[Moodles]

I agree the electoral college is not as good as a general public vote, however one counterargument to "side A won more votes than side B!" is that, both sides knew the rules ahead of time so if the rules were a general vote, then the campaigns would have been different so side B may still have won in that case. We will never know.

[makomk]

This is a particularly important counterargument when talking about the 2016 presidential election, since Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result. Trump's campaign, on the other hand, was by all accounts focused on simply getting enough electoral college votes to actually win. This was pretty obvious from their respective postmortems in the press.

The idea that a particular candidate was cheated because they won a symbolic but politically irrelevant victory that the competition wasn't even trying for is not a particularly good argument. In fact, it's positively Trumpian; he famously used the "popular vote" argument to discredit Obama's victory.

[dragonwriter]

> Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result.

What Clinton was trying to do was not so much “win the popular vote” but “maximize down-ballot coattails associated with an expected electoral victory” (and, thereby, assure that members of Congress of her party felt thet owed her.)

It's perhaps worth remembering that inability to marshal support from Congressional reps of his own party, particularly it's liberal wing, is what handed her husband two stinging early embarrassments (one of which was defeat on an issue she was the face of): the lesser being NAFTA passing with strong Republican support but widespread and strong Democratic opposition, and the greater being the humiliating defeat of Clinton's signature campaign initiative, health care reform.

[jandrese]

Bill Clinton did pave the way for HMOs. They were a punt, but it was progress in reducing healthcare costs.

[dragonwriter]

> Bill Clinton did pave the way for HMOs.

How? I rather thought that Nixon (or Ted Kennedy, the principal sponsor of the bill) did that with the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, the federal law that required employers with 25 or more employers to offer them if they offered traditional insurance plans, almost 20 years before Clinton took office.

What Bill Clinton did do after he big health reform failed was HIPAA.