Concise 538 live blog post illustrates how fucked up our country is

[NRaleighLiberal]

LEE DRUTMAN
NOV. 3, 10:46 PM
As we watch the results tonight, it’s important to keep in mind that in any other presidential democracy, this would not be a particularly close election. The only thing making this election so close is the Electoral College. Similarly, the only thing making the Senate so close is the small-state bias. If Trump ekes out an Electoral College victory, it will be the third time in six elections that a Republican has won the Electoral College and the presidency while losing the popular vote. Republicans have won the popular vote only once since 1988. And Republican senators have represented a majority of Americans only for one Congress in the past 40 years, despite having a Senate majority more than half that time.

[yardwork]

1. This.

[NoRoadUntravelled]

2. This explains a lot.

nt

[Doodley]

3. Most other Democracies, Trump wouldn't even be on the ballot - he would be too racist, too dishonest

and too stupid to be considered a credible candidate.

[PTWB]

4. I'm a little dubious of anything coming from 538 right now.

While that person’s point is absolutely correct, a lot of us put a lot of faith in their numbers that are, so far, way off.

[frazzled]

5. Well, 538 needs to explain why they had

Biden ahead in the electoral vote six ways to Sunday. Too late to avoid responsibility by blaming the EC alone. Sorry, they (and every other polling aggregator) has some splainin to do. And I, for one, am skeptical in advance of any pretzel-twisting explanation they will give in retrospect.

[NRaleighLiberal]

7. irrespective of the source, they are absolutely correct in the premise.

[frazzled]

9. Their original premise was that Biden had the EV pretty well sewn up

[NRaleighLiberal]

10. the premise that the electoral college is obsolete.

[regnaD kciN]

11. Aggregators have nothing to be ashamed of...

It's the polling organizations themselves that have problems. Unlike in 2016, where the polling results portrayed a tight race with a lot of volatility, and it was the aggregators who put that data together in a form that suggested Clinton had a bigger advantage than she did, this time, the data from the polling organizations all along was clear-cut, consistent...and, as it appears, almost uniformly wrong. Given that, there's no way aggregators could combine empirical data to come up with a result that was other than what everyone was saying.

(I'd add that Nate's observation in the OP had nothing whatsoever to do with "explaining" any errors. It was just a philosophical observation that our system is wildly skewed toward small states, which, in this case, means Republicans.)

[regnaD kciN]

6. A follow-up from one of the other bloggers there...

With the possibility of a split between the Electoral College outcome and the popular vote, I started digging to find out how various politicians justify the Electoral College. To lay my cards on the table, I think that defenses based on states as autonomous political communities are more compelling than defenses based on the particular features of this political moment (say, that the Electoral College protects certain groups of voters like rural voters). Interestingly, one of the strongest defenses of the Electoral College came from now-defeated Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, who said:

“The Electoral College is another unique system the founders created to take into account a state’s population but maintain each state’s unique, independent voice when electing the president. Our founding fathers did not get everything right, but their system did create a union where every single state is appropriately represented in Congress and in the manner in which we elect the president.”

The problem, though, is that that’s not how most Americans think about representation nowadays.

My response to that is that such an attitude might work in a federalist, or more accurately a confederalist system of government, where states were mostly autonomous and the federal government was a less-powerful entity only coordinating matters of national defense and a modicum of rules to allow everybody to get along. But it doesn't work at all when you have a powerful central government that controls much of what goes on -- and especially not one with the potential for a unitary-executive power. In such a nation, that argument falls completely flat and, indeed, is merely a recipe for "tyranny of the minority," which is exactly what we have right now.

[NRaleighLiberal]

8. thanks so much for posting that - it adds a lot.