EW's political two cents

[episcopalwitch]

Well, everyone else is doing it....

1) The most illuminating piece of analysis I've seen was a map run in the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" that showed the breakdown of presidential voting not by the silly blue/red states thing that made each individual state look monolithic, but county by county, in shades of blue and red, and grey for ties. I wish

Comments

[pelirroja_ljc]

I agree with what you said, save for maybe the electoral college thing. For example, In New York and New Jersey the way New York City and Newark vote controls the electoral votes. Many times, though not always, the rest of the state has a different opinion but we are effectively disenfranchised by those heavily populated urban areas.

This year, there was no political advertising from either side in my news area because it was simply assumed that the democrats would take NY and NJ. I find that sad, especialy since at the end the Kerry camp started to realize that NJ and Pennsylvania weren't as "in the bag" as they thought and they whipped together a hasty ad strategy the last minute. NJ he won out in the end, but PA was a nail biter.

[episcopalwitch]

I had not thought about the impact of New York City and Newark on the rest of New York and New Jersey. St. Louis and Kansas City aren't nearly as huge compared with the rest of the state. The Founders certainly never foresaw the existence or impact of mega-cities.

The U.S. is so huge and so diverse that it always amazes me that we hang together as well as we do.

[cow_girl_2003]

In my state, there were more "red" counties than "blue counties (My state is Washington, by the way) but because of the Seattle area which is heavily liberal, the rest of the state didn't really have a say.

A compromise to the winner take all electoral system without doing away with it entirely would be a point split, like what Maine does or what Colorado tried to do (that messure failed miserably though). It splits the electoral votes based on the precentage of the popular vote that each candidate gets. Therefore there would be no "Blue states" or "Red states" because everyone's vote would count toward's their candidate's electoral vote count.

Now, it isn't flawless and in order for it to work, every state would have to adopt it as policy, but it might be worth the consideration. It would give the smaller towns in these states dominated by large cities a voice.