11-21-2016, 12:00 AM
(11-20-2016, 08:47 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-20-2016, 02:54 PM)taramarie Wrote:(11-20-2016, 10:11 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(11-20-2016, 01:19 AM)taramarie Wrote: Yes she did which means she should have won. I do not understand the way the election process works over there. Sounds unusual. If she was more popular she should have won IMO.
One big difference between New Zealand and the U.S. is that the U.S. is bigger; the U.S. is large and geographically diverse. The electoral system, among other advantages, forces presidential candidates to maintain support across broad, diverse regions, rather than just running up the vote in friendly territory, minimizing the chances of geographic polarization. We'd have long since broken apart otherwise.
Imagine if the British Commonwealth elected an executive leader by direct popular vote. Do you think anyone would campaign in New Zealand? No, you wouldn't have enough votes to matter; your fate would be decided by people in population centers like London and Montreal, and those people wouldn't care a whit about what happened to New Zealand.
If it weren't for the electoral college, that's what would happen in the U.S., and eventually our equivalents of New Zealand would manage to secede. Then the U.S. wouldn't exist any more.
hmm fascinating and different system. I learned something today. Thanks. Unfortunately it seems polarization is happening already though.
There's definitely polarization but it's not highly geographic. For example, here in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states, about a third of voters still voted for Trump. That means that a Clinton supporter is likely to know some Trump supporters that they can go to if they want to understand what was going on.
In the 1850s, which was polarized geographically because the legality of slavery was decided on a geographic basis, you were likely not to know anyone on the other side. That was a recipe for civil war, which is what happened that time around.
And here in Missouri, a rural red "flyover" state, Clinton still received nearly 38% of the vote.
During the Civil War, Missouri was a sort of place in limbo. A slave state that was loyal to the Union (officially, at least); one in which slaves accounted for only 10% of the population (as opposed to say, 57% in South Carolina). It was also still something of a frontier. The population was diverse, you would have southern settlers in one town and in the next town you would have the strongly pro-Union, anti-slavery German immigrants. There were plantations in "Little Dixie" in the northern part of the state and recent, non-slave owning Irish immigrants in other areas. Here the Civil War became a horrible war of attrition of neighbor vs neighbor, which lasted years after the war officially ended.
I think that as far as ideological divisions go, much of the US today resembles Missouri during the Civil War. Some states are more red, some states are more blue, but if there ended up being another civil war, it would get pretty damn ugly.