WYSK: There funded by dark money PACS, but some good reporting has brought out these names: David Koch, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban, Harlan Crow, and Michael Bloomberg. Some of there members are most famous for stopping big bills. Joe Leiberman, for example, single handedly stopped the single payer portion of the ACA. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsen Simena kept the John Lewis voting rights act from passing, and famously kept the senate from repealing the filibuster.
Relevant video regarding the UK, which is in a similar situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoLJ1ggJ3P0
That was an interesting video, and I either didn’t realize or it just didn’t “click” in my head that it was possible for FPTP to lead to wins with even less than 50% of the vote. Now that I think about it, I looked up the US situation on Wikipedia, and yes, in most states FPTP is used but it’s possible to win with a “plurality” (largest number of votes in the state or district, but not necessarily 50% or more)! The point about there being no advantage to getting more than 50% (of votes, not seats) still stands, and it still can be advantageous up till that point, but confusing plurality for “majority” (strictly 50% or more) still bit me. I’ll add a note to my original comment to reflect that. Thanks for the good link!
I really like TLDR news. They are good!
Yeah, while you are at at, look up Gerrymandering. That’s drawing electoral districts in a way so that your own party gets ~55% in most districts, with the opposition voters bunched up in few districts, so that they ideally get >90% of the votes in these districts. In FTTP systems, every vote above 50% is lost, so that way you can make the opposition lose lots of seats.
And that’s only one way to hack the system, when you are in power. Another option that is widely used is vote suppression. If e.g. the opposition voters tend to be poor, and tend to not have any photo ID (as is the case in many areas in the USA), then you can just introduce a law that makes it mandatory to have photo ID, so that many opposition voters cannot vote.
Or you can make a certain level of English knowledge mandatory, to prohibit some minority groups from voting.
And if you have a look at the US presidential election, this becomes more striking. The last time a republican actually won the popular vote was in 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected. But even when he was elected for the first time, in 2000, he did lose the popular vote.
The last time a republican came into the office winning the popular vote was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush came into office.
If the US had a popular vote system, the democrats would have won 7 of the last 8 elections, instead of 4 out of 8.