Have you lost track of the point? You asked about how presidents ignore states. oldgulph responded with a standard explanation of safe and swing states. You picked out the example of Rhode Island and asked why they were a safe state for the Democrats if the Democrats were not meeting their needs. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and couldn’t be asking such a simplistic question because you didn’t know the answer and assumed you were making a roundabout point that if we weakened the 2 party system (using the approval voting system you had earlier spoken in favor of) then the safe/swing state dichotomy would be broken. My response was that this would not resolve the problems of the EC.
You replied, “It doesn’t really bother me.” I expressed confusion as to what you meant. You claimed to fail to understand why people would vote for a party that doesn’t fill their needs. I was flabbergasted at your naivete and posted a short (in more than one sense of the word) reply about the “lesser of 2 evils” effect that all politically aware Americans understand. MaxTheVool attempted a more in depth explanation which you shrugged off by asking again if this meant that Rhode Islander’s needs were being met when it was obvious to everyone else (or at least so it seemed to me) that the opposite was the point.
At this point I concluded that you were being deliberately obtuse. So when I objected to your lumping all Rhode Islanders together my post was dripping with sarcasm. Your question in reply asking when I would get back to the issue of people voting against their own interests didn’t seem to me to show any promise of engaging in actual discussion so I gave up on it and replied in kind. You responded with a question asking when I would start to understand what you were talking about. I replied honestly that I didn’t see any chance of that happening. So here we are.
I was making no such point. My point is: people who feel their interests aren’t being met aren’t reliable voters. If a state is reliable, then their needs are being met. If democrats aren’t exciting enough people to vote democrat, then people stop showing up at polls in sufficient quantities and republicans win. Now I am asking, specifically and without embellishment: why would someone suppose that a state could be reliably for a party and yet not be having its needs met by that party? Because that was the specific claim and I think it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
This has been asked and answered. Not that it is it much of a mystery to begin with. There are only 2 viable parties in America. You don’t have to believe one party can be trusted to look after your interests in order to consistently support them. You only have to believe they are consistently preferable to the other party. IMO both parties follow a path taking America over the cliff. But I never vote Republican because I believe their route is much more direct.
See, that sounds suspiciously like an interest being served. Do you expect me to feel sorry for you that you’ve felt compelled to some measure of compromise? You’ve chosen to characterize it in a way that makes it seem like you’re just holding your nose to vote, and maybe you really are, but there are over 100 million eligible voters and only one president so I’m inclined to believe that everyone is going to have to hold their nose at the result of a single-seat election under any aggregation method. The two-party-system issue is a real problem but is tangential to the claim in question.
I can’t tell if you understand now why a pattern of voting for one party over the other does not indicate that people consider their needs met or not. In any case it’s not about my feelings but about how best to represent these people. As you say there is inevitably going to be a lot of compromise but where we can we should give people as much choice as possible. The Electoral College is one of those places. Getting rid of it will hardly create a representative utopia but it’s simple enough to do.