I remember being in 3rd grade and learning about the electoral college and thinking, “that’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of”. Still true to this day.
Okay guys stop up voting this! Simply let me assure you that I will upvote for you!
If you upvote this comment to 100, I will upvote the way you want me to upvote.
Actually I’ll do you better! Look. I know these guys who can upvote. If you upvote my comment past 100, I’ll have them vote for you just the way you telepathically have told me to upvote by up voting for me…what? Why would you even need to know me or my friend who hasn’t even talked to you directly? That’s crazy talk! I’m an upvoter, I upvote. They. My friends who can upvote are true upvoters too. Soon you won’t even need to upvote at all! You can just go read all the shit we Upvoted for you! Yey! We call our selves the “Upvotlectoral” college. We learn algebra in this college too, but we never graduate…at least you don’t know if we have graduated or not.
Sounds like this clown lives in that one blip in Nebraska or whatever that can impact shit, you know what to do bois. Electoral vote this mofo out the comments section! /s (chill)
Then how do you stop urban concerns from completely trouncing rural concerns? Voters from rural areas have valid concerns which are largely opposite of urban voters. If you get rid of electoral college, candidates will campaign in major cities and that’s it. Nobody else will matter.
For anyone downvoting me- you should know I’m a liberal-libertarian registered Democrat from Connecticut, who’s very much against Trump and most of the BS today’s GOP is peddling. I just don’t think disenfranchising anyone who doesn’t live in a city is the answer.
Cities matter more. Sorry, but that’s the reality.
Cities are where people live. People matter.
Cities are where culture happens. Culture matters. You’re not going to have a big art/music/anything scene in bumbleweed, NE because there aren’t enough people there to constitute a scene.
Cities are where economy happens. Money moving around matters. There are more transactions per day in the corner shop by me than a whole week in some country town with 700 residents.
Rural people still have the Senate and local government. Their rep in the house (which should be expanded) also should speak up for their region.
Everyone deserves some minimum respect, but the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane. A minority holding the majority garbage is not good. Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.
I say it all the time - places like California and New York are strategically more important, too. Most of the game development, the movie/tv industry, software, even a lot of our food, happens in CA. And then a great deal of finance happens in NYC. Lots of defense industry stuff is clustered around DC as well.
It’s called “flyover country” for a reason. If you want to partake in what is happening, then move to those locations. Unfortunately, our backwards slave-era system gives wayyyy too much power to regions that just don’t matter as much.
With respect sir (or madam), you are personifying the ‘ivory tower elite’ attitude that so many conservatives make fun of. 'I matter, others don’t.
You think there’s no culture in rural areas? That you need a giant festival to have culture?
That corner shop that has 100 transactions an hour… where do you think the bread they sell comes from? The flour? The avocadoes on the avocado toast? (sorry, I had to :P ) Sure as fuck doesn’t come from the city. You can write the rest of the nation off as unimportant and then see how unimportant they are when your fridge is empty. They matter.
the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane.
And the idea that Queens should be able to dictate policy that applies nationally including Nowhere, UT is just as insane.
Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.
I’ll give you that- most of the conservative platform these days is a bit on the batshit side.
But there’s other parts that make sense. Take guns for example. A liberal in NYC has the 11th largest army in the world 3 digits away. Police response time is seconds or minutes. So ‘nobody needs a gun’ is a common urban liberal position.
Go out in rural areas, there might be two deputies for an entire county with police response time in the range of 30-120 minutes if at all. And that county may have 4-legged predators like bears, wolves, etc that can threaten humans. So that guy wants a GOOD gun to defend himself and his family, because if there is a problem nobody else is gonna arrive until it’s too late.
The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?
Guns are just an example, but that overall is why I think the electoral college has a place. House is based on population, Senate based on statehood, Presidency is in the middle with influences both from statehood and population. That’s a good way to go.
And FWIW, I also support INCREASING the population representative in the House. The current cap of 437 has not served us well with the expanding US population, and there’s now over 700k citizens per representative. That’s far too many to get voices heard, and one rep covers far too many disparate people. And it also in the House increases influence of smaller states (to a minimum of 1/437th).
I believe the cap should be raised to a very large number, perhaps several thousand. It may no longer be possible to have the entire House convene in one building, but technology has solved that problem. If you have one representative for every say 10,000-25,000 citizens, it becomes much easier for a representative to truly represent their citizens in detail and gives a citizen much greater access to his or her representatives.
There are simple and solid answers to this. First of all, dozens of other countries make it work. So there’s nothing magical that needs to be done. Second, the Bill of Rights is there to protect the minority from the majority. It’s also there to protect the people from the government, which is partly synonymous. Third, right now everyone in the minority in a winner-take-all state is being disenfranchised. My vote never mattered, not once in my entire life. I think that’s far more important than rural voters having cool voting power. At least they would still have some voting power, whereas I have none.
That’s what the Senate is for. Two senators per state regardless of population. Wyoming has as much of a say as California does.
And what of the House? It’s largely based on population. If the White House and the House of Representatives are both population heavy then the Senate is entirely outnumbered.
The point is supposed to be that the House is population based, the Senate is state based, and the Presidency is somewhere in the middle.
In all honesty, that should change as well. I don’t think that’s doing any good, either. It gives people with completely backward and insane ideas the impression that their positions should be on equal footing with normal people’s ideas.
You should read what the electoral college does, because that’s not what it does.
Not the previous commenter, but I’m pretty certain that the, apparently fictional book, that Leave Burton showed on either The Daily Show, or Last Week Tonight, entitled It’s all Because of Racism, would cover what the EC’s actual purpose is. Though in this particular case it may be fairer to say classism.
Sure, then we can have another republican get elected against the will of the people. Clearly rural concerns are more important than preventing authoritarian idiots like trump from being able to undemocratically take power.
So the people in cities should just be worth less when they vote? It’s a federal vote for a federal office, everyone in the country should count the same.
The individual states already have their own powers which make sure the federal government doesn’t make decisions that are bad for those states. And each county and town have their own governments that pass local laws.
I’ve also heard this argument so many times but I haven’t heard any actual examples.
and what has that gotten us? rural communities are subsidized out the wazoo as the urban centers across America are strangled and starved. as the more powerful minority of people is catered too
It’s almost like many people are getting taxed w/o proper representation…
Even if the 10 largest cities all voted Democrat that would only account for 8% of the vote. And not everyone votes the same way in a city either. There are plenty of republicans voting in major cities but their vote doesn’t matter because of the college. Long Island went to Trump. NYC still got 400,000 votes for Trump. All this means is more people get a voice.
As opposed to now where like 10 states are tossups and the rest are locked in?
Which would be replaced with “Can the Democrat win California by a large enough margin?”
Which was literally the case when people complain about Clinton winning the popular vote in 2016 - across the 49 states that aren’t California more people voted for Trump, but she won California by such a large margin that she won the popular vote because of California alone. Same thing in 2000, where Gore’s popular vote lead was smaller than his margin in CA.
Learning that it was so rich white people in the south could substitute the votes of newly freed black slaves with theirs is what got me.
All this shit is because they were too fucking nice to the slavers.
Should have solved that problem back then.
Note how racist and evil the south still is, and compare it to Germany, and they had 1/3 the time to get better.
