stopthatgirl7Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.
foggyWhen you say majority, do you mean by popular vote, or…
multiple choice, presumably
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Introduced in 2006, as of August 2023 it has been adopted by sixteen states and the District of Columbia. These jurisdictions have 205 electoral votes, which is 38% of the Electoral College and 76% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.
Napavointerco
BuelldozerThe Wyoming Rule, or something like it, would solve a lot more problems than just the EC.
Part of this piece has an excellent insight into the dichotomy of the Republican Party. Of those highly engaged with politics, only 27% want to ditch the electoral college! These people understand the party is unpopular and the tactics used to hold power are a necessary way to get their policies.
The rest of the group feels otherwise, probably NOT because they don’t care if their candidate gets elected, but rather that they don’t understand how crucial it is to their party (along with gerrymandering). And their first gut instinct is that popular vote is justified/rational/logical whatever.
Now for a little thought experiment: What would happen if this became an actual campaign issue? I’d put my money on those 27% being able to convince the rest of the party how important it is, flipping their view. Maybe I’m wrong, but since many R voters tent to put self interests above all else, it logically follows that they’re just not understanding how critical the electoral college is. If their talking heads went on air/TV each day and stopped talking about how immigrants are stealing jobs or poor people are taking their hard earned money, and instead focused on the importance of the electoral college, they’d flip. Not because they think it’s right or justified. Because they think it’s best for themselves and their party. And it’s the current rallying cry.
Now apply this across an entire party, with those highly engaged telling the others how to vote, what to think about policy, and what the outcomes will be. Being together uneducated people already susceptible to misinformation, and pair them with intelligent and extremely vocal/active groups who can sell snake oil like the best of them. Take that minority vote and put some real numbers behind it… likely not enough to get a majority, but enough to win a sophisticated electoral college or gerrymandered district.
PupBiruthey probably wouldn’t even try and hide it: they’d literally just come out and say the electoral college helps keep the democrats out and they’d vote for it
Good point. It’ll likely take three words to get a lot of those people to flip: own the libs.
Sometimes I forget how little value some people place in consistency of beliefs. Small government! Except ____. Ad nauseam.
OmegaThey already have these talking points. They used them when Hillary won the popular vote.
Tyranny of the majority, nobody would have to listen to rural Americans ever again.
It’s all bullshit obviously. But it cut through to moderates last time it made the rounds. And these are swayable voters I’m talking about.
The rest of the group feels otherwise, probably NOT because they don’t care if their candidate gets elected, but rather that they don’t understand how crucial it is to their party (along with gerrymandering). And their first gut instinct is that popular vote is justified/rational/logical whatever.
The (European) centrist part in me think the “less engaged” Republicans are those who like the central right-wing ideas (small government, less taxes etc.), but don’t like how crazy the current Republican party is, and since they have no real representative they identify themselves as “less engaged”. Those people would probably prefer for the electoral college to be abolished so that the current Republican party never gets elected again and they’re forced to shift to candidates that are actually sane in order to win back votes.
…but yeah, your analysis might be correct too, those “less engaged” people could also be MAGAs that just don’t understand how they wouldn’t win an actually democratic election.
I’m sure you’re right about some people. They’re feeling abandoned and disgusted by what’s supposed to have their support and ideologies in mind, therefore not as active. That makes sense.
I know there are a lot of good/reasonable people who just want the government to play a smaller role in society and I think that’s a necessary part of any well-functioning system. And I agree with the sentiment in specific applications. Hopefully there is a way forward for those types to force a change for the better from the current GOP. Because it’s gone off the rails.
dantheclammanYes, I think the rabble would quickly fall in line against changing the electoral college. We saw them growing more accepting of LGBT people for a few years only to whiplash back to homicidal hatred once their high priesthood started ranting against the gays again. These poll results are kind of like an interesting Freudian slip though: like you said, when they’re not paying attention a majority of Repubs can organically move to the reasonable opinion before the elites can apply their brainwashing again.
They told me in high school that the electoral college was still necessary because counting the popular vote was too hard…
Every other country in the world manages it but the Americans fuck it up. Like healthcare.
Every other country in the world?
Did you forget places outside Western Europe, Canada, and Australia exist?
I live in a Central European capital with worse healthcare than the US. (I have lived in both countries and have elderly relatives living under state funded healthcare in both systems.)
First, there’s a big difference between cities in both places. I could believe that if you compare California to Bratislav, but Oklahoma to Vienna would already be a different matter.
And in any case, it depends how much worse it was. In the US, even if it’s “state funded”, you have to pay for it, and quite a lot. Chances are if you went to a private clinic in Central Europe paying that same amount of money you could’ve gotten the same, if not better treatment.
I might as well just say it, I’m mostly comparing Louisville, KY and Los Angeles to Prague, Czech Republic and a midsized city in Poland. I have relatives who travel to the US for treatment because at least in CZ the elder care in hospitals is abusive/negligent.
I mean, I can believe public hospitals in Prague not being top-notch, but flying to America to get treatment seems surreal. Like, that’s a lot of money and I can’t believe for that amount they couldn’t find a private to do it better in CZ or at least in Germany.
I haven’t personally been in America so you’re probably more knowledgeable than me under that aspect, but from all the shit I’ve read online I don’t get why should anyone from Europe go get treatment there instead of a Scandinavian country.
There probably are people that could treat her well in Europe, but I think the issue would be getting her treated in a country she’s not a resident of, and doesn’t have insurance in. She has a condition that the Czech state insurance refuses to treat because of her age.
Oh that sucks. Seems like a very specific case so I guess I shouldn’t lump it in with the generic knowledge I have, sorry for talking out of my ass.
I still think a country like the US could manage with universal free healthcare, but I shouldn’t have assumed that every country that has one works just as well, you’re right.
I think the US system is very broken in pricing, but my experience in terms of quality of care and waits is that the US is very good in that regard. That’s why there’s a lot of medical tourism there for more extreme conditions. I’m not defending the terrible pricing structure, but the healthcare system overall is not just bad.
Well, it is one of the most developed countries in the world, it would’ve been weird if it didn’t have a lot of specialized doctors.
Other than the price though, I’ve seen a lot of people complain about long waits and surgeries (even reconstructive ones) not being “approved” by insurance companies. It’s probably skewed since people only talk about the bad experiences they’ve had, but just the fact that they can do that seems crazy to me.
I’ve never heard people complain about US waits to the level of Canada, or much of Europe. But yeah the insurance thing is that they will only cover treatments necessary to health (usually, but some others may be mandatory minimums now).
I can’t find the ones I saw before, but just searching “insurance” here brings results like this or this which are actual horror stories (both the ones in the posts and the ones in the comments).
It seems to me that queue issues are the same everywhere, only in the US you pay to wait. I’m glad your experience was different and I’m sure not everyone goes through that stuff, but the fact that it happens at all is pretty dystopic to me.
In small towns yes there are problems with waits sometimes of course, in my opinion this is largely due to anti-competitive laws like certificate of need and due to the strictest licensing requirements in the world. Also, urgent care waits usually aren’t bad. As for whether a place is covered by your insurer, yeah that’s pretty annoying, but there is a reason insurers don’t cover certain things from certain providers- the insurer doesn’t want to pay exhortationate fees just like an uninsured patient would have to so negotiate the cost with the providers ahead of time, and if they don’t reach an agreement they can’t pay for it.
I don’t know what the standard is in the US, but to me 80k is definitely not “a small town”. Like, here in Italy we only have 66 cities with more people than that. Someone in an 80k city not finding a gastroenterologist to visit him in three months within 1 and a half hour of driving seems absurd to me.
If having private healthcare causes all these issues with insurance I think it’s really not worth it at this point. I don’t think the quality of the service would decline either since even in free healthcare countries doctors earn a lot and are a coveted job.
No. It’s because states that have huge populations would choose the president with basically zero say from most others. Technically a non representative government.
So instead, states with populations smaller than some cities get to completely override the will of the majority of the country.
yukichigaiWhat we have now is non-representative. Rather, it's representative of land, not voters.
Rather, it’s representative of land, not voters.
Horse feathers. There are 535 total EC votes and only 100 of those come from the Senate. The other 435 are based on the House which, as you may remember, is based on population.
The solution to this mess is upsize the HoR and tilt the ratio back to where it was prior to 1929 when we fucked it up.
AmberPrinceExcept using the popular vote means that States wouldn't decide who was president like they do now, the people would.
Under the current system if I vote Red in Chicago I just completely wasted my time. Cook County is so blue that I don't have a voice. Get rid of the Electoral College, however, and now my vote worth just as much as everyone elses.
People seem to think that if we moved away from the College that the population of a blue state will 100% vote blue or a red state will only have red votes. It's just not true. The northern half of California or the southern half Illinois votes way different than their counterparts.
The Electoral College is an outdated system designed for a time when the US had relatively low Literacy and the public couldn't be reliably counted on to be informed. There is no excuse for it nowadays.
𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠You solve the ‘problem’ of ‘tyranny of the majority’ by having a strong constitution and good rights and protections for minorities, not by switching to the indisputably worse option of ‘tyranny of the minority’. Because that causes the exact same problem, but for even more people instead.
The version of the tyranny of the majority that he's warning against is already solved in the American system. The ward against it is the Senate. Every state has exactly 2 votes in the Senate and no legislation can be passed and enacted into law without passing a vote in the Senate.
The senate is a terrible way to deal with it though. But it’s at least better than the EC.
The issue is while a strong constitution is nice, it’s necessary to have at least some people in office who would respect the constitution to be effective, including at least a partially originality supreme court.
Alternatively, more clearly written constitutional laws. It’s wild that you have judges who cannot agree on what an article of the constitution really means, and the language should have been amended years ago.
In the Netherlands, we have a clearly written constitution, but no real ‘supreme court’ in the American sense. And that setup seems to work quite well.
Agreed some should be clarified, but a lot are pretty clear but are denied as unclear for political reasons. One obvious example is the 2nd amendment of the bill of rights. Also, keep in the mind the US constitution is the oldest constitution still in use, so language does evolve somewhat.
Did your teachers perhaps get their college diplomas in the 1870s? Because that predates the first tabulating machines being invented. Add that invention to the telegraph machine (ca 1837), and you’ve got a stew going.
I wish I was kidding! My school district wasn’t too bright.
Captain AggravatedYou’re either in your 90’s or 100’s, or that was a complete lie.
Oh I know it was a lie. My school district sucked.
I feel like while the electoral college is an issue, it's the gerrymandering that is ultimately the biggest issue.
And in fact probably also contributes to the electoral college issue.
The senate is pretty bad too.
In theory we could expand the number of house seats so that more populous states get more reps and everyone has a more equal number of voters per congressperson. I think that would not only help make the house more fair but would also make the electoral college more fair (since the # of electors increases with the number of house members). Not as good as the popular vote, but it’s an improvement that doesn’t require a conditional amendment.
The US has less representation per capita than most developed nations.
To be fair, it’s also the most populous developed nation.
Although it’s somewhat inconceivable to some people that the US can have more than 50 states (and that DC isn’t what it once was), don’t forget about representation for DC and Puerto Rico.
Both which operate very much like state entities now, making a pretty good argument for true federal representation with proper voting power.
Representation for DC would be harder to justify, but if a party actually pushed for it Puerto Rico statehood would have a fair chance.
What you’re talking about is the Wyoming Rule or something similar to it. We fucked up our Government in and we really really need to get rid of the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929.
Gerrymandering only directly impacts the House, while the EC biases the presidential vote, and state sizes bias the senate. All three elected branches are badly selected and all three are biased towards the Republicans. Hard to say the House is more important than the presidency though.
and state sizes bias the senate
That was entirely intentional though?
It was a bad idea necessary to bribe the small states into joining to keep the colonies together in a time with more important issues. The EC’s population bias was also intentional, it doesn’t make it not fundamentally undemocratic.
And the admission of states has always been very political. They have been often admitted in pairs to maintain political parity of the time and other proposed states (the state of Sequoyah) were rejected for political reasons (balancing east-west states or just racism, you decide). There’s a reason statehood for Puerto Rico, a territory with more than enough people and no historical impediments like DC, isn’t just a formality of waiting for a request by its people.
The Founding Fathers made a quite good first draft for modern democracy, but they weren’t oracles and they made compromises based on the political needs of the day. There’s a reason we don’t install American democracy in countries we regime-change.
Democracy wasn’t intended, I agree with that, but I don’t think many wanted an entire democracy either, it wasn’t just about states wanting power but also about minority representation. I personally prefer a constitutional system to a democratic system.
I mean, sure. They were also slaveholders. This is just trivia not something speaking to what should happen in the current day.
Because the constitution was the charter, the binding contract underwhich previously separate political entities agreed to be governed. You can’t just change my rental contract to kick out my roommate midway through my term without following an established process we both signed on.
Talking about the constitution protecting minority representation at anything but the state-vs-state level or acting like it’s a personal contract any of us at any point voluntarily entered into or could have rejected if not structured in this way is a laughable diversion. How it was made and that it exists as the current law of the land is irrelevant in a discussion of its current failures.
Again, there’s a reason we don’t implement it in other countries. It persists here because of inertia and cynical resistance by a minority party that can’t win governing power without it, but it’s not a good system in a country that purports to gain moral justification for its government through all of its citizens being equal.
Yes it was a contract at a state to federal government level, furthermore, it is a binding concession of power from the federal government
through all of its citizens being equal.
Equality doesn’t mean democracy. Democracy grants a majority power over a minority.
Now 1 person 1 vote isn’t equal? Democracy is everyone has the right to state their preferences and be treated equally. That sometimes more people want the other thing isn’t a flaw in the system and in no way a justification to just give some people more votes. A tyranny of the majority is a whole lot better than a tyranny of the minority.
I swear there must be some kind of rural state indoctrination camp where people learn that 1 person 1 vote is actually bad and they’re rightfully entitled to more say than those dirty city-dwellers. All while talking about the minority rights carefully crafted by the slaveholding men who literally transferred votes from the slaves to their oppressors.
Some more fuckery with the house: Each state is supposed to get at least one representative, plus another representative per every so many people, right? And historically the house has expanded to fit the growing population, right?
That’s not how it works anymore. They stopped expanding it when it was obvious the Republicans would never have a majority in the house ever again. Go look at the algorithm they use to determine how many representatives each state gets.