I’m putting this in MPSIMS instead of Politics & Elections because I’m not trying to engage in a political discussion. I want to talk about dishonest argumentation using numbers.
I got an email from the Democratic Governors Association that, among other things, said the following:
Democrats have earned more votes than Republicans in the last 7 out of 8 presidential elections, but we’ve only had 3 Democratic presidents in that time. It just doesn’t add up!
See the problem? It ignores the fact that Clinton and Obama each won twice. Two out of the last eight elections have resulted in Republican presidents who didn’t win the popular vote. They’re trying to make it sound like it’s happened four out of eight times.
I’m a Democrat, and I’ve been railing against the electoral college for years. I’d love to see it abolished in favor of a direct popular vote (although achieving it would be politically almost impossible). That doesn’t mean I’m in favor of trying to trick people into agreeing with me.
I completely agree, and for some reason I always hate it more when people on “my” side do this sort of thing, as if there aren’t genuinely good arguments so they had to resort to this sort of flim flam. It gives the position a bad odor with anyone who has a functioning brain.
(Note that I am not 100% agreeing with your political position, only with your dislike of using numbers in this dishonest way.)
In his 2001 book Stupid White Men, Michael Moore said the following about the Bush-Gore election: “…even sadder were the 200 million of us Americans who did not vote for Bush. In a nation of 250 million, that makes us the majority.”
What he omits is that, by that same logic, roughly 200 million Americans didn’t vote for Gore, either. (That, and also the fact that some of those 250 million Americans were underage and couldn’t have voted for anyone anyway.)