By the way the whole Hillary winning the popular vote thing is kind of bogus considering her win in popular vote is from one state alone. California.
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But the ‘popular vote’ just means the absolute majority of all individuals who voted. If a very large chunk of those individuals were from California, why does it make it ‘bogus’?
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So the vote count that doesnt matter anyway matters less. Cool. 
Exactly my thoughts.
Well, anyone would look like this after losing an election.
I don’t think so mate.
Have a look at past losers, in fact i’m sure they won’t look that bad.
The whole purpose of the electoral college is for other less populous areas of the country to have a say in who is elected. It’s sour grapes to scream she won the popular vote when it’s one state contributing to that. The entire rest of the country wanted Trump, and when you have 50 states that have major differences in their economic, geopolitical, and social situations it’s clear there isn’t a one size fits all solution. Thus the electoral college works. I live in California and I personally don’t want the out of touch liberals, sitting in their ivory towers, the very people who have turned California into a welfare state, deciding every President of the foreseeable future.
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What did you expect after such a shitty campaign? Everyone would be devasted.
so you could move around geographically to make your vote have a higher value than someone else’s? Isn’t that pretty shitty as a general example tho.
My first question to you would be, do you actually know how the electoral college works and the reasons why it was created in the first place? Keep in mind the US is not a true democracy. Electoral votes are not appropriated based upon population.
yea yea I know fairly well how it works, I’m just not convinced the original idea is relevant today. I mean, in theory people in Cali could just move to the swing states, OH, NC, FL etc and make sure whatever they want to win, wins, which is equally bad. Not that that would ever happen, it is just strange that they can.
Lol well yeah that’s a little farfetched, I don’t even think I will bother arguing with you on that one. 
The only thing I will say is that people in those states voted the way they did for a reason. The Obama administration wasn’t working out for them. Ffs in Florida, a large portion of the Latino vote went to Trump. That was my point about the situations in all states being different. In your experiment I’d be willing to wager that after having lived in Ohio or Florida for a couple of years, and trying to make ends meet for their families or themselves, the one million migrants from California would probably vote Trump as a majority.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with California, but if you were you’d understand why they voted the way they did.
Well it is not meant to be a discussion on whether that would happen or not 
More about the actual power of an individual’s vote.
You’re right in your example. My point was that you know that if you live in certain places your democratic right to elect your leader is simply forfeit, (say you’re a Trump supporter in Cali or a Hillary supporter in Oklahoma) simply because you live in the wrong place within that country, yet you’d be ruled by that leader nonetheless, which differs from a regular democracy where you have a full majority rule system which by design (at least preferential voting) pleases the most voters.
That is the weird thing. You could in theory lose the popular vote by 50 million votes and still win if they’re distributed optimally, that is just bonkers.
Or all states adopt that thing Nebraska does where you split the votes But I admit of course I don’t know how much living conditions vary between states in the US so I can’t argue with your example.
He is so fucking damn right! Everyone can post what he wants on a social media and becomes an influencer.
If an election were based solely on the popular vote it wouldn’t be decided by California (or any particular district/state/county in any country), that’s the whole point. Your president would be decided by who the most Americans want, where those Americans are based geographically is irrelevant. The person who becomes president would do so because the most individual Americans wanted them to be president. Your current system is decided by what, three or four swing states, and people in those states have a hugely disproportionate influence on the outcome. Which apparently is the hypothetical situation you are complaining about in the case of California.
I’d suggest that you actually just have disdain for liberals and that’s what’s fuelling your argument. You dislike Californian liberals and don’t want a system that fairly represents the large numbers of people there who think differently to you.
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Well it doesn’t happen very often. Earlier in this thread I stated that it’s not that rare, and I guess it’s not as it’s happened close to 10% of our elections. But in all honesty Trumps 46.6% and Hillary’s 46.9% I guess could be loosely defined as her winning the “popular” vote. She’s not even going to get to half of the voting population so her merits of winning and election based upon that could be debated as well.
The issue we have in this country is that we are a mix of a democracy, a republic, and a federal union. We vote in representatives, as opposed to directly voting in laws. Smartly our government took the federalist route, because how else would you govern 50 different states from Maine to Hawaii, with all the different social, and political climates in between? In order to unify the country and keep the bigger populations from bullying the middle of the country the electoral college was necessary.
The argument of the electoral college is more of an argument against federalism. If you are against federalism then there’s no need for the Senate as all they are is representatives of the states, there are no need for states, and taking it to the final step, no need for the constitution as federalism was the embodiment of that document.
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Good points. I knew the layout for how it works from reading about it in text, but I guess I have no experience with how divided states are on things like the social and political climates, and you have a long history with it as well. I mean every country has these differences regionally to some degree but there is probably a central difference in how autonomous states are (even the law differs on a state basis) compared to say regions in a country here. Which puts it in a different light how there is a type of fairness in state representatives rather than a country wide popular vote. Whether I agree or not I understand it better now.
It would also make the campaigning a bit fairer and probably make everything a bit less tribal. I think it’s pretty lame that you have this system where as you say, those swing states matter so much but you see them touring all the states and then at the end going back and focusing on those more because that’s how the game is played. How about touring the whole country, showing all the people that they matter to you and that you’ll do well for them and come up with policies for everyone? Right now there’s not much reason for either candidate to spend any amount of time trying to convince people in California to vote one way or the other because it’ll always go the same way for the foreseeable future at least in this system so it’s wasted effort that could be spent elsewhere but if they put the effort in there would probably be Republic votes there to be won.
Trump for example isn’t going to be popular in areas like NY or CA whereas he might be popular in the old industrial areas but as president he’s still going to be making economic decisions that’ll probably favour states like CA over states where his supporters are but why bother trying to win them in this setup when it’s meaningless?
There’s really nothing that makes you not care about democracy like knowing that your vote really doesn’t matter. I’ve never lived anywhere that my vote mattered and I probably never will but in the UK I can at least understand why we do it that way but in the USA, I’ve really no clue.
The issue we have in this country is that we are a mix of a democracy, a republic, and a federal union. We vote in representatives, as opposed to directly voting in laws. Smartly our government took the federalist route, because how else would you govern 50 different states from Maine to Hawaii, with all the different social, and political climates in between? In order to unify the country and keep the bigger populations from bullying the middle of the country the electoral college was necessary.
The argument of the electoral college is more of an argument against federalism. If you are against federalism then there’s no need for the Senate as all they are is representatives of the states, there are no need for states, and taking it to the final step, no need for the constitution as federalism was the embodiment of that document.
Basically my answer to that was in the post just after, I hadn’t seen that you’d quoted me.