That would also be a misleading conjecture. We were given two candidates both with a staggering amount of baggage, so I'd say he was supported despite his racism. You can be in favor of a candidate while disagreeing with parts of their belief or positions, just look at Bernie supporting Hillary while simultaneously saying he was going to fight her on a lot of things.
Well this is why the US election system is completely bat**** crazy. Switch to something like a 2-3 stage election or a Single Transferable vote system. In the initial stage you also need to ban the 2 big parties from having their own primary election to select a single candidate and also from putting more funds into the campaigns than the smaller parties. Then force the media include every "major" candidate in the debates and then let the people vote between something like 10-15 candidates instead of 2, and with an STV system that'd ensure that the candidate with the greatest actual popular support and least detractors would actually win. If you want to retain some power with the states(in order to prevent the urban areas from having complete and total domination over who is elected) let the states each nominate 1 candidate based on state primary elections or smth.Originally Posted by natebane
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day, Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
The problem is essentially this:
50% of the population lives in the blue area and the other 50% in the grey.
In a small nation like the Scandinavian countries this is less of an issue but in a huge nation like the US this creates an actual problem where the people in the rural areas are left with essentially zero influence.
So some disparity seems reasonable but in the US you can technically win with the support of just ~21.9% of the population, ie 78.1% voted against you
A few interesting videos from CGP Grey, which shows just how bat**** insane the whole electoral college system is:
How the Electoral College Works
The Trouble with the Electoral College
Re: The Trouble With The Electoral College – Cities, Metro Areas, Elections and The United States
What If the Electoral College is Tied?
Last edited by Elldallan; 12-11-2016 at 10:04.
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day, Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Guess what is funny, who is the only person who even talked about fixing our rigged election system that ran for president. Donald J Trump. Maybe he will fix the very thing alot of democrats are complaining about. :)
You were given more than 2 candidates. I know for a fact that Johnson was on the ballot in all 50 states. That's getting away from my point though. When you cast your vote, you're voting for that person and all of the policies and attributes of that person. There's a difference between these two statements:
"I voted for Clinton, but I do not support her wishes to preserve the ACA."
And
"Despite my disdain for the ACA, I voted for Clinton."
The first sentence just isn't true. You gave her the support on her stance by voting for her. I'll give another example.
Say in 2020, someone comes forward who is like 90% my absolute perfect candidate. Pretty much all of proposed policies allign with what I believe to be best for the country. However, he is a neo-nazi who also intends to purge the country of any non-whites. Now, despite having these great policy ideas I could and would never vote for this person because you don't get to cop out behind saying something like "look, I voted for the policies that I liked. I didn't vote for an ethnic cleansing" because yes you absolutely did vote for an ethnic cleansing.
Getting back to Trump, my point is that in the face of policy you support, there are deal breakers and you can't just ignore it. If you voted for Trump you gave him permission to bring everything he's bringing to the white house.
A vote for Trump meant that disrespect of POWs wasn't a deal breaker for you. It meant that the mockery of the disabled wasn't a deal breaker for you. It meant that banning all Muslims from entering the country wasn't a deal breaker for you. This is what the problem is.
But that's not true. You have the exact same influence and power as everyone else. Your vote carries the exact same weight as my vote or as John from New York or as Jane from a town of 1500. I still don't have an answer of why where you live should dictate how important your vote is. I'm willing to bet that if we switched to popular vote we'd have much better voter turnout. As it is now, if you're a Republican that lives in California or a Democrat in Texas, you don't have much reason to go out and vote (for the president, obviously you can still be influential in local ballot stuff). If we switched to popular vote, those people have reason to out and vote because their vote actually does matter now. It's now officially a vote in favor of their candidate.
You attack the issue from the wrong angle. Each invidual sure has the same power but if you watch it as a group of people, ie urban and countryside, the urban side has for sure more power than the countryside.But that's not true. You have the exact same influence and power as everyone else. Your vote carries the exact same weight as my vote or as John from New York or as Jane from a town of 1500. I still don't have an answer of why where you live should dictate how important your vote is. I'm willing to bet that if we switched to popular vote we'd have much better voter turnout. As it is now, if you're a Republican that lives in California or a Democrat in Texas, you don't have much reason to go out and vote (for the president, obviously you can still be influential in local ballot stuff). If we switched to popular vote, those people have reason to out and vote because their vote actually does matter now. It's now officially a vote in favor of their candidate.
But why is that a problem? We're all Americans. The urban side has more "power" because there is more people. The government is supposed to represent the people
I will point out the obvious country people do not need help of the big city people. But City people depend on country people for almost everything. So really country people should have the only say. ;)
LMAO this was a hilarious post. Republicans may have the most guns, sure, but I don't see how every hillbilly will use all of their 20 gun stash with just two hands. I assure you there are plenty of gun owning liberals in America, we're just not idiots and support background checks and more controls for the right to do so.
And "take back" your country from who? Anyone who is different than you? This stage of the Republican Party is on the wrong side of history and will be nothing more than an embarrassing old scar on a future more civilized society. The slaughter of American Indians, slavery, and the election of Donald Trump. If you think progress will stop because you got this clown in the White House, you are sorely mistaken. The majority of this country still believes in equality and real change.
You mean like a foreign government getting directly involved in one campaign to skew an election result? You elected who the Russian people wanted, not the American people. And the only thing that needs fixing is to abolish the electoral college so the true majority decides our President. Without the college we'd have had a peaceful and prosperous 20 years of democratic leadership without Republicans starting multiple wars, destroying the economy, and fueling massive racial and social divides in our own borders.
Last edited by DHaran; 12-11-2016 at 20:24.
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If you switched to a strictly popular vote system, then you are going to see all major candidates strictly campaigning in densely populated rural areas due to efficiency of dollars spent per vote gained. All policy proposals and issues will be geared towards winning the favor of the urban block of voters with some slight nods towards people living in the countryside. A candidate might go visiting the capital of Wyoming or some other rural state saying vote for me because I was the only one that gave enough ****s to come out here after campaigning in New York, LA, whatever other major metropolitan.
As if campaign locations had anything to do with who won this election. It's all about what you see on TV, which is why the average voter is completely uneducated on actual issues and policies and vote on nothing more than "walls" and "emails".
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Oh, so all those silly Constitutional Amendments we have don't count? Strange, I thought some of those were pretty important.....
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There are absolutely issues with the electoral college system. It's ridiculously archaic in a number of ways.
That being said, there's some value in weighting against population density a little bit. If we were looking at electing a president strictly on the basis of popular vote, then your average Dem would barely step outside the top 10 big cities when campaigning. Consolidating the urban vote would be far more important and far more valuable than reaching out to swing states, needing to broaden your appeal a little bit more to attract a bit more of the rural crowd, rather than simply pandering to the big cities. It's the same reason each state, regardless of size or population, gets equal representation in the Senate.
Frankly, I think that the people crying for electoral reform because Hillary lost should look more at the value of an instant runoff (i.e. 'ranked') ballot as opposed to scrapping the electoral college. (Not to say the EC doesn't need reform, but that's more complicated.) An instant runoff ballot allows one to escape from the mess of a 'two party system' without raising the specter of vote-splitting, and there really are no down sides in terms of a presidential election - well, unless you LIKE a two-party system, and the way it consolidates power in a small political elite.
Quite frankly, if President Cat-Grabber seriously wants to undermine the establishment behind the two main parties, he'll press hard for an instant runoff ballot in future elections. That's how you empower alternative ideas, and the weakening of the entrenched powers, by allowing people to actually vote for third party candidates (and thus giving the third parties reasons to field more serious candidates than the nutbars they did this time around) without being afraid that "A vote for a third party is a vote for the guy you like least".
If it was all about what you see on television, then Hillary should have won hands down. Her total general election ad spending was $211million to his $74million while outside groups supporting either candidate spent in the same ratio. It was a complete propaganda machine on Hillary's part if you take into account publications like the New York Times saying Donald didn't deserve fair treatment in reporting; however, despite the massive bias against Donald it was hard to hide her corruption.
Scrapping the college is easy and logical to suggest when the only two times in the last century the college has overridden the popular vote has given us Bush and Trump. Overriding the popular vote gave us two wars, a major economic collapse, and now widespread racism, harassment, and hatred.
THERE ARE SWASTIKAS BEING DISPLAYED ALL OVER AMERICA RIGHT NOW. HOW DAFT CAN YOU BE TO SUPPORT THIS ELECTION????
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