It's the electoral college that is causing all the Democratic

[rainy]

hand wringing. The leaders want to go after the rural white vote and there are lots of articles about giving that up and articles about pursuing the rural white vote.

The reason for all the confusion is because the rural white have a huge advantage due to the electoral college. One of their votes carries a lot more weight then one city dweller's vote. THIS is what we should be talking about!!!!

[Funtatlaguy]

1. True.

And many GOP run states try to suppress the urban vote with fewer voting places, fewer machines that lead to longer lines, voter role purges, etc.

[Cosmocat]

2. Not really

The EV effects only the POTUS.

Look past 1600 PA and you see republicans with full control of congress and most state governorships and legislatures.

Democratic hand wringing is due to the general feckless state of the party.

The primary need is for elected Ds to grow spines and Ds in general getting some sense of togetherness in messaging, going out staking our flag and going directly at republicans.

[Hortensis]

6. Yes and no. The bad guys are winning because of the power

of fear and negativism as tools in an era of rampant change that frightens people. And they're bigger tools than ever before in the history of our nation thanks to modern communications and huge money allowed in politics, both of which are being fully deployed.

Political scientists now know that one of the most powerful means of spreading lies has been the entertaining, malicious email, the one too good not to spread around to all one's friends until within a few days they're in millions of homes. Compared to other social media, almost occult, under the radar, a true "grassroots" dissemination of new "information" that spreads like wildfire. .

If you'd to try being "feckless," as you put it, maybe send out a couple emails yourself among some own acquaintances. Perhaps the current one about a dying CIA agent who confessed to blowing up WTC Building 7 on 9/11 through controlled demolition. Or maybe the one claiming Hillary sided with the Kremlin against sanctions after they paid $500K to Bill? And, at the same time one of your own explaining the Democratic Party's plan for massive investment in infrastructure and the hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs that will create, or any of your own favorite positions. Then check with your acquaintances to find out which they remember, talked about and forwarded on. Then come up with a new word to describe your experience.

Being a "feckless" idiot isn't your problem. Being unable to cage the forces of evil is.

We've never been here before. The Republicans are in the same position as drug cartels flooding the nation with a highly addictive drug that's very dangerous but so new that it's not been made illegal. And one that while the Republicans control government never will be.

[burnbaby]

3. each state

should have equal representation. CA I think gets 50 electoral votes NH gets 3 (I'm not checking these numbers going off on memory)

We may not like the out come of what happened. I would rather see us get a good message out than change the rules so CA and NYC pick the president every 4 years

[thucythucy]

17. Why should all states have "equal representation"?

That is anti-Democratic on the face of it.

California has many many times more people than New Hampshire, which has disproportionate power in national elections due not only to the electoral college, but also because the way the primaries are scheduled.

What makes voters in New Hampshire more qualified, more important, than voters in California, New York, Illinois, Texas, Massachusetts, etc.?

Personally, I'd have no problem with "CA and NYC" picking our presidents, as opposed to New Hampshire and Wyoming, considering that their populations are larger and far more diverse than most of the small (in population) red states that pick them instead. If the nation followed the lead of CA and NYC, we wouldn't have had Bush II or Trump (both of whom were installed, not by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College).

The Electoral College is state of the art democracy--if you still want to live in 1789. It's an anachronism, an embarrassment, and in the case of the 2016 election, a disaster for the nation and the world.

[former9thward]

18. CA chooses to have its primary late.

It could change it at any time. The legislature has the power to do that.

[thucythucy]

19. New Hampshire legislators have said

that they will ALWAYS be first. If any state should schedule its primary earlier, New Hampshire legislators will reschedule so as still to be first. Primary politics are a major economic engine for New Hampshire--the four year cycle of candidates, advertising, journalists flocking to the area to curry small town voters.

I'd like to see this changed, but am realistic enough to doubt it ever will. I'd have no problem with California (which has a larger economy than Russia) having way more say in our national politics than it does. As it is, thanks to the Electoral College, Russian oligarchs have more power to determine our leaders than American voters.

[former9thward]

20. CA could be second then.

What would be wrong with that? It is better than being almost dead last like it is now. Schedule it a day after New Hampshire. If CA wanted to be first then its legislature could say they are going to be first no matter what. What would NH do about that? Are you saying NH has more power than CA?

[thucythucy]

23. I'd have no problem with California being second or first.

It would probably give us a better range of candidates, and fewer extreme right wingers.

New Hampshire has a disproportionate impact under the current system. The Electoral College system means each individual New Hampshire voter carries more weight that each individual California voter. And the New Hampshire primary skews the whole field of candidates toward the right. This latter is slowly changing as demographics in New Hampshire change, but as it is the state is more white, rural, and conservative than the nation at large.

This conservative over-representation is also present in the Senate. Two Senators for each state means that Wyoming gets two Senators, even though it has a smaller population than the District of Columbia (which has none).

Each state's electoral college total is tabulated by adding up the number of Senators plus the number of Representatives. So no matter how tiny a state's population may be--Wyoming being a prime example--it still gets three Electoral College votes no matter what.

An antiquated and clearly dysfunctional way to choose our presidents. Without it, we would have had a Gore victory in 2000, and a Clinton victory in 2016. Instead, we have the current shit-storm, which will set the nation back decades.

[csziggy]

21. Congress is a balance between the idea that each state have the same representation

And that the population be represented proportionally.

The Senate is based on the first view, the House on the second.

While we may not like the results sometimes, overall this system has worked pretty good over the history of the country.

In my opinion, the biggest problem now is at the state level with gerrymandering that makes votes in Democratic precincts count less than votes in Republican ones. The DNC puts more emphasis on elections for Congress than they do on local and state elections. As a result two thirds of the state governments are in the hands of Republicans so voting districts are determined by Republicans.

Check out the Red Map Strategy - a good article about how it was done is "Drawing the Line: How redistricting turned America from blue to red." By Elizabeth Kolbert (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/ratfcked-the-influence-of-redistricting) which is a review of the book “Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy” by David Daley.

An earlier article on the subject is "GOP REDMAP Memo Admits Gerrymandering To Thank For Congressional Election Success" By Nick Wing, Updated Jan 17, 2013 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/gop-redmap-memo-gerrymandering_n_2498913.html).

The Democratic Party KNEW that this was happening - the GOP was not secretive about their goals - but did NOTHING. In fact at the same time the GOP was openly working on taking control of state legislatures so they could indulge in gerrymandering, the DNC abandoned Howard Dean's fifty state strategy and left the country more vulnerable to the GOP tactics.

We, as Democrats, need to work on the local races, need to work on getting people registered and getting people out to vote (the abysmal voting turnout is embarrassing for our country), and need to make sure voting districts are fair so that it does not take significantly more votes to elect representatives for one party over another.

[thucythucy]

24. Excellent post. nt

[Lurks Often]

4. It's been talked about and the Constitutional amendment to change it is extremely unlikely

The small states, Democratic or Republican, are not going to vote for a Constitutional amendment that puts all the power into a handful of heavily populated states.

You probably have a better chance of winning $50 million dollars in the lottery then seeing that Constitutional amendment then getting the 2/3rds approval in Congress and the 3/4's approval from the states.

[treestar]

16. It does not put all the power there

It would not be by state then. With the EC, the small states have too much power and they won't give that up.

[rainy]

5. More and more people are flocking

to the cities and therefore will be less and less represented in government because their vote is worth less and less.

[randr]

7. We need to shame them

The EC is nothing more than counting votes on a curve. Giving a leg up to the slower among us so to speak.
I don't think the conservatives would like the comparison.

[nikibatts]

8. Yeah. We know that. We also know they are acting against their own interests.

Unemployed, uneducated, drugged up folks who are prone to bigotry are easy targets for fascism. Just look at Russia today. Drunken, drugged, unemployed just ripe for picking the country's coffers clean spreading the wealth through their military industrial complex, and laundering their money through the US banking system. Remember the Yeltsin years? Putin is teaching Trump how to do the same thing.

Many won't want to admit it but the US oligarch are now using drugs and alcohol and the desperation of low or no income against rural whites just like they used them against inner city blacks.

[rainy]

11. They do vote against themselves:

Reason: God, Guns and racism and false patriotism.

[Little Star]

9. We need to elect our presidents by the popular vote, imho.

[rainy]

12. I agree.

[melm00se]

15. See comment #4 above n/t

[sfwriter]

10. As an urban city dweller I agree.

Look at what the yahoo!'s have done in Missouri. Look at Gerrymandering.

[Initech]

13. As long as the GOP owns the clergy, we'll never get their vote.

The sad thing is that rural Christian fundamentalists have been lied to for so long, that they'll never adopt left wing values. It's an absolute waste of time to court their vote. The sooner we realize this, the better.

[L. Coyote]

14. You exagerrate. Small state votes only carry a little more weight. There biggest advantage is

in the se4anate.

The real problem with the electoral college is it makes it easy to steal the election. Only 40,000 voters put Trump over the top and altered the outcome of a 3,000,000 vote victory.

[thucythucy]

25. An excellent observation:

"The real problem with the electoral college is it makes it easy to steal the election."

[JoeStuckInOH]

22. No... The EC's entire purpose IS to equalize voting power between rural vs urban people.

The purpose of the electoral college IS to attempt to give someone in a big city or populous state the same voting power on a national level as someone in a rural area or small state. In the US, there are 538 electors and if distributed evenly across the entire US population... each elector should represent approximately 600,000 voters. The EC's only real problem is that its numbers are based on old ass census data and recent population moves to (and away from) certain states is not well represented. So we now have citizens in states like VT/DE/WY with 3 times the per-person voting power versus states like CA/FL/TX/NY.

For example, each elector in VT represents about 208,000 voters and each elector in NY represents nearly 690,000 votors. A citizen's vote in VT has roughly 3+ times the power of a New Yorker's vote. But with current census data plugged in, the EC is actually designed to give each states' electors the same number of represented citizens under their elector vote. Problem is that our government has to update the number of EC allocations in each state to the most recent census data.

So are the electoral votes distributed fairly? No, not even close. Is this "what causes our Democratic hand wringing"? No, or at least it's not a significant factor. At the end of the day, the fairness of EC distribution would not have mattered in the 2016 presidential election. At least not with the winner-take-all style of state's electoral votes. Even if each elector in the nation gave each citizen the same voting power by all representing an identical number of constituents (or as near perfect as whole integer numbers allows us)... Trump STILL WOULD HAVE WON.

I found this graphic below somewhere several months ago that looks at the 2016 electoral college results and what the results would have been with FAIRLY distributed EC numbers. It's not the EC distribution that causes the Democratic hand wringing... it's the winner-take-all style of states awarding 100% of its EC votes.

People always look at CA and NY and imagine all the EC votes we're getting cheated out of, but never consider the blue states that SHOULD lose EC votes or the red states that SHOULD gain EC votes. The summarized version of the picture below is:

Hillary gains electoral votes in: CA, NY, IL, NJ and VA.
Hillary loses electoral votes in: CT, NV, NM, HI, NH, ME, RI, DE, DC and VT
Trump gains electoral votes in: TX, FL, PA, OH, GA, NC and AZ
Trump loses electoral votes in: IA, UT, MS, AR, KS, NE, WV, ID, MT, SD, ND, AK and WY

--== And it's all about a wash for the 2016 election no matter how fair the EC votes are divided ==--

[thucythucy]

26. But giving each state a minumum of three electoral votes

(no matter how small its population) skews the count in favor of small, relatively unpopulated states, which tend to be more rural (and more white).

Wyoming is a good example. Two thirds of its electoral college votes are based on nothing more than the antiquated formula: the number of Representatives PLUS two Senators.

If the Electoral College were based entirely on the number of Representatives alone, it would be less skewed.