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Originally Posted by MarchHare
Instead, they'd devote more of their advertising and messaging to broad national campaigns that reach a wider audience instead of hyper-focused regional campaigns that reach comparatively fewer people.
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What? No, they don't. This is completely wrong. They spend 99% of their campaign money in about a dozen battleground states. That's the entire problem with the current EC system. The only reason they spend any time or money in other states is to raise more money to spend in the battlegrounds. The campaigns are totally beholden to the issues important to people who happen to live in areas that are purple.
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As to your point that 83% of the population live in urban areas and so they would decide the election in a "national vote count" scenario...I'm utterly failing to see the problem with that. If only one out of every six Americans lives in rural areas, why are they given so much disproportionate voting power in national elections?
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The amount of disproportionate power is a bit overblown. Picking two states completely at random, Kansas has 3 million people and 6 EVs, New York State has 19 million people and 29. So NY gets 1.53 EVs per million people, whereas Kansas gets two. That's significant, but it's not like your vote is worth ten times more in Kansas. The real problem is that no one's vote is worth
anything at all in either of those two states because the outcome in both places is a foregone conclusion before the nominees are even selected.
As for why it matters that you disenfranchise anyone who doesn't live in a city, I mean, that should be pretty obvious, shouldn't it? If you're trying to fix a system because it disenfranchises a significant segment of your population, you should try to fix it in a way that doesn't disenfranchise a different significant segment of your population. 17% is
enormous. It's over 56 million people. That's more than the black population of the country. If you could fix all of the issues with the political system in the USA by denying all black people the vote again, would that be acceptable to you? It shouldn't. There needs to be another solution.