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I can’t see how you came to that conclusion whatsoever, though I may be biased as an SF-born Democrat. If you’re looking at the governor race, the votes eyebal

I can’t see how you came to that conclusion whatsoever, though I may be biased as an SF-born Democrat. If you’re looking at the governor race, the votes eyeball to 2.8m Dem, 1.7m Rep. As well, it was surprising to me that you would choose to remove SD, as a Republican lead that county, though the Democrat leader there was only down by 10k (of ~400k total) votes. Edit: 400k, not 350

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
He's talking about counties, which are spread across a diverse geographic region. As per the image there it looks like the clear majority of California's counties leaned republican for governor. But the counties that leaned democrat are very densely populated and so end up choosing for the entire state. On a national level this is the reason for the existence of both the electoral college and the senate. Imagine we did not have the college or senate and there was one very heavily populated state with a large group of mostly homogenous voters. Suddenly that state would be deciding every single action for the entire nation. Whether this is a good or bad thing probably depends on your views on what representation means, but it's safe to say that people in many states would feel they lacked such - which was the very reason that we rebelled against the British Empire.
- JamesBarney 8y ago
  Wait why should how homogenous a State of determine it's voting representation?
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    In effective two party systems, votes cancel each other out. If I vote A and you vote B, then our votes effectively negate each other. This is why 'strategic voting' is a thing - a problem that does not exist in more sane proportional systems with more diverse representation. The same thing would happen all the way up. Imagine we have two parties, again A and B, that are completely mutually exclusive - one representative always voting exactly the opposite of the other. And now imagine we have a state Massivefornia that has 1 billion voters and a proportional number of representatives, but it's split exactly 50/50. And then there's the other state, Lonely Island, with exactly 1 voter and 1 representative (who... I guess would be one and the same?). In this example, Lonely Island would decide each and every action that goes forward as Massivefornia and their 50/50 split of A/B cancels itself out on everything.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  Yes, thank you, I didn't realize it would be such a difficult topic to understand.
  - ohwaitnvm 8y ago
    It’s not hard to understand - land doesn’t vote, people vote, and measuring party share by the wrong metric is silly. Tango’s explanation was very clear and perhaps helpful to others but didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Ed: Your comment elsewhere in thread about districts helped the most in realizing we were talking about different things. MB

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

He's talking about counties, which are spread across a diverse geographic region. As per the image there it looks like the clear majority of California's counties leaned republican for governor. But the counties that leaned democrat are very densely populated and so end up choosing for the entire state. On a national level this is the reason for the existence of both the electoral college and the senate. Imagine we did not have the college or senate and there was one very heavily populated state with a large group of mostly homogenous voters. Suddenly that state would be deciding every single action for the entire nation. Whether this is a good or bad thing probably depends on your views on what representation means, but it's safe to say that people in many states would feel they lacked such - which was the very reason that we rebelled against the British Empire.

JamesBarney 8y ago
Wait why should how homogenous a State of determine it's voting representation?
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  In effective two party systems, votes cancel each other out. If I vote A and you vote B, then our votes effectively negate each other. This is why 'strategic voting' is a thing - a problem that does not exist in more sane proportional systems with more diverse representation. The same thing would happen all the way up. Imagine we have two parties, again A and B, that are completely mutually exclusive - one representative always voting exactly the opposite of the other. And now imagine we have a state Massivefornia that has 1 billion voters and a proportional number of representatives, but it's split exactly 50/50. And then there's the other state, Lonely Island, with exactly 1 voter and 1 representative (who... I guess would be one and the same?). In this example, Lonely Island would decide each and every action that goes forward as Massivefornia and their 50/50 split of A/B cancels itself out on everything.
SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
Yes, thank you, I didn't realize it would be such a difficult topic to understand.
- ohwaitnvm 8y ago
  It’s not hard to understand - land doesn’t vote, people vote, and measuring party share by the wrong metric is silly. Tango’s explanation was very clear and perhaps helpful to others but didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Ed: Your comment elsewhere in thread about districts helped the most in realizing we were talking about different things. MB