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Another awful law 6 years in the making, all thanks to people being too lazy to go out and vote.
We are going to be feeling the repercussions of that laziness for decades to come.
In today's world, we can still see the results of Reaganomics and the terrible Reagan administration and what it did to this country some 4 decades later. Allowing Trump to enter the White House 6 years ago has, and will, continue to have a similar profound negative effect on the trajectory of this country for a long, long time.
You guys sure showed us!
Lazy?
Have you forgotten about the gerrymandering and voter suppression that's been going on?
This is a result of a SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS membership is determined by the president and control of the senate at the time of vacancies. Neither of those are influenced by gerrymandering.
At the core of it this comes down to 2016 when a larger than typical number of people on the left lied to themselves and said "eh, they're all teh same" and tossed their vote at a third party or just didn't vote at all. Following that, SCOTUS went from a 4-4 tie (with 1 vacancy) to 6-3 conservative advantange.
I wouldn't blame laziness, but instead a combination of apathy and people who are more interested in ideological purity than in accepting the available-better such that they would rather complain about the unavailable-best.
RBG refusing to retire in 2012-2014 also shares blame. She could have retired then and the court would be 5-4 instead.
That 1 vacancy should have been Obama's pick. It was fucking stolen from him, and now we're paying the price of "decorum".
Of course, Republican hypocrites shoved another conservative justice on the bench before RBG's body was even cold, even after Trump lost the election (not to mention impeached).
It wasn't just 4 years of Trump that we had to endure, it's now three lifetime conservative appointments to the supreme court. So progressive legislation is stalled for another 30+ years. Our generation will be as old as the fucking Boomers are now before we get another chance at kicking out the conservatives, whose ideology is literally killing the planet. Gen Z and the generation that follows them will rightfully blame us for our inaction.
Or instead of giving up we could make court expansion and reform a litmus test in future Democratic primaries. And/or normalize the idea that judicial rulings need to be enforced by someone else and they too have agency.
Because allowing this to continue for much of our remaining lives is also decorum. We live in an unjust system, but it's not just how life has to be for the next 30 years.
I don't entirely disagree, but I'd like to see an actual roadmap for how such changes would be implemented. Voting for somebody who promises court expansion and reform, but doesn't have the support of either the legislative or judicial branches and doesn't have a concrete method of implementing it, seems like they are set up to fail.
I want to see more ruthless politicians on the left as well, but not if they can't actually follow through with their promises.
Easy:
Support from the legislature is all that's important. If the justices say "you can't do it", then ignore them because clearly they can. The constitution says very little about the supreme court and its size has been changed multiple times before. This is just doing history again.
The president and senate aren’t affected by gerrymandering?
Whaaaaa?
Since you actually seem to be asking... There is no gerrymandering at the federal level in the presidential election. You could argue that the electoral voting system is somehow a form of this, but it isn't the same as intentionally drawing districts to mathematically skew the advantage to the party drawing the map. That said, because electoral votes are based upon congressional representation, they do weigh smaller, emptier states more heavily. US senators are entirely free from gerrymandering as they are directly elected by popular vote. Small, empty states do have more power as a result and by design, for better or worse.
The Represenitives of House of Represenitives are affected by jerrymandering tho.
And they have 0 say in the Supreme Court. They have a minor say in creating other courts, but it's been a long time since anything has meaningfully changed there either.
This thread is not about the supteme court. This thread was about presidential elections.
The SC is its own issue with plenty of threads discussing it already.
It seemed like it was abt the Supreme Court to me
Not this spur.
It doesn't really matter if a state is "empty", what matters is the population not the density.
And for what it's worth: of the ten states with the least population, half generally vote for Democrats (HI, VT, DE, RI, ME). They are often overlooked in these discussions because they are mostly small in area too.
Hawaii isn't in the ten least populous states and Maine isn't a blue state. It's not a straight sort, but Republicans far and away benefit from the unequal representation of the Senate and Electoral College.
Maine has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election in the past 30 years. It's true that it has a Republican Senator, but if that means it's a battleground state then by the same logic so are Montana and West Virginia. Those incumbents are popular despite their party, but when they finally leave the Senate they will be replaced by someone in the opposite party.
But you're right that Hawaii is not one of the ten smallest. It's eleventh. However, I left out New Hampshire, which voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election in the past 30 years except one. So of the eleven smallest states, six consistently send Democrats to the electoral college.
While it's still arguable that Republicans have unfair representation in the Senate and EC, the issue is more complicated than simply blaming the small states. Or for that matter the big states: the top ten include three red (FL, TX, OH), three blue (CA, NY, IL) and four battlegrounds (GA, NC, MI, PA).
LOL, wut? There's nothing arguable about that. Republicans very definitely have an unfair senate and electoral advantage entirely related to being more popular in less populated states (which, with the notable exceptions you've highlighted, tend to also be more rural).
You're cherry picking top ten and bottom ten like the whole swath of states in between don't also have unfair allocation and thus don't matter, while being pretty inconsistent with your battleground state definitions to suit your sorting needs (NH is blue because it only voted R once in 30 years, while every battleground you listed has the same history, and red Florida and Ohio have been 50/50).
While your point about population vs. density is correct, everything else seems to be trying to muddy the waters about the EC rather than just point out an interesting factoid or offer a pedantic correction. There's no serious argument that the EC isn't unfair from an individual voter perspective and biased toward one side from a national perspective.
First, I'm using the common definition of battleground states, which is states that are currently considered winnable by both sides. That doesn't include New Hampshire, or any of the smallest states.
Second, arguable means you can make a good argument for something, so I think you just proved that it's arguable. It is not a slam dunk.
The only advantage of less populated states is that they get two "free" electors regardless of their population. This effect is strongest in small states, where it helps both parties equally.
Looking at all the states, the maximum advantage to a presidential candidate is the difference between the number of states they won times two. For example, if both candidates win 25 states, then the two "free" electors per state will cancel out and the electoral college will be determined solely by the number of representatives in the states that each side wins. Or to put it differently, if the Constitution were "fixed" so that electors were strictly awarded by population, then the winner would never change in a 25 to 25 split.
Of course, if one candidates wins 26 states and the other wins 24 states, then the first candidate could potentially get four "unfair" electors by winning more small states. But historically, the electoral college is won by much larger margins. The only modern candidate who might have won if the Constitution were "fixed" would have been Gore, and that was a highly unusual election. Otherwise, the small state advantage hasn't made a significant difference in our lifetime.
You're arguing that the EC's unfairness is unimportant, not that it's fair. And ignoring the senate imbalance where just a couple extra votes is a massive change.
So since it's unimportant, let's change it to be fair. Except I don't think you really feel it's unimportant and actually care very much about those two extra votes.
You seem to be implying that I don't want Democrats to win, but I can assure you that's not the case. I still do think that the extra votes in the EC are unimportant, and we should focus our efforts on things like voter suppression that have an actual impact.
I am especially concerned when Democrats are defeatist about elections (ie "The Constitution is hopelessly stacked against us in the EC"). Fair or not, the presidency is very winnable. So is the Senate: when was the last the time the GOP held a supermajority? They may have a rural advantage, but we have other advantages, including educated voters and women.
And I can think of two or three amendments that I would work towards (cough, Second Amendment!) before worrying about the EC.
Population density absolutely matters, because when an ignorant person looks at an electoral map, by county, it looks like a couple small blue dots in a sea of red. If the wrong person shows them that map, it can become pretty simple to convince them that Democrats are cheating them because, "just look at all that red!"
It is also about how districts in larger, more empty states, use that mostly empty area to gerrymander their blue population centers. You can't do that in smaller, highly dense, states.
And then, there's this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-01/how-the-density-of-your-county-affects-how-you-vote
I was responding to someone who said that "empty" states have disproportionate power in the electoral college and Senate. Their emptiness does not give them undue power, regardless of what ignorant people think.
I think they have a good point though. Sure, at a basic level, you can't gerrymander a senate election. But you start with the state, draw the district lines. Now the state is gerrymandered, often packing dense districts with democrats. Now your state legislature (gerrymandered as hell) passes a law that says 2 voting machines per district. You bet your ass that affects national elections. Ol' Jim-Bob has to share his two voting machines with 150 other people, whereas a city dwelling Democrat has to share theirs with a few thousand.
Read a book.
What do you believe gerrymandering is?
It means drawing legislative districts for political advantage. But elections for the Presidency and Senate ignore legislative district maps.
Riiiight, always with the excuses. Most of those fall flat when you consider HALF the registered voters can't be bothered to go vote on election day on most elections. Even in heavily trafficked ones, turnout rarely breaks 60 or 70%. Not saying voter suppression or gerrymandering doesn't exist, but neither of those would swing an election if we had enough people voting. The excuses have long since gotten old.
Instead of just flat out hating on them and calling them lazy, maybe do some research into why there are so many non-voters.
And yes, suppression IS a big enough reason to. Who the fuck on an hourly wage has the luxury of driving/transiting to a distant poll station and wait in line for 9+ hours to vote?
But hey, if it makes you feel better to dunk on them as "Lazy", keep at it, that's sure to convince them /s
Edit: Forgot to mention that you assume all these non-voters would vote for your party. Based on research, a very sizable portion would not.
That site didn't give much info. It says they are hard working people who are underexposed to political info and don't feel they can decide. Besides that making them fucking morons (sorry), that still doesn't excuse their inaction.
I'm guessing you only looked at the summary then.
That's not what it said.
There's plenty of data there that explains their inaction. Your refusal to read it doesn't make you right.
It all comes down to giving people a reason they can understand to take the time to vote.
Again, asking an hourly wage worker that can barely make ends meet already to travel/transit and then wait 9+ hours in line to vote is completely unrealistic and not something they should be blamed for.
But hey, like the other guy, keep calling them fucking morons, I'm sure it'll work out great. /s
Gerrymandering is half the reason people don’t vote. If an election isn’t competitive and there’s significant roadblocks put in your way, you might not vote either. Imagine having two jobs and kids and a long ass line at a voting precinct that isn’t within walking distance.
People like that person would rather hate and feel morally superior than spend 5 minutes understanding the reasons.
Lazy idiots like you rather come up with excuses than actually go do what you should be doing. You're the typical "lazy American" stereotype that fascists count on to get into power. Congrats asswipe.
So I guess your voter outreach is nil then.
Keep it up, I'm sure it'll work out great for you and the causes you champion.
citation needed on the first sentence
Pull your head out of your ass.
Remember how a lot of ML communities on Reddit (now on Lemmy) were banning people from their subreddits for saying to vote Biden
ML? I don't know what that stands for, but I did see the absurdity of Bernie and so-called progressive subs that were trying to convince people that a vote for Trump would further Bernie's agenda more than a vote for Hillary. They also were trying to convince people to "stick it to the DNC" and simply sit out the vote.
So the foreign agents running those subs were trying to flip some votes and push voter apathy onto others. Doesn't take much to change an election and the stuff I saw was clearly just a teeny, tiny part of their larger misinformation campaign. A few key votes here or there and that would easily explain Trump's victory.
There is no way this stuff isn't happening on Lemmy now. In fact, I guarantee it is.