(08-08-2016, 04:21 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: True, but in urban America you have smart Democrats, while in rural America you have dumb Republicans. The city people who run the show may live in urban America, but they don't have to votes to carry urban districts.
I don't necessarily oppose the current system. We could vote by congressional district, but in that case the federal government would need to certify that independent, non-partisan commissions have drawn districts in each state that are not gerrymandered, but represent a continuous district (just as is done in CA). Otherwise the presidency would be gerrymandered.
A straight-ahead popular vote is another alternative. It would mean that a candidate can't engineer an election by winning a few swing states, in which a relatively small number of swing voters in those states decide the election. On the other hand, voters might feel even more that their vote is just one in a million and makes little difference.
Paradoxically, rural America outside of the Mountain and Deep South isn't that dumb. Rural areas can get good K-12 education fairly cheaply because of low costs of construction and low pay to teachers (urban schools have a difficult time keeping good teachers because teachers have a desirable skill set for much of private industry. Rural teachers have few viable options. What? Be a cashier in a box store or be a waiter?)
Rural areas of course have a brain-drain after K-12 education, probably due to the paucity of desirable job opportunities. Who wants to return to some rural area to milk cows, work in a store or a roadside motel, or work in some sweat shop food processor after getting a college degree? The cities and the suburbs have the desirable opportunities.
Voting by Congressional district? The Reactionary Party has pushed that in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia with districts so gerrymandered that Republicans would get an advantage even if the states got Democratic majorities in the raw vote, even as much as 58-42, Republicans could get the majority of electoral votes. Congressional districts are artificial constructions, and voting for the President along such lines would be readily seen as capricious and arbitrary. Congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska make some sense for reasons other than division of power. The Reactionary Party of course would insist upon keeping winner-take-all in states that it expects to win.
I have my own idea for dividing the electoral votes, but it would be based heavily upon proportions. The idea is to make sure that minority interests get attention in Presidential politics, whether rural interests in Michigan or Wisconsin or blacks in the South. It's too complicated to offer here. In essence, whoever gets the plurality of votes gets the two electoral votes associated with the number of Senate seats and the other electoral votes are split in discrete numbers. Someone in a third-Party or independent campaign gets a vote share only if such is enough to get at least a fraction large enough to earn a full electoral vote. Otherwise such votes are ignored in the calculation. Fractional amounts go to the winner of the plurality. Thus in Massachusetts (12 electoral votes) if none of the third-party or independent nominees get 10% of the vote and the Democrat and the Republican nominee splits the rest of the vote 62.4 - 37.6, then the Republican gets three electoral votes for winning 30% but less than 40% of the relevant vote. The Democrat gets
2 electoral votes for winning the plurality of the vote
6 electoral votes for winning 60% but less than 70% of the popular vote relevant to the election, and the otherwise undistributed
1 electoral vote.
That is a 9-3 split, and Republicans could consider themselves lucky to get that many electoral votes in Massachusetts.
DC? It would be pure proportional voting.
States with fewer than six electoral votes could vote based upon districts; it is hard to gerrymander four or fewer Congressional districts. "Stuff the sack" gerrymandering as in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia should not decide the election; it is in effect as if the State legislatures decide how the states vote, which is a perversion of what could have ever been intended.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.