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>More than 50% of voters voted for Democrats in Congress (even when you discard seats where there was only one party on the ballot, still over 50% voted that wa
by travisp 14y ago
>More than 50% of voters voted for Democrats in Congress (even when you discard seats where there was only one party on the ballot, still over 50% voted that way), and a large majority in polls want Congress to become less partisan.
The problem with your argument is that people voted based on how the election system is currently setup. If the system were setup differently, then people might have voted differently. It's the same issue when people say that there is a problem when a presidential candidate won the "popular vote" but not the electoral vote. Had the election actually been based on the popular vote, the voting might have been different. If you live in a state that is definitely going to one candidate or another, you might not bother voting under the electoral vote system, but you might have in the popular vote system. The "popular vote" results don't take into account these people and is not necessarily a reflection of what the popular vote would have been in a popular vote system.
Similarly, let's suppose you have a state that's definitely going Republican in the presidential election no matter what. You get lower turnout and the state chooses a Republican president and congressmen, but the country chooses a Democratic president. Because the turnout was low in the Republican state, but perhaps higher in the swing states that ultimately voted Democrat, when you look at total voters, it appears that percentage-wise, more than 50% of voters preferred Democrats. When looking at the percentages you can't ignore that many people intelligently chose not to vote in that state because their vote didn't matter. Had they known their vote would matter, the turnout and percentages may have been different.
In other words, it's not so simple to say that "More than 50% of voters voted for Democrats in Congress" because you're not taking into account all of the people who had opinions about who they wanted to win, but rationally chose not to vote in their particular area because the outcome of the race was certain in the way the election system was setup.
- btilly 14y agoAccording to polls, people who don't vote are overwhelmingly Democratic. So if you count people who didn't vote, the election becomes even less representative.
- travisp 14y agoQuite possibly true. However, I'm not talking about everyone who didn't vote, I'm talking about people who would vote if the system were different or if the outcome of the election in their area were more likely to be different. This can roughly be seen by the difference in voter participation in swing states vs non swing states, not everyone who doesn't vote at all. (I'm assuming the people who don't vote in swing states wouldn't vote under a popular vote or different election system). There's also the fact that get out the vote campaigns and campaign advertising would be conducted differently under different election systems. Under the current system, neither presidential campaign advertised much in Vermont or Oklahoma, but under a different system they might have, and the actual percentages coming out of those states might have been different. All I'm really trying to say is that it's difficult to look at the results of one election system and easily predict what the results would be under a different system. The results under our current system may still be generally representative of what we'd get.