It's easy to ascribe arrogance to Clinton now, after everything went to shit, but the available data suggested that they were in play. If she had turtled up, played prevent defense, and lost, she'd have been called arrogant for thinking it was in the bag and that she didn't have to try to expand the map anywhere.

I mean, I have definite problems with the way she ran her campaign - not visiting Wisconsin *once* after the primaries? - but I don't think attempting to put states in play that appeared within a normal polling error of being winnable was "arrogant."

Trump did the same thing in the Rust Belt, chasing EVs in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. All of those states looked solidly pro-Clinton, but were within normal polling error of being in play. The difference between Clinton going after Georgia/Texas and Trump going after the Rust Belt is who was apparently ahead and who was apparently behind.

Otherwise? You talk about the Dakotas, Montana, etc recognizing that they have more power under the Electoral system than under a popular vote, but they get taken for granted now. What, they'd be taken for granted MORE with a national popular vote?

Most of the Midwest gets treated as, yes, "flyover country" in elections. The Upper Midwest/Rust Belt gets attention, and Missouri is still treated as a swing state, even though it probably isn't any longer. The South, with a couple of exceptions, is in the same boat.

When you go +30 to +50 for one party with regularity, under the Electoral College, there's no benefit to running up the score. Yeah, okay, the 3 EVs that Montana, Wyoming, and each of the Dakotas bring to the table might be disproportionately more powerful than their population would be in a popular vote, but every vote past 50%+1 is wasted in states like that.

If a Republican can actually squeeze marginal votes out of the "Republican firewall," it's going to make more sense to visit Wyoming, or the Dakotas, or Alaska.

Yes, California and New York would probably get increased attention from a Democratic candidate because the margins there are so much greater than they are in New Hampshire, but if you think Clinton was arrogant for thinking Texas and Georgia might be in play, how much more arrogant would a Democrat have to be to think that they could just focus on Texas and California and call it good because population centers?

The third party vote has been a little underrated in its impact. The top 4 third-party candidates got about 6.1 million votes combined. In 2012 the top 4 (which included Roseanne Barr) got about 1.75 million votes.

Edit: I don't know if that swung the election, but it explains why the voting turnout looks down when you just look at the top 2 candidates.

Impact though?

I mean, the indications are that most of Johnson's difference in polling vs votes went to Trump. And that's around 2/3rds of the total of all the fringe candidates.

It's unlikely those votes would have changed anything other than possibly the popular vote total.

(I guess I'm not clear whether you meant impact on the election outcome, or impact in terms of there being simply "more". If the latter, it's a figure that's lower than Perot [i]and Perot II, similar to John Anderson, and less than George Wallace)

Yep, thats one of the quirks that would need to be worked out. As you said, maybe you just round up in favor of the winner.

I guess status quo is the path of least resistance but just surprised that I haven't heard somebody advocating a system similar to that approach rather than full-on popular vote.

You mean like the Nobel committee awarding the peace prize based on ballot box? ;)

Sack, Bush43 said he could squeeze a million votes from Texas if that mattered. I think with the 4 big states already solid colors, the other states should be more important. It's unfortunate that CA-NY-IL alone can get a candidate almost 40% of the way there nowadays.

In the fictional country of Wimipany, where Trump wins WI, MI, and PA by narrow margins, and Clintons wins NY by a large margin:

Electoral Votes: Trump 46, Clinton 29
Popular Votes: Clinton 57.9%, Trump 36.8%

I kinda like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact idea. Although a bunch of rules in statewide elections would need to be addressed. Namely that in some states i believe that absentee ballots are not counted if they would not decide an election.

Why? That's where a lot of people live.

There was a time when this would have been a big deal:

Still crying about the EC? It is in place to prevent a large portion of the country from becoming irrelevant. It does what politicians should do, it serves the states.

Thank you for this worthless information...

Except it doesn't do that. It makes even more of the country irrelevant than a popular vote system would.

I see where the liberals are confused. The EC was a compromise between the large states and the small states. It's the whole compromise thing they don't understand; unless that compromise is giving them everything they want (without having to give anything up).

Thanks for the response. I think my initial reaction was to hypothetically think about where it would be 50 years from now: would only 4 states receive the majority of electoral votes out of 50 states?

And while I think there is a personal urban bias (never liked big cities much), I also do not believe political weight should be based on population alone. The interests and choices of non-urban economies have been vitally important throughout our history. That's why I love the bicameral compromise of 1787.

Maybe, but past isn't necessarily prologue. Agarian economies were massively important in the 18th and 19th century. Less so, now; the South is industrializing, and the idea of large agribusinesses are new, as well. I get that you don't want to leave the concerns of rural America behind in favor of the urban population centers, but that's kind of what you have right now. Whether you favor or disfavor urban (or agrarian) populations, the minority in either category feels forgotten.

Conservatives in states with large population centers, such as California, Illinois, and New York, have little to no electoral impact. They're spit in an ocean, electorally.

Liberals in rural America have the same problem. Maybe Wyoming isn't as populous as a "blue" state, but a left-of-center voter there has no impact on a national election.

And that's something the Electoral College can't account for. It concerns itself with the "interests and choices" of the "right kind" of voters in either case, leaving the others without a voice.

I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of a straight popular vote, but I think it's pretty clear the Electoral College leaves people behind regardless of what political affiliation you hold.

Give me a fucking break.

You might need arm extensions to be able to reach around and pat yourself on the back enough for that.

Liberals have done nothing but compromise in the interest of governing for 25 years. It's the burden of being idealistic... You have try to actually get things done other than just consolidating your own power.

Weren't you a Johnson supporter? How'd that work out for you?

Is it, though?
Doesnt it underscore the importance of the EC?

Why is it more important that one state can dominate the results? Or 2?

looking at those states, why would NY be more important than those other 3 states?

To be clear, I don't care much about changing the electoral process.

So explain to me how, with the electoral college, that 40 or so states weren't basically ignored, while 10 swing states got almost all the candidate visits. Or does that not count as "being irrelevant" for you?

Because it has more people? And NY wouldn't necessarily be more important in a pop vote system. If someone won NY narrowly and lost those other three states by a ton, then NY would be rendered meaningless. Replace NY with CA. A person winning by 1 vote in CA would defeat someone who won 90% in the other three states.

No states were ignored, they all had access to information and ballot boxes, right? Why is there so much emphasis on candidate visits? When they showed up, did they do something special that no one outside of the state would know about?

I know that sounds a bit snarky but it seems like when a candidate visited Colorado, they all talked about most recent campaign controversy, which could have been talked about standing in Outer Mongolia. And paying lip service to a state's/locale's needs could have been addressed from anywhere, assuming they had access to a TV or newspaper or the internet.

I wonder if neither candidate visited any states but campaigned from their front yard or in the case of Trump, rooftop, whether the presidential vote (as oppose to other votes) would still be the same?

We don't live in a democracy, so that's not a valid reason. The EC was devised, in part, as a way to keep more populous states from enforcing their will on less populous ones. It was one way from keeping too much power from being concentrated in too few places. The larger population areas already have an advantage in getting more EC votes. Add a true popular vote and they gain even more of one.

Why did you ignore the rest of my quote? You know, the part which showed that big states can have a huge impact or minimal impact in either system?

The whole point of my post was to show the folly of the winner take all system. And the winner take all can be absurd in either direction. Imagine someone winning the most populated states up to 270 EC, each by 1%, but getting destroyed in all the smaller states.

One way to mitigate this would be to increase the number of electoral college votes, while retaining the current proportional allocation between states. For example, doubling up (to 1,076 instead of 538) would give a minimum allocation of 6 to the smallest states (and DC), where a candidate would need to get more than 58% of the vote (in a 2-way election) to get a 4-2 result, rather than 50% plus 1 for a 2-1 split.

Just to hit at the idea of how much a popular vote approach would likely concentrate campaigning into fewer areas, the estimated US population for 2014 was 318.9 million. The estimated population for the top 10 MSAs for 2015 was 85.5 million, making it more than 25%. You almost get to half the population by the 33rd biggest MSA, Austin, and you've included every MSA over 2 million people.

You would be penalizing people for not living in urban areas and minimizing their voice. Rural and small town voters already spoke up in this election and moving to a popular vote system would almost certainly led to a further feeling of being disenfranchised.

How exactly is this penalizing people who don't live in cities? They have one vote no matter where they live. :confused:

More than the status quo? Those rural voters are, as discussed elsewhere, kind of superfluous to their electoral goals at 50%+1 in the states they occupy.

For example: Tennessee is estimated to have 6.6 million residents. An estimated 119k of those are undocumented immigrants, so let's work from a base of 6.41 million. Something like 77.3% of those are of voting age, which brings us to 5.1 million. 2.49 million of those cast ballots for President.

Trump carried the state by 25 points. Let's say that non-voting citizens in Tennessee would have voted approximately the same as those who cast ballots - that it's a more homogenous state than, say, California or New York (or states further south of Mason-Dixon).

3.02 million potential voters, 61% casting their ballots for Donald Trump, is another 1.8 million potential votes for Trump in a state where not quite 700,000 of the ballots cast on his behalf were superfluous to his efforts to carry the state.

You're worried about the disenfranchisement of rural voters if the Electoral College isn't in play, but what about the 2.5 million voters who either didn't vote because their state overwhelmingly goes Republican under the current system, or did vote but were superfluous? If the concern is rural disenfranchisement, how do you tackle that? What's the incentive, in a politically homogenous environment, to turn out at greater numbers when running up the score does nothing?

A system where one party has more votes for the president, more votes for the senate, and more votes for the House and loses or is the minority in all three is not a recipe for national stability. Falling back on, those are the rules, won't keep people from viewing it as inherently illegitimate.

I don't disagree, but some people seem to think that the electoral college magically makes candidates pay attention to places they wouldn't otherwise. I think there are inherent flaws in all possible versions of the electoral system. Still not sure why the simplest system wouldn't be the most fair. The pat answer is "candidates will ignore rural areas". The truth is that they do that now in most cases, even when going to "rural" states. Not a whole lot of candidates going to a 400 person gathering in Bumfuck, SD. Except during the primaries, where each state is on a staggered voting system and you are fighting for hundreds of votes instead of millions.

Yet somehow that party held the House, the Senate, and the Presidency all at once, less than six years ago. Amazing that they managed to do that with the minority of voters. 😋

If you look at the counties that Obama won once that went to Trump in this election, it should be clear as a bell that there is more than enough ground to be gained by both parties if they simply properly engage those voters. Obama did it. Clinton did not. Trump did. Let's not pretend because of one crazy election with two wildly unpopular candidates that somehow we've reached a tipping points where the Democrats cannot win because of the way the system works.

But that isn't true since 2010 with the House. Some of the problem is sorting, as Dem constituencies are generally piled together and Rep constituencies are more spread out, but gerrymandering also plays a major role. If the GOP wins big in statehouses in 2020 the problem will only be exacerbated.

This is where I'm a natural conservative. I believe in institutions, norms rules, and stability. Those are being eroded quickly, the results will be very detrimental.

No. It was easy to think that during the election for a number of reasons.

I equated her campaign to a football team who had forced 5 turnovers, injured the starting QB of the other team, was the benefit of a horrible call by the refs and went into the locker room up 7.

Her candidacy was littered with problems. Her thinking Texas was actually in play was the biggest. She could certainly see what the rest of us could see: That Trump was going after the rust belt and that was where he felt he could beat her.

Trumps only hail mary to win this thing was to break up the rust belt. I don't give a damn what the polling told her, her main job once she saw that was to protect those states at all cost. That was her blue firewall.

She badly miscalculated.

Yawn. I'm becoming tired of the incessant crying from the left. I didn't vote for Trump, can't believe he won, but am kind of glad that it's showing how entitled and immature much of the DNC base has become.

You knew the system, your horrific candidate couldn't be bothered to physically set foot in a state like Wisconsin, and you lost to a buffoon who can't even put together a transition team and cabinet without massive infighting. It's a good thing that you can't just ignore a huge chunk of the country and win the presidency. The system, which could stand to be tweaked, wasn't the problem and doesn't need to be thrown out.

I think you can expect a certain amount of unrest until its proven that Trump isn't going to victimize minority parts of the population like LBGTQ people or specific minority groups (ie. Mexicans, Muslims etc.).

His appointment of a known racist to a position of influence isn't something which has reassured these groups for fairly obvious reasons and as such I don't see their actions as 'incessant crying' more as attempting to indicate their stance and hope that he is as claimed a 'president for all people'.

If that was being done with a more introspective, "how did we screw up so badly", approach, that would be fine. Much of it is refusing to admit a problem with the self serving bubble that produced a terribly unlikeable candidate, whose campaigning choices were stunningly arrogant, and then blaming everything (racism, misogyny, education levels, electoral college, etc) other than the constant talking down to/ignoring the concerns of significant portions of the country.

They chose Hillary Clinton despite knowing how much, rightly or wrongly, the country didn't like or trust her. She confirmed part of the reason for disliking her by putting together a campaign strategy that was little more than a gigantic middle finger to a significant portion of the south and midwest. Those two things, in combination, were the reason she lost.

Trump is an idiot. He may be as racist as some of his campaign rhetoric was. He's almost certainly as misogynistic as his worst campaign rhetoric was. He won because he at least pretended that the voters that the DNC/Hillary held their noses up to were actually worth his time and said he would do something about their plight.

I don't know anyone here locally who is taking that approach - most were not particularly in favor of Clinton but backed her because the alternative (Trump) was abhorrent to them.

Most talking heads I've seen in the press are admitting that the Clinton choice wasn't great and that they underestimated the situation, I think that was obvious by the fact they thought Texas was in play at one point ...

Um, if you can't see many posts that do exactly that here or in the other thread, then you're just ignoring reality.


Hmmm? The midwest I get, but not the south. The electoral college dictates she must ignore large parts of the south. In fact, one of the criticisms of her post-election is that she shouldn't have spent money in Texas and Georgia. she had the best Dem performance in 20 years in both states, but it had zero effect on her election prospects due to the winner take all system.


And we can (and have) talk about mistakes Hillary made in her campaign, while still talking about the problems with our current electoral systems. It's not an either/or situation.

Seems very hindsighty to me. What if Clinton turned Georgia? Would folks be slamming Trump for going to try to turn the Rust Belt when polling showed he was vulnerable in GA?

One thing I think you're missing is that the 24 hour national news sites will only play the juiciest clips of rallies. But the local press is going to cover when Trump talks about NAFTA in Wisconsin or when Clinton talks about immigration in Nevada. And if someone is developing a platform, the swing states will have more influence than other states in the development of that platform.

What are their concerns? That they want heavy industry / coal back? It's not coming back, and telling them it is is a straight up motherfuckin' lie.

That they want Mexicans deported, blacks profiled, and the Islam religion banned? That's racist as shit. That's not "blaming" anything, that's calling a spade a spade.

That they want an outsider? That outsider is going to be putting in tons of insiders in positions of power. The LEADER OF THE GOD DAMN PARTY THEY SUPPOSEDLY DON'T TRUST is going to be White House Chief of Staff. It don't get no more insider than that.

Please tell me what the concerns are that were "ignored" since you know them so well.

I'll give you "unlikeable candidate", because what really happened was 20 years of "the Clintons are lying liars who lie and murder people they disagree with" manifested itself in the "redneck" voting in unbelievable proportions for Trump. There is a reason the map looks so segmented this time, much worse than with Obama. And it's not because Hillary ignored some imaginary issue. It's because they fuckin' HATE her and it's been practically imprinted on many voters for literally 20 years.

Yes, the Democrats were blind and stupid to that to nominate her in the first place, I'm the first one who'll cosign on that.

Racism and the electoral college have been the main arguments of several people here since the moment the results started coming in.

Clinton blew it, but I'd still vote for her over Sanders. And I'd have to go third party if it was Trump v. Sanders.

I get how the shock of Trump winning makes Clinton look really terrible, but, a lot of people really did like her, and not just as a "lesser of two evils". I get why she couldn't inspire millennials in the primaries, or minorities to come out in the general, but there must be a lot of late 30s regular white guys like me who would have loved more of the Bill Clinton/Obama years, which was the appeal of Clinton to me.

Or, you tell them that those jobs aren't coming back and then present a real, feasible means of training them for new jobs. Pretty much anything other than mostly ignoring them and then calling people who may vote for your opponent deplorable.

If I was voting in a swing state, I would have voted for Hillary because Trump is just that bad. Thankfully my vote was in a midnight blue state so I could try and pump up the vote for Gary Johnson in hopes that the Libertarian Party would get federal election campaign funding next time around.

You mean what Bill Clinton tried to do? Add to that, Obama and Dems went to the mat to save the auto industry? Sooo... that ignoring them?

I get that, but where her unlikable reputation comes in, is in the exit polls. I've seen numbers as high as 51% of Trump voters did so because they disliked Hillary as opposed to 42% voting because they strongly favored him.

Whether it's valid or not, you have to address the elephant in the room in campaigning. Address her good points instead of running months of ads that focus solely on your opponents horrible statements to the point that voters become numb to it.

Did Hillary do it?

Did Hillary do what? Tell them she's going to have retraining programs? Rust Belt Democrats who wanted Clinton to come to their states actually warned her that promoting job retraining doesn't work - folks think it's bullshit. They wanted her to try to promise to do things to repatriate manufacturing jobs, because that's what works (though it's not going to happen - repeal any trade deals you want)...

These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming | Mother Jones

Clinton gained a net 70k votes over Obama in 2012. That's not even close to turning.

As I've mentioned before, a popular vote system hasn't stopped Republicans from winning Georgia. They didn't need to introduce a system where the metro Atlanta counties are weighted the same as rural counties. They were able to get the rural vote out to cancel out the urban vote. That happens in many other states, like Texas. Rural voters can outnumber urban voters in a popular vote system. It happens all the time.

Interesting. I don't remember seeing anything from her about those actual plans. That's another of her failures campaigning, at least nationally, in that almost all of what I saw was trashing Trump instead of focusing on what she would do. I remember people here saying you could find her position on things on her website, but how often did she promote those things in other formats?

BTW, the one ad I remember seeing most of from Hillary was the one showing Trump on Letterman pimping his own products and being embarrassed when Letterman pointed out they were all made overseas.

Does "what if" not mean a hypothetical anymore?

Clinton didn't have huge margins in CO or NV. She spent a lot of effort towards the end in those places, and also trying to turn FL and NC. If she saves the rust belt, but then loses CO, NV, FL, and NC, she loses the election and people are criticizing her for wasting time in traditional Dem territory.

election post-mortem stuff moved into this thread

No, because he would've lost the EC by 150 votes. And it isn't all hindsight
That Mother Jones article is amusing. Does a well thought out explanation of how economic concerns mattered, and have actually been seeded by Democratic politicians... then the last few paragraphs throw in some random racism accusations, despite the only anecdote used showing that it wasn't really racism in that instance, the resentment was still economically based. It's like they tried so hard to actually get answers from people on the ground, but couldn't resist throwing in just a bit of the coastal elitist narrative their audience loves.

Good first step. But it will come to nothing.

A progressive magazine based out of San Francisco is out of touch with the Midwest?

Telling it like it is apparently is overrated. Well, depending on what side of the aisle you are on, of course. ;)

Because union workers being angry that Spanish speaking workers were coming in and doing jobs has absolutely nothing to do with racism at all...

I think they'd be just as angry if a bunch of Swedish people came in and took their jobs.

These were unions workers who were working on a plant... which jobs of theirs were those people taking?

Also interesting, the Midwest has by far the least foreign born workers than any other region of the US.

Came across this secondhand on FB, I can buy it, especially the resentment toward white-collar workers.

https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many...-working-class

Come on now, we've reached 6000 posts on this election alone At best, I would characterize the entire election cycle as flaccid pontificating, at worst, erotic asphyxiation.

How about this for a stat: 17% of Trump voters approve of the job President Obama is doing.

Who likes President Obama and voted for Donald Trump? Lots of people. - The Washington Post

Well, to be honest, (as the article somewhat alludes to) this probably isn't that rare... after all some of George W. Bush's voters had to approve the job that President Clinton was doing in 2000 considering Clinton's approval rating at the time.

By the time we got into the recession, I thought W, with the Treasury and the Fed, was doing a pretty good job managing the crisis, so I could have answered yes to that question in 2008, for sure.

OK, y'all, there's um, a bit of a perceived difference in GWB supporters vs. BHO supporters and BHO supporters vs. DJT supporters. ;)

I'm talking about WJC supporters vs. GWB supporters. Plenty of GWB supporters said all sorts of shit about WJC.

I find it totally believable that 17% of DJT voters were garden variety republicans who based a decision on the Supreme Court or E-MAILS!!!@@@!!!!

Well so do I, but that doesn't exactly fit the ZOMFG TRUMP VOTERS WERE RACISTS!!!1 foolishness I've been seeing all too frequently. ;) (To be fair, there's been very little of that here, but among my millennial FB contacts in particular, good gracious. Let them tell it, every HRC voter is a lawless baby-murdered, and every DJT voter hates all blacks, Jews, gays, and women.)

So your argument is that only 83% of Trump supporters were racist? ;)

"No more than" :D

Which, to me, is *massively* different than using "all." #AccuracyMattersToPedants

It's possible to be racist and still think Obama did a good job.

Probably not in the binary minds of the people I'm talking about.

To further go into this, a political scientist decided to try to chart the 'competing narratives' of whites voting for Trump did so because of either economic concerns or racism & sexism. He found that they weren't actually competing at all:

White support for Donald Trump was driven by economic anxiety, but also by racism and sexism - Vox

Honestly, I can't help but get a chuckle out of the analysis. The bias was built right in, and displayed in the results. As used here "racism" and "sexism" are lovely liberal code words for what a great many of us see as simple acknowledgements of reality.

The divides in this country are very real, and no election is going to change that. No amount of attempted social engineering is going to change it either, well, not for the better anyway.

My favorite part was the "women seek to gain power by getting control over men" and how agreeing to it or being neutral was seen as sexist (at least that is how I read that context).

Which is silly, since, well, yeah, sure women do that. Use what talents God gave you. Do all women do that? No. Can all women do that? Also no. Do I think they're bad people for doing it? Depends on the context and how far they take it. That's not an easy question to answer on a simple 1-5 scale and if the analysis is ascribing to respondents the title of guaranteed sexists for their responses to that question, then that analysis is very flawed.

Rot in hell you misogynistic pig.

Sorry, just trying to save someone else the trouble.

And some folks get all bent out of shape when people say Trump voters were (to a large part... yes, probably not all) racist and sexist. I can't comprehend a person who can say those are 'simple acknowledgements of reality" and NOT be a racist/sexist. At least not in my view.

The real trick is that the concerns of rural voters can vary greatly from the concerns of urban. Gun control, for example. Urbanites might be generally happy to do away with all guns, while ranchers out west have a much larger need for them (and in some cases ones with more firepower). Just one example, there are others.

The electoral college makes sure each group at least has a voice that can't be totally ignored.

States that are "ignored" during the election cycle are ones that are generally strongly favoring one candidate over another, and no amount of campaigning will overcome that. Although they are truly ignored at your own peril as was discovered in this election.

Where the problem lies right now is in the primaries, where the early states end up winnowing the field too much, and candidates I like have withdrawn before I even get my chance. If a state is going to give the lion's share of it's primary reps to the candidate who gets the most votes, that candidate out to get 50%+1, not squeak by with just 30 - 40%. We need more runoffs the way most states allocate their delegates, maybe then we can avoid an election where a majority of voters hate BOTH major party candidates...

It was a plant being built wasn't it? So presumably it was non-union construction jobs.Depends how far you want to go with it. I hate actual neo-nazis & places like Stormfront, but when an actual example of jobs being taken (presumably) by immigrants is used as another example of racism uber alles that's where I question the tactic. I think there are a lot more white people who are willfully ignorant of racism than actually racist, and when they're all lumped together in the alt-right it's not only a mistake from an electoral perspective (because there are a lot more people who'll align with Breitbart than BLM, f.e.), but is also dangerous because it provides cover for the actual virulently racist threats.

Willful ignorance of racism (or the we don't care about racism if we get ours) is not as bad as being actively racist, but that doesn't mean it's all that excusable. It kind of reminds me of the harsh words that Dr. King had for the 'white moderate'.

And I can't comprehend how anyone assigns the word sexism in any remotely negative context to the response described, for the reasons CR pointed out.

Honestly, outside of here (presumably, I haven't paid that close attention tbh) I don't really see/know anyone getting bent at the various allegations of 'isms,given the frequency of absurd situations where they're haphazardly applied. The "deplorables" label was a mark of pride for many voters, because condemnation from the quarters that latched onto it is just about as high praise as you can get. We'd only worry if we were getting praised by the same people,THAT would be a cause for concern.

*shrug* and I see 'women seek to gain power by getting control over men' and immediately think "Holy crap, that's sexist AF!"

(interestingly enough, of the three, that was the easiest predictor of if you were going to vote for Trump - being neutral on the question had the same probability of voting for Trump than if you slightly disagreed that "white people have advantages in the US because of their skin color" and if you slightly satisfied with your overall economic situation - which was the second worst option on economics)

Thats an outstanding article imho. Spot on. Thanks for sharing.

If you don't think some, maybe even a very high percentage, of women take some advantage of their sexual control over men to advance their own interests, then I have to question your visualization of the reality around you.

The number of women whom I know who have done this number in the thousands. I could probably name a hundred right now that I know who are actively supporting themselves with their sexuality.

I think there are two problems with your view on it, IMO. One, I think you're viewing the statement as a black or white, 100% true/false statement and the reality is that the actual percentage of women doing this is somewhere in the middle. Two, you are sexualizing the question, attaching morality to it, along with the longstanding misogynistic views of society on promiscuity (i.e. women are sluts, men are studs). I view this statement with no morality attached. The use of sexuality for gain to me is a skill set only. The statement in the analysis does not ask if it is right for women to use sexuality for gain (a moral question). It simply asks if they do. That's a fact based statement, and you denying it makes you look abit naive.

FWIW, this is not a women only problem. Men also put their sexuality to use. But it is much less prevalent for men because women don't usually judge men on physical factors alone (or even at all), and men already have the balance of power so don't usually need to go seek it from the other sex.

Instead of #Calexit, which is dumb, I propose that California split up into states equal to the population of Wyoming, which is the lowest populated state. You could split California up into 66 states doing this. Each state would get 3 electoral votes (not to mention 2 Senators and a Rep).

Instead of 55 Electoral votes, 2 Senators and 53 Representatives, California now has 198 electoral votes, 112 Senators, and 66 Representatives.

This is just as bad as trying to support right wing talking points by citing Fox. Vox is utter garbage. The implicit bias in the survey structure would have gotten me laughed out of my intro to research methodology class.

He is engaging in confirmation bias, as most of us do. I fell for this bias during the election when I would only look at information supporting why I didn't think Trump could win the battleground states. Others are using this bias to justify why their candidate lost, and pulling information from biased sources is the most common way of doing that.

I tried to follow the EC vote inside this thread but got complete lost in the argument. Interesting enough I had a EC conversion with friends and my children both republican and democrat and as far is voting was concern both sides felt screwed. Maryland is a democratic state so my democrat friends felt there vote didn't matter because there were more than enough democrats to allow Hillary to earn the EC vote. And my republican friends said they feel there vote didn't matter because there just weren't enough of them to push trump over the edge in Maryland to earn the EC votes. As a result, they didn't vote !!!! As far as the EC, I just not understanding how other think its a far system. I understand its intention but you have to question the fact Clinton won popular vote but lost EC by a very large margin. I believe its happened 4 times in history all of which are in favor of the republicans.

I think it comes down to your personal view of our country. Do you see the USA as 1 large unified entity, or do you view it as a collection of 50 individual STATES that have a sort of group construct to allow some sharing of resources.

I'm trying to make the point without evoking the charged "states rights" words but to me....yeah I think numerous items currently handled at a federal level should be handled at a state level, and if that strict conformity of the Constitution were carried out "appropriately" then it becomes a very real necessity.

Population is a component, for sure. But a candidate could dominate what 7(?) cities with a 75% majority and win the popular vote.

And Im not talking about campaign pandering, Im talking actual governing practice. If a President knows he doesnt have to worry about the opinion of rural ranchers ( in the previous thread example) he can/will literally disregard their entire needs in his decision making.

That's a great synthesis.

So I keep hearing this, yet no one has responded to the point I've made several times. In Georgia, the rural voters outnumber the urban voters and have complete control of the state. Should we develop some system in Georgia to make sure the urban voters are equally heard or do we only do that when rural voters are at a disadvantage?

Unless there's a large number of unregistered urban dwellers, that's not true. Georgia's rural population is 46.5% of the total.

I'm not 100% sure I understand your question.
My first initial response is state government does not equal federal government. Assuming you are suggesting that you want GA to develop an electoral college for electing their state reps. If they chose to run their government that way, then yes they should do that.

If your question is instead about how GAs POTUS EC votes are assigned, Im even more confused by your question

Speaking of confirmation bias, the author of the article, Brian Schaffner, is not a writer for Vox.com. He's not even a writer for 'The Mischiefs of Faction', which was the political science blog bought by Vox, under which umbrella this post appears. This is Schaffner's first article ever to be put on Vox. Who is Schaffner? Well, you could have read the attribution section...


So, I think he would have done quite well in your intro to methodology class. I hope you put a bit more effort in researching your sources than you did in this post.

I read that section, and actually sent a message to Vox about it due to the obvious flaws in the structure.

1. He pulled "an item" out of two batteries of questions. One of the ways to avoid bias in survey polling is having enough non-leading questions to counter imposing your own agenda. He did the exact opposite.

2. If you ask a loaded question like he did about women using their sexuality to get ahead in the workplace, you absolutely have to have a follow up to that which asks those who answered yes if they view that as a good or bad thing.

Even good researchers do bad research sometimes, and this was garbage.

It's the United States of America. All 50 States have some weight in this Republic. It's not called the United Peoples of Los Angeles and New York after all.

30 States voted for Trump. It's the job of the candidates to convince more states to vote for them. Just running around Los Angeles and New York and spouting off about how racist and sexist white people are doesn't sound very impressive of a change.

Small wrinkle with your plan ... Congress has to approve it. Repeatedly.

Congress also has the option to deny admission to any new 'state" formed out of part of an existing state. That requires the agreement of three parties: the existing state, the new state, AND Congress.