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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#91

Post by bleepblorp »

rubidium wrote: post #77
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

Protecting against the tyranny of the majority is just a politer term for enabling the tyranny of the minority.

The systemic disenfranchisement of the majority of the American population--through the electoral college, senate, and supreme court--is precisely why so much of American politics is broken.

Forcing the the majority to live under the rules set by a minority that has a completely different way of life does not lead to good outcomes.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#92

Post by rsynnott »

greenpizza13 wrote: post #49
bryanlarsen wrote: post #24

Another similar tool, with very different visualization. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-biden-election-ma...

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

538's model has the (probably reasonable) belief that polling errors don't happen in a vacuum; if there's a polling error in one direction in a state, then other similar states probably have similar errors. Trump winning Florida would imply at least a 3.5 point error based on current polls, so not insubstantial.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#93

Post by donarb »

atonse wrote: post #2

Nerd Me: This is a really nice use of this visualization. Human Me: I saw all this stuff in 2016 and Trump still beat the overwhelming odds. (Yes 16% chance of winning is still a chance, I get it... there's just so much deja vu with all these visualizations and articles about his campaign imploding).

But this visualization has nothing to do with projections or modeling. It's straight numbers, plotting out various pathways for either side to win.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#94

Post by rsynnott »

rubidium wrote: post #77
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country.

You're probably thinking of the senate. While very small states do have an advantage in the electoral college, it's not very big at all. The electoral college is largely an artifact of a time when the electors were directed by state governments, not state populations.

The brokenness of the electoral college is more about the winner-takes-all allocation of electors that is (usually) practiced. This makes the votes of people who live in divided states far more relevant than those of people who live in states where most people vote the same way.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#95

Post by dragonwriter »

bobthepanda wrote: post #83
rubidium wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. As it stands today winner takes all makes big states like California and small states like Wyoming equally uncompetitive since there’s a snowball’s chance in hell they will ever flip majority the other direction. Proportionally allocating a state’s electoral votes would level the state by state playing…

> What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC.

No, what is broken is indirect election with voting power distributed by state (no matter how you allocate the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state, whether its winner-take-all, by-congressional-district with winner-take-the-extra-two, or proportional allocation), since the basic model, irrespective of allocation, creates a intense systemic incentive for voter disenfranchisement within states, since by disenfranchising people in your state that aren't likely to vote like you, you not only nullify their vote (but reduce your states overall vote) as you would with direct election, but seize their voting power for yourself (well, at least, redistribute it among those you do not disenfranchise within your state.)

This is, of course, the intended effect of the EC and 3/5 compromise, with the original focal disenfranchisement being chattel slavery. But it works even more powerfully without chattel slavery, because then you don't have the voting power from the disenfranchised population deweighted the way the 3/5 compromise did.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#96

Post by nradov »

wtallis wrote: post #86
nradov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are numerous anecdotal reports of Trump supporters refusing to answer polls or giving intentionally misleading answers. But it's inherently impossible to know how prevalent that phenomenon is. Pollsters can't force voters to respond or give truthful answers.

> But it's inherently impossible to know how prevalent that phenomenon is. There was a lot of analysis after the 2016 election cycle about the "shy Trump voter" hypothesis, and it really didn't hold up, and continues to not hold up with under the data available from this election cycle. It is completely unreasonable to postulate that the effect would be drastically bigger this year, after four years of Trump actually…

Do you have a reference for a good analysis of that hypothesis? On the surface it would seem like a plausible explanation for the 2016 election results, but I don't know how we could prove or disprove it.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#97

Post by bryanlarsen »

rubidium wrote: post #77
greenpizza13 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so terrifying. If you start giving Trump states which are tossups, like FL, the others which were tossups begin to lean red. Choose red for those and you're done. At that point you're in 2016 territory. We have an extremely broken election system.

The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system.

Not really. The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount.

It's the Senate that protects smaller states, since each state gets two senators.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#98

Post by JoeAltmaier »

dragonwriter wrote: post #95
bobthepanda wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. As it stands today winner takes all makes big states like California and small states like Wyoming equally uncompetitive since there’s a snowball’s chance in hell they will ever flip majority the other direction. Proportionally allocating a state’s electoral votes would level the state by state playing…

> What is broken is not the number of electoral votes per state but the winner takes all allocation system of the EC. No, what is broken is indirect election with voting power distributed by state (no matter how you allocate the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state, whether its winner-take-all, by-congressional-district with winner-take-the-extra-two, or proportional allocation), since the basic mod…

Lots of negative descriptions there. But even with one-man-one-vote, the winning side seizes the voting power of those voting for the loser(s).

They're all ways of making a decision. In the end the votes are tallied somehow, to some goal. We used to have different goals 100 years ago.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#99

Post by nick_gur »

dragontamer wrote: post #90
bryanlarsen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. There are several paths where a Biden win could be called early on election night. For example, Texas has a large fraction of early voting and a small fraction of mail ballots. So the chance that Texas can be called early is quite high. And if Texas gets called for Biden, then the networks will call the entire country for Biden.

You're right that if Texas goes blue, I think its safe to say that Biden won the election. But I also think that Texas going for Biden is very small: Trump is still leading by 2% or so by official polls. Its important to push Texas a little bit since there's a chance for victory. In the most likely event: Texas goes red (as it has gone for the past several decades), and we're left wondering about Florida, Ohio, and P…

TX and FL going blue? Have you seen the early voting? Rs are LEADING in Miami-Dade, a Clinton county. Voter registrations are crazy for GOP in FL and the D-R voter gap is only at around 130,000 (used to be 650,000 when Bush won FL in 2000) Other than polls, I have yet to see any indication that FL will go blue despite going red in 2016 and then electing an R Governor on 2018.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#100

Post by dragonwriter »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #97
rubidium wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Politics is extremely broken, yes. But I don’t think the electoral college is the fault.

> The electoral college is designed (from the start) to prevent the larger, more populous states from dominating the country. Seems to be working as designed. And doing a good job as a system. Not really. The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount. It's the Senate that protects smaller states, since each state gets two senators.

> The college disenfranchises Wyoming Democrats and California Republicans a similar amount.

No, the States of California and Wisconsin do that; the Constitution and the design of the electoral college do not mandate winner-take-all allocation, and not all states choose to do that.

(The EC structurally incentivizes it, perhaps, in the same way that it definitely incentivizes doing everything that the rest of the Constitutiona and laws let you get away with to more literally disenfranchise people by preventing them from being eligible or practically able to vote at all, but it doesn't actually do either of those things, it leaves it to the states to choose to do them or not.)

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