November 2020 US Election

[Admiral Beez]

I don't think it will be a blow out for Biden.

I agree. The 1972 United States presidential election, now that was a blow out. Nixon carried 49 States and won 60.7% of the popular vote.

I’d say Biden wins, but it’ll be close. More importantly is the Dems need to win the Senate.

 

[Richard White]

I agree. The 1972 United States presidential election, now that was a blow out. Nixon carried 49 States and won 60.7% of the popular vote.

I’d say Biden wins, but it’ll be close. More importantly is the Dems need to win the Senate.

No worse than Reagan vs Mondale in 1984. Reagan won everything bu Maryland and DC. Reagan also had 58 percent of the popular vote.

 

[Jasmine18]

seems like since the Joe Rogan announcement, it becomes a meme to leave California. A bunch of famous YouTubers have left and one of my cousins who was born and raised in North Cal is moving to Montana.

Will be interesting as if a lot of people leave it court turn certain states more purple and blue.

 

[Admiral Beez]

No worse than Reagan vs Mondale in 1984. Reagan won everything bu Maryland and DC. Reagan also had 58 percent of the popular vote.

View attachment 276186

I am very much hoping for a blowout in favour of Biden, as a widespread repudiation of Trumpism. But the country is just too divided now.

 

[Jasmine18]

No worse than Reagan vs Mondale in 1984. Reagan won everything bu Maryland and DC. Reagan also had 58 percent of the popular vote.

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Ronald Reagan was a very well-liked leader and had like demi-god Status among the right.

Biden is not like that.

 

[Richard White]

Ronald Reagan was a very well-liked leader and had like demi-god Status among the right.

Biden is not like that.

Jasmine,

You could put a bag of wet newspaper up against trump and it would win every state except texas.

 

[Jasmine18]

Jasmine,

You could put a bag of wet newspaper up against trump and it would win every state except texas.

Not really, I think Trump is gonna carry around 200 electoral college votes in the end.

Politicians are no longer popular across the spectrum unlike in the past.

 

[Richard White]

Not really, I think Trump is gonna carry around 200 electoral college votes in the end.

Politicians are no longer popular across the spectrum unlike in the past.

When you have GOP ex-presidents and supporters all saying they won't vote for Trump I tend to disagree.

Even among Republicans he's somewhat toxic. Senators and Reps are obsessed with him but the average voter feels disenfranchised by Trump in most cases.

They voted for Trump in 2016 out of anger against the Democrats and wanting change. What they got was a senile lunatic for a president.

People saw that and are starting to realise Trump isn't looking out for them, only himself and the extremists.

 

[Jasmine18]

When you have GOP ex-presidents and supporters all saying they won't vote for Trump I tend to disagree.

Even among Republicans he's somewhat toxic. Senators and Reps are obsessed with him but the average voter feels disenfranchised by Trump in most cases.

They voted for Trump in 2016 out of anger against the Democrats and wanting change. What they got was a senile lunatic for a president.

People saw that and are starting to realise Trump isn't looking out for them, only himself and the extremists.

True but even Obama never got a massive landslide people did in the past, No matter how well liked or hated someone is there are some states that will never switch anymore these days.

 

[PinkLucy]

I don't think anyone ever realistically expected Obama to get a landslide.

 

[Richard White]

True but even Obama never got a massive landslide people did in the past, No matter how well liked or hated someone is there are some states that will never switch anymore these days.

The telltale sign of the election is when Texas, Alabama or Kentucky go Democrat.

These are 3 diehard Republican states and if they go the country goes.

 

[afransen]

seems like since the Joe Rogan announcement, it becomes a meme to leave California. A bunch of famous YouTubers have left and one of my cousins who was born and raised in North Cal is moving to Montana.

Will be interesting as if a lot of people leave it court turn certain states more purple and blue.

One interesting this is if the Californian exodus turns some of those red states purple. A lot of republicans like to brag about NYers and Californians coming to red states, but also complain that they still vote like they live in NY and CA.

 

[afransen]

Not really, I think Trump is gonna carry around 200 electoral college votes in the end.

Politicians are no longer popular across the spectrum unlike in the past.

If he only gets 200 electoral college votes, that is a pretty decisive loss. It looks like Biden is going to win by more than just one or two toss-up states.

 

[Richard White]

One interesting this is if the Californian exodus turns some of those red states purple. A lot of republicans like to brag about NYers and Californians coming to red states, but also complain that they still vote like they live in NY and CA.

Something tells me that this will be an election where red will go blue all across the board.

The senate is so out of touch with the average american that I feel like there really is not a safe republican seat in the country. GOP Senators love to hear themselves talk and pad their ego but at the end of the day people can see they are only trying look good for their base.

They are are so blind to the truth it will be their downfall.

 

[W. K. Lis]

‘A crazy system’: U.S. voters face huge lines and gerrymandering. How Elections Canada makes a world of difference north of the border

From link.

Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District sprawls in ungainly fashion across the map, looking, as one U.S. judge reportedly put it, like “a broken-winged pterodactyl lying prostrate across the state.”

It’s also been likened to a blood spatter on a crime scene. Or a praying mantis. Or a Rorschach test.

It’s one of America’s most extreme examples of what’s called gerrymandering — the practice of politicians literally rewriting electoral boundaries to benefit themselves. And it’s merely one instance of how state legislation can sway the running of an American election.

Amid pictures this weekend of hours-long lineups for voters, scrutiny of the U.S. electoral process and its vagaries may be at an all-time high. Meanwhile, north of the border, Elections Canada, the model of a politically independent electoral agency, is celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Though it has not been immune to occasional political chicanery, the Elections Canada model is currently offering a stark contrast to the U.S. and the accusations of partisanship and voter suppression that have been aimed at its process.

Here are some of the ways the two systems compare.

In Canada, and in most western industrialized countries, a centralized, independent body runs federal elections with the goal of making electoral procedures, including voter access, uniform across the country.

In the U.S., most of the election parameters are decided by 50 individual states, each of which has a slightly different approach.

To some people’s minds, it’s a bizarre way to run an election.

“The United States is a crazy system,” said Mark Rom, associate professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

“There’s a statement made by one of our Supreme Court justices in the past. Justice (Louis) Brandeis said that the states are laboratories of democracy so they can try things out. States can learn from each other and perfect their policies.

“This is clearly completely untrue. Regarding elections, after 200 years of experimentation, our election system is still pretty much a mess.”

North of the border, the task falls to Elections Canada, an independent, non-partisan agency of Parliament. Unlike other departments, Elections Canada does not report to an elected cabinet minister. Instead, it reports to Parliament as a whole.

Its mandate is essentially to ensure that the process of campaigning, obtaining a ballot and voting is exactly the same in St. John’s, Newfoundland, as it is in Victoria, B.C.

While Elections Canada is not immune from political interference, altering its mandate to any significant degree would require changes to the Canada Elections Act, which would require the relatively public process of rewriting legislation.

In the U.S., legislation can be bent to political will at the state level — and has been.

In Florida, after a state constitutional amendment gave released felons the right to vote in the upcoming election, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed off on a law that required those felons to pay all prison fines, fees and restitution before they would be allowed to vote.

As a result, as of last Monday’s deadline for voter registration, less than a quarter of those estimated 1.4 million potential voters had signed up to vote. The demographic most affected by this are Black men.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Gregg Abbott issued an order limiting the number of drop-off locations for mail-in ballots to one per county. That meant that Harris County — which contains Houston and has largely voted Democrat presidentially since Barack Obama in 2008 — had one drop-off location for 4.7 million people in a county that spans 4,600 square kilometres.

Republicans call that “ballot security.” Democrats call it “voter suppression.”

They’re all examples, critics say, of legislators changing the mechanics of an election to tilt the playing field in their favour.

Rom said the U.S. Constitution treats the federal and state governments as almost equals. And while the federal government lays down some strict broad measures about elections — minorities and women can’t be barred from voting, people over the age of 18 can vote, and so on — the actual administration is left to the states.

And that opens the door for some dubious practices, depending on who’s running the state.

Republicans — and in fact most conservative parties — generally benefit more from lower voter turnouts, said Rom.

“In fairness, both parties are doing what they believe to be good for the country. But they’re also doing what they believe to be good for their own partisan interests.”

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the practice of gerrymandering.

Samuel Wang is the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. The project uses data analysis to identify and — hopefully — eliminate partisan gerrymandering.

The U.S. census occurs every 10 years. The last was in 2010; the current one is ongoing.

Representation in the U.S. is district-based and, in general, districts in a state have roughly equal population. So following a census, the states use the latest population figures to redraw those boundaries.

That opens the door for abuse, because the people doing the redrawing are state legislators themselves. So, while they keep the populations of districts roughly equal, the borders can be drawn to benefit those legislators.

They’ll do that by “packing” all the opposition party supporters into a few districts — giving the opposition a few big wins, but fewer than would be expected by the state’s general popular vote.

And they’ll do it by “cracking” — spreading the remaining opposition supporters among a large number of districts, so that their voting influence is diluted.

The flurry of district boundary redrawing that occurred after the previous U.S. census, kicked off what Wang calls, “The Great Gerrymander of 2012.”

In 2012, said Wang, more people in the U.S. voted for Democrats than voted for Republicans for Congress — 1.4 million more, to be exact. Yet the eventual totals in Congress were 234 seats for Republicans and 201 for Democrats.

Wang believes gerrymandering had a lot to do with those totals.

“It’s hard to know for sure, but I would say the net effect would be 15 to 20 seats that became safely Republican that would have otherwise either have been Democratic or competitive. Those 15 to 20 seats, could well have made the difference between a Democratic majority and a Republican majority in 2012.”

Changing those practices is difficult, says Wang. Although the Supreme Court has acknowledged the existence of gerrymandering, it has so far declined to intervene.

At the state level, change would require legislators to act against their own best interests — any politician in a position to change electoral legislation has already benefitted from the status quo.

At the federal level, the majority Democrat Congress has — as its first act — already passed the reform bill HR 1, which is aimed at reducing the influence of money in politics, and protecting and expanding voting rights.

Under the current administration, the bill has no chance of becoming law. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to bring the bill to the Senate floor, and the president has shown no interest in it.

In the bill is an idea for installing independent, citizen commissions for resetting district boundaries all across the U.S., said Wang. And that could be a step to mitigating partisan gerrymandering.

It would be similar to Canada’s situation, in which that role is taken up by 10 independent Electoral Boundaries Commissions, one for each province.