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
23297 readers
4363 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
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.