Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Hillary's Excuses

Sarah Westwood is reading Hillary's book and chronicling her excuses. I include them as a footnote to the prior post, for your edification:

4 comments:

Jack Fisher said...

The Hildabeest's excuses continue:


10. I don't like spiders and snakes. And that ain't what it takes to love me.

11. ...

Ares Olympus said...

I'll help too...

10. Keeping a private email server looks suspicious, and even more so since it might be the only thing in Washington that was apparently never successfully hacked.
11. Taking $240,000 checks from Wall Street to give speeches no one remembers.
12. People are tired of inaction of a divided government, and want to see what a single-party government can get done.
13. Running for president after a black, Kenyan-born, Muslim-faith President tried to destroy America with Wall Street bailouts and unaffordable healthcare.
14. Running against the weakest and most preposterous Celebrity candidate in the history of America.

Oops, the last one was an anti-excuse, an insult only made worse by winning the popular vote.

Sam L. said...

In California, Ares.

Ares Olympus said...

Sam L. said... In California, Ares.

Are you saying if California was not part of the union, then Trump would have won the popular vote?

Let's check:
2016 US: Trump: 62,984,825, Clinton 65,853,516, --> Clinton +2.9 million
2016 California: Trump 4,483,810, Clinton 8,753,788
2016 US-CA: Trump 58,501,015, Clinton 57,099728, --> Trump +1.4 million

Looks good. Even New York only had a 1.7 million margin for Clinton, while Texas had smaller than a million vote margin for Trump.

And for perspective:
2012 US: Obama 65,915,795, Romney 60,933,504 --> Obama +5.0 million
2012 CA: Obama 7,854,285, Romney 4,839,958
2012 US-CA: Obama 58,061,510, Romney 56,093,546 --> Obama +2.0 million

2000 US: Bush 50,456,002, Gore 50,999,897 --> Gore +0.5 million
2000 CA: Bush 4,567,429, Gore 5,861,203
2000 US-CA: Bush 45,888,573, Gore 45,128,694 --> Bush +0.8 million

So that looks like good evidence that if California seceded from the union that instantly Republicans would be for ending the electoral college as undemocratic, while Democrats would instantly defend it as a sacred protection of smaller population states to influence the winner.

Myself, I'm open to the idea of weighed elector votes, so if Trump gets 31.62% of the California vote, he can get that fraction of the 55 electors, or 17.39 electors. Or you could allocate 53 electors by proportion of the state vote, and 2 electors for the state winner, so then Trump would only get 16.76 electors from California. You could round to integers if we keep actual electors.

But the real reason we can't do that is because third parties would suddenly get electors allocated to them, and we've have a lot more elections where no one gets the magic 270. (In which case I'd advocate the electors themselves become sovereign citizens who can vote in multiple ballots until a 270 winner is reached.)