This is where I point out once again that real estate doesn't have the right to vote and that only people do. Loving County, Texas is 677 square miles, about half the size of Rhode Island. Trump got 89.23% of the vote there. However, that meant that 58 people there voted for him. You see, Loving County is home to 82 people, according to the 2010 Census. I can find 58 Trump voters without walking more than a mile or two from my house and I live in deeply blue Boulder County, Colorado. ...which is my way of saying there are large swaths of this country where you won't find more than a couple of people but countless prairie dogs. Prairie dogs also don't have the right to vote, so let's not care too much about the places where they outnumber people. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton lost because she didn't win heavily urban states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.
Somehow, being ruled by someone who didn't even get a plurality of the vote doesn't seem a preferable alternative.
BTW, can I just point out how darling it is to see conservatives all of a sudden care about the diversity of this country?
1. This doesn't happen often, as I'm sure you're aware. 2. One thing is guaranteed: a straight-up popular vote that is a popular vote from the start will have a different result (no, not necessarily a different winner). How different, no one can be sure. The whole tenor and conduct of the race - and the vote - would be significantly different. All of the "butbutbut popular vote!!!!" is a bunch of emotional whining. Unless and until Sammer gets his way, we're not going to know, and even then we can't change the past.
I'm getting the feeling that the "ways to mitigate the fact that the bigger town has a lot more people" and how and why "they come up with a system that is agreeable to all" is overlooked by a few in this thread.
Also, we're punishing growth and dynamism and favoring rotten boroughs, like Wyoming (which has fewer humans than Louisville, KY.) Nothing's going to change until a Republican wins the popular vote and loses the electoral college, which is to say, never. It could have happened in 1969 when Congress and the President were on board but, as always, the South feared blacks more than they loved their country.
Twice in the last 20 years, but go on. I agree that it would be different. My own supposition is that it would push both major parties toward the center in an effort to keep the other party from "running up the score" too much in their own safe states.
In 2000, we could dismiss Bush - Gore because it had happened so rarely: four times in history (Quincy Adams, Hayes, Harrison, Bush) and only once in modern history. The fifth such election says we can no longer attribute this to random chance. Let's remove the two corrupt bargains (1824 & 1876) and just focus on the three fair elections where the plurality winner lost the election. That's 2/54, or 3.7% as of 2000. Trump's win makes it 3/58, or 5.1%. That means 5% of our elections will override the "will" of the people. There are easy fixes. Enlargening the House, removing districting control from legislatures and making districts allocate EVs, or PR would all eliminate the problem of the minority winning.
I think part of the problem is that people - not necessarily you- want change merely because they don't like the results they got. Because they don't like the party or the president that the system produced. You can't tweak the system to try to get the results you want, because this undermines the nation's democratic institutions that ensure a balance of power and protect our freedoms. This is not to say that we may not strive to improve the institutions, but it must be done within the process that was set up, understanding the reasons why the system was set up, and never in an opportunistic manner merely to get in the short term the results we want. More importantly, the worst time to talk about tweaks that are likely to undermine the institutions is when the nation has just elected a president who exhibits authoritarian tendencies and who appears to hold the nations institutions in contempt. I would argue that this is not a good time to talk about making changes to the system in ways that appear to be opportunistic. Such talk will backfire. I think this is a time when we would be smart to put partisanship aside in order to rally to preserve and defend the institutions and the system such as they are, as they've been set up. We need to protect the system and the institutions because they must hold, they must stand in the way of authoritarianism, regardless of what party or ideology produces it.
I'm not sure I buy that "one additional" means suddenly "let's call it sort of common-ish", but I don't disagree with most of the fixes you propose.
Let's hope the Democrats retake the House in 2018 on a platform to make those changes. But I bet they won't.
Rural people in the largest states are just as underrepresented as urban & suburban people in the largest states. A majority of the rural people in the US live in the eleven largest states.
Okay...? I mean, you can either be alarmed by that, or not, I guess. Twice in 20 years, 5 times in 230-ish. If history only started 20 years ago, I might be persuaded that this is "a bigly 'yuge issue". As it stands, I'd like more data points before I begin to freak out. There won't be such a thing as a "safe state" in a national popular vote.
If half of the rural population is effectively underrepresented, the electoral college is doing little to counter-balance the people living in metropolitan areas.
You wrote, and I quote: Since you used the present tense, I'm assuming that looking at something that's happened twice in the past 16 years is more relevant than something that happened only four times in the previous 212. Curse you, imprecise use of the English language! Let me restate: