Down To The Wire 2012 >>POLITICS<<

It wasn't politically incorrect, it was simply sophomoric.

Even admitting your premise, it's not the case that the choice of President is immaterial. Because how he decides to fix these things raised at state level depends on who s/he is or what he thinks.Gay marriage was first raised at state level? Sure. Now think about how. Some states have made it legal, some states haven't, and some states have changed their constitutions to say that it should never be legal. And then some politicians on the national stage have come out in favor of it, and some against it. Obama is in favor of it, Romney is against it, and some of the Republicans in the primaries would have supported a constitutional amendment taking that power away from the states.It's not unimportant what the President thinks. He has the power of veto. If someone want to (literally) make a federal case out of some issue, then the President can stop them from doing it, if they don't have the votes to over-ride.

I think that if we look at the stats for local elections when there are no important national races, we'd find an even lower level of participation.http://www.ncsbe.gov/content.aspx?ID=70 In my opinion, these examples make a case for action on the federal level as well as on the state level. It absolutely mattered who was president and who sat on the Supreme Court back in 1954 and 1964 when southern states as a block were opposed to integration. Yes, politics do matter on the state level. No question about that. But when it comes to enforcement of our basic rights, there is a history of both top down and bottom up action being absolutely required.Did your state representative help in replacing the "Don't ask don't tell" policy with something that actually works?" Is state action alone going to preserve women's reproduction rights? In the case of gun control, aren't the limits on what states can do a federal con law question?Like it or not the US system of federalism means that many aspects our lives are impacted by federal law. If your concern is medical marijuana legalization, you need to have the FBI stay out of things even if you and your fellow State bros. manage to get your state reps on your side.

EvC's resident funny guy doesn't get a free pass from me; I've called him on his remarks.In my experience, "politically incorrect" more often than not, is used as a cover for spewing xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist crap. When someone calls you on the spew, you just accuse them of being politically correct.

My guess is that the electoral college was yet another of the compromises needed to get the southern states to sign up for the ConstitutionPopulation in the northern states was growing faster than in the south. There had already been a compromise so that the southern states would have something close to equal representation in the House of Representatives. The south would get to count each slave as 3/5 of a person for apportionment purposes. Of course, the senate was already 'appropriately' balanced. Each state had two senators.But a direct popular vote for the president was another political power problem for the south. The solution was the electoral college in which the electoral votes were apportioned as one per senator and one per representative. The result was a balance of voting power for president among the states set up to be exactly the same as the balance in the Congress. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

True. I think this compromise has run its course now, however. For one thing, in most states (with a few exceptions, like Maine), EC votes are awarded on a winner-take-all basis. This means, as has been stated above, a Democrat in Texas or a Republican in California has exactly zero influence over the presidential election.If we removed the electoral college, every person would have the exact same influence, minimal as it may be. In some elections, the popular vote is a lot closer than the electoral college vote ends up being.For example, in 200, AL Gore won the popular vote (he probably won the electoral college vote, too, but that's another topic) but lost when Florida was awarded to Bush.Ronald Reagan's second term gave him every electoral college vote but Minnesota's 10. So, he got 528 EV votes to 10. That's 98% of the electoral vote, which seems like a landslide. He only got 58.8% of the popular vote, however. So, except in Minnesota, 41.2% of the country's vote was essentially thrown out.TO make this short, the electoral college is no longer relevant and should be abolished.

This cannot be fixed without radically changing our system. No matter who wins, the votes of people who vote in opposition are disregarded. In most recent presidential elections something close to 49% of the electoral are essentially thrown out. Unless we are going to make the loser the vice president, we're stuck.Nobody really cares what the electoral count margin is, anyways.

I've done a bit of thinking about this since you've posted it. I suppose I'd have to agree. It no longer serves the original purpose (which wasn't all that noble anyway assuming I was right about that).Arguments against changing the system is that the current system does force a bit of federalism into national elections. Some concerns are specific to the state in which you live, and having a state weighted election system forces politicians to appeal to more states.Added by edit: I believe there are only two states that do not use winner takes all. Maine and Nebraska. If every state went to the split system we would end up with something approximating a direct popular vote election without having to alter the constitution.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

NBCNews is reporting that Obama has strong leads in Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin which should push him over the 270 electoral votes needed for re-election:http://firstread.nbcnews.com/...ghts-obamas-midwest-firewallThe Romney campaign insists that Iowa is much closer than polls suggest which may have some truth to it. Nonetheless, Obama looks to be in a strong position as of now. If Obama is able to carry either Florida or Virginia it would make Iowa a moot point.

Shouldn't they? What's the point of having majority rule if the majority doesn't, in fact, rule?It's bad enough that the sheep and the wolf both get to vote about what to have for dinner, but I don't understand how you think it's supposed to work where a small number of election gatekeepers get to unilaterally determine two viewpoints that go to the election - and then whatever the results, we enact both viewpoints. How is that even an election? People are so obsessed with the useless notion of "centrism" that they insist that elections shouldn't have consequences.

NoNukes says: Except that the small population states would still have a disproportionately higher power per voter. This is due to the electoral college being the sum of the number of representatives PLUS the 2 senators. Since the small states know this and will never yield to any constitutional amendment that levels the playing field to one citizen - one vote, we are stuck with this defect. Plus there will always be hold outs to changing over to this method by certain stubborn states anyway. I think Ohio enjoys all the attention they are getting and would be reluctant to let go of it. Kind of sad.

The original idea was that the electoral college should get together, debate, use their judgement and take a vote, with the general population electing the actual electorate (so to speak).This might have been interesting, but it never happened. For one thing, the public didn't ever want someone who promised to use his best judgement after the election, but rather someone who would commit to a party and a candidate before the election; hence the members of the electoral college were always treated as markers for keeping score.Hence the electoral college is rather unusual, not because it is a historical relic, which is common, but because it's a relic of something that never actually happened; a vestigial organ, as it were, without an original function.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, there are voting systems in place that don't have the property that large minorities are completely ignored, and we can argue the pros and cons of those systems. So, if your question asking me whether I believe that such systems are so outrageous that we should not even consider them, my answer would be that I disagree. I didn't suggest that the election should work that way.If you take a second peak at the actual discussion that I was having with Perdition, you'll note that neither of us is advocating anything like that. My argument was simply that the fact that the electoral college resulted in a large number of votes not having any meaning was not a reason for replacing the system, because a direct voting system produces the same result.

Yes, you are right. I had thought that the resistance to change would come mostly from southern states who currently "benefit" from having large minority populations that all wind up getting counted as Republicans in the general election.I still think that, but your point about small states is well taken.

I must have missed this nugget before: George Romney was an evolution denier? Humph.The New Republic"The featured speaker at graduation was Tagg’s grandfather George, ever the distinguished-looking statesman even in his early eighties. But the speech itself was a shocka jeremiad about the importance of chastity and the false god of evolution. My wife isn’t a descendant of orangutans, George thundered. It was pretty offensive, says Tony Maws, a classmate and admirer of Tagg’s, who recalls his friend slinking down in his chair. "I don't remember if anyone has pressed Mitt on this?