Only 20% of Americans identify themselves as Republicans

Yurt said:
you do realize that most, if not all, states now have their electoral college vote in accordance with the popular vote.....
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I realize that the electoral college can bring about results that are significantly different than the national popular vote.....if every man, woman and cartoon character in New York and California vote Democrat the electoral votes carry no more weight than if a Democrat wins those states by 50.5% of the vote......
 
PostmodernProphet said:
I realize that the electoral college can bring about results that are significantly different than the national popular vote.....if every man, woman and cartoon character in New York and California vote Democrat the electoral votes carry no more weight than if a Democrat wins those states by 50.5% of the vote......
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i just googled it and if wiki is to be believed, every state, not most as i thought, elects their electoral college based on the popular vote...
 
blackascoal said:
1, 2, 3, and 4 ...

http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollReport.aspx?g=5ba17aa2-f1b9-4445-a6b8-62b9d1ba8693

According to the polling, Americans are to the left of you and 77% want a public option .. and so do the doctors ..

Doctors overwhelmingly support either a public option or a public system. Indeed, when you add the two groups together, it's more than 70 percent of respondents. There were some differences across specialties, but not a lot: about 75 percent of primary care doctors favored a public option or public system, while about 67 percent of surgeons felt similarly.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/09/doctors_support_the_public_opt.html

What Americans know is that the status quo won't solve anything and that healthcare costs will continue to spiral on our present most ridiculous course.
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As I STATED... which you of course must have missed... saying 'I want a public option' doesn't mean shit unless you define WHAT the public option entails. Does it include Government subsidies? If so, I am opposed. If not, I am fine with a public option.

We agree that the status quo is not sustainable. The costs as you mentioned are the key. The current proposals being put forth by Congress do NOT address what is causing the costs to increase. The merely pay lip service to costs. The fact of the matter is that with the second bill Reid tried to get through Congress (which he failed at today) would have increased the deficit by roughly $20b per year. Which means it fails Obamas promise. Without the 'fix'... it will not pass as all those doctors will come out against the current plan.

What needs to be addressed are the costs... as you mentioned.

So where do we start?

Start with the $500 billion Obama and the Dems say they can cut from Medicare due to inefficiencies. Continue with an end to defensive medicine... by putting into place tort reform. A reduction in defensive medicine will lead to lower costs to the consumers as well as lower premiums on malpractice. Then make sure the costs savings are passed along to consumers via lower charges from the hospital that cover the lower medical malpractice expenses. Finally make sure the insurance companies then reduce individual premiums to reflect the lower costs.

In addition, open all insurance products to every state. Let the companies compete across state lines. Here we can also insert the governments public option (provided it is not subsidized). Finally, make a return to individual policies. For most of Americans, the policies are cheaper. If you are obese... your policy is going to cost more. If you smoke... it will cost more. Insurance should be completely portable.

Just my thoughts...
 
PostmodernProphet said:
I realize that the electoral college can bring about results that are significantly different than the national popular vote.....if every man, woman and cartoon character in New York and California vote Democrat the electoral votes carry no more weight than if a Democrat wins those states by 50.5% of the vote......
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Same thing with single member disticts. A party could, theoretically, win a majority of the seats in the house with 25% of the vote vs. the other parties 75%. It would be an absurd result that would require everyone in the 75% party to be packed into districts voting 100%, and the other party to be packed into district voting 50%. I've never seen anything approaching such an imbalance, though. I've looked at a lot of elections, and I've never seen one where a party won that wasn't at least 3% of the popular vote within being the largest party. This is because it's very rare for things to be packed so much; usually the votes are distributed mostly at random, barring some extreme form of gerrymandering.

And we can usually predict elections based on how tightly the vote is packed. Votes are packed more towards Democrats in elections, so we're crippled. We have to win more than the Republicans to get the same number of seats. But the number of seats does still follow the popular vote, not the other way around.

We need to concentrate on the likely situations to form an accurate picture of how an electoral system works, not the absurd ones. The preponderance of probability predicts that the electoral college follows the popular vote. If you'd like to be a Vegas gambler and go against that, then fine. But don't expect to be taken seriously.
 
Watermark said:
Same thing with single member disticts. A party could, theoretically, win a majority of the seats in the house with 25% of the vote vs. the other parties 75%. It would be an absurd result that would require everyone in the 75% party to be packed into districts voting 100%, and the other party to be packed into district voting 50%. I've never seen anything approaching such an imbalance, though. I've looked at a lot of elections, and I've never seen one where a party won that wasn't at least 3% of the popular vote within being the largest party. This is because it's very rare for things to be packed so much; usually the votes are distributed mostly at random, barring some extreme form of gerrymandering.

And we can usually predict elections based on how tightly the vote is packed. Votes are packed more towards Democrats in elections, so we're crippled. We have to win more than the Republicans to get the same number of seats. But the number of seats does still follow the popular vote, not the other way around.

We need to concentrate on the likely situations to form an accurate picture of how an electoral system works, not the absurd ones. The preponderance of probability predicts that the electoral college follows the popular vote. If you'd like to be a Vegas gambler and go against that, then fine. But don't expect to be taken seriously.
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you are a blathering idiot...every state elects their electoral college members based on the popular vote.....

do you like spewing nonsense so that you hope people think you're smart or intelligent?
 
Yurt said:
obviously not....as your linked compact has yet to be implemented....

please turn yourself into to the nearest suicide hotline....
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All states currently allocate electoral votes based on winner take all besides Maine and Nebraska, which give each congressional district a vote and award only two in a winner take all fashion.
 
Watermark said:
The preponderance of probability predicts that the electoral college follows the popular vote.
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lol....elections aren't won on probability, they are won on counting votes cast....and the popular vote simply doesn't elect the president.....the electoral vote does....
 
Damocles said:
First, yup... 7.2%... My math sucked. Very not normal for me.

The electoral college is why they simply called the Dukakis election a "landslide", you can keep repeating it was the "same thing" but it wasn't. McCain nearly doubled Dukakis' electoral votes and that was with the perfect storm for the Ds, it will never get politically better for y'all than that particular election... 3.6% that's all that was needed for a shift. That ain't much. But what am I doing? I think it is even better for the Rs if you think you are somehow impervious to any shift in opinion now that Bush is out of office...

Forget I said anything at all. These are not the droids you are looking for.
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Okay, thanks for conceding that I actually rounded down Obama's margin of victory in a way that was actually charitable to McCain.

Hey bro, I never hear any person in the real world talk about "swings". And if you were as vigilant at checking other people's math, the "swing" of Obama's victory was actually 3.6%. Rounding it down to 3% is something I would think you would have been all over given your vigilance about my math. :p

Why are y'all using "swings" anyway? I only hear normal people, in the real world talk about margins of victory, popular vote, or electoral college count. I suppose if I wanted to claim Carter wasn't blown out in 1980, I could claim the "swing" between him and Reagan was only 4.8%, since Reagan won the pop vote by 9.7%. But nobody tries to cite Carter's loss as a percent "swing" because it sounds like spin.

If somebody was trying to use percent "swings" to discount Obama's victory, then I stand corrected. It's not a term, a metric, or a measure most normal people use. And I have seen many republicans cite Obama's margin of victory as 3%. I'm almost positive you cited the margin of victory in a previous post as 3% but I'm too lazy to look.

As for now changing the metric to electoral college votes, yeah Poppy Bush won 79% of the electoral college votes. Obama won 68%. According to Wiki. If you want to change the metric to the electoral college, why exactly does that make Poppy's victory a crushing landslide, and yet Obama's victory a nail-biting close call that clearly demonstrated Democratic weakness? Is there a magical number between 79% and 68% that defines a crushing landslide versus a nail biter? Why was 79% a massive mandate for Poppy, and 68% a nail-biting sign of weakness for obama? I don't get it.


Here's what I think the deal is. I think the mathematically and geographically challenged are used to looking at those big maps of red and blue states, on election maps. And Poppy's victory has a sea of red. Obama's victory proportionally in a geographic sense had significantly less blue.

Here's a tip. The amount of red area or blue area on a map means hardly anything. It's a geographic artifact that neither reflects the popular will, nor is a robust measure of electoral votes. A lot of that "red" area in Poppy's victory was in large swaths of rural area, with hardly any people. There are more cows and chickens in many of those areas than there are people. Cow, chickens, and swaths of rural land don't vote. People vote.
 
Cypress said:
Okay, thanks for conceding that I actually rounded down Obama's margin of victory in a way that was actually charitable to McCain.

Hey bro, I never hear any person in the real world talk about "swings". And if you were as vigilant at checking other people's math, the "swing" of Obama's victory was actually 3.6%. Rounding it down to 3% is something I would think you would have been all over given your vigilance about my math. :p

Why are y'all using "swings" anyway? I only hear normal people, in the real world talk about margins of victory, popular vote, or electoral college count. I suppose if I wanted to claim Carter wasn't blown out in 1980, I could claim the "swing" between him and Reagan was only 4.8%, since Reagan won the pop vote by 9.7%. But nobody tries to cite Carter's loss as a percent "swing" because it sounds like spin.

If somebody was trying to use percent "swings" to discount Obama's victory, then I stand corrected. It's not a term, a metric, or a measure most normal people use. And I have seen many republicans cite Obama's margin of victory as 3%. I'm almost positive you cited the margin of victory in a previous post as 3% but I'm too lazy to look.

As for now changing the metric to electoral college votes, yeah Poppy Bush won 79% of the electoral college votes. Obama won 68%. According to Wiki. If you want to change the metric to the electoral college, why exactly does that make Poppy's victory a crushing landslide, and yet Obama's victory a nail-biting close call that clearly demonstrated Democratic weakness? Is there a magical number between 79% and 68% that defines a crushing landslide versus a nail biter? Why was 79% a massive mandate for Poppy, and 68% a nail-biting sign of weakness for obama? I don't get it.


Here's what I think the deal is. I think the mathematically and geographically challenged are used to looking at those big maps of red and blue states, on election maps. And Poppy's victory has a sea of red. Obama's victory proportionally in a geographic sense had significantly less blue.

Here's a tip. The amount of red area or blue area on a map means hardly anything. It's a geographic artifact that neither reflects the popular will, nor is a robust measure of electoral votes. A lot of that "red" area in Poppy's victory was in large swaths of rural area, with hardly any people. There are more cows and chickens in many of those areas than there are people. Cow, chickens, and swaths of rural land don't vote. People vote.
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Again, another attempt to say that it is the same thing, and then you go by some imaginary people and how they look at maps rather than what is very real.

Dukakis won something like 11 out of 50 states, McCain like 22/50 (I'll have to look up the actual numbers)...

That was why they called "Poppy" Bush's election a landslide.

And after looking up the numbers... memory served me well.
 
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