Understanding the US presidential election system

Today is the day after Labor Day in the US and traditionally it is seen as the start of the race for the elections to be held in November. This is, of course, laughable because in the US we have effectively a permanent election season, but the conceit is that other than political junkies, most people do not pay much attention to politics until after Labor Day. How true this is is anybody’s guess.

Another curious feature of US politics that can be bewildering to those outside the US (and even to many in the US) is the electoral college system that is used to decide who the presidential winner is. Each state is assigned a number of electoral college votes made up of two (for the two senators) plus the number of congressional seats it has. So Michigan, which has 13 congressional districts, has 15 electoral college votes. Washington DC is not a state but it has been assigned three electoral college votes as if it were a state with just one congressional district. So the total number of electoral college votes is 538: 100 (for the total number of senators) plus 435 (for the total number of congressional districts) plus 3 (for Washington DC). Hence a candidate needs 270 electoral college votes to win. In 2020, Biden defeated creepy Trump 306-232. This need not correlate with winning the popular vote nationwide. In 2000 and 2016, George W. Bush and creepy Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
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‘Weird’ is spreading to right wing UK politicians

Move over weird JD Vance, you’ve got company.

The Conservative party in the UK is going through the leadership search process after the shellacking they got in the last general election. It turns out that in some surveys, voters see them as being a little weird.

Conservative politicians have started to be seen as “weird”, and few members of the public – even including the party’s own voters – are able to identify the Tory leadership candidates, research suggests.
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The research by More in Common said the party struggled with relatability, particularly in Liberal Democrat areas, by focusing on topics “which excite the base, or the highly politically engaged” but were distant from ordinary people’s lives.

In a similar vein to the attack that US Democrats have levelled against Republicans, especially the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, the research found “there is a danger that the Conservatives have started to become seen as ‘weird’”.
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It said that in seats won by the Lib Dems “voters would explain that they were voting Lib Dem in these traditionally Tory strongholds because Ed Davey’s party just seemed more ‘normal’”.

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Trump learns that abortion politics is quicksand

For creepy Donald Trump, the politics of abortion must have once seemed so simple. I strongly suspect that he does not care one way or another about this issue so he could decide what to do purely on the basis of expediency, of what serves his own interests best politically and personally. Conscience or moral and ethical considerations would play no role, though there is little evidence that those factors ever play any role in his thinking.

When he ran for president in 2016, he made a big play for Christian fundamentalist and evangelical support, and abortion has always been a big issue for them. They hated the 1973 US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade that enshrined the right to an abortion in the constitution. So creepy Trump made a promise to them that he would appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn that ruling, and he did so. He said that the abortion issue was now in the hands of the states to decide how they wanted to deal with it, and he seemed to think that he could now walk away from it. As far as he was concerned, that should have been the end of that. He should have been able to bask in his success as the man who had done what previous Republican presidents had failed to do, and thus earned the undying gratitude of the anti-abortion community.
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Update on comments policy

Just a reminder of the new comments policy that I instituted a couple of weeks ago.

That policy laid out certain rules that I expect commenters here to follow. I want to make it perfectly clear that I have zero tolerance for people who try to find ways to skirt the rules, such as, for example, skirting the three comment limit by continuing it on another thread.

Readers may have noticed that there are no ads on any of the blogs on this network. Nobody is making any money at all. In fact, it is a money sink and PZ Myers pays for the costs of the servers out of his own pocket. The bloggers here blog because they want to create spaces for conversations on issues that they care about. ‘Clicks’ have no monetary value. That means that I do not care how many people come to the site.

For me, and I suspect for the other bloggers on this network, the rewards of blogging lie in creating space for a community of people to exchange ideas and views on a variety of topics. But that is pleasurable only if people post comments that are polite and respectful towards others, even while disagreeing. Some time ago, I wrote a post that a good philosophy of life is “Don’t be a jerk”. That would be a good rule to keep in mind when posting comments as well. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be rude or sneering or condescending towards others.

Almost all the commenters on this blog contribute positively and it is a pleasure to read their contributions and interact with them. It is a very few who think that a sneering, condescending, or abrasively argumentative tone is appropriate. My patience has been worn thin by some of their comments in the past. If I think, for any reason whatsoever, that someone is behaving like a jerk, I will ban them. I am in no mood to argue about this. I will not make any public announcement about who is banned. They will simply find that they can no longer post comments. If you are not sure if a comment that you are thinking of posting violates any of these rules, that is a good indication not to post it.

I also reserve the right to make exceptions to the rules at any time, if I feel it is warranted.

These decisions will be solely mine and will be final. There will be no discussion, debate, or appeal. If anyone objects because they think that I am being arbitrary, they are of course free to leave and never return.

Trump continues getting hammered on Arlington visit

Throughout his life, creepy Donald Trump has adopted the strategy taught him by his mentor, the late infamous Roy Cohn, that you never back down and never apologize. You always charge ahead and attack whoever crosses you, throwing everything you have at them. It helps if you have money and can threaten lawsuits. This can result in people being too intimidated to fight back, even when they are in the right. His staff clearly follow him in this.

But in the case of the Arlington cemetery fiasco, creepy Trump may have made a bad miscalculation. What should have been a one-day story if, as I suggested a few days ago, his staff had claimed a misunderstanding and quickly apologized to the cemetery staffer, has now become a multi-day story about violations of the law, thuggery towards government employees, and disrespecting the military.
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America is not great but not in deep decline

America has a lot of problems. It needs to invest far more in education and health care so that everyone gets access to decent quality levels of both. It needs to improve its social safety net so that we reduce the numbers of homeless and the level of food insecurity. And it needs to treat its undocumented immigrants and prison population far more humanely.

But when creepy Donald Trump and weird JD Vance talk of America’s decline, they are not calling for the improvement of any of those things. What they are describing is a largely fictional set of problems designed to make their supporters think that the country is on the verge of collapse when it is manifestly not.

Kevin Drum looks at eleven complaints they make and compares it with macro-economic markers of the economy and says that the country is nowhere close to being in decline and is in fact doing quite well. What creepy Trump and weird Vance are describing is based on (is anyone surprised?) lies. Drum sums up:
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What do windmills and bacon have in common?

They both occupy an inordinate amount of space in creepy Donald Trump’s brain.

His obsession with windmills is well known. For one, he thinks that that they kill birds in vast numbers. This has a superficial plausibility since some birds do die by hitting the blades. But that number is far fewer than the number killed by cats, power lines, or by flying into windows.

But bewilderingly, he also thinks that windmills kill whales in large numbers and that the sound of the windmills causes cancer.

So why does creepy Trump hate windmills so much to the point of delusion? Back in 2022, Philip Bump ventured an explanation.
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The election numbers games: polls, ratings, crowd sizes, money

American elections, because of their absurd length, tend to focus a lot on various statistics in order to gauge the changing political fortunes of the candidates. But while each measure provides some indication of how things are going, one needs to treat each with some caution.

Opinion polls: These are probably the best measure of where the race stands but there are important caveats. The weird electoral college system in the US tends to have a bias towards red states so national polls have to be treated with caution. There are roughly seven so-called swing states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina) that usually determine the outcome of the election. Polls taken in just those states have more significance than national polls. This does not mean that national polls are useless but it is estimated that Democrats need approximately a +4% margin in the national polls in order to have an even chance of winning the Electoral College.

Right now, it looks like Democrats are approaching that 4% margin, making the race even, which is a huge improvement from the situation just a month ago.

A fresh Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday showed Harris leading Trump nationwide by 45% to 41% – a margin consistent with other surveys since last week’s boisterous Democratic national convention in Chicago that confirmed the US vice-president’s status as the nominee.
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A Fox News poll on Thursday showed the vice-president with narrow leads in three out of four southern Sun belt states; 48 to 47% in Arizona, and 48 to 46% in both Georgia and Nevada. In the fourth, North Carolina – which Trump won by just 1.4% in 2020 – the Republican nominee was ahead by a single point, 48 to 47%.

The poll represented a big jump on recent numbers recorded by Biden, who trailed Trump by six points in Georgia in April and by five points in Nevada and Arizona as late as June.

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