Because Senators represent their state and Congressmen represent their district. They’re elected by a majority vote of the people they represent. Which is the same system I think we should be using when we elect a President to represent the entire country.
So I guess it’s not as funny as you thought it was.
It might be worth mentioning I am a rural person. I grew up in a neighborhood that’s mostly trees. I worked on a farm. I look out my front window and I see a corn field.
But I don’t see any reason this makes me special. I don’t feel my vote is better than anyone else’s.
If I had to select any one thing as being the one thing that disabused me of the claim that this is the smartest message board on the planet, it would be people’s view of Donald Trump. He’s twice built multi-billion dollar fortunes, once from a million dollar loan and once from almost a billion in debt. He has created or has holdings in over 500 companies and has overseen the construction of huge, magnificent buildings and resorts. He employs many tens of thousands of people. He blew every established Republican candidate out of the primaries and he very savvily worked to economically win the general election by focusing on winning the electoral college. And now he’s staffing his administration with smart, accomplished, capable people whose primary fault is they differ from you politically.
And yet almost all we hear from the Dope is stupid, dumb, bankruptcy, idiot, last person he listened to, etc.
It is to laugh. Seriously.
Millions of people total? Ergo, not a “small” part of the country. QED
Totally, I don’t think rural America is worth any less certainly.
??? If “he lost the rest of the state,” then how could there be other counties that you could have used?
(I love the examples, which rebut the OP wonderfully! I’m only trying to figure out the logic puzzle here.)
It’s been a couple of decades since I read Fourth Mansions; now I’m gonna have to pull it off the shelf when I get home.
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No it wasn’t. His argument was that there are many disparate areas of the country whose populations vary considerably from one another in custom, need, desire and belief. They are all different from one another, not just California/New York and everyone else as a monolith.
Now there’s a revelation!
It’s already been explained. Many times. You just refuse to hear it.
Oh, give me a break! Urban dwellers is not remotely close to hood rats. For one thing the term urban dwellers is used mostly to differentiate from those who live in rural areas, and for another most of the population in these areas is white. Los Angeles, San Franciso, Portland, New York for example are all urban areas and they’re all predominately white. So let me give you a hint and suggest that you stop trying to tell other people what words they can use or how to speak. (And while you’re at it, stop trying to invent new ways to manufacture offense.) In case you missed it, this kind of behavior has played a not insignificant role in the fact that the nation’s governance is now almost exclusively in the hands of Republicans.
Just to clarify, I’m not saying he lost every other county in the state; he won most of them, actually.
It’s just that Clinton has a 22,600-vote plurality in the rest of Pennsylvania, once Trump’s nearly 67K plurality in Westmoreland County is excluded.
And the same is true of York County, which Trump won by 59,505 votes: Clinton has a ~15,200-vote plurality in the rest of the state.
If you think of Trump’s plurality in PA as a tower of Jenga blocks, with counties as the individual blocks, pulling out either Westmoreland or York causes the tower to collapse. 
It’s not about rural people being ‘special’. It’s about not being ruled by a distant power that is insensitive to your lifestyle and choices. After all, that’s why the war for independence was even fought.
But by all means keep telling yourself that the only problem the left has is a rigged system. I am sure you can also rationalize away all those governorships and state houses that have flipped to the Republicans over the last three election cycles.
The Democrats are now a regional party. There are only something like four states where Democrats hold the governorship and control the state houses. Federally, you have lost control of the House, the Senate, and now the White House.
Keep telling yourselves that you are only a procedural trick or two away from dominance. That way, you will fail to learn any lessons from this, and the Republicans will take another ten Senate seats from you in the next election and you will have no power left at all.
That’s a pretty weak argument. Right now we get rural voters imposing their views on the urban dwellers, is that better?
The rigged system is certainly a part of it. Midterm voting is weak for dems, because they tend to only suit up for the big game. 34 states elect their governors during the midterms, so that doesn’t help.
The census sweep of 2010 gave the GOP a lock on the House, even though they consistently get fewer votes.
So yeah, the Dems have problems. It’s not all a rigged system, but a fair amount is. And you’re being delusional if you think it isn’t part of it.
The lesson to learn from this, is that there are a lot of stupids in the country. And they’ll vote for a racist, inept cunt if Russia spreads a ton of disinformation and Bernie Bros repost it everywhere they can.
Dems aren’t perfect, certainly. But their policy is superior on nearly all points. And more importantly, they actually want government to work. Trump is installing people who will dismantle the agencies they’re in charge of.
So you favor Calexit, then.
No. Simply no. That’s your opinion, an opinion you do not back up with any attempt at discussion of the underlying political philosophies involved in federal governments versus governments that aren’t federations of independently political states. Nor do you back it up with any discussion of the competing philosophies behind democratic selection methods. In short, you just say, “I believe this is right, period.”
Let’s take a simple analogy: The governor of a state is elected by a popular vote of the registered voters of that state, for most states, by a plurality of those voting. But the chief executive of most counties isn’t even an elected position; it’s someone hired to do the job. Is it somehow un-democratic that this happens? In some cities, mayors are chosen not by the direct vote of the people, but rather by the people selected to the city’s council. It’s easy to envision a 4-3 vote in favor of someone to be mayor, where the four in favor were voted in by a total margin much smaller than the three who opposed the selection. Is this now “un-democratic?”
Or, let’s go back to the 2000 presidential election, which as you will recall was about as close as a contest can get. The Electoral College vote hinged on Florida, and the hanging chads. But Vice President Gore received only 500,000 more votes than did Governor Bush. Now, imagine that Florida ends up being allowed to re-count the ballots completely, and those few hundred votes end up going to Mr. Gore, swinging the EC vote his way. BUT, California manages to do a complete re-count and finds out that, because of massive irregularities in their ballot handling procedures, roughly 250,000 votes have to be switched from Mr. Gore to Mr. Bush. So Mr. Gore has the EC, but Mr. Bush now has the popular vote by a thin margin.
Would you have been at the forefront of the ranks of those protesting Mr. Gore’s election? I’m rather doubting it. 
The main mistake you make is persisting in insisting that there is some unified election that goes on on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. There isn’t. There are 51 different elections going on, each with its own set of rules. Pretty much the only commonality they have is that everyone who has attained the age of 18 by the day of the elections can vote, and you cannot bar women. But, notice that Virginia’s governor tried very hard to allow 200,000 plus people to vote who would be barred from voting in many other states. When he was precluded from doing so by the courts, he proceeded to restore those rights to about 65,000 of them before the election, one-by-one. California has bandied about the notion of allowing all residents to vote in elections, whether they are legally resident or not; there is no constitutional bar explicitly existing that would bar them from allowing such residents to vote in the selection of the electors from that state. That would make an election in California a much different critter than an election in, say, North Dakota, where there aren’t many non-citizen residents of ANY type.
In short, it is not, nor has it ever been the case that the President of the United States is selected by one national election occurring in November. Your assumption that this is what happens is manifestly untrue. Indeed, I, and a number of other posters, in other threads on this subject have pointed out that, given his success in doing what he wanted to do using the method prescribed by the Constitution, it’s highly likely that Donald Trump would have won the election, even if it HAD been a national plurality take all process. The campaign would have looked different, the issues would have been tailored to a different crowd (probably suburbanites and disaffected white poor people in urban areas), and it’s very possible that, in that scenario, Mr. Trump could have carried a plurality of the national vote, but lost some states he won in the process, which would have resulted in a “loss” had the election occurred under the rules in the Constitution. Would you have then stood up and said, “yeah, I can accept that result, after all, I dislike him, but because lots of stupid people voted for him, that’s fine by me?”
We’ll never know what would have happened. But if you’re going to promote an alternative to the Electoral College, you have to do some more work than “the votes of the most people aggregated across the country should win because … I say so.” :dubious:
Cool! Thank’ee. I misread what you wrote. And, yeah, this really does make the argument in the OP look a bit…misguided.
YES, BUT the Kansan has salt-of-the-earth bonus points (awarded why? Don’t ask, elitist!) that are being ignored when you treat their vote as equal to one of those filthy city-dwellers’.
Oh wait, I forgot that We’re A Republic Not A Democracy, and Kansas can’t be robbed of its extra franchise points without its consent - and that even pointing out the unfairness of this aspect of our electoral system is just sore losingism. I guess I’ll shut up, then, as someone who never plans to move to Ohio and actually have a say in a presidential election.
You’re wrong in guessing what I would do. Look it up. I have consistently said that Donald Trump won the election under the law that exists and should therefore be the President. I have explicitly opposed the idea of electors voting faithlessly. And I said the same thing in 2000.
That said, I think the law is wrong and should be changed. Not because this person or that person won. Any new law would have no effect on past elections. But a new law that decides the Presidency be a general nation-wide election would be better.
The person who wins the election should be the person who got the most votes. That’s my principal. Basic democracy. If you have a different guiding principal, I’d say you have a much harder time justifying your beliefs than I do mine.
You’re simply pointing out one of the major defects in our current system; it rewards voter suppression.
This goes all the way back to the 2/3 compromise. States didn’t want all their citizens to vote. But they wanted their state’s full population to count in the election. The Electoral College system lets you disenfranchise voters without paying any penalty for doing so.
All your complaints and assertions boil down to is that the Founding Fathers deliberately created a system whereby the winner of the presidential race is not determined by the total number of votes cast across the country but by votes resulting from each state’s elections, and because the candidate you supported happened to win the national vote total but lost the election as it was designed by the FF, you think their design is unfair and you want to see it changed so as to result in a more favorable outcome for you. But it was precisely to thwart the tyranny of large population centers that the FF set things up the way they did.
You may feel the system as it is is unfair, but fair is a subjective term that exists mainly in the eye of the beholder. And often an attempt to create fairness as one person sees it results in unfairness in the eyes of another. Clearly the FF felt it would be more unfair to have the fortunes of all the country’s states determined by the residents of only a few than it would be to deprive those few of the ability to win and call the shots for everyone every time.
So you agree that it’s wrong for a rural minority to rule over an urban majority.
I think it’s unfair because it’s not democratic. If the founding fathers were trying to thwart majority rule then the founding fathers were wrong.
The idea that majority rule is fairer than minority rule may be a subjective opinion. But it’s one held by a lot of people.