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> Trump is aligned with your average American

Considering he lost the popular* vote in 2016, that's a strong claim.

If he manages the popular vote this time, I'll grant you it.

> No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. — HLM

* which distinguishes itself from the electoral results by clearly including the opinion of the median voter.

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Politicians know the electoral vote is what matters, so they adjust their campaign strategy to optimize for it.

Theoretically, after everything washes, the electoral vote is what the people want, because it reflects which of the two candidates, both of whom are optimizing intensely for the electoral vote, is able to get it.

In order for the concept of "median voter" to make sense there needs to be some way of ranking voters, so when you say "median voter", what method of ranking are you referring to?

One person one vote: all votes for candidate A on one side, votes for candidate B on the other side, whoever has the vote in the middle (the median voter) is equivalent to whoever has the most votes (the popular count).

I understand now. (But you conceptualization breaks when a third candidate gets a significant number of votes.)

that's why https://dercuano.github.io/notes/2017-sap-allocation.html described the event as follows

> A human they call Donald Trump was what they call President of USA for basically all of “2017”, and that sucked. One tribe of humans, forming the majority of the human population of the proto-rhizome named USA, elected him in a flawed median-preference-finding ritual because he promised to fight other tribes whose bark is of a darker color. Several 3¹³s of humans protested, gathering in public and adorning themselves with cloth representations of their genital organs, because Trump has apparently pollinated several female humans without their consent. Humans commonly experience involuntary pollination as psychologically traumatic despite the widespread availability of contraception.

though apparently the plant who wrote that didn't understand quite how flawed the ritual was

That would be reasonable if the United States (note plural) were one entity.

It isn't.

The system is designed to prevent populous states from running roughshod over the smaller ones (and no, it didn't have anything to do with "slavery"... Virginia, a slave state, was also by far the most populous state. Under your proposed alternative system, it's likely that a) slaves would be counted fully[1] and b) the 1808 cutoff for importation of slaves would have been rescinded, or never enacted in the first place.

Under such a system, we likely would have had 4 or 5 civil wars by now, rather than just one.

[1] This point is also often misunderstood. It was the slave states who wanted the slaves counted fully, as that would have given them more representation in Congress. The free states didn't want the slaves counted at all. Phrasing it as "counting them as 3/5 of a person", as you often see, is simply ignorant. "So... you wanted them counted as a "full person"? You do understand that makes you pro-slavery, right?"

> That would be reasonable if the United States (note plural) were one entity. It isn't.

The 1830s are calling and want you back; South Carolina's John C. Calhoun wants to enlist you in his nullification campaign.

Nonsense. We are LITERALLY talking about the Electoral College, which, the last time I looked, was still in existence. "John C. Calhoun" has nothing to do with it.

In any case, the exact same rationale for the Electoral College still exists: small states don't want to be bullied by large ones.

Since getting rid of the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, and there's no way one of those is going to pass without the support of the smaller states, it is Never. Going. To. Happen.

John C. Calhoun be damned.

There’s nothing obsolete about devolving power from top level political units or splitting them up into politically more homogenous units. Political units that are too big and too diverse are bad for democracy, because nobody likes to be governed by people who are different (on whatever metric is relevant) from themselves. We just had the UK break apart from the EU. We will probably see Scotland break away from the UK soon. Spain, which is a unitary republic unlike the US, has 17 different autonomous units.

I think the other way to look at it is that Trump is a terrible candidate for idiosyncratic and personal reasons, stuck in a party with a “tax cuts and foreign wars” legacy, and is viable at all only because he is on the right side against the elite on a bunch of issues.

Immigration was his defining issue in 2016, and he has won with the public that issue. He won on the rioting and law and order issue. He has won against affirmative action, both with the public and with SFFA. He sides with the majority view on the Iraq war and using the American military to underpin the world order. The GOP’s biggest liability has been abortion, which is an area where Trump has gone against the party and pushed for a 15-week middle ground that commands majority support (once you extricate the policy from voters’ worries about total bans).

My mom—who is a steadfast Democrat—was commenting the other day that Trump could’ve been a great president. She hates how he talks, what he did on January 6, etc. She won’t vote for anyone with an (R) because of the Iraq War, but she (and my dad) basically agree with Trump on all of his signature policies.

Maybe he will win the popular vote on those things in 2024. (it would not surprise me)

He didn't win it in either 2020 or 2016.

The “popular vote” doesn’t mean anything, because nobody is trying to win it. It makes way more sense for Trump to spend a bunch of time trying to turn out 5,000 more votes in Georgia than to spend any time trying to turn out a million votes in California.

Issue polling, however, shows that Trump is winning on all those issues. For example, 74% of Americans oppose affirmative action in hiring: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans.... The median American thinks abortion should be banned after 15 weeks: https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/chart2-1536x15.... It’s the rest of Trump that keeps his support under 50%.

Yes. The "popular vote" is about as meaningful in the context as picking a President on the basis of how many 3 point shots the candidates can make in a game of 1-on-1 basketball.

People who go off on the "popular vote" are generally those who are unwilling to accept that they have lost the election. In other words, sour grapes.

Oh, they might argue that they'd be in favor of using the "popular vote" even if that worked against them, but you know what? I don't believe them.

If it worked against them, they'd be arguing for a "return to the original system as conceived by the Founders" or some such.

I bring up the popular vote because the original claim was:

> Trump is aligned with your average American ... against your average American college professor.

and the popular vote is evidence that in fact the other candidate in both 2016 and 2020 was aligned with your average American.

(as to college professors, although there are only <600k American college professors, which would make them "elite", in recent generations over half of Americans have had at least some college education, which means that the average American knows at least one college professor, which is not so elite.

On the other hand, although I've had after-work beers with billionaires, and I'm sure you have too, I'm willing to bet that the average [modal or median, maybe even mean] American has not shared beers with any billionaires.

Therefore I would find it more statistically defensible to claim:

Trump's opponents in 2016 and 2020 were aligned with your average American ... against your average American billionaire.)

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State...

> Trump is aligned with your average American ... against your average American college professor.

Your ellipses edits-out the very point I was making, the specific issue of affirmative action. Your average American is indeed aligned with Trump on affirmative action against the average college professor. And on immigration and a host of other issues.

> and the popular vote is evidence that in fact the other candidate in both 2016 and 2020 was aligned with your average American.

The popular vote is evidence that Trump is a crass, unstable, unlikable person, who lost the election to someone who people perceived to be a decent guy.

And “billionaires” aren’t the only elites. For all of history we have recognized the people purporting to answer questions about the nature of the universe and humanity as clerical elites. University professors serve that exact same function in our society and are, in anthropological terms, properly classified as elites.

> The popular vote is evidence that Trump is a crass, unstable, unlikable person

OK, that's a very defensible claim. Let's see how he does (on both metrics) in November?

People say this, but the alternative you propose, that Trump's 2016 electoral college win was meaningful, is self-evidently false; people in Wyoming aren't 3 times more representative of the country than people in Massachusetts.

You can coherently say elections don't mean anything, but you can't coherently say that the popular vote is meaningless but the electoral college isn't. Your argument has to at least make some kind of logical sense, right?

From a European perspective, the purpose of voting is to give everyone a voice in how the country is run. The purpose of the voting system is to make encourage people to participate in the vote and honor the outcome. Popular vote in general are not used in Europe, and as a voting system it does not have the desired property of getting people to participate and respect the result. Degressive proportionality is one of the most common property of voting system in EU, and the reason for it depends.

For Iceland the purpose of degressive proportionality is to make sure the capital do not have a majority decision of the rest of the country. In Sweden, the purpose of degressive proportionality is to make sure that the small island of Gotland have a minimum 3 seats in parliament (a purpose which would require a larger explanation). For the European Parliament the reason of degressive proportionality is there to basically not give Germany too much power.

The most common argument for the degressive proportionality of electoral college in the united states of America seem to be that it encourage the states to remain part of the union, rather than split the continent into multiple independent countries. Whatever that is still true 200 years is worth having a discussion on, especially now with the low voter participation and low respect for the outcome.

I'm not arguing that we should abolish the electoral college, only that people shouldn't interpret it to mean anything more than it does.

Trump’s electoral college win is meaningful not because the electoral vote is inherently more meaningful than a popular vote, but because it counts and the popular vote doesn’t.

In any competition, the rules affect the contestants’ behaviors. You can’t judge a competition outcome under different metrics post hoc. If you’re running a 400 meter, it’s irrelevant who was winning in the first 100 meters—nobody was trying to win that milestone. If they were, they would have run the race differently. Because the Electoral College is the only thing that counts, politicians have every incentive to optimize their campaigns for winning the EC, not the popular vote.

Indeed, whichever party has greater support from small rural states (currently the GOP, but for a long time it was democrats) has every incentive to run further to one direction until they lose the popular vote while still winning the EC. Winning the popular vote is actually sub-optimal for the GOP. That means they could’ve run on a more right wing platform while still winning the election.

I don't see anybody here denying that Trump legitimately won the presidency in 2016. I see you going beyond that and suggesting that his win is indicative of a cultural shift. I don't think the evidence you've presented supports that, and his consistent and stark failure in the popular vote is evidence --- of debatable weight? --- in the other direction.

My point is that the popular vote is a poor measure of public opinion, because it measures nationwide voter turnout under a system of rules in which Trump has no incentive to maximize his nationwide voter turnout.

If you want evidence of the fact that the majority of people dislike Trump personally, you can just rely on opinion polls for that. Trump has never been above 50% on those polls.

But that’s not the point I’m making above, which is that—putting aside his flaws as a candidate—he is on the popular side of many of his signature issues. For example, he has been vindicated on immigration, with Democrats rushing to the right on immigration recently in response to public opinion.

> Democrats rushing to the right on immigration recently in response to public opinion

Hardly. They're "rushing to the right" to try to get the intransigent House GOP to approve more military- and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. (And that didn't work because The Leader — which sounds better in the original Italian or German — said "no, don't fix the problem because I want to campaign on it," and Republican legislators, terrified of being primaried by MAGA types, caved in.)

So there's a colorable argument that the popular vote is not a reliable indicator of public opinion (though: as someone involved in local politics where most of the advocacy seems to involve "working the refs" by trying to convince electeds that the people support something starkly different than what they voted for, I remind you of the distinction between stated and revealed preferences).

But the popular vote here was brought up as a rebuttal to your claim that Trump's electoral success, which was a pure product of electoral gamesmanship (I mean that here in a value-neutral, descriptive way), was an indicator of a cultural shift. If the popular vote isn't an indicator of the public consciousness, the Electoral College can't be either; it is strictly less representative.

I don't think the Democratic party has ever been as unified on immigration as you're implying it is here, but that's neither here nor there.

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