[bdcravens]

This sums up well Trump's ascension: there are a lot of people who have real needs and real opinions, and whose votes count as much as someone's in California or New York. An environment where we insist on leaving those voices unheard is what enables someone to have extreme influence.

[buerkle]

In many cases California and New York voters count much less than in smaller, more rural states. The senators from Wyoming represent about 300,000 people each. The senators in California represent nearly 19,000,000 each. And the The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 capped the number in the House of Representatives. In this case, each California House member represents three times as many people as the House members in Wyoming. That's also one reason in recent presidential elections the electoral college which is based on the number of Senators and House of Representatives (plus 3 from DC) have won the race but lost the popular vote.

[mobilefriendly]

This is by design of course. The United States is a confederation of states...geographical balancing against population density was the Great Compromise. That people are surprised or shocked by this reveals how poor our civics education has become. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/A_Great_...

[chillwaves]

Has become? People are more educated than ever, and mostly what you hear about is people complaining because the current system is unjust, not because they are "shocked " to learn it exists.

When you balance representation against population, the gulf is vast and only growing. This is a compromise that made sense in the 18th century, not the 21st. Ignore it at your peril.

[techsupporter]

> This is a compromise that made sense in the 18th century, not the 21st.

Exactly!

People act like our[0] Constitution is some inviolable, sacrosanct tome with words that must be revered and held close, unchanging and unchanged forever. Yet they seem to skip that we've modified the thing TWENTY EIGHT TIMES and that every Much Revered Framer(tm) anticipated that we'd not only change it as often as needed, we would very likely scrap the whole thing and do it again every few generations.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that mandates that the compromises, adjustments, and tweaks our nation's founders made must persist beyond tomorrow, except our own collective will to not bother with or to actively resist change. It's why I very much enjoy hearing at least one of the major parties actively talk about modification of the Electoral College or the makeup of the Supreme Court or how the legislative bodies of our nation operate. Maybe their ideas are good ones, maybe they're not, but the one thing we MUST NOT DO is shy away from a willingness to keep our country's governance current.

0 - By "our," I mean the collection of people who are citizens of the United States of America. Other nations can and do amend their nations' basic laws as they see fit.

[omegaworks]

>geographical balancing against population density was the Great Compromise

That's flowery language to disguise what was essentially a pact between wealthy industrialists and slavers.

It's long past time to dismantle that "compromise."

[srj]

From what I recall being taught it was to get the smaller states on board. These weren't necessarily slave states (e.g. Rhode Island).

It's been effective. If presidential elections were just driven by popular vote candidates would only campaign in the top population centers. Entire regions of the country would be ignored.

[astura]

>If presidential elections were just driven by popular vote candidates would only campaign in the top population centers. Entire regions of the country would be ignored.

This is definitely 100% false; this goes against the mathematical population distribution of the United States. The top 100 biggest cities in the United States combined only make up less than 20% of the population.

But even if it were true, it's not any different than the current status quo where candidates simply only campaign in "swing states," ignoring the vast majority of the rest of the Unites States. In fact, it would be better, because more Americans live in population centers than they do swing states.

https://youtu.be/7wC42HgLA4k?t=108

The other problems:

Many people who live in solidly blue or solidly red states don't even bother voting for president - they know their vote doesn't matter. I know this because I've literally heard people say it.

This it not even considering electoral college also entirely ignores 4 million Americans because they live in territories, not states.

[srj]

Late reply, but your math about the top population areas doesn't seem right. Are you looking at just city populations? I don't think that's an accurate picture. For example, the population of Boston is around 685,000 but you add in the surrounding suburbs and it's 4.8 million.

[odessacubbage]

if you think politics are bad now, just imagine what they'd be like if you only had to pander to the interests of a few coastal metros and maybe also chicago & dallas. the interests of rural voters would lose out every time. just look at france to see how this can play out. ime things like water rights and public land mean nothing to urbanites but they impact us immensely.

[astura]

The top 100 biggest cities in the United States combined only make up less than 20% of the population; you can't possibly win and election pandering to the interests of a few metro areas.

[tropo]

Wyoming, and any state rounded up to 1 representative, is special. Aside from that the effect is minor.

There is an effect going the other direction that benefits California, and in fact is why there is a fight going on at the Supreme Court. Voters in those rural states are underrepresented due to non-citizens being counted to apportion the representatives. California has something like a couple dozen extra representatives from that.

[nradov]

The effects of Wyoming having two senators are far from minor in an age where key votes have been decided on a 51-49 basis.

[dunnevens]

Those voices are far from unheard. If anything, they've been the dominant political voices for the past 40 years. Sure, California and NYC's cultural output is the loudest voice in the country. But, politically speaking, they're largely ignored. Obviously ignored by Republicans, but the timid national Democratic leadership will also ignore them in their relentless centrism.

The political system makes it pretty easy to ignore the liberal coastal areas. Republicans benefit enormously from the unevenness of the Senate, House seat allocations, and the Electoral College. And then in the states they control, they put their finger on the scale via gerrymandering. Democrats can ignore the coasts too because who else are they going to vote for?

Though the greatest irony of all is that those rural and poor voters in the flyover states are also ignored in terms of their real needs. Their party tosses them cultural red meat regularly, but defunds the things they need: schools, roads, and various safety net programs which are often the only thing keeping the rural poor afloat.

[chillwaves]

This exactly. The folks claiming they are not represented are ironically over represented compared to city dwellers.

As long as Republican voters care more about abortion and gay marriage (and I guess transpeople using the bathroom now), they will not find economic solutions.

[dboreham]

Also guns.

[rayiner]

Are Democrats centrist? One of the things I learn the deeper I dig into how European countries are structured is that they’re more right leaning than American liberals assume. Let’s take Spain. If we adopted Spain’s tax structure, income taxes would go down by about a trillion dollars, while consumption taxes (paid for primarily by middle class and poor people), would go up two trillion dollars. Spain’s abortion laws are stricter than any southern state’s (elective abortion legal only up to 14 weeks). On gay marriage, Spain legalized it about 10 years before, but then the government tried to repeal that law a few years later. The constitutional court ruling permanently protecting gay marriage came just two years before the one in the US. The Spanish minimum wage works out to about 6 euro per hour. Like the US and almost all of Europe, many industries were privatized in the 1990s and 2000s, and unlike the US the passenger rail system is in the midst of privatization.

[dunnevens]

When I say "centrism", I'm thinking of it only as it relates to American politics with no external input. Comparing to other countries would be interesting, but I wouldn't even attempt it. Too many variations, even if limited to western nations. Your example of Spain shows the Democrats would comparatively be on the left on some issues, and on the right on others. Which, amusingly, would average out to centrism of a sort.

[jhbadger]

Spain isn't really the model Americans think about in terms of Europe though. That the country that was literally a Fascist dictatorship until the mid 1970s has some right wing views isn't exactly a surprise. It's Scandinavia that's the model the US left wants to copy.

[rayiner]

Sweden has corporate taxes slightly lower than under Trump’s tax law. It collects 6% of revenue from corporate taxes, versus 9% in the US. It collects much less of it’s revenue from progressive income taxes than the US does, and much more from regressive consumption and payroll taxes. Sweden’s capital gains rate is only moderately higher than the US’s (flat 30% versus 23.8% in the top brackets). There are no inheritance taxes. In short, if the US adopted Sweden’s tax code, taxes on lower income and middle class people would go up much more than on rich people. (In fact, the tax burden in Sweden is almost perfectly flat.) Sweden has school choice including subsidization of religious schools. Elective abortion is legal only up to 18 weeks. Deregulation and privatization are extensive. For example, Stockholm’s metro system is operated under contract by for-profit corporations. Sweden has no ban on fully automatic weapons or high capacity magazines.

These are really fundamental differences, particularly in the area of taxes (and that’s true not just for Sweden and Spain, but most European countries). In Europe, there is an expansive welfare state with lots of benefits for the middle class, but the middle class are also the ones that pay for it, through high payroll and sales taxes. In the US, replacing sales taxes with a 20% VAT (the OECD average) would raise an extra $700 billion according to CBO estimates. Enough to pay for socialized health care and education. But nobody on the left is proposing that. Every proposal focuses on raising taxes on corporations and the rich to pay for middle class benefits.

[odessacubbage]

gay marriage and liberal sentiment don't put food on the table. arms manufacturing and resource extraction does. things like gun ownership also take on a completely different meaning in places where weapons have a greater association with hunting & family tradition than to crime. these people are not stupid, they simply have a different reality than you do and our country will only become more divided until people begin to acknowledge this.

[dunnevens]

I never called them stupid. But I live in Kansas. I'm seeing this stuff on the front lines. The infrastructure is crumbling. The schools are starting to recover but are still in terrible shape after 8 years of Brownback and his ilk. The farmers are suffering, and many going out of business, due to Trump's tariffs. The state as a whole has trouble retaining young people due to much of the above.

The people here aren't stupid. Brownback's approval was in the mid 20's by the time he left. His policies are deeply unpopular. But, they keep voting for the party that originally pushed such disastrous policies, and is now trying to push them through again, despite popular opposition. I honestly don't understand it.

Perhaps they really do think guns are more important than the health of their community. Though even that makes no sense because state level Democrats are as pro-gun as the Republicans, and national level Democrats are zero threat.

I have no idea why you bundle up schools, roads, and social programs into "liberal sentiment". Guns may be loved, but they're not going to educate their children. And for many of the people in my rural district, what's putting food on the tables is the subsidized food programs and other aid offered. No arms manufacturing jobs and few resource extraction jobs here.

[debatem1]

I'm not sure where to go with this, honestly.

From an electoral perspective it's counterfactual: my family in the midwest have roughly 1.5x the electoral power I do. Historically speaking this has led two democrats in my lifetime to win the popular vote but lose the presidential election. So I don't think there's an issue with those voices being unheard in elections-- quite the opposite in fact.

On the other hand, I see where you're coming from. The loci of money and power in the United States speak loudly and listen poorly to the half of us that see stars at night. I think this has been to conservatives' advantage, although that seems to have more to do with preexisting cultural affinity than shared policy goals.

[pitaj]

Does winning the popular vote mean anything under the current system? It's not hard to assume that many people would vote very differently if the electoral college wasn't involved. For instance, left-leaning people might vote more often in red states, and right-leaning voters in blue states would do the same.

[TylerE]

No, the popular vote means nothing.

In fact, states aren't even required to put the presidential on the ballot at all. States are allowed to choose their electors by any method the state legislature decides on.

[astura]

Don't forget- there's 4 million Americans who are ineligible to vote for president due to the fact that they live in territories, not states (and DC since 1961).

[debatem1]

Only inside of individual districts-- eg, a senate race is a statewide popular contest. There are no federal popular vote contests in the US (although there is some momentum towards reform in that regard).

I'm not sure that the average voter really considers the electoral college today. Voter comprehension of it has historically been very low, at least. But you're right that many non-swing-state voters stay home after (correctly) figuring out that their votes are meaningless.