The popular vote is irrelevant.

Tom

it demonstrates the majority did not want a Spanky administration.

You think that's irrelevant? or are you one of the 46% that continue to fall for the voter fraud fantasy?

Not to the majority of voters who didn't get what they wanted!

Indeed, because the US relies on outmoded voting practices.

You guys are funny. Much as I loathe Trump, calls for electoral reform are always made by the side which lost.

It may not be the best system, and I agree that a system that allows him to be voted into such an incredibly powerful position would seem to have its flaws, it's the same system that elected Obama twice, and I don't recall Democrat supporters complaining about it then.

I don't see billionaires campaigning for tax increases either...doesn't mean it isn't right though

Didnt call for electoral reform, didn't vote in the US elections (not even as an illegal voter) so neither lost nor won. My point was that the popular vote more accurately represents the majority view of the US electorate, so it can't be described as "irrelevant"

True but in the case of the Obama Presidential votes he did not lose the popular vote?

Come on, we've all done it. Told people about the lovely letter you received then realise less than 10 minutes later that you haven't actually opened it yet.

https://twitter.com/Channel4News/sta...67233389989888

Of course if can. It would be relevant if you were discussing the electoral system, but apparently you're not. Relevant to how good or bad a job Trump is doing, or to any of the gossip mentioned in the last couple of pages of this thread? Not in the slightest.

Yes, my point encapsulated. When the system gives your desired outcome it's fine, but when it doesn't it's in need of change, or unfair, or unrepresentative, or whatever point it is you're actually trying to make.

BTW, nobody won or lost 'the popular vote', as there is no such thing to win or lose, and there's no reason to assume that the overall voting results would have been the same if there were.

Sure there is, it has been recorded during elections since 1824. It doesn't have much bearing on anything, aside from measuring how many people voted for each candidate, but there clearly is such a thing and denying that is a bit finger-in-ears-shouting-lalalala-ish.

The problem with Hillary was quite clearly that she only won the big cities and those were the only parts of the country where she was really popular.

That was one of the reasons why everybody including herself and Obama was so sure she'd win that they ridiculed Trump and his Twitter-outbursts, which I'm sure will haunt him (Obama) till the end.



But winning the big cities is not enough. And even if it was enough, it wouldn't be a good thing.




Longterm, this estrangement between different parts of the country and different parts of the population is going to kill society.

The US was already a divided society, on multiple levels: monetarily, racially, ethnologically, politically, socially. If you add "geography" to the list, you have to ask: at what point does it stop being a nation?

Is it enough when you can basically agree on one guy to carry the codes for the nukes - and that's pretty much it?

Taxes increases are bad for everybody.

Plus all the illegal immigrants who didn't get what they wanted!

Apart from those needing roads, medical care and welfare, etc.

He is getting stranger; look at
Who is he talking about?

Melania and Barron

I'm sure that if Obama had lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College, the Republicans would have moaned at least as much as the Democrats are now. But Obama was very comfortably elected by whichever measure you choose to take, so the question didn't arise.

Five US presidential elections have resulted in the winner (via the Electoral College) losing the popular vote, in some cases by a substantial margin. The elected losers are:

John Quincy Adams (1824)
Rutherford B. Hayes (1876)
Benjamin Harrison (1888)
George W. Bush (2000)
Donald Trump (2016)

In the 1824 election, all four candidates were from the same party (Democratic-Republican Party). In each of the other four elections, the Republican candidate won against a Democrat opponent. Gerrymandering has quite a bit to do with it.

Seems to me that Democrats have fair grounds for complaint.

Source

... 80% of the population lives in urban areas.

Now imagine the uproar if the elector votes were distributed evenly but there was one faithless elector who gave a candidate the necessary majority by his faithlessness.

THAT would be ... interesting.