The Electoral College is the big factor in a third-party nightmare for Democrats

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[–]ActuallyNot 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

The electoral college system is kind of fucked.

But it's more fucked now than it has ever been.

That's attributable to GOP gerrymandering more than third parties. Gore in 2000 and Clinton in 2016 won more votes than the person elected by the electoral college, and there was a bias then of about 1% in the GOP favor. Since the federalist society took over the Supreme Court, and they removed any recourse for gerrymandering, that has almost certainly got worse.

[–]TiberSeptim 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I think removing it would be worse though. Basically if you went to pure popular vote, then nobody outside of a major metropolitan area matters at all. Los Angles, New York, SanFransisco, Chicago — that’s enough to win outright.

[–]ActuallyNot 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It doesn't seem right to adjust the value of a vote from a city down compared to a vote from a small town, so that one party is competitive. The idea is that they'll adjust their policies to have the more general appeal.

Clinton's margin over Trump was less than 3 million.

Bush beat Kerry by 3 million, so a republican can, in living memory, actually win. Although to be fair, he was buoyed by the brutal and unjustifiable invasion of Iraq for some reason. Perhaps people thought that it has something to do with the September 11 attacks.

[–]TiberSeptim 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Except they won’t because even if every small town agrees on politics, the population is such that you get at least 40% of the vote from the top ten mega cities. The option that would work in that case is to mostly ignore those small towns and simply focus on urban issues.