I am beginning to become scared that Romney/Ryan will win. Can smart people please post here and say reassuring things to convince me that he won't?

I just googled electoral college to refresh my memory on how it works, and still it makes no fucking sense.

the good news is that if you don't live in one of the 8 swing states ur television viewing experience is blissfully presidential ad-free

― Mordy, Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

well.... this is true as far as presidential ads go. but a deluge of ads for state/local elections (even in illinois!) still exists.

If only televisions had some kind of controls.

xp. Haven't seen a single presidential ad in New York (upstate), but for fuck's sake, literally every prime-time ad break is nothing but "[sinister voice] Senate Candidate A wants to personally force-feed your children excrement laced with the eyeballs of adorable puppies. [cheery voice] But Senate Candidate B wants to pass a law making sunshine and rainbows mandatory under penalty of death!"

this shit invades youtube and hulu repeats of "Bob's Burgers. " I can't escape it.

I'm getting Obama ads on my Scrabble app.

JacobSanders, are you American? Just curious.

I see zero presidential ads (I don't think either of them even bother coming to WA, OR, or ID) but I see a bunch of ads that:

- point out how the republican gubernatorial candidate is, shockingly, a republican

- show normal boring married people talking about how they gay families they've met aren't scary

- a smaller number of ads saying you're going to get sued if you're a homophobe and don't want gay people getting married in at your resort or whatever

- a lot of ads with serious people in suits telling me how marijuana should be legalized

It's kind of awesome and surreal actually

oh yeah, and the ads attacking a candidate for attorney general for helping a death row inmate get a lawyer (which pretty much makes me more favorable to him).

Plus there's this insane bullshit where the Seattle Times bought $75,000 of ad space in its own paper to run ads for the republican gubernatorial candidate as an "experiment" in the effectiveness of print ads. Not that this experiment can possibly produce any useful conclusions or anything.

i guess they're also buying space to support gay marriage but still, such an awful paper.

Yes I'm american, and american politics make very little sense to me. For instance some states spilt their electoral college vote by district, most don't?? Texas is largely republican so it's a given that our electoral vote will go to Romney, so why vote in Texas?

i think i'd rather be inundated with ads while having a greater chance of my vote mattering

i think i am glad to live in a state where my vote doesn't matter at all because we are gimme for the dems, but ymmv

Obama could win electoral votes in Texas if the votes were spilt by how a district votes, Austin alone could give Obama votes.

I might be wrong about that, maybe I'm giving Austin too much liberal credit.

Texas isn't that conservative, it's just the most conservative state that the media gives a shit about

Obama won Travis County (where Austin is) pretty handily last time. Harris County (Houston) too I believe.

Romney's first day after losing the election: montage featuring Todd Rungren's Bang on the Drum where Romney locks himself in his house and, for he first time in his life, has a marathon session of marijuana smoking and dirty movie viewing. He also kills a ton of time on ILX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4KpGiVHP6s

I've up early today and have seen six Romney and Obama ads in 15 minutes

Sorry, Alfred. I live in Texas, and... Well, you can gues the rest.

Our ads are a) local race and b) national issue. The Ted Cruz campaign and whoever his opponent was, their ads are the ones we saw the most of, and that was a while back.

Obama could win electoral votes in Texas if the votes were spilt by how a district votes, Austin alone could give Obama votes.

― JacobSanders, Thursday, October 25, 2012 1:31 AM Bookmark

This would also be a good system, potentially; Maine and Nebraska have both had it in place for a long time, although it's never actually made a difference. Alternately, you could just proportion out a state's electors based on the overall breakdown of that state, so if the state were 60-40 blue/red you'd have 60/40% of the electoral vote roll out that way. Would also be a huge boon to third-party candidates. Of course, the ruling party in any given state has basically no incentive to ever implement something like this.

i mean. why not just have a popular vote

bc it would end the republican party

seems to me mitt would have a pretty good shot if we were directly electing presidents!

it was my impression that there are far more dem voters in the united states but bc they are mostly concentrated in a few urban areas in traditional blue states they vote less. i don't remember where i got that impression from tho.

probably a Democrat

Obama getting 270+ electoral w/ Romney getting the popular vote would be our best shot at changing the way the electoral college works, giving each party a recent popular win/electoral loss to remember.

would also be interested in how the likely voter model would change with direct presidential election, currently a lot of people on both sides don't bother voting if they're in a lopsided state even if the race is close nationally.

I don't know that the Democratic idea of what should have happened in 2000 was "we should elect the president based on popular vote" so much as "we should fire Jeb Bush into the sun"

and I'm sure there will be other recount controversies if it goes the other way this year, but until the Republicans are hurt by the electoral college there won't be much of a push to change it from that side

my idea was that we should elect the president based on popular vote

There have been four elections (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000) in which the winner of the popular vote lost the election. Each time it was a Democrat. In 1824 Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote and the electoral vote and still lost. (At the time you needed a majority of electoral votes, and with four candidates, he only received a plurality. Congress then decided the winner.)

electoral college doesn't necessarily help dems/reps as much as it helps certain states. change is never going to happen because as soon as it started happening people who don't currently realize they have disproportionate voting power would quickly learn that they have disproportionate voting power. less a party issue and more a state issue.

NYTimes:

While female voters generally tend to favor President Obama, that cannot be said of white women without college degrees, a group known in this race as waitress moms.

"Waitress moms"!?!

maybe they aren't voting Democrat because they keep getting called "waitress moms"

by whom, though?

apparently by "this race", and I think we all know EXACTLY what race they're talking about

waitress mothers make better lovers

i mean. why not just have a popular vote

― max, Thursday, October 25, 2012 9:24 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ this is substantively the approach taken by the National Popular Vote Compact which I mentioned above: since amending the constitution to switch to a popular vote is prohibitively difficult, instead they're trying to get states to agree to send their electors in the direction of whatever the national popular vote does. Eight states have signed on and another four I think have it on the docket. The gimmick is that all of them agree that it won't take effect until states totaling 270 are on-board, so that they don't shoot themselves in the foot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

If you like the idea, lobby for it in your state, etc etc.

as far as major electoral changes go I think dc statehood gets a better return 4 yr money

the popular vote compact is a great thing and it's nice that the 270 vote trigger means it wouldn't require a congressional vote or constitutional amendment

the difference between a popular vote compact and DC statehood is that one of them has a chance of happening in our lifetime

I mean it's fine, but I think people overrate the badness of the electoral college compared to other things. like the order of the primaries is probably even more distortionary than the electoral college.

nah I would put my money on dc statehood. it can happen whenever the dems control congress and feel like going for the power grab. and the gains are much more obvious.

One of my friends posted a thread on FB about that "waitress moms" thing, leading to some great comments, including:

"All that wasted energy on one band from Akron!"
"I'm voting for any candidate willing to put a waitress on mars within 10 years!"
"this article completely overshadows the struggles of Maître d'ads"

And my Reddit-ready contribution, "Any mom doing her job properly IS a waitress, am I right?"

(xpost) As a DC resident of course I'm hoping for it but even if we get something called "statehood" I don't see it coming with two voting senators and a representative. It's just nowhere near the top of national Dem priorities.

well the timing has to be right, something like the 2008 majorities w/o the world economy collapsing etc. I'm not saying it's inevitable or anything, but it's a power play there for the taking.

the good news is that if you don't live in one of the 8 swing states ur television viewing experience is blissfully presidential ad-free

― Mordy, Wednesday, October 24, 2012 11:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i live in vt and ive been getting hella ads targeted at nh, way more for obama fwiw

btw 538 has obama as a slight favorite in virginia, if he wins there you can start celebrating early