Not to be a gotcha ahole, but being a gotcha ahole…
[/quote]
Note the second half of the sentence. Fascist or.
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And the DNC gets to see how bad things get when they back a shit candidate.
Lets get the blame where it belongs.
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[quote=“SeamusAMurphy, post:155, topic:92510”]
Well, until the race-based internment camps show up, I’m not going to assume they are a fact.
Openly racist and sexist remarks are true. That isn’t what I think a good portion of people voted for/against. I think it was their economic interests, which have been outrageously distorted for a good long time.
[/quote]This is all horseshit.
You don’t get to say, yeah Trump campaigned on Muslim registrations, walls with Mexico, etc. but what people really wanted was a Bernie style return to pre-Reagan liberal economics even though the voted for the most extreme version of Reaganomics ever. The only thing the voters even clashed with the establishment on was free trade agreements. The majority of voters did not vote based on free trade agreements, and even if they did it was with a tacit approval of our nation’s leader being racist, sexist, and facist. Period.
[quote=“SeamusAMurphy, post:155, topic:92510”]
The nuke thing you attribute to Trump is B.S. though: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/05/25/479498018/obamas-nuclear-paradox-pushing-for-cuts-agreeing-to-upgrades
The Democrat establishment love nukes, they love war, they love the military industrial complex, and they LOVE upward redistribution of wealth.
[/quote]This refutes nothing I said, which is that Trump campaigned on increasing the nuclear arsenal. Trump said he wants to increase the nuclear warhead count and equip our allies with a larger nuclear stockpile (or enable them to possess them to begin with). On top of it all, our nuclear stockpile is protected behind a laughable infrastructure, and it needed investment. It was a huge issue talked about a few years ago during the Obama administration and he agreed to expand nuclear infrastructure with some delivery systems as well as spending money improving infrastructure in other countries. Obama reduced the worldwide nuclear stockpile a small amount, less than he wanted but more than Trump will since he wants to expand it.
[quote=“SeamusAMurphy, post:155, topic:92510”]
I don’t think you realize that the Democrats are not the progressives. Trump and the Republicans aren’t either, but nobody falsely thinks they are.
[/quote]Nothing I has said was even close to implying this. What I said is that progressive voters staying home did not cause HIllary’s loss and I pointed out you are completely excusing people for their actions in voting Trump because you are assuming they want progressive leadership despite having no proof progressive policy works when Democrats moved center-right to win any elections to begin with.
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Don’t worry. The right wing is ready to compromise. Forty five percent, if they get to choose which forty five percent.
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[quote=“anon3894935, post:161, topic:92510”]
Are there any major downsides to these ideas?
[/quote]The GOP would be decimated, which is why they did the opposite.
And if anyone takes that to mean I think it is a downside…
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I don’t know that to be true, neither do you. I’m not particularly impressed that half the country is populated with raving racists. There is a sizable minority, I think, but a lot of the same folks who voted for Obama ended up voting for Trump. That’s proof of racism?
I think why Hillary and lots of Democrats have lost seats over the last number of years is far more complicated than “Trump appeals to racists”.
It may be that they were shit candidates.
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Not half. 20%.
Worth a read:
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Sounds to me like all this shit cost her the election. Saying *** cost her the election, where *** is some secondary or tertiary side effect of her being a horrible candidate, and her and her cronies doing all kinds of slimy shit in the primaries, is just another way for them to try to shift the blame, so they don’t have to think about maybe learning anything from this.
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[quote=“SeamusAMurphy, post:167, topic:92510”]
I don’t know that to be true, neither do you.
[/quote]You are the one’s making claims based on the voter’s voting based on economic reasons over anything else. What I am saying doesn’t matter if they did or did not.
[quote=“SeamusAMurphy, post:167, topic:92510”]
I’m not particularly impressed that half the country is populated with raving racists. There is a sizable minority, I think, but a lot of the same folks who voted for Obama ended up voting for Trump. That’s proof of racism?
[/quote]I don’t have proof this is legit, but you should be able to connect the dots here.
[quote=“SeamusAMurphy, post:167, topic:92510”]
I think why Hillary and lots of Democrats have lost seats over the last number of years is far more complicated than “Trump appeals to racists”.
It may be that they were shit candidates.
[/quote]Yes, every Democrat that lost was a shit candidate and economic anxiety is why all independents were drummed out of politics and the GOP controls all levels of government. Because the Democrats are that shit, and they should have run progressive populists instead.
But this is also not what the conversation was about as it spirals out of control, because you yourself have come full circle on saying “50% of Trump voters are deplorable.”
I’m with @anon78706664 here. There was only one true write-in:
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It was the stay-at-home’s fault, it was Obamacare’s fault, it was Hillary’s fault. All of these might seem like relevant questions, but they are fundamentally local. You’ve got to look at Trump’s victory in the overall global context: Brexit, the recent Italian makeover referendum that was unexpectedly defeated by plebiscite, same with the leadership-negotiated peace plan in Columbia that was rejected, a right-wing strongman elected in the Philippines, an authoritarian Hindu nationalist in India, Turkey of course now, even Bibi Netinyahu for that matter. Whatever the hell is going on in the world, it’s not the fault of the U.S. Democratic Party.
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Not that I know all that much, but I agree that “purity” was not a huge driver. Much bigger was that voters want to be excited, or they’ll go home. Which is pathetic. You want excitement, do motocross or community theater or something. I am reminded of the standard showbiz story of the network executive who won’t cast a woman in a show because he doesn’t want to f***k her. If there’s anything to American Exceptionalism, it’s the absolute demand for drama on the part of the voter.
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majority
I remember you saying “most”, which is so wrong I was actually trying to be kind to you.
So speak for yourself, back off of the bs and have a great day! (parp)
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The need to be enthused - emotionally enthused - about a candidate is not a function of “American Exceptionalism”. It’s a function of human nature and a characteristic of democracies the world over. It’s also not something to dismiss as “pathetic”. A voter’s emotional response to a candidate is commonly sparked by that person’s character: vigor, attitude, engagement with the electorate… etc. The emotional response is impacted by qualities that make a good leader.
Voters were unenthused by Hillary Clinton. Not because the usual suspects smeared her, but because she exuded disdain for the people whose votes she needed. She dragged the rest of the party down with her. She is to blame. The Democratic leadership is to blame. Not some imaginary slacker-youth cohort dreamed up by her unhappy partisans to excuse the obvious venality and self-dealing of the Dems.
Back in the day, the era of Tip O’Neill, we had some spectacular corruption in the Democratic Party. But, they didn’t bore us, and they knew better than to display their contempt for the rubes as readily as she and her insiders did throughout her campaign.
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Yes. I won’t touch (1) or (3) here, but (2) instant runoff fails several of the traditional “goodness” criteria for voting methods; there are some interesting ways to game it. You can look this up in any discussion of election systems. However, for me the biggest issue is practical: to tabulate an election - especially one with several candidates in a large district - using instant runoff is complicated enough that it can’t be done by hand; it is an iterative process usually done by computer and is not transparent and very hard to audit. Its success requires a very high degree of confidence in the people conducting the election, as well as their IT staff. We don’t have that.
It also can’t really be done at the state level for the presidential election (or the county level for state elections). You would need to do a single tabulation at the national level from all the ballots. One of the problems with IRV is that it fails the “consistency condition”, which means that a candidate who wins in all 50 states by IRV might not be the IRV winner in a single national tabulation.
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I didn’t believe you, but you’re right! She got more than 20 million votes more than her husband did in 1992!
Hillary Clinton 2016: 65,844,954
Bill Clinton 1992: 44,909,806
Obama beat her both times with 69,499,428 and 65,918,507 votes in 2008 and 2012 respectively.
There is a tiny, tiny silver lining here that voter participation rates in the US has been climbing significantly since 1988 at least.
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Hands and eyeballs. With double the per-capita turnout of an American election.
They use computers to do the preference math in the Senate (proportional representation is the complication there), but the actual ballots are still counted manually.
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Although I’d say that raw votes are a pretty meaningless comparison across different times, because the population is, you know, growing.
It’s a lot more depressing when you put it this way:
Hillary managed to get 20 million more votes than her husband back in 1992! But the US population has grown by 80 million since then.
You can also frame it nicely again though: Hillary won 5% more of the popular vote than Bill did. On the other hand she won a lot less of the electoral college (150 fewer EC votes) and that’s what actually matters.Basically numbers are fun.
Bullshit. Anyone who can’t examine the 2 choices they had in this general election, pick the least bad, and just hold their nose and vote is petulant and/or ignorant. Yes, the system is bad and she could have been a better candidate, but she was clearly a better choice for the values of a majority of Americans than Trump. Yet enough of those people stayed home for him to win. There’s no acceptable excuses of “we weren’t excited” or “she wasn’t perfect”. He was appalling, that should have been enough, because those were the choices.
The only perfect candidate is the one you don’t know much about, one reason why Obama was so successful. We have created a electoral climate where only a blank slate is viable. Trump for all his exposition was a blank slate because he had no actual governing record. Gore and Kerry and McCain were senators with long voting records to mine for weapons against them. GWB was governor of a weak governor state, not much to hang on him.
This is the way to do it without touching the Constitution. State winner take all is state based. Given that the GOP has won 2 races of the last 5 without winning the popular vote, it’s unlikely a Red state will pass this anytime soon.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It has been enacted into law in 11 states with 165 electoral votes (CA, DC, HI, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NY, RI, VT, WA). It will take effect when enacted by states with 105 more electoral votes. Most recently, the bill was passed by a bipartisan 40–16 vote in the Republican-controlled Arizona House, 28–18 in Republican-controlled Oklahoma Senate, 57–4 in Republican-controlled New York Senate, and 37–21 in Democratic-controlled Oregon House. It has passed one house in 12 additional states with 96 electoral votes (AR, AZ, CO, CT, DE, ME, MI, NC, NM, NV, OK, OR)
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BTW: how instant runoff voting works in practice.
The typical number of candidates for a parliamentary seat is a dozen or less. Two major parties, a couple of significant minor parties, some trivial minor parties plus a couple of local independents.
The ballot lists these dozen names, with an open box beside each. You use a pencil to number them in order of preference; 1 for your favourite, 2 for your next-best, etc.
At counting time, they begin by just throwing them into piles according to the first preference. Once that’s done, they remove the smallest pile and redistribute those ballots according to their second preferences. This process just repeats (remove smallest pile, redistribute according to next preference) until one of the piles is big enough to be more than 50% of the electorate.
It really isn’t that complicated.
The whole thing is done by hand. The AEC hires people to do the counting, and the parties send in volunteer scrutineers to watch them do it.
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