And it is why the DP has to stop with their never ending, self abusive actions and rhetoric and attack:
“We are going to spend the rest of our lives arguing about the precise mix of economic desperation and cultural grievance that drove the calamitous election of Donald Trump. Already, however, there’s an emerging consensus that the Trump apotheosis can be blamed in part on “identity politics” and “political correctness.” In Sunday’s New York Times, the liberal Columbia University historian Mark Lilla proclaimed “the end of identity liberalism.” In the libertarian magazine Reason, an essay was headlined, “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash.” Bill Maher lectured liberals, “You’re outrageous with your politically correct bullshit and it does drive people away.” A Politico piece argued, “To many Trump supporters, Clinton … was merely another ‘PC’ liberal griping about ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘triggering’ language.”……
Those who believe that a purely class-based appeal can woo working-class whites back to the Democratic Party never fully reckon with the reason they abandoned it in the first place. Consider the people profiled in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. They are hard-working residents of Louisiana’s cancer alley; petrochemical plants have sickened their families, destroyed the waterways where they once fished and swam, and in some cases driven them from their homes. There is nothing abstract to them about the murderous price unfettered capitalism is exacting, and yet they’d much rather pay it than make common cause with those who don’t share their increasingly dysfunctional culture. “Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism,” says one. Their wages have fallen or flattened, but they blame that “mainly on the rising costs of welfare,” Hochschild writes. “They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns and the Confederate flag were all held up to ridicule.”
By voting for Trump, people like this have shown us what they value. In this moment of triage for civil society, liberals must hold fast to values of their own.
Certainly, Democrats should champion the interests of working people. They should struggle to expand the social safety net and defend the labor movement against conservative attempts to destroy it. They should work to preserve the gains of the Affordable Care Act, even for those Trump supporters who just voted to gut their own health care. But there can be no going back on defending the tenuous gains of women and people of color, or foregrounding their demands for full equality. They are the base of the party, the people who gave Hillary Clinton a popular vote majority but will now be ruled by a hostile minority.
Trump may very well oversee the end of abortion as a constitutional right in America. He wants to register members of a religious minority. His vice president is vehemently opposed to laws protecting gay people from discrimination. Lilla’s prose is vague, so I’m not sure what he considers to be the “proper sense of scale” in responding to these threats. I am sure liberals should not respond to them quietly. Trump’s nominee for attorney general is a racist opponent of the Voting Rights Act and must be stopped whether or not a campaign against him appeals to white Americans. The focus of left-of-center politics in the dark years to come must be on protecting the groups of people who are targets precisely because of their identities. To sideline their interests is to accede to a backlash that has just begun and will only get worse. If Democrats standing up for diversity makes Trump voters feel disrespected, the best response is a slogan popular among enemies of political correctness at Trump rallies: Fuck your feelings.”
EM, some of the analysis is close to how many conservatives viewed this past 8 years: “… there’s an emerging consensus that the Trump apotheosis can be blamed in part on “identity politics” and “political correctness.”… “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash.” Bill Maher lectured liberals, “You’re outrageous with your politically correct bullshit and it does drive people away.” A Politico piece argued, “To many Trump supporters, Clinton … was merely another ‘PC’ liberal griping about ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘triggering’ language.”……
Conservatives view the Dem Party as a party made up of “wanna feel goods”, and that’s why you see/hear comments: “Fuck your feelings.” Its also why we see those protestors called snow flakes etc.
i don’t know about snow flakes, but i wish EM would listen to CoRev about this.
We don’t need to give up advances made for minorities. We do need to find a way to include ordinary workers… including white men.
The people who voted for Trump have been lied to and misinformed. The Dems… pardon me… have not found a way to un-lie to them. I suspect it’s because they don’t care. Politics is a card game. The left took its cards and bet it could beat the Right’s cards. That used to work. This time it didn’t.
Don’t think you are going to get a better deal for minorities by handing elections to people who tell the voters that liberals hate them and their feelings.
Voter fraud — in which a person casts a ballot despite knowingly being ineligible to vote — is “extraordinarily rare,” according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. The 2007 study examined elections where wrongdoing was alleged and found the rate of substantiated instances of fraud ranged between 0.00004% and 0.0009%. Another study by a Loyola law professor found just 31 instances of in-person voter fraud (in which one person pretended to be someone else) out of more than 1 billion cast between 2000 and 2014.
Trump has charged that individuals are voting multiple times in order to tilt the election away from him. But UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen noted that such schemes are impractical to execute on a sufficiently large scale to sway the presidential race’s outcome.
“To vote five, 10 or 15 times one would have to either register five, 10, or 15 times in different jurisdictions or with false names or go five, 10 or 15 times to polling places claiming to be someone else whose name is on the voter rolls, in the hopes that this person has not already voted and you would not get caught,” Hasen wrote this week.
Then someone alleges it could have happened and everyone believes an unsupported “opinion.” Voting Irregularities do exist and it is usually because of the people working at the Polls and not due to voter fraud. It appears there are issues of double counting in Waukesha and not counting some votes in Milwaukee.
CoRev, don’t even bother me with your inane remarks.
It is astounding to me to see how accurate George Orwell’s description of politics and government has come to be in this period of time. I agree wholeheartedly with what EMichael has written. A minority, though slim, of voters have given Trump an Electoral College victory due to the severe gerrymandering of electoral districts across most of the middle and south-eastern United States. Reality TV has become reality. Trump lied repeatedly and was called out for it. He disparaged women in a most severe manner. As the President-elect he continues to make the entire process of electing a new Administration a total joke. What possible excuse is there for suggesting Ben Carson for a cabinet chair? How does Sarah Palin warrant serious consideration for a similar high government position? Trump discusses the pipe line issue while holding shares in the company pursuing that goal. What the devil is going on in America? What next? Cliven Bundy for head of the Bureau of Land Management?
I don’t know what the result of all of this circus machinations will be, but it won’t be good. Frankly, I think that even the other Republicans will begin to become concerned about the man who has made George W. look like a serious Presidential choice. He has real and serious financial conflicts of interest as President and owner of the Trump Organization. His selections for not one, but several high Administrative positions face serious examination. He has turned 180 degrees away from every promise that he made to his base voters. Wall Street insiders are about to take full control of the government control mechanisms that Trump assured voters that he would fix. I’m afraid the fix is in. What happens next is guess work.
True about the EC, but the Southern Strategy effectively did the gerrymandering. And now we have Jeff Sessions and this Supreme Court with the ability to redo that gerrymandering.
For the real reason as to why Trump won and Clinton lost if your still worried about that go see and read at the Economic Policy Institute.com “Manufacturing Job Loss, Trade, Not Productivity Is The Culprit” from Robert Scott on 8-11-15.
I think Pence’s admission to Stephanopoulos is extremely useful—if it’s recognized for what it is.
What it is is a clear acknowledgment that no statement of Trump’s purporting to be a representation of fact is anything more than just Trump’s opinion, because Trump doesn’t understand the difference between fact and opinion and doesn’t think there is one.
If you want to understand why Clinton lost, look at the Electoral College. HRC explained herself to American voters sufficiently to win the popular vote by a wide margin. This under conditions that history tells us makes it extremely hard for the party in the White House to succeed (a 2-term president). Could the Democrats do better? Sure. They could do better even if HRC had won.
The problem for Democrats is regaining state legislatures and governorships.
EC is a majority wins gets all of the state EC votes. There is no gerrymandering of the EC as the vote is not awarded by district. HRC lost because she did not get the majority of the votes in several states. The idea of the EC was to have more than a regional appeal. Small states were give a minimum of 3 Electoral votes (1 for population and 1 for each senator). Posner does give a good explanation of the need for the EC.
We’re definitely headed for a US split. The US makes sense when it is the preeminent military and economic force in the world. In a world where it isn’t, maybe it starts to look like the EU.
I guess the only question is whether Michigan will be part of the Union or the Confederacy this time.
“The idea of the EC was to have more than a regional appeal. ”
No. The idea of the EC was to have a slate of electors who could, if necessary, over-rule the excesses of democracy, which the founding fathers mistrusted.
It had nothing to do with incenting POTUS candidates to campaign in certain states. Indeed, campaigning by presidential candidates was unheard of at the time of the founding of the USA.
There are several inaccurate statements in Comments and yours is just a bastardization of the EC. The EC did not cause the loss, white America did. Here is Posner on the EC.
1) Certainty of Outcome
A dispute over the outcome of an Electoral College vote is possible—it happened in 2000—but it’s less likely than a dispute over the popular vote. The reason is that the winning candidate’s share of the Electoral College invariably exceeds his share of the popular vote. In last week’s election, for example, Obama received 61.7 percent of the electoral vote compared to only 51.3 percent of the popular votes cast for him and Romney. (I ignore the scattering of votes not counted for either candidate.) Because almost all states award electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, even a very slight plurality in a state creates a landslide electoral-vote victory in that state. A tie in the nationwide electoral vote is possible because the total number of votes—538—is an even number, but it is highly unlikely.*
Of course a tie in the number of popular votes in a national election in which tens of millions of votes are cast is even more unlikely. But if the difference in the popular vote is small, then if the winner of the popular vote were deemed the winner of the presidential election, candidates would have an incentive to seek a recount in any state (plus the District of Columbia) in which they thought the recount would give them more additional votes than their opponent. The lawyers would go to work in state after state to have the votes recounted, and the result would be debilitating uncertainty, delay, and conflict—look at the turmoil that a dispute limited to one state, Florida, engendered in 2000.*
2) Everyone’s President
The Electoral College requires a presidential candidate to have transregional appeal. No region (South, Northeast, etc.) has enough electoral votes to elect a president. So a solid regional favorite, such as Romney was in the South, has no incentive to campaign heavily in those states, for he gains no electoral votes by increasing his plurality in states that he knows he will win. This is a desirable result because a candidate with only regional appeal is unlikely to be a successful president. The residents of the other regions are likely to feel disfranchised—to feel that their votes do not count, that the new president will have no regard for their interests, that he really isn’t their president.
3) Swing States
The winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes induces the candidates—as we saw in last week’s election—to focus their campaign efforts on the toss-up states; that follows directly from the candidates’ lack of inducement to campaign in states they are sure to win. Voters in toss-up states are more likely to pay close attention to the campaign—to really listen to the competing candidates—knowing that they are going to decide the election. They are likely to be the most thoughtful voters, on average (and for the further reason that they will have received the most information and attention from the candidates), and the most thoughtful voters should be the ones to decide the election.
4) Big States
The Electoral College restores some of the weight in the political balance that large states (by population) lose by virtue of the mal-apportionment of the Senate decreed in the Constitution. This may seem paradoxical, given that electoral votes are weighted in favor of less populous states. Wyoming, the least populous state, contains only about one-sixth of 1 percent of the U.S. population, but its three electors (of whom two are awarded only because Wyoming has two senators like every other state) give it slightly more than one-half of 1 percent of total electoral votes. But winner-take-all makes a slight increase in the popular vote have a much bigger electoral-vote payoff in a large state than in a small one. The popular vote was very close in Florida; nevertheless Obama, who won that vote, got 29 electoral votes. A victory by the same margin in Wyoming would net the winner only 3 electoral votes. So, other things being equal, a large state gets more attention from presidential candidates in a campaign than a small states does. And since presidents and senators are often presidential candidates, large states are likely to get additional consideration in appropriations and appointments from presidents and senators before as well as during campaigns, offsetting to some extent the effects of the malapportioned Senate on the political influence of less populous states.
5) Avoid Run-Off Elections
The Electoral College avoids the problem of elections in which no candidate receives a majority of the votes cast. For example, Nixon in 1968 and Clinton in 1992 both had only a 43 percent plurality of the popular votes, while winning a majority in the Electoral College (301 and 370 electoral votes, respectively). There is pressure for run-off elections when no candidate wins a majority of the votes cast; that pressure, which would greatly complicate the presidential election process, is reduced by the Electoral College, which invariably produces a clear winner.
Against these reasons to retain the Electoral College the argument that it is undemocratic falls flat. No form of representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy, is or aspires to be perfectly democratic. Certainly not our federal government. In the entire executive and judicial branches, only two officials are elected—the president and vice president. All the rest are appointed—federal Article III judges for life.
It can be argued that the Electoral College method of selecting the president may turn off potential voters for a candidate who has no hope of carrying their state—Democrats in Texas, for example, or Republicans in California. Knowing their vote will have no effect, they have less incentive to pay attention to the campaign than they would have if the president were picked by popular vote, for then the state of a voter’s residence would be irrelevant to the weight of his vote. But of course no voter’s vote swings a national election, and in spite of that, about one-half the eligible American population did vote in last week’s election. Voters in presidential elections are people who want to express a political preference rather than people who think that a single vote may decide an election. Even in one-sided states, there are plenty of votes in favor of the candidate who is sure not to carry the state. So I doubt that the Electoral College has much of a turn-off effect. And if it does, that is outweighed by the reasons for retaining this seemingly archaic institution.
This is the most coherent statement on the Electoral College I have found to date coming from one of the better COA judges I have read case study on in the past. I can add more which will further refute your comment . . .
Run,
Putting aside Richard Posner’s reputation (locally, not so good), and the fact that back in the day he defended Bush v. Gore, he ignores the argument Scalia made in that ill reputed decision claiming the right of Florida voters to “equal protection of the laws” in the way the Florida votes were being recounted.
What about equal protection for the voters of populous states? It is unreasonable to give a Wyoming voter’s vote more importance than that of a California, Illinois, or New York voter. The argument that because the swing state’s voters’ votes will be more significant than those of non swing state voters mean that they will pay more attention and be more discerning and of better judgement strikes me as a baloney assertion devoid of any evidence.
Baker v. Carr established the importance of one person, one vote in congressional elections in terms of apportionment of districts. Seems odd, to say the least, to deny that principle in the vote for the one office that is truly national. In short, the Electoral College is historical, not rational.
You ignore the argument of Hamilton which is why the present system is in place. The fear was that larger states would be able to swing elections due to population. The fear was some”one would be able to manipulate the citizenry.” The population was not to be trusted. I suspect we could say the same now also.
“The electoral college is also part of compromises made at the convention to satisfy the small states. Under the system of the Electoral College each state had the same number of electoral votes as they have representative in Congress, thus no state could have less then 3. The result of this system is that in this election the state of Wyoming cast about 210,000 votes, and thus each elector represented 70,000 votes, while in California approximately 9,700,000 votes were cast for 54 votes, thus representing 179,000 votes per electorate. Obviously this creates an unfair advantage to voters in the small states whose votes actually count more then those people living in medium and large states.” http://www.historycentral.com/elections/Electoralcollgewhy.html
Is there an instance other than Jefferson where three Electoral votes swayed an election of a president??? no. Small states still, still have no power by themselves.
the trouble with deciding that someone else’s opinion is not rational, is that they are very likely to decide that your opinion is not rational.
then what?
it seems to me you think that “one person one vote” is THE rational way of deciding elections handed down from god.
Trouble is our way of deciding elections was haded down by the framers of the constitution, some of whom studied government very carefully and were not fools. and they came up with the electoral college for what they thought were rational reasons.
for one thing, they really distrusted “pure” democracy and built a system of “checks and balances” to prevent the evils thereof.
i don’t like the way the election turned out either, but i am not one of those who is yeling to change the distance from the pitchers mound to the plate because the opposing pitcher just struck out my side.
As Sinan points out over at Talkradiosucks, the equal protection argument is not against the electoral college as such (which is, of course, specified in the constitution) but rather against winner take all for the selection of electors. Proportional selection would solve the problem. The legal argument is laid out in his post and it is pretty good (in my opinion, of course!).
I would look to apportionment +2 with the balance going to the loser in each state. Those with three votes would only be able to award 2 at the most unless it was a slam dunk.
This is ABSOLUTELY litigation that should be filed, by a decent number of plaintiff voters from several states. And it should be given a lot of attention as it progresses.
If Biden had real guts, he would do this, and then travel around the country explaining not only the immediate factual reasons—Clinton’s significant popular-vote win; the unprecedented refusal by McConnell to allow hearings to be held on Garland’s nomination—but also Trump’s stacking his administration with industry and political insiders (including Wall Streeters), his bald reversals on such things as Medicare, his virulent anti-labor appointees (including, almost certainly, his Supreme Court picks), the input his billionaire donors are having in putting together his administration, and—most important, and certainly relatedly—his simply turning over to Paul Ryan the entire panoply of fiscal and regulatory policies. He really WAS just a Trojan Horse for the Republican establishment, on steroids.
But every single bit as important would be for Biden to tell the public what REALLY is meant by justices like Scalia. And a very good, very clearly, and VERY timely way to do that is by telling the public what the NYT earlier this week reported in a front-page article titled “Wells Fargo Killing Sham Account Suits by Using Arbitration” –and to explain that in a series of 5-4 Supreme Court opinions, the Republican-appointed justices effectively rewrote the Federal Arbitration Act to force virtually every claim against any large business—whether by consumers, employees, investors (especially small ones, such as stock purchasers), and financial services customers—into “arbitration” (ha, ha, ha), thus removing the right to litigate the claim in court.
And here’s the thing, Jack: Presumably, Biden would not be the only one with an actual public voice explaining this. Sanders, Warren, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio (he’s not known outside of Ohio, but he’s becoming quite vocal now, finally, in op-eds and the like), do, too. I’d say that Sanders and Warren have more access to, say, Rust Belt voters than Biden does.
And—AND—labor union leaders, who not only could speak publicly but also could communicate this through Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
As for the claim that the original purpose of the Electoral College had something to do with large states vs. small ones, you’re right that that’s just nonsense. And as for the ACTUAL original reason for it, if ever there was a time to invoke it, it will be on Dec. 19, 2016. But it won’t be, because of fear of major violence—meaning that its purpose is effectively defunct.
And about that Richard Posner hagiography thing, it’s, as you indicate, pretty laughable. We both know that there is Richard Posner, pre-finance-industry/economy collapse, and Richard Posner, post-finance-industry/economy collapse. Posner pre-late 2008 vs. Posner post-late 2008. In effect, two different people. One is fine, the other not fine at all. And you know which is which.
And not incidentally, that is even more dramatically true of his son Eric—he of I’m-proud-to-be-John-Yoo’s-co-author-fame. And now, I’m-proud-to-be-Fiona-Scott-Morton’s-and-Glen-Weyl’s co-authors. E.g., yesterday’s NYT op-ed, “A Monopoly Donald Trump Can Pop,” at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/opinion/a-monopoly-donald-trump-can-pop.html
They’re based on really, really important new research by three or four economists, whose research is based entirely on some shocking facts.
I also remember his reaction on Slate back in Jun. 2013 to the Shelby County v. Holder Voting Rights Act opinion as based on a bogus, fabricated-out-of-thin-air equal-protection-for-states claim.
Which, hey, maybe can be invoked in the Electoral College-challenge litigation, now that I think about it. Seriously.
Sooo … I do hope that Sanders, Warren, and United Steelworkers 1999 president Chuck Jones explain to Trump why, exactly, United Steelworkers 1999 ISN’T “any good.”
It wasn’t trade agreements after all that killed U.S. manufacturing! It’s the incompetent union members and their union leaders!
Ah. THAT’ll sit well in the Rust Belt.
Of all the many of Trump’s baits-and-switches, this is the one most likely to hurt him:
Bev,
On the try to confirm Garland business, I’ve yet to see an explanation as to why the Republicans couldn’t filibuster the effort. Probably doesn’t matter because I doubt that the Democrats would do it.
I was assuming that the filibuster requires 60 votes–3/5 of the allotted senators under the Constitution–regardless of the number of senators there are at the moment, but I’m not sure.
If it were Harry Reid rather than wimp-o-rama Schumer, he’d do it in a heartbeat if he could get the other Dems to do it. And other than Manchin, I think he could if there were a real education campaign by Sanders, Warren, Brown and union leaders in Rust Belt state and in Fla.. Cuz although most pundits and Schumer types haven’t realized it yet, Trump and the Repubs ain’t gonna be popular once white blue collar folks up north, and seniors, learn what the actual deal is.
CAN’T WAIT til they start privatizing Medicare AND VA healthcare. Looks like they’re not gonna keep their government hands off these programs.
Re the winner take all argument, at this point I think the court would hold the claim was waived due to everyone going forward under the current rules without objection until they learned how it turned out.
I would argue the contrary, Jack. There was no tangible injury-or at least not the injury they would be claiming–until the election result, in which several states went for Trump by tiny margins and Clinton won the popular vote by 2.7 million votes, and therefore there was no standing until after the election.
There’s a separate argument, of course, that could have been made earlier–that if you live in a solid red state and support the Dem, or a solid blue state and support the Repub–there’s no point in even voting for president. But just because that argument existed before the election doesn’t mean that the one that didn’t can’t be litigated now. It couldn’t have been litigated before these facts occurred, so no one waived anything by not filing the lawsuit beforehand.
Orwell lives.
And it is why the DP has to stop with their never ending, self abusive actions and rhetoric and attack:
“We are going to spend the rest of our lives arguing about the precise mix of economic desperation and cultural grievance that drove the calamitous election of Donald Trump. Already, however, there’s an emerging consensus that the Trump apotheosis can be blamed in part on “identity politics” and “political correctness.” In Sunday’s New York Times, the liberal Columbia University historian Mark Lilla proclaimed “the end of identity liberalism.” In the libertarian magazine Reason, an essay was headlined, “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash.” Bill Maher lectured liberals, “You’re outrageous with your politically correct bullshit and it does drive people away.” A Politico piece argued, “To many Trump supporters, Clinton … was merely another ‘PC’ liberal griping about ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘triggering’ language.”……
Those who believe that a purely class-based appeal can woo working-class whites back to the Democratic Party never fully reckon with the reason they abandoned it in the first place. Consider the people profiled in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. They are hard-working residents of Louisiana’s cancer alley; petrochemical plants have sickened their families, destroyed the waterways where they once fished and swam, and in some cases driven them from their homes. There is nothing abstract to them about the murderous price unfettered capitalism is exacting, and yet they’d much rather pay it than make common cause with those who don’t share their increasingly dysfunctional culture. “Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism,” says one. Their wages have fallen or flattened, but they blame that “mainly on the rising costs of welfare,” Hochschild writes. “They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns and the Confederate flag were all held up to ridicule.”
By voting for Trump, people like this have shown us what they value. In this moment of triage for civil society, liberals must hold fast to values of their own.
Certainly, Democrats should champion the interests of working people. They should struggle to expand the social safety net and defend the labor movement against conservative attempts to destroy it. They should work to preserve the gains of the Affordable Care Act, even for those Trump supporters who just voted to gut their own health care. But there can be no going back on defending the tenuous gains of women and people of color, or foregrounding their demands for full equality. They are the base of the party, the people who gave Hillary Clinton a popular vote majority but will now be ruled by a hostile minority.
Trump may very well oversee the end of abortion as a constitutional right in America. He wants to register members of a religious minority. His vice president is vehemently opposed to laws protecting gay people from discrimination. Lilla’s prose is vague, so I’m not sure what he considers to be the “proper sense of scale” in responding to these threats. I am sure liberals should not respond to them quietly. Trump’s nominee for attorney general is a racist opponent of the Voting Rights Act and must be stopped whether or not a campaign against him appeals to white Americans. The focus of left-of-center politics in the dark years to come must be on protecting the groups of people who are targets precisely because of their identities. To sideline their interests is to accede to a backlash that has just begun and will only get worse. If Democrats standing up for diversity makes Trump voters feel disrespected, the best response is a slogan popular among enemies of political correctness at Trump rallies: Fuck your feelings.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/democratic_politics_have_to_be_identity_politics.html
EM, some of the analysis is close to how many conservatives viewed this past 8 years: “… there’s an emerging consensus that the Trump apotheosis can be blamed in part on “identity politics” and “political correctness.”… “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash.” Bill Maher lectured liberals, “You’re outrageous with your politically correct bullshit and it does drive people away.” A Politico piece argued, “To many Trump supporters, Clinton … was merely another ‘PC’ liberal griping about ‘micro-aggressions’ and ‘triggering’ language.”……
Conservatives view the Dem Party as a party made up of “wanna feel goods”, and that’s why you see/hear comments: “Fuck your feelings.” Its also why we see those protestors called snow flakes etc.
Well
i don’t know about snow flakes, but i wish EM would listen to CoRev about this.
We don’t need to give up advances made for minorities. We do need to find a way to include ordinary workers… including white men.
The people who voted for Trump have been lied to and misinformed. The Dems… pardon me… have not found a way to un-lie to them. I suspect it’s because they don’t care. Politics is a card game. The left took its cards and bet it could beat the Right’s cards. That used to work. This time it didn’t.
Don’t think you are going to get a better deal for minorities by handing elections to people who tell the voters that liberals hate them and their feelings.
CoRev,
Neoliberals are all con artists. They talk about ‘political correct’ but do not walk the walk.
In my part of NH a lot of the tea party see the liberals as liars. Sampling the neighbors.
Too many saw the Clinton the same as the tea party this year.
The dems to many are the crooked party.
While they now convict Trump of cheating before he gets into a position to cheat.
Voter fraud — in which a person casts a ballot despite knowingly being ineligible to vote — is “extraordinarily rare,” according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. The 2007 study examined elections where wrongdoing was alleged and found the rate of substantiated instances of fraud ranged between 0.00004% and 0.0009%.
Another study by a Loyola law professor found just 31 instances of in-person voter fraud (in which one person pretended to be someone else) out of more than 1 billion cast between 2000 and 2014.
Trump has charged that individuals are voting multiple times in order to tilt the election away from him. But UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen noted that such schemes are impractical to execute on a sufficiently large scale to sway the presidential race’s outcome.
“To vote five, 10 or 15 times one would have to either register five, 10, or 15 times in different jurisdictions or with false names or go five, 10 or 15 times to polling places claiming to be someone else whose name is on the voter rolls, in the hopes that this person has not already voted and you would not get caught,” Hasen wrote this week.
Then someone alleges it could have happened and everyone believes an unsupported “opinion.” Voting Irregularities do exist and it is usually because of the people working at the Polls and not due to voter fraud. It appears there are issues of double counting in Waukesha and not counting some votes in Milwaukee.
CoRev, don’t even bother me with your inane remarks.
It is astounding to me to see how accurate George Orwell’s description of politics and government has come to be in this period of time. I agree wholeheartedly with what EMichael has written. A minority, though slim, of voters have given Trump an Electoral College victory due to the severe gerrymandering of electoral districts across most of the middle and south-eastern United States. Reality TV has become reality. Trump lied repeatedly and was called out for it. He disparaged women in a most severe manner. As the President-elect he continues to make the entire process of electing a new Administration a total joke. What possible excuse is there for suggesting Ben Carson for a cabinet chair? How does Sarah Palin warrant serious consideration for a similar high government position? Trump discusses the pipe line issue while holding shares in the company pursuing that goal. What the devil is going on in America? What next? Cliven Bundy for head of the Bureau of Land Management?
I don’t know what the result of all of this circus machinations will be, but it won’t be good. Frankly, I think that even the other Republicans will begin to become concerned about the man who has made George W. look like a serious Presidential choice. He has real and serious financial conflicts of interest as President and owner of the Trump Organization. His selections for not one, but several high Administrative positions face serious examination. He has turned 180 degrees away from every promise that he made to his base voters. Wall Street insiders are about to take full control of the government control mechanisms that Trump assured voters that he would fix. I’m afraid the fix is in. What happens next is guess work.
It is impossible to Gerrymamder the EC. It is winner take all by total vote within each state
EC votes are not awarded by district. It is winner of the state gets all the EC votes. Two states apportion.
Run,
True about the EC, but the Southern Strategy effectively did the gerrymandering. And now we have Jeff Sessions and this Supreme Court with the ability to redo that gerrymandering.
For the real reason as to why Trump won and Clinton lost if your still worried about that go see and read at the Economic Policy Institute.com “Manufacturing Job Loss, Trade, Not Productivity Is The Culprit” from Robert Scott on 8-11-15.
I think Pence’s admission to Stephanopoulos is extremely useful—if it’s recognized for what it is.
What it is is a clear acknowledgment that no statement of Trump’s purporting to be a representation of fact is anything more than just Trump’s opinion, because Trump doesn’t understand the difference between fact and opinion and doesn’t think there is one.
And, taking Pence at face value, either does he.
If you want to understand why Clinton lost, look at the Electoral College. HRC explained herself to American voters sufficiently to win the popular vote by a wide margin. This under conditions that history tells us makes it extremely hard for the party in the White House to succeed (a 2-term president). Could the Democrats do better? Sure. They could do better even if HRC had won.
The problem for Democrats is regaining state legislatures and governorships.
EC is a majority wins gets all of the state EC votes. There is no gerrymandering of the EC as the vote is not awarded by district. HRC lost because she did not get the majority of the votes in several states. The idea of the EC was to have more than a regional appeal. Small states were give a minimum of 3 Electoral votes (1 for population and 1 for each senator). Posner does give a good explanation of the need for the EC.
We’re definitely headed for a US split. The US makes sense when it is the preeminent military and economic force in the world. In a world where it isn’t, maybe it starts to look like the EU.
I guess the only question is whether Michigan will be part of the Union or the Confederacy this time.
Michigan is still a majority Dem.
“The idea of the EC was to have more than a regional appeal. ”
No. The idea of the EC was to have a slate of electors who could, if necessary, over-rule the excesses of democracy, which the founding fathers mistrusted.
It had nothing to do with incenting POTUS candidates to campaign in certain states. Indeed, campaigning by presidential candidates was unheard of at the time of the founding of the USA.
Joel:
There are several inaccurate statements in Comments and yours is just a bastardization of the EC. The EC did not cause the loss, white America did. Here is Posner on the EC.
1) Certainty of Outcome
A dispute over the outcome of an Electoral College vote is possible—it happened in 2000—but it’s less likely than a dispute over the popular vote. The reason is that the winning candidate’s share of the Electoral College invariably exceeds his share of the popular vote. In last week’s election, for example, Obama received 61.7 percent of the electoral vote compared to only 51.3 percent of the popular votes cast for him and Romney. (I ignore the scattering of votes not counted for either candidate.) Because almost all states award electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, even a very slight plurality in a state creates a landslide electoral-vote victory in that state. A tie in the nationwide electoral vote is possible because the total number of votes—538—is an even number, but it is highly unlikely.*
Of course a tie in the number of popular votes in a national election in which tens of millions of votes are cast is even more unlikely. But if the difference in the popular vote is small, then if the winner of the popular vote were deemed the winner of the presidential election, candidates would have an incentive to seek a recount in any state (plus the District of Columbia) in which they thought the recount would give them more additional votes than their opponent. The lawyers would go to work in state after state to have the votes recounted, and the result would be debilitating uncertainty, delay, and conflict—look at the turmoil that a dispute limited to one state, Florida, engendered in 2000.*
2) Everyone’s President
The Electoral College requires a presidential candidate to have transregional appeal. No region (South, Northeast, etc.) has enough electoral votes to elect a president. So a solid regional favorite, such as Romney was in the South, has no incentive to campaign heavily in those states, for he gains no electoral votes by increasing his plurality in states that he knows he will win. This is a desirable result because a candidate with only regional appeal is unlikely to be a successful president. The residents of the other regions are likely to feel disfranchised—to feel that their votes do not count, that the new president will have no regard for their interests, that he really isn’t their president.
3) Swing States
The winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes induces the candidates—as we saw in last week’s election—to focus their campaign efforts on the toss-up states; that follows directly from the candidates’ lack of inducement to campaign in states they are sure to win. Voters in toss-up states are more likely to pay close attention to the campaign—to really listen to the competing candidates—knowing that they are going to decide the election. They are likely to be the most thoughtful voters, on average (and for the further reason that they will have received the most information and attention from the candidates), and the most thoughtful voters should be the ones to decide the election.
4) Big States
The Electoral College restores some of the weight in the political balance that large states (by population) lose by virtue of the mal-apportionment of the Senate decreed in the Constitution. This may seem paradoxical, given that electoral votes are weighted in favor of less populous states. Wyoming, the least populous state, contains only about one-sixth of 1 percent of the U.S. population, but its three electors (of whom two are awarded only because Wyoming has two senators like every other state) give it slightly more than one-half of 1 percent of total electoral votes. But winner-take-all makes a slight increase in the popular vote have a much bigger electoral-vote payoff in a large state than in a small one. The popular vote was very close in Florida; nevertheless Obama, who won that vote, got 29 electoral votes. A victory by the same margin in Wyoming would net the winner only 3 electoral votes. So, other things being equal, a large state gets more attention from presidential candidates in a campaign than a small states does. And since presidents and senators are often presidential candidates, large states are likely to get additional consideration in appropriations and appointments from presidents and senators before as well as during campaigns, offsetting to some extent the effects of the malapportioned Senate on the political influence of less populous states.
5) Avoid Run-Off Elections
The Electoral College avoids the problem of elections in which no candidate receives a majority of the votes cast. For example, Nixon in 1968 and Clinton in 1992 both had only a 43 percent plurality of the popular votes, while winning a majority in the Electoral College (301 and 370 electoral votes, respectively). There is pressure for run-off elections when no candidate wins a majority of the votes cast; that pressure, which would greatly complicate the presidential election process, is reduced by the Electoral College, which invariably produces a clear winner.
Against these reasons to retain the Electoral College the argument that it is undemocratic falls flat. No form of representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy, is or aspires to be perfectly democratic. Certainly not our federal government. In the entire executive and judicial branches, only two officials are elected—the president and vice president. All the rest are appointed—federal Article III judges for life.
It can be argued that the Electoral College method of selecting the president may turn off potential voters for a candidate who has no hope of carrying their state—Democrats in Texas, for example, or Republicans in California. Knowing their vote will have no effect, they have less incentive to pay attention to the campaign than they would have if the president were picked by popular vote, for then the state of a voter’s residence would be irrelevant to the weight of his vote. But of course no voter’s vote swings a national election, and in spite of that, about one-half the eligible American population did vote in last week’s election. Voters in presidential elections are people who want to express a political preference rather than people who think that a single vote may decide an election. Even in one-sided states, there are plenty of votes in favor of the candidate who is sure not to carry the state. So I doubt that the Electoral College has much of a turn-off effect. And if it does, that is outweighed by the reasons for retaining this seemingly archaic institution.
Judge Richard Posner 7th District http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2012/11/defending_the_electoral_college.html “Defending the Electoral College”
This is the most coherent statement on the Electoral College I have found to date coming from one of the better COA judges I have read case study on in the past. I can add more which will further refute your comment . . .
” I can add more which will further refute your comment . . .”
Please do. Nothing in the bafflegab you’ve posted above has refuted anything I posted.
Joel:
It is difficult to refute supposition, conjecture, and opinion which is what you posted.
Run,
Putting aside Richard Posner’s reputation (locally, not so good), and the fact that back in the day he defended Bush v. Gore, he ignores the argument Scalia made in that ill reputed decision claiming the right of Florida voters to “equal protection of the laws” in the way the Florida votes were being recounted.
What about equal protection for the voters of populous states? It is unreasonable to give a Wyoming voter’s vote more importance than that of a California, Illinois, or New York voter. The argument that because the swing state’s voters’ votes will be more significant than those of non swing state voters mean that they will pay more attention and be more discerning and of better judgement strikes me as a baloney assertion devoid of any evidence.
Baker v. Carr established the importance of one person, one vote in congressional elections in terms of apportionment of districts. Seems odd, to say the least, to deny that principle in the vote for the one office that is truly national. In short, the Electoral College is historical, not rational.
Hmmm:
You ignore the argument of Hamilton which is why the present system is in place. The fear was that larger states would be able to swing elections due to population. The fear was some”one would be able to manipulate the citizenry.” The population was not to be trusted. I suspect we could say the same now also.
“The electoral college is also part of compromises made at the convention to satisfy the small states. Under the system of the Electoral College each state had the same number of electoral votes as they have representative in Congress, thus no state could have less then 3. The result of this system is that in this election the state of Wyoming cast about 210,000 votes, and thus each elector represented 70,000 votes, while in California approximately 9,700,000 votes were cast for 54 votes, thus representing 179,000 votes per electorate. Obviously this creates an unfair advantage to voters in the small states whose votes actually count more then those people living in medium and large states.” http://www.historycentral.com/elections/Electoralcollgewhy.html
Is there an instance other than Jefferson where three Electoral votes swayed an election of a president??? no. Small states still, still have no power by themselves.
Jack D
the trouble with deciding that someone else’s opinion is not rational, is that they are very likely to decide that your opinion is not rational.
then what?
it seems to me you think that “one person one vote” is THE rational way of deciding elections handed down from god.
Trouble is our way of deciding elections was haded down by the framers of the constitution, some of whom studied government very carefully and were not fools. and they came up with the electoral college for what they thought were rational reasons.
for one thing, they really distrusted “pure” democracy and built a system of “checks and balances” to prevent the evils thereof.
i don’t like the way the election turned out either, but i am not one of those who is yeling to change the distance from the pitchers mound to the plate because the opposing pitcher just struck out my side.
As Sinan points out over at Talkradiosucks, the equal protection argument is not against the electoral college as such (which is, of course, specified in the constitution) but rather against winner take all for the selection of electors. Proportional selection would solve the problem. The legal argument is laid out in his post and it is pretty good (in my opinion, of course!).
I would look to apportionment +2 with the balance going to the loser in each state. Those with three votes would only be able to award 2 at the most unless it was a slam dunk.
Jack, Lawrence Lessig posted a terrific article on Medium a few days ago titled “The Equal Protection argument against “winner take all” in the Electoral College,” at https://medium.com/@lessig/the-equal-protection-argument-against-winner-take-all-in-the-electoral-college-b09e8a49d777#.p2lnzduys.
This is ABSOLUTELY litigation that should be filed, by a decent number of plaintiff voters from several states. And it should be given a lot of attention as it progresses.
Meanwhile, there’s an article at Daily Kos, posted yesterday, titled “Sign the petition to Joe Biden and Senate Democrats: Confirm Merrick Garland to Supreme Court on January 3.”
https://www.dailykos.com/campaigns/petitions/sign-the-petition-to-joe-biden-and-senate-democrats-confirm-merrick-garland-to-supreme-court-on-january-3rd?detail=action&link_id=0&can_id=f702d31c7477f75f213c5cdeae3a74af&source=email-signature-needed-there-is-a-way-to-confirm-merrick-garland-please-read-2&email_referrer=signature-needed-there-is-a-way-to-confirm-merrick-garland-please-read-2&email_subject=signature-needed-there-is-a-way-to-confirm-merrick-garland-please-read
If Biden had real guts, he would do this, and then travel around the country explaining not only the immediate factual reasons—Clinton’s significant popular-vote win; the unprecedented refusal by McConnell to allow hearings to be held on Garland’s nomination—but also Trump’s stacking his administration with industry and political insiders (including Wall Streeters), his bald reversals on such things as Medicare, his virulent anti-labor appointees (including, almost certainly, his Supreme Court picks), the input his billionaire donors are having in putting together his administration, and—most important, and certainly relatedly—his simply turning over to Paul Ryan the entire panoply of fiscal and regulatory policies. He really WAS just a Trojan Horse for the Republican establishment, on steroids.
But every single bit as important would be for Biden to tell the public what REALLY is meant by justices like Scalia. And a very good, very clearly, and VERY timely way to do that is by telling the public what the NYT earlier this week reported in a front-page article titled “Wells Fargo Killing Sham Account Suits by Using Arbitration” –and to explain that in a series of 5-4 Supreme Court opinions, the Republican-appointed justices effectively rewrote the Federal Arbitration Act to force virtually every claim against any large business—whether by consumers, employees, investors (especially small ones, such as stock purchasers), and financial services customers—into “arbitration” (ha, ha, ha), thus removing the right to litigate the claim in court.
And here’s the thing, Jack: Presumably, Biden would not be the only one with an actual public voice explaining this. Sanders, Warren, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio (he’s not known outside of Ohio, but he’s becoming quite vocal now, finally, in op-eds and the like), do, too. I’d say that Sanders and Warren have more access to, say, Rust Belt voters than Biden does.
And—AND—labor union leaders, who not only could speak publicly but also could communicate this through Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
See, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/07/how-to-discredit-donald-trump-part-of-the-elite
As for the claim that the original purpose of the Electoral College had something to do with large states vs. small ones, you’re right that that’s just nonsense. And as for the ACTUAL original reason for it, if ever there was a time to invoke it, it will be on Dec. 19, 2016. But it won’t be, because of fear of major violence—meaning that its purpose is effectively defunct.
And about that Richard Posner hagiography thing, it’s, as you indicate, pretty laughable. We both know that there is Richard Posner, pre-finance-industry/economy collapse, and Richard Posner, post-finance-industry/economy collapse. Posner pre-late 2008 vs. Posner post-late 2008. In effect, two different people. One is fine, the other not fine at all. And you know which is which.
And not incidentally, that is even more dramatically true of his son Eric—he of I’m-proud-to-be-John-Yoo’s-co-author-fame. And now, I’m-proud-to-be-Fiona-Scott-Morton’s-and-Glen-Weyl’s co-authors. E.g., yesterday’s NYT op-ed, “A Monopoly Donald Trump Can Pop,” at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/opinion/a-monopoly-donald-trump-can-pop.html
That’s the third time he’s written about this. He wrote two earlier articles on it at Slate, in Apr; 2015 and Jan. 2016:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/04/mutual_funds_make_air_travel_more_expensive_institutional_investors_reduce.html
and
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2016/01/banks_charge_high_fees_because_there_is_no_real_competition.html
They’re based on really, really important new research by three or four economists, whose research is based entirely on some shocking facts.
I also remember his reaction on Slate back in Jun. 2013 to the Shelby County v. Holder Voting Rights Act opinion as based on a bogus, fabricated-out-of-thin-air equal-protection-for-states claim.
Which, hey, maybe can be invoked in the Electoral College-challenge litigation, now that I think about it. Seriously.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Sooo … I do hope that Sanders, Warren, and United Steelworkers 1999 president Chuck Jones explain to Trump why, exactly, United Steelworkers 1999 ISN’T “any good.”
It wasn’t trade agreements after all that killed U.S. manufacturing! It’s the incompetent union members and their union leaders!
Ah. THAT’ll sit well in the Rust Belt.
Of all the many of Trump’s baits-and-switches, this is the one most likely to hurt him:
Bev,
On the try to confirm Garland business, I’ve yet to see an explanation as to why the Republicans couldn’t filibuster the effort. Probably doesn’t matter because I doubt that the Democrats would do it.
I was assuming that the filibuster requires 60 votes–3/5 of the allotted senators under the Constitution–regardless of the number of senators there are at the moment, but I’m not sure.
If it were Harry Reid rather than wimp-o-rama Schumer, he’d do it in a heartbeat if he could get the other Dems to do it. And other than Manchin, I think he could if there were a real education campaign by Sanders, Warren, Brown and union leaders in Rust Belt state and in Fla.. Cuz although most pundits and Schumer types haven’t realized it yet, Trump and the Repubs ain’t gonna be popular once white blue collar folks up north, and seniors, learn what the actual deal is.
CAN’T WAIT til they start privatizing Medicare AND VA healthcare. Looks like they’re not gonna keep their government hands off these programs.
Ooooooh. Things are heating up. The Dems are awake now:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/spending-stopgap-congress-232363
Re the winner take all argument, at this point I think the court would hold the claim was waived due to everyone going forward under the current rules without objection until they learned how it turned out.
I would argue the contrary, Jack. There was no tangible injury-or at least not the injury they would be claiming–until the election result, in which several states went for Trump by tiny margins and Clinton won the popular vote by 2.7 million votes, and therefore there was no standing until after the election.
There’s a separate argument, of course, that could have been made earlier–that if you live in a solid red state and support the Dem, or a solid blue state and support the Repub–there’s no point in even voting for president. But just because that argument existed before the election doesn’t mean that the one that didn’t can’t be litigated now. It couldn’t have been litigated before these facts occurred, so no one waived anything by not filing the lawsuit beforehand.
The potential result was always there. An argument is an argument. Doesn’t mean the court will accept it.