Sure, fine, it’s a correction. Nobody except Obama has entered the White House with a majority of votes since Bush the Elder. No Republican at all has entered with a majority or plurality of the votes since Bush the Elder. I suppose this is a fair correction, but it doesn’t materially affect my point, that we’ve spent a third of the century so far under the rule of the person who got fewer votes than their rival, and that moves real far away from the idea of a representative democracy.
This is just an absurdity, though, and not really worth responding to.
Well that point is also not true because elder Bush was President until 92 and junior got a majority on reelection. But feel free to add as many qualifiers as you need until you make an irrefutable point.
Eh. It is a founding principle of this democratic republic and ignoring that isn’t going to get you anywhere. But feel free to keep doing so and let us know how that works out for you as you try and change things!
It’s not a trick. States are real things and some have existed longer than the union. Parties aren’t entitled to any form of proportional representation. And this thread seems like nothing more than a gripe because the dems lost.
If Congress hadn’t relinquished so much of their Constitutional powers to the Executive Branch over the past 100+ years, this wouldn’t even be an issue.
Does anyone else find it disturbing that one man, no matter who he is, has so much power to affect the lives of so many people?
The solution to this mess is to weaken the office of the Presidency.
There used to be, until the Supreme Court struck them down, saying that disproportionate representation of that sort is inconsistent with “a republican form of government”. Yes, that’s right, all you folks who go on about us being “a republic, not a democracy”, according to the Supreme Court, our system isn’t even a republic.
I mostly agree with you on this: the presidency is unnecessarily powerful now. Presidents don’t fear impeachment nearly as much as they should. If a president is openly refusing to carry out the will of the legislators, they should know that they face impeachment for that. (And yes, before someone thinks they’ve engaged in the most clever gotcha ever, this would apply to Democrats as well as Republicans).
The clear implication that I got was that only Republicans had been elected to the presidency without a plurality, and that he made a slight mistake on word choice.
The clear implication I got from your reply was that you would rather distract with irrelevant corrections than to address the fact that the last few decades have seen republicans getting into office, even though the voters made clear their intention that they preferred the other person.
Is it a founding principle, or was it a compromise?
Was it a “We hold these truths to be self evidence… that the president must be elected by an electoral college that will not always reflect the will of the people.” and so it was enshrined as an inalienable right?
Or was it “These small states keep whining that the larger states may have power proportional to their population, and the states where people don’t want to live want to have more power proportional to their population.” and so the more populous states, the states with economies and resources and other things that attracted people to live in those states, compromise with the little states and gave them disproportionate power, in the futile effort to get them to stop whining that democracy means that you need to actually have more people on your side?
There are a few different things being confused here:
People don’t like losing.
People think that the system of government should be better, and believe that establishing a vision for a better system is the first step; figuring out how to reach that better system is the next step, after the better system is imagined.
People have a clear path to a better system.
Of course people don’t like losing, but if that’s all you focus on, your contributions to this thread are super-boring.
Of course people don’t have a clear path right now to a better system; we haven’t agreed yet on whether a better system exists yet.
#2 is the most productive thing for us to discuss right now. If all you want to do is gloat that your minority of the population is maintaining power over the majority of the country, bully for you. If all you want to do is to complain that a bunch of posters on a messageboard haven’t solved the political crisis of our times, you win the Golden Deerstalker award.
But if you want to discuss whether, and how, anything should be done about the Electoral College, it’ll come across awful like you read the OP.
Time for a new constitutional convention then? I have a funny feeling with the presence of states that it won’t go the way you hope. Is your plan to dissolve the states and other sub national governments? Good luck with that.
Not at the national level. That’s the price to pay for a real country in a world where history matters. We don’t erase all precedent and pre-existing institutions or contracts each year.
The problem many focus on — small states getting a big advantage — is a big problem in theory, but it isn’t the problem that has produced undemocratic results. The D’s have just as many small states as the R’s.
People suggest that land should have a voice, that Montana deserves a voice out of proportion to its population because of its huge geographic size. I might accept that. But why does tiny Rhode Island deserve its extra 2 evs? Is it so culturally different from Mass or Conn? And if cultural difference is the criterion, shouldn’t California be divided into at least two dozen states?
Are you proposing that Montana get one seat in the House and, since California has 68 times the population of Montana it should get 68 seats? The House may already be too big; arithmetic flaws would still arise (unless you went to fractional representatives); and Trump would still have won in 2016. (I’ll have to check for Bush v Gore.)
The real problem that explains why the R's win when the popular vote is close, is that D voters are packed into a few large states and their franchise is wasted.
Here are the 2016 results for the four largest states in 2016, as cast and as might be cast with proportional evs: (It's a tedious and inconclusive result so I'll hide hide it and discourage clicking.[SPOILER]
Actual California
Clinton 55
Actual Texas
Trump 36
Kasich 1
Paul 1
Actual New York
Clinton 29
Actual Florida
Trump 29
Assuming the Texan defectors would have fallen in line had their votes been needed, Hillary's net advantage over these big states was 17 evs (84-67).
Proportional California
Clinton 34
Trump 18
Johnson 2
Green 1
Proportional Texas
Clinton 17
Trump 20
Johnson 1
Proportional New York
Clinton 17
Trump 11
Johnson 1
Proportional Florida
Clinton 14
Trump 14
Johnson 1
Now Hillary's net advantage would be 19 evs (82-63) despite the drainage to Johnson.[/SPOILER]
Of course it is impossible that any controversial constitutional amendment could be passed today (unless the R's can do it mischievously with cheating). The NPVIC has been proposed and wouldn't require an amendment. Unfortunately it would also be vulnerable to R cheating.
Statehood for Puerto Rico, anyone?
It means that history matters and if you are going to propose a change you have to take real world current conditions into account. The country and states didn’t pop out of a vacuum.
So a new system would have to take into account the desire of 3/4 of the states. What would be acceptable to the citizens of those states? Increasing the size of the house is something that could be done without a constitutional amendment and thus has a realistic chance of implementation.
Land gets a voice? No. Political entities such as states and nations do. Why is the USA on the UN security council as a permanent member? Power and historical compromises are why.
And the real problem isn’t just that small states get a disproportionate voice, the problem is that it really all comes down to a handful of states, and the rest can generally be ignored.
If you are in California, you don’t bother to vote, because it is a foregone conclusion. If you are in Texas, same thing. (And because you apparently don’t care about local politics, what you have more influence over, and what more directly affects your life.)
If you are in Ohio, you spend the last couple months of the election season being bombarded with ads from both sides.
The vote of the people in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin are more powerful than the votes of either the larger states, or the small states. If you are not in a swing state, your vote doesn’t matter. Unless that ss that one of the founding principles that our country cannot continue to exist without.
You make an unfounded assumption: that everyone who voted for the Democratic Party running mates would prefer a system that allowed those candidates to win to the present system. That’s patently untrue. I know for a fact it is untrue (you can probably figure out why I can say that).
One of the sad facts of life is that you don’t always get to win. How you deal with loss is a part of your character, in my opinion. You can whine and complain, you can demand that the system change to give you what you want, etc. Or, you can simply roll up your sleeves and work to do better next time.
Let me give an admittedly not exact analogy:
The US is having trouble winning the Ryder Cup at golf, which involves a series of match-play contests. Suppose that an analysis showed that, had the whole thing been played at stroke play instead, the US would have won (the Europeans tend to have a few really bad holes, but that doesn’t matter because losing a hole by one and losing by five is identical in value). Now, the US whines and complains that they really played better golf, and if the whole thing was structured to count strokes, like all other tournaments do, they’d have won. After all, counting strokes is the essence of the game. So they insist that the Ryder Cup be re-structured to stroke play format.
That’s in essence the argument behind abolishing/changing the Electoral College. We have a system, a system that very rarely produces a really bad product (the current occupant of the White House possibly excepted). While it is true that on a few occasions the person chosen has not garnered the most total votes from the aggregated elections held on Election Day, in none of those cases was the vote difference so staggeringly large that one can definitively say the will of the people as a whole was thwarted (remember: large numbers of people don’t vote!). But because the same party lost the last two elections where this happened, some members of that ideology want to change the way the game is played, on the assumption that that will mean they will win future contests where the same result would occur. In other words, you want a system that is rigged to allow YOUR team to win, rather than a system you perceive is rigged to allow the OTHER team to win.
But the better way to ensure that your team wins is to change how your team plays the game. It’s also the approach taken by people who understand that they cannot always have things their way. IMO.
