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The article opens with saying less than 20% approve of the job in congress, but then presents an argument on changing how representatives are elected that total

The article opens with saying less than 20% approve of the job in congress, but then presents an argument on changing how representatives are elected that totally ignores that statistic. The entire house of representative and 1/3 of the senate is elected every 2 years. So, the 20% approval statistic shows more that people are happy with their representative but not happy with all the others. This is a dysfunctional electorate problem, not a problem with how elections are run. At the core this proposal is more about allowing for a more stable bully majority, and very little to do with fair representation in the electorate. If you wanted to start transitioning back to a more fair representation how about we allow states to decide how senators are chosen so both the people and the states of the people can be represented.

acjohnson55 9y ago
Fair point on the distinction between satisfaction with Congress as a whole versus a person's own representative. However, one would expect satisfaction with Congress to have some kind of correlation with the popular vote. Why aren't Republican voters satisfied with Congress? After all, more than half of Americans voted for a Republican [1]. I agree with you that our electorate is dysfunctional. At the same time, we either believe everyone should have roughly equal say in our government, or we don't. I'm not saying that we should have an actual democracy, but that the mechanisms of our system should be fundamentally democratic. But if the problem is the electorate itself, that begs the question: what's the better answer? I'm earnestly all ears. Why do we want the states to be represented as a first-class entity? The concept of "one person, one vote" makes plenty of sense for people, but why should states have equal representation when they have different numbers of people? To me, _people_, not states, are paramount. I'm also unclear what you mean by a stable bully majority. Because I think that's what we have today. If you live in an uncompetitive district and you're in the political minority, you're essentially permanently disenfranchised. The best you can hope for is to be pandered to in a primary by some candidate trying to build a coalition. [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/10/democrats-won-popular-vote-senate-too/93598998/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...

acjohnson55 9y ago

Fair point on the distinction between satisfaction with Congress as a whole versus a person's own representative. However, one would expect satisfaction with Congress to have some kind of correlation with the popular vote. Why aren't Republican voters satisfied with Congress? After all, more than half of Americans voted for a Republican [1]. I agree with you that our electorate is dysfunctional. At the same time, we either believe everyone should have roughly equal say in our government, or we don't. I'm not saying that we should have an actual democracy, but that the mechanisms of our system should be fundamentally democratic. But if the problem is the electorate itself, that begs the question: what's the better answer? I'm earnestly all ears. Why do we want the states to be represented as a first-class entity? The concept of "one person, one vote" makes plenty of sense for people, but why should states have equal representation when they have different numbers of people? To me, _people_, not states, are paramount. I'm also unclear what you mean by a stable bully majority. Because I think that's what we have today. If you live in an uncompetitive district and you're in the political minority, you're essentially permanently disenfranchised. The best you can hope for is to be pandered to in a primary by some candidate trying to build a coalition. [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/10/democrats-won-popular-vote-senate-too/93598998/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...