Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Definitely not true. Plenty of dems still complaining about the EC. If it weren't for the EC this election would not even have the illusion of being close. Most dems would ditch the EC in second.

Serious question: why can't Rs win the popular vote? Why can't they pursue policies that the majority of Americans support and translate that support into popular vote wins?

 

Because that's not how our Constitution is written out.

 

That's not what I meant. I mean why do the policies continue to be out of step with the majority of Americans in most of the post-Reagan elections? Why aren't they shifting with the times? Lots of talk from some prominent Rs recently about "we'll never win the presidency again if..." seems to be foreclosing on the possibility of actually pursuing policies that are popular with a majority. They already have significant advantage with the EC. Seems like if they actually tried to appeal to a majority, they would have the presidency locked up pretty good. As we've seen, it takes *massive* Dem turnout and big margins to actually get an EC win.

 

I'm not understanding this question. Their policies must be popular enough for the GOP to win the Executive elections a few times. I mean, what stuff that came out of Trump's mouth was enough to give him one term via the EC.

The messaging of Reagan, HW Bush, W, and Trump were shifting and not always the same.

Could happen, but from the election last week Trump did picked up more working class whites and minorities for a GOP candidate. GOP can still win elections on the Executive with their currently messaging, but a minor tweak in messaging can help to not be too vinegar. I know conservatives who aren't the "stereotypical white dudes," but they don't like the GOP messaging. Just a minor tweak might make them future GOP voters. I don't know shit about OC, CA, but there is no way in hell the GOP can win House Seats by aiming for the "stereotypical white folks" people blab about. However, it didn't help the fact that Trump got Clinton'ed like it is 1992.

No party has a true political advantage in the EC maps. States can change politically in time, and there's always a surprise on the EC map (for this year, AZ/GA). You want to know what also can change in time, people's opinions/beliefs.

EC map is great because it keeps the pollical parties engage and focus on a state to state basis. States love to be in the center of attention via the EC Map.

 

To put it differently, they've lost the popular vote 6 of the past 7 elections. Why haven't they been able to secure any wins without also getting a majority of the votes? I'm not trying to be cute. I think the Rs are much smarter when it comes to strategy/messaging so it kind of baffles me that they have continued to allow Ds to claim the majority of votes. Maybe it doesn't matter to them since they can keep/gain power with a minority of total votes.

I have not read anyone that doesn't think Rs have the advantage in the EC. Losing the popular vote in 6 of 7 but still capturing the presidency 3 times would point to an advantage no?

 

I don't think you got the hint yet, but the combined popular vote #s are meaningless in our EC system. Focus on 50 separate Executive popular vote elections in each state, not the total number combined in all 50 states which will nowadays will benefit a D thanks to the voting population of CA/NY/IL.

Nope, just look at what happened last week.

 

Local foreigner question: so why did you guys end up establishing the electoral college, and why persist in using it to this day? (Yes I could easily look this up but I'm curious to hear candid responses from y'all)

Borat was guilty fun when I stole a watch with friends in primary school, kinda like a group of teen kids reading dirty magazines behind closed doors kinda vibe, but that was years ago. Probably gonna rewatch if bored but I'd probably rather catch miscellaneous horror flicks instead.

Or Sausage Party— that was fun. Got a proper frickin jumpscare at one point, you likely know the one if you've seen it.

 

??

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1142.html

Whether or not you want it, a majority of the U.S. population lives in cities. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with that statement.

 

I have to disagree on several points here. Both parties are broken, and as a result people are will try a candidate that is willing to break from the party line as long as they are confident that they could get something done for the people, even if that candidate is a significant risk.

Go back to 2016...The old guard Republicans were not supporting Trump. Media first pushed Jeb Bush to see if it would stick, then eventually Ted Cruz as candidates dropped off. Anyone but Trump. Remember how at the RNC there was strong evidence that Cruz could be the nominee anyway? But the peoples support for Trump was strong, and money wasn't an issue. Money (or lack of) is one of the biggest ways to make candidates die off.

It's about control. It's about protecting the brand. You don't willingly let someone into the Presidents club that won't toe the party line and might have independent thoughts. Bernie was too much of a wildcard for the Democrats which is why he got screwed twice by the DNC. Despite his extremism, his base was enthusiastic and he might have been able to beat Trump in 2016. The other D candidates in 2020 were pretty unremarkable. No real standouts in that bunch.

2008, 2012: There was a lot of tomfuckery in the Republican primaries that was ignored by popular media. If the party would have let things play out naturally, we may not have had McCain or Romney. But those guys were known quantities so they got the support.

Clinton worship has always been strong. Some might argue that they owned the D party. It was Hillarys turn.
Biden is a lifer Democrat politician and can be manipulated by his party. Perfect candidate.

 

The voters who live in the VA cities don't tell/override the voters who live in NC/SC. Be happy NYC don't override the voters who live in FL, because it's the joke that FL hates NYC with a passion (which I confirm).

 

In Malaysia, our elections are essentially decided in the boonies, which is why much of our politics pander to a tiny minority. Why is this desirable?

 

As a fellow local foreigner, my (admittedly limited) understanding is that several factors were at play, some theoretical, others practical, when it came to establishing the electoral college.

On theoretical grounds, there were concerns about the potential for tyranny. These concerns were twofold: the first was that any one individual might gain too much power, like a monarch, if the people elected a president directly; the second was that there might also be a “tyranny of the majority,” which sounds paradoxical but was essentially a concern that minority views might be steamrollered by majority, or “mob,” opinion. (Minority could be defined in various ways here, but is usually understood in terms of balancing the interests of rural and urban constituencies, especially with the vast, sprawling, and sparsely inhabited rural areas of states like MA, NY, and PA that were also home to some of the largest coastal cities).

These twin concerns about tyranny meant that a democracy in which presidents were elected directly had to be avoided and yet giving power to Congress to elect a president indirectly would undermine the principle of having checks and balances in the new political system. So, the electoral college emerged as an alternative method of electing the president indirectly, and it weighted the number of electors so as to preserve the interests of rural constituencies and thereby protect against a tyranny of the majority.

The practical element had to do with securing support for the new political system from the individual states. It’s worth remembering that not all states were necessarily sold immediately on the new form of national government—that the process of ratification could prove controversial, at times, and that compromises were needed on certain issues. One of those issues was the determination of the number of a state's electors according to its population size, and southern, slave-holding states were concerned that their large populations of slaves would not count towards the numbers of their electors—hence the 3/5 rule, which applied for the electoral college much as it did for the House of Representatives, i.e. by partially counting the number of slaves in those southern states.

I'm afraid I don't know enough to venture an answer as to why the electoral college persisted, sorry.

 

Off the top of my head, this comes down mostly to the distinction that the Constitutional Convention (1787) did not have any interest in setting up a democracy (in which people directly vote for policy), but rather a democratic republic (in which people would vote for representatives who would them vote for policy). They were also very motivated, from their fear of monarchy, to keep a weak executive branch and, from the positions most of the Conventioneers knew they'd have, a strong legislative. You may notice that the total number of electors is 538. This is, essentially, the total number of seats in congress (+ 3 for the Federal District of Columbia, added in 1961 under the 23rd amendment). This basically comes from the initial impulse of the Constitutional Convention (following the Virginia Plan) for congress to directly choose the President. The alternative of selected electors came up because the constitution also specifies separation of powers.

There was originally a bit of a wild west approach to how each state selected electors-- most of them were just appointed or elected by the individual state legislatures, and my understanding is that there was no standardization whatsoever. They were also not subject to any standard rules for how they were to choose their vote, so some went district by district per popular vote, some voted as they saw fit (after the citizens had voted for the elector), while others went winner-takes-all for the whole state. Across the 1800s this gradually changed (state-by-state)-- however electors were selected, they were then sworn to follow the popular vote, and states chose the winner-takes-all strategy to maximize their relevance to the election. At this point, it no longer matters who the electors actually are (in practice, they're decided by the parties), since they're sworn to vote in accordance to their state popular, and only Maine and Nebraska use the district approach vs. the statewide approach.

So anyways, there's an argument to be made that the electoral college is a nonsensical approach to choosing a president and that it's mainly held together with duct tape. Some people point at other countries that do fine without this kind of system. I don't know much about that; I'm no political theorist, but I did take the required number of civics courses in high school.

1. I've always been taught that representative systems (including the electoral college and congress in general) are supposed to be better at protecting minority rights than direct democracy systems, so maybe that's a point in its favor.
2. The other main argument is that it takes a super-majority to amend the constitution, and the electoral college benefits a large enough group (i.e. states that don't have any of the 10 larges cities in the country) that that's not going to happen.
3. One thing I've heard is that it's not a broken system, but rather a system that's been heavily gamed. The combination of winner-take-all states and gerrymandered district lines create a number of safe districts and safe states for either party, which causes the disconnect.

 

In a pure democracy, two wolves and one sheep vote on what's for dinner. Bad news for the sheep.
In a Constitutional Republic, all people have basic rights and have some representation regardless of how the mob votes. The EC works along similar lines.

Potentially real dystopic scenario:
1. EC is eliminated
2. Top 10 most populated cities decide the election (maybe less)
3. Party in power stays in power by flooding money into these cities to give everyone everything they want, regardless of waste. Vote for Santa!
4. Supreme party tells rest of country to f**k off.
5. As a result of #3 and #4, many people relocate to the big cities, making their power even greater.
6. Other parties never have a chance again, short of succession, revolution, etc...

(I think I just described how to actually pull off Agenda 21....) Anyway, if this scenario doesn't sound so bad to you because you already live in these cities, and Supreme Party is your party, do you think that party will remain the same or does it morph into something more corrupt and evil with no opposition or motivation to sound centrist?

We are a vast body of land with a diverse range of colors, cultures, religions, industries, etc. Farmers votes need to count as well as urban votes and other examples. The EC ensures we still have a shot atr some sort of balance.

 

Where I'm coming from:

Votes are cheap, just slap your name on some candy or maybe a cheap phone and you'll be the only name that triggers recall on the ballot. Heck, wrap DISASTER RELIEF GOODS in branding to really drive the point home! If you're feeling fancy, maybe commission jingle that's somehow STILL stuck in my head after over a decade and use it every time you campaign so it really, really sticks, or get a proper friggin music video together because that's perfectly typical of a billionaire running for office.

You can buy votes for $10 or maybe a bag of supplies during lean times. Proof they'll actually vote for you? None needed. Perhaps it's a cultural thing but stuff like that does inspire loyalty, as does mere "well my friends are voting for X and they say that it'll be good for the country cuz those damned *insert miscellaneous foreign country* need to know their place. Nationalist pride for the f'ing win.

For an example that I refuse to touch but may serve as an interesting read for people unfamiliar with this, please feel free to look up Ferdinand Marcos's family and the deep loyalties Ilocos and the rest of the Northern Philippines hold for them.

In all I understand that taking steps to ensure that people so far removed from actual issues at hand need not be given sole determination to design and approve policies that may not even be pertinent to them is in spirit a good thing, but also:

this is a big ol red flag (pun inadvertent) that's not been satisfactorily addressed to my awareness.


Disclosure of more biases: I very often think that voting should be a privilege earned and not an intrinsic right borne of citizenship because of how easily votes are swayed through force of idiocracy, coercion, desperation, apathy, or all-of-the-above, but I'm fully aware that that's a whole-ass shitshow in and of itself. Education brainwashes you.

Edit: add air quotes around "education brainwashes you"

 

To use modern language, it's not a bug but a feature. Any and all systems "will be gamed". Our system which is not a democracy (repeat after me, "America is not a democracy, America is not a democracy") was intentionally designed to be "gamed" in the just such a way with limits that "contain" the damage so to speak. It turns out to be a robust design, one that is "non fragile" and naturally conservative - it is difficult to change. As @sphinxvc notes it is the very antithesis of a consumeristic system.

One of the irony's of our media driven climate is the accusation that Trump and a certain kind of right wing politics are "populist". Truth is it is the American left that is populist as "one man one vote", anti-EC and similar (such as the complaints that Delaware has the same # of senators as California) are the populist positions.

Ah, turns out your not a democrat (not the party, the governing philosophy) either. Welcome to the club.

 

If we define populist positions as positions that are taken for no reason other than to gain popularity, then Trump’s policies are decidedly populist, unless there is some way to reason that border walls and environmental deregulation are beneficial in some way to the general public.

Positions like recognising the existence of climate change are certainly popular and supported by the majority, but they often relate to legitimate problems that should be addressed - calling them populist positions is rather disingenuous.

 

I'm not American so how the hell can I fall neatly into any of your weird-ass parties parties? Real talk, I strive to be a centrist.

My personal ideologies align more closely with leftisms, but besides being pro-choice I also, IN CERTAIN SITUATIONS, acknowledge justifications behind the death penalty; it's an INFINITELY worse option than reclusion perpetua but unfortunately financial realities don't stop at prison gates.

Individual freedom is a nice thing to have but then you have to deal with idiots who abuse the liberties afforded them, thereby necessitating the imposition of limits upon those freedoms and the enforcement thereof; leaning on stereotypes is f'ing horrible when people use it to justify racism, but I believe there is a reason stereotypes are formed. Yes to state-sponsored higher education, but if it gets to a point like how I understand student loans in the USA are (allowing debtors to spend funds obtained therefrom on extravagances) then... maybe don't. Rigid adherence to the rule of law is a good way to run a country, but perhaps laws that appear to suit systems more than it values human life and well-being on ANY scale need extensive rethinking and reform. I'm cool with legalising cannabis and most recreational drug use despite not really being on anything aside from sugar, caffeine (so much caffeine...), and occasionally alcohol, but feel that the stuff that can genuinely ruin someone's life need be purged and even smoking weed should be given the same restrictions as tobacco. I hate how pro-weed people seem to overlook the detrimental health effects thereof and how people who hate the stuff refuse to acknowledge benefits derived therefrom

I've said this before on the forum: I grew up with racist beliefs and come from a conservative background. This is why when shit with Garuspik went down I crapped on the idiocies he was spouting but also commiserated with him because I know firsthand how hard it can be to disavow things you take for granted growing up. I'm all for allowing room for second chances and growth up to a point, and where that point lies honestly just varies depending on my mood— perfect arbiters don't exist and anyone who claims to be one is either deluded or deceptive.