USA Politics

bearfan said:
Clinton deciding to try to hide from the Freedom of information Act, ignore record keeping directives and cover it up > trying to be at least a semi-honest person. The email deal is no ones fault but her own. Something she will have plenty of time to contemplate for the rest of her life.
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Right, because the Bush Jr. administration "losing" something around 2 million e-mails and Powell and Rice using private service is totally not the same thing.

bearfan said:
The true signature of a leader ... blame everyone and everything but yourself for a failure
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This I do agree with. BOTH candidates' behavior was less than stellar, but Clinton "blaming" the FBI... that's a sore loser if I ever saw one.
 
Love it.

And I completely agree with bearfan and Mosh - Hillary, while the preferable candidate in the two, did not lose the election because the FBI screwed her, though that may have been the straw that broke the camel's back. She lost the election because she had incredible foolish mistakes in the past that undermined her positives and were able to be successfully exploited by her opposition.

Anyone who blames the FBI for Hillary losing is likely correct on the face and wrong where it counts. The Democrats cannot nominate such a flawed candidate ever again. And if people want to, in the modern age, be elected, they have to accept that everything comes out and it's preferable to deal than deny.
 
LooseCannon said:
though that may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.
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May have been? Can I have a laugh. Of course it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Thus she lost. Because it was so close, the FBI's actions have been decisive. People who deny this lost their sense of reality, or suffer greatly from some sort of bias. Hillary can blame herself and all the people who spread lies and insinuations (FBI included).
 
I'd say they/she also really misread the electorate ... Hillary spent a decent amount of time and resources in Georgia and Arizona trying for a massive electoral win and took some states for granted. From what I read Bill Clinton seemed to be about the only one in the campaign pointing that out.

One good thing about this election is it showed that $1B+ in campaign spending does not equal a victory. More and more (and for better or worse) social media played a huge role and that is dramatically less expensive (really just some salaries) than buying air time on TV/radio. TV/Radio is certainly still needed but outspending Trump 2-1 did her no good.

I think it also showed what they should have known from the mid terms and history is that a coalition on the Presidential level does not fully transfer. It did not from Reagan to Bush (even though he won once), it did not from Obama to Hillary.

To the electoral college versus popular vote. Saying Hillary won the popular vote is incredibly meaningless. The campaign was based on winning the most electoral votes, that is how they campaigned. If it were a popular vote election, you would have seen a completely different campaign. Hillary would have been in urban areas across the country trying to roll up margins, Trump would have been doing the same in rural areas, the battle ground would have been the suburbs. Versus get out the vote efforts literally targeting to "maybe we can get 10 extra votes in some small town in New Hampshire" or "maybe we can pick up this extra 100 votes just outside of Detroit, Michigan" that we saw this election.

Maybe Hillary would have won that campaign, maybe she would have lost .. we will never know because that campaign was not run. At this point it is like saying we lost 4-3, but we had 32 shots on goal to their 30 .. nice stat, but meaningless because shots on goal is not how victory is determined.

For those saying "get rid of the EC" .. I would say step back a bit and think about it independent of a single election or particular candidates, because any changes in voting will always come back to bite you in the ass at some future time. I am sure the GOP regretted some Senate and House rules they passed when they had the majority after the Dems took over, I am sure the Dems are going to regret some paths they took (Obamacare passing without the need for 60 votes, easier to get federal judges on the bench, some executive orders) now that they are not in control ... and the GOP should keep that in mind as well now. Add to all of that, the EC is not changing as there will not be a Constitutional Amendment passed .. so it is a moot point anyway.
 
And here our troubles began.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/stephen-bannon-white-house-trump.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — In naming Stephen K. Bannon to a senior White House post, President-elect Donald J. Trump has elevated the hard-right nationalist movement that Mr. Bannon has nurtured for years from the fringes of American politics to its very heart, a remarkable shift that has further intensified concern about the new administration’s direction.

The provocative news and opinion website that Mr. Bannon ran, Breitbart News, has repeatedly published articles linking migrants to the spread of disease. Its authors have criticized politicians who do not support a religious test for immigrants to screen out potential jihadists. And it has promoted stories that tried to tie Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton who is Muslim, to Islamic militants. ... read more here
 
bearfan said:
I'd say they/she also really misread the electorate ... Hillary spent a decent amount of time and resources in Georgia and Arizona trying for a massive electoral win and took some states for granted. From what I read Bill Clinton seemed to be about the only one in the campaign pointing that out.
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Yeah, absolutely. There were huge strategy errors by the campaign as well. Lots of blame to go around internally, let alone before they consider the admittedly prejudicially timed Comey emails.

bearfan said:
For those saying "get rid of the EC" .. I would say step back a bit and think about it independent of a single election or particular candidates, because any changes in voting will always come back to bite you in the ass at some future time.
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I have no problems with the electoral college being the way it is. My problem is more to do with the partisan way that state legislatures break up their own areas in seats, and the House areas in seats, in very gerrymandered ways.
 
I am not a fan of the way seats are drawn either ... the problem is both parties do it .. the Republicans are doing it more now just by the fact they control more state legislatures ... but the Dems do their share where they can.

I think we talked about this before here ... if it were up to me, I would pick a corner of every state, start moving in some direction and keep going until you get to the number of people you need .. allowing for small variances to account for things like city limits to keep them in one district. You would see more moderate members on both sides and more competitive elections. Then you could also look at tweaking how states allocate electoral votes if more of them wanted to go the way Nebraska and Maine do it .. which I like.
 
bearfan said:
I am not a fan of the way seats are drawn either ... the problem is both parties do it .. the Republicans are doing it more now just by the fact they control more state legislatures ... but the Dems do their share where they can.
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The two most gerrymandered states are North Carolina (GOP) and Maryland (Dems).
 
I have not yet seen a compelling argument for keeping the EC in the modern age. Any democratic system is going to have its cons, but popular vote seems like the best way to go now.

Ironically, the purpose of the EC is to keep people like Donald from being president anyway. But they are not going to vote against the electorate. So it seems pointless keeping it to me.
 
The founders wanted the states to be important. That's why, originally, the Electoral College was selected by the states by a method of their choosing, and that's why Senators were elected by the legislatures of the several states. Besides, regional overrepresentation is not uncommon in democracies. There's a legitimate argument that rule of the absolute majority means rule by the cities over the vast heartlands, and that the populace of places like Chicago, NYC, DFW, and LA could not possibly understand the unique issues brought forward in places like Iowa, Montana, and South Dakota.
 
LooseCannon said:
The founders wanted the states to be important. That's why, originally, the Electoral College was selected by the states by a method of their choosing, and that's why Senators were elected by the legislatures of the several states. Besides, regional overrepresentation is not uncommon in democracies. There's a legitimate argument that rule of the absolute majority means rule by the cities over the vast heartlands, and that the populace of places like Chicago, NYC, DFW, and LA could not possibly understand the unique issues brought forward in places like Iowa, Montana, and South Dakota.
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^This.

Lost in all the drama about who actually won the popular vote (a recent Google report that Trump has more popular votes is being debunked by certain media outlets) is the fact that Trump won 30 states, and Clinton won 20. That's a legitimate reason why he SHOULD (there is no dispute that he will be) be the President of the United STATES of America.
 
LooseCannon said:
There's a legitimate argument that rule of the absolute majority means rule by the cities over the vast heartlands, and that the populace of places like Chicago, NYC, DFW, and LA could not possibly understand the unique issues brought forward in places like Iowa, Montana, and South Dakota.
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This is the argument that seems outdated to me. Maybe this worked when candidates campaigned by visiting states in person, but most people have access to the same information now and should be responsible for being an informed voter. Although I would agree that if dems want to win more elections, they need to stop relying on the coastal states.

I read the article, plenty of interesting points but I am still not totally convinced. Particularly the bit about opening the door to more candidates. I can't see the (lack of) EC changing that.
 
Mosh said:
I read the article, plenty of interesting points but I am still not totally convinced. Particularly the bit about opening the door to more candidates. I can't see the (lack of) EC changing that.
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Do you want the winner to be the one having a majority or a plurality?
 
I don't think we're ever going to have more than two viable candidates whether there's an EC or not. That was the part of the article I disagreed with. If it was viable, then yes an electoral college type of system would probably still be necessary. But it would still need revisions and maybe a ranked choice vote system should be considered in that case (this is already necessary in primaries IMO).

BTW we already have a problem with a minority group of people choosing the president. Having trouble finding the exact numbers right now, but based on turnout only 25-30% of the country chose Donald Trump. This is not an argument for or against him being president, the numbers would've been similar had Hillary won, but it shows we have a major turnout problem as a country. Hard to feel sorry for the country when you see numbers like that.
 
Mosh said:
This is the argument that seems outdated to me. Maybe this worked when candidates campaigned by visiting states in person, but most people have access to the same information now and should be responsible for being an informed voter. Although I would agree that if dems want to win more elections, they need to stop relying on the coastal states.

I read the article, plenty of interesting points but I am still not totally convinced. Particularly the bit about opening the door to more candidates. I can't see the (lack of) EC changing that.
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Maybe the graphics in this NYTimes article will better illustrate the point. For a country as large as the U.S., geography does - and should - matter.
 
There's an easier way to move to closer to population anyway...add more house seats. If you doubled up the house seats, you'd have larger states with more seats than smaller states, and conversely, make the EC more "fair".
 
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