"...overflowing with foulmouthed ignorance."
http://www.irongarmx.net/phpBB2/
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ ... ile-rubble[A]t the sub-presidential level, the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that's essentially a smoking pile of rubble.
Republicans control the House, and they control the Senate. District lines are drawn in such a way that the median House district is far more conservative than the median American voter -- resulting in situations like 2012 where House Democrats secured more votes than House Republicans but the GOP retained a healthy majority. The Senate, too, is in effect naturally gerrymandered to favor Republicans. Two years from now the Democratic Party will need to fight to retain seats in very difficult states like North Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Indiana, and Missouri along with merely contestable ones in places like Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
In state government things are worse, if anything. The GOP now controls historical record number of governors' mansions, including a majority of New England governorships. Tuesday's election swapped around a few state legislative houses but left Democrats controlling a distinct minority. The same story applies further down ballot, where most elected attorneys general, insurance commissioners, secretaries of state, and so forth are Republicans. [...]
Meanwhile, Democrats' very weakness down ballot threatens to breed more weakness. The 2010 midterm elections went very poorly for Democrats, pushing the blue-to-purple states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio into total Republican control. In all three states, the new GOP regimes used their newfound clout to enact anti-union measures. Those measures, by weakening the progressive infrastructure in the states, helped contribute to an ongoing reddening trend that reached its fruition in Trump seizing those states' electoral votes.
This same basic pattern threatens to reassert itself across large swaths of the country.
It's less straightforward that the popular vote count suggests. The popular vote count itself is a function of the Electoral College system. The vote count with the Electoral College is not necessarily what it would be without the Electoral College.dead man walking wrote:bottom line is hillary got 2 million more votes than the other bleach blonde running for pres.
so it's not entirely straightforward.
Yes, but try to think about this... what if some people in states like California, Massachusetts, etc. just didn't vote because they knew there was no way Trump would win their state even if they voted?dead man walking wrote:did she get more votes?
yes or no?
Well putPinky wrote:The popular vote count itself is a function of the Electoral College system. The vote count with the Electoral College is not necessarily what it would be without the Electoral College.
Exactly. Something like 57% of eligible voters actually cast votes. For many of them they choose not to vote because we have the electoral college. Others just don't care. It's really hard to say what would have happened if the rules were changed. The way they campaigned would have been completely different for sure.Fuzzy Dunlop wrote:Yes, but try to think about this... what if some people in states like California, Massachusetts, etc. just didn't vote because they knew there was no way Trump would win their state even if they voted?dead man walking wrote:did she get more votes?
yes or no?
c'mon dude, you're smarter than this.
No. It's not "winning" when you make up your own rules post facto. Like me saying, admit it, the Panthers won where it really counted.dead man walking wrote:so based on what people have said, while squirming to avoid a direct answer. yes, she won more votes.
it that really so difficult to admit?
How many Hillary voters in California didn't vote because she was automatically going to win the state?Fuzzy Dunlop wrote:Yes, but try to think about this... what if some people in states like California, Massachusetts, etc. just didn't vote because they knew there was no way Trump would win their state even if they voted?dead man walking wrote:did she get more votes?
yes or no?
c'mon dude, you're smarter than this.
Agreed, it could end up providing benefit to either party. My point is that the popular vote doesn't mean shit when everybody voted based on the electoral college premise.milosz wrote:How many Hillary voters in California didn't vote because she was automatically going to win the state?Fuzzy Dunlop wrote:Yes, but try to think about this... what if some people in states like California, Massachusetts, etc. just didn't vote because they knew there was no way Trump would win their state even if they voted?dead man walking wrote:did she get more votes?
yes or no?
c'mon dude, you're smarter than this.
replace California and win with Texas and lose
replace Hillary with Trump and California with Texas
Lots of what-ifs, but there's no reason to believe a shift to the popular vote would be a boon to either party. Each of them has locked-in states that leads to supporters or opponents choosing not to vote because their vote is irrelevant.
Apparently Dems should have a supermajority in the CA legislaturemilosz wrote:It still means something - it means that more Americans chose her. There's no legal weight behind that but it should color the political landscape.
More Americans voted for Democrats this time around in the Senate (by an enormous margin) as well, as has become common for the last 25 years. It's the irony of the narrative of poor put upon rurals being held back by them educated urban elites - the system is rigged, rigged to be a boon to the shitholes of America.