The fact that Dems, within 16 years, nominated an environmentalist and a feminist for president, who won the popular vote but lost the EC, and that the party's overwhelming response was not "We must abolish the EC" but "Heh yeah our nominees sucked lol" is such a classic case of learned helplessness
And no, Electoral College reform or abolition is not going to happen any time soon. But it's never going to happen without a long term sustained national campaign. Meanwhile, as long as we're in an era of close presidential elections, Dems are going to get frequently screwed by the EC.
I think the best chance was in 2001 and they didn’t press it, then 9/11. The only way it will get changed now is if it causes a Republican to lose in the EC. not bloody likely. 🤬
The best chance would have probably required Kerry to win Ohio in 2004, winning the EC despite losing the popular vote. That might have forged a bipartisan consensus.
This is exactly what's required. Both parties losing because of it in rapid succession.
It might require just happening to Repubs once or twice. There are enough Dems out there who are against it on principle rather than politics to usher it through if the GOP turns against it.
The GOP has to be scared that their coalition has resulted in an Electoral College disadvantage. It's hard to imagine unless they really do start making inroads with minorities in urban centers but Biden is able to make up the difference with Rust Belt whites.
There was a push under Nixon, and it almost happened! (when judging on amendments almost happening), because both parties were concerned at that time that they both might be screwed by the EC.
I feel like Texas going blue COULD be enough to scare Republicans into action, since it would immediately make the EC math a harder climb.
Though at this rate they might just try to rig or overrule Texas first.
Texas was right there but the GOP will move heaven and earth to rig Texas now because without that bulwark, even Florida isn’t enough to anchor a red wall any more
The EC is an issue due to two factors:
Winner Take All allotment of electors in 48 states
Failure to Uncap the House, resulting in disproportionate Electoral allocation.
If either were fixed, the issue resolves itself.
I say, get more states to ratify the Congressional Apportionment Amendment.
something i tried to write and failed during the Trump years is that the combo of a fairly fragmented, group-based party and partisan polarization is especially ripe for this. Democrats talk about 2016 like it was 1984. HRC won by 3m votes!
I think we talk about it because it was 1984 because our baseline expectation for what should have happened when the Republicans nominated Trump is that he would get like 33%
Or, that's part of it anyway
i think gore and hillary DID both run bad campaigns, but… gore won the election, and trump won through crimes and fraud. how can you say your sports manager did a bad strategy and should be fired when the other team is immune to fouls and penalties?
Because knowing that the other team is immune to fouls and penalties necessitates different strategies, and it's your strategists' job to know that.
(Also, maybe just don't let Mark Penn anywhere near your campaign operation.)
i have made a similar point regarding all the “but the popular vote” stuff (that’s not the win. you don’t get to say you won if you had more yards gained but fewer touchdowns), but i don’t know that the strategists “should have predicted” emails and comey and russiagate
I think they should have assumed that their opponents would try to steal a close election, as they did in 2000, and that therefore they needed to pursue as large a margin of victory as they could possibly amass. Instead, I distinctly recall her campaign's having pursued a "51 percent" strategy.
Not defending the multiply bad tactics employed by the HRC campaign, but I think this is sorta what they thought they were doing by campaigning in Arizona and Georgia instead of the midwest. Of course it turned out to be one of the campaign's biggest blunders.
we’d be talking about them differently because a strategy that correctly reads the environment of the country is good but the same strategy when it incorrectly reads the environment of the country is bad
But if Comey didn't knife Clinton (something that had little to do with her campaign strategy) and she won, we'd be talking about how she correctly read the environment of the country and Trump didn't.
I still find it infuriating that Gore was undermined by the Green Party after trying his hardest to hide his environmentalism. Nader was an order of magnitude less "Green" but you'd never know it from the campaign.
Agreed. Pretty remarkable that after Comey knifed HRC 10 days before an election the lesson Dems didn't learn was "we need to take control of institutions dominated by Republicans that they're using to tilt the playing field"
💯
(Not an issue of flawed institutions in 2004, but I think that Dems also had the wrong takeaway from that election too. “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t have just rolled over and taken the beating when Republicans are running smear campaigns based on lies” would have been a good lesson then.)
the don't-feed-the-fire tactic like don't-feed-the-trolls, only works until the trolls run the platform - at which point potential approaches are dramatically limited
don't argue BS ended up ceding way too much platform space
IDK, its pretty remarkable that Dems got as close as they did in 2004. Going against an incumbent war-time president that was in office during an economic recovery is a huge battle and they got close.
Arguably, both parties were playing pretty close to the top of their games in that year. GOP had a wartime incumbent popular among basically all segments of the party. Dems ran a decorated veteran with a strong critique of war policies. We can criticize in hindsight but this was a good matchup
Avoiding writing by stirring things up: The rules are nearly impossible to change, and you can't just lose elections (but win the popular vote) until you can change the rules. I strongly support EC reform, but in the meantime, Ds have to nominate candidates who can win 270.
Comey knifed her after the MSM clobbered her for months for an e-mail filing issue that turned out 100% manufactured. Yeah, that's the same media who downplays Trump's theft of sensitive national security information. No lesson learned from Republicans working the refs for decades.
Democrats consistently refuse to learn the first rule of politics: play the game you're in, not the game you want to be playing.
The popular vote is entirely meaningless. The game in the USA involves the EC, Congress, and the Senate.
expand the House of Representatives for the first time in 100 years. If the EC suddenly has a bunch more members, the distortion effect for smaller states gets reduced substantially. And that’s just a bill, not an amendment.
build the Pelosi House Office Skyscraper and declare that districts are now 60,000 people large at most. Gerrymandering is impractical, the EC is defanged, and you have ten times as many reps so campaigns get cheaper and it’s easier to know and reach your member of Congress. Boom.
tough but fair.
I was gonna say just make a law that the smallest state gets 3 reps. divide that pop. by 3, and thats your new district size.
currently about 195K/district and 1600 Reps.
sure, that's a problem.
but as the house gets bigger, it becomes progressively smaller.
WOULD she have lost with a 1600 seat house?
would love to actually run the numbers.
