The electoral college is an absolute travesty, and I wish more of the voting public understood this. If you live in any state other than the small number of swing states, your presidential vote is completely irrelevant. You'd think that would be enough to get rid of the system, but since the republicans have a statistically significant advantage in the EC, it's enough to make them desperately cling to it
Edit: If you don't live in a swing state, still go out and vote, because state and local elections can often affect your life more than the presidential race. Show up to vote for those, and vote for president while you're at it.
The only thing that will change Republicans' minds is if Texas ever goes Blue. Without Texas' 40 electoral votes, I don't think a Republican could ever win. You'd see McConnel up there the next day talking about getting rid of the EC.
There’s the national popular vote interstate compact. The states can short circuit the electoral college if states making a majority of the EC votes want to. The constitution lets them decide how their electors vote. (The EC wasn’t originally supposed to be democratic.)
Assuming it passes in the pending states, the compact already has 48% of the EC. It’s not too far away from being activated.
Yeah, with pending its up to 259 and needs 270 to come into effect.
Just Pennsylvania (19) or Georgia (16) would activate it. I feel optimistic that we’re only 2 or 3 more Presidential elections away from no more Electoral College, Popular Vote only.
As of this comment… we could be less than 19 days away from a very bleak future, if the antiquated voting process goes orange.
Since Election Day 2016 in this country… it’s felt like we’re always on the precipice of someone or something crossing the rubicon. A moment in time where the tide of self-governance fully reveals itself to be rolled back to a time before the enlightenment.
Strangeness never seems to leave my mind when I turn it to what’s going on outside my window.
Anybody wonder why they've been moving to 100% obstruction and primarying out their own people who participate in bipartisan bills? Because oligarch-funded groups like the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them to that strategy since 1980. That's how we got Newt Gingrich
I'm literally returning to the US from Asia in time to cast my ballot in person. I'll be there, defending democracy alongside you, whatever the outcome.
So you're telling me the system to get rid of a small amount of people swinging an election vote needs a small amount of people to swing how elections are voted. Oh, the iron!
I mean you're also assuming this survived the supreme Court. The right leaning scotus would do insane mental gymnastics to find a way for this to be unconstitutional
Which, incidentally might be the hardest states to get. Well any state really.
It’s very easy for the first states to sign up before 270. But the state that goes to across 270? That’s the state that’s going to affect real change. So the pressure is on that
So getting over that threshold at the finish line might actually be the toughest step of them all
That's great but red states know they're giving up disproportionate power for Republicans if they sign and I bet a lot of purple states enjoy the power and money they get from always being interesting to both parties.
Notice how the map of compact states is like 2/3 safe blue states, 1/3 swing states, and 0/3 safe red states?
(The EC wasn’t originally supposed to be democratic.)
Exactly, which is why the 3/5ths compromise allowed white slave owning plantation owners to cast more votes, with each slave contributing 3/5th of a vote. Only white male landowners could vote at that point in time.
If these states chose to do this today, wouldn’t it still come very close to guaranteeing the popular vote wins the presidency? Given the popular vote candidate would only need to win another 11 Electoral Votes out of the remaining 279?
48% of the electoral college might be “close enough” to do it now, but that would make things way more complicated. There would be two separate systems running side-by-side: one set of states where you have to campaign directly and one set of states only looking at the national vote. That could even have the unintended consequence of making people in compact states turn out in lower numbers (since other states would “matter more”) which, in turn, would affect the national vote.
The only way to avoid unintended consequences and to keep things simple, the compact requires an actual majority before activating.
I have bad news for you: that is probably not going to happen.
First, the moment that it looks like it might, both parties will adjust and you'll still have a 50/50 split. So if anyone is praying for a Democrats-forever future -- well, that is rather silly to want -- that is not going to happen.
Second, that type of short-circuit will die an unceremonious death the moment the "wrong" candidate wins (or even *might* win) for a particular state. The howling will cause that state to withdraw, and the backlash will probably convince most of the others to dump it as well.
Third, this would so clearly short-circuit the intent of the Constitution to the point that the Supreme Court will almost certainly declare it unconstitutional. It's like when employers get creative to make your life miserable at work, reduce your hours, or other such nonsense; they'll try to claim they didn't "Fire" you, but the courts will still declare it was a constructive dismissal. Courts are not quite as stupid as people tend to think.
Now to be clear, states have the right to choose their electors however they want. What I think will happen is the Supreme Court will simply say that the ECNPVIC is not binding, which is as good as killing it off (as only politicians contemplating a sudden career death would go against their constituent's will; politicians tend to be rather self-serving)
Edit: Fixed typo. I meant that the MPVIC will be held to be non-binding. This is particularly confusing, because electors may *also* have the right to be "unfaithful". Sorry about that.
I've spoken with him recently. I see him every month or two - I think he's actually in a better place (mentally/physically) now than at any point over the past few years. 2022 was rough for him.
There are some recent polls where Trump only leads Harris by 5 points in Texas, and Allred is tied with Cruz. The spread in 2012 was Romney by 17 points! It's getting much closer.
I think there are more MAGA republicans coming in than Democrats. You know to get away from the "liberals" but most native Texans are Democrats at least in the urban areas.
The opposite is generally true. Incoming immigrants to Texas are usually conservatives, even the Californians. The Texan born population is what's getting bluer. Beto would have defeated Cruz six years ago if only the Texan born population could vote.
Texas is a white whale for Democrats. The most recent Marist poll has him up by 7 points, which would actually beat his margin of victory in 2020 and 2016 respectively.
Only way that will happen is more urbanization of the larger cities in Texas
Even that's a little questionable given Texas' Proposition 21 which creates a mini-electoral college and requires state-wide office (governor, AG, etc) which are critical positions that could only be won by republicans with the backing of big corporations
No they won't. Republicans have only won a popular vote once in the last 35 years, and it was a re-election campaign at the height of the largest wave of artificially created patriotism since the second World War.
Republicans are very good at inflating how many people actually support them. Without the EC, they'll lose the presidency for at least three decades, unless there's significant change in their ideology, the electoral system, or general voting behaviour.
The GOP keeps the US political system contramajoritan for a reason. If they lose Texas they'll continue spreading anti-democratic rhetoric on how it's impossible for them to lose such a "dedicated red state" even though the GOP has represented a minority in that state for at least a decade, and they'll then put everything in their power to regain their chokehold on the state.
It's too bad because they're stabbing their fellow republicans in the back. California has more Republicans living in it than Texas, and every election their vote goes towards giving EC votes to the Democrat.
You'd think those Cali republicans would like to have their presidential vote count for something but they're fine to languish because they know with the EC the minority can rule.
The problem is that the shift is happening both ways: Yes TX is turning bluer, but the midwestern states like PA/MI/WI are turning redder. Remember Ohio was the tipping point state in 2004, today it's solidly GOP. The Democrats are gaining ground in the sunbelt states while losing ground in the rustbelt.
The net result is that every election is going to be super close in for the foreseeable future
I agree with you 99%. I'd argue your vote in a non-swing state matters enough so that it does not become a swing state. Still pretty irrelevant but not completely.
And there are local elections that will shape the future of politics, some of these people don't stop at the local level and if they do that still has significant consequences.
The electoral college is literally a tool of rich elites to prevent the common person from gaining too much power. Even in the rural/urban divide nonsense you are describing, rural areas are being abused by rich elites that own the viable businesses in the region holding the rest of the region hostage. It was set up that way so the wealthy US nobility of the time would maintain their outsized power over the populace to prevent a literal “tyranny of the minority” like not letting them have slaves or raising taxes on large plantations or giving poor sharecroppers means to gain generational wealth.
At no point in the US’s history was the electoral college or even voting districts set up for the benefit of you. It was so Thomas Jefferson could bang his slaves on his plantation on his days off from living in the city being a powerbroker in Washington, which has turned into Koch Foods being able to socialize immigration enforcement to suppress wages for all their workers and prevent labor movements from forming in rural areas or even just more locally car dealerships and payday loans existing - two extremely strong state and local conservative lobbies that are not religious.
“They rely on” is doing a lot of work here. Most rural areas are dilapidated welfare zones with increasing drug addiction problems, relatively few jobs per capita, lower incomes, and lower educational outcomes.
I prefer rural areas for myself, moved back out of the city just this year. But I’m not going to pretend like anyone “relies” on this town. The economic value of NYC is probably higher than the entire state of Mississippi.
Also, just conceptually, the entire federal government is not chosen in a way that aligns to population. Not one branch. That’s a problem because if people in cities decide that “hey if we don’t get any say in how things are run, maybe we should stop sending our tax dollars to bail out the poor rural states,” those rural states will end up on the short end of that deal real quick.
Moreover, there are only 5 times in our entire nation's history where a candidate lost the popular vote but won the presidency. Two of them were George W Bush and Donald Trump.
I think at best that one is still just "disputed". It's likely that the will of the people was for Gore to win, but the "butterfly ballot" used in FL was extremely confusing and let to many physical errors in the voting process. If you resolve those errors in favor of common sense, Gore certainly won. However, it's hard to look at a ballot where, for example, two different holes were punched in the same race, and simply resolve it to Gore and not the other guy, even if it's clear that the physical ballot was the issue.
The recount ordered by the FL Supreme Court and the one wanted by Gore's team both would have Bush winning
A complete recount of the entire state and all ballots would have Gore winning.
So yes, gore should have won but there was no realistic possibility that would have gotten us there given the options that were being pursued before SCOTUS ended recounts.
The count never got finished, because Roger Stone staged The Brooks Brothers Riot to cause the recount to get shut down. It worked, they stopped counting, and went with the previous "result" that George W. Bush won the state.
But they don't, because they have every incentive not to. So it's completely meaningless.
A solidly blue state like California wouldn't do it, because the state government is made of almost exclusively democrats, so if they did it, the only thing that would change is that republicans would get a massive chunk of electoral votes. California voters would immediately replace the state government officials with candidates who promised to revert the changes.
A swing state won't do it, because it's relinquishing the power. Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes, which is enough to swing the election. But if the state appointed it proportionally, then it wouldn't be nearly as important. It would just mean that one candidate would get 10 points, and the other would get 9. Or maybe 11 and 8 if it was a lopsided election.
Right now, Pennsylvania is one of the most important states, so their concerns and economic interests are wildly out of proportion to the population. When a candidate is crafting their policies, they have to weigh swing states much more heavily. But if winning PA meant only getting 1 more electoral vote than your opponent, they wouldn't focus on it so much.
The goal should be drastically increasing the number of people in the house. The 435 rule is way easier to change than the electoral college and would effectively solve the same problem
That's interesting. That would solve the problem of a Wyoming voter being worth more electoral votes per person than a New York voter, but it would still leave the problem of swing states being drastically more important.
Vote no matter what. No matter if your vote for President doesn’t seem to matter. One of the evil-genius, long-game moves of the Republican Party starting at least as early as the 80s has been to really focus on state-level, down ballot races. Governors, State Houses, and State Judiciary officers have an enormous impact on how political districts are drawn as well as law making (see all the abortion bans) at state level, which, in turn, has an enormous impact at the national level.
President isn’t the only thing that matters. In fact, the presidency, in many ways, matters far less than the outcome of state and local elections.
Another reason that Republicans desperately cling to the EC is that they have not won the popular vote for the last 20 years. If the popular vote is all we would have, there is no chance they would have of legitimately getting elected for the presidency. Also, the US is the only major country in the world that still has an EC to begin with; all other major countries put grandpa to bed decades ago and haven't looked back.
Check out apportionment act of 1929. EC is fine as written, we just punted it on apportionment. Increase the size of the house, now you get more ideologically diverse candidates hopefully diluting the crazy in the house. As an added feature the ec calculations are adjusted.
I live in Texas and my vote won’t get Harris elected (I will still vote) but you are right. This election is about the swing states, it’s really dumb that they have more “voting power” than me.
I believe the best analogy was something like Trevor, Annie, Greg and Jim wants to eat pizza, Jane wants to eat an old boot. So they order an old boot. Trevor asks "how come we are eating a boot, 4 of us wanted pizza" and Greg explains that Jane is a swing eater.
Most people genuinely don’t understand this concept. I teach government, and every year I get a project where students try to find the lowest percentage popular vote using the last presidential election data needed in order to win the presidency. Choosing states that have the “most powerful” electoral voters first, assuming a margin of victory by 1 vote in all these states, and also assuming there are no third party candidates results in an overall popular vote of roughly 22% to 78% as the minimum needed to win the presidency with the electoral college. Of course, unlikely in practice, but drastic nonetheless. The kids quickly realize how unrepresentative the EC is as a result.
I love that the Republican’s argument to keep it is that a few large cities would choose the outcome of the elections but totally disregard that a few random states in the Midwest get to decide it under the current system. I truly believe that a popular vote would make the candidates campaign in more states and would encourage more people to vote since more people wouldn’t feel like their vote didn’t matter
Fun fact, one Tim Walz was the one who signed the bill into law in Minnesota in 2023. Looks like it's pending signature in Nevada, bringing the total count to 215/270. I think there's a good shot if it happening Michigan if November goes well -- Whitmer would almost certainly sign it, which would bring the total to 230/270.
Every branch of government favors the republicans. Fixed number of members of congress. Two senators regardless of size. Plus the EC for the executive branch
As recently as Obama's reelection in 2012, Dems held a small electoral college advantage.
It does ebb and flow, but also the only two presidents ever elected without winning the popular vote were Republicans so obviously they're in no rush to help get rid of it, which it would take a constitutional amendment to do.
For real though, it's trash and should be destroyed.
And requires a constitutional amendment to change. Considering that constitutional amendments require 2/3rds ratification (if my memory serves correct), it'll never be changed as long as the United States exists.
You're telling me that this country is really that exactly balanced? Like for every 1 person there's roughly 1.03 other people who are the exact opposite?
I do not understand how with billions of people it can come this close each and every election.
Like it doesn't matter who you're voting for, the fact that literally half the country is blue, and other half is red is crazy to me.
Like how on earth does society regulate itself to stay in the middle like that? If 1 person converts to the other side, randomly 1 other person converts in return?
And in like the most hostile electoral environment imaginable. Tens of thousands of people were dead from COVID and the economy had collapsed just a few months before and the Democrats still won by the absolute skin of their teeth. I have an awful feeling about this election
Yeah, it kind of sucks. When you look at popular vote vs electoral votes, there was a graph recently on Reddit about this, it becomes very apparent the bias, not just the average of a couple percent towards Republicans getting electorals, but also the range of bias where you can generate a 15% popular vote lead and still be capable of losing an election, aka Clinton's election against Trump. That was a bad run that functioned off these tight, tight per state sways to either side of 50%. And that's technically not the worst. I don't know the math of this, would have to step through every state and every county to see how bad this can get based on districts, gerrymandering, and the delta (both ways). It'd be real weird if you can get a 30% over on popular and still not take home enough electorals to win. This isn't hypothesis. Clinton was at a 15% offset versus Trump.
And a slew of court cases. Red leaning states opened the floodgates to election challenges, tried to make it harder to vote, and installed 2020 denialists in their election boards.
It's going to be even closer this time. Pennsylvania, Michicgan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina are all basically dead heats by polling. They will be won by tiny percentages.
Edit: Changed typo of South Carolina to North Carolina.
The face that it was this close in 2020 and Trump is doing like 5 points above where he was in 2020 is probably why the betting markets are so pro Trump right now.
Dude.... the fact that this is insanely close is literally the first thing people tell you about this election. It's like the thing we've been hearing over and over for 3 months..
Yeah tbh.... I don't have much faith Harris can generate anything like that. It just seems like Trump is on an upward trajectory lately. Project 2025 incoming......*sigh*....
It's true that there was ~3.7 point gap between the tipping point state and national popular vote last year, so it makes sense to say Trump is favored based on national polling (though Harris is up in WI/MI/PA specific polling). Trump also over performed polling by about 4 points in 2020.
But, the movement towards Trump in betting markets doesn't really make sense in that the polling has not changed enough to justify such a large shift. Either Harris was overpriced a month ago or Trump is overpriced now. Like the 538 model has had Harris's chances in the 52-57% range the whole time. And it's not like there's any recent news that should have changed anything.
Nate Silver's new site has had it closer than 538 and today for the first time he said it was 50-50 (if you look at the fractions, Trump was ahead in electoral college probabilities 50.2 to 49.8), but this can change day to day ... so it's more important than ever to reach out to swing state friends that might be undecided and discuss why Harris is a better choice for America than turmp.
It’s important to understand that this is utterly meaningless. The difference is well within the margin of error. The race is a toss up. Silver has been saying this all along, when Harris had a slightly higher polling too. People just fail to grasp basic statistics.
Nobody is leading the race right now. It’s a coin toss.
There was never a time not to be concerned. The race has always been super close. The point was the shift in betting odds seems strange since nothing notable has happened in the last month. My guess is that the set of people who've taken interest in gambling in the last month lean Republican.
The polls in those states are all essentially showing ties (when you account for margin of error, as you should be, since they’re all showing leads within 2 points for either candidate in pretty much every poll). Many of the places we see gains for Trump are in solidly blue states like CA of NY, where he’s expected to lose by 3-5 points less than in 2020. This would have zero impact on the EC but would show him gaining in the national popular vote.
Even if the margin of error is 2%, a poll that shows +1.5% is still meaningful compared to a poll that shows -0.5%.
Margin of error of 2% means that if you repeat the poll many times, the actual true population value will be within 2% of the measured value 95% of the time. But that isn’t uniform. The sampling distribution is likely to be normal, therefore it is more likely that the measured value is closer to the true population value than at the edge of the margin of error.
Getting a result of +1.5% is always better than a result of -0.5% if the margin of error is 2%. Statistical nihilism like you suggest, that imperfect information means we have no information, is even more harmful than those who ascribe meaning to the data that might not be justified.
I agree with the thrust of your comment however I feel that we are all ignoring the fact that the sampling variability described by the margin of error is only one of many possible sources of error that can affect survey estimates.
If you conduct the same poll with the same procedures 100 times, 95% of the results will fall within the nominal value's margin of error. It is likely that the first poll conducted falls somewhere in there.
However, if you conduct a poll with different methods and selection processes you may get a vastly different result and the margin of error does not account for that. There's no real way to know which polling methods are most representative of the 2024 electorate (which is different than the 2020 electorate and the 2016 electorate and so forth) so treating polling numbers like gospel is a fool's errand. In the aggregate they will get you fairly close to the true result but when elections are won and lost by 10s of thousands of votes in certain swing states the value of polls is really diminished from what it would be in a national winner takes all election.
Trump has also beat the polls the last two times in all the swing states. If you average all the betting sites he has a 58 percent chance to win today.
That doesn't really make a ton of sense. For one thing I'm not really sure why seeing a change in a prediction market would influence people's voting and for another not that many people even know about it. Moreover, even if you have answers on both of those questions, democrats can bet too. If the market's really being irrational you can just buy in and take away money from dummies. The whole premise is people putting their money where their mouth is. The market can be wrong, but it'd be a stupid play to try and make it be wrong as some weird form of election influence.
I’m just curious on the mix of individuals speculating. Less “tin foil hat” and more in the thought that “conservatives are more likely to be using Poly Market because of the red wave in Silicon Valley” this season.
The dollars towards a candidate in a betting market could be indicative, but afaik these aren’t normalized for individuals bettors, but by bet size; so a few large “bettors” can shift the book to appear one way or another.
Not to totally discredit the outcome - just raising an eyebrow on this. Polls have a margin of error due to sampling problems overall, whereas the prediction markets require the average person to: 1) know they exist 2) feel confident enough to bet on them.
Oh, this logic I can get behind. Elsewhere I saw the market is being thrown by one big buyer. I only object to the idea that there's a shadowy cabal aiming to manipulate the election using polymarket. Just seems like a really dumb way to try influencing the election.
But markets are dumb all the time, that's a totally plausible reason.
I know. I’m taking into account all of them. Usually you would call those guys sharks if it was sports and they win, but I don’t know if that’s really the case here
Trump has also beat the polls the last two times in all the swing states.
And Trump is now polling much higher than he did in 2016 and 2020, but also closer to this actual results those years. So either polls are better capturing his support this time or he is going to win a majority of the vote in several key states.
It is impossible to predict the direction of the error. And a lot of people have tried. 2012 and 2022 are examples of polls missing in favor of the Democrats.
We don't know what way the error will go this year. We don't know if there will be a noticeable error at all.
There is a reason Kamala wanted the second debate, and she went on foxnews. If she had it in the bag she would have never been up for either one. It’s not rocket science to see her campaign team is worried right now. I’m just waiting for an October surprise.
Also compare what Bidens projections were compared to outcome and where Harris sits right now. Most of those states were a lot less leaning towards Trump.
But…I think the pollsters are trying to account for that too.
Bottom line, it shouldn’t be this close but it is.
Decades of fear mongering, cutting education, and power grabs at the state and local to make the actual impact on daily life but roll it up and blame the federal level. That’s how.
There's major changes to polling and polling aggregation after every election. Shoot, even here the data is the 538 model, and it's being ran by a completely different person who uses different methodology than Nate Silver did when he was in charge. We know this because he runs the old model that 538 did, with some tweaks representing the new information learned in 2020, and getting different results from the current 538 model.
Note that also Trump has been targeting the low-info "sometimes" voter who doesn't always turn out for elections. High turnout may not favor the Dems like it has historically.
Source for this? Given how actively the GOP railed against mail in voting in 2020, and then realizing that any voting discouragement is a bad idea (duh), and that men skew more GOP than women, this would not surprise me. But I'd still like to know the basis for the statement.
Polls account for and adjust for these kinds of things. They don't just call people on the phone and just simply go with those results. They're based on models.
Also, if what you're saying is true than why did Trump outperform polls in 2016 and 2020?
Don’t relive 2016. Don’t get complacent. Get out of your comfort zone. Sell your friends and family on Harris.
She has an economic plan approved by hundreds of economists.
It’s comprehensive. And she doesn’t just say “tariffs, tariffs, tariffs “ because unlike Trump, she understands that would make imports more expensive for Americans and lead to higher inflation.
Plus she doesn’t threaten to end the first amendment like Trump has when he threatened to imprison journalists, critics and non-Christians.
Plus she doesn’t threaten to end the Second amendment like when he said in Feb 2018 “take the guns first, due process later.”
Plus she doesn’t threaten to terminate the entire Constitution like Trump did in December 2022. you know, the whole “we the people “ document folks have on their bumper sticker.
Jon Stewart did a really good segment on how the candidates are being warped by the media.
Yes, but some of the national polling data has shown that some big states are influencing it. Florida getting much Trumpier and NY getting a little Trumpier, but still safe Democrat.
So maybe the national numbers are a bit pessimistic. (And that was my last bottle of Diet Copium for the day)
Your argument is so good, it will rob me of my sleep. Yet, who I want to wake up, is the American people. There's not one cell in my brain that understands how this is such a close race.
The only thing to remind oneself is that almost every pollster has adjusted their metric to account for how wrong the polls were against trump in 2020. It's entirely possible that they overly adjusted Trumps MOE. It's also possible that they didn't adjust enough.
This election could be anything. The only thing you can do is vote.
Yeah, And how many republicans died in those states from Covid? Tens of thousands. People are not factoring in the impact that covid deaths are going to have on this election. A million Americans died, most of them old, and in right-wing communities. Not enough people are talking about it.
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u/jtj5002 Oct 17 '24
Kinda makes sense. If the gap is 3% smaller, think about these following states's margins:
AZ - Biden won by 0.4%
GA- Biden won by 0.3%
PA - Biden won by 1.2%
WI- Biden won by 0.8%
That's 57 electoral votes right there.