All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[Kevinroc]

That's a feature, not a bug.

I know. For this administration, the racism is a feature.

[Tami]

[Tazirai]

Neighbor charged after Toledo home spray-painted with N-word

Human beings suck at being human.

[aja_christopher]

How was the electoral college gerrymandered?

This information is readily available for you -- all it requires it a search: the entire basis of the electoral college was to protect the voting power of slave states.

Having the initial primaries in places like Iowa and New Hampshire alone assures that "white voters" will be the primary decision makers with regards to who makes it into the White House.

------
"The Electoral College magnifies the power of white voters"

"Before the election, we computed the probability that a single vote would be decisive in the presidential election, in any state. In addition to answering the perennial question, “does my vote matter?” our goal was to explore the degree to which the Electoral College gives voters in some states disproportionate power.

The probability of one person’s vote being decisive, we found, ranged from roughly one in a million for a resident of New Hampshire — a swing state with a relatively small population — to less than one in one billion in states that are reliably “red” or “blue,” such as New York, California, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

We can use a similar approach to show how the Electoral College increases not just the weight of voters in swing states but the weight of voters of certain ethnicities — based on their distribution across the states. We find that, based on the current distribution of voters of different ethnicities across states, and particularly within swing states, the Electoral College amplifies the power of white voters by a substantial amount.

Our first calculation — the probability of a single resident’s vote making the difference nationally, regardless of ethnicity — is straightforward. You multiply together two factors: 1) the probability that your state is needed for an electoral college win and 2) the probability that the vote in your state is tied, given that its electoral votes are necessary. Take California, for example. There we estimated a probability of over 50 percent that the state's 55 electoral votes would be required for a win. But there was a probability of less than 1 in 10 billion that the vote in the state would be tied, under this scenario.

In contrast, a single voter's probability of determining the election was highest in New Hampshire, where we estimated there was only a 4 percent chance that this state's electoral votes would be a necessary part of a winning coalition. However, in that circumstance there was a 1 in 40,000 chance of your vote being decisive (if the state's electoral votes were to make the key difference). Multiply these together and you get a one in a million chance of a New Hampshirite’s vote being decisive.

One in a million isn't much, but from the standpoint of a political campaign, it's not nothing. Sway 10,000 voters in a one-in-a-million state and you have a 1 percent chance of swinging the election. In a close election like the 2016 presidential race, an effective campaign in several different swing states has a good shot of making a difference, as Donald Trump, and the world, learned on election night.

White voters are overrepresented in swing states

The same approach also lets us introduce ethnicity into the picture, because we know the approximate ethnic composition of voters in each state — the proportion who are white, black, Hispanic, or “other.” We can average this across states and thus compute the average probability of decisiveness for everyone of each of these ethnic groups, across the country.

After running the numbers, we estimate that, per voter, whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the Electoral College is taken into consideration, 28 percent more power than Latinos, and 57 percent more power than those who fall into the other category..."

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/201...e-white-voters

[aja_christopher]

Cont'd.

-----
"One can approach the issue in other ways and get similar results. For example, we might look at the ethnic composition of voters in swing states compared with the country as a whole.

Based on our calculations before the election, the five states with the highest voting power per voter were New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. According to exit polls, the voters in these states were 80 percent white, compared with 70 percent in the country as a whole. Or, to take a slightly different tack, after the election the five closest states in percentage vote margin were Michigan, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Voters in those states were 73 percent white — again, higher than the nationwide figure.

Let’s try one more approach. According to exit polls, the electorate was 70 percent white, 12 percent black, 11 percent Latino, and 7 percent other. Reweight this by voting power and you get an "effective electorate" that is 75 percent white, 11 percent black, 9 percent Latino, and 4 percent other. That's a big difference, with nonwhites declining from 30 percent of the electorate to 25 percent of the effective electorate.

Exit polls are not perfect. Indeed, our calculations showed the 2012 electorate to be much whiter than was estimated by exit pollsters. But for the purpose of estimating relative voting power, this doesn’t really matter. If we extrapolate our analysis from 2012 and assume the exit polls continue to overstate minorities' share of vote totals, we still find that the Electoral College amplifies the white vote.

For example, suppose we assess the national vote as 75 percent white, 10 percent black, 9 percent Latino, and 6 percent other. Then rescaling by voting power gives an effective electorate that is 79 percent white, 9 percent black, 7 percent Latino, and 4 percent other. Again, whites are overrepresented, and all other groups decline from 25 percent of the voters to 21 percent of the effective electorate."

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/201...e-white-voters

[Mister Mets]

This information is readily available for you -- all it requires it a search: the entire basis of the electoral college was to protect the voting power of slave states.

Having the initial primaries in places like Iowa and New Hampshire alone assures that "white voters" will be the primary decision makers with regards to who makes it into the White House.

------
"The Electoral College magnifies the power of white voters"

"Before the election, we computed the probability that a single vote would be decisive in the presidential election, in any state. In addition to answering the perennial question, “does my vote matter?” our goal was to explore the degree to which the Electoral College gives voters in some states disproportionate power.

The probability of one person’s vote being decisive, we found, ranged from roughly one in a million for a resident of New Hampshire — a swing state with a relatively small population — to less than one in one billion in states that are reliably “red” or “blue,” such as New York, California, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

We can use a similar approach to show how the Electoral College increases not just the weight of voters in swing states but the weight of voters of certain ethnicities — based on their distribution across the states. We find that, based on the current distribution of voters of different ethnicities across states, and particularly within swing states, the Electoral College amplifies the power of white voters by a substantial amount.

Our first calculation — the probability of a single resident’s vote making the difference nationally, regardless of ethnicity — is straightforward. You multiply together two factors: 1) the probability that your state is needed for an electoral college win and 2) the probability that the vote in your state is tied, given that its electoral votes are necessary. Take California, for example. There we estimated a probability of over 50 percent that the state's 55 electoral votes would be required for a win. But there was a probability of less than 1 in 10 billion that the vote in the state would be tied, under this scenario.

In contrast, a single voter's probability of determining the election was highest in New Hampshire, where we estimated there was only a 4 percent chance that this state's electoral votes would be a necessary part of a winning coalition. However, in that circumstance there was a 1 in 40,000 chance of your vote being decisive (if the state's electoral votes were to make the key difference). Multiply these together and you get a one in a million chance of a New Hampshirite’s vote being decisive.

One in a million isn't much, but from the standpoint of a political campaign, it's not nothing. Sway 10,000 voters in a one-in-a-million state and you have a 1 percent chance of swinging the election. In a close election like the 2016 presidential race, an effective campaign in several different swing states has a good shot of making a difference, as Donald Trump, and the world, learned on election night.

White voters are overrepresented in swing states

The same approach also lets us introduce ethnicity into the picture, because we know the approximate ethnic composition of voters in each state — the proportion who are white, black, Hispanic, or “other.” We can average this across states and thus compute the average probability of decisiveness for everyone of each of these ethnic groups, across the country.

After running the numbers, we estimate that, per voter, whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the Electoral College is taken into consideration, 28 percent more power than Latinos, and 57 percent more power than those who fall into the other category..."

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/201...e-white-voters

Gerrymandering has a specific definition. It's not supposed to refer to every policy in which one group has a disproportionate influence in elections (although this confusion might explain some arguments I've had about gerrymandering in the past.)

Gerrymandering refers to people manipulating the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor a particular group (usually a political party.) The only cases this could apply with the electoral college are with the two states that reward electors to the winners of the popular vote in a congressional district (this would be Maine and New Hampshire.) The other 533 electoral votes are based on how a state votes, and those boundaries were not developed for gain in presidential elections.

[aja_christopher]

Gerrymandering has a specific definition.

I know but I think you get my point -- just like many gerrymandered districts, the electoral college system is unfairly biased towards white voters.

That's not how it should be in a nation where every citizen should have equal say in who leads our government.

That's also why you get people like Trump and Bush leading said government.

[Gray Lensman]

Gerrymandering has a specific definition. It's not supposed to refer to every policy in which one group has a disproportionate influence in elections (although this confusion might explain some arguments I've had about gerrymandering in the past.)

Gerrymandering refers to people manipulating the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor a particular group (usually a political party.) The only cases this could apply with the electoral college are with the two states that reward electors to the winners of the popular vote in a congressional district (this would be Maine and New Hampshire.) The other 533 electoral votes are based on how a state votes, and those boundaries were not developed for gain in presidential elections.

True, but the point was that the Electoral College is basically a natural gerrymander. It has the effect of one, even if it isn't a deliberate attempt to do so.

[Gray Lensman]

In 2016, voters actually saw Trump as being closer to the center of the electorate than Clinton and as the most moderate Republican candidate since 1972. https://53eig.ht/2EbSY3P

Voters *now* see Trump as being quite conservative—and maybe that's what they should have expected all along—but 2016 was actually a pretty good data point for the median voter theorem! If Trump had run on the Paul Ryan economic platform, not clear he would have won.

I think this is a point where Trump's past as a Democrat helped him - it disguised how conservative he was going to be. It was right there for anyone paying attention, but people tend to not notice stuff like that and see what they want to see.

[Tami]

This is creepy, follow this Twitter thread and see what you think

These tweets today from Trump's account use some very specific and distinct language. (They definitely aren't written by him.) So...I got curious and started researching. And I'm going down a rabbit hole that is weird af. That's all I'm going to say right now.

A related discussion

[Iron Maiden]

Looked at those tweets and they sure don't read like a Trump tweet. Something very peculiar about them IMO too.

[4saken1]

Figure out how to beat him next time.

As long as certain segments of the voting public continue to avoid responsibility for their own inaction, this is likely to happen again and again. Fact is, EVERYBODY FUCKING KNEW HE WAS A RAPIST AND A FUCKING PEDOPHILE, BUT A **** TON OF PEDOPHILE DID. FUCKING. NOTHING. on Election Day! All because they were convinced that Hillary was a meh candidate. I guess you'd have blamed Obama if he'd have lost for all the people that didn't vote for him because they were believed he was born in Kenya and a secret Muslim to boot, too. A candidates words and actions are not the sole arbiter of what people believe about them. More often that not, people just believe what they want, and that is completely on them!

[JCAll]

Gerrymandering has a specific definition. It's not supposed to refer to every policy in which one group has a disproportionate influence in elections (although this confusion might explain some arguments I've had about gerrymandering in the past.)

Gerrymandering refers to people manipulating the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor a particular group (usually a political party.) The only cases this could apply with the electoral college are with the two states that reward electors to the winners of the popular vote in a congressional district (this would be Maine and New Hampshire.) The other 533 electoral votes are based on how a state votes, and those boundaries were not developed for gain in presidential elections.

It's just colloquial.

[Robotman]

This is creepy, follow this Twitter thread and see what you think



A related discussion

Wow there is definitely something not right about those Tweets. Super weird.

[Tendrin]

It's just colloquial.

It's fun because some 'conservatives' are trying to change the electoral college to be by congressional district wins so that they can gerrymander that too.