"If the president were elected by simple majority vote then small states would be overpowered by large states. Thanks to the electoral college the interests of small states are protected."
Okay but... what are the "interests of small states"? Do small states have a consistent set of certain political interests that are clearly distinguishable from the interests that big states have? Do people who live in small states categorically believe or care about different things than people who live in big states do?
Conservatives like to talk about "small states" as if that isn't a category that includes both Vermont and Wyoming.
Goddamnit I forgot all about Shays and Whiskey. Fuck George Washington, this might be a bold take but I hope he is dead.
Viewing the American Revolution as a counterrevolution really changes the way you interpret just about every event in it and makes the whole thing make more sense. At almost every point the Founding Fathers were essentially conspiring in secret to rig society to be more favorable to them at the expense of everyone else, I wonder if that has something to do with the popularity of Illuminati narratives in American pop culture.
There was also a popular movement where people were burning down landlords' homes, think Ethan Allen, which got coopted by the so called revolutionaries.
it's how they complain that cities will get more representation than the country, tacitly endorsing the vast majority of people live in cities so obviously that demographic deserves more attention. Also seeming to think all city folks are hard liberals, which is just incomprehensible.
There are more republicans in New York City than in Montana
The only policy I see brought up that would supposedly and disproportionately benefit city dwellers more than people in the country would be a raise in federal minimum wage. The premise being the poor rural small business owner wouldn't be able to keep up with minimum wages set for city folk with a higher cost of living. I don't think the premise holds a lot of water, plus it asks you to care about small business dipshits. Plus I don't even know how true it is because plenty of large city business owners would love lower wages.
I think the argument against a popular vote is that they'll only campaign in big cities.
The fact that they currently only campaign in swing states is the counterargument.
Right, the electoral college doesn't mean presidential candidates will care about small states (when's the last time someone campaigned in Vermont), but rather they campaign only in states that are "up for grabs".
I think the argument is simply not made in good faith. It only sounds coherent because it's written into our civil religion and forced down our throats in 7th grade. Conservatives are really just happy about their wildly disproportionate voting power because rural areas are disproportionately conservative. I've had some go mask off and flatly say to me, "if it benefited your side you'd be fine with it too," and it's like, NO DIPSHIT, I ACTUALLY HAVE PRINCIPLES AND A COMMITMENT TO EQUALITY THAT GUIDES MY THINKING AND POLITICS. These people know it's undemocratic, but they're fine with it because 'the right kind of people' get the advantage. Fucking Kulaks.
nah I'm with the conservatives on this one, imagine if we had an actual socialist party in america, I would 100% want them to use republican tactics if that is what's needed to win. Gerrymander, abuse the electoral college, do whatever they can to enact their agenda (and to be clear in this fantasy the agenda is to benefit the proletariat and end imperialism). I wouldn't complain about it for a second
I think the underlying circumstances are too different to effectively compare. For one, a socialist party is likely to be Urban. Unless all of a sudden all the reactionary chuds in suburbia and rural America became card carrying commies, the rural advantage is just fundamentally a conservative advantage. That more so applies to the Senate and Electoral College than state level offices/operations, such as Gerrymandering.
But even if all of a sudden the roles were reversed, you don't think the military industrial complex and finance capital wouldn't just change the rules? They hide behind a veil of legalism to make it look like they wouldn't just utilize power anyway. That's why I think it's best to attack the idea on first principles of democracy.
if it benefited your side you’d be fine with it too,
I see you've been talking with my father
I'm convinced the entirety of this premise is a mystified way of saying white people's votes need to count for more, since that's who it overwhelmingly benefits.
What will always be incredibly funny about this argument is that there are probably three times as many republican boaters in California, Oregon and Washington than in every single sparsely populated red "smol state" like Wyoming, Utah, etc entire voting population combined, and they are completely and totally voiceless thanks to their own electoral system they're so eager to defend. It's actively damaging to their own electoral interests and they have to defend it by muttering something something mob rule, something something, smol states. They can't even fathom winning an election by popular policies; they deliberately endorse unpopular policies and have to win via legal technicalities, because the 1% knows better than the common rabble.
Yeah I came here thinking this too. The conservatives who defend the electoral college are tacitly throwing away millions of votes they could get from California and New York. If America had some kind of parliamentary system like in other countries, the chuds could possibly come out ahead if they played it right.
what are the “interests of small states”
Being tax havens for credit card companies, I guess.
But, but rural urban divide is natural and will always break down along similar lines. No, ignore the Populists!
