Hey, that’s what it took to keep the slave states in the union. And the Founding Fathers were guided by God, don’tcha know.
Well start organizing for an amendment or a constitutional convention then.
There have been 700 attempts. The problem, as you may realize, is that the outsized power given to small states in electing presidents is also given to them in blocking amendments. It’s extremely difficult to distribute power fairly when the distribution depends on those with outsized power giving up their power voluntarily.
Again, the so-called power of less populous states is only outsized when you attempt to abandon the concept of a federation of 51 self-determining entities and try to turn elections into a nationwide referendum instead.
The residents of each state deserve to have their say in how the nation is governed, and a popular vote only system such as you advocate in the supposed cause of fairness would leave them with no significant voice at all in choosing the nation’s chief executive. This of course is patently unfair, and if fairness were truly your goal you wouldn’t be advocating a popular vote system.
But you know you’ll win every time with a popular vote system due to the overwhelming number of liberal voters in a small number of states in a relatively small part of the country, so true fairness goes out the window while you advocate for a system that puts presidential elections primarily in the hands of New York and California and guarantees you a win every time, all under the specious guise of how unfair it is that every state has two senators or how a voter in Wyoming allegedly has more voting power than a voter in California.
Basically you simply want to win and are therefore constructing specious arguments that go completely against our entire system of government. But I have no doubt at all that were the situation reversed and the popular vote were keeping your candidate out of the White House you’d be arguing just as strenuously about the unfairness of the popular vote system and how in disenfranchises all the voters outside the coastal southwest and coastal northeast.
Are you just ignoring the fact that you’ve had multiple republican presidents win the popular vote and W (the 1st time) and Trump are outliers?
That being said, if you’re saying that the majority of Americans will ALWAYS prefer a liberal president, doesn’t that say something about Republican policies?
I suggest you find something they want and offer it to them in exchange for this amendment you want. Make a deal. You might think of it as an art. Asking people to just give you something for nothing is just begging.
And the three cities in the OP are the only ones Clinton won? Oh wait, they’re not and you don’t have any actual argument?
This is an amazing list of data and does show a definite split between city folks and smaller communities that together helped get Trump elected by the electoral college in those swing states like Ohio, Florida, Penn.
Without the electoral college rules the state of California would’ve been the swing state due to over two million voters voted for Hillary Clinton in that one state alone with that in mind the east coast would’ve only made it a tie without California and Oregon and Washington.
The west coast rules without the EC ha ha 
They don’t care, they know conservatism cannot win the battle of ideas, which is why they are so fond of the electoral college system as it acts as a sort of affirmative action/welfare/quota system to prop up conservative power in the presidency and Congress.
Conservatives are the biggest political affirmative action babies in the US. They keep talking about the virtues of winning districts of empty space and more state governorships and legislatures, but every state in the union has cities and metro areas that tend towards more liberal governance than the surrounding areas, but they come on these boards and lie about it being liberal big states against small states. The dynamic cities in Texas are with us as well, it is civilization itself against the backwoods.
The liberal controlled ares are literally the lifeblood of the nation, the place the withering conservative dominated areasy are fleeing to… so let’s ignore the wishes of the TRUE MAKERS and give power to the takers of this world.
Do not appear to accuse other posters of lying in this forum. If you feel you must, the BBQ Pit is right around the corner.
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I can’t believe that people really think that basing the presidential election on the popular vote would insure only liberals get elected. I think this is totally out of touch with the American people.
Dealing only with presidential elections since 2000 and looking at the popular vote there is simply a limited dataset. If we look at the popular vote for the House over the same period, only three times in nine elections did Dems garner more votes nationwide than Republicans. What’s more, most of these elections were quite decisive either way: the substantial majority of these elections had the winning party ahead by several million votes.
And keep in mind, these elections already represent the trend of most campaigning and dollars spent being concentrated in more densely populated areas. So the idea that a truly national election cannot be compared to House races nationwide because presidential contenders would focus more on cities: that’s already the case in House races. They are focused on cities, and more money is spent on those races.
Why is it, do you think, that a majority of Republicans think that Trump won the popular vote? Is that a sign that 52% of Republicans exhibit signs of ignorance? Are they unsophisticated in some way?
Because if some people can be derided in such harsh terms for failing to understand that the presidential election is run differently than elections for literally every single other elected office in the country, surely you must have some commentary on those who have a total misunderstanding of the election results that were so recent. Right?
I’m just gonna throw this out.
Pretty much EVERY expert/random talking head I’ve seen on TV since about the time VCRs became a thing has said one thing.
The electoral college voting system favors the Democratic party. Demographics and demographic shifts and blah blah blah. It seems to favor the Dems and most experts seem to think it will only get better/worse (depending on who you are)
“Experts” on the left. “Experts” on the right. “Experts” from gawd knows where. They almost all say this to a T.
Yes, you “liberals” think you got shafted in this election and perhaps the Bush/Gore fiasco awhile back by the electoral system. But those may be flukes. And more importantly, anybody with half a brain plays to win the electoral system so when somebody does not win the electoral vote but wins the popular vote…that doesn’t mean diddly because if the popular vote was the way to win the whole game would have been played differently in the first place.
I’ll note here that there is a recent story that team Hillary actually WAS worried about the popular vote…which probably explains why the fools won the popular vote and NOT the one that actually counts.
So, yeah, Democrats/Liberals…go ahead and PUSH for the popular vote route…if those experts are right, you will probably have bought the Republican party as it is another generation or so of having a fighting chance.
Push for the popular vote option. Push to keep the same old tone deaf leadership that got you in this mess. Keep believing it was ONLY about not getting your message out and NOT that maybe your message ain’t all it is cracked up to be. Keep thinking you got screwed and you ran a perfect game rather than your game sucked and you need to change tactics.
Works for me.
The Democrats have won the popular vote in six out of the last seven presidential elections. So you might want to find some new experts to listen to.
And they lost 5 out of the 6 before that.
So everyone but SA agrees: the popular vote is a fine way to choose a president.
Great. Let’s get this done.
Sounds fair to me. To summarize your position:
One person, one vote = not fair
Variably weighted votes depending on your location = fair
I don’t think the Chinese or Indians would appreciate Americans telling them they don’t count as much as Americans. Liberals would probably call it racist. If anything this is a starting argument for dismantling behemoth states.
Washington is both far away literally and metaphorically, since policy is largely decided by the elite business class, not normal people. Federalism failed pretty hard if it was meant to avoid that. Not that a popular vote would help either.
I think, given how the Dems have spent the last month shouting from the rooftops that electors are not constitutionally-bound to vote the way state law tells them to, that the NPVIC is effectively dead (it’s unclear if it was ever alive, but I"m quite certain it’s dead now).
Isn’t that exactly what the UN has done though? How much of a security council vote is each Chinese person? How much for each American? Indians don’t even get a veto, all because they live in the wrong country.
There are two issues that often get conflated when talking about the EC:
(1) Small states getting proportionally more EC votes than large states (directly constitutionally mandated)
(2) The fact that most states apportion their EC votes with direct winner-take-all elections (not mentioned in the constitution at all)
There’s a lot of grousing about (1) (not unreasonably, imho), but I think that (2) causes even more serious issues, because of how it divides the nation into swing states and non-swings-states.
Here’s a way to think of how much influence voters actually have… imagine that Jane Citizen has a political awakening tomorrow and becomes a passionate supporter of the Republican Party. So she convinces a bunch of her neighbors via passionate debate, and they form a politics club, and they go door to door in the city, and due to her civic engagement and passionate command of the issues, convince a total of 1000 local citizens to vote Republican. Hey, good for her, that’s what grass roots democracy is supposed to be.
But what’s the likelihood that Jane and the fairly impressive 1000 friends actually sway the outcome of the presidential election?
For that to happen, two things need to happen:
(1) Her 1000 votes need to decide her state
(2) Her state’s EC votes need to decide the presidency
Now, (2) is obviously more likely for larger states than smaller states. If you swing Alaska, the EC vote has to be MUCH closer for your state to matter than if you swing California. But (1) is much more likely for smaller states than larger states. 1000 votes is far more likely to determine the winner in Alaska than in California.
So, if you started out with a totally blank slate, every citizen in every state was equally willing to be convinced to vote for either candidate, then doing a bunch of math would, I suspect, determine that Jane living in Alaska was slightly more likely to determine the presidential outcome than Jane living in California. Which is, arguably, what the founders intended.
But of course we don’t start out with a blank slate. We have political parties. We have swing states. So what we actually have isn’t a system where voters in smaller states get undue weight, or voters in rural states get undue weight, or anything like that. What we actually have is a system where voters in states which are close to evenly divided between the parties get undue weight, particularly large states which are evenly divided.
So Jane living in Florida is orders of magnitude more likely to determine the presidency than either Jane living in a big blue state (CA) or a big red state (TX, at least for now) or a small blue state (VT) or a small red state (KS). And it’s hard to imagine that that’s what the founders intended.
I’ve heard a lot of arguments in which people are praising the wisdom of the founders in making sure that LA and NYC don’t decide the presidency… but there’s nothing in the constitution that stops either NY or LA from being in a swing state, or that guarantees that PA or FL is a swing state. Twenty years down the line, maybe demographics will shift, and TX or CA will be the only state that matters.
The system as we have it right now isn’t protecting the little states due to the genius of the founders. It’s a weird dysfunctional accidental by-product of a necessary compromise made hundreds of years ago, and it places enormous disproportional weight on a totally arbitrary group of voters based purely on accidents of geography… those accidents not being state size or rural-vs-urban or middle america vs the coasts, or anything like that. Those accidents are purely based on party demographics, which are something the founders never anticipated at all.