1122
Tim Walz calls for scrapping of electoral college to decide US presidential race
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
1122 points (98.5% liked)
News
23284 readers
4149 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fucking hell! Every time either of them says something truly based, some DNC lackey comes and spoils it by saying that! 🤬
And all interest in this statement was lost in record time. Even though it would help Democrats win every time, as swing states would stop being a thing, and the Democrat voters in Wyoming and Texas and every other sold-red state is now something to seriously count.
Not every time. Republicans have won the popular vote before. What would happen, though, is the Republican Party would have to adjust its platform to become more in line with the majority of Americans.
Are you aware of what is minimally required in order to pull off this kind of change? There is no outcome to this election that will result in the Democrats having even the faintest possibility of doing this.
Isn't this kind of missing the point, though? The reason neither party wants to change a thing about the current system is the whole point of abolishing the electoral college is to remove the spoiler effect that eventually leads to a two party system. If the electoral college ends, there's no such thing as swing states, gerrymandering will be moot, candidates will actually have to have policies that people want, they'll have to actually campaign, and many corporate "Democrats" will probably get outed by more progressive candidates.
There are other benefits, but I really don't see this getting any traction, regardless, until we can get money our of politics and a wealth tax that makes sense (like 70%+ on the ultra wealthy).
I agree with your sentiment that Democrat ideas -- more likely the progressive Democrat ideas -- will likely be the candidates that win the most. However, we'll likely never find out cause both parties will fight this with all of their being and financial ghouls.
Seems like an infinite loop by design.
Okay, a couple things here are way off. The electoral college is not a cause of the two party system. FPTP is the primary driver of that.
No, both parties don't want the electoral college. Pretty sure the Dems would love to win nearly all modern presidential races. This is a pretty lame "they're both the same".
Please don't vote-splain. You're arguing semantics. The electoral college just gives states the ability to decide to honor or ignore the will of the people. It also gives rural states more per-capita power than they'd othereise get. Until relatively recently, most states had nothing on the books to force delegates to vote the way the people wanted.
Sure, some of the younger crowd may want to abolish the electoral college, it won't happen unless states force an amendment. The fossils in Congress, as well as the enshrined political surnames, will all use their collective power and wealth to shut that shit down for as long as they can.
In terms of they're both the same, you are naive if you think the Democrats really care about you or power. They just don't outrightly tell the populous to fuck off like the Republicans do. The party tolerates progressives, but does everything they can to keep them out of power. Look to Adam Schiff these last couple of years for a good example. If I recall, didn't he politically champion and/or donate to a candidate running against a progressive Democrat in his state? When the Democrats, or even the Republicans for that matter, have all three branches, they still never seem to get anything done.
Hmm, 🤔... It's almost like they want the current status quo to persist, even when empowered to do something without barriers.
It's not like Walz or Harris can do anything about it anyway. Legal scholars have said that it would take a Constitutional amendment to change the electoral college system to anything else, as it is mandated by the Constitution.
Amending the Constitution requires ratification by 75% of the 50 US states after passing a 2/3 majority of Congress.
It's best to be realistic and not get worked up about things you can't do anything about.
NaPoVoInterCo!
Did you have a comment reply to make? I'm not watching anybody's youtube link.
There’s a way to circumvent the electoral college without a constitutional amendment. It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It’s in progress, but not triggered yet until a few more states adopt it.
If states totaling at least 270 electoral votes sign on, then it kicks in. Every state in the compact will send the electors for the party that wins the national popular vote, regardless of how their state votes. Electoral college rendered meaningless without a constitutional amendment.
(The video is good, it’s CGP Grey’s explanation of this compact.)
Thanks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
That video is worth watching just for the LOLs, but also does a great job of explaining exactly how the whole thing works.
If you can keep the train of thought through ads.
Not like the dnc couldn't lean hard on party representatives to make them fall in line.
We are slaves to the ruling class forever then.
We really have nothing to lose in that case, and may as well do anything and everything to end the electoral college.
I'm not a slave, I do whatever I want and life is great. Perhaps you should try just doing whatever the fuck you want to sometimes.
For real, ENOUGH already with the milquetoast Dem leadership being so terrified of actually taking a stand about any issue.
This is just like all those times Republican candidates hedged about Roe v Wade… right up until they finally got it overturned. Sure, the majority of voters agree the EC is outdated and needs to go; but saying as much can scare moderates, and doesn’t get you any new liberal voters. Never forget, “undecided” voters in the US are just fickle assholes who don’t want to vote for someone who “feels” too conservative or liberal. Unfortunately, with FPTP voting, they carry a lot of weight.
I can understand the strategy this time
One of the big motivators for the left is that Trump has made credible threats about undermining votes and folks have signed up for it. A fear of having your voice forever silenced in the political system is a strong motivator. You can see because pundits for Trump keep trying to turn it around and say "nuh uh, the Democrats are the ones that will take away your voice", which generally rings hollow because there's zero history or rhetoric in the Democratic party to even suggest that.
This could be the sort of rhetoric those Republicans have been wanting. A Democrat proposing a fundamental change to the biggest election that everyone knows would usually prevent a Republican win for that office. We wouldn't have had either Republican president in the last 30 years. This could energize scared Republicans or feed the "but both sides" distraction.
It may make tons of sense, but it's a huge risk of scaring people to vote against Democrats that might have otherwise sat it out.