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Comment by laGrenouille | Hacker News Reader

Not really a fair statement given the oddities of the electoral college. I know a lot of people in big coastal cities (New York, Boston, LA, San Fransisco, Seattle) who don't vote but are very anti-Trump. They know it doesn't matter because their states were always going to go strongly for the Democrats.

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It seems like those people didn't feel the electoral college was problematic. Otherwise, voting would have exposed the vast discrepancy between popular opinion and the college. Even if Hillary had won, that demonstration could be used to spur reform of the election process.

Say the majority went up to 55%... We'd still need a lot more than that to change the electoral college.

And honestly, having big states control who becomes president just because of their population, given how independent states should function, is a cornerstone of the electoral college.

A presidential candidate can win the election with only 21.91% of the popular vote.

Something closer to that might be enough. However, I don't think that the electoral college could be changed because the parties responsible for changing it would be decreasing their electorates influence in the government which might be unpopular with said electorate.

> A presidential candidate can win the election with only 21.91% of the popular vote.

That's great and might seem scary to some, but nothing close to that has ever happened.

From John Q. Adams' 31% win to Clinton's 43% win, it depends on what you call "close."

> having big states control who becomes president just because of their population, given how independent states should function,

This used to be true, but as more government control has been ceded to the federal government I don't believe this to be the case. The President is not all powerful either, this should be a fully democratic election. Also, the electoral college was broken when states started alotting their votes in a winner take all manner.

> This used to be true, but as more government control has been ceded to the federal government I don't believe this to be the case.

Maybe this is the problem then? If you have less federal government control, and more state-level control then it wouldn't be as big of a deal if Trump is elected if you're a Californian. Likewise with a democratic candidate.

And the current setup actually works pretty well. You should get diminishing returns on popular vote in a republic. Otherwise you have some areas that dominate others instead of a balance. In other words, you don't punish people/states that are not highly populated. It may not have worked out for us this time around, but it's more fair. If you want a different system, then abolish the Republic and the States.

If Hillary was up to 55%, a feat not reached by Obama, the discrepancy between the college and the popular vote would be huge, at minimum 10%, which would top the already few instances of a president winning without the popular vote.

Actually no. Literally all the cities listed are in states that have agreed to a compact [1] that would award all electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote. The thinking being that such a system would be easier than getting rid of the electoral college. It goes into effect if 61.1% of electoral votes are part of the compact.

What is it with non-US citizens in this thread? Honestly, none of you seem to have a good understanding of US politics and are being very insulting.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Inters...

But not all states are part of the compact, so they still could be convinced to join it, and a higher popularity vote margin would be more persuasive. Hillary's vote margin was smaller than Bush(2004) and both of Obama's. A 7%+ loss like 2008 would make a discussion about the electoral college more pertinent, since it's such a rare case that someone wins without the popular vote. My argument was that if people wanted to advance a position of reform, it would help highlight the college as being too far away from the popular vote.

Except a discrepancy between popular opinion and the college won't matter because the party who wins is the one that the problems of the electoral college worked in favor of. The electoral college was already brought up when Trump won while losing the popular vote, but it's just seen as "whining and complaining" so it just drops off pretty quickly.

I'm not from the U.S., so my knowledge here is a bit sketchy, but wasn't one of the problems Clinton had exactly that some states which always voted for the Democrats fell to the Republicans this time?

Well, sort of. There were several states that Democrats traditionally won federally, but those weren't the "safe" ones like new York and California. The big thing Trump took from the Democrats was the Rust Belt states - the old industrial places like Michigan, which usually vote for Democratic Party presidents but have strong Republican contingencies and often have Republican governors.

The difference is that the Democratic party "rebased" itself. They've basically removed blue collar white people as a constituency that they focus on.

This created a problem, as the get out the vote efforts from groups like unions and others were tepid as a result, and the GOP isn't stupid and courted these voters pretty heavily. The other thing is that the Democrats over-relied on minority voters as a key base, which didn't work out for a variety of reasons.

I think strategically they missed the fact the ethnic voting requires an ethnic candidate. They also missed that certain key platform positions alienate ethnic factions of their voting base. In the old days, the Irish-Catholic political machines didn't run aging teetotaler baptists as candidates for a good reason!

Basically, Mrs. Clinton ran a campaign that was divided, disorganized and poorly administered, which crippled her ability to make appropriate decisions. Trump's opportunism, marketing savvy, and tight team made his campaign agile and tightly focused on the objective. When the campaign had internal divisions, he purged the dissenters and moved on.

No, no, no, she lost because of Russian hacking! /s

Not really. Both bases stayed pretty true to their colors.

That's a slight simplification. There where over 200 counties that voted for Obama twice and now voted for Trump.

Right i wasn't including those in the "bases". 200 counties represents about 6% of the total number of counties in the country, and few of them are from states that "always vote for democrats"

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