Yep. Polls are getting less reliable anyway, because so many of them rely on landlines, and some segments of the population are less likely to respond to surveys than others.
To be fair, Clinton won the popular vote by a large margin, it’s just that the House has not been expanded in 100 years despite the population more than tripling, so some states have outsized impact during a presidential election.
If you increase the members of congress, then that’s going to increase the number of electoral college votes needed to win as well. So, proportionally, it all stays the same.
Congressional districts are divided among states based on the census, and then become the count of electoral votes, which in turn award the presidency. So they have a lot to do with presidential elections.
But you wouldn’t just double it for each state. You’d increase the total number of House seats, and then portion them out according to the populations of each state. That’s how it was always done before they capped the size of the House.
Currently, Wyoming has just one House seat. If you double the number of total House seats, Wyoming still only gets one. They currently have a larger impact on Presidential elections than they should if it were decided strictly by population, and that’s due entirely to the Electoral College and the cap on the size of the House.
The size of the electoral college is based on the size of the House, because the House (currently) has a fixed size, the states each get a set number of electoral votes, that do not actually match the populations of those states.
This is due to a law passed in 1929 called the permanent apportionment act, which froze the size of the House, despite the fact that we’ve added two new states since then.
So States like California have less electoral power than they should, while states like Rhode Island have more than they should. Well, technically Rhode Island should have more as well, every state should have more.
Because the electoral college includes the sum of all Senators and Representatives in a given state, rural states with low populations presidential votes carry much more weight than urban states with large populations. You’re right about the House not expanding, that’s also shifting things around - but a huge reason the electoral college exists at all was to assure the southern states that the institution of slavery would be protected in order to get them to ratify the Constitution. It shifted power to shitheads on purpose.
The electoral college didn’t shift power to slave states. That was the 3/5ths compromise.
No, the electoral college was created because the fastest way to travel in the 1780s was via foot. There weren’t even good roads between the new states. So it could take months to get from Georgia to Washington, DC.
We don’t have that problem anymore, but changing things like that would require a constitutional amendment. Something that is fairly hard to do in today’s political climate.
And it still wouldn’t fix the problem with the House not being representative. But one act of congress to repeal the permanent apportionment act of 1929 would fix both issues.
Massively expanding the size of the House would make it representative, and it would make the electoral college better represent the populations of each state.
It sure did shift power to the slave states. The Senate gives equal power to each state, regardless of population. That’s why, as states were allowed to join the union, they were done for quite some time in pairs - one slave, one free - in order to maintain a balance in the Senate.
You’re mixing two different things and not quite understanding history.
The House and the Senate are very different things, and together they add up to the electoral college.
The electoral college was created for one reason and one reason alone. To allow people to actually vote in a national election when the fastest way to get from one end of the country to the other was via footpath.
The Senate was actually a check on the power of the slave states, as was the 3/5ths compromise.
Although, the northern states were also slave states at the time the constitution was signed. People often forget that fact.
The problems with slavery were painfully obvious, even then, but rich white guys wanted to own people. This lead to even more problems as the North slowly banned slavery. But that’s a different section in the history book.
The Electoral College did give the slave states more power, by way of the three-fifths compromise: the number of Electors depends on the number of Representatives, which depends on the census of inhabitants, not vote-eligible citizens, including, at the time, 3/5 of the slave population. So a state like Virginia, with more slaves than free people, got a boost compared to a state with only free residents.
It’s bad per se and also ludicrous. It gives way too much power to states with small populations, which tend to be rural and very right wing. But it is also ludicrous, we should all vote for the person selected to rule the nation, and every vote should have equal weight. Those same states - the right has a hugely unbalanced say in the senate for the same reason, small rural states have massively disproportionate representation. Reforming presidential elections can be done by amendment or by efforts like the popular vote compact, by agreement between enough states. The stupid constitution forbids amending the way the senate is apportioned, so there might have to be a court fight over changing that rule.
Again… The outsized power of smaller states is 100% an artifact of the permanent apportionment act of 1929. It decreed that the size of the House would be set at 435 members. And then we added two states and tripled the population.
And the House is still 435 members. Some congressional districts have more than a million people. How the hell can a Representative actually be said to represent 1 million people?
To fix this would take a single act of congress. Just a simple repeal of one law, and the adoption of a new apportionment standard. That’s it. Then the popular vote would mostly line up with the electoral college, because the votes would have to line up. Because it would actually be representative of the actual population.
Just massively increase the size of the house to match the actual population.
I agree the house needs expansion, however I also think that would only moderately address the electoral college skew toward rural states. Also it is in my opinion irrelevant as it does not address the core problem: the president should be elected by a direct national vote, each person getting one vote of equal weight to every other vote.
I’m saying that if you expand the house, the skew that you are complaining about goes away.
Here’s a Time article on the subject that uses the current algorithm to find the most representative number of Representatives while still being a fairly low number. The answer comes out to 930.
That’s the on the lower end of fixing the House. There are proposals that go much higher.
And all it takes to get to any of them is a simple act of congress. No need for a constitutional amendment, no need to get the states on board, just one law passed.
Fixing the House would also massively curtail gerrymandering. Particularly the packing and stacking tactics.
And again, all it takes to do this is a single law passed by congress.
Ditching the electoral college completely? That’s either get the states to agree to the National Interstate Compact, or a constitutional amendment.
Allow me to evangelize the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which aims to bypass the Electoral College and elect the president by popular vote.
It’s a little more complex than that. The national polls had him losing solidly to Clinton on the popular vote, which actually happened. The real polling errors occurred at the state level, in a few key states.
This actually kind of sucks because then if/when the votes don’t look close to how they expect according to polls they automatically assume something fishy happened.
And yes, I realize many will think that regardless.
Interviews were conducted in English, and included 319 live landline telephone interviews, 480 live cell phone interviews, and 111 online surveys via a cell phone text
But you are right on polls not really meaning that much. Especially over a year away.
That’s a valid point. Not many people do. Pollsters have a tough road ahead of them, because actually doing a scientifically valid poll is getting harder.
Nothing Clinton said about coal was “stupid shit.”
She just told people the truth, and people prefer to be lied to over hearing uncomfortable truths.
Same happened to Al Gore: he told people the truth, and people went absolutely bonkers over that.
By contrast, Trump told people exactly what they wanted to hear, even though it was clear to anyone that he was lying to them or promising them things that he could never, ever fulfill - and people loved it.
Telling blue collar workers your goal is to end their industry is, indeed, stupid shit.
We complain bitterly on the Left about Republican voters voting against their own self interest… well, when you have a Democratic candidate telling them the intent is to put them out of work? What do you expect them to do?
77,744 people made Trump a President. The rest of us knew better.
Sorry but that’s not how math works. 63 million people made trump president, and only 66 million of us knew better. That huge number of trump voters is the horrible reality of American politics weve had to come to terms with. Luckily some of the trump supporters learned from their mistake, but there’s still millions of them out there, not <100k
Yeah I get that, but what I’m saying is it’s not like the rest of the US knew better than that 77k figure. 77k is just the difference in votes, it doesn’t represent the only 77k people that did wrong
I mean, pollsters actually do account for how elections work in their models. There are all sorts of actual reasons polls have failed to be reliable lately, but if you think it’s because they just count total responses across the country, that isn’t the case.
So, I think you’re probably right, in this case. But you’re just quoting the reporting on the poll, which is very misleading. It makes it sound like there is no statistical model involved at all. From the methodology on the linked full poll results: “The full sample is weighted for region, age, education, gender and race based on US Census information”. Like I said, I think you’re right - I doubt if they mean weighting for “region” to imply they did an electoral college analysis - but until you look at the actual poll and it’s methodology, you can’t just assume that an article reporting on the poll is giving an accurate impression. There are polls that do account for state breakdown, and the reporting in an article on such a poll would probably be just the same as here.
It seems the focus of this poll was to get some initial idea what kind of impact a third-party run with Manchin and some Republican running mate would have, and looking at weighted national numbers is probably “good enough” for that purpose, at this time. Definitely not a basis to conclude Biden has it in the bag, and the poll itself doesn’t seem to be trying to claim that.
Sorry I’m going on, but yeah, big picture, you are correct, at least in this case.
Oh, there’s no doubt a statistical model to represent the entire country. The problem with popularity contest polling like this is the election isn’t a popularity contest.
Now, a similar survey running down each contested state and calling out the electoral college votes, that would be useful.
Anything that leads with “a national poll…” can be safely disregarded.
It was a self inflicted injury, which was so, so avoidable.
She COULD have rolled it into a victory like this:
“I’m going to tell you something right now that not a lot of people know… my great grandfather was a coal miner in Durham, England. Moved to Scranton with his six kids dreaming of a better life for all of them. I’d like to see a better life for your fathers, brothers, and sons that doesn’t involve risking their lives underground for a few scraps of coal that they’ll never share in the profits on.”
Only twice in three elections. This means Trump had a one third chance to win that election. Which, sadly, he did.
If the weather forecast says 30% chance of rain and it rains do you question the validity of the forecast or do you think “I guess I ended up getting some of that rain”?
Vote every time. Polls mean nothing. Vote.
Yep. Polls are getting less reliable anyway, because so many of them rely on landlines, and some segments of the population are less likely to respond to surveys than others.
Which is telling, because the land line polls tend to over inflate Conservative voices, and it still has Trump losing in a landslide.
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To be fair, Clinton won the popular vote by a large margin, it’s just that the House has not been expanded in 100 years despite the population more than tripling, so some states have outsized impact during a presidential election.
District sizes have nothing to do with Presidential or Senate elections, they are state wide.
Except that California should have like 60x as many votes as Wyoming.
If you increase the members of congress, then that’s going to increase the number of electoral college votes needed to win as well. So, proportionally, it all stays the same.
The number of votes per state would go up based on the population of each state, not a straight multiply by x.
Congressional districts are divided among states based on the census, and then become the count of electoral votes, which in turn award the presidency. So they have a lot to do with presidential elections.
Increasing the number of congressional districts would also necessitate increasing the number of votes needed to win.
Right now, each state has 1 per Congressman and 1 for each of 2 Senators.
538 total with 270 needed to win (50.18%).
So if you add house members, let’s say we do something crazy and double it for everyone:
976 electoral college votes (538-100 because the Senate votes are fixed. 438*2 then add the 100 Senators back in).
Now you need 488 to become President. The problem remains, all you did is change the scale.
But you wouldn’t just double it for each state. You’d increase the total number of House seats, and then portion them out according to the populations of each state. That’s how it was always done before they capped the size of the House.
Currently, Wyoming has just one House seat. If you double the number of total House seats, Wyoming still only gets one. They currently have a larger impact on Presidential elections than they should if it were decided strictly by population, and that’s due entirely to the Electoral College and the cap on the size of the House.
The size of the electoral college is based on the size of the House, because the House (currently) has a fixed size, the states each get a set number of electoral votes, that do not actually match the populations of those states.
This is due to a law passed in 1929 called the permanent apportionment act, which froze the size of the House, despite the fact that we’ve added two new states since then.
So States like California have less electoral power than they should, while states like Rhode Island have more than they should. Well, technically Rhode Island should have more as well, every state should have more.
Increasing the number of congressional districts would also necessitate increasing the number of votes needed to win.
Right now, each state has 1 per Congressman and 1 for each of 2 Senators.
538 total with 270 needed to win (50.18%).
So if you add house members, let’s say we do something crazy and double it for everyone:
976 electoral college votes (538-100 because the Senate votes are fixed. 438*2 then add the 100 Senators back in).
Now you need 488 to become President. The problem remains, all you did is change the scale.
Overinflating conservatism in the US is par for the course. See: the three-fifths compromise and the electoral college.
The electoral college isn’t bad per se, it’s just been allowed to become bad in a way that hints at a deeper issue.
Notably that the House has not been expanded in 100 years, even as the population has expanded, and two states have been added.
We need to un-cap the house and get it to the point where it’s actually representative again. Doing so would take a single act of congress.
Because the electoral college includes the sum of all Senators and Representatives in a given state, rural states with low populations presidential votes carry much more weight than urban states with large populations. You’re right about the House not expanding, that’s also shifting things around - but a huge reason the electoral college exists at all was to assure the southern states that the institution of slavery would be protected in order to get them to ratify the Constitution. It shifted power to shitheads on purpose.
The electoral college is bad.
It is unneeded in the modern era.
The electoral college didn’t shift power to slave states. That was the 3/5ths compromise.
No, the electoral college was created because the fastest way to travel in the 1780s was via foot. There weren’t even good roads between the new states. So it could take months to get from Georgia to Washington, DC.
We don’t have that problem anymore, but changing things like that would require a constitutional amendment. Something that is fairly hard to do in today’s political climate.
And it still wouldn’t fix the problem with the House not being representative. But one act of congress to repeal the permanent apportionment act of 1929 would fix both issues.
Massively expanding the size of the House would make it representative, and it would make the electoral college better represent the populations of each state.
It sure did shift power to the slave states. The Senate gives equal power to each state, regardless of population. That’s why, as states were allowed to join the union, they were done for quite some time in pairs - one slave, one free - in order to maintain a balance in the Senate.
You’re mixing two different things and not quite understanding history.
The House and the Senate are very different things, and together they add up to the electoral college.
The electoral college was created for one reason and one reason alone. To allow people to actually vote in a national election when the fastest way to get from one end of the country to the other was via footpath.
The Senate was actually a check on the power of the slave states, as was the 3/5ths compromise.
Although, the northern states were also slave states at the time the constitution was signed. People often forget that fact.
The problems with slavery were painfully obvious, even then, but rich white guys wanted to own people. This lead to even more problems as the North slowly banned slavery. But that’s a different section in the history book.
The Electoral College did give the slave states more power, by way of the three-fifths compromise: the number of Electors depends on the number of Representatives, which depends on the census of inhabitants, not vote-eligible citizens, including, at the time, 3/5 of the slave population. So a state like Virginia, with more slaves than free people, got a boost compared to a state with only free residents.
It’s bad per se and also ludicrous. It gives way too much power to states with small populations, which tend to be rural and very right wing. But it is also ludicrous, we should all vote for the person selected to rule the nation, and every vote should have equal weight. Those same states - the right has a hugely unbalanced say in the senate for the same reason, small rural states have massively disproportionate representation. Reforming presidential elections can be done by amendment or by efforts like the popular vote compact, by agreement between enough states. The stupid constitution forbids amending the way the senate is apportioned, so there might have to be a court fight over changing that rule.
Again… The outsized power of smaller states is 100% an artifact of the permanent apportionment act of 1929. It decreed that the size of the House would be set at 435 members. And then we added two states and tripled the population.
And the House is still 435 members. Some congressional districts have more than a million people. How the hell can a Representative actually be said to represent 1 million people?
To fix this would take a single act of congress. Just a simple repeal of one law, and the adoption of a new apportionment standard. That’s it. Then the popular vote would mostly line up with the electoral college, because the votes would have to line up. Because it would actually be representative of the actual population.
Just massively increase the size of the house to match the actual population.
I agree the house needs expansion, however I also think that would only moderately address the electoral college skew toward rural states. Also it is in my opinion irrelevant as it does not address the core problem: the president should be elected by a direct national vote, each person getting one vote of equal weight to every other vote.
I’m saying that if you expand the house, the skew that you are complaining about goes away.
Here’s a Time article on the subject that uses the current algorithm to find the most representative number of Representatives while still being a fairly low number. The answer comes out to 930.
That’s the on the lower end of fixing the House. There are proposals that go much higher.
And all it takes to get to any of them is a simple act of congress. No need for a constitutional amendment, no need to get the states on board, just one law passed.
Fixing the House would also massively curtail gerrymandering. Particularly the packing and stacking tactics.
And again, all it takes to do this is a single law passed by congress.
Ditching the electoral college completely? That’s either get the states to agree to the National Interstate Compact, or a constitutional amendment.
Both would be very hard to actually accomplish.
Allow me to evangelize the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which aims to bypass the Electoral College and elect the president by popular vote.
Which still doesn’t fix the problem with the House not being representative.
The polls showed him losing solidly to Clinton right up until he won though… The numbers are looking worse this time, but still.
It’s a little more complex than that. The national polls had him losing solidly to Clinton on the popular vote, which actually happened. The real polling errors occurred at the state level, in a few key states.
Polls have evolved since then you know.
I’m not saying they are perfect, but they understand, generally, that landlines aren’t key anymore. It’s literally their job.
This actually kind of sucks because then if/when the votes don’t look close to how they expect according to polls they automatically assume something fishy happened.
And yes, I realize many will think that regardless.
From the article:
But you are right on polls not really meaning that much. Especially over a year away.
Also, you have to take into account the weirdos who answer unknown numbers on their cell phones
That’s a valid point. Not many people do. Pollsters have a tough road ahead of them, because actually doing a scientifically valid poll is getting harder.
Also, national polls mean nothing. We don’t have a national election.
Trump lost in 2016 by 2.1%, he became President by winning in WI, MI and PA. 2 states Clinton failed to campaign in and a 3rd she alienated.
The total number of votes that elected Trump were just 22,748 in WI, 10,704 in MI and 44,292 in PA.
77,744 people made Trump a President. The rest of us knew better.
Trump became president because the Russian state interfered in our elections. Full stop.
Also true, but it wouldn’t have happened if Clinton had actually campaigned in states she took for granted and didn’t say stupid shit about coal.
Nothing Clinton said about coal was “stupid shit.”
She just told people the truth, and people prefer to be lied to over hearing uncomfortable truths.
Same happened to Al Gore: he told people the truth, and people went absolutely bonkers over that.
By contrast, Trump told people exactly what they wanted to hear, even though it was clear to anyone that he was lying to them or promising them things that he could never, ever fulfill - and people loved it.
Telling blue collar workers your goal is to end their industry is, indeed, stupid shit.
We complain bitterly on the Left about Republican voters voting against their own self interest… well, when you have a Democratic candidate telling them the intent is to put them out of work? What do you expect them to do?
I agree except for that last point
Sorry but that’s not how math works. 63 million people made trump president, and only 66 million of us knew better. That huge number of trump voters is the horrible reality of American politics weve had to come to terms with. Luckily some of the trump supporters learned from their mistake, but there’s still millions of them out there, not <100k
Millions out there, countered by millions of Democratic voters, and over votes on both sides in states like Texas and California.
It was the 77K in those three states that threw it to Trump, and note, in 2020, Biden did not repeat Clinton’s mistake.
Yeah I get that, but what I’m saying is it’s not like the rest of the US knew better than that 77k figure. 77k is just the difference in votes, it doesn’t represent the only 77k people that did wrong
This is true. 77k vastly undercounts the number of idiots that voted for that guy.
I don’t think YOU understand statistics, lmao
I mean, pollsters actually do account for how elections work in their models. There are all sorts of actual reasons polls have failed to be reliable lately, but if you think it’s because they just count total responses across the country, that isn’t the case.
Not really, case in point is this very poll:
“In the national survey of 910 voters, 47% of voters said they would definitely or probably support Biden, while just 40% said they would back Trump.”
Which is meaningless, because unless 47% of voters flip the correct states, it won’t matter how much Biden wins.
Remember, Clinton won the popular vote. Gore won the popular vote AND Florida. It didn’t matter.
So, I think you’re probably right, in this case. But you’re just quoting the reporting on the poll, which is very misleading. It makes it sound like there is no statistical model involved at all. From the methodology on the linked full poll results: “The full sample is weighted for region, age, education, gender and race based on US Census information”. Like I said, I think you’re right - I doubt if they mean weighting for “region” to imply they did an electoral college analysis - but until you look at the actual poll and it’s methodology, you can’t just assume that an article reporting on the poll is giving an accurate impression. There are polls that do account for state breakdown, and the reporting in an article on such a poll would probably be just the same as here.
It seems the focus of this poll was to get some initial idea what kind of impact a third-party run with Manchin and some Republican running mate would have, and looking at weighted national numbers is probably “good enough” for that purpose, at this time. Definitely not a basis to conclude Biden has it in the bag, and the poll itself doesn’t seem to be trying to claim that.
Sorry I’m going on, but yeah, big picture, you are correct, at least in this case.
Oh, there’s no doubt a statistical model to represent the entire country. The problem with popularity contest polling like this is the election isn’t a popularity contest.
Now, a similar survey running down each contested state and calling out the electoral college votes, that would be useful.
Anything that leads with “a national poll…” can be safely disregarded.
Serious question, which state she alienated and how?
Pennsylvania. She gave a speech in neighboring Ohio where she said:
“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
That echoed through coal country, and while nobody expected her to win states like West Virginia, it absolutely killed her in PA.
https://www.npr.org/2016/05/03/476485650/fact-check-hillary-clinton-and-coal-jobs
https://pagop.org/2015/08/03/clinton-pledges-to-continue-the-war-on-coal/
It was a self inflicted injury, which was so, so avoidable.
She COULD have rolled it into a victory like this:
“I’m going to tell you something right now that not a lot of people know… my great grandfather was a coal miner in Durham, England. Moved to Scranton with his six kids dreaming of a better life for all of them. I’d like to see a better life for your fathers, brothers, and sons that doesn’t involve risking their lives underground for a few scraps of coal that they’ll never share in the profits on.”
True story: https://www.palatinate.org.uk/hillary-clinton’s-great-grandfather-was-a-durham-miner-says-local-historian/
Instead? “Imma put a bunch of you out of work. U mad bro? LOL.”
Hilary Clinton is the definition of hubris.
Absolutely! If polls were deciding the outcome, Hilary would win in 2016.
Only twice in three elections. This means Trump had a one third chance to win that election. Which, sadly, he did.
If the weather forecast says 30% chance of rain and it rains do you question the validity of the forecast or do you think “I guess I ended up getting some of that rain”?