Kamala Harris’s running mate urges popular vote system but campaign says issue is not part of Democrats’ agenda
Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has called for the electoral college system of electing US presidents to be abolished and replaced with a popular vote principle, as operates in most democracies.
His comments – to an audience of party fundraisers – chime with the sentiments of a majority of American voters but risk destabilising the campaign of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, who has not adopted a position on the matter, despite having previously voiced similar views.
“I think all of us know, the electoral college needs to go,” Walz told donors at a gathering at the home of the California governor, Gavin Newsom. “We need a national popular vote. We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, and win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada, and win.”
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It’s become unpopular with everyone except the people who originally demanded it so they could count their slaves as 3/5 of a vote.
I’m pretty sure it’s still very popular for a lot of Republicans considering that conservatives have only won the popular vote once in the last 35-ish years. The only time they won was George W. Bush’s second term after the events of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Why though? We call baking people bakers, why shouldn’t we call enlaved people slaves?
It’s not as if their circumstances become more human that way.
This very succinctly summarizes what I hate about the “unhoused” brand of pedantry. Pretty sure they want shelter more than some rich college kid making sure everyone on the internet gets their fucking nouns right.
It helps humanize them
It’s just good to reinforce the idea that enslaved people’s were people who were enslaved. Not a profession, slave was not their job, it was their status.
Plus studies have shown that by using these people first language, especially while teaching the subject, results in higher empathy for enslaved people and reminds that their status as a slave was one forced upon them and continually so rather than the simple status they were born with.
It’s not a huge problem or anything, but it isn’t hard to toss in every now and then and only does good.
I think there’s a difference between the two. The term “salve” says nothing about what happened. It just tells you how things are. However, the term “enslaved” clearly indicates that the person used to be free, but was later forced into slavery by someone.
I think it was progressive who demanded it to be 3/5 if then conservative had their way they would happily count slaves as two people. It’s was in their favour to do so. Slaves could vote and it inflated their population count which will grant more seat. I’m neither American nor have I been there.
Nope, but not bad. The free states wanted them to not count for representative purposes, since they couldn’t vote.
From Wikipedia:
Slave holding states wanted their entire population to be counted to determine the number of Representatives those states could elect and send to Congress. Free states wanted to exclude the counting of slave populations in slave states, since those slaves had no voting rights. A compromise was struck to resolve this impasse. The compromise counted three-fifths of each state’s slave population toward that state’s total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives, effectively giving the Southern states more power in the House relative to the Northern states.
