> Not all voters are equal, but if people dont like you, you won't win
Does that sentence not completely contradict itself?
How often in modern times has a Republican president won a majority of the popular vote? Seems like the will of the people is not consistently respected, and even if people like you then you may very well lose. Especially if the people that like you are urban voters.
>The Presidency should not be a popularity contest.
Correct. Well, I mean, popular among the states, but not the people individually. I'm stunned how this is a difficult concept for people. I'd bet the people arguing for popular vote would change their mind in a hot second if LA and NYC went red.
>You might wonder: why would electing the President by popular vote be such a big deal? After all, this is how things are done in the United States (at least technically).
The last two Republican presidents would beg to differ.
> expect if it were popular vote they would play a different game with different policies
Right, and that different game would look nothing like the current Republican Party, hence why it’s a totally fair statement to say that the Republican Party as we know it today would never stay in power in such a system. They’d have to change, and that change would probably make them look a lot more like Democrats.
Put differently, the current politics and policies of the Republican Party only yield electable candidates in a country that gives outsized power to rural voters.
>This is twice in recent memory that the majority of the United States was overruled by the minority.
Which means nothing because they were not playing a popular vote contest. We will never know who would have won, on that day, in a pure popular vote contest.
Winning the popular vote and losing the contest means you miscalculated, and misprovisioned your campaign resources, focusing too heavily on areas you already won.
>if roughly half of the country (or your state) vote for one candidate and roughly half for the other, then it should imply that the opinions of both of these camps are roughly equally valid from the perspective of the society.
Or, it implies that roughly half of society is wrong. More than one genocidal dictator was originally elected by popular vote. We do not need to take as a premise that equal support implies equal value.
>those people may be your neighbours and your colleagues and they have the same right to be there as you do
See, this is exactly the problem. Right-wing cultural opinions tend to define certain groups of people as not having the same right to be there. You cannot simultaneously advocate for tolerance and be totally okay as just a minor difference of opinion with the other side saying that some people should be thrown out.
Also, I had forgotten this (and it was huge at the time, and I voted in those elections, so I should remember), but Bill Clinton didn't win the majority popular vote either. The democrats had a larger popular vote that the republicans, for sure, but not over 50% due to third party / independent candidates.
Contrast that with the last 6 elections where the democratic party has had more than 50% of the popular vote each time.
Ah... And W's second term the republicans had more than 50% of the popular vote...
>Another one would be that one can be elected without the approval of the majority of the people who could vote.
That's simply handled by saying that they should vote.
>one can legally be elected without the having the majority of the counter, valid, votes
How so? If you are referring to the President, did he not win the majority of the valid votes in the population allowed to vote? You could say there is an issue with only allowing a subset of the population to vote, but most people I've seen making such a claims still believe their own limits as for who can vote are valid and have not offered me a reason as to why one method is more valid than the other.
> And yet that was the only presidential election in decades where the Republican candidate got the majority of the votes.
That election was 2004 of course. Reagan got 58.8% in 1984, so two decades prior (decades as you noted).
Obama got 52.9% in 2008. And prior to that for a Democrat? More than two decades prior, wherein Jimmy Carter barely scratched out a majority popular vote at 50.08% in 1976.
Lyndon Johnson of course got 61% in 1964. The monster that put us deep into Vietnam and wrecked the country got the highest popular vote percentage for the Democrats in the past century.
The two highest in modern US history, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. What does it say about the people of the 1960s and 1970s? It says a lot of terrible things about their ability to judge character and make rational decisions.
> 2/5 last elections won by the loser of the popular vote seems extremely problematic.
Well, no, because it was designed this way. Popular vote is the obvious option when designing a democracy. They decided to go with something else under the specific understanding that any system other than a popular vote would allow this to happen.
> In the 21st century, winning the most votes for president only results in a 50% success rate for Democratic presidential candidates.
It will always affect Democratic candidates more negatively because they don't do as well with rural voters and the electoral college exists almost specifically to give rural voters more power. This is by design--not an oversight or misunderstanding.
> So having a majority of the votes gets you elected.
In a presidential democracy, yes. In the others, maybe. Win 51% of the districts with 51% of the vote, and lose the other 49% without getting any votes. You've won the election, but haven't gotten the majority of votes.
Yes, it's usually less extreme than in the US, but it still has the same issues with different district sizes.
> And yes, the vote for the president is not a raw popular vote. There is a level of indirection through another body that often does, but may not, yield the same result as a popular vote would. But it does not logically follow that Americans do not vote for their president.
I think this is an interesting way the criticism was phrased about the electoral college. I mean, across world governments, it's pretty dang common for the executive of a government to not just be chosen by the populace.
> The system has twice produced a result that was clearly against the popular preference, and most recently the losing candidate took numerous measures to attempt to make it a third.
the popular vote is not the popular preference. it's just the total number of people who voted for each candidate under a set of rules where that number doesn't matter. the popular vote would likely look quite different if the popular vote decided the election. people who live in overwhelmingly red or blue states often don't bother voting in presidential elections outside of the primaries.
> It doesn’t help that the US system can have a winner who didn’t get the majority of the vote
This is incorrect.
You require a majority of votes in the USA in the presidential election. What you seem to be missing is that people do not vote for the President but vote to direct how their state votes.
States vote for President. People vote for states.
> Just short of half of the country recently elected a President who openly spouted white-supremacist conspiracy theories.
He was elected by the votes of ~27% of eligible voters, and about ~20% of the population, not “just short of half the country”.
You could say it was a little less than half the people who felt it is worthwhile to vote in a system where votes matter so little that getting the most of them doesn't mean you win, but then the story is about alienation from the electoral system more than support or even indifference to racism.
> “The person who wins the presidential election is not the person that most people voted for”
This indicates that you simply disagree with the EC, not that it is in some way a failure. The EC is not about fairness to voters, it is one of the two concessions that are made to less populous states to ensure that they would join and stay in the Union.
> In the US, it would have been sufficient to vote for a different party. Enjoy the government, the majority of you people voted for.
Except in the lower house of the national legislature (where the dominant party is still significantly overrepresented compared to the popular vote for that body), the dominant party in the political branches of the US government was not supported by a majority of voters in election to each body, even if you only consider major party votes.
Does that sentence not completely contradict itself?
How often in modern times has a Republican president won a majority of the popular vote? Seems like the will of the people is not consistently respected, and even if people like you then you may very well lose. Especially if the people that like you are urban voters.
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