2020 US Election

Electoral College has evolved over the life of the Consitution but TLDR and to quote Life of Brian: "Cause it's written"

  On 11/4/2020 at 6:33 PM, scumtron said:

I really don't get the winner takes all for each state. If it's 60/40 in a state, wouldn't it be more beneficial and representative for the population to let the losing party get around 40% of the electoral votes? What's the rationale with winner takes it all?

theres no sense trying to rationalize it- the electoral college is still around because it is politically advantageous to small states (mostly republican) to keep it in place.  and the political will to change would have to come from the senate, which already overly represents small states (2 senators per state no matter the population).  the electoral college, at this point in time, upholds racist and monied interests, valuing the votes of white america more than diverse cities where there are actually  more people

  On 11/4/2020 at 6:33 PM, scumtron said:

I really don't get the winner takes all for each state. If it's 60/40 in a state, wouldn't it be more beneficial and representative for the population to let the losing party get around 40% of the electoral votes? What's the rationale with winner takes it all?

there are a couple states that split the electoral votes proportionally but they're the exception not the rule. it's dumb. we should get rid of the electoral college. it was set up by the ruling class when the constitution was written to ensure the "plebs" didn't take over. 

well so much for a potential "blue wave" as had been hyped in recent months. it all looks about the same. even turtle man managed to slither through. 

absolutely mind blowing that after dealing with the worst president in the country's history, people still lined up to vote for him. I'm pretty sure that Hitler could run today as a republican. it really doesn't matter who it is, people are going to vote along party lines no matter what because they've been brainwashed into it. do not ever think for yourselves, because of some notion you can't even explain rationally to anyone tells you to. human beings deserve all the horrible stuff that happens to us. history teaches nothing. fuck this.

  On 11/4/2020 at 6:44 PM, zero said:

well so much for a potential "blue wave" as had been hyped in recent months. it all looks about the same. even turtle man managed to slither through. 

absolutely mind blowing that after dealing with the worst president in the country's history, people still lined up to vote for him. I'm pretty sure that Hitler could run today as a republican. it really doesn't matter who it is, people are going to vote along party lines no matter what because they've been brainwashed into it. do not ever think for yourselves, because of some notion you can't even explain rationally to anyone tells you to. human beings deserve all the horrible stuff that happens to us. history teaches nothing. fuck this.

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hitler would be called a socialist and run out of the republican party. 

  On 11/4/2020 at 5:59 PM, hijexx said:

I thought Texas awarded electoral votes based on the state's popular vote? They do it based on districts?

He's referring to internal districts within Texas, so for things like seats to the Texas State House of Representatives. It always winds up working out to get districts that would likely go Democrat gets chopped up so the Democrat votes are divided and Republicans win.

Gerrymandering sucks, fuck Tom Delay.

  On 11/4/2020 at 6:49 PM, Taupe Beats said:

He's referring to internal districts within Texas, so for things like seats to the Texas State House of Representatives. It always winds up working out to get districts that would likely go Democrat gets chopped up so the Democrat votes are divided and Republicans win.

Gerrymandering sucks, fuck Tom Delay.

Yeah I know about districts and gerrymandering. When I said flip I meant flip the state's vote for President.

  On 11/4/2020 at 5:40 PM, ignatius said:

bernie's prediction from a while back going viral. 

 

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Thanks for that! Explained it to me in simple monkey terms. Now back to my covid home cave. 

Americans never fail to surprise on how backwards they are. Not only making an election close where human disgrace Donald Trump is a candidate but that the votes take forever to count. Like what the hell. What a shithole country.

Also Biden will be a lame duck president until the Dems can take back the senate since turtle Mitch and the GOP senators will not pass anything. This will of course further prove the right-wing talking point about the government being useless. The Dems of course are unable to make it clear that the GOP is at fault for the inevitable economic crash and mass deaths from covid.

  On 11/4/2020 at 6:44 PM, zero said:

it really doesn't matter who it is, people are going to vote along party lines no matter what because they've been brainwashed into it.

I would say this is much more true for Republicans than Democrats.

Only guessing but I'll bet that in 2016 there were many more people who didn't necessarily like Trump but voted for him just cuz he was the Republican candidate (or for guns and/or religion), where a lot of the Democrats who didn't like Hillary either didn't vote or wrote somebody in.  It's an unfortunate side effect of having one party who is generally more educated, enlightened, and engaged vs. uneducated & easily persuaded.

A lot of dems stayed home too and didn't vote because they thought Hillary had it in the bag and/or underestimated Trump. I know educated and enaged people who had visceral hatred for all things Clinton in 2016 and voted against her, not necessarily for Trump. Stuff that goes back into the 90's that was before my time.

The Dems better come up with some better candidates for the future elections than old farts from the establishment. As the GOP descend further towards fascism and the best Dems can offer is the status quo it's not going to inspire future voters one bit. Perhaps in a few decades they can offer a progressive platform.

The electoral college made sense a couple hundred years ago to offset populations of such large areas. People outside of America forget just how massive of a country this is. And while I agree that it is an outdated format, there are tons who don't believe that. Republicans have even said out loud that the more people that vote, the less chance they have of winning. That is why they have set up leaders in the Post Office and other areas to make counting votes difficult while Democrats have just said, go fucking vote.

IMO, in order to fix many of the issues we have here, we need to abolish the electoral college which would then allow for a legitimate third party. That said, they need to also abolish all term limits so you can't be a career politician and have major ties to giant corporations. These would help turn the country in a little more of a progressive direction. The problem is over 67,000,000 americans are not really in favor of progress.

the gop mostly likely remaining in control of the senate is a disastrous result, and will severely limit any efforts to make the usa a more equitable and democratic country.  granting PR and DC statehood (4 more senate seats), and then inspiring a younger generation to vote, could have gotten rid of the clear power bias which currently exists, paving the way to get rid of policy that blatantly upholds monied and/or white interests.

also agree everything @jules said.  i am dissappoint

It's all the brain-poisoned Fox News watching boomers ruining any chance of progress in the US. 

edit: Speaking of poison, I wonder if all the leaded gas that was around when the boomers were growing up has caused them to basically ruin the planet.

  On 11/4/2020 at 7:17 PM, azatoth said:

The Dems better come up with some better candidates for the future elections than old farts from the establishment.

Which leads to my question: why is Bernie Sanders out? Didn't he have very good support?

  On 11/4/2020 at 7:31 PM, cichlisuite said:

Which leads to my question: why is Bernie Sanders out? Didn't he have very good support?

The establishment Dems got scared and did some ratfuckery to get Biden as their nominee. Question is would a scary socialist grandpa have a chance against a fashy doofus. You know the right-wing media would go all out on SOCIALISMS WILL EAT YOUR BABIES!!!1 scare-mongering and as we've seen some are just unreachable and it would probably have gone to Trump. Or then the Dems having a candidate, who actually had a platform that is actually progressive and tangibly meaningful to a lot of people, that could have energized people much more than now.  Instead they offered a mummified milquetoast centrist and a platform that is as meh as possible. 

  On 11/4/2020 at 7:39 PM, azatoth said:

The establishment Dems got scared and did some ratfuckery to get Biden as their nominee. Question is would a scary socialist grandpa have a chance against a fashy doofus. You know the right-wing media would go all out on SOCIALISMS WILL EAT YOUR BABIES!!!1 scare-mongering and as we've seen some are just unreachable and it would probably have gone to Trump. Or then the Dems having a candidate who actually had a platform that is actually progressive and tangibly meaningful to a lot of people could have energized people much more than now. 

well, black people in the south supported biden heavily over sanders and other candidates in the primary and that kind of sealed the deal. also, young people didn't come out to vote for sanders. he got more votes of young people but biden got some and most people over 40 voted for biden in the primaries. so, ratfuckery aside, biden got more votes by far. i'd have loved a bernie candidacy but it'd be tough slog against trump. bernie would have to sell his message harder than anyone and it would've been tough during covid. a lot of boomers don't like bernie and there is such rapid paralyzing fear of bernie amongst right leaning voters and GOP voters. the "he's  socialist" thing stuck really hard. 

  On 11/4/2020 at 7:31 PM, cichlisuite said:

Which leads to my question: why is Bernie Sanders out? Didn't he have very good support?

The Democratic Party elite and media conspired against him to basically pretend like he lost before the primary even finished, then encouraged him to drop out of the race due to coronavirus concerns, rather than expend large amounts of resources redesigning the primary voting system to allow everyone to continue voting.  They did this under the justification that Biden was the "most electable".  Electable my ass why isn't it a landslide victory?  Fuck Democrats.

If you think the party and msm hated Bernie, what they did to Andrew Yang was atrocious. They'd all leave him out of the infographics of the Democratic side and not even mention him.

  On 11/4/2020 at 7:49 PM, hijexx said:

If you think the party and msm hated Bernie, what they did to Andrew Yang was atrocious. They'd all leave him out of the infographics of the Democratic side and not even mention him.

Yang's a libertarian techbro fuck him

  On 11/4/2020 at 7:45 PM, cyanobacteria said:

The Democratic Party elite and media conspired against him to basically pretend like he lost before the primary even finished, then encouraged him to drop out of the race due to coronavirus concerns, rather than expend large amounts of resources redesigning the primary voting system to allow everyone to continue voting.  They did this under the justification that Biden was the "most electable".  Electable my ass why isn't it a landslide victory?  Fuck Democrats.

they did get out the message on him pretty early and trashed him leading up to and during the primaries. but americans seem to always vote against their self interests.