If it costs millions of dollars to be a viable candidate, is it still accurate to call it "democracy"?
The Jeb Bush campaign spent roughly 130 megadollars on the primaries alone. The Donald Trump campaign spent less than 280 megadollars from primary to president; where the Hillary Clinton campaign spent about 1.2 gigadollars (along with huge amounts of spending outside the direct purview of the campaign) and lost fair and square.
Depends on your viewpoint of the Electoral College vs Popular Vote of course.
In any case, its clear that Mr. Trump won with less money spent. Bernie Sanders is similarly a candidate who famously spent less money that Ms. Clinton but also had a chance.
The main issue is that these candidates (Trump and Sanders) were far more willing to participate in reality-distortion-field politiking, which is something that the mainstream candidates did not do as much. But that's a different debate... I would definitely argue that money has a role in politics, but it isn't as strong as most people think it is.
Alas, not all plans work out. Our current system is an accident, created in the ignorance / naivete of political parties with little thought or design put into the real operational use.
The only thing that DOES work is that our constitution can (and regularly does) change when everyone is convinced that our rules and regulations are in need of an update. And more and more people are beginning to think that this whole "Electoral College" crap is stupid.
Tribalism, Cheerleading, Echo-chambers, "Fake News", Yellow Journalism, Propaganda... these are facts-of-life in America and no amount of legal writing will prevent humans from being humans. We will always separate ourselves into camps during political decisions.
Its a bad thing for our democracy because our system wasn't designed for it. But alternative voting mechanisms or improved systems can allow us to make progress in spite of the corrupting influence of human nature.
What have we learned in the past 250ish years of this country? And what can we do with that knowledge to improve our country? In general, this country learns to harness human nature, instead of trying to defeat it.
When you try and defeat human nature (say: Amendment 18), you are only met with failure.
As long as there is healthy debate on what is progress, I am all for it. No suppression of free speech.
In this case, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting produces a two-party system. No matter how you structure the electoral college, as long as their vote is FPTP/WTA, the two-party system will change every other rule that they can touch to ensure that only those who will vote for the party can ever become electors.
The electoral college is an order of magnitude smaller than the original constitution would call for. The method by which many states apportion electors has changed since the US's founding. We also count people differently than we used to. Not to mention the 12th amendment.
I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair. However Trump won fair and square.
I agree things would have been different. That's not the real issue.
> I am inclined to agree with you that the EC is unfair.
I think this is where you and I can agree, and is the more important issue at hand.
As a result, safe-states get safer over time and partisanship might be on the rise. Maybe if Trump did focus on California, and maybe if Clinton did focus on Texas... then our country would better understand each other's viewpoints.
Look at Europe. The seats in EU is regressive representative to the nation population. This mean that some very small nations are allowed a seat while having a population that's a fraction what a seat of a large nation, while large nations still have more total power than smaller ones. If EU followed popularity vote, then a bunch of countries would likely never bother being part of EU and you would get an EU that's just a handful of countries that may or may not even be neighbors.
I think Wikipedia succinctly provides a factual assessment in this case: "The United States Electoral College is the mechanism established by the United States Constitution for the indirect election of the President of the United States and Vice President of the United States. Citizens of the United States vote in each state and the District of Columbia at a general election to choose a slate of "electors" pledged to vote for a particular party's candidate."
One can argue about the merits of the popular vote, but as per the Constitution, elections are won according to Electoral College vote.
That's the rules. That's how it works. Since the 18th century, with little change.
Mrs. Clinton also had a chance to win a round of Yahtzee, if Rock-Scissors-Paper were used to determine the winner.
The expectation was that each state would deadlock upon "local favorites" and then the House of Representatives would choose the winner.
Clearly, the Electoral College system is not working as designed, and I really do think its time that we start thinking about changing the constitution to make things more fair.
How in the world do you consider the 12th and 13th Amendments and the Apportionment Act of 1911 "little change"?
Which only demonstrates the supreme idiocy of the original system our founding fathers envisioned. Its a good thing they gave us a mechanism to change the Constitution and the rules.
The founding fathers never tried to design a perfect system. They only hoped to make a "more perfect" system, that over time would improve upon itself.
And improve itself it has. Vice Presidents and Presidents now run together, instead of being #1 and #2 in the Electoral College. Black people can vote (and be more than 3/5ths a person), slaves have been outlawed, Women can vote. This country is one of continuous self-improvment (or at least, ATTEMPTED self-improvement)
And what, exactly, would that have changed?
Which means every "close call" vote in the Senate (including the Supreme Court Justice vote, various laws that have been passed this year, etc. etc.) would have only passed at the Pleasure of Ms. Clinton.
For another: Mr. Trump delegates a lot of tasks to the Vice President. The Vice President has a lot of power when it comes to implementing the President's policies.
So far, none of the above have been groundbreaking.
As for your last point: the idea that Trump would delegate anything to VP Clinton in the same manner he delegates items to Pence is utterly absurd.
yes, and last presidential election was such an event.
Why, do you think none of your friends were impacted?
In my own experience, everyone I know who makes their politics known (obviously, selection bias) has been immovably in one camp or another.
Considering how close the election was, those kinds of changes seem non-trivial on a national stage, particularly if they're all in a direction that benefits one candidate over another (and likely were the intended ones from PSYOPs campaigns).
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/11/does-mo...
One part of me wonders if we see the correlation because candidates who are more likely to win get more money as sort of an 'advance' for favors? If I knew that my grocer was about to become a sheriff, I'd volunteer to pay $6 for a banana just to be sure we were on good terms. I think speeches work broadly the same way - banks pay politicians 400k to recite a 15 minute stump speech they've already delivered and both parties get to act like it was a legitimate transaction without any additional elements.
the only way I could test that hypothesis is by comparing the money a candidate raises verses their expected chance of victory. But I think I'm somewhat vindicated, candidates in races that are perceived as close seem to haul less than candidates in safe races. Pelosi raises a ton of money and I'm not sure all of it is given to beat the helpless Republican who runs against her. Now there are other factors at play but it's not coincidental that candidates who are the most appealing to the establishment seem to out-raise people who threaten the establishment.
I think the deeper problem is that the political class thinks they can compensate for an unappealing candidate with money.
I love the fact that what they think isn't true, at least not always.
Certainly there is evidence suggesting both..
How about all of the free TV time from the grandstanding and sensational nature of the campaign?
May be she did. She might have avoided unscripted exposure. That actually makes Trump's run that much more effective.
It also depends how you measure the money invested. By some calculations Trump received $3 billion worth of free advertising. I guess this also shows that the media can have great influence in swaying elections, too, especially when the hosts' opinions are set on helping one candidate and attacking others (almost constantly, either way), or worse, it comes as an order from the top to do that.
In this way, it seems not to matter what specific opinion the media takes at this point. The vast majority of those three gigadollars were spent on media taking a position against the candidate who prevailed, and the candidate who spent the least doing it.
It's not "lost fair and square", its "lied and cheated like hell and still lost".
In the words of Colin Powell: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris”
The democratic ideal is self-rule of the people. The candidate who wins is identified as the most legitimate because we identify the will of the majority with the will of the people. Ultimately, the people affirm the power of the political class. I don't know of anyone who has a concrete way to associate the idea of democracy with a particular method of public will-formation.
However, this does violate the norm of political equality. The choices available reflect natural differences in status among candidates - there isn't an equal or nominally equal path to candidacy for all people. And I think the status quo challenges the claim that America is a liberal democracy.
Rather than creating a democracy that promotes and respects Liberal-Humanitarian freedoms (speech, right to property, religion, safety and security), the elite political community has made American non-elites their enemy (or at least their opposition). Political taste makers are not committed to a State that has the power to protect those freedoms. The GOP fights unions and the DNC-Google fight Damore and both are victories that affirm the right of consolidated power to make decisions for other people.
The question is more whether the average voter would respect someone only on the internet as much as someone making 1000s of campaign stops and printing millions of littering flyers and signs. I think by 2030 there will be a respectable primary candidate that campaigns 99% from the internet spending almost nothing.
For an electorate like this, a candidate needs vary little money. And extra million or two spent on ad buys isn't going to be useful, because people aren't voting based on television ads.
The desire to get more money to buy advertisements and flyers is a symptom of a larger issue - an electorate that votes based on ads and flyers, not positions (the situation is of course much more complicated than just this, but it at least highlights a major issue).
Going on TV will instantly get you millions of viewers. Going on youtube can also get you millions of viewers.
The thing is, there is a lot of viewership on these two that do not overlap. A candidate should be available on all medias, it's not reasonable for anyone to miss millions of people.
When there exist corporations capable of mass cultural shaping and branches of government that intercept that data, it is inevitable that power will be used to control the masses. Astroturfing is already becoming the norm, even on sites like this.
It creates a huge potential for democracy being taken over by a kleptocracy, but it is not something automatic.