The titanic Biden-Trump election likely will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states, top strategists in both parties tell us.
The titanic Biden-Trump election likely will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states, top strategists in both parties tell us.
If your electoral system is so complicated and convoluted to the point where elections representing 300 million people are decided by only 6% of the population who will more than likely be influenced by those with 99% of the wealth … why bother referring to it as a democracy?
6% of six states. Because of the Electoral College, any majority wins all of a states votes (for most states), regardless of 51% or 75%. The only states that matter are where the election is even enough where that states electoral votes can go either way.
Of course I’ll vote for whoever is more likely to improve society, but my state has historically overwhelmingly voted for one party, so adding my vote to that doesn’t affect anything — this is where you’ll read complaints that for quite a few recent elections, the declared winner was NOT the one with the most popular votes
… and America is supposed to represent the standard for the rest of the world’s democracies?
In that system, people have absolutely no power other than to feel good about themselves while having a confused look on their face.
Fwiw, America started to make its democracy prior to the French revolution, i.e. it is old as fuck. The USA has encouraged democracy all around the world, ostensibly even serving as a role model to its parent the UK that at the time the USA broke away was still fully a monarchy under King George III, but in all that time it has not updated its own system processes.
Nor did it really see a need - e.g. a few decades ago the two sides were more similar than they had ever been previously (obviously not in their talking points but in their actual actions after being elected) - but recently people have revealed how easily the system is to game.
And even deeper than that, the forces of automation and globalization seem to have pulled the wealthy away from having a sense of investment in the nation doing well, to now no longer caring. So while before, they worked alongside the nation to accomplish all of our shared goals - e.g. to not be nuked by Russia during the cold war - now they just (ab)use its populace until robots can manage to replace them, without paying in anywhere close to what they take out. The CGP Grey video Rules for Rulers really opened my eyes, and supremely depressed me, to learn how that works.:-(
But anyway no, I would not look to the USA as the epitome of democracy in today’s era. It is loud, it has Hollywood, it has nukes, it supplies weapons to other places and has the world’s largest economy, but as far as democracy, it greatly lags behind the likes of the EU, with significantly healthier processes.