It's the government that the collective beliefs and cultural assumptions of this country have built. Maybe there's a cause-effect link in there, somewhere, you would think?
No, the federal government we have is the result of our outdated, quirky and flawed electoral system, where the votes of certain states are much more valuable than others.
> The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people).
That's because States are political units, not just arbitrary boundaries. So they also have a voice in the federal government as States. To me, Wyoming being able to not be run roughshod over by California just because California has a lot more people is a feature, not a bug.
If that's true, why does it not also apply to the weighting of the Presidency between those two poles?
What they were describing applies to every federally elected position, in different amounts. Whether it's a bug or a feature (as a whole or for each position) is very much up for discussion, but it's orthogonal.
In that case, I don't think anything really remains of your original comment in this thread? Your follow-ups have blurred the line between factual questions and normative, but in both cases the comment you initially replied to applies at least as much to things other than the presidency.
(I'll note that this doesn't mean there weren't interesting points worth discussing that you've been trying to get at, just that you've at least wound up unclear in how you've been expressing them.)
The Senate is designed to act as a counter balance to the house. The senate with equal representation per state, and the house with population based representation.
No, the votes of people in certain states being more valuable than those in others is also true of the House and Senate.
In fact, the inequity in voting power produced by the Electoral College is a direct consequence of that in the structure of the House and Senate, since the latter is apportioned simply (except for DC) by adding the apportionment of House and Senate seats.
I responded to a similar point by not2b downthread. The following are some additional points I didn't make there.
To some extent the inequity you describe can be corrected by forcing particular methods for apportionment that can better prevent gerrymandering, and by increasing the size of the House to reduce the difference between the populations of the least and most populous districts. A certain amount of inequity of this type is, however, unavoidable in any representative democracy.
Also, this particular inequity is important to people only to the extent that what the Federal government does directly affects their lives. So an obvious way to reduce the impact of this inequity is to reduce the ways in which the Federal government can affect individual people's lives. The idea that Federal laws and regulations should be able to micromanage so many aspects of everyone's lives would have been horrifying to any of the Founders. Not only that, but it also disempowers people by making them much less aware of everyone's ability to find local solutions to local problems.
Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions; they can continue to make them with impunity since they know they are not risking reelection by doing so. (For example, in all the furor over the CDC and FDA bungling COVID-19 testing, nobody to my knowledge has observed that the only reason the FDA had the power to prohibit State and local health authorities from developing their own tests is that Congress gave it that power, and legislation to rethink bad policy decisions like that is not even on the table.) That is not something that can be fixed by adopting a different system for apportionments.
> Another point to make is that the main problem with the Senate and the House has nothing to do with the inequity you describe: it is the simple fact that Congress has very low approval ratings but very high incumbent reelection rates. That means members of Congress are effectively never held accountable for bad policy decisions.
Wrong.
Individual members of Congress tend to have high (often overwhelming) approval in their districts (or states for Senators); members generally do a good job of representing the people they are elected by.
Congress as an institution has low approval rates because people dislike what it does in aggregate, not what the people they have a vote in do. If Congress was more effectively representative—which is a matter of apportionment and electoral system—the aggregate approval would be higher.
This is not only analytically obvious, but borne out by actual results of surveys of public approval of representative democratic governments in general and legislative bodies specifically when compared to measures of effective proportionality of representation.
> Congress as an institution has low approval rates because people dislike what it does in aggregate, not what the people they have a vote in do
In other words, people like their individual representatives because those representatives favor their preferred policies; but they strongly disapprove of Congress as a whole because they don't see any of those preferred policies actually being enacted.
> If Congress was more effectively representative—which is a matter of apportionment and electoral system—the aggregate approval would be higher.
This assumes that, by changing apportionment and the electoral system, more people would see Congress enacting their preferred policies. I don't think this is true. I think the reason Congress as a whole doesn't enact anyone's preferred policies is that there is no broad bipartisan consensus behind any of them; if a majority exists at all in favor of any particular policies, it is a thin majority, and there is no majority with enough consensus on a range of policies to be able to make the required legislative deals to get those policies enacted.
In other words, Congress is reflecting the fact that the country as a whole does not have a broad consensus in favor of most policies that are on the table. And in that situation, those policies shouldn't be enacted. So I would argue that in this respect our current system is doing exactly the job the Founders intended it to do: it is preventing thin majorities from imposing their preferred policies on everyone.
However, the disconnect between individual approval ratings and the overall approval rating of Congress does allow something else to happen: since there is effectively no competition for individual seats, there is no accountability for bad policy decisions that do have broad bipartisan consensus behind them. So those decisions can be, and are, made with impunity. The grant of power to the FDA that I mentioned previously is an example: there is no serious opposition from either party in Congress to granting unelected bureaucrats in Federal agencies extremely broad powers that affect everyone and cannot be effectively challenged. So that disastrous policy decision continues on while people squabble over policies that have only thin majorities, if any, in favor of them.
Yes, some states have House seats that represent somewhat fewer people than some other states. I suppose, technically, that means the votes in that state are "more valuable". It's far different from the Senate, though.
It's absolutely true of the House, though because of granularity rather than fixed representation, so it's not simply smaller-states-are-overrepresented. (But instead smaller states have the most variable representation.)
> Yes, some states have House seats that represent somewhat fewer people than some other states
“Somewhat fewer” in the sense that 527,000 (Rhode Island) is “somewhat fewer” than 994,000 (Montana), but, while it's a narrower range than the Senate (65.7:1) or EC (3.59:1), 1.88:1 isn't a close ratio.
Trump did not lose the popular vote. There is no contest for the popular vote. Perhaps one party should try moving a bit to campaign according to the actual contest at hand, rather than try to rewrite the rules.
You assume the Democrats would win a popular vote easily. First, Republicans would actually campaign in California for a change. They might even move left a tad on some issues. Democrats might decide it's the time to go batshit insane and go further left, leaving an even wider, disenfranchised center than we have now.
Dear god, do facts not matter at all? He absolutely lost the popular vote. He won the election through the electoral college. It's the system we have and it's what determines the election but to say he didn't lost the popular vote is false and revisionist.
I believe that you are missing LanceH's point. I'll try to put it in different terms.
Here's a football game. Team A scores 17 points on 284 yards of offense. Team B scores 10 points but has 317 yards of offense. Team B's fans say "We won on total offense!" That's great, Team B fans. Here, have a lollipop.
Why am I being so condescending? Because no football game is decided based on total offense. They're decide on points. Team B "won" something that is a statistical category, not a game.
In the same way, Hillary won a statistic, not an election. So all this "Trump lost the popular vote" is... yeah, so what? Winning the popular vote plus six bucks will get you a latte at Starbucks. And Democrats knew what the rules were going into the election, and have known ever since. Who cares about the popular vote? It's totally irrelevant. They. Lost. The. Election.
I think you misinterpreted what he was suggesting - it is meaningless to say that Hillary won the popular vote because neither party were trying to win the popular vote - you win the presidency by winning the electoral college.
If instead the president was chosen by popular vote, both parties likely would have campaigned differently.
>I think you misinterpreted what he was suggesting - it is meaningless to say that Hillary won the popular vote because neither party were trying to win the popular vote - you win the presidency by winning the electoral college.
This is a non-sequitur. Whether or not that metric (popular vote) has a bearing on the results of presidential election is irrelevant to the statement of whether he won in that metric.
Furthermore, it's counter-productive to the discussion to preface a comment with a politically charged comment (trump and some of his supporters legitimately believes he got more popular vote than clinton, despite evidence to the contrary), then backpedal on that statement by adding a bunch of qualifiers.
Maybe with a definition that you can only "win" a competition that was agreed upon ahead of time. However, a quick search on hn shows that "win" colloquially also can mean beating everyone else at some metric (or in some cases, on a subjective basis). eg.
And that since the rules weren’t “whoever wins the national popular vote is president” we can’t know how campaigns and voters would have behaved under that rule set, making appeals to the “popular vote” meaningless. A position which I actually agree with, despite very much not liking the last couple R presidents who won despite “losing” the (meaningless, and not a useful measure of much given the above) popular vote.
It’s fun to complain about when your (our, perhaps) person loses but is about as meaningful as “our team should have won because we had more men-on-base”. Well, OK, but baseball is played to optimize for runs because that’s how you win, so no, you shouldn’t have won, and also if the other team had been optimizing for men-on-base you may still have lost—we simply can’t know.
It's the government that the collective beliefs and cultural assumptions of this country have built. Maybe there's a cause-effect link in there, somewhere, you would think?