The Suddenly Exciting Presidential Election

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Because political parties want to do what is fair and equitable and in the interests of the country as a whole, and not to do what is self-serving.

 

Still, I think it's a weird system. California has 55 electoral votes. Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama have a total of 54. If slightly less than half the population of California votes for Romney and every single person in the other 3 states votes for Romney as well, Obama would still be in the lead, while he has only the back-up of about 1/4 of these people.

Imperial measures, degrees in Fahrenheit, a weird electoral system... You people make calculations far too difficult.

 

While theoretically true, it's an implausible scenario you are setting forth. Even though the other three states you listed are heavily Republican, about 30-40% of the electorate in those state do vote Democrat. It's not nearly enough to win the state, but it's not like 95% of the people in Texas will vote Romney.

 

True, very implausible. But an electoral system should not be based on plausibility, but on fair representation of what "you, the people" want, imo.

(I don't know if that phrase even makes sense. I'm not much of a debater in foreign languages. But I hope you catch my drift. )

Also, iirc, people don't vote for a president, but for an electorate who votes for them. These promised to vote for a certain candidate. Nothing in your laws keeps them from breaking that promise, I heard. (It's considered ill will, though, and most likely never happened) Is that true?

 

Your impressions are pretty much accurate. Whichever candidate receives the most votes in the state is awarded the the electoral votes for that state. So for California, it gets 55 eletoral votes. The winning candidate's campaign staff gets to assign the 55 people who will make that vote. (They announce who would cast those votes prior to election night, but the point isn't when, but that they get to pick the people who will cast those votes.)

AFAIK, the people assigned to the electoral college are not legally compelled to vote for the candidate that assigned them to the college. However, the people who are typically assigned to the college are typically people who are major supporters and campaign contributors, so it would be really odd for someone who has spent a lot of time and money on the campaign to vote for somebody else. And I cannot recall a case where someone didn't vote for who he pledged to vote for.

Finally, I must point out that I would be greatly disappointed if Obama were to lose the popular vote, but win in the electoral college (an unlikely, but not completely implausible scenario). I was very angry back in 2000 when Gore won the popular vote but lost in the college. Just because it would now happen in reverse and benefit the guy that I'm voting for wouldn't make it right. (Some might consider it apropos, or even ironic, but not right.)

 

As of right now, that's what you've got - Obama with the electoral vote and Romney up by 226,000 in the popular vote.

 

We have a proportional system here in New Zealand, and we're the best country on the planet, so it must be OK.

 

It looks like the total difference in vote percentage will be just under 2 percentage points - nearly exactly matching what you'd get if you took the average of the top national polling results. (NOTE: While the individual polls don't do a particularly great job of forecasting the result, the composite of ALL the polls typically are pretty close. That's not that surprising. By taking the polls as a whole - treating them as if they were one big poll - greatly increases the sample size, and thus reduces the margin for error.)

It was a pretty good night down the ballot for Democrats as well. The Senate will remain in Democratic hands - in fact it looks like they'll pick up a couple of seats. The current total sits at 51 Democrats, plus two independents that will caucus with Democrats. That puts them at exactly 53 - which is the number they had going into last night - but there are two very tight races that haven't been called yet. But the worst-case scenario is they'll have 53, and they very well could move up to 55.

The Democrats also pickup up a few seats in the House of Representatives, although not nearly enough to take control back from the Republicans. It was an odd year in that there were comparatively fewer contested House seats compared to Senate seats. (Proportionally anyway - just as a raw number there were probably more, seeing as how there are 435 House races, but only 30-something senate races.)

Finally, I can't shake the feeling that after a year of this we're pretty much exactly where we started. We have the same president. We have a House that is still controlled by Republicans (by a slightly smaller margin that previously), and a Senate that is still controlled by Democrats by a slightly greater margin).