Eternity RPC Board
12-05-2016, 02:46 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-05-2016, 02:48 PM by Seperallis.)
I'm well aware. Candidates only have so much money to spend on their campaigns, and if they're buying ads and traveling and setting up rallies and speeches, that money disappears fast; of course they're going to want to go where their money has the most impact.
I'd like to see a map of past elections to see the changes in where candidates go...but here's an interesting thought experiment: do the visits by candidates make the states contested "swing states," or are they already predetermined to be by whatever powers that be, for whatever reason? One thing I noticed on the map, that isn't shown in the numbers above, is that Trump not only traveled more, but he did so to places that otherwise wouldn't have received any visits whatsoever...all those places that got less than one visit? Most of those were him. That's pretty neat in itself.
But the overarching problem, and the discussion that needs to be had, is that the needs of a few states are still trumping (no pun intended) the needs of all the states at large, the needs of all the nation. The very fact that there are "battleground" states is of course inevitable, it's going to come up no matter what in places candidates think they'll be able to win a greater number of votes or points. This is an obvious problem of the EC, but would it happen under any other system? ...Probably, yes. Most likely it would, just in a different way, but it's something to think about when people go "if we change the EC, it'll just be tyranny of the rural by the urban," all the while our president is currently effectively already determined by only 20 to 40 million people out of 300 million, which is some other kind of "tyranny."
But I'll stop short there, because we've had enough bickering about the system itself in chat already. I'm much more interested in these here numbers above, because I'm looking at the numbers, and I'm seeing... 23 states - nearly half all states - without their voice being heard, and let's be honest here, the vast majority of them are small states with very few electoral votes.
I'd like to see a map of past elections to see the changes in where candidates go...but here's an interesting thought experiment: do the visits by candidates make the states contested "swing states," or are they already predetermined to be by whatever powers that be, for whatever reason? One thing I noticed on the map, that isn't shown in the numbers above, is that Trump not only traveled more, but he did so to places that otherwise wouldn't have received any visits whatsoever...all those places that got less than one visit? Most of those were him. That's pretty neat in itself.
But the overarching problem, and the discussion that needs to be had, is that the needs of a few states are still trumping (no pun intended) the needs of all the states at large, the needs of all the nation. The very fact that there are "battleground" states is of course inevitable, it's going to come up no matter what in places candidates think they'll be able to win a greater number of votes or points. This is an obvious problem of the EC, but would it happen under any other system? ...Probably, yes. Most likely it would, just in a different way, but it's something to think about when people go "if we change the EC, it'll just be tyranny of the rural by the urban," all the while our president is currently effectively already determined by only 20 to 40 million people out of 300 million, which is some other kind of "tyranny."
But I'll stop short there, because we've had enough bickering about the system itself in chat already. I'm much more interested in these here numbers above, because I'm looking at the numbers, and I'm seeing... 23 states - nearly half all states - without their voice being heard, and let's be honest here, the vast majority of them are small states with very few electoral votes.