U.S. Politics: 2016 Election Goes To Overtime

[Noneofyourbusiness]

Please share this with everyone you know who would be interested!

First my stepsister shared with us a petition to abolish the Electoral College, and now even better: Petition for the Electoral College to Elect Hillary Clinton on December 19. This was linked on my professor, Nnedi Okorafor's, Twitter: https://www.change.org/p/electoral-college-electors-electoral-college-make-hillary-clinton-president-on-december-19

I hadn't known this, but there's no legal way of stopping Electoral College members from voting against the majority of their State. They just have to pay a small fine, which would be well worth it.
 

[denstorebog]

Well, this is obviously never gonna happen, but if at least some electors were to go rogue, it might raise some questions about the future of the EC. So I guess the headline should be "sign if you want to weaken the Electoral College system".

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

If 21 of them go "rouge" things get interesting.

[Dr. Pepper]

There have been some electors who have pledged to not vote Trump, iirc.  I think one was from Georgia.  But there's almost no way that any petition will get them to vote rationally and for the best interests of the country if the popular vote doesn't convince them.  The petition is pretty dumb, tbh.  

[Altherion]

And people here accuse me of "accelerationism" 

This should probably be in the politics thread, but look, do you honestly not understand what you are asking for? Do you think Trump's supporters would calmly accept this turn of events? The faithless electors would almost certainly experience the significance of the Second Amendment firsthand, but it would not stop there.

In some sense it is quite fortunate that Trump won by such a large electoral margin. This petition would have had more of a chance in 2000 (when only 4 electors needed to flip to give Gore the win). This year, Clinton needs either 38 (assuming Trump's result of 306 votes stands) or 22 (assuming Michigan goes to Clinton). And they need to go to Clinton, not merely for some candidate other than Trump or the election goes into the Republican House which can only choose between Clinton and Trump and will almost certainly choose Trump.

Bottom line: it's not going to happen and it's good that it is not going to happen.

[Week]

15 minutes ago, Altherion said:

In some sense it is quite fortunate that Trump won by such a large electoral margin.

The smallest since Bush - 3rd smallest in the last 50 years (just ahead of W twice). Largest popular vote loss coupled with an EC win.

Agree that it is not going to happen.

[Ded As Ned]

This would be a terrible precedent to set, and wreck the entire electoral system... but if that's your goal...

[Dr. Pepper]

These fuckers who voted Trump say they wanted change.  Mega change, so much change they'll be changing so much they'll get tired of changing.  Sort of surprising they don't want to wreck the system.  

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

Petitions like this are giving people too much false hope. 

[Yukle]

This would be difficult: the electoral college is elected.

For instance, the 55 Californian Electors are 55 Democratic electors going to their convention. If the Republicans had won the state then their electors would go, not the Democrats. Different people are Electors, depending on who won. I'd say that it's safe to assume that only the most loyal Republicans would bother being electors in an area like Wisconsin, where they didn't expect to win.

Some states have prison sentences for faithless electors, too, so it's asking a lot for any of them to go against their state's decision.

In other words, convincing a minimum of 37 Republican party members (assuming Trump's lead in Michigan holds out, which it probably will) to prevent their party getting the White House is a tall order.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

 538 says the math doesn't holdup on the premise of potential fraud in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan...

 http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/demographics-not-hacking-explain-the-election-results/

 

That said, 538 has been a bit suspect itself of late.

[The Marquis de Leech]

I would be *very* surprised (albeit delighted) if it turned out there was something to this. But seeing as Stein's paying for it - why not? It's good to reaffirm faith in democracy. 

[ThinkerX]

Merely calling for a recount in a handful of closely contested states undermines confidence in the result?  At least that is what I get from the 538 article.  I have serious doubts about that. 

I greatly doubt it'll affect the results, but the recount itself for those close races should cause no harm. 

[Altherion]

Stein isn't paying for it, she's just spearheading the effort. It will be interesting to learn who gave her the money on such short notice.

On a different note, people have asked for examples of how political correctness helps drive voters to Trump and the like and it didn't take long for one to present itself. It seems that some of the Democrat leadership would like to escalate anti-white identity politics even further:

Quote

Symone Sanders, former spokeswoman for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, appeared on CNN Wednesday afternoon to weigh in on the future of the DNC and the Democratic party.

...

"And in my opinion we don't need white people leading the Democratic party right now. The Democratic party is diverse, and it should be reflected as so in leadership and throughout the staff, at the highest levels. From the vice chairs to the secretaries all the way down to the people working in the offices at the DNC."

Note the indirect equivalence between "diverse" and "non-white" inherent in the first two sentences.

Also, I am once again reminded of what might have been. What if Bernie Sanders had not affiliated himself with scum like this and, worse, with their immoral and counterproductive identity politics?

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

16 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Stein isn't paying for it, she's just spearheading the effort. It will be interesting to learn who gave her the money on such short notice.

On a different note, people have asked for examples of how political correctness helps drive voters to Trump and the like and it didn't take long for one to present itself. It seems that some of the Democrat leadership would like to escalate anti-white identity politics even further:

Note the indirect equivalence between "diverse" and "non-white" inherent in the first two sentences.

Also, I am once again reminded of what might have been. What if Bernie Sanders had not affiliated himself with scum like this and, worse, with their immoral and counterproductive identity politics?

And done what, run as an Independent? 

 

/And you consider one spokesperson "some of the Democratic leadership"? It's one persons' opinion. Scum seems a bit strong as well. 

[Altherion]

5 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

And done what, run as an Independent? 

No, run as a Democrat. With the strategy he used, he lost the minority votes by so much that explicitly rejecting identity politics and focusing exclusively on the economy (for everyone!) would probably have helped him.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

1 minute ago, Altherion said:

No, run as a Democrat. With the strategy he used, he lost the minority votes by so much that explicitly rejecting identity politics and focusing exclusively on the economy (for everyone!) would probably have helped him.

You believe that focus wasn't personally important to him? I got the impression that this was his belief, not some agenda thrust upon him by his campaign.

[The Marquis de Leech]

1 minute ago, Altherion said:

No, run as a Democrat. With the strategy he used, he lost the minority votes by so much that explicitly rejecting identity politics and focusing exclusively on the economy (for everyone!) would probably have helped him.

No-one was put off voting for Bernie because of him courting minority groups. Bernie's mistake (understandable at the time, but fatal in hindsight) was not contesting the South: he allowed Hillary to build up an unassailable delegate lead, because she was running up vast margins among black voters - all of which matter in a proportional model.

[Altherion]

17 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

You believe that focus wasn't personally important to him? I got the impression that this was his belief, not some agenda thrust upon him by his campaign.

No. I have no doubt that he believes in Martin Luther King's ideas and they are personally important to him, but that is not what today's activism is about. Sanders tried to explain the difference to Black Lives Matter back in the summer of 2015, but they weren't interested and by October he had surrendered and embraced identity politics (not that it did him any good). However, now that the election is over, he has returned to his real beliefs:

Quote

When an audience member asked him how she could become the second Latina senator in U.S. history, Sanders said her gender and ethnicity don’t entitle her to votes.

“I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country and is going to take on big money interests,” Sanders said. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, I’m a woman, vote for me. No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.”

“In other words, one of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics,” he continued. “I think it’s a step forward in America if you have an African-American CEO of some major corporation. But you know what, if that guy is going to be shipping jobs out of this country, and exploiting his workers, it doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot whether he’s black or white or Latino.”

There's a kind of tragic hero vibe to this -- man betrays his principles in the hope of a gain... would probably have done better by sticking to them.

30 minutes ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

No-one was put off voting for Bernie because of him courting minority groups.

I was -- although I might still have voted for him had the election not been effectively over by the time my state held its primary. I suspect quite a few other white people were too, though I don't know of a way to prove it.

[The Marquis de Leech]

As I said before, Bernie was on life-support after Super Tuesday in the South - which in the context of the Democratic Primary, meant he was doing terribly with black voters. That was his problem - not appealing to the "we hate identity politics" crowd (at the risk of stereotyping, I'd point out that Bernie won the West Virginia primary overwhelmingly).

Look, I really liked Bernie, and if I'd been an American I'd have voted for him (in the primary). That doesn't mean I think Bernie would have won this election, given what we know about the locations of the swings. Gaining Michigan and losing Virginia still isn't a winning map.