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Originally posted by Aden
This is exactly how a democracy works, though. The winning outcome is the outcome chosen by the majority. It's no one's fault that the largest clusters of the American population are centered in what happen to be strongly liberal states.
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Originally posted by cloudinthesky
But if there's more people in those states with large cities then what's the problem? That's democracy. The votes of the majority should take precedence. If it was reversed and Trump won the popular vote, he would have rightfully deserved to win because the majority of the country would have said they wanted him. As it stands right now, the majority of the country wanted Hillary, and look where we are.
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Originally posted by nuclear
Yeah the couple million people in Arkansas deserve to have the same amount of voice as the 30-40 million in New York and California. Wow such democracy you need Google the definition of democracy
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Because the issues plaguing rural voters like the opioid epidemic and wage stagnation still deserve the same amount of attention as people in the bigger cities.
For better or for worse, the life and issues plaguing someone in the city is incredibly different than someone in a rural area.
The concern is that those issues would largely be ignored if the popular vote was implemented as presidential candidates would focus on large cities and the issues specific to those areas since that's where most of the votes are concentrated and entire segments of the population would be completely overlooked.
I don't think it's an entirely valid excuse since Senate and Representatives would still be advocating for rural voters, but I understand those concerns and I could see the potential issues with a popular vote system as well. And we can all agree that the President has more power and sway than a given Representative or Senator.
Neither the electoral college nor the popular vote are perfect systems. The best system would split the difference and delegate electoral votes proportionally based on the margins within each state instead of being winner take all, but that system would be even harder to implement than a straight forward popular vote.