This is about how outdated institutions warp presidential politics, in a way that short term helps conservatives but long term hurts the party. 100% agreed. But it seems even more true about the house, senate, and state houses across the country.
It’s really bad to have large swaths of voters abandoned without any chance of representation, it distorts politics in unhealthy ways. I dream of republicans/conservatives waking up to the benefits of proportional representation (could mostly copy the systems of Denmark and Germany), fewer elected offices (we should have unicameral legislatures at the state level, not house/senate/governor and definitely not elected sheriffs and judges), and eliminating the senate (with some emeritus body doing confirmations instead, akin to the House of Lords but with more teeth
Conservatives do quite well in countries with proportional representative governments! If anything they have a better track record of success than American republicans (this is debatable I know…). There’s no reason for us to accept such confusing and unrepresentative government, it does not benefit any party so much as it promotes confusion and corruption of the general will.
I wouldn’t want to model the US GOP on a European conservative party. The UK Tories are basically to the left of Democrats as are any « centre-right » parties most of the EU. Parties like the Rassemblement National in France or AfD in Germany that are actually conservative are doing okay, but they het pluralities at best and other parties in the multiparty system collude against them. They also seem to have the same issue the GOP does with having a high « Gribble » voter base. The GOP is the only party in the world that I would view as solidly anti-socialist which is why I keep voting their way despite the insanity
U don’t knwo what conservative is , tories in the UK are to the left of dems on most issue and they still lost to labour , the left wing gov in denmark has done a better job in stopping mass immigration than conservatives u mentioned. Other than not being commies what conservative position those parties in those countries have ?
I completely agree. It’s nice to see another conservative-leaning person who sees the value in unicameralism and proportional representation. Sadly, it will probably never happen in the US.
Going to PR and unicameralism in the US would be very difficult and likely unpopular. It would clearly require an amendment to the Constitution. There are other ways to reform the American electoral process and achieve your desired goals without amending the US Constitution:
That may be by design. I doubt Hanania would deny being an elitist and abolishing the Electoral College would put the political power in the hands of elite cities and accomplish the stated goal of diminishing the influence of « gribbles » in the GOP.
There certainly is merit to the idea that the brighest brains ought to have a larger say. I recall seeing observations that some people are intellectually incompetent to stand trial for breaking the law but still allowed to vote (because literacy tests are illegal under the Voting Rights Act)
One self interest you might appeal to in safe Republican states, particularly large ones like TX, is that currently their preferences don't matter at all. National popular vote would give more influence at the federal level to state politicians in NY and CA but also TX and other medium to large conservative states.
I wonder how many more people would vote in those states if they new it mattered. Maybe the GOP gets all new voters in Texas and California that weren't even bothering before.
This may be true about Republicans, but it will have the same effect on Democrats, in a bad way, as they will also cater (even more than they already do) to urban populations. For the Republicans that’s good and makes them more balanced, but Democrats will start to resemble a dumber version of the European left.
Voter fraud will also become a real problem once the margins in NYC, Chicago, LA, etc, start to matter.
Point about voter fraud is valid, and all else equal, I think we should expect voter fraud to increase as social trust and institutional quality in the US continue to deteriorate. And perpetrating large-scale voter fraud is going to be much easier in a political monoculture. If doubts about political reliability are normalized, we go back to the thought that the states need to take back more power from the Federal government. If Florida and California can't trust one another's election results, then the conclusion is that neither state should let the other one rule it.
But I don't know if the point about the European left seems correct. The US would presumably still have a two-party system, and when we think of the European left, we're normally thinking in terms of a 3+ party system. In the US, both parties would still be trying to appeal to the median voter, only it would be a broad American median voter and not a swing state median voter.
I would be really interested to see a single-day in-person voting + ban the electoral college trade. I thinks such a ban favors the Democrats in the short term, but they will probably still resist it
Conceptually I agree -- but I think there is a more practical solution:
In the 1970s the United States became one of the only countries where parties outsourced candidate selection entirely to voters. Parties should not be internally democratic. Primaries worked because party insiders, money, and ideologues could sideline bad candidates in “the invisible primary.” You would describe it as an intelligentsia.
Campaign finance laws sidelined the parties and elevated small donors with rising polarization, primaries now promote candidates on the left and right that are more rabid ideologically than the typical voters in either party. The parties have become captured by their bases and the activists who keep them whipped up in a constant frenzy and antipathy at the other party. This is more true in the GOP than the Democratic party.
It is unlikely to happen anytime soon but nominating conventions that produced Republican nominees like Lincoln, Coolidge, and Eisenhower would be a vast improvement. Nominating conventions would provide and incentive structure for EHC to engage with the GOP and have stakes in the convention.
"Jungle primaries” is another idea. The GOP could simply revise its rules implemented in 2012 that favor front-runners. Oftentimes in GOP primaries, whoever wins gets extra delegates even if they received only a modest plurality of the votes. Recall that Trump never won a majority of the votes in a state primary until he all but secured the 2016 nomination.
100% agree. We basically just mangled the electoral college to a zombie version of what the founders DIDN'T want, direct election of the president by the voters. I am fine with getting rid of the electoral college and having it actually be a direct election, but if not then let's try to get back to something closer to what the framers wanted in the first place. Allowing the parties to select their candidates in nominating conventions is a great idea. If so there would be no Trump and no Bernie!
The premise of this article is incorrect. The Senate is strongly biased towards rural areas. The electoral college has a slight bias towards small states, but mostly the electoral college bias is random and does not reflect a rural-urban or any other meaningful divide. In this election the electoral college will bias campaigning towards Pennsylvania, which has an urbanization rate almost exactly the same as the urbanization rate of the US as a whole (Pennsylvania is the 21st most urbanized state, urbanization rate 76.5% compared to US urbanization rate 80%.) In this election the small-state bias of the electoral college is actually also an urban bias, since the only small state that is a swing state is Nevada, which is one of the most urbanized states (94.1% urbanization rate).
It sounds like you just read the title and deployed a ready made argument that you’ve adopted for partisan reasons without reading the article. I may delete this misinformation if it stays at the top, since it pollutes the discussion.
I think his point is that there are 2 aspects to the electoral college distortion. One is the small state bias (the +2 for each state regardless of population), and two is the segmentation from the winner takes all aspect, which favors swing states (that dont necessarily need to be small). If you look at the last 2 elections that were won by the popular vote lose, Bush was helped more by the small state bias, whereas Trump was aided more by the segmentation (he would have won even without the '+2')
I think his point works either way though. The electoral college does favor small states, which tend to be rural, AND in particular swing states, that tend not to have particularly accomplished citizens.
I think the electoral college is dumb too, but not because it has a bias towards rural people, or unsuccessful people, or whatever. It's dumb because it's random. In the 1980s California was a swing state. In 10-15 years Texas might be a swing state. Like I say, random.
I read and quoted your post, and I disagree that the comment is "misinformation". Whether a state is a swing state is different from it being more or less urbanized than average. Pointing out that fact makes readers more informed.
Another interesting claim is "primary voters often worry about electability" despite primary voters actually being unusually ideological and demanding more unpopular stances than the median voter would from their candidate.
It's notable both parties this cycle engaged in bizarre and reality-defying antics (The 2020 election was stolen! Biden is totally capable!) to avoid a repeat of the 2016 Republican or 2020 Democratic primaries. That's because the parties have correctly noticed the primaries are huge liabilities that make for more unpopular nominees bloodied by vying for intra-party interests.
I would also note that if the rural dimension is exactly what's making the GOP stupider (as best I can tell, Hanania has not provided evidence there is any meaningful IQ difference in partisanship) we would expect it on steroids in the Senate as you explained. Yet the Senate contained *less* pushback to confirming electors in January of 2021 than the House. Perhaps because they are on longer election cycles and didn't face the primary fears that House members held?
> Perhaps because they are on longer election cycles and didn't face the primary fears that House members held?
That's what Garett Jones would tell you, having worked in the Senate. He also says that politicians act dumber/more populist when "in cycle" and facing election.
This is one of the more literate posts here, but I think it's glossing over some details. When primary voters' decisions are clearly at odds with electability, the general election will still punish them and smart voters/candidates will moderate the next time around. At the very least, it affects the intraparty conversation in 4 years. It's also hard to test your theory because (1) there haven't really been any "unelectable" nominees for decades, and (2) the issues debated in primaries suffer from recency bias, usually ones that haven't been repudiated in a general election yet. This is why Sanders was bloviating about breaking up the banks in 2016, then dropped it from his platform in 2020 when it slipped from the public consciousness.
Also, the term lengths for senators have another impact: it means that a mistake costs a party a seat for 6 years. When Republicans nominate nutcases like Kari Lake, they get punished, sending a message to primary voters that they have to pick someone better next time.
"smart voters/candidates will moderate the next time around"
The voters and candidates are very different. Trump absolutely made his sales pitch to the upper GOP circles getting DeSantis-curious on abortion. I have little doubt of that fact. But the actual GOP (or Democratic) primary voters do not strike me as people carefully deliberating on that median voter theorem situation. So what Trump's new issue "Was 2020 stolen from Trump" allowed him to do was run to the left of Haley and DeSantis on abortion but to the right of them on his new custom-made issue. It was so successful that he never even had to show up for a debate and the primary contest might as well have been in 2020.
"there haven't really been any 'unelectable' nominees for decades"
Correct, but there have been more dramatically polarizing nominees in the last decade, and I suspect the year long media-soaked primary cycle is an important factor of exactly the positions median voters find off-putting. Harris's proposal for trans care to every border arrival and Trump's proposal for Mexico to fund a border wall make sense only in the context of those ridiculous primary media shows. They don't actually happen in Congress, where the median voter is more present.
Finally, Sanders really has successfully pulled the Democratic party to a more left-wing platform than it held in 2012. The main counterbalance is the educated suburbanites entering the Democratic party don't want their taxes going up a dime, so the platform just gets steadily more disconnected from Congressional reality and outside of ARPA, the biggest new deficit spending is executive-centric actions like college loan forgiveness.
I respectfully disagree with your conclusion. In fact, I am for doubling down on the electoral college idea by instituting it at the state level. If each county (borough / parish) of each state were to have equal representation, then you would have less people unrepresented and less strangleholds of large cities over the rest of the state. This would decrease the many movements such as the "Greater Idaho" movement where the majority of Oregon wants to part ways with increasingly mentally disturbed Portland.
I do agree that the EC is undemocratic. That is a GOOD thing. Pure democracy is simply tyranny of the majority. To put it in todays terms, tyranny of the condescending, out-of-touch, city dwellers over the remainder of our countrymen. The case made could certainly be considered progressive, but I see no case made for it being a "conservative case", in that I believe the conservative case would be to conserve the original protections of under-represented states.
As a rural Colorado refugee who was forced out by Californian nut-jobs more than a decade ago to now living in remote Alaska, I know that nobody would care about these areas without the electoral college. And yes this where I and other "people actually live".
Finally, education and income do not equal intelligence, wisdom, or "human capital". Some of the most idiotic people I've ever met where university professors and classmates while getting my doctorate.
A majority of Oregonians don't want to join Idaho. And the problem with this plan is that rural counties don't have a sufficient tax base to pay for their roads and schools. Rage all you want about the tyranny of Portland, they are the only reason you can drive from Bend to Pendleton. You deciding rules for Portlanders while they foot the bill for your services...doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Oregon already has a Senate, which gives more power to rural voters than they would get otherwise.
First, I live in remote Alaska so it is not my services they are "footing".
Second, if the Greater Idaho movement were to succeed, the property values of eastern Oregon would immediately jump and it would be Idaho who would "foot the bill" for those counties as those counties would then be part of Idaho. Portland and the majority of Oregonians that don't want to join can remain and destroy their cities to their hearts content. But we all know they will then leave and push their fantasies in states that haven't committed suicide.
Those are the percentages of Texans who showed up to vote, not of all adult Texans. That state has been having poor turnouts even for the US (52% in 2020, 48% in 2016, 44% in 2012, 46% in 2008, etc). If the EC no longer put the state into the "your vote doesn't matter" category for so many voters perhaps TX turnouts would stop being so low. Would more of the additional voters be conservative or liberal in their worldviews?
Great example of why conservatives should want to abolish the electoral college. Since liberals want it too, I guess that means it's in everyone's interest, case closed.
I basically agree it would be good for the conservative movement as you claim. I think your readers are the sort of brighter-than-average conservatives who would appreciate this.
However:
1. As you say, it would severely damage Republicans in the short-term. Since lately we have been on a political cycle with a roughly 16-year period (yes, they've done analyses with wavelets), the GOP doesn't want to give up its 8 years and let the Dems run the country for a quarter-century. Political parties are ultimately full of people who want jobs, and there are going to be a lot less of those for them if that happens.
2. Allowing the Dems unchecked reign for a quarter-century would allow the left to do lots of what they want without having to worry about MAGA or (earlier) the Tea Party. Given that most conservatives are already very concerned about the way the country is going, especially with the young leaning further left (with a noticeable exception with Zoomer boys), letting the left do what they want completely sounds existentially terrifying and definitely not worth it for some theoretical gain 30 years down the line. It doesn't really matter if you're going to get smarter Republican mayors of New York and clever Hollywood movies with libertarian themes in 2055 if by that point all your kids have cut off their genitals.
This is a big hang up as a conservative Zoomer over here. The promise of a more conservative smaller government future has no teeth if the Democrats are able to push us past a point of no return before that happens, and if it takes 30 years, I’ll be retired by then (assuming I can even save enough under a Harris-Walz tax plan).
On the other hand, there’s a higher purpose. Planting a tree whose shade we may not live to enjoy, just like our founding fathers did.
If more conservative-leaning voters in blue states became energized in presidential elections, rather than being told over and over that their votes were meaningless, that would improve the GOP's results in House, Senate, and state-goverment races. The Dems wouldn't be ruling anything unchecked if Dem POTUSes are regularly faced with GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. If fewer statehouses have Dem "trifectas" while more have GOP ones. Etc.
The GOP getting a congressional majority under Gingrich was a big deviation from what had been the norm since the New Deal. You shouldn't assume they would have one under this reform.
The Lucas Critique says you can't assume that current empirical observations will hold after a reform (like Fort Knox not being robbed and removing the security from it). This holds even moreso if you're ignoring earlier data when things were different.
Pure gibberish -- Lucas was talking about _economic_ data, and his theorum was about people making rational adjustments (because their money was involved). The inapplicability of that to electoral politics is obvious.
Also you are putting words and arguments into my mouth and it be better if you'd stop. You won't though so welcome to my mute list, bye.
That is nominally true, but in practice laws are difficult to remove. Someone earlier in this thread made a great point about the Johnson administration’s Great Society which was deeply unpopular, but even after Reagan, two Bushes, and Trump, those programs are still around
It is true that it is more difficult to repeal a law than to pass it, but it is by no means impossible. If the laws are truly terrible there will be bad consequences that you can run on. Laws tend to be hard to repeal because the consequences are not as bad as partisans tend to claim. And I would argue that half the reason Republicans can't repeal anything is the exact kind of brain drain that Richard is talking about in the first place. Democrats had a 214 seat majority in 2020 and they passed a bunch of signature bills. Republicans had a 214 seat majority in 2022 and they couldn't pass anything.
Republicans didn’t have the Senate in 2022 while Democrats did, but your point stands if you consider the 2016 Congress. They ran on getting rid of Obamacare and didn’t really do it. Even so, the only examples of governments that seem to be able to radically shift the direction of a country are those lead by Bukele and Milei and those two are both villainized in legacy media.
The closest equivalents are Trump himself and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, both of whom were swiftly voted out and subjected to lawfare campaigns. Leftism is already deeply entrenched globally and letting them have free reign to add more of their agenda will only further entrench them
"Allowing the Dems unchecked reign for a quarter-century would allow the left to do lots of what they want without having to worry about MAGA or (earlier) the Tea Party."
If what they do is so unpopular, the popular vote will be a check on them. If you disagree, then you believe that people can't be trusted to self-govern. But you shouldn't disagree, because normal, already existing Republicans *can* win the popular vote already: Haley was outpolling Biden *nationally* by insane amounts in some surveys. And if she's your nominee, then without the Electoral College, you don't even have to worry about her being likeable among Pennsylvanians or whatever - you can just coast to victory on your candidate being backed by a majority of Americans. A man can dream.
> If what they do is so unpopular, the popular vote will be a check on them.
LBJ's changes were unpopular when he passed them, but then they became the status quo and practically impossible to reverse.
> If you disagree, then you believe that people can't be trusted to self-govern.
This country wasn't founded with everyone being able to vote, or with the Presidency being determined by the popular vote, or even Senators being directly elected.
> Haley was outpolling Biden *nationally* by insane amounts in some surveys.
Biden being on track to lose the popular vote was unusual, and resulted in him getting replaced outside the normal primary system.
You might not think she’s a great candidate, but plenty of American’s believe that there is real value in having a muscular foreign policy, hence her widespread popularity (relative to Biden).
The only purpose she served in the above post - and this is clear just from reading it - is as a confirmatory example of a mainstream Republican who can win the popular vote.
Respectfully, for the sake of appearances, you should be trying harder to follow the logical thread of the discussion, especially when the intellect of conservatives is at issue. The post to which I was responding warned that Democrats would reign unchecked for 25 years if the Electoral College was abolished. This implies an inability of Republicans to win the popular vote. I countered that they can, in fact, win the popular vote. I'm not saying the policy outcomes would be good - I'm a liberal, so it would be strange for me to believe that - I'm just resolving the question of "can Republicans win the popular vote?" with a statistically validated example. If you want to know all of my beliefs, they're just a few clicks away, but I'll save you time and say that they're not all that interesting for the purposes of this discussion.
If the majority of your functional political base will only provide support to someone who attaches unworkable, unpopular moral absolutism to every policy position you'll get outmaneuvered anyway. It's already happening. Barring national catastrophe, the rural right is only going to get more unreasonable because they feel entitled to results they like from policy the character of which is congenial to them.
For a further example, the US' entire foreign policy towards Cuba is predicated on chasing after the votes of a motivated diaspora living in one state. Now granted, Cubans would still be a voting bloc worth courting even if they were distributed proportionately across the country, but their concentration in a swing state has dictated one of the dumbest foreign policy third rails for decades.
The electoral college also makes statehood (or districthood*) the standard for federal voting rights, which isn't a very consistent policy. Puerto Ricans can't vote in the general election, despite being citizens, just because Puerto Rico isn't a state and doesn't receive electoral votes. But if they move to a different state, suddenly they are allowed to vote. Obviously Puerto Ricans should be able to cast a ballot for president (it's not like there's a PR equivalent of Hamas), but the fact that they're enfranchised based on what ground is beneath them is bonkers.
Further, because it enshrines regionalism into Democracy, the electoral college also enshrines interregional strife. Other popular vote systems have some regionalism, and maybe Iranian voters complain about coastal elites too, but surely it's worse in the US when a Republican can absolutely trash New Yorkers and Californians without any consequence.
Your post is mostly about how the electoral college increases the share of dumb Republicans. But there's ways in which the electoral college also increases the share of smart Democrats, and not just by the transfer of would-be Republican elites who are turned off by the Trump movement. The electoral college forces Democrats to campaign better, because they have to balance broad-based support with regional code-switching. They can't just coast by on a liberal majority, they also have to signal restraint and openness to the ideas of fence-sitters in the Midwest. No matter how far the left goes, they could never (for example) advocate abolishing the 2nd amendment or explicit anti-capitalism in a general election without getting crushed, whereas the right has more room for error in terms of who they alienate. This also affects the culture of the parties, hence why Republican ads are more negative (per Ben Krauss: https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-frontline-republicans-talk-to).
Abolishing the electoral college might disadvantage Republicans, but it might also make them actually worth voting for.
*Defined somewhat goofily as "the state of being a district".
Probably just non-embargo conditional on not doing anything unhinged. That policy would neutrally effect the political situation on Cuba, but it would improve trade and make America and Cubs both richer. Not a huge win, but you should take them where you can get them.
The more I read Hanania the more I question what JD Vance in particular would do differently for a party base with higher human capital. He may be one of my favorite politicians at this point since he’s one of the few Republicans to definitively buck the trend of being the stupid party.
He seems quite articulate in interviews and even his statements on immigration seem carefully formulated to avoid owning the most ludicrous of the claims and focus on the problems immigration causes. Even when confronted he doesn’t take baits that other conservatives do.
Even so, he still seems to be running with claims that there are 20000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH (There are ~5000 in the whole state) and that they eat cats (does not seem to be true)
He seems like a Republican who knows that his base is probably 2-3 SDs of IQ below him on average and is campaigning accordingly. The left is understandably calling him on it though I doubt they understand the the true extent of the difficulty in Vance’s position for this campaign.
It’s kind of sad to think about since this year’s campaign might disqualify Vance from the post-NPVIC intellectual GOP proposed here even though he’s exactly the kind of person that movement needs. Tim Walz criticizing him for attending Yale of all things betrays the true hatred the Democrats have for ambitious conservatives, and yet the GOP can’t use that against him at all because their own platform is so anti-university and their people are too busy running with the (fake) Haitian immigrant story.
Walz is criticizing him over his Yale degree not because Dems hate ambitious conservatives or Ivy League elites, but because Appalachian swing voters do.
Clearly, the Dems pander to low human capital because they are evil, while your tribe is just an unfortunate victim of electoral circumstances. Very astute analysis.
What I was getting at in reference to Tim Walz is that the Democratic Party seems to have a problem with any form of social mobility that happens outside the government or without Government oversight. There are plenty of Ivy League educated Democrats who Walz would not question. He also wouldn’t question anyone who attended such a school on a Pell Grant or via affirmative action admissions, but JD Vance succeeding without all that threatens the Democrats in two ways:
1) They don’t want a counter-elite. This is why they hate Elon Musk as well.
2) Vance succeeding without the government flies in the face of their sensibilities about the necessity of the welfare and nanny state.
Elon Musk is something akin to that second point as well. Democrats should love him for putting out EVs that people want to buy, but that makes the free market look too good for the party that wants more heavy-handed regulations.
Most Democrats (so excluding Bernie-bros) loved Musk before he took right wing political stances, just like they also love plutocrat billionaires like Bill Gates. Of course they don't want a counter elite, but Musk being self-made is not an aggravating factor. Do Republicans like the opposition elite? The Yale thing is pretty specific to Vance and his campaign strategy: he is trying to appeal to blue collar Appalachian voters with his "hillbilly" upbringing, implying that he is one of them. The obvious counter from Walz is highlighting that Vance is a Yale graduate, while he himself is a school teacher and football coach.
Also, this is somewhat besides the point but it was in large part the nanny state that allowed Vance to climb out of poverty based on his book. The military made him get his shit together and the GI bill paid for his Bachelor's. He got a generous scholarship at Yale due to his low income, which of course doesn't come from the government but is similarly a non-merit based handout from a "charity". I am not sure whether he got extra points on his application for his poor background (DEI?). In any case, he could hardly spite the Dems with his succeeding without government help.
Very true. But for me, the fact that Vance is willing to cater so hard to people with lower IQ for the sake of his ambition shows me that his true character is not one that should be allowed near power. Regardless of political ideology, a person whose sole ambition in life is the accumulation of power should not be given any.
I understand your points. I still hold out hope that the post-trump GOP has room for him to step in and guide the party in a more intellectually honest direction. In another Hanania article, he suggests that Vance is viewed less favorably because he acts like he’s conflicted about saying things to win voters while Harris and Walz aren’t conflicted at all. If that’s true, I would say it reflects better on Vance than the others because it means he has a desire for truth and just needs a political climate where he can express that. Right now it seems that your choices are stupidity on the right or tyranny on the left. I don’t blame Vance for choosing the former. I’m basically doing the same thing when I vote after all
Lol, tyranny. Like when Kamala said the constitution should be suspended and she would only be a dictator on day one? Our choice is stupidity AND tyranny on the right or slightly dumb but normal on the left.
I’m thinking more when Tim Walz said there’s no guarantee of free speech and Kamala said Elon Musk should lose his privileges.
How about Hillary Clinton multiple times suggesting punishments for speech (wearing black in all said interviews). If you needed to write a female version of Darth Sidious, it would be Hillary.
I’m not foolish enough to say Harris is as bad as Hillary, but she’s bad enough for me to vote Trump without any hesitation in spite of everything you’ve written.
> NBC News called the attempted assassination a "golf club incident." The LA Times told us "Trump Targeted at Golf Club." The USA Today's top of the fold headline is "Hope in America," and they published a preposterous letter to the editor arguing that Trump "brings these assassination attempts on himself." CNN's Dana Bash--who just yesterday bizarrely accused me of inciting a bomb threat--said today that Harris campaign rhetoric didn't motivate Routh even though he echoed their rhetoric explicitly.
More of this? This is just bashing the media for not immediately saying "HARRIS CAUSED TRUMP TO ALMOST BE ASSASSINATED" the millisecond anyone with a gun is seen in his vicinity. It's very tiresome, I remember the same thing from last time because the media responded to an unclear information environment with hedging, which they always do because unlike MAGA they don't want to just say things that are false.
No. It’s « bashing » with receipts for instances of the media alleging or implying that Trump « deserved » to be shot. That’s not hedging on the news, and many of those headlines came after the FBI announced it as a assassination attempt.
Even so, I was referring more to the censorship portion of the post. « There is only one way to permanently silence a human being ».
The objective is to make the Democrats’ advocacy for censorship seem like a physical threat rather than just a moral one (and I find his argument compelling. You certainly don’t have to.) It certainly paints Hillary Clinton in a different light when she’s on the record advocating criminal charges for misinformation.
Are you also against the US Senate, Richard? Because that institution is arguably a much bigger problem than the Electoral College is. California has as much US Senate representation as Wyoming has in spite of having 50 times more people, for instance. The US Senate in its current set-up will always be more conservative than the US as a whole will be, which is a problem for those who want a political system with greater public legitimacy.
By the way, you can keep the electoral college while abolishing winner-take-all. Theoretically, even the US Supreme Court can do this. The 14th Amendment and/or Guarantee Clause could be interpreted by a future liberal SCOTUS as prohibiting winner-take-all in the Electoral College.
But there is another factor to consider here: If one wants a national popular vote, then how about requiring an instant runoff election between the top two candidates if no one will win a majority of the popular vote in the first round? Or, alternatively, using ranked-choice voting?
As a side note, though, it would be nice for a national popular vote scheme to have uniform nationwide criteria for recounts since otherwise there could be constitutional concerns similar to those SCOTUS previously raised in *Bush v. Gore*.
The electoral college is just affirmative action for rural people. Objecting to its abolition because it would "let California decide the election for the whole country" is the same idea as objecting to democracy because it "lets whites decide the election for the whole county". That's the whole point of democracy; if a certain group of people is larger than another group, they get a larger say!
There is some logic to the electoral college; people who live in cities depend strongly on rural areas for their food and other resources, but the needs of rural people are deeply foreign to the average city-dweller. So the concern is that without the electoral college, big cities would vote in myopic ways that ignore rural economic considerations and end up hurting the cities in the long run.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the founders didn't form the electoral college in order to give additional power to rural states. They created the electoral college as a compromise between people who wanted the president to be directly elected, and those who wanted the legislature to pick. Then we changed the state rules so that now we basically directly elect the president, but in a weird way that doesn't quite work.
Counting illegals in apportioning political representation and power is warps our politics and gives illegal aliens political power. Funny how this affirmative action is ignored.
I'm a liberal, and I would basically take 6 out of 7 of these just to abolish the Electoral College - in fact, it would be an easy trade. Deporting millions of people would be ghastly, and census law probably shouldn't change, but I would compromise on the latter and everything else. I think you'd be surprised how much the policies you described are conditioned on trying to edge out votes in a deeply unfair system, and if you make the system fair, there's less incentive to push back on (e.g.) voter ID laws. Liberals are very philosophically flexible when it comes to voting regulations, so long as the vote-counting system is majoritarian (and if they aren't flexible, they're bad liberals).
One (surmountable) problem with abolishing the EC, is that it will require federalizing elections. When the total vote count that matters, you can imagine the problems when single-party states run the elections, determine vote eligibility, etc. A state, especially a large state, could improperly effect the national election.
A solution, (that also does not require a constitutional amendment), is for Congress to require that all electoral votes be apportioned by according to state vote tallies. So a state with 5 electoral votes, that votes 45%/55% would allocate votes 3:2 to the two candidates. Thoughts?
The opposite of this idea, restoring the independence of electors to select whomever they want as originally intended ( as by #68 of The Federalist Papers), would also likely change Republican politics for the better.
In such a case electors would mostly resemble the composition of the Senate, who afaik are high human capital versions of Republicans, hence would be very unlikely to support someone like Trump.
This is about how outdated institutions warp presidential politics, in a way that short term helps conservatives but long term hurts the party. 100% agreed. But it seems even more true about the house, senate, and state houses across the country.
It’s really bad to have large swaths of voters abandoned without any chance of representation, it distorts politics in unhealthy ways. I dream of republicans/conservatives waking up to the benefits of proportional representation (could mostly copy the systems of Denmark and Germany), fewer elected offices (we should have unicameral legislatures at the state level, not house/senate/governor and definitely not elected sheriffs and judges), and eliminating the senate (with some emeritus body doing confirmations instead, akin to the House of Lords but with more teeth
Conservatives do quite well in countries with proportional representative governments! If anything they have a better track record of success than American republicans (this is debatable I know…). There’s no reason for us to accept such confusing and unrepresentative government, it does not benefit any party so much as it promotes confusion and corruption of the general will.
I wouldn’t want to model the US GOP on a European conservative party. The UK Tories are basically to the left of Democrats as are any « centre-right » parties most of the EU. Parties like the Rassemblement National in France or AfD in Germany that are actually conservative are doing okay, but they het pluralities at best and other parties in the multiparty system collude against them. They also seem to have the same issue the GOP does with having a high « Gribble » voter base. The GOP is the only party in the world that I would view as solidly anti-socialist which is why I keep voting their way despite the insanity
U don’t knwo what conservative is , tories in the UK are to the left of dems on most issue and they still lost to labour , the left wing gov in denmark has done a better job in stopping mass immigration than conservatives u mentioned. Other than not being commies what conservative position those parties in those countries have ?
You acknowledge it's debatable. How about you debate it! What is the track record of success you're referring to?
I completely agree. It’s nice to see another conservative-leaning person who sees the value in unicameralism and proportional representation. Sadly, it will probably never happen in the US.
Going to PR and unicameralism in the US would be very difficult and likely unpopular. It would clearly require an amendment to the Constitution. There are other ways to reform the American electoral process and achieve your desired goals without amending the US Constitution:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/to-reform-our-policy-we-must-first
That may be by design. I doubt Hanania would deny being an elitist and abolishing the Electoral College would put the political power in the hands of elite cities and accomplish the stated goal of diminishing the influence of « gribbles » in the GOP.
There certainly is merit to the idea that the brighest brains ought to have a larger say. I recall seeing observations that some people are intellectually incompetent to stand trial for breaking the law but still allowed to vote (because literacy tests are illegal under the Voting Rights Act)
One self interest you might appeal to in safe Republican states, particularly large ones like TX, is that currently their preferences don't matter at all. National popular vote would give more influence at the federal level to state politicians in NY and CA but also TX and other medium to large conservative states.
I wonder how many more people would vote in those states if they new it mattered. Maybe the GOP gets all new voters in Texas and California that weren't even bothering before.
This may be true about Republicans, but it will have the same effect on Democrats, in a bad way, as they will also cater (even more than they already do) to urban populations. For the Republicans that’s good and makes them more balanced, but Democrats will start to resemble a dumber version of the European left.
Voter fraud will also become a real problem once the margins in NYC, Chicago, LA, etc, start to matter.
Point about voter fraud is valid, and all else equal, I think we should expect voter fraud to increase as social trust and institutional quality in the US continue to deteriorate. And perpetrating large-scale voter fraud is going to be much easier in a political monoculture. If doubts about political reliability are normalized, we go back to the thought that the states need to take back more power from the Federal government. If Florida and California can't trust one another's election results, then the conclusion is that neither state should let the other one rule it.
But I don't know if the point about the European left seems correct. The US would presumably still have a two-party system, and when we think of the European left, we're normally thinking in terms of a 3+ party system. In the US, both parties would still be trying to appeal to the median voter, only it would be a broad American median voter and not a swing state median voter.
I would be really interested to see a single-day in-person voting + ban the electoral college trade. I thinks such a ban favors the Democrats in the short term, but they will probably still resist it
Conceptually I agree -- but I think there is a more practical solution:
In the 1970s the United States became one of the only countries where parties outsourced candidate selection entirely to voters. Parties should not be internally democratic. Primaries worked because party insiders, money, and ideologues could sideline bad candidates in “the invisible primary.” You would describe it as an intelligentsia.
Campaign finance laws sidelined the parties and elevated small donors with rising polarization, primaries now promote candidates on the left and right that are more rabid ideologically than the typical voters in either party. The parties have become captured by their bases and the activists who keep them whipped up in a constant frenzy and antipathy at the other party. This is more true in the GOP than the Democratic party.
It is unlikely to happen anytime soon but nominating conventions that produced Republican nominees like Lincoln, Coolidge, and Eisenhower would be a vast improvement. Nominating conventions would provide and incentive structure for EHC to engage with the GOP and have stakes in the convention.
"Jungle primaries” is another idea. The GOP could simply revise its rules implemented in 2012 that favor front-runners. Oftentimes in GOP primaries, whoever wins gets extra delegates even if they received only a modest plurality of the votes. Recall that Trump never won a majority of the votes in a state primary until he all but secured the 2016 nomination.
100% agree. We basically just mangled the electoral college to a zombie version of what the founders DIDN'T want, direct election of the president by the voters. I am fine with getting rid of the electoral college and having it actually be a direct election, but if not then let's try to get back to something closer to what the framers wanted in the first place. Allowing the parties to select their candidates in nominating conventions is a great idea. If so there would be no Trump and no Bernie!
The premise of this article is incorrect. The Senate is strongly biased towards rural areas. The electoral college has a slight bias towards small states, but mostly the electoral college bias is random and does not reflect a rural-urban or any other meaningful divide. In this election the electoral college will bias campaigning towards Pennsylvania, which has an urbanization rate almost exactly the same as the urbanization rate of the US as a whole (Pennsylvania is the 21st most urbanized state, urbanization rate 76.5% compared to US urbanization rate 80%.) In this election the small-state bias of the electoral college is actually also an urban bias, since the only small state that is a swing state is Nevada, which is one of the most urbanized states (94.1% urbanization rate).
It sounds like you just read the title and deployed a ready made argument that you’ve adopted for partisan reasons without reading the article. I may delete this misinformation if it stays at the top, since it pollutes the discussion.
I think his point is that there are 2 aspects to the electoral college distortion. One is the small state bias (the +2 for each state regardless of population), and two is the segmentation from the winner takes all aspect, which favors swing states (that dont necessarily need to be small). If you look at the last 2 elections that were won by the popular vote lose, Bush was helped more by the small state bias, whereas Trump was aided more by the segmentation (he would have won even without the '+2')
I think his point works either way though. The electoral college does favor small states, which tend to be rural, AND in particular swing states, that tend not to have particularly accomplished citizens.
I think the electoral college is dumb too, but not because it has a bias towards rural people, or unsuccessful people, or whatever. It's dumb because it's random. In the 1980s California was a swing state. In 10-15 years Texas might be a swing state. Like I say, random.
I read and quoted your post, and I disagree that the comment is "misinformation". Whether a state is a swing state is different from it being more or less urbanized than average. Pointing out that fact makes readers more informed.
Another interesting claim is "primary voters often worry about electability" despite primary voters actually being unusually ideological and demanding more unpopular stances than the median voter would from their candidate.
It's notable both parties this cycle engaged in bizarre and reality-defying antics (The 2020 election was stolen! Biden is totally capable!) to avoid a repeat of the 2016 Republican or 2020 Democratic primaries. That's because the parties have correctly noticed the primaries are huge liabilities that make for more unpopular nominees bloodied by vying for intra-party interests.
I would also note that if the rural dimension is exactly what's making the GOP stupider (as best I can tell, Hanania has not provided evidence there is any meaningful IQ difference in partisanship) we would expect it on steroids in the Senate as you explained. Yet the Senate contained *less* pushback to confirming electors in January of 2021 than the House. Perhaps because they are on longer election cycles and didn't face the primary fears that House members held?
> Perhaps because they are on longer election cycles and didn't face the primary fears that House members held?
That's what Garett Jones would tell you, having worked in the Senate. He also says that politicians act dumber/more populist when "in cycle" and facing election.
This is one of the more literate posts here, but I think it's glossing over some details. When primary voters' decisions are clearly at odds with electability, the general election will still punish them and smart voters/candidates will moderate the next time around. At the very least, it affects the intraparty conversation in 4 years. It's also hard to test your theory because (1) there haven't really been any "unelectable" nominees for decades, and (2) the issues debated in primaries suffer from recency bias, usually ones that haven't been repudiated in a general election yet. This is why Sanders was bloviating about breaking up the banks in 2016, then dropped it from his platform in 2020 when it slipped from the public consciousness.
Also, the term lengths for senators have another impact: it means that a mistake costs a party a seat for 6 years. When Republicans nominate nutcases like Kari Lake, they get punished, sending a message to primary voters that they have to pick someone better next time.
"smart voters/candidates will moderate the next time around"
The voters and candidates are very different. Trump absolutely made his sales pitch to the upper GOP circles getting DeSantis-curious on abortion. I have little doubt of that fact. But the actual GOP (or Democratic) primary voters do not strike me as people carefully deliberating on that median voter theorem situation. So what Trump's new issue "Was 2020 stolen from Trump" allowed him to do was run to the left of Haley and DeSantis on abortion but to the right of them on his new custom-made issue. It was so successful that he never even had to show up for a debate and the primary contest might as well have been in 2020.
"there haven't really been any 'unelectable' nominees for decades"
Correct, but there have been more dramatically polarizing nominees in the last decade, and I suspect the year long media-soaked primary cycle is an important factor of exactly the positions median voters find off-putting. Harris's proposal for trans care to every border arrival and Trump's proposal for Mexico to fund a border wall make sense only in the context of those ridiculous primary media shows. They don't actually happen in Congress, where the median voter is more present.
Finally, Sanders really has successfully pulled the Democratic party to a more left-wing platform than it held in 2012. The main counterbalance is the educated suburbanites entering the Democratic party don't want their taxes going up a dime, so the platform just gets steadily more disconnected from Congressional reality and outside of ARPA, the biggest new deficit spending is executive-centric actions like college loan forgiveness.
I respectfully disagree with your conclusion. In fact, I am for doubling down on the electoral college idea by instituting it at the state level. If each county (borough / parish) of each state were to have equal representation, then you would have less people unrepresented and less strangleholds of large cities over the rest of the state. This would decrease the many movements such as the "Greater Idaho" movement where the majority of Oregon wants to part ways with increasingly mentally disturbed Portland.
I do agree that the EC is undemocratic. That is a GOOD thing. Pure democracy is simply tyranny of the majority. To put it in todays terms, tyranny of the condescending, out-of-touch, city dwellers over the remainder of our countrymen. The case made could certainly be considered progressive, but I see no case made for it being a "conservative case", in that I believe the conservative case would be to conserve the original protections of under-represented states.
As a rural Colorado refugee who was forced out by Californian nut-jobs more than a decade ago to now living in remote Alaska, I know that nobody would care about these areas without the electoral college. And yes this where I and other "people actually live".
Finally, education and income do not equal intelligence, wisdom, or "human capital". Some of the most idiotic people I've ever met where university professors and classmates while getting my doctorate.
A majority of Oregonians don't want to join Idaho. And the problem with this plan is that rural counties don't have a sufficient tax base to pay for their roads and schools. Rage all you want about the tyranny of Portland, they are the only reason you can drive from Bend to Pendleton. You deciding rules for Portlanders while they foot the bill for your services...doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Oregon already has a Senate, which gives more power to rural voters than they would get otherwise.
First, I live in remote Alaska so it is not my services they are "footing".
Second, if the Greater Idaho movement were to succeed, the property values of eastern Oregon would immediately jump and it would be Idaho who would "foot the bill" for those counties as those counties would then be part of Idaho. Portland and the majority of Oregonians that don't want to join can remain and destroy their cities to their hearts content. But we all know they will then leave and push their fantasies in states that haven't committed suicide.
The conservative edge of the electoral college only lasts until Texas flips blue.
Percentage of Texans voting GOP:
59% (2000)
61% (2004)
55% (2008)
57% (2012)
52% (2016)
52% (2020)
Those are the percentages of Texans who showed up to vote, not of all adult Texans. That state has been having poor turnouts even for the US (52% in 2020, 48% in 2016, 44% in 2012, 46% in 2008, etc). If the EC no longer put the state into the "your vote doesn't matter" category for so many voters perhaps TX turnouts would stop being so low. Would more of the additional voters be conservative or liberal in their worldviews?
Great example of why conservatives should want to abolish the electoral college. Since liberals want it too, I guess that means it's in everyone's interest, case closed.
I basically agree it would be good for the conservative movement as you claim. I think your readers are the sort of brighter-than-average conservatives who would appreciate this.
However:
1. As you say, it would severely damage Republicans in the short-term. Since lately we have been on a political cycle with a roughly 16-year period (yes, they've done analyses with wavelets), the GOP doesn't want to give up its 8 years and let the Dems run the country for a quarter-century. Political parties are ultimately full of people who want jobs, and there are going to be a lot less of those for them if that happens.
2. Allowing the Dems unchecked reign for a quarter-century would allow the left to do lots of what they want without having to worry about MAGA or (earlier) the Tea Party. Given that most conservatives are already very concerned about the way the country is going, especially with the young leaning further left (with a noticeable exception with Zoomer boys), letting the left do what they want completely sounds existentially terrifying and definitely not worth it for some theoretical gain 30 years down the line. It doesn't really matter if you're going to get smarter Republican mayors of New York and clever Hollywood movies with libertarian themes in 2055 if by that point all your kids have cut off their genitals.
This is a big hang up as a conservative Zoomer over here. The promise of a more conservative smaller government future has no teeth if the Democrats are able to push us past a point of no return before that happens, and if it takes 30 years, I’ll be retired by then (assuming I can even save enough under a Harris-Walz tax plan).
On the other hand, there’s a higher purpose. Planting a tree whose shade we may not live to enjoy, just like our founding fathers did.
If more conservative-leaning voters in blue states became energized in presidential elections, rather than being told over and over that their votes were meaningless, that would improve the GOP's results in House, Senate, and state-goverment races. The Dems wouldn't be ruling anything unchecked if Dem POTUSes are regularly faced with GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. If fewer statehouses have Dem "trifectas" while more have GOP ones. Etc.
The GOP getting a congressional majority under Gingrich was a big deviation from what had been the norm since the New Deal. You shouldn't assume they would have one under this reform.
Since the New Deal? As in FDR??
Well sure okay....more relevant to now is that during the past 40 years the Republicans have had control of both houses 7 times and the Democrats 6.
The Lucas Critique says you can't assume that current empirical observations will hold after a reform (like Fort Knox not being robbed and removing the security from it). This holds even moreso if you're ignoring earlier data when things were different.
Pure gibberish -- Lucas was talking about _economic_ data, and his theorum was about people making rational adjustments (because their money was involved). The inapplicability of that to electoral politics is obvious.
Also you are putting words and arguments into my mouth and it be better if you'd stop. You won't though so welcome to my mute list, bye.
There is no point of no return as long as there is democracy. Even the constitution can be amended, you just have to persuade enough people.
That is nominally true, but in practice laws are difficult to remove. Someone earlier in this thread made a great point about the Johnson administration’s Great Society which was deeply unpopular, but even after Reagan, two Bushes, and Trump, those programs are still around
It is true that it is more difficult to repeal a law than to pass it, but it is by no means impossible. If the laws are truly terrible there will be bad consequences that you can run on. Laws tend to be hard to repeal because the consequences are not as bad as partisans tend to claim. And I would argue that half the reason Republicans can't repeal anything is the exact kind of brain drain that Richard is talking about in the first place. Democrats had a 214 seat majority in 2020 and they passed a bunch of signature bills. Republicans had a 214 seat majority in 2022 and they couldn't pass anything.
Republicans didn’t have the Senate in 2022 while Democrats did, but your point stands if you consider the 2016 Congress. They ran on getting rid of Obamacare and didn’t really do it. Even so, the only examples of governments that seem to be able to radically shift the direction of a country are those lead by Bukele and Milei and those two are both villainized in legacy media.
The closest equivalents are Trump himself and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, both of whom were swiftly voted out and subjected to lawfare campaigns. Leftism is already deeply entrenched globally and letting them have free reign to add more of their agenda will only further entrench them
"Allowing the Dems unchecked reign for a quarter-century would allow the left to do lots of what they want without having to worry about MAGA or (earlier) the Tea Party."
If what they do is so unpopular, the popular vote will be a check on them. If you disagree, then you believe that people can't be trusted to self-govern. But you shouldn't disagree, because normal, already existing Republicans *can* win the popular vote already: Haley was outpolling Biden *nationally* by insane amounts in some surveys. And if she's your nominee, then without the Electoral College, you don't even have to worry about her being likeable among Pennsylvanians or whatever - you can just coast to victory on your candidate being backed by a majority of Americans. A man can dream.
> If what they do is so unpopular, the popular vote will be a check on them.
LBJ's changes were unpopular when he passed them, but then they became the status quo and practically impossible to reverse.
> If you disagree, then you believe that people can't be trusted to self-govern.
This country wasn't founded with everyone being able to vote, or with the Presidency being determined by the popular vote, or even Senators being directly elected.
> Haley was outpolling Biden *nationally* by insane amounts in some surveys.
Biden being on track to lose the popular vote was unusual, and resulted in him getting replaced outside the normal primary system.
You might not think she’s a great candidate, but plenty of American’s believe that there is real value in having a muscular foreign policy, hence her widespread popularity (relative to Biden).
The only purpose she served in the above post - and this is clear just from reading it - is as a confirmatory example of a mainstream Republican who can win the popular vote.
Respectfully, for the sake of appearances, you should be trying harder to follow the logical thread of the discussion, especially when the intellect of conservatives is at issue. The post to which I was responding warned that Democrats would reign unchecked for 25 years if the Electoral College was abolished. This implies an inability of Republicans to win the popular vote. I countered that they can, in fact, win the popular vote. I'm not saying the policy outcomes would be good - I'm a liberal, so it would be strange for me to believe that - I'm just resolving the question of "can Republicans win the popular vote?" with a statistically validated example. If you want to know all of my beliefs, they're just a few clicks away, but I'll save you time and say that they're not all that interesting for the purposes of this discussion.
If the majority of your functional political base will only provide support to someone who attaches unworkable, unpopular moral absolutism to every policy position you'll get outmaneuvered anyway. It's already happening. Barring national catastrophe, the rural right is only going to get more unreasonable because they feel entitled to results they like from policy the character of which is congenial to them.
If it takes the GOP a quarter century to figure out how to remain competitive, then there was an even bigger brain drain than we thought.
Zoomer boys aren't rightwing. They just aren't as left-wing as zoomer girls.
For a further example, the US' entire foreign policy towards Cuba is predicated on chasing after the votes of a motivated diaspora living in one state. Now granted, Cubans would still be a voting bloc worth courting even if they were distributed proportionately across the country, but their concentration in a swing state has dictated one of the dumbest foreign policy third rails for decades.
The electoral college also makes statehood (or districthood*) the standard for federal voting rights, which isn't a very consistent policy. Puerto Ricans can't vote in the general election, despite being citizens, just because Puerto Rico isn't a state and doesn't receive electoral votes. But if they move to a different state, suddenly they are allowed to vote. Obviously Puerto Ricans should be able to cast a ballot for president (it's not like there's a PR equivalent of Hamas), but the fact that they're enfranchised based on what ground is beneath them is bonkers.
Further, because it enshrines regionalism into Democracy, the electoral college also enshrines interregional strife. Other popular vote systems have some regionalism, and maybe Iranian voters complain about coastal elites too, but surely it's worse in the US when a Republican can absolutely trash New Yorkers and Californians without any consequence.
Your post is mostly about how the electoral college increases the share of dumb Republicans. But there's ways in which the electoral college also increases the share of smart Democrats, and not just by the transfer of would-be Republican elites who are turned off by the Trump movement. The electoral college forces Democrats to campaign better, because they have to balance broad-based support with regional code-switching. They can't just coast by on a liberal majority, they also have to signal restraint and openness to the ideas of fence-sitters in the Midwest. No matter how far the left goes, they could never (for example) advocate abolishing the 2nd amendment or explicit anti-capitalism in a general election without getting crushed, whereas the right has more room for error in terms of who they alienate. This also affects the culture of the parties, hence why Republican ads are more negative (per Ben Krauss: https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-frontline-republicans-talk-to).
Abolishing the electoral college might disadvantage Republicans, but it might also make them actually worth voting for.
*Defined somewhat goofily as "the state of being a district".
What would have been a better Cuba policy?
Probably just non-embargo conditional on not doing anything unhinged. That policy would neutrally effect the political situation on Cuba, but it would improve trade and make America and Cubs both richer. Not a huge win, but you should take them where you can get them.
The more I read Hanania the more I question what JD Vance in particular would do differently for a party base with higher human capital. He may be one of my favorite politicians at this point since he’s one of the few Republicans to definitively buck the trend of being the stupid party.
He seems quite articulate in interviews and even his statements on immigration seem carefully formulated to avoid owning the most ludicrous of the claims and focus on the problems immigration causes. Even when confronted he doesn’t take baits that other conservatives do.
Even so, he still seems to be running with claims that there are 20000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH (There are ~5000 in the whole state) and that they eat cats (does not seem to be true)
He seems like a Republican who knows that his base is probably 2-3 SDs of IQ below him on average and is campaigning accordingly. The left is understandably calling him on it though I doubt they understand the the true extent of the difficulty in Vance’s position for this campaign.
It’s kind of sad to think about since this year’s campaign might disqualify Vance from the post-NPVIC intellectual GOP proposed here even though he’s exactly the kind of person that movement needs. Tim Walz criticizing him for attending Yale of all things betrays the true hatred the Democrats have for ambitious conservatives, and yet the GOP can’t use that against him at all because their own platform is so anti-university and their people are too busy running with the (fake) Haitian immigrant story.
Walz is criticizing him over his Yale degree not because Dems hate ambitious conservatives or Ivy League elites, but because Appalachian swing voters do.
Clearly, the Dems pander to low human capital because they are evil, while your tribe is just an unfortunate victim of electoral circumstances. Very astute analysis.
What I was getting at in reference to Tim Walz is that the Democratic Party seems to have a problem with any form of social mobility that happens outside the government or without Government oversight. There are plenty of Ivy League educated Democrats who Walz would not question. He also wouldn’t question anyone who attended such a school on a Pell Grant or via affirmative action admissions, but JD Vance succeeding without all that threatens the Democrats in two ways:
1) They don’t want a counter-elite. This is why they hate Elon Musk as well.
2) Vance succeeding without the government flies in the face of their sensibilities about the necessity of the welfare and nanny state.
Elon Musk is something akin to that second point as well. Democrats should love him for putting out EVs that people want to buy, but that makes the free market look too good for the party that wants more heavy-handed regulations.
Most Democrats (so excluding Bernie-bros) loved Musk before he took right wing political stances, just like they also love plutocrat billionaires like Bill Gates. Of course they don't want a counter elite, but Musk being self-made is not an aggravating factor. Do Republicans like the opposition elite? The Yale thing is pretty specific to Vance and his campaign strategy: he is trying to appeal to blue collar Appalachian voters with his "hillbilly" upbringing, implying that he is one of them. The obvious counter from Walz is highlighting that Vance is a Yale graduate, while he himself is a school teacher and football coach.
Also, this is somewhat besides the point but it was in large part the nanny state that allowed Vance to climb out of poverty based on his book. The military made him get his shit together and the GI bill paid for his Bachelor's. He got a generous scholarship at Yale due to his low income, which of course doesn't come from the government but is similarly a non-merit based handout from a "charity". I am not sure whether he got extra points on his application for his poor background (DEI?). In any case, he could hardly spite the Dems with his succeeding without government help.
Very true. But for me, the fact that Vance is willing to cater so hard to people with lower IQ for the sake of his ambition shows me that his true character is not one that should be allowed near power. Regardless of political ideology, a person whose sole ambition in life is the accumulation of power should not be given any.
I understand your points. I still hold out hope that the post-trump GOP has room for him to step in and guide the party in a more intellectually honest direction. In another Hanania article, he suggests that Vance is viewed less favorably because he acts like he’s conflicted about saying things to win voters while Harris and Walz aren’t conflicted at all. If that’s true, I would say it reflects better on Vance than the others because it means he has a desire for truth and just needs a political climate where he can express that. Right now it seems that your choices are stupidity on the right or tyranny on the left. I don’t blame Vance for choosing the former. I’m basically doing the same thing when I vote after all
Lol, tyranny. Like when Kamala said the constitution should be suspended and she would only be a dictator on day one? Our choice is stupidity AND tyranny on the right or slightly dumb but normal on the left.
I’m thinking more when Tim Walz said there’s no guarantee of free speech and Kamala said Elon Musk should lose his privileges.
How about Hillary Clinton multiple times suggesting punishments for speech (wearing black in all said interviews). If you needed to write a female version of Darth Sidious, it would be Hillary.
I’m not foolish enough to say Harris is as bad as Hillary, but she’s bad enough for me to vote Trump without any hesitation in spite of everything you’ve written.
All this to say, there is nothing normal about the left.
Well, this comment aged well https://x.com/jdvance/status/1835823158957391923?s=46&t=dQP-em-Baj6eVqIXb9PE-A
Less hysteria and more of this please.
> NBC News called the attempted assassination a "golf club incident." The LA Times told us "Trump Targeted at Golf Club." The USA Today's top of the fold headline is "Hope in America," and they published a preposterous letter to the editor arguing that Trump "brings these assassination attempts on himself." CNN's Dana Bash--who just yesterday bizarrely accused me of inciting a bomb threat--said today that Harris campaign rhetoric didn't motivate Routh even though he echoed their rhetoric explicitly.
More of this? This is just bashing the media for not immediately saying "HARRIS CAUSED TRUMP TO ALMOST BE ASSASSINATED" the millisecond anyone with a gun is seen in his vicinity. It's very tiresome, I remember the same thing from last time because the media responded to an unclear information environment with hedging, which they always do because unlike MAGA they don't want to just say things that are false.
No. It’s « bashing » with receipts for instances of the media alleging or implying that Trump « deserved » to be shot. That’s not hedging on the news, and many of those headlines came after the FBI announced it as a assassination attempt.
Even so, I was referring more to the censorship portion of the post. « There is only one way to permanently silence a human being ».
The objective is to make the Democrats’ advocacy for censorship seem like a physical threat rather than just a moral one (and I find his argument compelling. You certainly don’t have to.) It certainly paints Hillary Clinton in a different light when she’s on the record advocating criminal charges for misinformation.
Are you also against the US Senate, Richard? Because that institution is arguably a much bigger problem than the Electoral College is. California has as much US Senate representation as Wyoming has in spite of having 50 times more people, for instance. The US Senate in its current set-up will always be more conservative than the US as a whole will be, which is a problem for those who want a political system with greater public legitimacy.
By the way, you can keep the electoral college while abolishing winner-take-all. Theoretically, even the US Supreme Court can do this. The 14th Amendment and/or Guarantee Clause could be interpreted by a future liberal SCOTUS as prohibiting winner-take-all in the Electoral College.
But there is another factor to consider here: If one wants a national popular vote, then how about requiring an instant runoff election between the top two candidates if no one will win a majority of the popular vote in the first round? Or, alternatively, using ranked-choice voting?
As a side note, though, it would be nice for a national popular vote scheme to have uniform nationwide criteria for recounts since otherwise there could be constitutional concerns similar to those SCOTUS previously raised in *Bush v. Gore*.
The electoral college is just affirmative action for rural people. Objecting to its abolition because it would "let California decide the election for the whole country" is the same idea as objecting to democracy because it "lets whites decide the election for the whole county". That's the whole point of democracy; if a certain group of people is larger than another group, they get a larger say!
There is some logic to the electoral college; people who live in cities depend strongly on rural areas for their food and other resources, but the needs of rural people are deeply foreign to the average city-dweller. So the concern is that without the electoral college, big cities would vote in myopic ways that ignore rural economic considerations and end up hurting the cities in the long run.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the founders didn't form the electoral college in order to give additional power to rural states. They created the electoral college as a compromise between people who wanted the president to be directly elected, and those who wanted the legislature to pick. Then we changed the state rules so that now we basically directly elect the president, but in a weird way that doesn't quite work.
The United States was not founded as a democracy.
Counting illegals in apportioning political representation and power is warps our politics and gives illegal aliens political power. Funny how this affirmative action is ignored.
Voting takes place one day a year.
Votes counted on the day of election.
Proof of American citizenship required.
Paper ballots only.
Mail-in ballots and absentee voting illegal, with few exceptions.
Deportation of millions of foreigners who were invited by Biden/Harris et al.
Changing census law so that only citizens are counted in congressional representation.
And then we can discuss keeping or abolishing the electoral college. Ignoring these conditions is either sinister or retarded.
I'm a liberal, and I would basically take 6 out of 7 of these just to abolish the Electoral College - in fact, it would be an easy trade. Deporting millions of people would be ghastly, and census law probably shouldn't change, but I would compromise on the latter and everything else. I think you'd be surprised how much the policies you described are conditioned on trying to edge out votes in a deeply unfair system, and if you make the system fair, there's less incentive to push back on (e.g.) voter ID laws. Liberals are very philosophically flexible when it comes to voting regulations, so long as the vote-counting system is majoritarian (and if they aren't flexible, they're bad liberals).
One (surmountable) problem with abolishing the EC, is that it will require federalizing elections. When the total vote count that matters, you can imagine the problems when single-party states run the elections, determine vote eligibility, etc. A state, especially a large state, could improperly effect the national election.
A solution, (that also does not require a constitutional amendment), is for Congress to require that all electoral votes be apportioned by according to state vote tallies. So a state with 5 electoral votes, that votes 45%/55% would allocate votes 3:2 to the two candidates. Thoughts?
Great article. This is why I subscribe to you.
The opposite of this idea, restoring the independence of electors to select whomever they want as originally intended ( as by #68 of The Federalist Papers), would also likely change Republican politics for the better.
In such a case electors would mostly resemble the composition of the Senate, who afaik are high human capital versions of Republicans, hence would be very unlikely to support someone like Trump.
Yeah, the EC showed its uselessness when the electors didn’t dump Trump in 2016.