r/politics • u/ben_watson_jr • May 19 '24

How Can This Country Possibly Be Electing Trump Again? Soft Paywall

https://newrepublic.com/article/181287/can-america-possibly-elect-trump-again
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u/[deleted] May 19 '24

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u/crudedrawer May 19 '24

Yeah, I don't think a lot of people realize just how radical very powerful, very rich republicans are at this point. They've controlled the narrative that the left is extreme because of shit like "blue hair" but guys like Alito and Leonard Leo want to entirely reconstruct our government in their image. Thats radical!

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u/Omar_Blitz May 19 '24

Everything is set up by the system to benefit them. Their power is very disproportional. It's easy for them to stay in power and perpetuate the cycle.

Think about it. You can win a state by A SINGLE vote and get all the votes of that state. How is that just and fair? You can get ten million extra votes and it wouldn't matter if they weren't in the "states that matter." Very fucking fair.

Vermont and wyoming have the same power as California and Texas in the senate. How is that democratic? How can you say "One man, one vote" when one vote in this state counts almost a hundred times more than a vote in that state when it comes to the country's highest legislative body?

And the worst thing is, to fix this you need the consent of those who are in power BECAUSE of the broken system. It's like needing the consent of a felon to issue a fine.

It's all fucked in America.

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u/assimilat Tennessee May 19 '24

Amen. The sad honest truth (and im not trying to instigate anything, and I dont condone violence, im just stating a fact) it would unfortunately take a lot of deaths to see any of that change any time soon, but finding a way to end to the electoral college would be the most important step in gaining any sort of meaningful positive reform. (Obviously)

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u/branedead May 19 '24

I believe there is a process underway where starts will automatically cede all of their electrical college votes to the winner of the popular vote, and they're closing in on 270 EC votes, which will de facto eliminate the EC

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u/TheLurkerSpeaks Tennessee May 19 '24

This is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and is a pipe dream that will never happen. In the event that they reach the 270 votes to essentially end the EC, this WILL be brought before SCOTUS and be declared unconstitutional by a conservative bench. They will say the only way to rid ourselves of the EC is through the states' ratification of a constitutional amendment.

Don't bother with the logic and reason behind it, as well thought out a plan it may be, because SCOTUS doesn't necessarily need the logic and reason, either.

I've been wrong before (I famously told many people America would never vote in a black man called Barack Hussein Obama as its President) and I hope I'm wrong about this too but I really cannot see how this happens unless SCOTUS gets a liberal majority, and maybe not even then.

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u/Mundane-Mechanic-547 May 19 '24

And then what's to stop a new court from demolishing this whenever they feel like, now that Roe was ripped to shreds even though it was established precedent.

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u/kyredemain May 19 '24

The thing that stops a new court from overturning it is that it is very unlikely that a republican would become president again for a very long time. The last republican to win the popular vote was Bush in 2004, as an incumbent (and during a war). The last republican to win the popular vote who wasn't an incumbent was HW Bush in 1988.

If we have a 20-36 year gap between republican presidents, it will be a hard sell to get that changed, especially right after it got them elected again.

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u/branedead May 19 '24

Sounds like the GOP needs to reform

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u/smith8020 May 20 '24

While working on state by state not following EC, we need to vote blue every single vote, and over time change the court!!!

The US population is changing. More people of sense and love democracy and wanting freedoms protected come, raise children and continue those politics. More kids go from highschool to college to grad school as costs of undergrad schooling are helped by FSFA and Pell Grants.
The educated are not voting Trump unless they are gutless GOP kissing the orange a$$.

GOP is in a panic! Women hate them in our doctors office and personal business of healthcare. Minorities hear Trump lying and calling them rapists and robbers. Conservative of the Lincoln Project see him for the no clothes king wannabe. There is no similar org equal to The Lincoln Project, fighting against democrats!!! Woman, minorities, millennials, gen Z, Most hate trump, and vote blue!

GOP goes with wacky Trump, because the gop platform: men rule, women are merely tolerated, Roe over turned, support the rich , tax middle class and poor, right wing , zealots, and maga cult lies, and new now… proud boys and oath keepers as Trump fans? Gee, wonder why none of that appeals to the country as a whole???

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u/PiscesDream9 May 24 '24

yep, the very thing a lot of them pledged to not touch. grrr

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u/Lafemmefatale25 Washington May 20 '24

It is unconstitutional for states to enter into agreement or compact among themselves without congressional approval. It would violate art. I, sec. 10, par. 3.

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u/Expensive-Rub-4257 May 19 '24

Supreme Court is a political court, end of discussion.

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u/PiscesDream9 May 24 '24

I don't know why I was shocked at the "Alito Reveal"

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u/makashiII_93 May 19 '24

We thought Roe was settled and would never change. “Pipe dream that’ll never happen”.

Please stop being so naive and dismissing real issues.

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u/SeventySealsInASuit May 19 '24

If SCOTUS made that ruling it would be a major constitutional crisis. I think you are severely misunderstanding the potential fallout here. I strongly suspect that there are states willing to play chicken with the executive branch and blatently ignore such a ruling and I doubt the president would be willing to start a civil war to enforce it.

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u/Several-Cheesecake94 May 20 '24

👆 proceeds to type out a logical legal argument, that accurately demonstrates a point. Then blames the way the law works on radical Republicans 🤣

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u/nzernozer May 19 '24

It's nowhere near 270 and doesn't have a reasonable path to 270 unless Democrats sweep the state governments in several swing states. It's only at 209 and all the solid blue states other than Michigan have already signed on.

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u/Ok_Zebra6169 Tennessee May 20 '24

Thats not going to happen. This would take a constitutional convention and the Dems don’t have the numbers. The Republicans have control of most of the state legislatures. This country was founded as a constitutional republic and a move like this would lead to civil war. NY and California are so out of step with the rest of the country they shouldn’t get to disenfranchise everyone else, permanently.

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u/branedead May 20 '24

It absolutely would NOT require a constitutional convention. If 270 EC votes were coming from states that said "whoever wins the popular vote gets 100% of this state's EC votes" and boom, the EC is effectively abolished.

Why in the world would this require a constitutional convention when states get to determine the criteria by which they award EC votes?!

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u/Ok_Zebra6169 Tennessee May 20 '24

This will never happen dude. You might see some deep blue states do this but why would a smaller state relinquish their powers? Ridiculous lol

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u/branedead May 20 '24

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is currently at 209 EC votes with a number of states polling as interested in joining the compact. Time will tell whether enough join to reach 270, but even at 209 this is a significant number of votes just from the popular vote.

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u/Ok_Zebra6169 Tennessee May 20 '24

Its all deep blue states that have no chance of going republican. What a shocker! Maine could go Republican, hypothetically.

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u/Ok_Zebra6169 Tennessee May 20 '24

So if a Republican Wins Maine and EC but loses pop vote then Maine disenfranchises own voters, nice lol

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u/Ok_Zebra6169 Tennessee May 20 '24

Probably would lose a SCOTUS challenge

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u/branedead May 20 '24

You're just a negative nancy, aren't you?

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u/Ok_Zebra6169 Tennessee May 20 '24

Realistic.

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u/Ok_Zebra6169 Tennessee May 20 '24

People forget that when states joined the Union that there were protections inherent in the contract. A smaller state would not be beholden to the bigger states. This is why all states have two senators. This is why you have the EC to protect the little guy from the big guy. The minority gets to have a say.

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u/SBraund May 20 '24

The Electoral College was founded to protect the power of slave-owning states

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u/branedead May 20 '24

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the electoral college was not introduced until 10 years after the founding of the country

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u/Ok_Zebra6169 Tennessee May 20 '24

It was a compromise between congress picking the president and the popular vote. Personally, I’d rather congress pick the president. I believe more would get done and you would have a referendum on the president every two years.

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u/branedead May 20 '24

Guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I personally wish there was less power concentrated in the hands of the few

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u/smith8020 May 20 '24

Yes some states do this and many do not. It makes sense to need to win the most votes to win! What other vote says, well you won 2000 more votes over all, but not in the right combination, so the other person wins.. with fewer votes!??? Geesh.

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u/deadboipgmatic May 20 '24

It’s amazing how bad the propaganda has you loony lefties sucked in . Under leftist control and power the kids are gay , boys and girls have zero idea about what they were born as , pedophiles are considered normal we are in three different ways at once I he economy is dead and they have destroyed the nuclear family and have destroyed you low iq zombies relationship with god . And you beg for more destruction , stripping of your freedoms and all out demonic because you are godless purple haired freaks that have zero reason to be any part if any civilized society. You are an extremely mentally ill culture that normalizes pedophiles. You’re sick as rabid dogs

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u/CpnStumpy Colorado May 19 '24

Fixed apportionment of the house is also an enormous unbalancing factor, but the minority in power will never change it

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u/SchuminWeb Maryland May 19 '24

This. The House needs to be uncapped. That will make a massive difference in a lot of ways.

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u/[deleted] May 20 '24

It was uncapped until the 1920 census and the prairie republicans had the House capped at 435 to keep the rapidly urbanizing northeast and Midwestern areas from gaining more seats in Congress than them.

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u/Omar_Blitz May 19 '24

Don't forget the senate. Either scratch the whole thing, or give seats based on population.

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u/TarantulaMcGarnagle May 19 '24

We have the House of Representatives as the population proportional balance to the senate.

What should happen is that there should be a lot more seats in the house.

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u/allenahansen California May 19 '24

It's not unruly enough the way it is?

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u/TarantulaMcGarnagle May 19 '24

I understand your concern, but:

Population of California = 39 mil

California seats = 52

Citizen per seat for California = 750,000

Population of Wyoming = 581K

Wyoming seats = 1

Citizen per seat for Wyoming = 581,000

Wyoming's representation in the house is disproportionate.

Then you add in the idea that each state has two senators, and California's federal representation is even less!

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u/allenahansen California May 19 '24

More than aware, but Wyoming also has a disproportionate amount of mining, cattle ranching, military, ag, and natural resource$ that also demand national repre$entation. Hence the Senate, which as you know doesn't control the federal purse strings; that is, of course, the province of our House of (ahem,) Representatives.

The Founders set it up this way for a reason; the older I get, the more sense it makes to me. Now "justice"? That's another matter altogether, but whenever I get antsy (as a fifth-generation Californian,) I stop and ask myself if I'd feel the same if the Senate was disproportionately controlled by, say, Southerners. . . or New Jersey.

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u/allenahansen California May 19 '24

House represents The People (allegedly.) Senate represents The Money (unquestionably.)

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u/V-RONIN May 19 '24

History has shown that sometimes violence is nessasary to enact change

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u/claimTheVictory May 19 '24

The ironic thing is that the right have the best possible world for themselves right now, and they're still not satisfied.

They look at Russia and think Putin and his oligarchs have a better system. They are actually fucking stupid.

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u/vonmonologue May 19 '24

That’s because they think owning a 3br house and a $80k trucks makes them an oligarch.

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u/neologismist_ May 19 '24

I think reversing Citizens United would eliminate a lot of the tripe we see these days.

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u/SaintTimothy May 19 '24

What about changing to a ranked choice system?

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u/makuthedark May 19 '24

I don't think the death toll would matter. It's if it effects the bottom line or not that we'll see change. How those with the resources benefit (or are hurt) by the route the masses take will dictate more changes than blind violence. If we want change, we need to clean up the twisted relationship between the government and the private sectors. Like enforcing codes of conducts and conflicts of interests with certain politicians and public officials. Buuut that's just one of the many objectives that would need to be tackled to get us back on track.

Right now, folks can't afford to fight for change. Always been like that through history. Only those with the resources can enact the change we want to see, and they'll only do that when it is a benefit to them for that change.

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u/Excolo_Veritas May 19 '24

Also not trying to incite anything, but just reminds me of the quote from Lord of war

"Bullets change governments far surer than votes"

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u/SignificantWords May 19 '24

And in order to do that end unlimited lobbying via citizens United but unsure if that’s possible

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u/Mundane-Mechanic-547 May 19 '24 edited May 19 '24

The Framers did not want popular vote. It gives rise to Populism, which is a precursor to fascism. (Remember Hitler was voted into power by people who knew what he would do, there was no surprises).

The major issue is gerrymandering. When one party completely dominants a state, there is no chance for the other party to have any say at all. We're basically there in NC. The only thing that is holding them back from absolute power is a democratic gov. And I'm not sure that's going to last. IF the state wasn't gerrymandered to hell and back then all people would equally have some votes in the state. As it is, about 10% of the population controls the votes (because the state is very rural and divided into many districts, most of which are rural).

Maybe you can make the same case for each state itself, but within many states, gerrymandering is a massive issue and completely destroys democracy.

I feel like at the Federal level, we have the House which has proportional represntation (although states like CA get fucked, it's not perfect), and we have the Senate to ensure that minority states have a say. Maybe the Senate should not have so much power. I'm not sure. But the process has worked for 200 years so far.

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u/mjc7373 May 19 '24

I struggle to imagine how lots of deaths moves us any closer to defeating the fascists.

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u/EagleChampLDG May 19 '24

“The Great Compromise”

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u/MiccahD May 19 '24

We are also looking at the senate in modern pretenses. Back when the constitution was being agreed upon there wasn’t such discrepancy in size. It was an “easy” compromise to make when historically you didn’t have a lot of cities in the world that were big enough to be to their own country much less in the colonies where there was none.

I think the bigger compromise that screwed us to that effect were laws dictating how many people had to be in a territory before it could apply to be a state. It is why states out west are so huge and many of them just in size are bigger than many countries.

As far as the house goes when that took a terrible turn was when in the 1920s? They dictated the maximum amount of seats there could be. Fast forward to today where a small handful of states have populations smaller than what the average district size should equate to.

Fast forward to today where it has outsized the “conservative” representation in congress and to some effect in many statehouses.

You are correct in assuming there won’t be change coming anytime soon to “fix” it but more so because the more you can consolidate power the less you have to listen.

That listening part is why people like Trump can rise to power. There is no incentive for a large swath to tune him out. He is willing to give them enough of what they want and in turn this gives him his soap box. In his case it keeps getting more and more extreme.

Two simple things that could have changed that course though.

Biden could have immediately pardoned him. It would have neutralized him. (A lot harder to ramp people up when the boogeyman pardoned you.)

He could have won in 2020 and this nightmare would be nearing its end. Be real with yourselves on this one. We saw with our own eyes there were normal Republicans left at that time. There would have been less than a real chance of an over throw of government. The last few years we have seen less and less of that style of Republican in important places. While the government probably won’t get over thrown if he is re-elected the probability has definitely increased dramatically.

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u/DamonRunnon May 19 '24

Yep, here we are...none dare call it democracy..

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u/omegagirl May 20 '24

And let’s not forget those states (California is the third largest economy ON EARTH… literally larger than China and Russia) and we get 💩 on all the time from states that are true welfare states.

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u/FishingInaDesert May 19 '24

A long time ago I worked out that if several thousand people from each state moved to Wyoming, we could entirely take over the state. And that's assuming zero assistance from the current population

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u/kit_mitts New York May 19 '24

Neo-Nazis are trying on-and-off to do that in states like Idaho and the Dakotas.

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u/flyblackbox May 19 '24

Is it broken? Can it be considered broken if it intentionally created this way?

During the debates over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in the late 1780s, a major point of contention was the structure and powers of the Senate. This issue was central to the arguments between the Federalists, who supported the Constitution, and the Anti-Federalists, who opposed it.

The Anti-Federalist Papers, a collection of essays and speeches by opponents of the Constitution, include numerous critiques of the Senate’s powers and election process. These writings argued for more direct representation and greater accountability to voters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Federalist_Papers

https://csac.history.wisc.edu/document-collections/constitutional-debates/senate/

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u/lobabobloblaw May 19 '24

Our lives are as rigged as our politics. The powers that be count on instinctive complacencies dominating and dampening the will to effect change.

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u/harryregician May 22 '24

You are lucky you missed the 60's.

Civil rights

You could be drafted at 18 years of age, yet you could NOT vote until you were 21 !

Even pirates held elections as to who would be the captain of the ship.

One could not participate in electing a president, your commander & chief of all armed forces in this country, if you were under the age of 21.

At that time frame in this country's history, I was 18 in 1969. If I were in any branch of the armed forces, I should of had the right to vote for a president who is sending me to my grave.

I don't mind dying for my country. I do mind dying in vein.

Even President Johnson saw no way out of Vietnam.

You may have noticed Johnston did NOT run for reelection back in 1968 due to him knowing there was no way out of a war that he felt he had inherited from President Kennedy.

At least we got to the moon by 1969. Talk about fly by wire in today's world.

REAL change takes a long time in a democracy.

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u/thrawtes May 19 '24

Vermont and wyoming have the same power as California and Texas in the senate. How is that democratic?

It's not and was never meant to be. For some reason people have been taught that our form of government derives power entirely from the population when the way it's actually constructed is to share power between the population and institutions.

A pure and direct democracy is something to strive for, but it's not something we ever had.

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u/Omar_Blitz May 19 '24

Yes, you haven't had it. But that's not democratic, and the country can't be democratic until those are fixed.

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u/claimTheVictory May 19 '24

There's no real hope of them being fixed either, is there.

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u/from_whereiggypopped May 19 '24

I'm 1 of 81,000,000 and I say don't worry Trump lost in 2020 - contrary to myth. AND he'll lose again. In case you haven't been keeping score, the GOP hasn't won a major election since they took control over women's healthcare. So VOTE!

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u/RiOrius May 19 '24

They won the House in 2022.

They didn't do as well as some were projecting, and their majority is super slim, but they did win. By three million votes.

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u/OutofReason May 19 '24

I get the general sentiment but the issue with VT, WY, CA and TX in the Senate is pretty simple. The Senate represents the states. The House represents the people. The Senate was a way for states like NY and CA to not simply overrule MD or VT due to their size. It is a way for smaller states to still be heard.

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u/Omar_Blitz May 19 '24

But it's a way for small states to stop big states from doing anything. The House that represents the population can't pass anything without the senate. The senate becomes the ultimate decider of rules, and it represents the states, not the people. The house is a formality if another body can kill a bill, and when that legislative body has Cali and Vermont on the same footing, that's actual fucking insanity.

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u/OutofReason May 19 '24

Kinda, yeah. If MD and VT vote opposite CA and NY then you are correct. That’s the way it is designed. But also calling the senate the ultimate decider is wrong since the president or house can also kill a bill. Granted, a veto can also be overridden with enough majority, but the veto still carries weight.

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u/Omar_Blitz May 19 '24 edited May 19 '24

The presidency (if it matches the popular vote) and the house ARE the will of the people, they SHOULD be able to kill a bill. The senate is the will of States, it's the bottleneck that becomes the ultimate decider whether something passes or is killed. They appoint the supreme Court, for fuck's sake. And yet, they aren't the will of the people. And most Americans look at that and see nothing wrong with minnesota having the same power as texas.

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u/batweenerpopemobile May 19 '24

Our government is not that of a single country, but more of an earlier EU, set up by design to be fighting with itself at every level in order to keep power from centralizing and to keep the government and those running it somewhat in check.

The states vote for the president of the union. Not the people, though their votes are in proportion to their population. Hell, originally plenty of electors were simply appointed by the state legislatures in various methods. It was a long road to the popular vote even being used in all of the states.

The senate does not appoint the supreme court, the president does. They approve justices. As Mitch's gambit shows, there is no limiter on that delay, save people being willing to get rid of senators for refusing to fulfill their duty.

Be wary of uncorking the power of any organ of government. It will not always be interests aligned with yours that controls it, and that power will be turned against you.

There will be shitheads at every level forever, because shitheads are the first to vie for power, and love to wield it for its own sake. The only real chance folks have is to keep the shitheads at each others throats perpetually.

What we have is not a crisis of government, but a crisis of the soul of the American people. We're decades into a return to yellow journalism, and only a popular movement against it will see the current bullshit turned around.

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u/Dair2KNow May 19 '24

While yes you “need their permission” for the regular way of changing the system there is another method. Of course it just switches the venue of who you “need” but things can be effected by the state level with a constitutional convention of stste pacts.

There is for example the National Popular Interstate Compact which I believe has 77% of the needed electoral college votes needed to move the presidential election to the popular vote.

The one issue with any major change coming from a constitutional convention from my understanding is that once a one is called anything can be changed not just what the convention is called for.

So in the end most of the radical changes for the positive are impossibly hard for the general populace to get done without severe motivation. Thus we can at best hope for incremental change without a major shift in the system but something else (could be a great leader, a new technology like ai, a 2nd Covid like epedemic, or similar) causing a major shift. But who knows time makes fools of us all as they say.

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u/LordOverThis May 19 '24

 Vermont and wyoming have the same power as California and Texas in the senate. How is that democratic? How can you say "One man, one vote" when one vote in this state counts almost a hundred times more than a vote in that state when it comes to the country's highest legislative body?

There are reasons of history and deep political divides at the founding of the country and drafting of the Constitution which answer that, and you’d do well to separate “unfair” from “something I don’t like”.  The Senate is, considered through historical perspective, extremely fair.

We, as Americans, are in the tiniest of minorities in the world where the word “state” is understood to mean “a subdivision of the country as a whole”; in most of the world, the word “state” has one political meaning, and that is “a nation”.  That’s why their leaders are referred to as “heads of state”.

At the outset of the American experiment, Virginia operated very much as an independent nation from, say, Pennsylvania, which itself operated as a nation separately from Massachusetts.  Bringing them together to be bound in any way by one overarching document and system of government was a monumental, and experimental, undertaking.  This is the root of your federalist vs anti-federalist argument.

The solution was to have the House, where population does matter, and the Senate, where all member “countries” are equal, as co-equal parts of the legislature.  Moving to a system where the Senate is proportional to population would be to say that Wisconsin is “more equal” than Vermont, as it already is in the House, and make the Senate an unnecessary redundancy.

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u/Omar_Blitz May 19 '24

It's a bottleneck, my friend. The house doesn't matter if the Senate refuses the bills. So all the population proportionality fuck itself because the "equality factor" is the final decider.

You need to look up "fair" in a thesaurus.

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u/LordOverThis May 19 '24 edited May 19 '24

That.  Is.  The.  Point. 

Again, “I don’t like it” isn’t the same as “unfair”, and you’re failing to grasp that.

You, I, and one of my friends are in a room being fair and democratic.  My friend and I introduce a resolution to kick you in the crotch repeatedly for an hour.  By your logic, it is a “roadblock” and “unfair” for you to have any mechanism to say “whoa, hold the fuck on for a minute.”

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u/aHipShrimp May 19 '24

Right. It was set up to be a feature, not a bug. The system was designed to work at a glacial pace exactly so there could be a, "whoa, hold the fuck on for a minute."

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u/maxerickson May 19 '24

Winner take all is a bit of a prisoners dilemma. Having all the votes go to a winner increases the influence of the state as a whole (making it more important to campaign in and so on). If you do it proportionally, individuals have more influence (but something like 1/3 as many electors are actually up for play).

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u/JimBeam823 May 19 '24

It’s not just the United States. It’s a global, and probably human problem.

Change requires the consent of the people in power. If they refuse and you overthrow them with force, then change requires the consent of the NEW people in power.

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u/israfildivad May 20 '24

Thats why they say its a republic...altho it is really democratism forces vs replublicanism forces, made more complicated by federalism vs 'statism'

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u/Solo_Says_Help May 19 '24

Because there wouldn't have been an America without this setup. Smaller states refused to join if they would just be directly controlled by the more populated states, like Virginia and New York. The senator was chosen by the state government leadership back then and seen as their representative, not by a direct election by popular vote as well.

We are not a direct democracy, where a simple majority (mob rule) rules the day. We were purposely set up so that there would need to be be an overwhelming consensus to change course.

I find it funny that many of the comments in this thread are about evil Republicans wanting to scrap our system of government, yet with the next breath are calling for the very same thing.

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u/Omar_Blitz May 19 '24

The system isn't democratic nor fair.

When small states can kill bills, the house of representatives can frolic all they want, they are a formality to the senate, where real power lies. And the senate has a state of 50 million at the same level as the state of half a million.

Your country was established over two and a half centuries ago. It's OK to change things when our understanding of rights and justice improves with each passing decade.

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u/kit_mitts New York May 19 '24

Your country was established over two and a half centuries ago. It's OK to change things when our understanding of rights and justice improves with each passing decade.

This is the actual problem.

The bicameral legislature was crucial to making the early American experiment work. But the Constitution is too rigid and the mechanics of amending it are too clunky to allow it to adapt to modern challenges.

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u/Solo_Says_Help May 19 '24

We have one of the most stable governments in the history of the world, why should we just toss it aside? We have changed a lot of things. It just requires more than a simple majority. Were it pure mob rule (50% plus 1 vote), the losing minority (whether Democrat or Republican) would essentially be cast by the wayside every election.

And it is a democracy, it's a democratic Republic. No one is saying there can't change, but it will require a period of overall harmony to have the numbers required by the constitution, and that's not where we are at right now.

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u/imscaredalot May 20 '24

It's been that way even in Abraham Lincoln's time. https://youtu.be/-UTUETYZSk8?si=JC2_-M7MMoHGwqly

Didn't stop him from running.

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u/Easy-Marsupial-1343 May 20 '24

It’s not fucked in America, ‘Merica is fucking awesome!

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u/ponyboy3 May 26 '24

I don’t think you thought this through. Anyway the issue is electoral college where your vote doesn’t matter anyway.

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u/Ok_Leading999 May 19 '24

The same system elected Obama, Clinton and Biden. They made no effort to change that system because it benefits them too.

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u/Omar_Blitz May 19 '24

Yes, but those didn't lose the popular vote. They would have won under any system.

They don't change it because it's impossible. You need two-thirds of the legislative votes, and no one is getting that... Because of the system...

2

u/GrafZeppelin127 May 19 '24

They made no effort to change that system because they could not do so. None of them ever had the votes necessary to pass a constitutional amendment. You need a 2/3 margin to do that in Congress.