If electoral college was ended, could the republicans EVER win another election?

[alexw]

Newsflash: the Republicans won the popular vote for the House (again). Yes, the party that won the popular vote for the chamber controls it (again).

I know it must be difficult to get outside of the circlejerk blogs and Facebook groups, but for once, I wish people who continually parrot this nonsense would actually try to actually look things up.

Seriously. One might start thinking that the lefties on this site only are for the popular vote as a whole when it suits their candidate. This wouldn't be hypocritical at all.

No they did not win the popular vote for the house again. They lost the popular vote for the house both in 2012 and 2014. They won it for the first time in 6 years by a 3 million majority. That should amount to a tiny majority in the house not a 50 seat advantage.

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Yes. My point is that only 12 counties voted for Hillary. That was a number discusses in the thread, and it ties in to the idea that it's hard to do THAT much Gerrymandering.

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I think you missed his point. His point was that you can't blame the senate on gerrymandering, since there are no districts for it.

Where did I blame the senate result on gerrymandering? I said the house and state elections. And it is true that gerrymandering has given them a massive advantage there.

[Annoying]

Newsflash: the Republicans won the popular vote for the House (again). Yes, the party that won the popular vote for the chamber controls it (again).

I know it must be difficult to get outside of the circlejerk blogs and Facebook groups, but for once, I wish people who continually parrot this nonsense would actually try to actually look things up.

Seriously. One might start thinking that the lefties on this site only are for the popular vote as a whole when it suits their candidate. This wouldn't be hypocritical at all.

While you're right that they certainly won the popular vote (56.3m vs 53.2m), it's pretty easy to look at and see it's not the way it should be.

Popular vote: 56.3m R vs 53.2m D
Actual seats: 241 R vs 194 D

Popular vote %: 51.4% R vs 48.6% D
Actual seats %: 55.4% R vs 44.6% D

So the Republicans are over represented by ~4%, or ~17 seats.

This, of course, doesn't mean it was entirely due to gerrymandering or something, as I'm sure certain areas had huge landslides where some of that popular vote got deflated for the democrats.

What factual basis do you have for your assertion that one side draws the lines more unfairly than the other side, other than the comical point that Democrats now only hold 6 legislatures?

Fundamentally, there can never be a truly "fair" way to draw the lines, since both sides disagree where they should be drawn.

Also, the notion that one set of politicians plays dirty but not the other is pretty naive man. Just sayin...

Actually, there's a "fair" way to draw the lines, though. Computer optimization. Can't argue with math, heh.
And yeah, both sides are guilty of gerrymandering.

[jimboa24]

/facepalm. You don't even know what you are talking about do you?

Each state gets two senators irrespective of population. There are a number of small low population red states. By contrast house seats are divvied up based on population.

The senate and governor elections are completely and utterly unaffected by gerrymandering, which you held up as the sole thing keeping republicans going without the electoral college. If your premise held any validity, then republicans would always lose any time an election was held by popular vote. Senators and Governors win by popular majority, and districts have absolutely ZERO affect on who wins popular vote. In other words, gerrymandering isn't going to help you in your senate race or governor race - it's pure popular majority.

So if your claim had ANY validity, then republicans would consistently and constantly lose senate races and governor races. Wrong again. 31/50 governors are republicans, and the Senate majority is republicans at 54%.

Time to either admit that you might be full of shit, or move on to your next liberal talking point on why republicans still win elections. Because of COURSE it couldn't possibly be because most people don't drink the liberal koolaid, right? :rollseyes:

[Tijuana]

No they did not win the popular vote for the house again. They lost the popular vote for the house both in 2012 and 2014. They won it for the first time in 6 years by a 3 million majority. That should amount to a tiny majority in the house not a 50 seat advantage.

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Where did I blame the senate result on gerrymandering? I said the house and state elections. And it is true that gerrymandering has given them a massive advantage there.

You didn't. Why is this hard for you to follow? HE said the senate shows not all republican gains are from gerrymandering. That's it. It's not a tricky deal or anything like that. He was making his own point.

[Renathras]

Yes of course they do it the most. It's obvious they do. You've got to be either stupid or be in willful denial of reality to believe that they don't.

That doesn't mean there are not democratic party gerrymanders though and that they don't derive some benefit from it. Overall though the overwhelming winners from gerrymandering are republicans and its why they hold such a large majority in congress. It also explains their hold on so many state legislatures. It's enabled them to turn slight majorities into overwhelmingly large ones.

1) Your picture shows the 2016 results to be basically identical between representation and votes, just in case you missed that.

2) The Republicans have won a popular and seat vote in the last election, and a NARROW split the two elections before. While you might argue that their outsized majority is a result of gerrymandering, you can't argue that their simple majority would be. That is, they still won, in 2012 and 2014 due to their regional distribution, in 2010 and 2014 due to Democrats having lower turnout in midterms, and in 2010 due to Democrats having DEEPLY unpopular policies (that election was largely a backlash against Obamacare/the ACA - which was imposed on the nation without much in the way of popular consent). The fact of the matter is, because the House isn't purely based on the national population, there is still a slight bias towards smaller states. What you're complaining about is the size of the majority, not that Republicans have a majority, since they still would.

3) My post about the random distribution vs the actual districts - basically a study was done that determined what we have shows very little signs of gerrymandering vs a "blind" computer program randomly making districts up.

4) Republicans aren't winning a majority of legislatures because of gerrymandering. They're winning a majority of legislatures since a majority of the states are rural with little to no urban centers. Republicans can easily win 50-60-70% of the votes at the local level, and so are rightly winning these legislatures. STATE legislatures are not decided by NATIONAL popular vote majorities, and it's laughable you'd even make the comparison. Republicans are winning on the STATE level because there are a lot of little states.

5) Half of the states (25) have 5 or less House seats and are largely rural populations, with total STATE population less than 5,000,000 people. This means with no gerrymandering at all, if you took the vote totals in those states, they would still be going Republican, so Republicans would still have the legislatures in those states, and still be getting the House seats if they were decided like the Senate seats - by statewide popular vote. Additionally, most of those states also elect Republican Senators - again, statewide elections which aren't susceptible to gerrymandering - as well as Republican governors - again, by statewide vote. And then you get odd cases like Montana, with a Republican House seat (only 1), two Republican Senators, a Republican legislature...but a Democrat governor. How does your argument address those things?

In short: Republicans don't gain majorities through gerrymandering. They're already winning majorities, mostly due to their geographic distribution. Their majorities might be being "padded" by gerrymandering, but they are already winning the majorities baseline.

Democrats are in the minority, gerrymandering or no, because of their regional distribution. They are so densely concentrated in a handfull of states that even with perfectly equal districting, because districts don't cross state lines (they're state, not national, subdivisions), all those "extra" votes in California, for example, are "wasted".

This has nothing to do with districting but everything to do with where Democrats congregate vice how Republican voters are spread out across the sparsely populated heartland.

This is at the heart of it. If conservatives actually think the Electoral College is the way to go simply because it makes them win DESPITE losing democratically, why not just drop the pretense of liking democracy and declare their absolute rulership already?

The EC is not democratic, it's a way to be in power despite less than half wanting you to be.

Not really. Absolute rulership would have no representation. If you mean where the side that wins the majority wins everything (House, Senate, Presidency), we don't have that, either - even with Democrats having a minority, they can fillibuster the HELL out of the Senate (and probably plan to), and the Supreme Court will side with them some too due to having 4 staunch liberals and 2 swing Justices (Kennedy and Roberts). Further, the Democrats still have power on the state level, though in a laughable minority of them, largely due to driving rural voters and working class whites away from their party in droves.

Less than half voted for Clinton as well - Bill Clinton, in 1992 and 1996 got less than half the vote. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, also got less than half the vote. So if your argument is unless someone has more than 50% of the vote they shouldn't win, that means Clinton STILL WOULDN'T be President.

So you believe states, with imaginary lines in the sand, should have more of a voice in politics than people?

Wisconsin has 1% the population of California, but 5% of the vote. Why is someone's voice in Wisconsin worth 5 times that of someone in California? I thought this union was set up to create equal people, not bolster states with more cows than people.

Little of column A, little of column B. Remember, when the US formed, it was a confederation. Even under the Constitution, both the EC and Senate were formed on the basis of states having power. Until an amendment (14th?), the Senators were even elected by the state legislatures directly, not by the statewide popular vote. And only land ONWERS, over the age of 21, and male, could even vote (maybe even white only, not sure). They even had the "3/5ths compromise" that technically was the Constitution implicitly saying slavery was legal.

Set up to create equal people, not states, you say...?

.

The only reason republicans control congress is due to gerrymandering. Its a big part of why they dominate state legislatures too. They've used big data to gerrymander large majorities despite having less votes in elections than democrats. They are just not popular.

Fortunately it looks like the supreme court is going to put an end to that. There's a case going to SCOTUS sometime early next year, and Anthony Kennedy the swing SCOTUS ruled last time that gerrymandering was unconstitutional, but that nothing could be done about it because there was no measurable standard by which to decide whether a something had been gerrymandered or not. Now some bright academics have invented such a standard so its likely that gerrymandering will be on its way out.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...mandering.html

That's going to cause a hell of a lot of pain for republicans going into the future.

People use the gerrymandering argument a lot, but it's not really true. Firstly, Democrats do it as well, but, more importantly, it isn't really happening.

An analysis was done back in 2014 or 2013 in which the study authors made a computer program that randomly made Congressional districts across the states - sometimes simple shapes like squares, sometimes crazy squiggles - to see how randomly made patterns would compare with what we actually have. Their results were that what we have is pretty much in the centerline of the random results - meaning if you made the districts randomly, you'd basically get results very similarly to what we have.

While there are some cases of gerrymandering, these often only decide a few seats (not enough to flip the majority in the House right now), and they can't be too close on the margins, because then you run the risk of the other party winning if you have a bad year. If you make it to where you have a 51% majority, then if 2% of your people get sick one year at election time, you lose.

The reason the Democrats have popular vote majority and less than majority in the House is because Democrat voters tend to congregate in a few areas of the country. Then you have vast swaths of rural America which still get at least one House seat. There are 5 states that only get one, this list is instructive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._by_population

Look at the "estimated population per House seat".

That's where the Republican advantage comes from - their voters are more effectively distributed across the country to places where they're both (A) more likely to affect the outcome of a Congressperson's election and (B) where the population per House seat is higher (because of the state getting a number of seats closer to the minimum).

Note on the chart every time you bump up into the category of states having an additional House seat, the first one or two of those states have a better population to House seat ratio than the most populous states that get a lesser number. E.g. Montana is about 1 million people per House seat while Rhode Island is about half that, having a population only slightly larger but being bumped up into the next bracket.

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So even if you get rid of this supposed rampant gerrmandering that the left insists is going on...it won't change the control of the House by large numbers.

Not only that, but as long as Democrat voters are less likely to vote in mid-terms, it means the power of the House will constantly be flipping back into Republican hands (see 2010, also 2014).

.

Yup.. They tried to discuss all the mud the alt-right threw.

Seriously, the "alt-right" is the new leftist boogieman. The term wasn't anywhere until about five months ago.

We even had people seriously trying to rationally discuss pizzagate.

Who? Further, WHY? Pizzagate wasn't even really a thing until after the election was over. And, for reference "It's a conspiracy theory!" isn't a "discussion". It's somewhere between retort, insult, and rambling.

1. Are you really claiming these people aren't what got Trump into power?

Yes. Let me be clear: Trump had support from white supremacists.
We weren't talking about white supremacists.
We were talking about millennials who are conservative and don't like being called racist and sexist.

That you can't tell the difference is you basically making my point for me.

2. Boo-fucking-hoo. You have an entire convention screaming "lock her up" and "guilty" and then you complain when someone calls them deplorable.

"You have"? What makes you think I have anything to do with the Republican convention?

That is what they are.

So, a sterling example of the compassionate, reasonable liberal, are you? "they"? Who are "they"?

In this conversation you've talked about conservative millennials, Confederate flag wavers, white supremacists, and the Republican national convention. These aren't all the same groups, the same people, or even the same voting blocs.

But people tried to reason with them, stupid move. They should ignore and silence them, don't validate their nonsense with a response.

Holy GOD! I hope people like YOU never come to power. That's totalitarianism and you basically saying that democracy shouldn't exist. That people who you disagree with should have NO say at all, and should be silenced. Is that REALLY the argument you're making?! O.o Good GOD that's messed up...I don't even know where to begin.

...other than saying that's not - AT ALL - reasonable argument or discourse.

Oh noes, mob rule majority. How terrible!

Uh, yes. Yes it is. To the point basically no one questions it as true how terrible it is. Mob rule, lest you forget, is what gives you things like slavery and Jim Crow.

[/quote]Let's instate a minority rule because that solves all the problems [/quote]

To be fair, no nation in history has had a true majority rule. It's always some representatives or rules which are, themselves, a small minority of the population.

Article 16 of the UDHR disagrees with you.

Oh hey look! Someone bringing something that ISN'T THE CONSTITUTION out to say WHAT THE CONSTITUTION DOES. Oh MY! No one has EVER done this before in the history of debates on the CONSTITUTION and US LAW! /blatantsarcasm

Literally no one?

Pretty much. I mean, if you exclude the BDSM crowd?

So you draw the line at article 4 of the UDHR, good to know.

I draw a lot of lines.
Nuance is so overlooked in these days of hyper partisanship and insistence on ideological purity.

...that last line WASN'T sarcasm, by the way. I see a lot of sides as using broad brushes and having a "your either with us or against us" approach. I parse things a lot more finely than most people do.

How about torture and inhuman punishment?

Constitution's already got ya there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth...s_Constitution

No cruel and unusual punishment, which includes torture and inhuman punishment.

Statewide or at federal level?

Federal level - because it's in the Constitution. Which I already stated is my litmus test.

Do try and keep up...

[alexw]

What factual basis do you have for your assertion that one side draws the lines more unfairly than the other side, other than the comical point that Democrats now only hold 6 legislatures?

Fundamentally, there can never be a truly "fair" way to draw the lines, since both sides disagree where they should be drawn.

Also, the notion that one set of politicians plays dirty but not the other is pretty naive man. Just sayin...

Because they do??? For example for the 2012 elections the democrats won the house popular vote. But what was the result in terms of house seats? The democrats held 201 and the republicans 234.

Here is some data for the elections in various states -

[Linkedblade]

Democrats think that Mexicans and Muslims will vote for them. Yet, their religiousness would make them side with Republicans.

[alexw]

The senate and governor elections are completely and utterly unaffected by gerrymandering, which you held up as the sole thing keeping republicans going without the electoral college. If your premise held any validity, then republicans would always lose any time an election was held by popular vote. Senators and Governors win by popular majority, and districts have absolutely ZERO affect on who wins popular vote. In other words, gerrymandering isn't going to help you in your senate race or governor race - it's pure popular majority.

So if your claim had ANY validity, then republicans would consistently and constantly lose senate races and governor races. Wrong again. 31/50 governors are republicans, and the Senate majority is republicans at 54%.

Time to either admit that you might be full of shit, or move on to your next liberal talking point on why republicans still win elections. Because of COURSE it couldn't possibly be because most people don't drink the liberal koolaid, right? :rollseyes:

And where exactly did I say gerrymandering affected the results of senate and gubernatorial elections? Please point me to the phrasing I used where I said that.

[Tijuana]

Because they do??? For example for the 2012 elections the democrats won the house popular vote. But what was the result in terms of house seats? The democrats held 201 and the republicans 234.

Here is some data for state elections -

The other poster more clearly refutes your point, where he points out that since Democrats are highly concentrated in urban areas, and there are many states that lack any urban areas, the advantage is in geography alone.

Also, Mother Jones is the Breitbart of the left. It's not exactly an unbiased source...

[jimboa24]

And where exactly did I say gerrymandering affected the results of senate and gubernatorial elections? Please point me to the phrasing I used where I said that.

You specifically said that

The only reason republicans control congress is due to gerrymandering.

That's bullshit. Demonstrable, complete and utter bullshit. Since the senate is one half of Congress, you basically said, by extension, that gerrymandering is the only reason republicans control the senate.

[Tijuana]

And where exactly did I say gerrymandering affected the results of senate and gubernatorial elections? Please point me to the phrasing I used where I said that.

Nobody is saying you are saying that. They are using that as additional support for their own ideas, not to refute yours. Why won't you let that drop? Come on man...

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You are right. I too prefer the term neo-Nazi's.

Your point?
We also have the mails, Benghazi, and tons of other bullshit.
Solution: Do not vote for a sexist.
That's like voting for the communist party and claiming you're actually right.


You live in the US, so yeah, you have the RNC.

Did Alex Jones tell you to use that idiotic argument?

It's not an argument.
When you have people voting and the guy with the most votes win, we call it a democracy. Not a mob rule.
How the fuck can anyone prefer the minority rule? That's the bullshit that gets you things like ISIS and freaking North Korea.

You're making less sense than Trump's twitter right now.

Ooh look, another alt-righer shitting on the universal deceleration of human rights.

But, the US is NOT a democracy, it is a republic.

[jimboa24]

But, the US is NOT a democracy, it is a republic.

Well, sort of. It's a democratic republic. We took both concepts and mixed and matched them.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Not really. Absolute rulership would have no representation. If you mean where the side that wins the majority wins everything (House, Senate, Presidency), we don't have that, either - even with Democrats having a minority, they can fillibuster the HELL out of the Senate (and probably plan to), and the Supreme Court will side with them some too due to having 4 staunch liberals and 2 swing Justices (Kennedy and Roberts). Further, the Democrats still have power on the state level, though in a laughable minority of them, largely due to driving rural voters and working class whites away from their party in droves.

Less than half voted for Clinton as well - Bill Clinton, in 1992 and 1996 got less than half the vote. Hillary Clinton, in 2016, also got less than half the vote. So if your argument is unless someone has more than 50% of the vote they shouldn't win, that means Clinton STILL WOULDN'T be President.

That's not my argument at all.

Republicans haven't won a primary popular vote over Democrats since Bush Sr. and Bush Jr only won his incumbency by the smallest margin of the popular vote of incumbency victory in history.

Clinton (Bill) also won over the Republicans by a very wide margin. Your argument isn't even addressing mine at all. Republicans have been the unpopular party, yet they keep finding themselves in power.

[Stormspellz]

If EC was ended and we granted open boarders and amnesty to all illegals the way Democrats want, we would effectively become a one party system. People would have to run on the right or left of the Democratic party. I do also think it will have impacts beyond party affiliation and personally I don't think it will be a great time.

Illegals can't vote, immigration reform =/= let any one in, but at this point trying to pop the rights bubble with simple facts is impossible.

[Renathras]

Actually, there's a "fair" way to draw the lines, though. Computer optimization. Can't argue with math, heh.
And yeah, both sides are guilty of gerrymandering.

Not really, though. I'm not a fan of computer optimization because it doesn't capture the views of the people well. For example, in northeast Texas, there's a lot of rural areas, but a tiny sliver of their district goes into the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, meaning a lot of the representatives elected are more beholden to their big city constituents than their country ones. It would make more sense to bend the "rural" boxes around so they cover more area but don't include the Metroplex. In that way, the representatives from the rural areas, while being part of fewer districts, actually would end up with more representation in the sense of getting fewer representatives, but representatives that actually represent their needs. Instead of being part of (nominally) more districts, but having less representation since the representatives are elected by the tightly packed city voters.

That is, it would be better to have 3 rural representatives and 7 urban ones than 10 urban ones.

Computational distribution models don't really do much about capturing the needs of the voters for representation based on their views, they only count them as individual people, which summarily dismisses a lot of voters actual needs.

That is to say, just because two distribution schemes for an area have the same number of voters per district doesn't mean that they result in representation that actually represents the needs and will of their constituents. Dallas being able to dominate 30 districts vs Dallas having absolute domination in 25 but having 5 districts it has no influence over being merely one possible example.

The senate and governor elections are completely and utterly unaffected by gerrymandering, which you held up as the sole thing keeping republicans going without the electoral college. If your premise held any validity, then republicans would always lose any time an election was held by popular vote. Senators and Governors win by popular majority, and districts have absolutely ZERO affect on who wins popular vote. In other words, gerrymandering isn't going to help you in your senate race or governor race - it's pure popular majority.

So if your claim had ANY validity, then republicans would consistently and constantly lose senate races and governor races. Wrong again. 31/50 governors are republicans, and the Senate majority is republicans at 54%.

Time to either admit that you might be full of shit, or move on to your next liberal talking point on why republicans still win elections. Because of COURSE it couldn't possibly be because most people don't drink the liberal koolaid, right? :rollseyes:

As I say, it's more a combination of two things:

1) Republican votes are more optimally spread out. Democrats long ago ceded most of rural America (which means a majority of the states, since fully half [25] have less than 5 million person populations - there's no liberal bastion in Kansas, for example that can dominate the state like Chicago can Illinois.)

2) Republicans are about 30% of the country, Democrats about 35%. That leaves a full 35% of the country that are moderates/not strongly affiliated with either party (I'm not registered to either, and before 2010, I voted for Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians about evenly.) So it's not a two horse race, much as people like to see it as such. Those 35% are not super Republican, but they aren't all Democrats in-waiting, either. They're social and economic moderates, which is why they often switch their vote one election to the next, or even stay out of voting in some elections. Particularly across the large swaths of rural America, these voters are more socially and economically conservative meaning they vote Republican even if they don't affiliate themselves with Republicans. Across the Midwest and the Rust Belt, they're socially moderate and strongly concerned with old school industrial and manufacturing. Which means the hard left turn on social policies and climate change by the Democrats has driven them to vote Republican - not so much because they agree with Republicans so much as they see Democrats as threatening and imposing on their way of life.

Indeed, the Democrats aren't winning the culture wars in the hearts and minds of the people, they're winning them through legislative victories, which feels like dictatorship to the vast hearts and minds people who, largely, want simply to be left alone.

Combining these two things - distribution and that a third of the voting population doesn't identify as Democrat OR Republican, but are socially and economically moderate to conservative - is why Republicans have a commanding dominance of state legislatures, governorships, and the Senate - and this year, the Presidency.

Even as Democrats insist demographic trends will give them a popular vote majority over time, this is irrelevant on the state level (where state, not national, popular vote is what matters), and also means it's likely that, over time, as Democrats gain more dominance in the House (though Republicans will always have an outsized advantage due to the distribution of their supporters - which should tell you just how DEVASTATING their loss in 2008 REALLY was...), the Senate will increasingly trend Republican since you only need 26 states to have a Senate majority, and there are at least that many rural states with no real Democrat population centers.

...and, while Democrats used to be able to win there, as people have become more polarized in political party, this will happen less and less. There's a reason I said BEFORE 2010 I voted about evenly between the parties. After 2010, I don't. I think a lot of other people made a decision similar to my own - I may not like the Republicans, but the Democrats as a party have no place for me in it. Not because I'm some backwards hick, but simply because I don't agree with their ideology and they brook no compromise anymore (except when it comes to winning a few votes on the margins - like they "let" Democrats in rural states say they're against abortion to get elected, knowing that there's no way they'd win otherwise.)

[Cthulhu 2020]

Because they do??? For example for the 2012 elections the democrats won the house popular vote. But what was the result in terms of house seats? The democrats held 201 and the republicans 234.

Here is some data for the elections in various states -

Let's take an even better look, in picture form!





A district that puts urban Jacksonville, urban Gainesville and Urban Orlando in the same district, sometimes even going along mere strips of highway to reach both cities? NAW. That ain't gerrymandered AT ALL!!!



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Illegals can't vote, immigration reform =/= let any one in, but at this point trying to pop the rights bubble with simple facts is impossible.

You tell them that we used to have open borders with Mexico, meaning anyone could freely visit the other, but not live there, and they absolutely flip their shit. They think it means being able to immigrate freely, which isn't the case at all.

Mexicans were seasonal workers, working the fields during picking season and going back to Mexico in the off season. Funny how the undocumented worker population LIVING IN THE UNITED STATES started to sky rocket after we got rid of open borders and began enforcing and patrolling that border. It's as if making it difficult to cross disincentives them from leaving, because the trip across the border is now incredibly perilous that they only want to do it once.

[alexw]

The other poster more clearly refutes your point, where he points out that since Democrats are highly concentrated in urban areas, and there are many states that lack any urban areas, the advantage is in geography alone.

Also, Mother Jones is the Breitbart of the left. It's not exactly an unbiased source...

Yeah a graphic with percentages in it. That's so biased.....

You are just into reality denial. The concentration effect does not provide an advantage like that. Here is what happened to state capitals -



In 2008 the popular vote went to democrats 53/43. Note how in that graphic how many states were blue. In 2010 the popular vote went to republicans 52/45. Note how the blue/red ratio was pretty much inversed. In 2012 the popular vote went to democrats 49/48. Note how republicans didn't lose any control but actually increased it! That is due to gerrymandering. Republicans have only added more since then as the already existing gerrymandered control has enabled them to gerrymander further to stop states swinging away, and what should be temporary election swings has given them control of more states which they then have also gerrymandered into permanent control.

[God Save The King]

The senate and governor elections are completely and utterly unaffected by gerrymandering, which you held up as the sole thing keeping republicans going without the electoral college. If your premise held any validity, then republicans would always lose any time an election was held by popular vote. Senators and Governors win by popular majority, and districts have absolutely ZERO affect on who wins popular vote. In other words, gerrymandering isn't going to help you in your senate race or governor race - it's pure popular majority.

So if your claim had ANY validity, then republicans would consistently and constantly lose senate races and governor races. Wrong again. 31/50 governors are republicans, and the Senate majority is republicans at 54%.

Time to either admit that you might be full of shit, or move on to your next liberal talking point on why republicans still win elections. Because of COURSE it couldn't possibly be because most people don't drink the liberal koolaid, right? :rollseyes:

Your argument falls apart once you realize senators and governors are not created equally. A senator from Wyoming represents ~600k people whereas a senator from California represents ~39million; however each senator gets 1% of the voting power in the U.S. senate. Wyoming senators need (theoretically) 300k votes and a CA senator needs ~20million. This creates the disproportion of senate/governor power. Gerrymandering covers the House of Reps. EC covers the presidency. It's how the repubs hold their power.

In raw numbers:
The last 3 senate elections (since senators are on a 6 year rotation, considering the last 3 aggregates into total votes cast for all 100 seats)
Dems received: 116m votes, repubs received: 103m votes
Yet somehow repubs have the senate

To be fair, in the house, repubs won the popular vote by 2.6%, so its theirs fairly.

Clinton leads by 2.5m in the popular vote, yet The Donald won the White house.


If the Senate/White House were a direct proportional popular vote, democrats would have both without a problem. The issue is we have a direct non-proportional vote for Senate and an indirect disproportionate vote for President. This allows for the winners under one system to be losers in another.



(Note, I'm not claiming one system is better than the other, just explaining why repubs win Presidency/Senate/Governorship)

[Tijuana]

Yeah a graphic with percentages in it. That's so biased.....

You are just into reality denial. The concentration effect does not provide an advantage like that. Here is what happened to state capitals -



In 2008 the popular vote went to democrats 53/43. Note how in that graphic how many states were blue. In 2010 the popular vote went to republicans 52/45. Note how the blue/red ratio was pretty much inversed. In 2012 the popular vote went to democrats 49/48. Note how republicans didn't lose any control but actually increased it! That is due to gerrymandering. Republicans have only added more since then as the already existing gerrymandered control has enabled them to gerrymander further to stop states swinging away, and what should be temporary election swings has given them control of more states which they then have also gerrymandered into permanent control.

So, you are saying Gerrymandering is so out of control, that Republicans are the reason the Democrats only control 6 legislatures? I mean come on man...

Also, I like how you ignore that other posters hugely extensive and well thought out post, then jump on me who isn't even trying to beat you as hard as the other guy.

[Glorious Leader]

Doubtful but they still also have the gerrymander and robbing blacks of the franchise in the name of "stopping voter fraud".