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Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by jamiequint on Friday September 18, 2020 @08:18PM (#24523293)
Hillary won the popular vote by 1.1% and currently the Republicans hold a razor thin Senate majority and have been substantially outpaced by Democrats in the House, so I'm not really sure where you get the idea that there's a "far disproportionate share of power/representation". It seems pretty proportionate to me.
Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by tyre on Friday September 18, 2020 @08:33PM (#24523475)
You look at the core beliefs of the Republican Party:

Anti-Abortion: about or above sixty percent of Americans support legal abortions

Climate change: two thirds of Americans view it as a top priority and that the benefits of action outweigh the costs

Guns: sixty percent to two-thirds of Americans support stricter gun control. 90–92% support mandatory background checks

Taxing Wealthy: again, sixty percent to two thirds support higher taxes on the wealthy.

Those are the pillars. Those are the core propositions.

Americans do not support them or not by a margin of 1.1%

Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by edbob on Friday September 18, 2020 @08:53PM (#24523677)
Polls are notoriously unreliable and easy to manipulate. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". I'm not even saying that you're wrong -- I'm saying that we have no way to know whether you're correct or not based on the numbers you threw out. We would need some good sources to even begin to evaluate the truth of these assertions.

The assertions themselves are so unbelievably vague that they could easily go either way with cherry-picked polling. Most people support abortion in cases of rape, so if you do a poll asking if people think some abortion should be legal, you will easily get a majority. If you ask about easy access to abortion in the 9th month, you get far lower levels of support. Saying "most support legal abortions" is practically meaningless without specifying what type of abortion they support.

Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by chub500 on Friday September 18, 2020 @11:55PM (#24524870)
I know many people who vote Republican only because of abortion. The fact is that pro-life people see this as the greatest injustice of our society by a wide margin. The left is motivated by BLM and the right is by pro-life.
Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by zepto on Friday September 18, 2020 @08:56PM (#24523719)
The first two are accurate because they are relatively clear.

The other two depend very much on how you ask the question. It’s nowhere near as simple as you make out.

Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by taurath on Friday September 18, 2020 @08:54PM (#24523690)
If people voted for any of those things, there would be quite a different margin. So then, what DO people vote for?
Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by 8note on Friday September 18, 2020 @09:45PM (#24524110)
Is it relevant what people do vote for?

Getting the most votes isn't what translates to forming a government in the US. The big things are: having your family members run state governments, setting district lines, and setting up laws to prevent people that disagree with you from voting. Not to mention just having a lot of money to bribe already elected politicians.

Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by taurath on Friday September 18, 2020 @09:53PM (#24524156)
As an absolute leftist, I think you're overstating the effects of gerrymandering. State gerrymandering cannot win statewide seats, nor the electoral college.

Anti-voting regulations, while frankly absolutely despicable, I've not yet seen any studies regarding a significant effect. Do you have any data on that?

Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by pm90 on Friday September 18, 2020 @09:02PM (#24523765)
People do vote for these things, but if you split voters is a particular way you can ensure that the minority hold on to power (Gerrymandering and the Electoral College).
Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by taurath on Friday September 18, 2020 @09:50PM (#24524136)
If you're looking at a 60/40 split though, even the extreme levels of gerrymandering can't override it. So what are the other things that people vote for - they must have a large rightward split if people keep voting right wing, in the face of all those left-leaning polls on policies.
Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by pm90 on Saturday September 19, 2020 @01:10AM (#24525289)
That’s not how elections work in the US, 60/40 is not a big enough divide to undo a gerrymander. The majority of the liberal population lives in dense urban areas and thus their votes get “wasted” as they’re reliably Democrats, while sparser regions which consist of the minority view get more representation compared to their actual numbers.

Add to that the fact that many voters are single issue voters, so their opinions on different policies don’t end up amounting to much.

So even if some policies are popular overall, they need to be popular enough to overcome these things to form a durable coalition that advocates for them in the halls of power.

Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by refurb on Friday September 18, 2020 @09:27PM (#24523959)
Did you just make those numbers up out of thin air?
Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by zanny on Friday September 18, 2020 @08:31PM (#24523446)
Proportionality isn't one to one because half of Americans aren't republican and half aren't democrat. The problem is that polling data is absolutely awful at showing absolute support for the individual parties platforms and membership numbers are largely biased compared to what the electorate actually wants, but there are plenty of articles about GOP tactics to hold power from a minority bloc position.[1]

I wish I bookmarked the statistics on this because they were eye opening to me, but 2016 polls were showing about 40% democrat to 35% republican leaning in the country. So if the public at large is 5% more blue than red, but Republicans hold near-even seats in government, thats a bias in their favor. And as this and many other articles show this isn't the product of random swings of popular support but structurally orchestrated power grabs meant to keep a minority party in power.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/12/gop-man...

Edit: And to be fair the Senate isn't a democratic institution whatsoever to begin with. Its going to naturally lean red because there are many states with low urbanization and population that produce permanent seat Republican senators. Because the distribution of states has nothing to do with the distribution of people that lends the senate to be hugely incongruent with the actual ideological makeup of the populace at large.

Re:Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died by basementcat on Friday September 18, 2020 @08:26PM (#24523386)