with the electoral college is that it’s used to invalidate the votes of countless individuals on both sides of the aisle. If we had won the election but lost the popular vote, would it be different? I doubt it; the problems with the electoral college are real and well-acknowledged by many. You could just as easily say that if the roles were reversed, you would be bitching and moaning about it, and that hypocrisy would be just as impossible to prove.
Meanwhile, most of the country lives on the coasts, we’ve seen 8 years of consistent recovery leading to an excellent economy, and Clinton carried the popular vote by a huge margin, while proposing plans to fix that which ails working-class whites that for some reason didn’t actually get through. What we’ve learned from this election is that a dedicated minority of the country’s populace is incredibly stupid.
A two or three million vote margin out of 128 million cast is not a huge margin. It’s a difference of approximately 2%, maybe less.
2% is a pretty huge margin to win by if you still lose the electoral college.
What are those very valid reasons? If a majority+1 of the people vote for a candidate, then that candidate should win the election. It shouldn’t make any difference where those people live. Every person’s vote should count equally.