Final election predictions

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I'm interested to see what all the electors do. The presumed electoral gap between Trump and Clinton is so wide that having a handful of faithless electors is unlikely to change anything, but I'm still curious to see how things will play out.

[Dalty]

I see the "Little Monsters" have turned up 24 hrs too late and are now burning stuff.

[omicron]

"We want a change! No beltway insiders! #draintheswap" they said. Let's see who Trump is contemplating for his cabinet.
www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/11/politics/new-cabinet/

Wow, almost all old white guys with extensive history as politicians. Many ex-senators/representatives. Liking those changes Trump voters?

[omicron]

Not racists, but #1 with racists
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/11 ... l=facebook

[neglet]

Here's my final election predictions: Trump will either resign (out of boredom/disenchantment) or be impeached (duh) before the end of his term. And Democrats will take the Senate in 2018, because the electorate isn't comfortable with one party holding both the White House & Congress for very long. I'm sure the GOP will merit their disenchantment soon enough.

[Dalty]

Pretty much this:

https://www.facebook.com/viralthread/vi ... 190359668/

[Space Tycoon]

I posted that on my Facebook page. I now have a Facebook page. Of course, this is exactly the kind of self-serving, ultimately meaningless gesture the commentator was railing against.

But I done did it anyhow.

[Dalty]

Basically nails what I was saying. And the left still don't get it. They lost because apparently 50+ % of America woke up on Tuesday a.m. and decided to be a sexist, racist deplorable.

[Adam54]

Basically nails what I was saying. And the left still don't get it. They lost because apparently 50+ % of America woke up on Tuesday a.m. and decided to be a sexist, racist deplorable.

That's because that's not even a little bit correct, Dalty. He got like a quarter of the eligible vote. So did she. http://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy- ... ent=safari

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I think what Dalty's trying to say is that he feels a lot of people on the left are acting like this is the case. That's probably what his "apparently" was meant to communicate, at least within the context of the video he posted. I think he was going for sarcasm.

[Adam54]

I'm less sure and will await his clarification.

[Dalty]

I should have put the apparently in italics.

[Adam54]

I'll still await his further clarification.

[Dalty]

You could be waiting longer than for a fulfilling career at Whole Foods!!

[Mal Shot First]

It occurred to me today that we're going to have our first Moon Man president in Donald Trump.

[Space Tycoon]

You could be waiting longer than for a fulfilling career at Whole Foods!!

I thought about applying for a job there. They have a lot of good food there. Darned expensive though!

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

The owner's a piece of work.

[Space Tycoon]

Mackey? I used to look to him as an example of a progressive libertarian, what with his "conscious capitalism" mantra. He seems misguided but intelligent.

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

I ran some numbers last night--mostly out of curiosity--to see how many popular votes a person could win by and still lose the election. The intention wasn't to condemn or endorse the electoral college.

I assumed going in that a popular vote winner could win by as much as 3:1, but I wanted to see some real numbers. I figured someone else had already done something to this end, but I wasn't having any luck finding anything. I was probably just not coming up with strong enough search terms.

My methodology was both simple and lazy. I based it on this election's electoral spread. I made some minor changes. I gave Pennsylvania to Clinton. It has 20 electoral votes, and Trump only needs 270 of the 290 he was presumed to have last night. Trump's number has since increased to 306, thanks to the addition of Michigan. Speaking of Michigan, I also gave it to Clinton, since giving it to her still wouldn't give her the win.

I wanted a pretty lopsided fantasy scenario, so I didn't have a problem with giving Clinton 100% of the votes for the states she won. For the states she lost, I gave her one or two fewer votes than Trump. (I gave her one for states with an odd number of eligible voters, and I gave her two for states with an even number.) I assumed 100% voter turnout for the voting-eligible population as recorded on the following page:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 2030096602

Specifically, I used the numbers provided for each state's "Voting-Eligible Population." (I grant that the data could be bad. I didn't follow the links to verify any of it.)

Maine and Nebraska were special cases. I kept the electoral votes the same as they were in real life. Popular vote-wise, I gave Trump a two vote lead in Nebraska and Clinton a two vote lead in Maine. (Trump would have to get a significant number of votes in Maine to be able to secure one of the two district's electoral votes. I'm not all that comfortable with the way I handled Maine, but it's not like there are that many electoral votes at stake. Still, I'm not entirely sure of the maximum number of votes Clinton could get in Maine and still have it work out so that she took 3 electoral votes to Trump's 1.)

DC was also a special case, since DC gets 3 electoral votes but has no representation as far as the popular vote goes. (I guess I could have bothered with the territories, but I didn't. I'm sure there's all sorts of things I could have done differently.) I gave Clinton DC's 3. This made it so that she had 268 to Trump's 270.

I'm including a spreadsheet at the bottom that details things from state to state, but here are the most important numbers, just in case the Ghost of Jobs keeps Dalty from being able to see the spreadsheet:

Individual Votes for Clinton: 169,532,311
Individual Votes for Trump: 56,942,276
Total Votes: 226,474,587

That's pretty close to 3:1. I'm sure it could be worked out in such a way that a person could win by an even larger popular vote margin, but, again, I was building things around this voting cycle's electoral spread. I'm sure somebody out there better informed than I am and better with numbers can work out something even more lopsided. I'm by no means the best with numbers or the most informed about the inner workings of our voting system.

fantasyscenario.jpg (582.56 KiB) Viewed 1056 times

[The Swollen Goiter of God]

The above is an incredibly unlikely scenario, so it's not really all that useful. It doesn't necessarily tell us whether or not the electoral college needs to go, and it doesn't offer a better alternative. Going strictly by popular vote is an alternative, but that has its own problems. The masses can be pretty awful. At present, some may look at the popular vote and feel that there's a pretty awful mass that's still slightly smaller than a less awful mass. It could swing the other way fairly easily, of course.

The majority's not necessarily right just because it's the majority. That's part of what brought the electoral college into being in the first place. The creators of the electoral college went with their own fantasy scenario. In their fantasy scenario, though, the sane/well-meaning/educated minority benefited over an insane/malicious/uneducated majority. (Of course, some may feel that, for better or worse, the majority's the majority, and they may feel that the country should have to lie in the bed it made.)

People have suggested an electoral system wherein each state's electoral votes are split in such a way as to reflect the split in that state's popular vote, but that, too, could be problematic. If it's so close to the popular vote that it almost always reflects the popular vote, people will probably start wondering aloud why we even have an electoral vote. (Unlike now, where nobody ever wonders this aloud!)

A lot of people probably didn't even notice it for years and years. They probably didn't know what it was or that it had any kind of potential for impact until 2000. Nowadays, people can't help but notice it. It's like a mole. They didn't see it until they did, and now they stare at it constantly and wonder if it's cancerous.

It could happen, if they were to change things so that electoral votes in-state were split in such a way as to reflect the split in that state's popular vote, that the popular winner and electoral winner would be at odds even more often than they are now. The popular vote these days is always so close that it seems having electoral votes be so close to the state votes could make this happen. (Then again, the numbers may not bear this out. I'm no statistician. Well, I was in high school. [High school in my hometown went from seventh grade to twelfth grade.] I was the basketball team's official statistician for five years. But that's a different sort of stats.)

Whatever the case, I'm glad a discussion is taking place, but I don't see things changing much in the immediate future. We have a few years ahead of us with branches of government in place that are happy with the current setup. Are they right to be happy?

There's the National Popular Vote compact. That's gaining some ground in blue states, but it's unlikely to gain any red state ground for a while. I suppose a blue state could go red but continue to support the NPV, but that's unlikely. A friend tells me Michigan and Pennsylvania are considering it, but I haven't really been keeping up with it.

I can see arguments for and against. There's potential for Country Mouse to be exploited without certain protections in place. There's also potential, of course, for City Mouse's will to be overridden, thanks to these same protections.

Country Mouse tends to assume himself to be the more sensible of the two, and City Mouse assumes the same about himself. It's sometimes the case that both are right--at least inasmuch as their sensibilities apply to their specific surroundings. It's also sometimes the case that one or the other is (or both are) wrong.

Something one mouse believes should be law may not even apply to the other mouse's situation. Then again, it may apply doubly so, and the other mouse may be too close to the tree/building to be able to concern himself properly with what's going on in the forest/city.

It tends to be the case that the person who benefits from the electoral college champions it. It also tends to be the case that the person who does not benefit from it calls for it to cease to be. Unless the electoral college is done away with or modified, this will likely always be the case.

If a majority of the people in the US vote to force Wyoming both to receive the rest of the US's bottled farts and to make all of Wyoming's children smell said farts, the electoral college can still put a stop to it. (I went with a The Oatmeal-like analogy. I hate The Oatmeal. Now that I've gone with a The Oatmeal-like analogy, I also hate myself. Unlike before, when I never hated myself!) This is a potential win for the people of Wyoming--which people might otherwise have been dehumanized. On the other hand, if the majority of the people of the US vote to give all of the US free and open WiFi across the nation, the electoral college can also put a stop to this. This is a potential loss of the people of the US--which people might otherwise have saved a ton of money on their phone plans.

The trick is to turn the majority into a majority that protects the minority without also exploiting that minority. You do this, theoretically, by making the majority better informed, smarter, and more compassionate. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.