The titanic Biden-Trump election likely will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states, top strategists in both parties tell us.
The titanic Biden-Trump election likely will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states, top strategists in both parties tell us.
If your electoral system is so complicated and convoluted to the point where elections representing 300 million people are decided by only 6% of the population who will more than likely be influenced by those with 99% of the wealth … why bother referring to it as a democracy?
6% of six states. Because of the Electoral College, any majority wins all of a states votes (for most states), regardless of 51% or 75%. The only states that matter are where the election is even enough where that states electoral votes can go either way.
Of course I’ll vote for whoever is more likely to improve society, but my state has historically overwhelmingly voted for one party, so adding my vote to that doesn’t affect anything — this is where you’ll read complaints that for quite a few recent elections, the declared winner was NOT the one with the most popular votes
… and America is supposed to represent the standard for the rest of the world’s democracies?
In that system, people have absolutely no power other than to feel good about themselves while having a confused look on their face.
Fwiw, America started to make its democracy prior to the French revolution, i.e. it is old as fuck. The USA has encouraged democracy all around the world, ostensibly even serving as a role model to its parent the UK that at the time the USA broke away was still fully a monarchy under King George III, but in all that time it has not updated its own system processes.
Nor did it really see a need - e.g. a few decades ago the two sides were more similar than they had ever been previously (obviously not in their talking points but in their actual actions after being elected) - but recently people have revealed how easily the system is to game.
And even deeper than that, the forces of automation and globalization seem to have pulled the wealthy away from having a sense of investment in the nation doing well, to now no longer caring. So while before, they worked alongside the nation to accomplish all of our shared goals - e.g. to not be nuked by Russia during the cold war - now they just (ab)use its populace until robots can manage to replace them, without paying in anywhere close to what they take out. The CGP Grey video Rules for Rulers really opened my eyes, and supremely depressed me, to learn how that works.:-(
But anyway no, I would not look to the USA as the epitome of democracy in today’s era. It is loud, it has Hollywood, it has nukes, it supplies weapons to other places and has the world’s largest economy, but as far as democracy, it greatly lags behind the likes of the EU, with significantly healthier processes.
I’m pretty sure nobody outside America thinks that.
America likes to think that hard enough to have some of thought left over for everyone else though.
Sadly, I live in the Canadian province that seems to think this
Well put.
Fwiw, this article title & description, like every other media source in existence in our current capitalistic hellscape that as it chases profits to the exclusion of all else, somehow converts even true statements into false ones (literal heroes like Ian Danskin’s Innuendo Studios aside ofc, although that’s probably why it struggles to find funding, b/c it doesn’t “enrage” more than it informs).
Thus, that statement “the election will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states” is the tiniest bit true, more than 99% false, and any way you slice it, is designed to make you angry. And therefore talk about and share it. As we are doing now.
Rest assured, all the votes will be counted (barring some other event where that somehow does not happen - meh, it’s been known to occur before, see e.g. Bush in Florida where his brother was in charge of the counting process - but why would we think that a conflict of interest could be there!?), from all of the voters.
It is just that there is this statistical model that the authors are using, whereby states that usually tend to vote one way, are thereby expected to vote the same way that they have in the past - there is nothing guaranteed about that, though it is indeed likely. And that model predicts a tie in many states. Which will be broken by a much smaller number of voting entities than the full 100%. As is always the case - that’s just what “tie-breaking” means.
A much more informative title would have been a lot more boring, with caveats scattered all throughout every part of it, and would say something like “Based on our statistical modeling predictive algorithm that even we did not bother to look at but our interns who work hard for very little pay, haha j/k it is no pay at all, tell us that we should be making forward predictions into the next quarterly review and are you even still reading fuck you all but also if you could send us money that would be great…”.
But if they did that then their website could not use your click as the product to sell to the advertising executives, so that they can buy a thirtieth summer home.
TLDR: tie-breakers gonna tie-break, same as always. Probably. Maybe. They think. We’ll see.
Edit: you also happen to be correct and the USA is not a democracy - we are rather a plutocracy where monied interests subvert the election process and get their way regardless of who wins - but that is a separate matter from the one that this article was trying to get us to click on and read.
Edit 2: I also entirely skipped over the Electoral College system, since that refers to the form of democracy, not whether a democracy exists in the first place. You can, and probably should, argue that it is a very bad form, that is less democratic “in spirit”, but at least technically it does lie within the purview of democratic systems.
You’re being overly pedantic. Nobody thinks that only 6% of the votes in six states will be counted- the issue is that those votes are enough to swing the election. If something like 80,000 voters in the right states had voted the other way, Biden would have lost the 2020 election. Biden’s margin of victory was over 7 million and yet all it would have taken was 80k people voting the other way.
And that’s why the US isn’t democratic. That the President can be elected without the consent of the majority or that the Senate doesn’t (and was never intended to) represent the majority of Americans is a problem the GOP have no intention of fixing, because they’d never win another election again.
Probably, but the person I was responding to said:
And I was pointing out that it’s not that their vote won’t be counted, it’s just that it is balanced by a nearly equal and opposite force on the other side. But… that’s just how “democracy” works?
We saw an example of that two elections ago, when people did protest voting by putting them into third-party candidates, which allowed Clinton to lose and thereby Trump to “win”. Those votes were counted, and if they had been put towards opposing the greater evil, really would have kept Trump from winning that election.
That shows that votes, far from having “absolutely no power”, are actually EXTREMELY powerful! i.e. they are “necessary”, even though they are not “sufficient”. In fact, making people think that their votes don’t matter is one tactic that Republicans use to try to “win” - but just b/c they say that, does not make it TRUE!:-(
I did say that I support changing the form of democracy in the USA. I am being pedantic in saying that we have a democracy though, b/c I feel like that detail matters. i.e. don’t just vote, but DO vote!