Poll: Voters prefer popular vote over Electoral College
29 replies, posted
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/27/poll-popular-vote-electoral-college-1238346
More voters prefer to elect the president by national, popular vote over the existing Electoral College system, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.
Obviously a Democrat power grab conspiracy fueled by fake news
Which will win? Will of the entire US populations, or some electoral boys?
I still don’t really understand how the electoral college is supposed to work. They’re evidently supposed to represent the will of the people, except it doesn’t, because it overrepresents low population states and underrepresents high population states. Like, say you’ve got 3 states, 2 of which have 20% of the population respectively and the 3rd had 80%. You can just pour ALL your resources into that measly 20% and win the election because 2/3rds of the states went to you, but 80% of the population didn’t. How the fuck is that fair?
Something something tyranny of the majority.
It's not like Senate and House elections are meant to give smaller states representation in Washington or something.
I was under the impression some Republicans would be in favor of this too considering it'll be beneficial for them too since states like California aren't going to be just a guaranteed blue zone and they can still campaign there effectively for example.
I can understand having a house of congress which gives less populous states equal representation (I don't agree with the ability of McConnell to unilaterally determine what bills they'll consider) but the electoral college seemed ridiculous to me even when I was in school learning about it. There's only one president for the entire country, everyone should get equal say in who it should be.
The president should be the guy who got the most votes.
I always forget that I don't know how US politics work, I can't get away from the notion of having major parties and voting for the member of an electoral district
Its netted them their last two presidents. Of course they're going to want to keep it around.
You would be soooo fucking surprised by the insane mental gymnastics that some proto-Fascism supporting republicans are willing to go through to argue against this point. It's nauseating.
Intuitively, it makes sense that people would prefer the popular vote. But I think the better solution is a re calibration of the electoral college. The president is not elected by the people necessarily, they're decided by the states. A popular vote proportionate electoral college would be the pragmatic solution.
Our divergence from state politics has lead to some incredible inefficiencies and power grabs by the federal government. The federal taking more control is like a CEO of a multinational corporation micromanaging a sales team of a small regional branch.
At the end of the day, I primarily want to deal with my city and state government.
That is not how it should be.
Basically this. The idea you're going to reform central government to be more democratic, and therefore locally accountable, is an ideological absurdity that consistently leads its advocates into quick confrontation with their peers rather than an elite.
Your electoral college fucking sucks balls, your country wouldn't have imposed absurd tariffs on its BEST ALLY Canada if your federal elections actually respected the will of the people. Fuck the false dichotomy that just because you care about federal matters you also can't possibly be equally be worried about local politics.
I’ve been against the EC since Bush v. Gore. Just know that if you disagree with a national popular vote then you are okay with an election winner who didn’t get the most votes.
The president is supposed to be a representative of the entire country. No matter what kind of mental gymnastics you try to do to justify it, there is just no way it's democratic to give some people more power than everyone else to decide who represents the country.
There's just too many problems with this simple view. Any idea of the will of the people is limited and informed by the user's bias, it's an opportunist appeal. For example, I can easily point out that half of the population lives in 146 of 3000 counties or 9 out of 50 states to question just how representative in its priorities an unwieldy national government can be. I can point out the uninformed and tribal nature of the average voter and how their votes are swayed by the rhetorical appeals and entitlement promises of politicians raised and educated in the heights of society then backed by money from the same place. From there, if at some point the 50+1 produced by that and defined by an arbitrarily set scale compromises the 50+1 of many smaller ones, possibly to the point they would simply be freer with decentralization, I consider that democracy very flawed.
That helps illustrate why the democratic and accountable nature of central government is limited, which also tells us why the push for EC abolition will be seen as just part of sheer clamoring for power in a divided and ineffective government. I would also argue a simple popular vote will definitely refine that dysfunction and make our divisions worse while doing nothing to affect the fact we are ruled by an elite, one thing that causes that is these representative institutions are of such size the average person can't navigate them. Andrew Yang seems to recognize this.
Given that limitation, a democratic republic is not just about abstracted majorities deciding things for all, it's about pluralism and balance of interest groups that the people are actually broken down into. The EC was a founding bargain meant to help do this.
That doesn't mean it can't be reformed, but I'm not seeing the tempered views of thoughtful reformers. I see a whole lot of opportunism and disdain for the spirit of federalism because one side lost (and not because of the EC, but because they did worse in 2016 compared to 2012), which itself wouldn't have been so impactful if central government hadn't grown to this historical point and national politics defined by it wasn't so polarized and totalizing.
There is no false dichotomy here, centralization and national development across the world has consistently been at the expense of more local forms of power and it directly relates to totalizing mass politics. It's one of the bigger downside of the modern state. If you're arguing that central government can either be just as representative or sensitive to local needs (all simultaneously as a matter of fact), I don't know what to say to you.
@tempcon can you, in less than two paragraphs, briefly outline your ideal system of picking the president and why it shouldn’t be the candidate who receives the most votes?
The problem is that the EC was designed to react to population shifts and give states representation by population, but the distribution has been frozen since 1916 and there have been dramatic shifts in America's population distribution. And both parties strategically benefit from being able to ignore safe states and concentrate on contested states, so it hasn't changed.
The EC needs to be unlocked and refreshed with every census (or at most every other census), or simply abolished, because right now it's a damaged artifact of the past that's being kept on because of comfortable tradition and systemic convenience. To do anything else is to prolong the lifespan of an undemocratic system of choosing the leader of the country.
as someone who’s lived in fly over states his whole life I don’t think the electoral college is a bad idea, I think a lot of people are over exaggerating about how problematic it is just because of the last election.
I feel as though with just a popular vote system in place politicians would only care about the most populous states, whereas with the current electoral system I live in a battleground state and we have a lot of political activism and participation which I don’t think we’ll get anymore with a popular vote and our voice wouldn’t get heard
There's been 6 elections since I was old enough to form memories an in a full third of them the popular vote winner lost the election.
With a popular vote system, presidential candidates wouldn't care about any given state at all. The popular vote sees no state boundary. A vote from a citizen in Vermont would be worth exactly as much as a vote from a citizen in California, as it should be. Instead, presidential campaigns would focus on groups of people across the nation who have similar aspirations and who, taken together, form a majority.
So yes, no more catering to a handful of states above all else.
The founding fathers assumed electors would be members of the local community casting the vote, they did not understand that the states would not only make the process 100% partisan, but also make them legally bound to vote one way
Replacing the “tyranny of the majority” with a literal tyranny of the minority (see: 2016, 2000, etc) is a stupid idea. It’s a shitty excuse for a democracy. Sotp.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/education/article/Delaware-governor-signs-national-popular-vote-bill-13723990.php
Delaware's Governor has signed the National Popular Vote law today, thus becoming the 14th and current state to doing so.
Most states are already not visited by presidential candidates.
The EC causes exactly what you're afraid the popular vote will do...
Problem is, far far less people care about state and local politics than they do the federal government, leaving the local and state politics to be decided by an even smaller few. I'm someone whose politically informed and even I struggle with this as I don't have the time to research all of the candidates and all of their policies to choose the best one.
No bloody wonder. America has elected mayors, elected councillors, elected county officials, elected school boards, other elected special-purpose district members, elected clerks, elected sheriffs, elected judges etc, and that’s not even scratching the surface of all the elected positions in American local governments, let alone the state governments.
Here in Australia, we only have councils for local government, and elect just the councillors. Some councils have separately elected mayors. That’s it. And the only elected state government officials are members of the lower and upper houses of Parliament; no governors, lieutenant governors, attorneys-general, secretaries of state etc.
No shit. What if every other Super Bowl the team with less points at the end was given the trophy and declared the winner?
the EC is a relic from a time where grand scale voting was much more infeasible
this isn't those times and its time for it to go byebye
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