StrangeSox

*BREAKING NEWS* Bears team bus crashes, 52 players suffer season-ending injuries.

There's a very tight race for GA Gov this year. The GOP candidate is the current SoS, and he's doing everything in his power to suppress the vote. Another way the GOP clings to power. Too bad the Roberts Court('s five conservatives) found that racial voter suppression was actually not a problem at all these days. I'm sure they'll issue a revised opinion restoring the VRA.

I don't know how to split things up with the new board software, so I numbered them. 1) It was a novel system based heavily on compromise between competing factions. The idea that there was a single, unified "idea" or intent or purpose is a myth. As for the rural/urban divide, I posted the census data. You're right, the divide was even greater at the time--in that we were much more agrarian and rural. A knock against the idea that the Senate and EC were meant to force candidates to broaden appeal rather than concentrate on urban areas. It's an anachronistic discussion anyway because political campaigning was nothing like it is now. 2) This...doesn't make much sense. Democrats won a majority in 2008 and thus had majority control. That is how all elections should be. That said, Obama bent over backwards for years to try to get bipartisan agreement. He kept on several Republican appointments and made more Republican appointments as the years went on (this is how we get Comey!). The system can be changed within the constitution or outside of it. The EC was not created with modern political campaigning in mind. It wasn't created with the popular vote in mind at all. They created a system where aristocrats would appoint one of their own to govern. That didn't last very long, and we long ago subverted the "original intent" of the EC by tying it to popular vote on a state-by-state level. We can further change that by giving EV's proportionally by state, or by multiple states banding together to say "we'll all go whatever way the national popular vote goes." None of that is anti-republican (small-r here, not the party). 3) I do not care about counties. It is one person, one vote. Not one county, one vote. People matter, acres don't. And conversely, why should Wyoming get 40 times the say what happens nationally over a Californian? Tell me how it's fair that something like 30% of the country's population banded together in the Senate could prevent the other 70% from ever doing anything. Tell me how it's fair that a party and political ideology that routinely fails to win more votes nevertheless gets to control the government. 4) The founders designed a system by and for wealthy aristocrats. We've substantially reformed that system many times in many ways, often but not always for the better. 5) Again, people matter, not land mass. I for one think it's important that a candidate has national people beyond one specific demographic. Clinton had appeal beyond mainly white voters while Trump did not--why isn't that the criteria instead of counties? It's no more arbitrary than your love for counties, and it has the added benefit of focusing on people. 6) You've cited the Federalist Papers numerous times. Go read what they said about the EC. It wasn't about "broad appeal." It was about keeping what they feared would be dangerous incompetent ideologues out of the office. It failed in its original design intent. (It, like many of the Constitution's compromises/designs, were also about keeping slave power in control)

They should have representation proportional to their political support.

He's threatened it several times before. He's a narcissistic billionaire. I wouldn't put it past him at all. Bernie Would Have Won

WSJ is endorsing this now, I'm sure the rest of mainstream conservatives will too. They loved Pinochet, why not Bolsonaro?

He will run a third-party spoiler campaign against Trump and whatever marginally progressive candidate the Democrats end up nominating. He'll either throw the election to Trump or, more hilariously, throw it to the House.

1790 Census Data Even though there were cities, the country as a whole was much, much more agrarian and rural. This was pre-industrial revolution. It was a completely difference society and economy with completely different demographics and population distributions. The largest city in the country at the time was NYC, it a paltry 33k. The tenth largest was 5.5k. https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/fast_facts/1790_fast_facts.html

Bloomberg would be awful. He'd love to gut medicare, medicaid, social security etc. I'd hold my nose and vote for Booker. Not sure about Bloomberg.

It seems more that it makes sure that a minority conservative view controls and overrules the majority view.

Brazil is poised to elect a far-right authoritarian in an unexpected and sweeping political change https://theintercept.com/2018/10/10/watch-the-stunning-rise-of-brazils-far-right-and-what-it-shows-about-western-democracies/

"If you combine two candidates into one, the other person would have lost" is a weird argument. Lincoln won a plurality. In a first-past-the-post system, that should mean he's President.

There is nothing about being a republic that requires a system like the electoral college. There is nothing anti-republican about having federal offices determined by popular vote and not an arcane institution that was never even used for its original purposes.

I'm still not entirely sure why, but the MI GOP seems to be collapsing in on itself hard. Flint fallout? General lack of doing positive things for constituents? Not sure, but national groups are largely pulling out of the state this cycle, and a raft of pro-democracy/voter access reforms look very likely to be approved by voters.

I have a feeling Booker would be a lot like Obama. Plenty of soaring rhetoric, in practice a lot of middling at best accomplishments while being way too friendly with certain industries (pharma/finance for Booker).

I agree that almost the entirety of a current batch of federal politicians is hot garbage and should be replaced wholesale. This is part of why I oppose antimajoritarian institutions put in place by wealthy aristocrats to protect the aristocracy! To tie this back around to the thread topic, the current GOP SCOTUS majority is going to further gut voting rights and will continue to entrench gerrymandering. A liberal SCOTUS majority almost definitely would not have gutted voting rights (Shelby County) and would have likely ruled against gerrymandering in the previous term's major cases.. A non-gerrymandered House and strong voting rights protections would make Congress more responsive and more accountable than what we will get.

That's just an argument against ever doing anything in any way because it's possible that it's done poorly or not properly funded. We have more than adequate economic output in this country to afford these things. We* choose not to. *these programs are broadly popular, while things that Republicans want like gutting the ACA and cutting taxes for billionaires are broadly unpopular (no shocker that they're not running on either of those issues, at all, this year!). Nevertheless, thanks to our antimajoritarian political structure, the preferences of the minority that are against these programs rule the day.

You're not the only one making this argument, but the whole "oh you're only saying that because you're shortsighted and Trump won!" is a pretty BS argument. You can find multiple rounds of many of us arguing against the EC pre-2016 election, probably even leading right up to the 2016 election when it was assumed the "blue wall" was a big democratic EC advantage. Blowing up the judicial filibuster was good. If Reid hadn't done it, McConnell would have done so in 2017 anyway and would have had dozens more judicial spots to fill. The alternative was a future where no appointments would ever be made unless one party controlled the WH and had a supermajority in the Senate. Nobody else uses a system like the EC and for good reason. It was designed for an aristocratic democracy over two hundred years ago that limited general enfranchisement to only white male landowners. It was never even meant to be tied to "winner of popular vote in each state gets those EV's." The framers of the Constitution deserve praise for a lot of their bold ideas, but they were trying out a whole lot of brand new political philosophy. They didn't get a lot of things "right," at least per modern democratic understanding.

Undue the multiple rounds of Republican tax cuts for the wealthy. Reduce military spending substantially. Both of those would more than pay for the estimated cost of $75/B a year for free undergrad tuition. That's as grounded in reality as constantly inflating our military budget by billions or funneling billions more to billionaires. Those are sustainable programs. We can pay for them. And universal health care. And better transit, etc. etc. etc. It's a matter of political will, not an economic impossibility.

The horror of a living wage and extending free pubic education four more years Truly the greatest sin in American history

You're conflating a number of different things again. A Republican form of government does not require any sort of Electoral College. France is on it's fifth Republic, none of them featuring the Electoral College. You've cited Fedearlist Papers a number of times--go back and find their justifications for the Electoral College and the other analyses of the Constitutional debates at the time. The EC was meant to strengthen and embed an aristocratic democracy. It's never actually been used for it's original intended purpose. That's not what happens in other republican countries that do not have an electoral college. As it is, candidates are actually punished for trying to reach a broad section of the country rather than focusing on a handful of whatever states are expected to be close in that particular cycle. Liberal votes in Texas, Mississippi, Utah, etc. are essentially meaningless. Same for conservative votes in CA/NY/IL etc. Hillary's campaign gets strong criticism for having the chutzpah to expand campaign operations in states like Texas and Georgia, chasing states she'd never win. Presidential candidates should have to focus on winning the most number of voters. The underlying alternative argument is that the US is "too big to govern" and should probably be split up rather than permanently disenfranchising majorities of voters. We've had a countermajoritarian government from the start. We've undergone major, arguably revolutionary changes at times in the past. I would be happier if Trump had won the popular vote and lost the EC because he's a shitty, awful person doing shitty, awful things cheered on by bad people. That doesn't mean I'd suddenly be embracing the EC or the Senate. Not everyone is that unprincipled.

The NPV Compact wouldn't require an amendment. It's also possible to both criticize the failings and short comings of the current system while working within it. Characterize that as "rage" if you want, but it's just a way of avoiding the subject E: beaten by both sb and quin

If anything, that highlights how the electoral college works the opposite way it's defenders like to claim (which of course was never the original design intent anyway). Instead of trying to reach the most people in the most places, they're punished if they don't focus narrowly on whatever the "battleground" states happen to be in that election. Even with the electoral college, nobody pays much attention to Wyoming.

There are other choices besides proportional representation and the structure of the US Senate