Campaign finance reform won't help this kind of thing. Just look at Dave Brat in Virginia; he won over Mark Cantor, despite Cantor being a long-time incumbent with a huge war chest and lobbyist backing and Brat being a little-known Tea Party candidate. Or just look at Trump: how much did he spend on campaigning? Virtually nothing. Hillary was the one spending obscene amounts of money on campaigning, and she was horribly unpopular and lost.
The problem isn't money, it's the voters.
Given enough money you can convince enough people of things like trickle down economics work, or climate change is a Chinese hoax. So indeed voters need to wise up( not going to happen IMHO ), we need to have less money in politics ( right ), or pigs could fly out my ass. I am just hoping that our AI overlords will be kind.
Campaign finance laws actually have significant influence on how much money can be spent, how transparent the funding must be, what money can be used for, etc. Media regulations also have a large impact.
A particular fringe world-view doesn’t just pop into significant numbers of voters’ minds out of nothing. It is deliberately tended and promoted by folks with large amounts of money with specific policy goals.
See e.g. this interview with Jane Mayer about Bob Mercer from yesterday, http://www.npr.org/2017/03/22/521083950/inside-the-wealthy-f...
How many people bothered showing up for Hillary's rallies? That's how you measure popularity and enthusiasm. Hillary didn't have any. People only voted for her because the alternative was viewed as worse.
In the (generally liberal) DC area that I live near, I saw almost no bumper stickers for Hillary. I actually saw far more bumper stickers for Obama than Hillary! Why would I see far more 4 or 8-year-old bumper stickers for Obama than for the current Dem candidate? Because she's unpopular, that's why.
Hillary ran against one of the most unpopular candidates in presidential election history, and she lost. Any other candidate would have easily won. Trump was an outsider, and deeply unpopular even among Republican voters. This should have been an easy election for the Dems to win, but they insisted on running the most unpopular, unpalatable candidate they possibly could have, and that's why they lost.
Hate the game, not the players.
TL:DW - If I get to choose everyone you can vote for, does it matter how you vote?
1) it's not one person/group who's choosing who you can vote for. It's a product of the system as a whole, which has competing actors. The GOP does not decide who runs in the Dem races, and vice versa, for instance.
2) you're not as limited in who you vote for as you allege. There are always 3rd-party options. The only reason they never win is because no one votes for them because "they'll never win", a self-fulfilling prophecy, just like believing you'll never succeed and then never trying. If nothing else, voting 3rd-party shows that you cared enough to vote, and didn't like the 2 mainstream choices. If enough people vote that way, one of the 3rd parties will then get more recognition, matching funds, a place at the debates, etc. We've had FPTP voting since the very beginning, but we do NOT have the same political parties that we started out with.
Interesting. I was unaware studies had been done on this. Care to share any links?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
By coincidence, Planet Money recently did a podcast about automatically filling out tax returns in California:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/episo...
tl;dr: In a pilot, 99% of people preferred the auto-filled returns, but the bill to make it law failed by one vote, because of Intuit and Grover Norquist.
0: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/poll-gop-trump-obamaca...
Until you took into account money. Then there was a correlation between what was passed and the 'will of the lobbyist'.
Really wish I could find that study again.
In the case of Trump, he IS one part of corporate America. He is benefiting himself and his slice of corporate America.
"Now, big corporations (the New York Times, etc.) are what stand between Trump and his agenda."
There are shades here, not as easy a statement to make as you have made.
While trump would definitely scare the American corps because of his protectionist, destabilising economic policy, the republican establishment is still behind a metric ton of the laws/bills etc that are bandied about, and they are corporate owned.
They still have the pockets of the politicians, they just don't like some of the other stuff. The weapons industry as a softball example would be jumping for joy at Trump.
So the corps are not standing between Trump and his agenda, but they definitely would have preferred a normal republican candidate.
Why do the majority of people not recognize this?
This was a straight party-line vote. There's a single party here working very hard to centralize and corporatize the internet. There's another party working against that.
I have to say I find it a bit hilarious when something like this happens and it's the result of a select, easily identifiable group and Americans then throw their hands up and declare, "The whole system is corrupt!"
I mean come on.
Before America can accomplish much of anything, we need a populace that will invest more into choosing a candidate than deciding who has the pithiest attack ad.
There's a hell of a lot of symptoms between us and the goal, and the current system seems to be doing everything it can to prevent us from reaching it (defunding education, defunding healthcare, preventing efforts to get out the vote, gerrymandering).
Believe it or not, it's not a full-time job. Given that we've seen poll after poll showing that the average voter couldn't pass a 6th grade civics class, but I don't see how cutting education spending is the real problem. We spend plenty on education. If that were the root of the problem then the districts which spend the most money would have the best grades, but there's not a strong correlation there.
We spend money poorly, but we spend plenty. There are a lot of things that could improve the American education system, but one thing has been shown conclusively to not do any good on its own and that's spending more money.
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/15/482150951/understanding-congre...
[] Two states have been admitted since 1912 - Alaska and Hawaii - but their borders match preexisting borders (the Alaska-Canada border was last altered in 1903).
Second, I don't understand how in a "no electoral college" universe, the concept of a "county" is even relevant. With every vote being perfectly equal, one would think the balance of power would perfectly equalize across all voters.
It wasn't voter suppression that caused this result, it was 5+M people more than in 2008 staying at home and not voting.
http://www.electproject.org/2008g http://www.electproject.org/2016g
I will also note that the poster you're replying to references gerrymandering as one of the causes of the election results not matching the votes; neither of your statements directly refute that.
http://www.npr.org/2016/06/15/482150951/understanding-congre...
As for gerrymandering, that only affects the House races, nothing else. The President isn't affected by that, only by the archaic and undemocratic Electoral College and the way state borders are drawn. The Senate is similar. The GOP swept all three.
It looks like the voter turnout was pretty average. Going back to 1972, the turnout numbers are similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...
Thank you for the reminder about the limitations of gerrymandering!
Senate is 52-48 which doesn't seem like a sweep. This includes two independents which caucus with the Democrats. I think the Democrats actually picked up two seats, which doesn't seem like a sweep either. Also, in your previous comment, you said the GOP won some seats. Which seats were these?
Donald Trump had a victory margin in the bottom 10 of historical elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
If government can prevent people from rallying near a party convention, government can prevent people from bribing candidates for office.
I know what you mean (interchangeable?), and the problem is that it only goes one way. With money, you can purchase "free speech," e.g. in CA, you can pay signature gatherers a few million to put a proposition on the ballot, because signatures cost a couple bucks apiece. But you can't easily turn free speech into money: 100 million people could send nasty letters to the Koch brothers, and they'd be told to pound sand.
They don't. The politicians who voted for this only represent the interests of the lobbyists and financial backers who 'donated/bribed' them during their campaign. Politicians don't care about the will of the people at all, several studies have shown this.
Before America can accomplish much of anything--we need real and substantial campaign finance reform. Too many corporations are able to influence elections and it's not good for democracy. I would think after this last election, democrats could run on this as a national security issue, if they were smart but no one has ever accused them of that.