Ending America's Oldest Affirmitive Action Program

[AlpsStranger]

I realize that rural, white voters are just asking for a hand up, not a hand out. But they've had long enough to get it together at this point.

We need to repeal this PC bullfeathers! Your vote shouldn't be worth more just because there are more cornfields near you.

 

[Silurian]

More info?

 

[Farm Boy]

This in an old one Sil, the federal Senate grants 2 senators per state regardless of population. The electoral college grants a flat +2 to every state before then scaling with population. This, with some complications, leads to the situation in the OP where I by my physical location near cornfields am overrepresented by my meaningless IL vote since other people who also live near cornfields(or tobbacco, or wheat, or sugar beets, or almonds(wait, wups!) or or or) who sometimes have views that align with mine are weighted somewhat heavier in representation to cancel out part of the power of first past the post elections and population concentrations scaling with socioeconomic/political might.

 

[Silurian]

Ok I thought it may be about rural tax breaks or something like that.

Well the USA is a federal system so that does not seem so bad if you want to protect the smaller and less populated states.

 

[AppleDumplingHead]

Democrats should have campaigned harder, instead of seeing Clinton as a given.

I don't mean that in a taunting way. I mean dems really should have campaigned harder.

 

[Lexicus]

It's almost like the cities should be more politically important because they have more people, or something.

 

[Farm Boy]

They are.

 

[civvver]

I think you are over stating the impact of rural america, well not over stating but the phrasing isn't quite right. The electoral college really keeps a couple top heavy states like New York and California from drowning out all the rest. It's more about preventing a few states from dominating national politics. Like Farm Boy said a lot of Illinois is very rural but the state as a whole always goes blue. This election got flipped cus the midwest completely flipped. That's not solely a rural vs urban thing, it's a midwest vs the coasts thing.

 

[Lexicus]

The electoral college was designed to allow slaveholding states to count their slaves in Presidential elections.

They are.

By virtually any empirical measure a rural voter has far, far more power than an urban voter.

 

[Silurian]

The electoral college was designed to allow slaveholding states to count their slaves in Presidential elections.


By virtually any empirical measure a rural voter has far, far more power than an urban voter.

How does that work for rural voters in New York etc and Urban voters in smaller states.?

 

[Farm Boy]

It works in that Iowa stands in(usually) for representing me much more closely than my own representatives do.

But to that, Lex, is sure: empirically a rural voter's vote tends to count for more. As the OP laid it out, that's the point. Like you said, however, cities have about 4x the votes. Cities win elections. Unless, for some weird reason, the voters with the minority protections(despite their own disparate and competing interests(seriously guys "rural and white" does not catch a singular and solid interest group)) have all swung against the majority and by much larger margins than the ones that exist within the cities themselves.

 

[Lexicus]

Maybe cities used to win elections. They won't anymore, not if the Republican Party can help it. Now that the Republicans run the federal government I don't expect American democracy to function much longer, assuming it ever did.

 

[civvver]

The electoral college was designed to allow slaveholding states to count their slaves in Presidential elections.


By virtually any empirical measure a rural voter has far, far more power than an urban voter.

I mean do you have some backing of that statement about slaves?

And the rural voter only has more power if they live in the right state. But Farm Boy has already explained that better than me.

 

[BvBPL]

By virtually any empirical measure a rural voter has far, far more power than an urban voter.

Rural voters have more power on a voter by voter level whereas cities have more power on a mile by mile level.

Of course if urban citizens wanted to have a more say in their democracy, it might be a good idea to start voting and engaging with the political process. Rural areas have more power because farmers are political people. If urban citizens choose to involve themselves in their government to the same extent rural citizens do then things would be very different.

 

[Bootstoots]

You mean the Senate? It is a pretty dumb thing, but it would be rather hard to get rid of it. I have some vague recollection of equal representation of states in the Senate being entrenched in the Constitution so that it can't even be amended out, but that might not be true. At least it isn't as dumb as the Canadian Senate.

The net effect of EC overrepresentation is pretty much nil: if you allocate the electoral votes strictly according to population, giving California 65.something votes and so on down to Wyoming with 0.98, Trump's number of EVs only falls by 2. The problem is the winner-take-all nature of it, not the slight overrepresentation of small states vs large ones. Rust Belt states matter because they're split about 50-50, not because they're overrepresented in the EC - in fact, the larger ones are underrepresented.

Gerrymandering in Republicans' favor is a substantial factor too, although its effect is limited to 3 or 4 percentage points' worth. There is a small built-in anti-city bias here too, because cities are compact and very heavily Democrat, so simply concentrating as many Dems in as few districts as possible and diluting them elsewhere is easier.

Overall, the pro-rural bias is substantial but not overwhelming. The Senate is by far the worst, the EC is pretty stupid but doesn't have much effect this way, and the gerrymandering on federal and state levels matters but doesn't fully explain Republican dominance since 2010.

 

[Lexicus]

Rural areas have more power because farmers are political people.

Rural areas have more power because of how the political system works.

Meanwhile, let's have some sources for the respective levels of 'involvement' among urban and rural voters.

I have some vague recollection of equal representation of states in the Senate being entrenched in the Constitution so that it can't even be amended out, but that might not be true

Nope, that is exactly correct. No state can be deprived of equal representation in the Senate without its consent.

 

[BvBPL]

Rural areas have more power because of how the political system works.

That’s because farmers helped to write and design the system to serve their interests.

 

[Farm Boy]

Seriously, farmers are 5% of rural people. It's 2016. Anytime a coaster says rural, they might mean farmers, but they're describing dezinens of small cities and towns at a 19 to 1.

 

[Lexicus]

I mean do you have some backing of that statement about slaves?

http://people.uncw.edu/lowery/pls101/wilson_chapter_outlines/The Proslavery Origins of the Electoral College.pdf

....the records of the Convention show that in fact the connection between slavery and the college was deliberate, and very much on the minds of many delegates, including James Madison.

http://www.constitution.org/dfc/dfc_0719.htm

If it be a fundamental principle of free Govt. that the Legislative, Executive & Judiciary powers should be separately exercised, it is equally so that they be independently exercised. There is the same & perhaps greater reason why the Executive shd. be independent of the Legislature, than why the Judiciary should: A coalition of the two former powers would be more immediately & certainly dangerous to public liberty. It is essential then that the appointment of the Executive should either be drawn from some source, or held by some tenure, that will give him a free agency with regard to the Legislature. This could not be if he was to be appointable from time to time by the Legislature. It was not clear that an appointment in the 1st. instance even with an eligibility afterwards would not establish an improper connection between the two departments. Certain it was that the appointment would be attended with intrigues and contentions that ought not to be unnecessarily admitted. He was disposed for these reasons to refer the appointment to some other source. The people at large was in his opinion the fittest in itself. It would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. The people generally could only know & vote for some Citizen whose merits had rendered him an object of general attention & esteem. There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

That’s because farmers helped to write and design the system to serve their interests.

The solution is, therefore, to change this system. Also - no, 'farmers' did not write and design the system. The people who wrote and designed the system did not do that kind of work themselves, they came from the leisured classes. If you were being more accurate you would have said planters, or slaveholders.

 

[Zkribbler]

...the USA is a federal system so that does not seem so bad if you want to protect the smaller and less populated states.

Why would you be more concerned with protecting land than people?