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If Trump wins re-election while losing by 5 million votes.
- Thread starter BackLogJoe
- Start date
I live in the upper midwest. Your needlessly obscene point is just plain wrong as you basically have it backwards. Right now, due to the senate, eliminating the electoral college would simply lessen the low populations states' disproportionate high amounts of political power.
instead we have a few unpopulated areas speaking for the whole country, and from what I hear it's working out great for them!
You wouldn't even have to abolish the electoral college to have better representation in presidential elections. Having electoral votes be proportional to voting percentages in each state would essentially accomplish the same thing as relying purely on the popular vote.
This would probably be far more palatable and easier to get accomplished than abolishing the whole current system. I mean Nebraska and Maine already do proportional electoral voting, so it's not like there isn't precedent.
Said who? Because seemingly almost everyone here is scared shitless that he will win again.
This would probably be far more palatable and easier to get accomplished than abolishing the whole current system. I mean Nebraska and Maine already do proportional electoral voting, so it's not like there isn't precedent.
Said who? Because seemingly almost everyone here is scared shitless that he will win again.
The states that you're saying wouldn't be worth dropping pamphlets in the event of a popular vote system - do you think they get lots of candidate visits now?
Those are, on the whole, safe states. The reason that you get candidates visiting Las Vegas isn't that they're visiting every state because of the electoral college, it's that Nevada is a swing state.
If you want all states to be equally worth visiting, the electoral college is not the system you want.
I think it's the wording (at least partly). The phrase "leaving office" is an active one, maybe to some people it suggests that it's an action that Trump himself has to take (and can therefore decide not to take). If the phrasing made it clear that it was a fully automatic process in which Trump had no say, it'd presumably be easier for people to grasp.
The issue with Texas is that there government have closed over 750 voting booth locations, the most out of any state since Supreme Court ruled that Southern states don't have to have Federal oversight over voting law changes.
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But now you have sparsely populated areas having a disproportionately large amount of say so and it doesn't work for anyone.
It's not areas that speak. It's people.
Stop thinking of the president of the united States and start thinking about the president of the United States
not really though because as one example .. those places are major farm lands and the such. If you left it up the cities ... they don't care about farmers until the food supply gets low. They won't care about the steel workers until the building materials run out.
thetes a lot more to than just the hot topics in the headlines.
I think they can and should but people forget US elections is like 50 countries voting for a president. In that context the EC.system makes sense.
Electoral College doesn't need to exist when every single American can have their voices heard through phone calls, internet or mail-in. Shit needs to go.
First, the states are free to assign their electoral votes proportionately. That's not a problem with the EC structurally. That's a winner-take-all problem that would still exist if we used the popular vote nationally. Nearly half the country's votes would still be "meaningless" every election.
Secondly, what I said was that each state having an election and adding them up isn't inherently wrong. The founders were proposing a nation of individual states. It's perfectly valid. I didn't say it was the best, nor that it's still appropriate 200 years later, merely that it isn't the source of the issue of some votes counting so much more than others. Wyoming voters having 5 times as much pull as California voters isn't because both states have their own elections. It's because those states' electoral votes aren't assigned the same value.
But don't you see that is exactly the problem?
I get what you are saying but to be honest I'd still feel like my vote would count more in a general popular vote. Is it one of 300 million? Yes. But the point is everyones vote is equal and everyones vote is counted. You can say "I voted for Hilary Clinton and I was part of the x amount of votes that made her win."
Not everyone can say that with our current system. If I lived in Kansas, my vote for Hilary would not matter because the state went red. I get that it was counted within Kansas, but realistically I had no chance of turning that state blue. And as soon as the state turned red my vote is essentially declared null and void.
On the flipside, I have a friend who was honestly just too lazy to go and vote in 2016. I would want to get mad at him for not doing him part but why would I? He would have voted in Massachusetts if he did vote. That state was gonna go blue either way. I honestly don't have a case if I got mad at him for ruining the election. I know people that voted for Jill Stein in Mass as well. Mass isn't anywhere close to being a swing state so fuck it why not a protest vote.
The current system means that votes in certain states carry more weight than others. If you are not in those states you honestly feel disenfranchised. ESPECIALLY if you are blue living in red and vice versa.
In a popular vote, the person voting in Florida or PA, or WI might not feel as though their vote holds as much power. But the people living in Washington, Mass, Kansas or Alabama feel like their vote actually means something now.
The Republicans are dying dinosaurs that rely on the worst of people to sustain power, they know it, they are fighting to sustain it. Gerrymandering and Electoral College are completely anti-democratic.
To an outsider it makes no sense how the US calls itself THE democracy of the world.
Have you been reading the headlines, the farms are struggling. Farmers are committing suicide at record pace, steel is plummeting. So exactly how is the current setup working well for them? Those sectors are worse off when their choices (Republicans) are in office.
That's why we need to implement Ranked Choice Voting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
New York City got that right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
New York City got that right.
Of course it's a problem... the whole idea of basing an argument for or against a voting system where there are millions of people voting on the myth of vote efficacy is ludicrous, and I'm not using "the power of your vote is greater with the EC than without it" as an argument for the EC. I only bring it up as a counter to the feeling that your individual vote doesn't matter in the EC... statistically, it matters more with the EC, but to be quite clear... your individual vote doesn't matter under any voting system.
Except that Trump isn't like most other Republican/GOP presidents who are so corrupt & obnoxious like Trump is, not even Richard Nixon (even though he was bad, but not obnoxious in personality). Trump has taken things to a whole another level than just Watergate with Richard Nixon.
This isn't the Richard Nixon era in which neither the internet or social media hadn't existed. Trump cultists can't just easily retract back & say something like, "Well, I've never supported Trump," etc. when everything is now out of the open on the internet & social media for everyone to see (especially when they've been exposed on National TV committing crimes as well as racism "because Trump said so"). Not like Richard Nixon supporters could get away with saying that they've never supported him when they only have media & newspapers.
The Trump brand name? It's been heavily tarnished thanks to Donald himself. No sane individual would want to vote for another Trump. Everything that Trump has said & done, will remain on the internet (through Google) & on social media, plus will be written in history books.
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Explain this logic. He was unlikely before but won so since he's unlikely again that means he'll win again?
Russian Interference
Ukraine President phone call
Massive corruption(ProPublica)
You're looking at things too narrowly. It's not just laws, but democratic norms he's been pushing against.
Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/us/politics/jeff-sessions-hillary-clinton-donald-trump.html
And it doesn't happen in just 2 years, lol.
Read "How Democracies Die". A lot of authoritarians started out like that(anti-media, threats for political opponents, condoning violence) but it was dismissed because "it was just words."
Then years later, they and their political allies started to act on those words.
Ex:Evo Morales, Chavez, Orban.
All of that had more evidence to support it happening before he took office than there is evidence to support this extreme corner case scenario designed solely to generate clicks.
Seriously, we should all be outraged and mad at the abuses but anyone actually surprised wasn't paying attention to the guy. I don't think most people find it unbelievable or totally unexpected that any of this is happening. Equating that all to this article doesn't make sense.
Trump is not as appealing this time in the minds of ppl who voted for him, he talked a big game and things like gdp and unemployment rate seem OK but real life for Americans is not better.
So they will vote for another change agent, I thinkwarren, yang and bernie could beat trump.
So they will vote for another change agent, I thinkwarren, yang and bernie could beat trump.
By winning the popular vote in enough states for it not to matter, it's incredibly pointless when a president like Trump could win with a 5 million vote deficit because of a document drafted when we only had 13 states.
People want Bush back and he was worse than Trump. And people have already deified McCain even though he too was a colossal POS. Again, Americans don't do viliification at all, you have one political party who thinks civility is like the cornerstone of society and if you aren't civil even to those who strip your freedoms your worse than scum, and is all about that middle. Then you have another party who has no problems with whitewashing history (and again the entirety of America minus minorities helping).
I have absolutely no faith that Trump won't be deified to some degree. By 2028 I expect people to talk about how he wasn't THAT bad, and to get stern lectures from those in the middle and democrats alike about being civil
It's pretty simple. A lot of people underestimated his support last time. A lot of people are underestimating his support this time.
The reasoning is they must be underestimating him this time because they underestimated him last time? That doesn't make any sense.
They aren't. If that was the case, then many people out there wouldn't be voting against Republicans/GOP in other elections, especially in which Trump himself had endorsed & having rallies for them.
So are you implying that all those people that supported Trump stayed home during the 2018 Blue Wave?
Not to mention the election just now where a Dem won in Kentucky where Trump campaigned right before?
What the hell are you on about? Do you just post for the sake of arguing semantics? Seems so.
The point is, I see the same dismissiveness and underestimation of Trump as I did last time. If the slightest thing goes wrong from him (the Bevin loss), people extrapolate from that that the end is night. They hear and see what they want to hear and see, which was precisely the issue last time. Republicans won 13 out of the 15 races on Election Day, and our biggest scalp was Bevin... once the least popular governor in the US.
Too many people are missing the forest for the trees.
Nothing you're arguing is causal. It's poor reasoning. People thinking event A was unlikely in the past and it happening has zero impact on the quality of analysis regarding the probability of event B. Nothing about the first scenario suggests the second must be or is likely wrong or right or anything. It just doesn't make any sense logically.
The Kentucky governor result is a red herring and people aren't reading into it. Kentucky typically favours Democrats for governor. The Republican who lost (Matt Bevin) is only the second Republican governor since 1971. The Republicans also easily won every other race in the state last week. The governor election was a vote on Bevin, who many Kentuckians hated. He was at one point the least popular governor in the US.
Do not read into the Bevin loss.
Yeah but...it's Kentucky. Rs winning every other election there is expected, which is why Bevin was a surprise.
The point to read into is that Trump is losing support in the states that helped cinch his victory in 2016, MI, WI, and PA. It's most likely it'll come down to those again and so far it isn't looking like he's exactly gaining ground there since then.
My argument is that people are underestimating Trump, and the evidence is there. Many people seem to presume Trump has no chance. Yet, recently the NYT polled the six biggest swing states and Trump is competitive in every state regardless of the opponent. He's even winning in some states.
It's much closer than many people think.
That's still just one poll, and before that he was losing with every candidate. While it's probably not going to be a blowout he definetly does not have more support than he did in 2016.
Especially with impeachment on the air throughout the election.
Is he though? If you put any stock in polling, the NYT put out a really interesting podcast this week where they polled the six biggest swing states. Trump is competitive in every state regardless of opponent, and even winning in some states.
I guess my point is that people seem to be digesting recent events and results as bad signs for Trump, but I just don't agree.
The person I actually responded to made the argument that everyone said Trump wouldn't win last time, so that means this time they're personally assuming he will win. That's what I was replying to.
If anyone is suggesting Trump has no chance they're wrong. I think most people paying attention closely see that all of the tradition measures for incumbent success are very much in his favor. They would also know, however, that his approval is historically bad, polling for him is terrible and every election since he took office has been, on balance, bad for the republican party. Presumably they understand the margin he won by in 2016 was minuscule and believing this has stayed the same or improved is very hard given all the data we have.
For every person assuming Trump will lose in a landslide there are 10 that think he'll win easily just because "everyone said he would lose last time therefore the more they say he will lose this time the more it means he'll win! #smartguy2019 #realist #pollsarebad #538sux."
He was only losing against every other candidate in national polls, not state polls. When you poll swing states, he's either competitive or winning. And they are the states that won him the election last time and will win it for him again.
I don't agree with your point that he doesn't have the same level of support as last time. You may be right, but I don't see evidence of it. His base is more raucous than ever, he has complete support from the GOP, and he's raising obscene amounts of cash. He certainly didn't have those last two factors last time. He's going to be very tough to beat.
The 2018 Blue Wave is the evidence against it.
We can't keep bringing up his base because his base is small and they're always motivated to vote. He can't win with just his base though, as 2018 proves when people are energized.
Did these people just not vote in 2018? Or maybe they were outnumbered? I think the latter is more likely.
The main issue is getting our side out to vote. There's more of us than them.
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You're right. Anecdotal, but I live in Indiana and waited three hours to vote in 2018, in a building full of Republican voters. Trump's base was incredibly energized last fall and they'll be just as energized next year. Fortunately, a lot of the country woke up after 2016 and gave Dems many victories in 2018. We just need to get the left energized and excited over the next 12 months. If we can accomplish that, we'll win. I think.
The Blue Wave is encouraging but the midterms also highlighted some dangers. The Republicans actually increased their majority in the Senate, the house which most closely aligns with the electoral college. That is to say, Republicans still have plenty of motivated support in regional and rural areas, which are given an amplified say via the electoral college.
Also, midterms are almost always won by the minority party because they are more motivated to vote. But Obama is a good example of why I wouldn't be reading much into the midterm results. Obama won in a landslide in 2008, and lost the midterm elections in 2010. He then won the presidential election easily in 2012, and got trounced in the 2014 midterms. The Republicans flipped 9 fucking senate seats.
I agree that voter turnout is the key, but that goes both ways. He's a cult of personality, he's going to get massive support. It's whether Trump convinces swing voters and independents to back him again.
Don't know if this is the right word for it, but the EC should be proportionate: you get 40% of a state's vote, you get 40% of that state's EC. Would already be way more fair than the current shitshow as it wouldn't ignore people who voted for the candidate which lost in their state.
You can fix the EC without a constitutional amendment. The easiest way would be to increase house representatives.
