Just to be clear, I didn’t say Hillary Clinton won the Presidency. I did say that she won the general election - she got more votes. But winning the general election doesn’t make you President. Donald Trump won the electoral college election which determines who becomes President.
I acknowledge that under our current legal system, winning the general election does not mean you become President. But my personal opinion is that it should. Because I think democracy is a good system.
I think a lot of people were so disgusted by Donald Trump and his whole movement, that they just kind of zoned out the leadup to the election and didn’t follow what he was actually doing. And I can’t really blame them - it was, and is, a depressing state of affairs. But I did follow that campaign avidly in 2016 and it must be noted that Trump absolutely campaigned his ass off in the Midwest. I mean he was holding a rally what seemed like every single day, in a different city or state. Odious as he may be, I do feel like he earned those victories in those states, because he really did work for it. He may have had narrow margins, but it was enough.
The Democrats cannot neglect those states ever again.
Yeah, and give me ranked choice voting, runoff primaries instead of whatever you would call our current monstrosity, and a pony while we’re at it.
(OST, keep the pony, ponies are assholes.)
I didn’t say deception. I said redefinition.
There is a certain amount of deception that is normal on both sides in politics and there are plenty of principled conservatives that realize that the leader of their party has gone well past that line. But when you (not you personally) redefine words so that you can pretend your really bad idea was actually a perfectly reasonable idea, you are making communication less clear at a time when the breakdown of communication is one of the primary problems.
We (not you and me personally) ought to simply condemn the “defund the police” movement as stupid and misguided, and advance the notion of reforming the police and investing in community resources. Pretending that you always meant reform when you said defund is just a stupid way of not offending people who have stupid ideas. Fortunately, this is exactly what biden is doing, he is calling out this stupid idea for what it is.
That’s fine. I think an electoral system is also democratic. Not in the athenian sense, but it is rule by the governed. There is no innate advantage that one citizen has over the other. Someone from California can move the Wyoming and have their vote count for more to account for the electoral system. Someone from Idaho can move to Florida to have people give a shit about their vote.
If I were going to make changes to our democracy, I would focus more on campaign finance, ballot access and gerrymandering rather than shifting the flavor of democracy from electoral college to popular vote.
I think the Senate race might actually be one of the most significant political stories of this entire cycle. If this result actually materializes, it should be a major mother fucking wake up call to the Republican party, not just in Arizon but nationwide.
I think that it was somewhat easy for the national party to write off the GOP’s collapse in California starting around 2010. For one thing, the party had just won back the House and Senate, but for another, they thought “Pfff! It’s California.”
Arizona’s a different story. It’s not just a (potentially at this point) cautionary tale of a party losing a state; it’s a tale of what happens when you ignore demographics. Within the span of about 5 years, Arizona is about to go from being the land of Sheriff Joe, to being potentially controlled by Democrats. Arizona was in 2010 the state that was a beacon and a model for the war against Hispanic immigration; 10 years later, the GOP may be suffering a terrible price. Of all the races besides the presidential race, this is the one to watch.
I agree with this assessment. Not only did Trump campaign in the Midwest; more importantly, Clinton really did NOT campaign there. I don’t entirely blame some “blue wall” voters for feeling ignored.
I don’t like to keep drilling down on the last election but I have a hard time understanding and believing this to be the case. HRC may not have run a great campaign, but the choices were stark in the last election. No Democrat can seriously claim being neglected by HRC’s lack of presence in their battleground state when the other candidate was Trump. They did not stay home because they didn’t get enough love from HRC. People stayed home because of apathy and lack of love for HRC. They have only them selves to blame for PA, MI and WI going for Trump.
Only if they have the resources to make such a move. Plenty of Americans don’t. Your preferred system gives an advantage to the wealthy, beyond simply everything that already comes with the wealth. In my preferred system, every American has the exact same voting influence, and potential voting influence, on Presidential elections, no matter their location, and no matter their income.
I have no objection to your method. Just get the constitution amended and you’re in business.
I think the current method is fine also.
If campaigning doesn’t make a difference, why do candidates spend so much time and energy doing it? Why is it so hard to believe that spending 50% more energy on swing states might have gotten Trump a handful more votes? Perhaps it wasn’t suppression of apathetic Democrats but the energizing of excited Republicans that was not countered with a similar energizing of the Democrats in those states?
I disagree. You mentioned California and Wyoming, so let’s use those examples. Wyoming has 578,759 people and chooses three electors; that’s one electoral college vote for every 192,920 people. California has 39,512,223 people and chooses fifty-five electors; that’s one electoral college vote for 718,404 people. This means a Wyomingite’s vote counts 3.7 times as much as a Californian’s vote. I see that as an innate advantage.
Saying a Californian can move to Wyoming is irrelevant. A Californian shouldn’t have to move to Wyoming to get equal rights as an American citizen. Citizens in California should have the same rights as citizens in Wyoming.
If the reasoning for this is “to balance the interests of the less populated states against those of the more populated states”, even in the society of the late 18th century, that’s just plain nonsense to base it on overall population. It would make more sense to have representation for different groups, such as those in major cities, those in smaller cities and towns, those in rural areas, those in the military, and so on. That list could be endless. Of course, the real reason was to have a compromise that would not scare the smaller states out of ratifying the constitution. And, yes, that was definitely rooted in slavery given the size of the slave states comapred ot the others.
There’s no reason today, or any time after the Civil War settled the issue that each state is, in fact, not a sovereign entity, but is part of one nation, that we should be allocating votes the way we for president and vice-president. As you say, each voter in the country, regardless of where said voter is located, should have equal say in the matter.
Wasn’t Virginia one of the biggest states at the time?
The enticement given to slave states wasn’t giving more representation to smaller states (the two smallest being Rhodes Island and Delaware), it was the 3/5th compromise giving the slave states extra representation based on slaves that couldn’t vote.
I have no quarrel with that. Just get a constitutional amendment and you’re in business.
If it was a particularly large disadvantage, people would move to Wyoming.
This is the deal California agreed to when it joined the union, nobody forced statehood down its throat. It can push to get the deal amended but it has to get the consent of most of the rest of the states to do it.
If we’re going to give larger representation to rural people to make up for the fact that they are a minority, why stop there? Why not give larger representation to black voters to make up for the fact that they are outnumbered by white voters? Why not give larger representation to gay voters to make up for the fact they are outnumbered by straight voters? Why are rural people the one minority that we’re supposed to give an electoral advantage to?
Would you feel it’s acceptable to ban firearms in California as long as they were legal in Wyoming? After all, anyone who wanted to own a firearm would be free to do so simply by moving to Wyoming.
If the constitution not only allowed it but specifically required it? Nope.
However, if the constitution did not have the second amendment, but allowed states to choose for themselves, I would probably choose to live in a state that gave me the right to defend myself if it was that important to me.
The equally weight votes between states in presidential elections, however, is not a constitutional right. But if the constitution were to be amended to require a popular vote, that would also seem like a reasonable method of choosing a president.
Please check out the next two sentences after what you quoted:
The second amendment only says that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be infringed. According to your argument, banning the sale of firearms in California would therefore be constitutional. A person in California could buy all the firearms they wanted by moving to Wyoming so their right to keep and bear arms is uninfringed.