Here is a pie chart listing the populations of each state.
With these charts, we can easily see that the candidates for president only really need to address the wants of the ten biggest states to get a majority and win.
No. Unless that candidate wins every single one of the top 10 states, they cannot win with just that. And assuming both of the candidates actually campaign and are fairly close (Within 5 percentage points, which is the vast majority of elections), that's not going to happen. As you can see, the smaller states (Which is around 4/5ths of the states) make up approximately a majority as well. So no, no reasonable candidate is going to ignore half the population. They'll have a focus on larger places, like they
already do, and a smaller focus on smaller states, like they already do.
When people say "the president needs to represent the majority country", they're not saying it in terms of people, they're saying it in terms of land. If we had a popular vote, who the forget would care about Montana, or Nevada, or Alaska? No one lives there, so it's justified to work against their interests.
That's a pretty sweeping generalization you're making there. Do you have evidence to back up that claim that people unequivocally always mean land instead of people?
Because I'm looking online for statistics on support for the popular vote over electoral college, and, well...
It seems that easily the majority support popular vote over electoral college.
And no, it's obviously not justified to work against their interests. If you purposely alienate voters in one area, voters in another area aren't going to like that and your numbers are going to go down.
AKA, the "tyranny of the majority" you keep hearing about. If popular voting was enacted, then you'd accentuate the problem that you're trying to eliminate (less people voting) in less populated states. Voters in those states don't make up the population of the ten most populated states, so they don't matter to the candidates, which means that their input doesn't matter overall. Ever hear the phrase "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner"? That's exactly what they mean by it.
Just saying "Tyranny of the majority" doesn't make the majority a tyranny. And again, as I've said multiple times now, no reasonable candidate would ever ignore approximately half the US population, and pretty much every candidate ever skips over at least a few states during their campaigning, talking little to no policy about said states and maybe not even visiting them once. Annoying Orange and Clinton are included in this. That's right, even with the electoral college, many states gets left out anyways. That's because it's just not feasible or sensible for the candidates to equally pay attention to all the states.
You forgot that the electoral college actually does matter on population size to a degree.
If you compare the college map to the density and population charts, you'll see that they line up pretty well.
Well no, not really. Voter power can be inflated by 2-3 times in certain states.
And if we were going to be going on land area, like you so helpfully suggested earlier:
When people say "the president needs to represent the majority country", they're not saying it in terms of people, they're saying it in terms of land.
well then we have a serious issue: Densely populated small states are going to get ignored. Places like new york for example would be completely and utterly ignored, it's so small, it has so little land mass, therefore we shouldn't care about it. After all, we care about land mass, right?
And that's the flaw in the thinking here: People are what matter in a country. Sure, the land is important, but if 80% of your state is uninhabited, then there's really no reason to pay attention to all that uninhabited area.
You could say that there are "purely red" or "purely blue" states, but keep in mind, these change a lot.
They do change occasionally but that doesn't at all change the fact that for a significant portion of the population, their vote does not matter. Whether that be because of the current political landscape or people who just decide that they're going to vote party no matter what. People who go against the majority in any given state don't matter because it's a winner take all system.
The idea that "the people should decide the election, not the states", no matter how nice it sounds, is pretty dangerous. You realize that if people's votes actually mattered, Harambe would have had a distinct possibility of being elected?
This is quite possibly the dumbest reasoning I've heard. He isn't a loving candidate. Even if the loving majority of people wrote him in (hint: less than 1% of 1% did) he wouldn't have "become president." There was no such "distinct possibility." Do you know how the election system even works? Because you have to actually be in the race to be able to win.
So what are you proposing to fix stupid people then? I don't know, maybe a
literacy test?That was a joke, by the way. The point is, the government deciding who is and is not "smart" is an ideal far more dangerous and corruptable than one might initially think. Even if it was completely unbiased IQ tests, the best measurement of "intelligence" we have, it's still a pretty terrible indicator of whether or not you're an informed voter. There is no such thing as an informed voter test.
