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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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And the votes of the flyover states become an after thought.
Tue votes of the flyover states would matter exactly as much as the votes of any other arbitrary subsection of the country with the same number of people. That's the point.
Exactly. Now any Democrats in flyover states actually have their vote matter.
Fun bit of trivia: which state had the most Republican voters in the 2020 election? Answer: California had more R votes than Texas or Florida or any deep-red state. But neither party gave a shit what California Republicans wanted: Democrats knew that the Electoral votes would go for Biden no matter what, so they didn't need to campaign there or court anyone's vote. And Republicans knew that there was no way to get even one of those Electoral votes, so their time and money was best spent campaigning elsewhere.
Y-you're telling me that gasp LAND DOESNT VOTE?!?!
You are so obtuse i would be amazed if you can find a chair that fits.
Exactly!
Why would you want people to decide their countrys future when empty landmass could do it?
They are already advantaged in both the house and the senate. Why do they need advantages in literally all elections to feel they are treated fairly?
How?
Everyone gets 2 senators, and then 1 house rep for every so many people.
Not quite, the number of house reps is not strictly proportional to the population of each state. California has 704,566 people per house seat, while e.g. Wyoming has 568,300 per house seat. This means a Californian house vote is worth roughly 80% of a Wyoming house vote.
I hate this argument. There are still a lot of votes in the flyover states. The electoral college doesn't disadvantage flyover states anymore than not having an electoral college disadvantages those living outside of the major cities in a state wide election.
Republicans still win the Ohio governor's election despite 5 major metropolitan areas in the state.
Also there are Republican votes in New York and California that get discarded currently.
This isn't a game, this is just making the thing fair.
When you've become accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression.
The "fix" for the problem of equality isn't removing voter power from the flyovers it's ADDING voter power to the large coastal states like California and doing it is so damned simple. Uncap the size of the House of Representatives by changing the Re-Aportionment Act of 1929.
The Wyoming Rule doesn't go far enough in my mind but it's a good starting point.
Maybe, maybe not. It would depend on the districting process in each state. We'd certainly see new Republican's in Congress from California but we'd also see new Democrats in Congress from Texas.
If that happens then it happens. The intent of increasing the size of the HoR isn't so that the Correct Party, whichever you judge that to be, would win. The intent is restore its ability to correctly represent the Citizens of this country. Doing that will have a direct and positive impact on the EC and other things.
I think what they're speaking to is how such a change may alter the course of a presidential campaign. As it stands, there's this notion that a candidate has to try and have broad appeal; they need to spread their campaign out a bit in order to "capture" the electoral votes of a state.
Sans the electoral college, I see presidential campaigns becoming even more polarized and exclusionary. The Democrat campaign will become the "big city loop." Continually visit Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, and Miami. Maybe they slide in a few secondary metros if it's convenient. The candidate won't have to worry about any non-urban messaging, and if they're particularly incendiary could even preach "dumping those hicks in the sticks."
Conversely, the Republican campaign (not even considering the existing insanity) becomes "everywhere else." They can push the message of "big city Democrats want to destroy you" even more convincingly.
Such an outcome strengthens the "not my president" sentiment (on either side), and just further aggravates partisanship. I'm not saying eliminating the electoral college is a change that could never be made, but I definitely think this is a bad time. It will feel like exclusion and alienation and in politics perception is reality.
For the obvious follow-on question "when is a good time," I don't have a pat answer and I can't even speculate if that will be in 4, or 12, or even 20 years. But it needs to be a time when there's far less immediate friction between the two leading parties, or it's just going to be another wedge opening the divide.
The problem with your whole argument is that ultimately it comes down to the fact that the literal minority might be unhappy that they didn't get pick the winner over the will of the majority, and that might make them feel that it's exclusionary to them.
By definition, the majority will actually get their chosen candidate as president. Do you know what strengthens "not my president" sentiment? Having a privileged, autocratic minority choose the president, overriding the will of the voters.
That's currently not the case: in most states, the vote isn't close, so we know before the campaign even begins how most states will vote. There's no reason for Republicans to appeal to Kansans, because Kansas will vote R no matter what. Likewise, there's no point for Democrats to appeal to Kansans because it won't do them any good.
There's a word in politics for a candidate who wins in big cities, and nowhere else: "loser".
Check the demographics. Get a list of the 20 biggest cities in the US and add them up. You'll see that's only about 30% of the vote. So even if you somehow managed to get everyone in the big cities to vote for you, including children under 18, felons, and people on student visas, that still wouldn't be enough to determine the election.
Just in passing, there are more Republicans in the California sticks than the total population of several other states. If the president were elected by popular vote, candidates could no more ignore those voters than California gubernatorial candidates can, today.
Well, our campaigns are ridiculously antiquated with the campaign season being kicked off in....Iowa? And silly photo-ops of them eating county fair food and so on, as if that is somehow representative of America in the past several decades.
Sorry, most people are not farmers, and it's absurd to pretend as if that is "middle America".
It would make far more sense to kick things off on the coasts. Where all the people are.
I think it's a farfetched concern.
If you're still voting based on whether or not someone visited you or not I'm also giving you exactly 0 sympathy. It doesn't matter, that's just a show. Jason Aldean can visit all the county fairs he wants, that doesn't make him a real country boy or mean he's "with you." The same is true of a politician. What you should care about is how their policies affect you and the rest of the country.
Not to mention areas already have disproportionate representation via the Senate. If you can't get your case across to the majority of the county or by senate representation... maybe you don't have a very good case.
We should be trying to convince a majority of people about something, not forcing some arbitrary "win" that allows a minority to have disproportionate power over the majority in multiple areas of the country. We're closer than ever to having "taxation without representation" as is, and it's getting worse (Gore only had ~500,000 more votes, Clinton had ~3,000,000).
That's 3,000,000 people that didn't get their voices heard at all, and that Trump promptly told to go pound sand (even in the face of a natural disaster https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/10/16/trump-administration-refuses-to-give-california-federal-aid-for-wildfires/?sh=304cb4cb3416).
Except they can say whatever politics they feel like that day, and the average American is neither smart nor informed enough to predict how policies will affect them.
The only solution is to go back to supporting ethical politicians instead of the ones who are best at saying what you want to hear. And that will only happen if we start actually educating citizens instead of just teaching them to check educational boxes.
Well on that I can agree
That's a great joke.
Right, because Kansas's vote should hold the same weight as New York or California even though there's less people that live in Kansas?
No, but a Kansan's vote should have the same weight as a New Yorker's or Californian's, or even a Pennsylvanian or Michigander. Not all Kansans vote the same way, and it would be nice to have a system that recognizes this.
And that's okay.
So its bad if peoples votes in densly populated places don't matter, but it doesn't matter if people voting in sparely populated areas don't matter?
But those people's votes each matter the same without the electoral college?
The money and politicians will focus on the large urban areas, because that will maximize time and money invested.
People in rural areas will not have the capacity to affect things at all.
They get to vote, don't they? They just don't get to have their vote given extra privileges just because they live in a sparsely populated area, that's all.
What extra privlages?
Everyone gets 1 vote as it is now.