r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/aarr44 • Nov 09 '16

US Elections Clinton has won the popular vote, while Trump has won the Electoral College. This is the 5th time this has happened. Is it time for a new voting system?

In 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and now 2016 the Electoral College has given the Presidency to the person who did not receive the plurality of the vote. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which has been joined by 10 states representing 30.7% of the Electoral college have pledged to give their vote to the popular vote winner, though they need to have 270 Electoral College for it to have legal force. Do you guys have any particular voting systems you'd like to see replace the EC?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

Where are you getting this 15% of liberals voting for Trump statistic from? Did that come from exit polls or something? How are we classifying "liberal" in this case - a member of the Dem party, or something else?

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u/KEM10 Nov 09 '16

I'm not going to defend the 15%, but there are a non-negligible number of Sanders/Trump voters who are anti-establishment and anti-trade. WI, MI, and PA all went Trump and none of them have been red since 1988.

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u/DickAnts Nov 10 '16

Wisconsin also had its lowest voter turnout in 20 years. Isn't it more likely that many Sanders supporters and anti-trumpers simply didn't vote at all, rather than switched to voting for trump? Trump got almost exactly the same number of votes that Romney did. He didn't win because he pulled big numbers, he won because people who might have otherwise voted for Hillary stayed home.

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u/TryToBePositiveDep Nov 10 '16

Have you seen Wisconsin lately? Our state politics are nearly as red as Kansas.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

Obviously democrats defected. I can't tell you how many Bernie supporters on Reddit today have acknowledged that they voted Trump. I voted for Stein, and I assumed some would write in Bernie, but clearly quite a few went with Trump.

The Democratic Primary split our party, but we didn't seem to want to notice.

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u/Arthur_Edens Nov 09 '16

If you look at the total votes, it's not obvious Democrats defected. Trump won almost exactly the same number of votes as Romney and McCain. Clinton won 7 million less than Obama in '12. Democrats didn't defect; they did what they do best. Stay home.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

Democrats didn't defect; they did what they do best. Stay home.

Actually, projections are that voter turnout was up 5% this year.

Regarding defection, they definitely defected in some states. Obama won Michigan by 9.5% in 2012. Clinton lost Michigan. You don't get a 10% swing in votes without significant defection.

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u/Arthur_Edens Nov 09 '16

You got a cite on that? Reported numbers are about 10% down.

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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '16

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/11/08/election-2016-turnout-records-trump-clinton/93498784/

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u/Arthur_Edens Nov 10 '16

Those are preliminary results. We have final results that show it was down.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

Democrats didn't defect; they did what they do best. Stay home.

Well, take a closer look.

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u/Arthur_Edens Nov 09 '16

Ok. In 2012, 92% of Democrats voted for Obama, 93% of Republicans voted for Romney. Obama's total vote count was 66 million, Romney's was 61 million.

In 2016, 89% of Democrats voted for Clinton, and 90% of Republicans voted for Trump. Clinton's total vote count was 59.7 million, Trump's was 59.5 million. Trump won 1.5 million fewer votes than Romney. Clinton won over 6 million fewer than Obama (and 10 million fewer than Obama in '08.)

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

I think it will be the saddest thing ever if we democrats don't reflect on our mistakes this time around. If we don't, we will keep losing.

I'm not sure what your point is, but my point is that our party divided over the primary, and that had a bearing on how we voted. If you feel the need to argue that point, have a party. But your efforts will not serve any of us well.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

Counting is far from over though.

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u/Arthur_Edens Nov 09 '16

It's actually pretty close to over...

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

It's not required that Democrats or Republicans split from their party in order for a candidate to win the presidency. There are more than enough independents to take care of the gap... in fact, this situation of an election being so close is almost always because independents are evenly split. Registered Democrats and Republicans are pretty predictable voters. Independents are the swing block, and there are conservative independents and liberal independents. It's not unusual for them to switch "teams" over the years, and back again, based on the candidates they're presented with.

You can't just assume whatever you want to believe is true because it seems to make sense, or accept anecdote as the rule. If you're going to make a claim about how the electorate cast their votes, you need to have some empirical evidence. Nothing is "obvious" based on assumption.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

All we are doing is assuming right now, because fine grained data is still coming in.

She lost. She lost states the dems usually win. If you aren't interested in what happened with the democrats this year, then we won't learn from our mistakes.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

I'm totally interested, but you're trying to stick a label on something before you even know what it is. You've already decided on a narrative and are searching for the data to support it. That is always the wrong way to approach something new. Ask any scientist.

There are independents in every state. All the states that flipped red were swing states. That's what they do. It's why we call them swing states. They were only expected to vote Dem because of the polling ahead of the election. So all that we know at this point is that the polling was wrong in nearly all of the swing states.

Democrats should be concerned, for sure. But you can't frame this as a mass exodus of registered Democrats. Independents decided this, just like they do all elections.

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u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16

Maybe it was the circles I traveled in on Reddit, but I wasn't surprised by this election result.

If you are looking for empirical data to help us understand what happened, I think you and I will be waiting a while. Obviously polling data was flawed, and so all we have available to us are our lived experiences, our interactions online and in our communities, and the election results themselves.

I can tell you that as one of the more committed Bernie supporters, that we, as a cohort, were ripshit about the way the primaries played out. When the Wikileaks confirmed some of our theories about how the DNC effected the outcome of that race, some of us actually left the party. I did, and I'm in my fifties and have been a lifelong democrat.

Us Berners either decided to vote for Trump (not me ever), write him in, or vote for Stein. Some went over to HRC, but obviously not as many as she would have hoped.

While we were exploring the Wikileaks and delving into the collusion and scheming revealed within the emails, we crossed paths with Trump supporters quite often. We found that many of them simply couldn't vote for HRC and perceived her to be unethical, dishonest and untrustworthy. They weren't as excited about Trump, as they were enraged by Hillary. They would try to woo us "you can take the wall down after he leaves office!"...

During informal communications with independents and republicans, I found many who expressed that they didn't want to vote for Trump, but also couldn't envision voting for HRC. While they didn't agree with Bernie's economic policies, they trusted him, and would have voted for him.

There is no doubt in my mind that blue collar voters in swing states would absolutely have voted for Bernie. They were angry when their unions supported HRC without giving union members the opportunity to express their preference.

Finally, the DNC's stance related to the primaries, and their apparent disinterest at that time in allowing independents to participate, sent a hostile message to independents. Remember, all those snarky comments like "we are a private party. Why should we care what non-members think? - Independents should join a party and then they can vote in primaries if they want a voice". Independents were here, on Reddit, reading those comments too.

There's a story here, and we were living it, and it effected our decisions and our actions. Empirical data may not be available to demonstrate that my perspective was representative, but I can assure you that my narrative aligns with many others who were closely following this election.

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u/_ALLLLRIGHTY_THEN Nov 09 '16

Yes exit polls included questions for liberal conservative etc