If they are of childbearing age, they need to leave last week! This state has let a shitload of women bleed out in the parking lot, while they are loosing their baby!
I lived in Texas for 5 years and it was one of the nicest places I've ever lived. Low crime rate. Cheap cost of living. Rent was reasonable in the area. No state level income taxes. Weather was fantastic too, though that's not dictated by politics, still a huge plus.
I’d live in hell, if my vote helps to eliminate Dump and MAGA! (I about live in Hell!I live in Texas!
It wouldn't. Liberal policy creates Conservatives. You can't get rid of Conservative ideology with Liberal ideology or policy. You have to elect socialists. That's the way forward. Anything less is theater. No, really. No, really, really.
If your vote is being counted as a vote for president and not going to the electoral college, then your vote does count and more than ever. What am I missing?
I always laugh at how people mention how "but then less populated states would get ignored" as if they don't already. When was the last time a presidential candidate campaigned in fucking Montana or Alaska. The very issue the Electoral College was supposed to address, happened anyway just worse than expected
The electoral college was meant to keep virginia from dominating politics.
The original states were far more independent and the constitution as written, still written in fact even if not as currently interpreted, wildly restricts the federal government. The smaller states, as a condition of giving up part of their sovereignty, demanded safeguards against being dominated into irrelevance by larger political entities. Thus the senate and electoral college.
Basically the US is supposed to be structured a lot more like the EU currently is.
Well that was the reason for the weighted votes. The reason for the electors is of course that, again, constitutionally, people are supposed to vote for electors and the electors vote for a president, precisely because they felt people would elect a populist demagogue if left to their own devices.
TLDR: Nothing is working like its supposed to work and thats causing all sorts of problems like people wanting to end the electoral college because the federal government has so much influence over their lives when it shouldn't.
California was absolutely Republican pre-1990s. and except for 99-03, they had only Republican governors from 1983-2011. They’ve even elected celebrities twice with the Republican ticket
“Noooo, but then my vote in rural Pennsylvania won’t matter >:(“
No, it's literally the opposite. Under the EC, their vote doesn't matter. Under a popular vote, literally every single vote from the bluest part of NYC, to the most remote tent in Alaska matters.
And it does, by an unfairly large amount and they want to keep it that way. 70% of America doesn't support them, yet they control every single branch of government.
Yeah, but the problem is they will never win an election again. It's why conservatives are so against any form of democracy. They have names for it like "mob rule". If it were up to them no blue state, city, woman or minority would be allowed to vote.
Only presidential elections are affected by the EC, but yes there is a risk that they will never win the presidency again, unless they change utterly, or perhaps they will use the COngress and courts to gut the powers of the president
Pennsylvania would matter but it would also make it so that the Republican candidate would need to appeal to voters in California, and the Democratic candidate to voters in Texas, instead of them basically just looping between Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina,etc.
You’re in a large state. Your vote gets diluted by the smaller states. You get attention because you’re a swing state. I do think that the party platforms would be different if they had to appeal across the entire country.
Today, the swing states are the only ones that truly see any candidates campaign. Florida, NY, CA and some big red states only get visits for fundraising but not campaigning.
When’s the last time a dem or republican went to Des Moines to campaign? A dem could go to get some voters to show up for him. My district is terribly gerrymandered and my state is largely red. Probably 2/3 of the elections I participated in as an adult were meaningless. No hope for prez and Rep. a little more competitive for senate but not much. It wouldn’t have mattered if u have voted or not. No electoral college and my vote truly would count for prez.
The reason we use the electoral college is so that a candidate can't just appease California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois and tell the rest of the country to f*** off. Or just ignore them all together.
At least that was the idea. (Although I think it was New York and Virginia that were the powerhouses back then)
(I agree though we should definitely use the popular vote).
People have such a short term view of everything. They think the way things are today are how they're going to be forever. California used to vote Republican. The South used to be the Democrat stronghold.
Honestly, I never understood the whole concept. A candidate in any other election would prioritize large, populous areas regardless of what office they were running for. Like is someone in the back woods of West Virginia mad that their local county commissioner had a round table at a local school auditorium instead of driving out to the middle of nowhere to meet them? Probably not. But for some reason we act like a presidential candidate appealing to populous states is a bad thing.
I understand the intention, but what I'm saying is it shouldn't matter. I used a small scale example just to point out how ridiculous it is. It makes no sense that the majority shouldn't decide the outcome of an election. The reason states like California get to decide isn't because they're better, more powerful, or unfairly prioritized. It's because there are TONS of people there. The 4 most populous states make up one third of the entire US population. People in Wyoming shouldn't have disproportionate voting power just because they live in the middle of nowhere.
But that's exactly what is going on now. Do you think anything positive has been done by the current president to help California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois?
They have similar problems my state has. High insurance, affordable housing because of housing shortages, and homelessness. The good thing is my state doesn't get earthquakes. M right now food and fuel is a bit pricey.
Obviously, candidates dont get 100% of each state, and, really, the top 8 states by population are pretty even split in (if you align purple states with the party their state leans towards)
California- 40m
Texas- 32m
Florida- 24m
New York- 20m
Pennsylvania- 18m
Illinois- 13m
Georgia- 12m
North Carolina- 11m
But, really, the question i ask people whenever i see the issue you pointed out being discussed is this:
If a majority of americans living in a small number of states want something....how are their opinions less valid than the opinionsjhhhh of LESS americans spread out in a larger number of states?
That's not why we have the EC. It was to appease the slave states. What it does is disenfranchise large swaths of people and candidates all but ignore the most populous states during the General because they're either deep red or deep blue.
The reason we use the electoral college is so that a candidate can't just appease California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois and tell the rest of the country to f*** off. Or just ignore them all together.
Yeah, instead they ignore the millions of Republicans in CA and NY and the millions of democrats in Texas and Florida and focus their energy on the fucking morons in bumblefuck Wisconsin.
The reason we use the electoral college is so that a candidate can't just appease California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois and tell the rest of the country to f*** off
Our literal system has a candidate appease Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona
The founding fathers wanted senators to elect the president. Not the people in a popular vote. look it up- it’s true. Sometime later it evolved to the electoral college.
I'd argue that everyone's vote matters more because it's YOUR VOTE. Republicans are just mad that they'll lose way more presidential elections if everyone's vote actually mattered.
It’s quite the opposite actually. It will matter. So will all the republican votes in California. And all the democratic votes in Alabama. People who might as well not even vote right now suddenly matter.
“Noooo, but then my vote in rural Pennsylvania won’t matter >:(“
I grew up in rural upstate NY. Got into an argument with a HS acquaintance who believed his vote from his town of 2000 should count more than anyone who lived in NYC because "there's so many people there."
Funny that the people that complain about their votes not counting don't bother to vote in local elections where their votes have a lot more power.
If we focus on the popular vote, then the country won't care more about fracking (a small industry almost exclusivly done in a swing state) than they do war in the middle east.
That's only cuz yall vote the same way everytime. The reason the 7 battleground states matter is because ppl actually switch their votes based on the candidates instead of always voting for the same team.
That shouldn't mean you get pandered to the most, and swing states aren't swing states because the populace considers every candidate independently, they are swing states because the political demographics are roughly 50/50, and that's largely coincidence and it changes over time (Former swing states Florida and Ohio, new swing state Georgia).
Personally I think the electoral college is far too gamified a voting system, overcorrects in its weighing of low population states over higher, and ultimately no American is greater or less than another based on the state they reside in, it's one union and one executive and everyone's vote should count the same. We should elect via popular vote and with a 50%+1 requirement (majority) and a voting system like RCV, score voting, or some sort of condorcet voting method where there isn't a winner until someone reaches majority support, no winning by plurality.
Republicans have won the popular vote before (did in 2024 by plurality) and they will again so they shouldn't be so scared about it. With popular vote, first of all the red voters in California and blue voters in Texas (both are large numbers of people) won't have their votes locked away in a state election they can never win, those votes will matter again. But large population centers aren't enough to overcome rural areas by themselves, elections would be won in the suburbs and exurbs all over the country
The issue with popular vote will always be the same it was back when they put in the electoral college, it would allow cities to control everything and what ppl in cities want is vastly different to what ppl in the countryside want. Any politician that represents any citizens from the countryside would be betraying their constituents if they agreed to get rid of the electoral college and because of that, I don't think it's ever going to happen.
I just explained that it really does not do that. Part of this is one's definition of "big cities", technically anyone living in a place of 50,000+ people could be considered part of an "urban population" but I don't think most people in OshKosh consider themselves city-folk.
The urban-core lily blue population isn't that much bigger than the ruby red rural population, candidates would need to reach the midsize towns, the suburbs, the exurbs, but they would be incentivised to do so all over the country, not just in a handful of closely divided states. You could drive up vote counts in states that largely get ignored or ones you would never normally "win" because they aren't 50 individual winner-takes-all contests any more, every vote would matter no matter where it was cast.
The EC doesn't really reward small rural states as much as it rewards politcally polarized states, even amongst the current swing states Nevada isn't fought for quite as hard as say Pennsylvania, or Michigan, or Georgia, or North Carolina.
There are as many Republican voters in California as there are total people in Wisconsin. California is only "always voting for the same team" because of the electoral college system.
Why should those 6 million Republicans' votes matter less than the 6 million people in a "swing state"?
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u/DinosaurDied 10h ago
“Noooo, but then my vote in rural Pennsylvania won’t matter >:(“
Yea well the rest of us living everywhere else besides those 7 battleground states have votes that don’t matter.
I’ve lived all over this country and really always wanted thr same thing and it pisses me off that my vote only matters when I lived in certain areas