Popular vote has never meant anything in America in all it's existence. But the point is a person with zero political experience, completely outside the political echo chamber/insiders club just won the most powerful office on earth. Whether you are for him or against him I believe it does show that people can absolutely start a change.
Yes, people can...in the aggregate. But aggregating people takes a lot of work. So unless you devote yourself to the task of saving social security (by mobilizing lots of people to fight with you) then you're not going to have much influence. The ~50 million Trump voters, how much influence do they have with him right now? fuck all. I don't mean that as a comment on him, just pointing out the huge asymmetrical power differentials. Voting does make a tiny difference, but that's like saying you can steer a boat by getting the passengers to rush to one side of the deck or the other. It's technically true but nobody actually steers a boat that way.
He's not a politician. The last one not a politician was Dwight Eisenhower, and the list is real sparse before him. [1]
But I never said I was compared to Trump, I was stating that common people absolutely made a significant impact to this election against the wishes of the incumbents
Trump easily won the popular vote for the 48 states that aren't California and New York. Popular vote indeed. There's a very good reason the electoral college exists.
And if you take out a couple states, Clinton won the electoral college. What's your point? That we should ignore the votes of two of the largest states because they don't agree with you?
> That we should ignore the votes of two of the largest states because they don't agree with you?
Ahh, yeah. That's the point. So America isn't CaliforNewYork.
The electoral college isn't a scam, it exists to bring balance, so your hipster javascript developer gets the same weight as a coal miner in rural Ohio.
Why should the coal miner get more of a voice than the guy who lives in a city? They're both citizens, right?
They both get to vote on their state, city, and county stuff. Why should the guy who lives in the middle of nowhere get to say "my vote's worth 50x what yours is, sucker!!"?
The minority already has constitutional protections to live, love, worship, engage in commerce, employ speech and association, without interference from the majority. Their rights are already guaranteed by the constitution.
Getting a way-outsized vote in federal elections is undemocratic, and doesn't protect the minority from "tyranny" so much as give it outsized power, just as a quirk of geography.
It doesn't reassure me that we give much more weight to a minority of voters just because they live in less densely populated areas. That's completely arbitrary.
The design of the electoral college was not to prevent influence by larger states. That's the function of the Senate. The electoral college exists in part to enable the 3/5ths compromise and in part to allow the vote of the people to be changed by someone who is theoretically more sophisticated.
CA would be the 7th largest economy in the world if it were its own country. NY would be 11th. But yes, let's just pretend like they don't matter when it comes to the US as a whole.
> CA would be the 7th largest economy in the world if it were its own country. NY would be 11th. But yes, let's just pretend like they don't matter when it comes to the US as a whole.
Except we're not pretending like they don't matter. We're pretending they have a proportionate say. Regardless of wether your hypothetical proportion would be sound or not the proportion just isn't based on the size of the economy of a state.
Businesses work that way though.
You're free to petition for a CAexit or NYexit if you desire. Not that that'd happen either...
> Except we're not pretending like they don't matter. We're pretending they have a proportionate say.
Well... they don't have a proportionate say, if by "proportionate" you mean "in proportion to their population". They have less say then that.
But they also don't have a proportionate say if you mean "in proportion to their only being one state out of fifty". They have more say than that.
All of which is by design. Whining about it now is just sour grapes. Now, if people had been complaining about it since they first learned about it in junior high civics class, then I'd be more inclined to grant them that they have a principled position...
I live in Washington State, which was essentially totally ignored by all the candidates. The reason is simple - WA is an overwhelmingly blue state with a winner-take-all delegate selection.
If elections were based on the popular vote, then the candidates would have been here campaigning, which might have dramatically changed the vote in WA. Not enough to turn it red, but a big chunk.
My point is that changing the rules on how Presidents are elected will change how they are campaigned, the platforms of the candidates, etc. One cannot assume a voter tally under one scheme will be the same as the tally under another - not at all.
Not when it comes to an election. It is what it is but the electoral college is the rules to the game. The popular vote does not mean one thing in America when it comes to an election.
You don't even have to go further than electricity and water supply to see how much they rely on other states. But I'm sure there's a lot of other areas where they're reliant on other states as well.
Other than the Colorado River, does California depend on other states for water? If California seceded, wouldn't they retain their part of the Colorado River Compact?
Power, I'll grant you. They've been "exporting pollution" by having power plants built in other states for a while now...
Yea, and many of us don't live in CA. The country is 50 states, of which the president should represent. If you want laws specialized for CA, pass them in CA. This is why federal should be staying out of local affairs in my book. Because the needs for CA and NY are drastically different than less populated areas.
There is no winning here. You either ignore the voice of CA or the voice of less populated states. You're arguing to ignore a voice, just the same as it is now.
That's like saying: let's ignore 58.55 million voters for no reason other than where they live. More than 18% of the entire US population.
States are arbitrary dividers, it's silly to think there's some great reason for allowing people in some random groups (states) have much more voting power than others. What if the dividers were based on income, race, etc? Wouldn't even that be more reasonable?