Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
OK, things are complicated, and vary a lot from one state to another. So to set the stage: the goal here is to select a candidate to represent a party in the general election in November. In most states, this is essentially an election, where the people go to the polls and vote. But even this varies by state. In some states, people register with one party or another or as an independent. After that, they are only permitted to vote in the primary for that party (or if independent, they can vote in either Republican or Democratic primary, but not both). In other states, registration isn’t by party, and voters can pick whichever primary they wish to vote in, but only one. Often, both primaries are held in the same time and place, and the voter gets to vote in either one.
However, a few states do hold caucuses (not usually called primaries, though the result is the same), and in general delegates vote in the caucuses. How the delegates are selected also varies by state.
Presidential primaries work just like any other; the goal is to select the eventual nominee. (Bear in mind that “just like any other” is per state, states do this in quite a variety of ways). So: The Democratic Presidential primaries are run by the Democratic National Committee, and they have decided to allocate delegates according to the primary vote percentages – each candidate gets delegates according to how much of the vote they get. Often, no candidate gets a majority of the votes. The Republicans (at least right now) have a winner-take-all for whoever gets a majority. If nobody gets a majority of all votes cast, the top two vote getters have a runoff election. The winner of the eventual majority gets ALL the delegates from that state. But this can (and does) change year to year, state to state. So I’ve read that this year Trump is hoping for a big field of candidates, so he can “plurality himself” into the nomination.
Most primaries (that is, non-Presidential) are to select statewide rather than national candidates, or local county or city candidates. So as a citizen in some states, you might vote in quite a few primaries in some years, and rarely have a whole year without any. And of course, each primary results in a candidate for a general election. Where I live, the primary to select the Republican candidate is the only election that matters. Often, no Democrat even bothers to run in November, why bother?
OK, I wasn’t clear. Alaska had a primary ballot to see who would be the Republican candidate in the general election. Murkowski wasn’t on that ballot, but she was well known and well liked, and the ballot had a blank line for the voter to write in any candidate they wanted (many people write their own name in!). So she got a lot of write-in votes. Then Alaska tried an experiment, which has subsequently been tried elsewhere in some places, called a ranked-choice election. Instead of voting for a single candidate, the voters ranked their choices among all candidates, indicating their first choice, second choice, third choice, etc. The candidates got more points for being a higher choice, and the candidate with the most points wins. So if (for example) there are three candidates and a lot of polarization, then the two polarized candidates might get nearly all the first choice votes between them, while the third candidate would be everyone’s second choice, with some first choice votes. And THAT candidate would end up with the most points despite the fewest first choice votes. And that’s how Murkowski managed to win the Republican nomination.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with how American presidential elections work. Elections are run by states. Rules and procedures are by state. Election mechanics are by state, or even by county within a state.
It is at the level of procedures and mechanics where complaints arise. I have no ax to grind regarding such things as ranked voting.
What needs to be fixed are signature verification and tabulation. These are quite good in most states and cities, so there’s no excuse for incompetence, it’s a bad look. Both major parties have had meltdowns over this, so why not fix it?
As far as I could tell, this isn’t a problem. One of the benefits of the Republicans and Trump claiming fraud endlessly is, signature verification and tabulation was examined in meticulous detail, at least in swing states (or big cities in swing states) and found to be essentially error-free. No fraud, no incompetence. Turned out elections generally are well run, and nonpartisan.
But even if elections are run perfectly, that doesn’t fix the problem of Fox News.
I know it. This translates to: Maybe in some states people vote for the president of USA, but not in all states. This does NOT translate to: People of USA vote for the president and it’s a democratic process. But I know more: The popular vote has some effect on the electoral college (on the electoral college rather than the candidates), differently in different states, and maybe not at all in some states.
According to the constitution of USA, there is explicitly zero role attributed to the people in electing the president. According to the constitution, the president is elected by the electoral college, whose members are APPOINTED by the states. You know the difference between elections and appointments, don’t you?
This is enough knowledge for the conclusion: The people in USA do NOT vote for their president and they are deluded if they think they do.
Flint, good explanation with lots of (mostly unnecessary) details. I’m interested in the following:
In this “essentially an election”, who do people vote for? According to the constitution, they cannot vote for the president, but I assume presidential nominees are on the ballot there, giving people the idea that they are voting for the president. Not a good look.
The result of these elections presumably is that the state knows what kind of electors to send to Washington, DC. As I have read, electors do not have the freedom of conscience, but they have the duty of mandate – in DC they must vote as told by the state. But if this is not true of all electors, then people’s vote in those states was a completely unnecessary exercise.
The devil is in the unnecessary details. But here goes — FIRST, we must distinguish between a primary election, (where the voters are selecting which candidate will represent their party for each office in the general election), and SECOND a general election where the voters are electing a candidate to hold office. The winners of the primary (or a runoff election after the primary, depending on votes, and on states, and on party – they all do it a bit differently) get to represent their party in the general election. There is no particular difference between a Presidential and a non-Presidential primary. The winner of any primary doesn’t get to hold office until and unless they win the general election in November.
Next, we get to general elections. This is generally where the Republican and the Democrat compete against one another directly (primaries are all within parties, never between parties). Often, other candidates appear on the ballot (the requirements to get on the ballot vary by state, so some third party candidates are on the ballot in some states but not others.)
It’s in the general election that the Presidential race differs from any other, because for historical reasons (that many Americans consider at least obsolete if not outright wrongheaded) voters aren’t voting for the candidate directly, they are actually voting, state by state, for a slate of electors who will later on cast their vote (in the electoral college) for President.
With the exception of two states, the candidate with the most votes gets the entire slate of electors, but this isn’t a rule, it’s a tradition. Actually, it’s two traditions. The first is the winner-take-all tradition (not followed by Nebraska and Maine) and the second is the “loyal elector” tradition. There is no rule or law requiring any of the electors to vote in the electoral college for anyone in particular – they can vote for whoever they want. State-level parties are the people who pick the electors, and they make an effort to pick people they can expect to be loyal to their party. Sometimes they get it “wrong” and you get a rogue elector.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the state”. The slates of electors are picked by the political parties in each state.
Nope, that’s simply a tradition. Again, they are selected by the parties, not “the state”, and are generally loyal to their party.
Rogue electors are extremely rare – their party (Republican or Democrat) selected them basically because of their dedicated partisanship. I vaguely recall there has been only one or two rogue electors in my lifetime. For all practical purposes, a vote for your favored candidate is a de facto vote for that candidate, and the intervening electors who then turn around and vote for your candidate in the electoral college is essentially a formality.
So the substantive complaint with the system isn’t indirect election of Presidents via the electoral college. The complaint is electing a national President by states rather than by the nation as a whole. In recent times, Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 both lost the popular vote but won the electoral college because small states have outsize power in the US system (when the Senate was 50-50, the Democratic Senators represented 70% of the people, the Republican senators only 30%).
However, this slanted playing field is unlikely to be corrected, because changing it would require the support of those who benefit from it.
Alaskan voters chose (in a 2020 ballot initiative) to go with a form of ranked choice voting, specifically Instant Run-off Voting (also called Preferential Voting in Australia). So, not any committee’s choice.
Not in Alaska’s IRV. One vote is always one point. Candidate with the least points is eliminated, and those votes are then transferred to the next candidate on each voters’ ranked list. Repeat until someone has a majority.
Murkowski beat the Alaska Republican Party’s preferred candidate, Kelly Tshibaka, when she picked up the Democrat’s second place votes.
No. In every state the vote for President is votes for electors. Nowhere is the President elected by popular vote. In actual practice, the President is elected by popular vote per state. California is WAY underrepresented in the electoral college. What changes state by state is, for example, the location and number of polling places, the protocols for mail-in votes, the deadlines for counting votes, etc.
The popular vote determines the electors in every state. In all but Nebraska and Main, the winner gets all the electors. Those two states each have multiple districts, and different electors for each district.
In practice it doesn’t work that way. And if anyone tried to make it work that way, it would be a futile effort because it would be political suicide. You are missing the essential difference between elections and appointments. Electors in practice do actually represent the popular vote in each state. Yeah, the actual people chosen to be the electors are selected by their political party apparatus in each state, but nobody knows or cares who they are, because they always vote according to the popular vote in their states. In theory the electors can ignore the popular vote, but in practice this simply does not happen.
(However, there is a case about to be decided by SCOTUS that may make a major change here. The issue is whether a state legislature can appoint (in your sense) electors and totally ignore the popular vote. Turns out there are several states where statewide offices are currently held by Democrats but the legislature is majority Republican because they gerrymandered themselves into permanent majority status. And since the majority of voters in those states vote for Democrats, the Republican legislators wish to throw out the Democrats’ electors and replace them with Republicans. SCOTUS currently being hard-right Republican, and wouldn’t have ever considered taking this case otherwise, the prospects are grim.)
That’s a serious misunderstanding. In actual practice, the people vote for the President. The insertion of an electoral college between the people and the President is transparent – that is, it doesn’t ever change the result. While it’s true that in 2000 and 2016 the President lost the popular vote but won the electoral (that is, state-by-state) college vote, this doesn’t mean the people didn’t vote for President. Even if the electoral college were eliminated, so long as one vote in one state counts more than one vote in another state, a minority of voters can elect the President.
(And as I said, much depends now on SCOTUS. If they decide the benefit to their (Republican) political party outweighs precedent or even basic sanity, this upcoming decision could be a giant stop toward their apparent ultimate goal of simply NAMING a President of their choice, bypassing both the public and the states.)
I have no problem with that approach either. It’s not explicitly a point system, but as you say, second-place votes do count. Voters do rank-order their preferences.
I see you have it a bit hard to make up your mind whether the people vote for electors of for the President. I see why it would be hard for you. But for me it is not hard at all. The presidential candidates may be on the ballot, but the people are really voting for the electors. Given some of the systemic quirks we have identified, it should be indisputably clear that the people not voting for the president — there’s ultimately just one candidate per party + people need to register their party affiliation (i.e. they act like party delegates, not like voters) = the party does the picking. Except in some states maybe people get to vote almost directly for the president, if that’s any consolation.
Here’s how the government (the executive branch) works in (all, I think) European countries. First, people vote the representatives into the parliament. Then the government is formed by negotiations among the parties who got into the parliament. Usually the government is proportional based on the party who got the most votes in the parliamentary elections. (Additionally there’s some small role for the president, who is picked by a separate procedure. The president usually routinely confirms the government that the parliament has agreed on.)
Under this system, nowhere at any time do the people delude themselves believing they vote in the government. They know they vote in only the parliament.
Your faith is touching. I dare you to produce evidence of the kind of anal probe that Florida got in 2000. Did the New York Times or Washington Post verify all the signatures? Did the the opposition get to verify the signatures?
Is there a hostile witness backing your claim?
Minor detail: I haven’t claimed there was fraud. Just incompetence of a kind that suggests willful incompetence.
https://ballotpedia.org/Personal_Gain_Index_(U.S._Congress)
Top 20: The average increase in net worth in the Top 20 was 422% a year, excluding Chellie Pingree.
Top 21-40: The average increase in net worth in the Top 40 was 240% a year; for those in spots 21-40, it was 68%
Top 41-60: The average increase in net worth in the Top 60 was 173% a year; for those in spots 41-60, it was 42%
Top 61-80: The average increase in net worth in the Top 80 was 137% a year; for those in spots 61-80, it was 30%
The average member saw his or her net worth increase by an average of 15.4 percent per year.
I wonder how this compares to the average voter.
We are not communicating. Yes, for President, technically speaking, people are voting for a slate of electors. The electors invariably turn around and vote for the candidate that won the state.
I think where we’re not communicating is in the fact that with the electoral system, states cast either all their votes or none of their votes for a candidate, whereas in state-level elections the winner needs only a majority. But this is generally a distinction without a difference, because a candidate who has the majority by even a single vote wins the office, and his opponent gets nothing. I would prefer, as would many, a nationwide popular vote for President, but we’d still end up with only one President.
Simply not so. In primaries, there are many candidates vying for the nomination in each party. The party does NOT pick those candidates. The party may endorse only one, but all are running at once. Often enough, the party-endorsed candidate does NOT win the primary. Primaries are popular votes, but the primary winners don’t win the office, only the chance to run for office later.
And as I said before, I have voted in many primaries. I am not a party delegate. I have never actually lived in a state where I have to register with a party.
When we get to the general election, all states are the same, where the voters are voting for a candidate to be assigned all the electors for that state. No state votes more or less directly for President than any other.
I understand that under most European systems, the people vote in the legislature and the legislature picks a Prime Minister, who forms a government. Thus, the Prime Minister ALWAYS represents either the legislative majority, or some coalition that together represents a majority. In the US, it is possible for the President to be of one party, and both houses of Congress to be of the other party. Happens fairly often. And this is common at the state level. It’s currently the case in Wisconsin and North Carolina, for example.
Your paranoia is discouraging.
May I present the state of Georgia, which had two recounts and a careful examination of all signatures. May I present Arizona, where there was what the Republicans called a “forensic audit” and brought in some QANON people to do the audit! And these auditors ended up finding the original count was correct! May I present the state of Michigan, which also held recounts and detailed examination of signatures. After the 2020 election, the US easily busted the all-time record for the number of recounts and audits ever performed. Without a single result changing.
Certainly there are some election deniers who deny the results they themselves examined! But the guy in Arizons (Vos?), president of the Arizona Senate who commissioned the QANON audit, ended up accepting that his side lost.
And you have cited, well, by my count, ZERO cases supporting your concern. The consensus I’ve read basically says that the sheer competence and integrity of the people running the elections nationwide was surprisingly good.
Where are you getting this “incompetence” stuff anyway? I have seen a couple of cases where election officials have stolen machines, or snuck in “examiners” after hours – one in Colorado, one in North Carolina. But I have seen no allegations of incompetence. And I’ve tried to pay attention. Are you just making that up because it suits your preferences?
Much better than the average voter, but not a lot different from voters in the same income and wealth brackets as the office holders. The rich are getting richer across the board, while the average schmuck is stuck in the mud.
It’s not easy to communicate with someone under a delusion. This much should be clear to you from talking to ID theorists.
Which, again, means that people are not voting in the president. Even if primaries were popular votes (which they are not by several characteristics in several states), it cannot be said that they are voting for the president when the outcome of the voting is something other than the president. When they vote and the outcome is not the president, but they still think that they are voting for the president, then this is called a delusion.
The difference with for example French presidential elections is as follows. The parties set up their candidates. People cast their votes for the candidates – whichever they want, nobody checks the party affiliation of the voters. The winner needs 50+% of the votes. If there is no such winner in the first round, there will be a second round with two leading candidates. In the second round, it is again the people who vote for the two remaining candidates. This is how the French people can say that the people vote for the president – the outcome of their voting is the president. If the second round occurred by some committee procedure, the people would be able to vote for the president only in the first round by giving someone 50+% of the votes and any second-round president would be derided as not voted in by the people.
Stay free from delusions.
Bernie Madoff was doing 20 percent. At least a hundred congressman are doing much much better than Bernie. Year after year, decade after decade, with no losses.
Nearly all primaries are popular votes, but not all. But I can assure you that NOBODY voting in ANY primary believes they are voting for President. They are voting in an attempt to select their preferred candidate for the general election later. And in the general election, I would sincerely hope nobody thinks the President is elected by national vote, especially since the electoral college has been in the news so often recently.
I should repeat that in many districts voting for many lower level offices, the primary is the de facto election, because a single party is so dominant in that district. But the winner STILL must run in the general election and get a majority, even if he’s running unopposed. I saw recently that of the 435 Representatives in the House, only about 45 seats are actually competitive in the sense of changing parties; gerrymandering has rendered the other 390 seats “safe” – that is, safe for the party, NOT the person. The real threat to most Representatives is to be “primaried”, that is, replaced in a primary election by another candidate of his same party.
Yes, I agree that system is simpler and I think superior. And to repeat what I said earlier, many in the US would like exactly such a system because the current system violates the one-man-one-vote principle, and gives much more weight to some votes than others. Many Americans consider this unfair, BUT the procedure for changing it requires cooperation from the very people who benefit from the unfairness, so they refuse to cooperate.
Nobody in the US is deluded. We know how the system works. We understand primaries and general elections. We understand differences in voting between states. We understand the electoral college. We know that our President is NOT elected by national popular vote. We even understand that if we eliminated the electoral college and went with a popular vote, we would also have to eliminate certain differences between the states, so that a vote in any state would be just like a vote in any other state.
But if you think a vote in November for President is meaningless, YOU are deluded. Yes, in most states, like most districts, the candidate the electors will vote for (because that slate of electors won the popular vote in that state) is a foregone conclusion. The US only has maybe 10 swing states at the most, and usually 5-6. A swing state is a state where the popular vote MIGHT be a majority for the candidate for either party. And since the electors will all vote for the popular vote winner in each state, and since the foregone-conclusion states do not represent a majority of electoral votes for either party, the swing states determine the President.
But then again, I read that in France there is often some doubt as to who the people will vote for, and that there are more liberal and more conservative regions within the country. Not as explicit as states in the US, but the effect is similar. French politicians know where to spend their campaign funds.
No surprise, right? Politicians tend to represent the donor class for a reason.
Erik,
You appear to be making an argument that is so deeply weird that I have trouble believing it is your intent.
Consider the French Presidential election, but instead of tallying the votes nationally, the votes are tallied in each Department, and the Presidential candidate with the most votes in a Department ‘wins’ that Department. The candidate with the most Department wins becomes President. Suppose also that this modification in tallying has zero effect in 90% of Presidential elections.
Your position, as I understand it, is that this modification means that French voters are not voting for a President at all, and any Frenchman who thinks that when he put an X next to Mitterrand’s name, he was voting for a President is deluded.
I think the error lies elsewhere, Erik.
My best explanation is that you are mis-translating the English phrase “voting for”.
Also, be careful with your aspersions of mental defect.
I don’t think so. The US electoral system has a history, much of it interesting. After all, why NOT elect President (and a while back, Senators) by popular vote? My reading of the history is that there are two answers. First, smaller states wanted enough political power not to be steamrolled by larger states, and wanted a system set up to give them political parity as much as possible. And second, the US founders had no confidence in the wisdom of the electorate. Yeah, they made sure slaves couldn’t vote, and women couldn’t vote, and children couldn’t vote, and white male adults who didn’t own land couldn’t vote, but STILL they were dealing with widespread illiteracy, and no effective way to educate the eligible voters, or collect their votes (it took weeks to cross the country, even though it was only 13 states at the time.)
The civil war, 70 years after the constitution was ratified, was STILL fought by armies representing the various states. My grandfather was a proud member of the 2nd Massachusetts during WWI. It was only after WWI that the military was no longer organized by state. And for a long time, states defended their autonomy quite fiercely. It has taken a long string of SCOTUS decisions to homogenize the states to the extent that they are – and police powers still belong to the states, as do voting procedures and a great many laws and ordinances.
So I think Erik is trying to visualize the US as being a single monolithic political bloc like France, and isn’t grasping the history, or the role of the states. Hell, the old confederacy STILL wants to secede!
I’m an expat southerner living in Connecticut , and what I hear is New Yorkers wanting Florida and Texas to secede. No Lincolns in sight.
One other responsibly delegated explicitly to the states is public health. Then there’s the tenth amendment.
From what I hear, New York Staters want New York City to secede.
Here, my reading is that SCOTUS takes the 10th Amendment seriously when federal powers favor Democrats. When federal policies are to the Republicans’ liking, not so much.
As a cynic, I’m deeply touched when faith is expressed in elected officials of either party. Or in the incestuous amalgam of hereditary bureaucrats and news media moguls.
I differ from Trumpies in that I don’t think any of this is new or remarkable. Nor am I shocked or dismayed by the woke. There are things about cultural trends I like, and things I don’t like, but they flow past me. None of my grandchildren have been to involuntary trans conversion classes, so I assume the hysteria is a tad overwrought.
I sympathize with people who think government is hopelessly corrupt, but if you read about the writers of the constitution, it always has been.
Always, probably. Hopeless, clearly not.
I have a hunch that AI is currently stuck on the intractable problem of evaluating facts.
Alternative facts?
Have they been to voluntary ones?
Incidentally, all school (including home-schooling) and kindergarten is involuntary for almost all children most of the time.
I am not aware of any family interaction with wokeness. It just hasn’t come up. I have personally chatted for several years on another forum with a trans woman. Many of the currently hot topics came up. There are plenty of rights issues that seem to me more pressing than who uses what restroom. Things like international travel, passports, and such.
My kids, who were heavily into high school sports, are skeptical about the neutrality of birth sex in competitive sports. I think this will be controversial for a long time.
The most effective form of disinformation is simply not reporting inconvenient news.
Could you elaborate? Motivating the target believe there is no such thing as inconvenient news seems more effective to me.
Seems strange to me that people think that schools are incompetent to teach basic math or reading can persuasively teach a kid to become trans. How does one even start?
You’re looking at it wrong. It’s not whether this is teachable, it’s whether enough parents FEAR that it’s teachable to elect someone who preys on fear.
Occasionally I think about the McMartins.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/2/20-4632_article
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/coronavirus-italy-covid-19-pandemic-europe-date-antibodies-study
petrushka,
petrushka,
I am curious as to what message you are trying to convey here. Both of your citations are evidence against the sinophobes’ pet “lab leak” theory of CoVid origin. Have you, perhaps, finally accepted the viral zoonoses explanation?
They are not evidence FOR either origin theory.
But they are evidence that the official timeline is off by several months.
And evidence that the Chinese version of the early epidemiology is irrelevant. By the time of official Chinese case zero, the virus had been in Italy at least two months.
My question is, have the Chinese never analyzed waste water?
I have links to published papers pointing out that travel between China and Italy was two way, and it is physically possible that the deadly variant originated in Italy. No evidence for this particular scenario, except that the virus seems to have circulated for several months without killing a lot of people. It was just diagnosed as pneumonia, in both Italy and China.
There were no tests, no sequence, so no covid diagnosis.
We are making progress, I think. Now, I want you to imagine two numbers:
If we assume that the pandemic was caused by a lab-leaked gain-of function variant, what is the probability that this virus circulated for months in Italy and China without killing a lot of people?
Alternatively, if we assume that the pandemic was caused by a recombination event between two viruses circulating in the wild, what is the probability that a virus with this spike protein circulated for months in Italy and China without killing a lot of people?
Personally, I think the second probability is higher. This is what is known as “evidence.”
Try to find where I asserted the virus was manufactured. Hint. I have never promoted the assertion that the virus was manufactured.
I do suspect, though it is only a suspicion, that the virus was brought to Wuhan as part of research. Even Fauci has said that is a possibility.
The timeline is important, not because it can prove the specific history of origin, but because the August/September case zero scenario suggests something about the ethics or competence of the Chinese government.
We already know they destroyed their virus samples, that they detained and intimidated whistleblowers. There is also the death of Dr. Li Wenliang at age 33.
Rather young.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_due_to_COVID-19
Well, you have promulgated that assertion. Uncritically.
But you are missing the point spectacularly.
Let me re-phrase:
I would have hoped that you would have been able to manage that rephrase yourself. My point is not to accuse you of making unfounded racist allegations — I don’t think that is the case — it is to explain that you do not understand what “evidence” is, in the forlorn hope that you might learn.
In USA, there is additionally the electoral college, and it has more effect on the presidential elections. There can be competing lists of electors, for example Trump came up with fake electors. In France the voters do not need to register their political party, so the voting process cannot be steered by the political parties the way American primaries are. The closest to a similar system in USA is perhaps “open primaries to unaffiliated voters”, available in just seven states out of 50. This means the presidential elections of the two countries are not comparable.
And, fundamentally, the United States constitution says what it says about electing the president. You are basically arguing that the people have the right to believe that they are voting for the president regardless of what the constitution says and how the process works. Indeed, people may insist on remaining deluded, but it’s still a delusion.
I seriously doubt there are many Americans who think the President is elected directly by popular vote. If those people exist, I wonder what they think of the fake elector scheme that’s been in every source of news.
Please try to keep up. The existence of and structure of the Electoral College affected the elections of Harrison, Hayes, Duyba Mk1 and Trump. So four out of 49 since JQ Adams, where the old three-fifths compromise complicated matters. Hence my reference to “zero effect on 90% of Presidential Elections”. D’oh.
Naah, that’s equivalent to lying about who won a Department
You keep confusing the primaries with the election.
Again, confusing the primaries with the election. You told us that in France ” The parties set up their candidates.”, so the French electorate has no role in selecting the candidates. It is much the same in the USA. Ask a Bernie supporter.
Deep.
I do enjoy your use of “basically” in this sentence. It translates as “This is a strawman, and I know it is a strawman, but imma gonna use it anyway. People understand the process, and vote “for” a president, knowing that their vote is unlikely to swing the result, just like any other election. I live in Massachusetts, so my vote would be particularly unlikely to swing the result…
Quite. Your knowledge of the US electorate being a case in point.
This is true for all but a handful of states. I wonder if the same holds true for the majority of departments in France.
Flint,
Also true in ‘parliamentary’ systems: I reached voting age in a stockbroker belt constituency in the Home Counties that was a safe seat for a ‘bring back the birch, bring back the noose’ Conservative. A wasted vote. As soon as I could, I established residency in Cambridgeshire…
Dunno if anybody will be interested but a lot of my writing over the past several years (maybe since I stopped participating here) has been on the issues discussed above. In addition to the stuff focused on electoral politics, I’d expect this blog entry, on what it makes sense to believe (and the attached review of Weill’s new book on conspiracy theories) to be of some interest at TSZ: https://luckorcunning.blogspot.com/2023/06/which-views-are-sensible-which-off-wall.html