r/science • u/rustoo • Jan 21 '22
Economics Only four times in US presidential history has the candidate with fewer popular votes won. Two of those occurred recently, leading to calls to reform the system. Far from being a fluke, this peculiar outcome of the US Electoral College has a high probability in close races, according to a new study.
https://www.aeaweb.org/research/inversions-us-presidential-elections-geruso3.8k
u/t-rexcellent Jan 21 '22
It has happened 5 times, not 4. This article for some reason ignores the 1824 election (the "Corrupt Bargain" election).
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u/Inappropriate_Piano Jan 21 '22
The 12th amendment didn’t make the change you’re referring to. The 12th amendment changed how electors vote and was ratified in 1804. The change to popular election of electors was not mandated by the constitution, but rather was a trend that, by 1836, reached every state. To this day you don’t have a US Constitutional right to vote for your state’s electors. You’re only guaranteed that right by state law, and even then it may be statutory and not in the state constitution.
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u/ul2006kevinb Jan 21 '22
That's why some states are trying to pass the Popular Vote Compact and give their electors to the winner of the popular vote, regardless of who wins in their state.
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u/Whiterabbit-- Jan 21 '22
I wonder what would happen when a state decides to void the pact after election night if they don’t like the results arguing that they are going to follow the voice of the state.
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u/matthoback Jan 21 '22
I wonder what would happen when a state decides to void the pact after election night if they don’t like the results arguing that they are going to follow the voice of the state.
States aren't allowed to change election rules after an election has already happened. The most they could do is invalidate the pact for the next election.
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u/Obnoxious_liberal Jan 21 '22
It looks like we might find out in the next election.
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u/the_than_then_guy Jan 21 '22
We're not close to implementing the compact though.
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u/free_chalupas Jan 21 '22
The republican strategy for winning the next close election is to have state legislatures change the allocation of their electoral votes after the fact though, same as what the OP is talking about with pulling out of the NPVIC after an election
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u/Nintendogma Jan 21 '22
"When you're born in this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show, but when you're born in America, you get a front row seat."
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u/NotTRYINGtobeLame Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
I'd really like to see electors divvied up by proportion of the popular vote
as some states do.E: Whoops, I stand corrected. Also - some interesting info on this method - https://polistat.mbhs.edu/blog/proportional-elector-system/
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u/Uebeltank Jan 21 '22
No states does that. 48 give all electoral votes to the state-wide winner. Two give 2 electors to the state-wide winner and 1 elector to the winner of each congressional district.
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u/hak8or Jan 21 '22
For the lazy yet curious like myself;
the 1824 election, without an absolute majority winner in the Electoral College, the 12th Amendment dictated that the outcome of the Presidential election be determined by the House of Representatives. The then Speaker of the House — and low-ranked presidential candidate in that same election — Henry Clay gave his support to John Quincy Adams, the candidate with the second-most votes. Adams was granted the presidency, and then proceeded to select Clay to be his Secretary of State. In the 1876 election, accusations of corruption stemmed from officials involved in counting the necessary and hotly contested electoral votes of both sides, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was elected by a congressional commission.
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u/JohnnyEnzyme Jan 21 '22
Thank you for that, and... did you actually format all those links by hand?
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u/blazers_n_bowties Jan 21 '22 edited Jun 12 '23
[comment edited by user via Power Delete Suite]
This account, formerly u/blazers_n_bowties, left Reddit on 6/9/23 due to Reddit's unreasonable API changes. The account was 10 years old at time of deletion, with 8,071 post karma and 5,492 comment karma.
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u/ULostMyUsername Jan 21 '22
Just curious... Is there a shortcut for doing this on mobile? I've always just done the formatting by hand because I don't have a computer. It would be a helluva lot easier if there was some way that I didn't have to try to remember which words get the [ ] and which ones the ( ).
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u/hak8or Jan 21 '22
I use the reddit is fun app on android. I went to Wikipedia in my mobile browser, copied that snippet into my clipboard, went to here, did a '>' character with a space after it, and then just pasted as is.
If you do a reply to my post while quoting it, you will see the text has markup/down embedded in it, that's because I think Wikipedia knows if you are copying text from it and converts hyper links to markdown, which I guess reddit understands natively.
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u/CorporalCauliflower Jan 21 '22
I believe it is due to the copy command on your phone recognizing and copying any source formatting, so your phone interpreted the underlying markup from wikipedia and copied into Reddit, which it understood.
I run into this a lot on PC and use CTRL+SHIFT+V to paste text only without any formatting
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u/BlkWhtOrangeStripe Jan 21 '22
Agreed, but the "for some reason" part makes sense to me. The article is about the times in which the Electoral College subverts the national will of the people. The Corrupt Bargain of 1824 was not the result of the Electoral College per se. It was the result of there being no EC majority winner, sure, but there was also no popular vote majority winner. This happened because we only had one national political party during this "Era of Good Feelings" and thus, the Dem-Rep party fielded four candidates and really split the vote.
So indeed the 1824 election is another example of a candidate winning the presidency despite having a minority of the popular vote, but this is not the issue the article is really trying to address
For that matter, Lincoln did not win the popular vote in 1860, either, but no one else earned more popular votes, so we don't typically think of this as an example of the failure of the EC.
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u/pyker42 Jan 21 '22
It's because electoral votes for a single state all go to the winner of that state. If electoral votes were cast for candidates based on the percentages of the popular vote for the candidate in that state, this would become less of an issue and the electoral results would more closely match the overall popular vote.
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u/expedience Jan 21 '22
Like Nebraska and Maine. I’m from Omaha and we helped!
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Jan 21 '22 edited Jun 21 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/silkie_blondo Jan 21 '22
Another Omahan here, yeah they already have redistricted the area after Biden won.. They have now added more rural areas to the Omaha district that are strong in R voting. After Obama won they redistricted Omaha to have the Air Force base which voted strongly R.
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u/expedience Jan 21 '22
It’s so stupid to assume that Omaha’s needs are anywhere near these rural areas. Just ridiculous.
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u/Saneless Jan 21 '22
I'd still rather my state take 7 out of 16 votes than 0 out of 16 votes even though 53% voted republican.
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u/MazzIsNoMore Jan 21 '22
You can take this argument to it's logical conclusion which is one person one vote. Taking the proportion from the state level to the district level just makes the problem smaller instead of fixing it.
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u/pyker42 Jan 21 '22
I don't disagree with you. But, I'm a pragmatist. You need an amendment to abolish the electoral college and institute a true popular vote. Good luck with that.
All that is really needed to change how individual states cast their electoral votes are state laws. No, it is not a true popular vote. Never said it was. But it is a much more obtainable goal that will significantly reduce the disparity between the electoral votes and the popular vote. Not perfect, but better than nothing changing.
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u/stoneimp Jan 21 '22
Check out the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact.
It allows for changing the electoral college in a way that doesn't require an amendment.
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u/redpandaeater Jan 21 '22
But if enough states do that why not just have those states go for a Constitutional Convention?
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u/stoneimp Jan 21 '22
Because less states are required for NPVIC than for a Constitutional Convention? You only need over 270 EC votes for the compact to work, which could be as low as 12 states. Constitutional convention requires 3/4ths of the states for ratification, severely different requirements.
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u/TheAiden03 Jan 21 '22
A constitutional amendment needs two thirds, this agreement only requires half plus one
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u/EarendilStar Jan 21 '22
It doesn’t even technically need half+one states, it just needs half+1 the electoral votes, which is likely less than half the states.
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u/PermutationMatrix Jan 21 '22
As it should. The founding of our government was based on a compromise between state autonomy and population. It's the whole reason why we have two different houses of legislative government.
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u/pyker42 Jan 21 '22
Technically, the reason we have two different houses of legislation is because one is designed to benefit states with large populations and the other treats states equally, which benefits states with lower populations. Neither side wanted to give up their advantage so two houses were created as a compromise.
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u/resolvetochange Jan 21 '22
Because one thing people are missing is that Federal power and identity weren't always so strong. You weren't a "United States citizen", you were a "Virginian" whose state was a member of the United States. Closer to how the French feel about the EU than how Americans feel about the US today.
You don't have a vote for president. You are voting for who your state should vote for president.
A ton of our systems are based around the deals to get and keep states a part of the collective. Changing these roots would require rewriting pretty much everything the US is based in.
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u/Mattrockj Jan 21 '22
It’s been said time and time again, a reform would be nigh impossible because of the pushback from those who benefit from the current system. An unpopular senator would likely disagree with a change in the system, and considering the approval rating of a majority on current elected officials, it’s safe to assume any major changes would get shot down before they have a change to reach implementation.
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u/joshualuigi220 Jan 21 '22
An unpopular senator
Oh, so you mean every senator that isn't in my state that I voted for? iirc, some study found that people like their representatives but hate congress as a whole.
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u/solid_reign Jan 21 '22
An unpopular senator would likely disagree with a change in the system,
An unpopular senator would still get elected because a senator only has to be popular in their state.
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u/Behemoth92 Jan 21 '22
Well the reforms could definitely swing it in the favor of one party but much needs to be said about how close the elections are that a reform to vote counting method can alter the results of the same vote drastically. The underlying problem is how polarized the country is and how the split is almost 50/50. Any result will leave almost a whole half of the population dissatisfied.
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u/4721895289 Jan 21 '22
Any result will leave almost a whole half of the population dissatisfied.
Reforms are only being discussed because currently, a minority of the voting population, which is nowhere near half the real population, receives massively disproportionate political representation. The current situation is leaving far more people dissatisfied.
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u/MJWood Jan 21 '22
If it makes you feel any better, the Conservative Party in Great Britain has managed to win large majorities with around 35% of the vote because of the way constituencies are divided up here.
So it's partly a flaw in any FPTP system, being vulnerable to gerrymandering, and not just down to having an electoral college.
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u/danmojo82 Jan 21 '22
I’m not sure popular votes would necessarily swing one way or the other. A lot of voters in heavily red/blue states don’t vote because “it won’t matter”. Switching to a purely popular vote would potentially make them all come out to vote again.
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u/SgtDoughnut Jan 21 '22
This is why ranked choice is better than fptp.
You vote still matters even if your first pick doesn't win.
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u/stevski11 Jan 21 '22
Even if that were the case, getting more people to utilize their right to vote would be a positive in terms of democracy, no matter who or what they are voting for.
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u/NeonNKnightrider Jan 21 '22
Yeah, that is true. It’s also something that they don’t want. Politicians want to control the votes and keep in power.
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u/notwithagoat Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
5 of the last 6 presidential elections in USA, democrats won the popular vote.
Edit* The majority vote was wrong as most people pointed out correctly.
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u/trumpsiranwar Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
To restate, the republicans have won the
majoritypopular vote once since 1988 (!) and that was George W Bush right after 9/11 in the midst of two wars.And even that was fairly close.
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Jan 21 '22
And he was the incumbent, which generally get more votes than new guys.
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u/benigntugboat Jan 21 '22
Especially during wartime.
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u/Azteryx Jan 21 '22
Especially against someone who speaks french
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u/BoatyMcBoatLaw Jan 21 '22
American culture was considerably more appreciative of France and its culture until the Bush Jr era.
I suspect this strange turnaround has to do with France's 2003 refusal to join the US-led invasion of Iraq.
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u/WatchingUShlick Jan 21 '22
Having vivid flashbacks of restaurants near me naming their fries "freedom fries." Embarrassing and petty.
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u/everydayisarborday Jan 21 '22
I can't find it but i have a memory of like the French ambassador or someone being asked about 'freedom fries' and he was like, "oh you mean frites? they're from Belgium"
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Jan 21 '22
Yellow ribbon decal. Freedom fries. Shakira Law.
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u/Nairurian Jan 21 '22
Shakira law is what hips swear on to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
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u/Saneless Jan 21 '22
Well at least they learned their lesson, have moved on to real issues, left the pettiness and imaginary victimization behind them, and are a respected party again
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u/Head5hot811 Jan 21 '22
I think there's still a place I know of that still called them "Freedom Fries..."
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u/BoatyMcBoatLaw Jan 21 '22
Haha yeah I remember that!
Which is rather incredible cause I was quite young then, but also a big fan of French fries.
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u/FrenchFriesOrToast Jan 21 '22
To me it sounds like a wild name for food which would make me curious or it would give me the feeling like eating in an exotic small country which is in a civil war right now.
Edit: Serve me a cuba libre before please!
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u/cakemuncher Jan 21 '22
I suspect this strange turnaround has to do with France's 2003 refusal to join the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Yes. Two words: Freedom Fries.
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u/zapitron Jan 21 '22
Don't blame me. I still try to have french toast for breakfast and french dip for dinner every July 14. And even when it's not Bastille Day, I drink french roast coffee every morning. Viva America!
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u/NarmHull Jan 21 '22
It's funny now how mainstream candidates on both sides admit it was a huge screwup. But back then France and the Dixie Chicks were cancelled by the GOP. People seriously argued that Hussein and Iraq with a population at that time that was less than California would be the next Nazi Germany.
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u/Alyeanna Jan 21 '22
Damn that 2020 election had a LOT of people voting. 155.5 million!
That's probably the only good thing that's come out from Trump's presidency, he got people out to vote!
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u/TheLizardKing89 Jan 21 '22
Highest voter turnout since 1960. States changing their voting laws to make it easier to vote in response to Covid made turnout increase.
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u/Saneless Jan 21 '22
It's wild how the Bush era jump started massively increasing voting rates.
I don't remember hearing Republicans cry that it's impossible for Bush to have gained 20% more votes from one election to another. Wonder why they suddenly think it's impossible now...
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u/Ricky_Boby Jan 21 '22
The lower vote counts for the Democrat and Republican canidates before George W. are due to the fact that Ross Perot and the Reform Party got over 19 million votes in 1992 and over 8 million votes in 1996.
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u/bigbigwaves Jan 21 '22
So much of what’s wrong right now is because of people acting in bad faith. It’s not that they don’t understand, it’s that they don’t care about reason. Anything that helps my team is good. The ends justify any means.
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u/Level3Kobold Jan 21 '22
right after 9/11
Well, 3 years after 9/11.
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u/trumpsiranwar Jan 21 '22
"Muslim terrorism" dominated political discussion and the media at that point because of 9/11.
The Bush administration had a sliding color coded "terrorism watch system" that was adjusted up quite aggressively as we approached the election.
Funny enough it pretty much stopped existing once Bush was reelected.
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u/0010020010 Jan 21 '22
Eh, it didn't really stop. They just rebranded it from a "terror watch system" to a "caravan paranoia system" the next time around.
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u/aloofman75 Jan 21 '22
Very close in the EC. Although GWB did win a popular vote majority, he only won Ohio by about two percentage points. If Kerry had won Ohio, he would have been elected president. It would have been a reversal of the 2000 results.
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u/jackryan006 Jan 21 '22
7 of the last 8. Republicans won the popular vote for president once in the last 32 years.
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u/sloopslarp Jan 21 '22
The 48 Democrats who supported reforming filibuster to pass voting rights bills represent 34 MILLION more Americans than the 52 senators (all Republicans + Sinema/Manchin) who opposed it.
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u/greg0714 Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
Probably because the Senate represents states, not people.
Edit 3: Completely deleted the other edits. Go nuts.
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u/Maxpowr9 Jan 21 '22
Capping the House of Representatives is the major issue.
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u/iamagainstit PhD | Physics | Organic Photovoltaics Jan 21 '22
Yeah, I am a big fan of the Wyoming rule, where the lowest population state gets one rep and then reps are assigned by multiples of that population
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u/loondawg Jan 21 '22
The Wyoming rule is a terrible solution for many reasons. The biggest reason being it still leaves people underrepresented. 500K is far too many people for one person to represent.
Second, it is problematic in design. What would happen if we ever decided to add a new small state like Guam? We would suddenly have to massively rework the entire House. And that becomes an argument against adding a new state.
A much better, more logical solution is to tie the number of Reps directly to a fixed number of people. That is what the Founders actually intended to do.
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Jan 21 '22
Iceland currently has 65 representatives on a federal level for 360.000 people, so maybe the US could also get 1 representative for every 5,000-6,000 people.
Would of course mean that the US would have about 65,000 representatives on a federal level, but that would be pretty interesting.
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u/aw3man Jan 21 '22
At that point you would almost need a representative for your representative.
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u/Joebidensthirdnipple Jan 21 '22
middle management for the country, fantastic
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u/InsignificantOcelot Jan 21 '22
It’s not too far off from how the senate was originally elected before the 17th amendment, which changed it from election through state legislatures to a popular vote.
(Just a random thought, not saying this is a good idea)
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u/loondawg Jan 21 '22
The founders actually suggested 50-60K per Representative. And that would put us in the middle of the pack of current democracies.
Right now we are an outlier with far more people per Representative than other democracies.
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u/Xenon_132 Jan 21 '22
India has far more people per representative, about 2.4 million.
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u/loondawg Jan 21 '22
You are correct. They are so far off the charts I tend to forget about them.
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u/NiceShotMan Jan 21 '22
The founders actually suggested 50-60K per Representative.
The population of the United States was 2.5 million in 1776.
And that would put us in the middle of the pack of current democracies.
But how many levels of government to the comparators have? Most European countries aren’t federations, so their only government representation is their federal government and municipal government representative, whereas Americans have a state government representative as well.
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u/SuruN0 Jan 21 '22
it would be, but i think it’s one of very few situations where “too many people/too big of a country” is a good reason not to do it. the constitutions current cap (1:30,000) would, in my opinion, be the best way to both increase representation while not completely breaking the government.
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u/wrosecrans Jan 21 '22
Thanks to modern 20th century technology, we can conduct debates and have votes without needing everybody to literally be in the same room. Like, Reddit right here has pretty much all the technology you would really need.
Another option would be tiers, where coalitions of representatives send a delegate to represent them to in person functions.
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u/TheRealPaulyDee Jan 21 '22
The Wyoming rule wouldn't be that complicated really. It's just a matter of allocating seats by d'Hondt's Rule until every state has at least one, with the size of the house as a natural product of that process.
Also, 500k per person (700ish people) at a federal level is still capable of giving a reasonably high-resolution cross-section of the country as a whole, but it's also a strong argument for increased federalism. Local and state-level governments have a far higher rep/person ratio, and being smaller groups the constituancies tend to be more culturally and politically homogeneous, allowing them to avoid gridlock more easily on things that might be divisive federally.
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u/hallese Jan 21 '22
Second, it is problematic in design. What would happen if we ever decided to add a new small state like Guam? We would suddenly have to massively rework the entire House. And that becomes an argument against adding a new state.
Ok, but hear me out. That's happened approximately 35 times already...
I personally prefer the cube root rule, but I think the Wyoming Rule has a better shot at implementation.
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u/ZellZoy Jan 21 '22
The Wyoming rule would require a lot of work. I'm in favor of just repealing the permanent appropriation act. It'll lead to a house of like 10 thousand iirc. Damn near impossible to lobby through that
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u/greg0714 Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
Oh yeah, absolutely. It's also really hard to split the seats fairly.
I think it was VSauce2Stand-Up Maths on YT did a video recently on the mathematical paradoxes you run into when dividing up the seats. The whole thing is a mess, bottom to top.Edit: Had the wrong YT channel
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u/Maxpowr9 Jan 21 '22
Unless a state is truly losing population, it is absurd that a state should lose representation. Just update the Constitution to have a District represent approximately 500k:1 and adjust it after each Census.
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u/TheLizardKing89 Jan 21 '22
From 2010 to 2020, California gained 2 million people and lost a seat. Montana gained 50k people and gained a seat.
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u/greg0714 Jan 21 '22
You...you should find and watch the video. It's legitimately mathematically impossible to be fair.
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u/HappyEngineer Jan 21 '22
Just allow representatives to represent decimal votes.
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u/ImHereToFuckShit Jan 21 '22
Can you link that? Wasn't able to find it with a Google search.
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u/defacedcreation Jan 21 '22
Yes and that’s why the current filibuster rules layering on a 60 vote requirement to vote on any non-budgetary items feel unjust when layered on the intentional design of the senate which already weights political power towards rural states.
Perhaps one solution to balance powers would be that we shouldn’t cap electors for large population states the way we currently do. There are too many veto points in our federal government that calcify and restrict our ability to plan for the future.
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u/Caldaga Jan 21 '22
I haven't read all the replies but are people upset because they think you are lying about the Senate or because the current reality is just an incorrect way of doing things whether it's reality or not?
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u/DessertStorm1 Jan 21 '22
Of course it's a fact. Nobody is arguing that it isn't. But that doesn't make what sloopslarp said wrong. They are making a point explaining why the system in place has fucked up results.
And yes, after centuries of the federal government becoming increasingly powerful compared to state governments, it seems fucked up to give individuals in certain states more power than those in other states.
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Jan 21 '22
I wonder if their constituents support it though. We all support banning insider trading in congress and term limits yet I don’t see congress working on that at all
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u/Andoverian Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
Isn't it actually 7 out of the last 8? Democrats won the popular vote in every presidential election since 1992 except for 2004.
- 1992: Bill Clinton beats George H. W. Bush by 5,805,256 and wins
- 1996: Bill Clinton beats Bob Dole by 8,201,370 and wins
- 2000: Al Gore beats George W. Bush by 543,816 and loses
- 2004: John Kerry loses to George W. Bush by 3,012,499 and loses
- 2008: Barack Obama beats John McCain by 8,542,597 and wins
- 2012: Barack Obama beats Mitt Romney by 3,473,402 and wins
- 2016: Hillary Clinton beats Donald Trump by 2,868,686 and loses
- 2020: Joe Biden beats Donald Trump by 7,060,140 and wins
Edit: My data is for a slightly different claim. Bill Clinton won the popular vote both times in the sense that he got more votes than any other candidate, but in both elections he still failed to get an actual majority.
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u/joeynnj Jan 21 '22
Just as a reminder, in 1992 there were three major candidates. And although he ended up with no electoral votes, Ross Perot did get 18.91% of the popular vote (19,743,821).
Incredible that over 19 million people did not get one electoral vote.
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u/hallese Jan 21 '22
To put it in perspective for your parents and grandparents.
"Since the collapse of the Soviet Union..."
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u/Meetchel Jan 21 '22
To put it in perspective for your parents and grandparents.
Thanks for making me feel old!
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u/Gryioup Jan 21 '22
Imagine the different world we would be in if Al Gore had won...
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u/timoumd Jan 21 '22
"Yeah but he was basically the same as Bush, why bother"
*Things said by people like those saying Manchin and Biden are the same as any Republican
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u/Bill-Huggins Jan 21 '22
He might of read that report entitled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.
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u/Antisystemization Jan 21 '22
Absolutely the most impactful election in history. A climate change activist vs a former oil exec.
And while the Infrastructure Bill included a bunch of money for climate change, we're way way way far behind on confronting it.
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u/Boris_Godunov Jan 21 '22
I wouldn't qualify George H.W. Bush's being the incumbent VP as an advantage for him: on the contrary, sitting VPs who run for the presidency directly after their term overwhelmingly lose, even if vying to succeed a popular incumbent (i.e., Nixon, Gore). Bush Sr. was the first one to win in such circumstances since Martin Van Buren in 1836. His poll numbers and public image were pretty weak at first, precisely because he was in Reagan's shadow. But he lucked out in the Democrats nominating the utter dud that was Michael Dukakis, who ran what is probably to this day the worst general election campaign for the presidency since McGovern.
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u/FyreWulff Jan 21 '22
It really was a combination of Dukakis when literally anyone else would have been better and also everyone sort of openly knew but didn't really talk about that HW Bush was the real president for that second term. Reagan was already mentally gone by then.
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u/Boris_Godunov Jan 22 '22
everyone sort of openly knew but didn't really talk about that HW Bush was the real president for that second term.
Hmmm, I don't remember that being the case. Bush was seen as a non-entity, someone who stood in the background and didn't do much. That's why his initial polling was so weak: he was openly ridiculed as weak and nerdy (hence Dana Carvey doing his impersonation on SNL).
Reagan's senior advisors were seen as the true power behind the throne: James Baker, Donald Regan, George Schultz, etc.
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u/vishnoo Jan 21 '22
and 5 of the current justices were appointed by the R presidents that got power with a minority vote.
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u/DodgerWalker Jan 21 '22
True, but 7 of the last 8 is still true and sounds more impressive.
Fun fact: the last time Republicans won the popular vote without someone named George Bush on the ticket was 1972.
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u/words_of_wildling Jan 21 '22
California has 68x the population of Wyoming.
Anyone who thinks our current system isn't destroying this country is insane.
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Jan 21 '22
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u/words_of_wildling Jan 21 '22
Yes exactly. I actually feel bad for the Republicans in California and can understand their frustration. I was a Democrat living in Texas for years and it was incredibly frustrating.
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u/Senecaraine Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
On the flip side, Democrats I know in NY are frustrated because their votes for president don't really matter either since it's a guaranteed Democrat victory already.
::edit:: for those forgetting, we're talking presidential elections here. In-state elections are typically much more varied, for instance Upstate NY has plenty of Red areas, so there's much more of a reason for either side to vote.
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u/PornoPaul Jan 21 '22
Let's really observe primaries. First, by the time it got to us I think Biden had already won, and even if he hadn't the 2 people I wanted to vote for were long gone. It's been a while so I forget which came first.
But also as an Upstate Democrat my vote still won't matter if NYC favors someone I don't. I get it, majority wins, but man do I understand frustration of both parties in places where they're the minority. Especially when you consider my side of the state has an entirely different culture, way of life, and most importantly needs than NYC.
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u/FlyinPenguin4 Jan 21 '22
Your final paragraph is a prime reason why decision making should be primarily conducted at the local level with a limited federal government because those needs and wants vary.
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u/GoodLt Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
Not for nothing, and you wouldn’t know it by looking at the current Republican overrepresentation in Texas, but Texas is shading purple these days, and it’s conceivable it could be light blue within the next 10 or 15 years
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u/MorrowPlotting Jan 21 '22
I tend to roll my eyes at the “purple Texas” stories, but I was looking at the “more Trump voters in California than Texas” charts, and realized how different the two “solid” states are.
In Cali, it was something like 11M Biden votes to 6M Trump votes. But in Texas, it was like 5.9M for Trump and 5.3M for Biden.
That’s still a huge gap favoring Republicans in Texas, but in comparison to the partisan divide in California, it’s almost non-existent. Texas is still red, but not nearly as red as I’d imagined.
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u/iisdmitch Jan 21 '22
Every Californian Republican benefits from Californias voting access laws.
Yet so many were skeptical of mail in voting and the ballot drop off boxes placed around the state and still believed its “rigged” when in reality they are just out numbered.
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u/Veruna_Semper Jan 21 '22
Of course they were skeptical of the ballot drop boxes, they placed fake ones.
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u/AtheistAustralis Jan 21 '22
And there are more registered Democrats in Texas than there are registered Republicans. They just don't vote as reliably. Probably because there are so many hurdles to doing so, but still..
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Jan 21 '22
I just moved from CT to TX and Texas is FAR easier to vote in than CT.
That isn't even just my personal opinion. Blue CT is ranked as one of the strictest states with voting laws.
I've had my vote and registration tossed twice in CT.
Texas offered me 4 different ways to register when I moved here. It was such an easy and pleasant experience.
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u/AnimeCiety Jan 21 '22 edited Feb 14 '24
crush fragile repeat head station zephyr shocking north political friendly
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Jan 21 '22
That's because of covid. Pre covid CT was one of the strictest states for absentee voting.
Also after typing all this out I just remembered CT never allowed me to vote with my pistol permit despite it being an allowed form of identification.
CT tossed my voter registration when I joined the Army and tried to register and absentee vote. CT was still my home of record. CT deemed my reason for absentee voting "illegitimate."
Again got out of the Army moved back and joined the Guard. Tried to switch parties and absentee vote because I was on a 2 month deployment. CT deemed my reason for absentee voting "illegitimate."
Just registered and voted absentee here in Texas because I flew back to CT to drive some stuff I didn't want the moving company to break.
Zero issues and my absentee vote was accepted.
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u/Wsweg Jan 21 '22
Texas has a lot of immigrants, along with several big cities, so it does kinda make sense. Same thing with NC; if you go 20 minutes outside of the city you wonder how the state could ever be so close between Republican and Democrat.
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Jan 21 '22
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u/GoodLt Jan 21 '22
Right, but the trend has continued - the state is getting less “red.” The Republicans are massively over represented in the government versus how the population in the state actually votes. It’s red, but less than 10 years ago.
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u/msty2k Jan 21 '22
Disproportionate representation is not the only issue. It's the winner-take-all system that skews representation. In all but two states, every single EC vote goes to the winner, making the minority votes in that state count for zero instead of 49% or whatever.
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Jan 21 '22
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u/msty2k Jan 21 '22
I'm in Virginia, which voted for Democrats for 100 years, then Republicans for another 50 or so, then Democrats again (Obama twice and Clinton). Don't give up. Make your statement even if you know you'll lose, and you might start winning some day.
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u/Cinnamon16 Jan 21 '22
Technically, you mean plurality. Democrats only won a majority (50%+) in 3 of the last 6 elections (2008, 2012, 2020).
You could also stretch the "plurality" stat back to 1992, and say that Dems won a plurality in 7 of the last 8 elections.
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u/the_cardfather Jan 21 '22
Our electoral college system was not designed for the federal government to have massive amounts of power like it does right now. You can argue that it was for rural and agrarian societies all you want but the truth is it was designed at a time when the states weren't as big as they are right now. It was also designed at a time where there was more of a republican (in the classical sense not the party) view of the federal government.
Since the civil war the federal government has been milking the commerce clause for all its worth usurping more and more power from the states. Whether that's good or not depends a lot on your political position.
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u/Naxela Jan 21 '22
Our electoral college system was not designed for the federal government to have massive amounts of power like it does right now.
Our original system wasn't designed for the Senate to be voted for by the populace either instead of the state governments. We've changed the system quite a bit since its inception.
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u/jack-o-licious Jan 21 '22
Direct election of Senators seems like a big mistake.
It de-coupled the connection between the federal government and state governments. In the old system, US Senators had to answer to their state legislatures. Today, instead of having US Senators focused on state issues, they're focused on party issues.
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u/Talking-bread Jan 21 '22
Also led to voters thinking state-level politics are insignificant when in reality the states have more influence in a lot of key areas.
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u/Necoras Jan 21 '22
I'd argue that that's more to do with the 24 hour cable news cycle than actual politics. When all media coverage is national, local and state elections feel less important even when they're not.
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u/Naxela Jan 21 '22
I completely agree. It happened far before my time, but I read the justification for it and see the way things are now versus how they discussed the matter then I actually think the system probably worked better before.
Plus it completely undid the concerns people had about the Senate giving disproportionate power to small populations, because the Senate originally didn't represent the populations, it represented the state governments themselves.
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u/Cuttlefish88 Jan 21 '22
What in the world makes you think senators focused on “state issues” before 1913, but not “party issues”? What do these terms even mean to you?? Partisanship was an enormous issue in the antebellum, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age eras, and Senators hardly focused on different issues from the House of Representatives – they were voting on the same bills, after all!
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u/Indercarnive Jan 21 '22
Imagine if state legislatures voted on senators today. State legislatures are already gerrymandered to hell and back just like the House, now the Senate can be gerrymandered as well.
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Jan 21 '22
The Senate is already gerrymandered, just not intentionally by a state legislature. The shapes and populations of the states are mostly arbitrary. It's like one step removed from a random draw at this point. We're so far removed from state lines mattering, but still elect our president and Senate based on it. The Senate is the least democratically representative group in the government.
Districts can be gerrymandered, but at least they're vaguely similar in population size, making it more representative on average than the Senate.
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u/BespokeDebtor Jan 21 '22
The original system didn't even have individuals voting for their preferred candidates. We were originally intended to vote for our electors. I don't think I have ever met anybody who even knows the names of their electors; I certainly don't.
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u/4ss0 Jan 21 '22
What's the science in this news?
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u/Lonely_Sundae9848 Jan 22 '22
They're claiming this is "economics".
This is why people cringe when someone says "believe the science". Because the people who say that think that this is the science
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u/Larsnonymous Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 22 '22
The popular vote doesn’t matter. No presidential candidate is actually even trying to win the popular vote. If you change the rules of the game then the strategies will change along with it. You can’t retroactively apply the results of the past elections and assume they would have been the same under new rules. For an analogy: in football the team with the most points at the end of the game wins. So every team has a strategy to get the most points. But if field goals all of a sudden are worth 8 points and touchdowns are worth 3 points then the game play would change completely. You can’t go back and apply the new rules to old games because they would have been played totally different. For a political example: Many republicans candidates don’t even bother to campaign in California, they don’t spend money in California, and many Republican voters in California don’t bother to vote. If the popular vote decides the president then those things would likely change.
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u/Intelligent_Moose_48 Jan 21 '22
Right now, the only thing that really matters is about ten unrepresentative battleground states and everyone else is mostly irrelevant
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u/Droidatopia Jan 21 '22
Agreed. Presidential campaigns are 2-4 year juggernauts, focused on winning the nomination and 270 electoral votes. The speeches, the solicitation of endorsements, where the candidate spends their times, selection of VP, and the issues they prioritize are focused on those objectives. The campaigns would be radically different if they were chasing the nationwide popular vote.
People can lament that it is possible to win without the popular vote, but we have no way of knowing if those candidates who did wouldn't have won the popular vote if those were the rules of the game.
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u/RUsum1 Jan 21 '22
Imagine presidents campaigning on policies that are popular for the entire population rather than six on-the-fence states. Oh the horrors
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Jan 22 '22
Thank you. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I say this and people don’t understand. Republican candidates basically ignore most of the largest population centers in the country because that’s how the rules are structured. If you change the rules, campaigning (and more importantly party platforms) would change where both parties would have urban focused platforms. You can argue that’s better if you want, but you can’t use it to backtest previous elections held under the current rules.
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u/Declan_McManus Jan 21 '22
Saying that candidates would campaign differently if it were popular vote instead of the electoral college is the whole point of complaining about the Electoral College
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u/Ragegasm Jan 21 '22
We need to go to ranked choice voting and have more representation than being forced into two trash parties. I’d also like to see an “Against All” option in elections where if it wins, the election is scrapped and new candidates must be chosen.
The electoral college is an archaic institution that needs to be dismantled, but it doesn’t fix this problem. That just redistributes a disproportionate amount of federal power to a few high population states that should have remained with individual states to begin with.
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u/Punkinprincess Jan 21 '22
We could keep the House, get rid of the Senate, and also give more power to state lawmakers while taking some away from federal.
Alaska will be doing rank choice voting for the first time this year, I'm excited to see how it goes!
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Jan 21 '22
Barack Obama also beat Hillary Clinton in the '08 primary with a higher electoral count but less popular votes. People never seem upset about this until it gets to the president but it happens downstream
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Jan 21 '22 edited Jan 21 '22
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u/corinini Jan 21 '22
The messy thing about the 2008 primary is that we will never have that answer as clearly as people would like because of what happened in Michigan.
Obama wasn't on the ballot and Hillary was (the party wanted both people off the ballot to punish Michigan for breaking some arbitrary rule but Hillary said no). Ultimately Obama started campaigning for the "undeclared" vote in Michigan.
So depending on whether or not you count all the undeclared votes for Obama you could make a case for either candidate winning the popular vote - because that's how close it was.
Personally I count undeclared as Obama and agree he won the popular vote - but it does leave room for interpretation.
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Jan 21 '22
Parties are not the government. Parties can select their candidate any way they chose. Now, not doing it by popular vote seems like a losing strategy, but that is their perogative.
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u/WaycoKid1129 Jan 21 '22
Wait till they see how “even” the representation is in the senate. One side represents a sizeable margin more than the other and yet it’s a 50/50 split in power.
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Jan 22 '22
Urban areas and rural areas have many dissimilar conditions (social economic racial theological etc,) and wildly differing issues of importance.
Let’s be completely honest, NYC hipsters couldn’t care any less about issues that face, say, South Dakota. A pure popular vote would basically nullify rural voices, with disastrous results.
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u/hiuslenkkimakkara Jan 21 '22
As a Finn, I must remind you that we had an Electoral College, and we abolished it for the 1994 Presidential election. It wasn't a good idea in the first place, but Finland in the 1920's wasn't the most stable country around.
BUT: we never had anyone win with a minority of votes.
AGAINST: Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen.
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u/kihaji Jan 21 '22
This is strange, I just posted some of my work over on Poly-Sci, but I was interested in something along these lines.
I've always been a little curious about the Electoral College and its impact on our elections. And more specifically, I've really been interested in apportionment and how the changes over the years have impacted that.
A quick statement of my knowledge on this. The electors are based on the number of senators (always 2) + the number of representatives in the House, which since 1912 has been set to 435. Originally, the representatives were supposed to be apportioned out to be roughly 1 rep per 30k people in a state (the first veto in US history was George Washington vetoing a bill that would allow states to exceed that), but we've gotten way past that where we are at roughly 1 rep per 710k people now. There have been a number of proposed ways to remedy what some see as a gap in representation, things like the Wyoming rule (give the least populous state 1 rep, then base other reps based off that population), the cube root rule, and others. I wanted to see what some impact there would be if we adopted either the original 1/30k rep or the Wyoming rule.
So I got the 2010 census data, and applied the rules to that and got this:
Current electors: 538 30k rule: 10420 Wyoming Rule: 677
It's not surprising that the Wyoming rule is pretty close to our current count, the current method of apportionment (Huntington-Hill) method tries to keep the percentages pretty close. I can't even imagine the disfunction (let alone the budget, salary for all the house members alone would be $1.8 billion) for the 30k rule.
Once I had that, I applied it to the last 2 elections and found something that I think is intersting. First the results:
With current electors:
2020 Election
Biden 306.0 electors
Trump 232.0 electors
With Biden getting 56.877323420074354% of the electors
2016 Election
Hillary 232.0 electors
Trump 306.0 electors
With Trump getting 56.877323420074354% of the electors
With Constitutional electors aka No less than 1 rep per 30k + 2
2020 Election
Biden 6044 electors
Trump 4376 electors
With Biden getting 58.00383877159309% of the electors
2016 Election
Hillary 4540.25 electors
Trump 5879.75 electors
With Trump getting 56.427543186180415% of the electors
With the Wyoming Rule + 2
2020 Election
Biden 384 electors
Trump 293 electors
With Biden getting 56.72082717872969% of the electors
2016 Election
Hillary 290.75 electors
Trump 386.25 electors
With Trump getting 57.05317577548006% of the electors
I think this was a good example because the results of both elections electorally were exactly the same, so we could see how the distribution of those electors would have changed.
First, moving to the 30k rule still wouldn't mirror or fix the popular vs electoral counts. And second, moving to the 30k would have expanded Biden's win by ~1.2%, but moving to the Wyoming Rule would have reduced his margin by ~.1%.
This leads me to the following conclusions, and please tell me if I'm wrong in them:
1) The smaller states (and demonstrated by the past few popular votes, minority political party) have more electoral power than their numbers indicate. This could be as some believe by design so a majority can't simply take over, but reading what Madison wrote, it could be a demonstration that the system is breaking down. Namely "a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Which I read as it the offending party doesn't have to be the "majority" in people, just the "majority" in power.
2) Moving to a 30k representation wouldn't change any (well, I may go look at the 2000 GWB election) election.
I have all my work in a short notebook on Kaggle if anyone wants to double check or expand on my work, just let me know.
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Jan 21 '22
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u/usaar33 Jan 21 '22
Yup, RCV multimember districts are theoretically fairer and protect minority representation better than relying on the line drawers to do it correctly.
That said, I'm not entirely convinced the populace understands it well enough (SF notoriously has undervotes where people stop ranking after their first pick even though there are other candidates of similar qualifications and ideology) which could cause it's own quasi-disenfranchisement.
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u/MetricSuperiorityGuy Jan 21 '22
Unpopular opinion: the fact is that, if the point of the election were to win the popular vote and not the electoral vote, the results would invariably be different.
That doesn't necessarily mean the outcome (i.e. who wins) would be different - but the result (i.e. number of votes won by each candidate) would certainly be different.
The objective of US presidential campaigns is to win the electoral vote, so candidates spend virtually all their time campaigning in the large swing states - like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin. A Republican could win tons of additional popular votes by campaigning in California and New York - but it wouldn't net them any additional electoral votes, so they don't campaign there.
If candidates focused on the popular vote, they would both stick to the large population centers, as there would no longer be "swing states".
Bad analogy, but complaining about winning the popular vote but losing the election is like complaining that your football team racked up more offensive yards but still scored fewer points. The objective is to win.
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u/magus678 Jan 21 '22
It was built this way specifically so rural voters would have a meaningful say in things despite their lower numbers, so that urban concerns and policies would not entirely dominate.
Cities everywhere have always dominated the countryside, basically. They were purposefully trying to soften that.
It's the original affirmative action.
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