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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Summary
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has criticized the Harris-Walz 2024 presidential campaign for playing it too “safe,” saying they should have held more in-person events and town halls.
In a Politico interview, Walz—known for labeling Trump and Vance as “weird”—blamed their cautious approach partly on the abbreviated 107-day campaign timeline after Harris became the nominee in August.
Using football terminology, he said Democrats were in a “prevent defense” when “we never had anything to lose, because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”
While acknowledging his share of responsibility for the loss, Walz is returning to the national spotlight and didn’t rule out a 2028 presidential run, saying, “I’m not saying no.”
The electoral college is not a problem, it’s a great system. Winner takes all is the actual problem.
They’re both problems.
No they’re not. Abolishing the Electoral college removes yet another barrier to populism and it could have unintended far reaching consequences down the line. I know MAGA is already a populist movement, but it can be so much worse. Just because the popular vote will get you what you want now doesn’t mean that it won’t hurt you in the future. Much like we’ve seen the damage that the reckless expansion of presidential power has done. The founding fathers created a good system and bipartisan politics have corrupted it, it’s restoration should be top priority.
The system works if used as intended. Winner takes all is not using it as intended, just like electors voting in the same way as the voters mindlessly is not using it as intended. Yes it’s elitist. Current state of affairs prove that the founding fathers were correct in their beliefs.
The founding fathers created a good system and bipartisan politics have corrupted itOnly when compared to monarchy, or the Soviet Union.
It was always going to be corrupted, and if you think the electoral college will ever prevent a demogoge from taking power, I have a bridge to sell you on Pluto.
The system your beloved founders created wasn’t just “the person with the most votes gets the whole state” because there were no votes for president at all! It was entirely up to the political elites in each state to decide who to support between two nominees who were also not voted on because primaries were not a thing and were again picked by party elites in smoke-filled rooms based on corrupt deals with no democratic input. And even in the cases where people could vote, women and slaves were of course excluded from the process entirely.
Unless you’re either a billionaire or a high-ranking member of a major political party, your beliefs are directly opposed to your own interests. “Populism” guess what, you are part of that population, your voice and your interests are the ones being suppressed when “populism” is suppressed. You’re shooting yourself in the foot.
But really it just seems like “populism” is just a meme in your head. If you want proportional representation instead of winner-takes-all, you’re supporting “populism.” The alternative to “populism” is the suppression of democracy by a political elite. The “winner-takes-all” system is already considerably more “populist” and democratic than what the founders set up.
By the way, the “bipartisan politics” that “corrupted” the “good system” emerged immediately, before the ink was even dry on the constitution. It was an inevitable result of the system that the founders created and they didn’t understand that because they had nonsense ideas that politics could be “nonpartisan,” a process of people randomly coming up with different ideas through reason as opposed to competing socioeconomic groups asserting their material interests. But immediately one party emerged representing the southern slaveowners and another representing the northern capitalists, because that’s how politics works. You can even see this in the constitution itself, things like the Three-fifths Compromise which was blatantly a political compromise and not reflective of some transcendent truth.
Even if you were to argue that some of the founders had good ideas, it’s absolute nonsense to suggest that they all did, especially, you know, the ones who supported slavery as a precondition of signing off on the project and insisted on provisions to grant slavers more power and to bar congress from making any laws about it for a specified period and wanted to suppress “populism” out of fear that it could lead to the slaves being freed. Your reverence for them is both completely irrational and against your own interests.
I defend them because for all their moral failings they did design a system that is more resilient than any other to autocracy. We could have extended participation to all without destroying that system, and Trump would have never happened. Or if he had he would not have had the power to do the things he’s doing now. But every president takes a little bit more, and you don’t say anything if they belong to your party but cry bloody murder when the other one does it. And then when you’re back in power do you ask your lawmakers to stop the power grab? No, why would you, you like what’s being done. And that’s how we get here.
But I digress, you wrote all of that and never refuted the fact that the electoral college does in fact work. Land might not vote but states need equal say regardless of the population they have. If New York and California decide all elections, how soon until the other states start to secede because their votes count for nothing?
States have strong individual cultural and administrative identities and unless you erase that, there’s no way you can abolish the electoral college without also destroying such a thing as the United Staes of America.
Just do the following mental excercise: Texas and Florida are the two fastest growing states at the moment. Let’s say they remain red and manage to get a bigger population than all the blue cities combined (because of all the space they have) and now because of them every election a Republican president wins. Would you be ok with that? If not then you have to be in favor of the electoral college.
So you disagree with the idea of “one person, one vote,” then? Absolutely ridiculous. People living in densely populated areas have just as much ability to think and arrive at a diversity of opinion as rural people do, if anything, moreso because they’re more likely to encounter a range of views. This also doesn’t account for minority enclaves, the various Chinatowns and similar, that can exist in cities, or the more diverse populations in general. The electoral college disproportionately favors white people.
That’s a terrible argument. If that happened, perhaps I would be in favor of the electoral college for purely pragmatic reasons, very reluctantly. If I’m operating on ruthless, unprincipled pragmatism (the only reason I would ever, even hypothetically, consider supporting the electoral college), then obviously, in the present situation where the electoral college is disadvantageous to me, then I should oppose it.
During the Civil War, Lincoln temporarily suspended certain civil liberties due to the existential threat the south posed - and it was probably necessary and the right call. But just because I might support suspending certain liberties in extreme situations, facing a true, existential threat, it doesn’t mean I “have to” be in favor of suspending them on some kind of principle.
Obviously, all else being equal, it’s better for everyone to get an equal say. You can conjure up a situation with a horrible population and a benevolent monarch keeping them in line and argue that in that hypothetical monarchy is superior to democracy, but that in no way proves it in the general case or as a principle. In the same way, when you conjure up a situation where the electoral college is keeping an evil population in line, that in no way proves that the electoral college is better than democracy.