(December 1, 2016 at 3:52 pm)abaris Wrote: Elected exclusively by American standards. I would be hard pressed to name another country where the losing candidate actually leads by 2.5 million votes according to latest counts.
I think that the founding fathers of the US understood that the electoral college could lead to that result. While they would not have wanted it to happen, they felt it important enough to give low-population states a say to take the risk. There are at least a few things about our government that are based on how things were done more than 100 or 200 years ago, but changing them can be difficult. Getting rid of the electoral college will be near impossible because it would require the ratification of a new amendment by 3/4 of the states, and I think that there are too many states who would fear being disenfranchised under a popular vote system.
As someone who didn't vote for most of his life because of his stupid religion, I am keenly aware of how valuable that opportunity is. But fewer than half of eligible Americans do so in presidential years, and far fewer still in between. Those percentages are much worse as the demographics get younger. And those younger voters skew liberal. If we were somehow able to ditch the electoral college for a popular vote, those non-voters might be even less incentivized to get to the polls. Republicans didn't just take the White House, they still have majorities in congress and have solid footholds in many local government positions throughout the country. Instead of focusing on the electoral college, Democrats must figure out how to get more people to the polls.
As for the question in the OP: My thoughts on Trump are that he was more interested in running for President than in being President, and if the next four years turn out to be forgettable we'll have dodged a bullet. But he already stumbled by publicizing a phone call with the President of Taiwan which could have long-lasting repercussions on our relations with China. It's a bad way to start a presidency that hasn't even started yet.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
