Summary
Trump’s popular vote share has fallen below 50% to 49.94%, with Kamala Harris at 48.26%, narrowing his margin of victory.
Trump’s share of the popular vote is lower than Biden’s in 2020 (51.3%), Obama’s in 2012 (51.1%) and 2008 (52.9%), George W. Bush’s in 2004 (50.7%), George H.W. Bush’s in 1988 (53.2%), Reagan’s in 1984 (58.8%) and 1980 (50.7%), and Carter’s in 1976 (50.1%).
The 2024 election results highlight Trump’s narrow victory and the need for Democrats to address their mistakes and build a diverse working-class coalition.
The numbers also give Democrats a reason to push back on Trump’s mandate claims, noting most Americans did not vote for him.
This is major league copium. The fact is that Trump’s opponent got way more votes in 2020 than in 2024, and had the blue turnout in 2024 equaled what it was in 2020, he would not have won in 2024. Period.
Yeah I’m really not sure why these conversations are still going on. It’s painfully clear that Dems lost this election because of voter turnout.
At this point it’s just sad to see the impotent denial of facts of some people. He won the election and the popular vote. End of story.
Great! We can relish the fact that he didn’t win over the majority of Americans as our country descends into a fascist hellhole run by billionaires, war hawks and rapists.
This is a ridiculous argument. Orange man won the electoral college, got the most votes, won the senate, house of reps, the presidency, and the supreme court. What more is there to lose?
Plenty of coping from the liberal corporate media, instead of admitting that liberals abandoned the working class to court the monied interests.
It really didn’t have much to do with abandoning anyone. It didn’t matter what democrats proposed at all. The vast majority of people answers they were dissatisfied with America in exit polls. The economy is doing fine on paper but people don’t feel that way. It was the inability to distance from Biden and provide actual radical solutions to things that got them voted down.
At this point it has nothing to do with working class policies. It has everything to do with voter dissatisfaction and pandering to moderates.
The economy doing fine means nothing for 99.9% of people. All that means is rich people made money. People have seen a decrease in their pockets
The economy doing fine means nothing for 99.9% of people.
this isn’t actually true. The economy just leads the people in most circumstances. 6 Months from now the economy will be doing better than it was now, and people won’t be struggling as much. Not due to trump, amusingly enough.
Also inflation is irrelevant, you can’t really just undo inflation. Sure you could just, not do it. But good luck with that one. Inflation is really just a mechanism to offset economic dysfunction, and broaden the impact of it. Such that you don’t have a complete global collapse of trade for example.
Not sure why everyone keeps suggesting that the economy will do well under trump. It will only do well if he doesn’t do anything. But the deportations alone will be a disaster.
You’re talking about entire towns losing their farming and dairy communities overnight, not good. Same is true of healthcare workers and food service. Housing prices might double.
And if he does the tariffs, we’re cooked. Recession would happen the very next day no question. So he has like 5 different ways he already plans on taking the economy, he just needs to try one of them and we’ll be in recession.
Bitcoin is already way up
The third dimension of the political compass is radical vs. moderate. People want more radical change, and the Democrats didn’t meet them there.
Exactly. In a high dissatisfaction environment, you must do your best to distance from the status quo which is why Trump got elected twice. It’s not that democrats are proposing bad policies, it’s that they’re only associated with changes that don’t mean much to average people. They represent the status quo far too much to be interesting.
Yep. The “liberal media” kept up a drum beat with the inflation and of course did next to nothing to tell the low info the real source and it wasn’t all inflation.
idk why people keep yapping about abandoning the working class, it mostly just seems like a dogwhistle to a general dissatisfaction that never seems to go away.
People were doing the same shit before biden dropped out, saying they would support someone else, like kamala. That happened, and then they didn’t.
how would the liberals court the working class? would electing a fucking immigrant factory worker do it? At what point does the working class actually go “you know what, i agree, i will vote for this person” because the problem is, you can’t just put some guy in the seat, we did that with trump, it was a horrendous mistake, and trump should have some idea of how this stuff works.
You need someone politically educated and experienced, capable of representing the people, like biden. There’s a reason he got so much legislation through the government, even with how polarized it is right now.
unless of course, you want to overthrow the government, and install a dictator. That would also work.
Bernie Sanders is correct that the Democrats abandoned the working class. I will be blunt and say that Lemmy has ironic bigotry and disdain on the people of colour and working class who voted for Trump. It is important to understand the other side even if you don’t agree; that way you would know where they are coming from and sway them. Call Trump voters of all backgrounds racists, hillbillies, mysoginists, redneck, traitors, Uncle Toms or Uncle Hector; but people don’t have jobs and crime rate is up. The former blue wall is now the orange Rust Belt that colours Trump. And it is taboo to say this but many places are indeed overwhelmed by too much immigration since those places don’t have the infrastructure to support the sudden population increase. Chronically underfunded public services make locals and immigrants compete for school, jobs and hospital beds. Immigrants are blamed instead, when in fact it’s the affluent middle and upper classes who keep voting against building more social housing and expanding health services because they don’t want their property value to go down and/or pay more taxes. And frankly, I believe many Lemmy users fall into this class camp and don’t want to admit we’re part of the problem. Many of us are college-educated with higher economic mobility and earnings live in safe and affluent areas because we benefit from the new knowledge economy. We are not rubbing shoulders with working class folks who lost their traditional manufacturing jobs and not experiencing their every day struggle. So, we become detached from the real lived experiences of those left out and deprived of opportunities. We consign rural and de-industrialised Appalachian former workers as ignorant and racists, when in fact we’re also being bigoted against them for dismissing their genuine feelings of not having anymore jobs left, and their community left rotting by offshoring and automation caused by mismanaged globalisation. Why else has protectionism returned to the political menu? Has no one asked this instead of simply saying autarky and protectionism is dumb and makes their favourite video-games more expensive?
Simply saying that the economy is doing better is not enough if the rest are not feeling it. Just because we’re feeling cushy in our office job doesn’t mean those in the Rust Belt are feeling the same. We would not say we’re fine if we have cancer on the liver while the rest of the body don’t.
There is no denying that there are outright bigotry, but many people are left behind by emerging new technology and job market trend. And the folks who are out of jobs who could not put food on the table is the stuff that dictators are made of. I did not say this, it was Franklin Roosevelt. He knows that desperate people are easily brainwashed and swayed. Tell me you have not been in a dark place on a personal level before and you have not had negative thoughts dominate? It’s the same situation happening right now with the working class which manifest on the societal level.
If the mostly affluent Lemmy users, progressives and liberals realise this, then we can take back progressivism into the political spotlight. The same progressives who always call for empathy do not place the same to the blue collar, working class folks left behind economically. Progressives need to understand the people different from them. It is only right to learn even from the other side.
During the Great Depression, neighbours would buy their neighbouring farmers’ property at a penny to prevent being possessed by uncallous bankers, and threaten auctioneers for not agreeing with the sale. Where is that solidarity right now?
Control of his ticker, one hopes
Well the left lost thier sanity so everything else has become trivial.
He lost last time and we let him take it. We dont have to keep letting him steal the office
He still won the popular vote.
By being less less poplar than he was last election, because the Dems were even less poplar
What do poplar trees have to do with this ?
Their wood is too soft to stand up to the Republicans, the Democrats need something stronger, like oak or maple.
I kinda like the sound of Maplecrat.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what Yew can do for your country!
Soon there will be no more of them
The first line of the summary starts with …
Trump’s popular vote share has fallen
He still has more than Harris. I’m not thrilled about any of this, I just don’t see any sort of significance of being under 50% when we already don’t use the popular vote for anything meaningful. If it drops below Harris’s, then that’s worth talking about.
i think in presidential elections in order to “win” you need at minimum a 51% vote. Otherwise you don’t actually win, but i could be mixing some shit up lol.
Voting is fucking weird.
You can win the presidency with as little as 22% of the popular vote. https://youtu.be/7wC42HgLA4k
Very, very slimly.
It won’t matter. He, and his cultists, will continue to claim otherwise.
I mean his vote share went down, he still has more votes than kamala.
So they don’t need to say anything he still won the popular core
You all need to get your “Fuck Trump” flags made and start driving around with them for the next 4 years.
That’s still a win in the popular vote. He has a mandate.
It’s a plurality and not a majority, pretty far from a mandate. It’s a legal win.
That’s a mandate
Usually, “mandate” used to mean overwhelming support from the majority. If these percentages hold up, donvict has a plurality. Even if he had a bare majority with Kamala and him having ~1.5% delta, it’s not like it is some real mandate, either…
It is. If you look at his appointments it looks like he’s going to be moving as fast as he can so that’s good.
The Democratic party is a lost cause. They NEVER take any responsibility for their actions. What they did this election should even be illegal. They had no primary, so as a Democratic voter, I had no choice in who I was voting for. They picked my candidate for me, and it wasn’t even the incumbent! What’s the point of a democracy where my vote doesn’t matter, because THEY decide who I have to vote for? It’s stupid! They keep doing it over and over. Before, they threw Bernie under the bus and backed Hillary whether we liked it or not. They keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over because they just don’t care about working class people
They did have a primary.
And Hillary won her primary popular vote against Bernie and you’re still pissed about it so seems like the method isn’t the problem for you, it’s that they (“they” being Democrats according to the party rules) don’t pick whoever you like.
The primary where she bought out the entire DNC and was in control of them? The same primary where the DNC worked together to stop Bernie and sabotage his campaign, even going so far as to contemplate attacking him for being Jewish? The primary where the chair apologised to Bernie for fucking him over?
Oh yeah, totally democracy in action.
What they did this election should even be illegal
illegal how? they’re a private party, their own rules don’t require them to hold a primary. Even if they wanted to do so, it was most definitely too late, should they have held one prior? probably.
They had no primary, so as a Democratic voter, I had no choice in who I was voting for.
man you guys need to learn what irony is. Also just to be clear, like 10 million people ever vote in primaries, so uh. Good luck? I guess? It’s not even representative to begin with lmao.
What’s the point of a democracy where my vote doesn’t matter
i mean it objectively does, but ok.
Actually only 50% of us support the fat pedophile fascist.
It’s way less than that. Like 35% of eligible voters did not vote.
Only 33% of eligible voters actually voted against Trump. 66% either agree with him or don’t care.
And in not doing so, they objectively supported him, whether they’re too braindead to know or not.
Yeah like those people who voted for the people actively funding a genocide that somehow believe the vote they were casting was for less genocide.
That is an amazing brain trick.
this is my favorite israel palestine talking point, instead of actually doing something about the issue, or like, discussing actual things actually happening, people just bitch and moan about semantics instead.
Who gives a fuck whether or not voting for kamala was a vote for genocide, or whether or not abstaining, and therefore helping trump get elected was also a vote for genocide, go do literally fucking anything for the cause.
You are claiming that Trump automatically wins if nobody votes. That’s objectively not how US elections work. He still has to get the plurality of votes to win. People who do not cast votes don’t automatically support Trump, it just doesn’t sway the election at all. Please stick to the facts and not to the fake news. Election misinformation is not cool.
Yup, just 71 million or so goddam people voted for a narcissistic grifter felony with daddy issues. Fuck.
Or 71 million people voted against democrat corruption and the fact that they do not represent the working class.
By voting for blatant corruption instead? And tax cuts for the rich is not a policy representing the working class.
They didn’t say that they were making a good decision voting against Dems, just that it was a decision.
Yes, a bad decision, but that shouldn’t need to be said to anyone with regularly firing neurons.
They voted for disruption. And that’s the one thing trump is good at.
Maybe a percentage of those votes were because of this, but you can’t actually believe that 71 million people voted for him because he somehow represents the working class better than the dems would. The vast majority people who were protesting the dems not representing the working class, did so by not voting or voting 3rd party, not by voting for Trump.
99 percent of those people voted for Trump because of 3 reasons: Racism, Misogyny, or ignorance. There is a fourth group of rich voters who voted for him to line their pockets, but they are a miniscule portion of his votes. This fourth group mostly just invests money to encourage the racist, misogynistic, and ignorant ones to go vote.
Ah yes, that’s why they did it. I’m sure that’s exactly why they voted for the, as stated previously, narcissistic etcetera etcetera. Get the fuck out of here.
Yea but he has 100% of the control now so it doesn’t matter unfortunately.
The fact that a majority of voters did not want Trump to win makes me simultaneously feel happy (that I’m not surrounded by idiots) and more depressed (that the Electoral College has screwed us AGAIN!)
It’s a lack of majority not a lack of plurality. Harris is still trailing Trump by 3m votes or so (and 1.6%), Trump is just not above 50% after further votes have been counted. So this isn’t an electoral college steal
Yeah, but even if Kamala wins the popular vote, this is going to be the closest a republican has gotten in…
Decades?
Maybe longer?
But the DNC is going to latch onto this and try to claim if they had moved just a little more right they’d have won.
Regardless of what happens, the DNC will always say the answer is moving to the right.
The DNC brain trust is already claiming that they should go further to the right
They were told they abandoned workers, and somehow heard “What if we betray Transpeople?”
Corporations fund the big name democrats and their campaigns. These same corporations benefit greatly from Republican wins. They are buying intentionally ineffective democrats who are unincentivized to either win races or appeal to worker interests as they are typically directly at odds with these big bankrolling corporations.
I am not saying every democrat is paid for or every democrat is ineffective or democrats as a whole are an entirely bought and paid for organization, but what I am saying is that enough of the prominent enough democrats legitimately are financially disincentivized from helping the people they’re supposed to represent so as to effectively gum up the works of the whole machine.
They’re already starting to trial run the messaging through lower ranking democrats in safe seats. (Link)
Well at least they’re getting roasted for it, I mean in this link the aide who said that was fucking fired over it. Yeah it said he resigned, but when you get up enough you aren’t “fired” you’re “asked to resign”
Oh no, you’re reading that wrong. The aide resigned in protest to Rep. Moulton’s comments. The article also quotes Rep. Tom Suozzi. Moulton is also in the House Equality Caucus, which is supposed to be protecting LGBTQ rights. I’m not sure how they square that with his comments that fundamentally misunderstand the process for transgender kids though. His comments show a fundamental misunderstanding of scholastic sports, human physiology, and hormone blockers. Which you think 2 of the 3 would be required reading for that caucus…
Well yeah they’re strategists are essentially corporate lobbyists.
“Poor me, my constitutes don’t like that I am not representing them in government. Corporate lobbiest, you’ve done nothing but shower me in money, won’t you tell me what Americans really want?”
Regardless of what happens, the DNC will always say the answer is moving to the right.
This isn’t borne out by trending or statements. What kind of crystal ball are you smoking?
Two examples: ran on being humane to migrants and continued title 42 three years into the Biden term and proposed a draconian new immigration law.
Ran on reforming the police, flooded them with money.
The kind that’s had me watching politics since Clinton… Have you been under a rock?
FPTP should get FAR more attention as the culprit for this situation. Sure, the electoral college caused Kamala to lose (or whatever) but if we had a true democracy, there wouldn’t be only two possible parties to choose from.
This fixes congress. How does this fix the presidency, which is one single office?
FPTP applies to ALL political offices in a country that uses it.
Using the presidency in this graphic would have been a very poor choice to display the difference between the two. Comparing 1 result with another result on a scale of 1 person would not have the pedagogical weight that the Congress graphic does.
Yes, and you abolish FPTP and now you elect a president how? I’m interested in your proposal, because it’s incomplete to say get rid of FPTP… Otherwise top vote getter, who gets maybe 30% of the vote leads the country which is also an abomination as 70% didn’t vote for that person.
Abolishing FPTP requires doing something else on top of it, ranked choice or run off would be better than the highest count.
Ranked choice voting
Right that is the problem wolfpack described. So what’s the solution?
Ranked choice voting
You can do it in a multitude of ways. The French for instance elect their president by voting twice, the first time they vote for their favorite candidate (and the parliament), the second time they vote for either of the two candidates that got the most votes (a run off)
There are other ways, like ranked voting, or you could look up parliamentary republics for an alternative form of government.
Read up on what happens in the rest of the world, at this point, we, as a human species, have tried pretty much everything
the simplest fix for states would be to adopt something like what maine and nebraska have, since they have vastly more representative turnout compared to FPTP.
Wouldn’t be perfect, but would basically kill any chance of republican DEI in the fed ever again lol.
It could give people opportunities to vote for third parties without feeling like they’re throwing away their vote
Okay so you go with what system?
Let’s say the breakdown of votes looks the same as the Swedish breakdown. There will be more people that voted for a different candidate than the red one (Social Democrat).
This then requires a run off system like france, or a ranked choice, which is also fine to propose, but you can’t hold up a visual of a parliament and say the system is so much better, when we talk about one singular office.
The post compared two things that have different end goals
Any system where your vote is a list instead of a checkbox.
That way in 2016 you can vote for Bernie as 1, and if he loses, you can vote for Hillary by putting her as 2. You don’t have to give up your moonshot to get your safety net.
Great video on the problems with first past the post, with links to some other videos discussing better systems: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
Don’t worry, you’re still surrounded by idiots no matter who wins the presidency
Yeah does it really make that much of a difference in terms of “being surrounded by idiots” whether 51% of the people around you are idiots or 49%? Sure, I’d prefer the 49% scenario, especially if there’s an election happening, but you’re still surrounded by idiots.
The fact that Trump could get elected at all, let alone twice, is proof that there’s too many idiots to want to participate in normal society
Typical liberal cope.
“We KINDA won!”
Face it y’all. Democrats and liberals are a LOSING block. FAILURES.
I’ll continue to vote straight D, because it’s the only choice I got. Fucking losers and failures.
Since it’s just about a half split, you’re at least semi-circled by idiots.
So stay away from walls and other obstacles you can back into…got it!
He still had more of the popular vote than Harris, it was just they were both less than 50% due to 3rd party votes. So neither had a “majority” of the vote.
So he still would have won, even under a purely popular vote based system.
Another thing it means is that if we had ranked choice voting, those 3rd party votes would be the deciding factor in who won the presidency.
If we had ranked choice and got rid of the electoral college*
A lot of those third party votes are in solid red or blue states where it wouldn’t matter. Also a lot of the third party votes this time was for rfk and the libertarian Oliver, who wouldve probably went to trump so the outcome would probably be the same.
The 2024 election results highlight Trump’s narrow victory and the need for Democrats to address their mistakes and build a diverse working-class coalition.
just to be clear, this isn’t really a failing of the dems per say, not to say they didn’t have issues, they did. But this was a global shift away from incumbency. This seems to be more of a response to covid and inflation more than anything else possibly could’ve influenced it.
Lucky break for trump, dems just have to come back stronger i guess.
To be clear, because the headline I think is a bit misrepresentative. Trump still has over a million more votes than Harris. He just no longer has over 50% of the votes cast.
It’s like 49% Trump, 48% Harris, 3% Other. So Trump still won the popular vote.
This isn’t a “the Electoral College screwed us” situation. He still “won” the popular vote. He just didn’t win a “majority” of the votes cast.
Yep. And as much as I’d like to blame 3rd party voters, even if they all voted Harris to giver her the majority, she’d have still lost due to electoral college.
I will absolutely blame the non-voters though. And the 3rd party voters still get part of the blame.
I mean…. Does it really matter?
Nope.
Some liberals will say that he won’t be able to claim a mandate. Doesn’t matter. He will.
Seriously, how far does that excuse get anyone? “Well everyone didn’t vote for him so whatever” and he says “Yeah they did 🥴” and proceeds to do whatever tf he wants anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s still good to know he doesn’t have one, be able to prove it, and say it a lot all over the place with the receipts in hand.
I think this type of thinking is dealing with Trump the wrong way. Censoring him is pointless. He’s going to say what he wants until it isn’t useful and then pivot. He’s going to do what he wants regardless of what he says.
Don’t take him literally. Take him seriously. Defend at the points of real vulnerability. Counter at the right times. Sow discord and distrust in his hapless helpers and incompetent ranks.
Play to win.
None of the news you read on this app matters. This is at least an interesting tidbit.
now take into account the massive GOP voter fraud
I thought we spent four years exhaustively proving that the election cannot be stolen? How did they find loopholes after the Democrats exhaustively proved they didn’t exist?
It wasn’t that it can’t be stolen. We proved the dems didn’t steal it.
This year we had lots of evidence of fraud and manipulation by Rs and like do you really think Trump and Musk would actually just play fair?
I thought we spent four years exhaustively proving that the election cannot be stolen?
Wrong.
Trump’s team claimed for 4 years that the election was stolen without evidence. We’ve spent 4 years showing that the 2020 election was not stolen, which does not mean that election fraud doesn’t exist and never will exist.
I thought we spent four years exhaustively proving that the election cannot be stolen
Um, hate to tell you bro, trump did cheat and steal the 2016 election (proven in court, 34 counts convicted)
The biggest problem with the letters that went around is that it would require every swing state Secretary of State to stay quiet about it happening. And some of those SoS’s are die hard democracy and election people. It would also require the IT people not to leak any concerns and they aren’t known for staying quiet about systems being penetrated.
All in all it seems like a weird thing happened but the silence is verging on Secret Government Agency with millions of domestic spies that never write a tell all book conspiracy territory.
What about the starling machines
I couldn’t find anything about voting machines named Starling. There is a StarLink theory. The problem is that seems to be based on a TikTok video that was incoherent by most reports, and is no longer up.
I get that moneyed interests could get evidence removed from a centralized social media service. But nothing in the transcript I’ve found describes a specific link from StarLink to voting machines. In fact it sounds like the person just described the basics of TCP/IP in a roundabout way to make it sound sinister. The problem is election systems are air gapped with the exception of a few highly controlled access points. Situations where that’s been compromised, (such as allowing remote work from home for election office workers) have made the news for precisely the reason that it’s rare. And the most credible criticism of election security is that the election office’s computers could be compromised and used to spread malware to machines. But that’s an inherent weakness. If the office can’t access the results, they can’t report them.
Furthermore, there’s nothing special about StarLink that would make them a better access route. They aren’t close enough to intercept the unofficial results as a false cellphone tower, (and that wouldn’t change the official results later anyways), and any traffic going through them to attack election systems would also have to travel through modems on the ground, controlled by election officials. So destroying the satellite does nothing for covering your tracks. If you believe they can erase all traces of their traffic, then there’s no need to destroy a satellite as surely that would be even easier on a satellite controlled by a close ally.
At the end of the day, with what we know right now, the fuck up was with the Democrat’s messaging. Not anything to do with election security.
the only two significant things i’ve heard, one is pretty much confirmed.
republicans had access illegally to source code for dominion voting machines (we know this because people were charged over it) this is also the contents of the “letter to VP harris” thing that was released a minute ago. Though it doesn’t claim fraud or anything of the nature, just calls for a recount, and establishing that no foul play happened.
The second, and one i haven’t dug into at all, so take this at face value, is that apparently, there may have been a very large number of “bullet ballots” or ballots just voting for trump, in AZ i think. I don’t know the status of this one. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t explicitly mean voter fraud happened. It may be a tad bit suspect though.
Those are the only two theories i’ve heard that have weight, granted i’m not following election conspiracies, because i’m a normal sane person.
Realistically the most likely “fraud” was elon musk buying twitter.
so… are we hearing any of that now?
I haven’t seen anything. I know Arizona for sure would be all over it. Their last three SoS elections were about keeping Maga out of the elections. The current governor is governor largely for standing up to Trump in 2020. If they thought they got hacked they would be using bullhorns to let us know.
“Cannot”? How does one prove a negative?
58% of the deciding power with just under 50% of the vote?
This might be a catalyst for states to sign the NPVIC. Pennsylvania started the process to sign on this week in legislature.
Perhaps in the past, swing states enjoyed the attention they got.
Now, I have a feeling voters are frustrated from getting way too much attention with mailers, calls, texts, illegal lotteries, news stories, events. As a bonus, voters in swing states are and will be getting outsized blame for electing the returning rapist-in-chief. Anyways a potential silver lining in the impending sea of shit.
Think about the NPVIC critically for a moment. What would you have done if your state voted for Harris, but some agreement your state legislators made forced your state’s EC votes to go to Trump? Suppose the margins were narrow enough that your state’s EC votes were the deciding factor.
I would be contacting my state representatives and governor immediately, demanding they withdraw from that compact before the EC votes are cast in December.
Trump voters would make similar demands of their state if the situation were reversed.
The NPVIC will never actually affect an election, because the participating states would almost certainly withdraw long before it did.
There was some misinformation like that spread about Colorado this year, where more people voted Harris but the state assigned their electors to Trump. Only would happen if the compact is in force.
Thing is though, as it stands with the EC, neither party gives a shit about Colorado in elections as a 54/44 split is treated as a “given” for the Dems. With a national popular vote, every blue vote in Colorado or Washington, would matter just as much as a red vote in California, same as a blue vote in Oklahoma or a red vote in Montana.
Sure, people will try to call their reps and sue if they think their state could flip the result when EC doesn’t match the popular vote result. Those processes tend to take a long time that the chances of reversing it before January are slim. This election, it would have gone to Trump either way since he had a plurality of votes. Is it really fair that only 7 or 8 states of 50 had over 90% of the campaign visits, and nearly half had none?
You don’t have to convince me of the merits of bypassing the EC.
You do have to convince me that the NPVIC will remain in effect after one election. Yes, repealing something like this generally takes time, and probably longer than the 5 weeks or so between the election and the day the EC votes are cast. But they don’t have 5 weeks. They have the entire election cycle.
The only way it stays in effect is if it has no effect. If it would ever change the outcome of an election, it will be repealed by every state compelled to flip its votes.
Are you certain? I do see the possibility of a state attempting to repeal it after the popular vote going the way they didn’t want and perhaps it would only live for one election cycle. I’m just not sure that every state that could overturn it would want to do so, given that a campaign under a national popular vote would mean that there would be far more attention paid to places outside of Pennsylvania and the select handful of swing states. Both campaigns want to see all of America improve in their speeches, not just the midwest and sunbelt battlegrounds, but their campaign actions aren’t representative of that within the EC.
E: Oh and if the 2028 and/or 2032 election has a result where popular vote and EC are aligned when the compact is first in force, there will be much less momentum to overturn it in the following election even if they differ.
given that a campaign under a national popular vote would mean that there would be far more attention paid to places outside of Pennsylvania and the select handful of swing states.
Under popular vote, candidates will run to the urban centers, and completely ignore the rural populace.
NPVIC creates Panem.
That’s hyperbole, of course, but exaggeration for purposes of demonstration.
There’s no perfect solution, but the fact there will be more campaigning in urban centres is not an indictment of the popular vote system. Rural centers don’t have to be excluded, campaign resources can be more spread out to them than before.
Example: Sure, maybe Trump wouldn’t have visited Butler, PA without EC but they are the few rural areas that would benefit at the expense of small towns in every other state. Instead, you would have Republican outreach to the red states that are perennially overlooked, Trump visiting Redding to get out the vote there, Harris campaign in CO and the PNW. Puerto Rico, US territories and DC would have actual importance instead of the whole discussion being around “what does insulting the entirety of Puerto Rico mean for Pennsylvania?”
Can you honestly tell me that you would support your state casting their EC votes for Trump, even though a majority of your state voted for Harris?
Can you honestly say you expect the citizenry of every state to put the will of the nation ahead of their own? Ahead of their neighbors? I mean, most of these states are already using all sorts of shady methods to keep “undesirable” people from voting. The last president went so far as to attempt a coup, and his supporters loved him for it.
Do you honestly believe they’re going to tolerate their state voting against their professed wishes?
Would you actually tolerate your state going against its own voters?
The best that the NPVIC could possibly accomplish is to allow a simple majority of the Supreme Court the opportunity to appoint the presidential candidate they prefer.
