Trump winning while losing the popular vote is the system working as intended, but we can definitely debate whether those intentions were good and if the reasons for the system still apply today. The political situation is very different now from when the electoral college was implemented. As it stands, it's entirely up to the states to change the laws binding their electors to the state popular vote. Eleven have already signed on to National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which would bind their electors to the national popular vote if enough states sign on.
Exactly, these complaints are based on an unknowable counterfactual, that if the rules of the game were total votes, a Trump campaign based on them wouldn't have won. All we know is that if you change the rules of the game after it's been played, Hillary "won".
Plus states generally don't count absentee ballots unless they could change election results (which wouldn't necessarily be for the presidential race), so we're only talking about votes counted, not votes cast. And absentee ballots strongly break Republican, like 2/3rds to 1/3rd from one source I just read.
In case it isn't clear, yes, all ballots are counted in every election. Even absentee ballots. The idea that they're not counted is ludicrous.
And whatever that Official Federal Government FAQ might say to, for example, encourage people to vote absentee, it has no bearing on the facts on the ground. The rules of which are, for Presidental elections, the sole prerogative of each state's legislature.
To say a metric we aren't optimising for shows X is not really anything more than a side effect of something else.
"Leftists" aren't saying anything proponents of the other party haven't said when their candidate loses.
The discussion at hand is about the imbalance in our election system as a whole. NOT this election.
There is ample data to suggest control of our government is not decided by the people put the parties. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are very real things. Both sides engage in it, but IMO the evidence suggests one party is "winning" more than the other because of it.
Candidates from outside these parties hardly have a voice thanks to these parties designing the rules around who is included.
That is a serious issue that's not being discussed on the whole.
Your comment is simply perpetuating the notion that things are fine and the other side is butt hurt. I somehow doubt in a world as complex as ours that's the easy answer. Especially when both sides are implicated by data that they're rigging the system.
It's not about a particular candidate for me. It's about a two party duopoly on our politics. If anyone wants to shake up the establishment, breaking that strangle hold is target. Not simply passing a baton to the candidate that appears more anti-establishment only for them to load up on pundits from an established party after the fact.
IMO the news media is only a system. The bigger issue has been here for years. It's our short term mentality when it comes to making decisions. Next quarter versus next year. Next election versus next generation.
This isn't a problem created by Twitter and 24/7 news. This has been going on since well before either existed. They've exacerbated it, but IMO the underlying issues are our deifying our economics. We don't talk about how to help each other directly. We just believe that growing our economy will magically make the world better.
No matter which side a player is on our system at the core right now is against the people. Not just us but our descendants. It's this short term vision of how to solve our problems (which usually means get the stock price up or some similar cold economic metric) and not about what's beneficial outside the bubble that is recent past and recent future.
Why not give the article a shot before insulting "the left"?
The candidate that was selected showed himself during the campaign to be entirely unmoored from factual reality or consistency, and somehow he paid no political consequences for that.
This is important for reasons above & beyond whether one's own candidate won or lost.
All the scandals. Too uncharismatic and un-empathetic to really resonate with voters. (It would not be a stretch to compare her to Kerry in this category.) She was completely an establishment candidate at a time of great anti-establishment sentiment. And the DNC put her on the express path to the nomination, which turned off a big chunk of her own party, and thereby (I strongly suspect) reduced turnout.
With all those flaws, it's a measure of Trump's weakness that Hillary came as close as she did...
I don't like all this recent talk about how Comey sunk Clinton's candidacy or some right wing FBI agent conspiracy did her in. She owns all her scandals, it's her job to defend and sell her brand.
I took it she thought the presidency was a foregone conclusion and she felt should could let the email thing fester for months with evolving excuses without taking any serious damage. The unanswered drip-drip Wikileaks revelations with DNC bag ladies and Media shills dropping like flies all around her didn't help either.
I didn't have a dog in the fight, I didn't vote for either Clinton nor Trump. Both the candidates were super negative. I believe if the Democrats put up someone with a modicum of positive energy (Bernie, perhaps?) Trump would not have been elected.