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Electoral College Decision Tree

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Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#111

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #89
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…

Another solution with potentially a clearer path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... What's really annoying is how close we came to abolishing the electoral college, that 3 segregationists were able to halt almost univeral consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_abolition_am...

The biggest problem with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is that in order to get a majority of the electoral college delegates into it, you would need states to sign on who benefit from the existing arrangement. You can't get the swing states because the existing system makes them the focus of national politics and you can't get always-red states because the party that controls them benefits from the extra two delegates per state which go predominantly to that party. And together they're the majority of the electoral college delegates.

What you could do is do something like national popular vote weighted by electoral college delegates, because then you could get everyone but the swing states, and that would represent a majority. And then you're not disenfranchising half of both California and Texas.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#113

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

s_gangopadhyay wrote: post #45

I travel to "flyover" cities pretty much every other week, and I think the polls got it wrong again. Because of my transient nature and the fact that I'm neither black nor white, my coworkers and clients tend to speak more freely with me regarding politics. My conclusion is that the BLM/rioters have really screwed over Biden, and that not only will Trump win, he'll win by a landslide victory. This is all assuming the…

They predict my state will vote biden which...baffles me. My state has only voted blue for obama the first time he ran. Other than that, since bush, it has been red. I'm assuming they are either polling white liberals in the major cities, or they just ignored the electoral college voting records. I really think they have a bias that a democrat governor got elected somehow means people don't like trump here. No they just hated the republican governor who treaded on his own constituents and sold out a significant amount of our budget for the worthless foxxconn deal. People didn't want change, they just wanted that bourgeoisie moron out.

I mean trump flipped an affluent blue white people electoral vote. I can assure you these aren't the people unemployed due to covid and that they are still voting red which basically means trump will win my state again.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#114

Post by [deleted] »

alistairSH wrote: post #85
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.

Not quite. The EC (along with the 3/5 compromise) was designed to protect the interests of slave-holding states, while also avoiding direct election of the president (ie, the people were too stupid to elect directly). And now, instead of tyranny of the majority, we have tyranny of the minority. Due to capping the number of members of the House, those small-population states have disparate impact on federal issues.

[deleted]

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#115

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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…

First: There are lots of "shy" voters. I'm one. I do not have time in my life for every opinion poll that calls me to take 5 or 10 or 20 minutes of my time. Even more so when some of them are push polls. No. Just go away. You'll find out what I think when I vote.

Now, do people like me lean one way? "Get out of my face and leave me alone" people might plausibly lean toward Trump, but I wouldn't be dogmatic about it. Even more, I wouldn't claim that it's statistically significant.

Second, you said:

> It is completely unreasonable to postulate that the effect would be drastically bigger this year, after four years of Trump actually being in power and normalizing his status.

Um, what? We've had four years of the media relentlessly telling us how stupid, evil, and wrong Trump is, and how stupid and racist all his supporters are. We've seen the media twist the facts to support this narrative. (Yes, Trump does so also. That's not the point.) I would be astonished if there aren't a bunch of Trump supporters who aren't going to tell pollsters what they think. (No, I can't prove it. Even if it's true, I can't quantify it. But I bet that they're out there, and that there are a lot of them.)

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#116

Post by standardUser »

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #57
standardUser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He "beat the odds" because most models were incorrect. They have been corrected. Are the models wrong again? Maybe, but it would need to be in a totally different way, and by a much larger margin than in 2016.

> They have been corrected. Based on what are you saying this?

A lot has been written about this. Here is a good recent article: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-pollsters-have-cha...

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#117

Post by dragonwriter »

jedberg wrote: post #103
dragonwriter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you made the House an even number, they might have ties, so then they would need a way to break ties. The House can and does have ties, even with an odd number of members; members abstaining or missing votes in the House are more common in the House than the EC. You could extend the same EC voting arrangement to, say, (to pick an odd number of territories) Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands as D…

> Or adopt D.C. statehood That would only add two, unless you also had a reapportionment act. Same with adding Puerto Rico as a state. Edit: As pointed out below, this is wrong. Since DC already has 3, it would actually lower the number by one, so this would in fact give an odd number. > The House can and does have ties, even with an odd number of members; members abstaining or missing votes in the House are more com…

> > Or adopt D.C. statehood

> That would only add two, unless you also had a reapportionment act.

Absent a change to the fixed number of seats of full House members, it would subtract one; D.C. currently has zero Senators out of 100, zero members of the House included in the apportionment of the fixed 435 seats (it has a delegate, which is separate), and 3 electoral votes. Absent a change to the legislated size of the House, with D.C. statehood it would have 2 senators out of 102, 1 member of the House within the fixed 435 total seats, and 3 electoral votes. The total size of the EC would be reduced by one seat.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#118

Post by standardUser »

nick_gur wrote: post #65
standardUser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He "beat the odds" because most models were incorrect. They have been corrected. Are the models wrong again? Maybe, but it would need to be in a totally different way, and by a much larger margin than in 2016.

The models are wrong again. Take it to the bank and take it to Helmut Norpoth aka the Primary Model (primarymodel.com). Hasnt been updated since March but the author (@primarymodel16) recently tweeted that the decision still stands: Trump is getting re-elected. Also, the last person ANYONE should be listening to is 538/Nate Silver. People need to remember that before he was in politics, he used to be in sports bettin…

This sounds like a lot of axe grinding without much evidence or a logically consistent argument.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#119

Post by anthonyrstevens »

nick_gur wrote: post #99
dragontamer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The numbers disagree with your assertions.

https://data.tallahassee.com/early-voting-turnout/florida/

About 500,000 more D than R voters have voted early. This is a MUCH bigger gap than we saw in 2016.

Re: Electoral College Decision Tree

#120

Post by wtallis »

nradov wrote: post #96
wtallis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

FiveThirtyEight published a well-sourced summary a month ago: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-supporters-arent-...

The main reasons to disbelieve the shy Trump voter hypothesis are that there's not a big difference in responses to live phone polls vs online polls, and that polls missed Senate and Gubernatorial races in 2016 by about the same amount as they missed the Presidential race.

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