Aug 21-25, 2020 (No 538 rating) Opinium Biden 56% Trump 41%
Is there a bit of an inconsistency between the betting on the House and on the presidency when you look at the polling and the odds?
According to oddschecker you can get 4-1 on the Republicans winning a majority in the House. 538 has the Dems 7.2% ahead in the generic congressional polling average, and they probably need to win by at least 5% (?) to retain majority (because of inefficient vote and gerrymandering). So you can get 4-1 on the Democrats getting at least 2% less in November for the House than in current polling.
538 has Biden 7.3% in the national polling average. He probably needs to win by at least 2% in order to win the EC. So you can get evens on the Democrat getting at least 5% less in November for the presidency than in current polling.
I realise these are different races, but that seems to be a massive difference, and either one or both of the 4-1 on Republicans in the House, or Evens for Biden, has got to be value?
Trump won very narrowly in 2016, and Republicans won the House 241 to 194.
Cheers, Trump/Biden and the house might not be perfectly correlated but it's close enough to act as a hedge £200 on for me.
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
Bozo’s Quarantine Hokey Cokey continues as Ministers are considering reimposing quarantine measures for those arriving in the UK from Portugal as coronavirus cases rise, sources have told the BBC.
A change this Thursday would be the fifth affecting travellers and travel companies to Portugal since this whole sorry farce commenced.
Well your choices are:
A) no restrictions blanket ban C) flexible restrictions which change as the facts change
C) seems like a logical approach to me
Why is your data better than the people reviewing the information and making the decision on behalf of the government?
I'm with Charles on this one. Everyone knows that travelling abroad at the moment carries the risk of restrictions changing and at short notice. If you are not prepared to take the risk that you might need to isolate at the end of the trip, or worse cut the trip short, you should not be undertaking foreign travel, not at the moment.
Exactly. I have absolutely zero sympathy for those caught by a change in the regulations. They have taken a very obvious gamble and lost. Tough. The only reasonable alternative is the blanket ban (by which I mean no travel without quarantine) which would be simpler to administer.
Agree, but it would be useful if the govt released its logic for its decisions. Similarly for the internal lockdown decisions. Today's Manchester decisions seem completely irrational. Presumably there are sensible reasons but who knows. It is also in the government's interest as currently they look incompetent.
I am equally bewildered by the new restrictions in Glasgow. I mean, as a general proposition shutting down large parts of Glasgow seems a step forward but the rationale for these particular restrictions escape me.
It does help Nicola play mother of the nation once again I suppose but once again jobs will be lost.
It is only in people's houses so not shutting down anything , which is whole point of limiting it.
Which by remarkable coincidence are the same reasons the same decision was made for the North West.
Not a criticism it is probably the right move for both though I'm guessing when Sturgeon does the same as Boris it results in fewer snide remarks than when it is the other way around.
It may very well be that the underlying mechanics are the same anyway.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
I agree. The electoral college is stupid. I don't know anybody who would set it up as it is now if they were starting from scratch.
Our electoral system is not perfect either, as constituencies are not equal-sized. The Outer Hebridies has 21k and the Isle of Wight has 105k. So an OH vote is worth 5x what an Isle of Wight vote is worth.
But Wyoming has one EC vote per 190k people while CA has one per 1.4m, a 7x disparity. So our system is better, from tha point of view.
If we finally get around to eqalising constituency sizes, of course, that's another matter.
The US system has varying EC votes all the way through, for example, you could compare Texas vs. Rhode Island or Florida vs. South Dakota
Once our new boundaries are put in place, you should have 645 constituencies all within a narrow range, and then 5 undersized constituencies due to being islands
The EC system would be better if it wasn't 'winner takes all', and the EC votes were split according to the votes cast. In the last list HYUFD posted the two main candidates were within a percentage point of each other in most cases; in only the last two was there what one might describe as a clear lead for one or the other, yet in each case all the EC votes were cast one way or the other.
The best argument I've heard for the EC, or at any rate for some state-based system, is what happens if there's a very close result. If it's in the EC, then the recount chaos is limited to one or two states, as in 2000.
But can you imagine the nationwide chaos and paralysis if the candidates were within a couple of thousand votes of each other nationwide? Each party would look for tiny anomalies and claim that because a few posters showed the wrong opening times for a polling station in Rhode Island or Alaska, the other side has stolen the election.
National chaos for months or years.
The only time it was less than half a million in the last 100 years was 1960 when Kennedy won by 113 thousand
Yes, and claims that that election was stolen have resonated ever since.
Which was held under the stupid electoral college system. It is much easier to rig the electoral college than the national vote, it can only take a few thousand votes in a couple of swing states.
Bozo’s Quarantine Hokey Cokey continues as Ministers are considering reimposing quarantine measures for those arriving in the UK from Portugal as coronavirus cases rise, sources have told the BBC.
A change this Thursday would be the fifth affecting travellers and travel companies to Portugal since this whole sorry farce commenced.
Well your choices are:
A) no restrictions blanket ban C) flexible restrictions which change as the facts change
C) seems like a logical approach to me
Why is your data better than the people reviewing the information and making the decision on behalf of the government?
I'm with Charles on this one. Everyone knows that travelling abroad at the moment carries the risk of restrictions changing and at short notice. If you are not prepared to take the risk that you might need to isolate at the end of the trip, or worse cut the trip short, you should not be undertaking foreign travel, not at the moment.
Exactly. I have absolutely zero sympathy for those caught by a change in the regulations. They have taken a very obvious gamble and lost. Tough. The only reasonable alternative is the blanket ban (by which I mean no travel without quarantine) which would be simpler to administer.
Agree, but it would be useful if the govt released its logic for its decisions. Similarly for the internal lockdown decisions. Today's Manchester decisions seem completely irrational. Presumably there are sensible reasons but who knows. It is also in the government's interest as currently they look incompetent.
I am equally bewildered by the new restrictions in Glasgow. I mean, as a general proposition shutting down large parts of Glasgow seems a step forward but the rationale for these particular restrictions escape me.
It does help Nicola play mother of the nation once again I suppose but once again jobs will be lost.
It is only in people's houses so not shutting down anything , which is whole point of limiting it.
Which by remarkable coincidence are the same reasons the same decision was made for the North West.
Not a criticism it is probably the right move for both though I'm guessing when Sturgeon does the same as Boris it results in fewer snide remarks than when it is the other way around.
PS Haven't seen anyone else make that connection, actually. Discussion seems to be more on the apparent contrast between domestic and public measures. But I haven't looked much.
ONS death figures out for week ending 21st August 2020. Deaths well above average, but increase not caused by Covid which represented just 1.4% of deaths. It is so clear that the obsession with Covid is stopping treatment for all the other illnesses that kill people.
Thank you Doctor.
Rather than try and be clever why don't you come up with a reason that death figures are now well above average when Covid deaths are just 1.4% of the total.
Yes, but having managed to get Covid under control at the moment proves that there’s no need to have Covid under control.
I think that’s the rationale.
Nearly 7 times as many people died in the week ending 21/8/2020 of flu/influenza than died of Covid.
My rationale is to deal with the obvious backlog of people who are not being treated and are dying. Thats the reason for the excess deaths. Surgeries are remaining shut due to a disease that amounted to 1.4% of deaths.
That stat seems amazing.
I don't think you could argue this is because of measures to get COVID under control, because those measures would work just as well with stopping the flu.
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
Big Dom believes he can fix procurement at the MoD. Procurement is a shit show so actually an excellent target for Big Dom. However his blog writings on the subject imply he has fuck all knowledge about what the actual problems are and how to fix them.
The worry is that he will make the situation worse because he is a clueless idiot and the taxpayer will be out another few billion on boats that won't ever sail or planes that won't ever fly.
Big Dom doesn't believe in Ships or planes or guns. A teenager with a drone can take out our aircraft carriers.
It's a decision that all 4 ministers in the UK responsible for education took. I find it vanishingly unlikely that that was not as a result of professional guidance by the Civil Service rather than 1 of those Ministers going off on one.
Yes the obsession some have with Williamson well after this story has finished, when all 4 did the same thing, is bizarre to say the least. If Williamson was the odd one out it'd be different but the obsession with him is trying to make him the odd one out instead.
My daughter returned to school today. My youngest starts for the first time on Friday. That is what really matters to Education now - this twisted obsession on the dumped algorithm still going on in the week that millions are returning to school is strange to say the least.
90% of the UK live in England, is it bizarre that most people blame the man in charge of education in England rather than focus on what happens elsewhere? Its not like 25% live in each nation so should get equal attention.
At the time it was relevant? No. Though I don't see why it shouldn't have been mentioned at the time.
Later on when it is clear that all had done the same thing, all have stayed and frankly the news story in education is the return to school? Yes absolutely it is bizarre.
If there were issues with back to school right now there isn't the slightest chance people would still be talking about the exams. That there isn't is a good thing - but lets not say that lets harp on about last months stories instead. Its pathetic.
It is nice for governments when major blunders are forgotten quickly but it's not always the case. Sometimes they stick in people's minds for quite some time and lead to a loss of trust and (ultimately) to defeat at the polls.
Big Dom believes he can fix procurement at the MoD. Procurement is a shit show so actually an excellent target for Big Dom. However his blog writings on the subject imply he has fuck all knowledge about what the actual problems are and how to fix them.
The worry is that he will make the situation worse because he is a clueless idiot and the taxpayer will be out another few billion on boats that won't ever sail or planes that won't ever fly.
That isn't a worry of mine, it's an expectation...
No 10 plans to create online “ID cards” for British citizens as Dominic Cummings tries to revolutionise the use of data across government.
Under proposals announced yesterday each person will be assigned a unique digital identity to help them with such tasks as registering with a new GP.
The details have yet to be finalised but it is understood that legislation could be amended to remove the need for landlords to check tenants’ immigration documents. Witnesses would no longer have to attend signings on property deals in person, and bar owners would be able to digitally verify drinkers’ ages.
What happens to all my data? Who has access to it? Who can they share it with? What can they do with it?
I definitely dont want mandatory ID cards. I can see benefits in replacing my NHS number, NI number, passport number, driving licence number, govt gateway numbers with a single number. If we are just adding yet another number it is bonkers.
The bigger issue is that the NI database and the NHS database (and probably many others) are full of duplicate entries and errors which are almost impossible to correct.
There's a definite huge advantage to a single login online to access all government services, but as with the last ID card proposal it needs to be done in a way that doesn't involve a massive tracking database behind it. The government, of course, would love the big database. All governments and their civil servants love big databases.
My university experienced a “cyber attack” 5 days ago and pretty much all systems are STILL down with no end in sight. Campus is locked down whilst they “deal with it”.
I’m starting to have serious concerns about their ability to deliver a distance learning curriculum...
Bozo’s Quarantine Hokey Cokey continues as Ministers are considering reimposing quarantine measures for those arriving in the UK from Portugal as coronavirus cases rise, sources have told the BBC.
A change this Thursday would be the fifth affecting travellers and travel companies to Portugal since this whole sorry farce commenced.
Well your choices are:
A) no restrictions blanket ban C) flexible restrictions which change as the facts change
C) seems like a logical approach to me
Why is your data better than the people reviewing the information and making the decision on behalf of the government?
I'm with Charles on this one. Everyone knows that travelling abroad at the moment carries the risk of restrictions changing and at short notice. If you are not prepared to take the risk that you might need to isolate at the end of the trip, or worse cut the trip short, you should not be undertaking foreign travel, not at the moment.
Exactly. I have absolutely zero sympathy for those caught by a change in the regulations. They have taken a very obvious gamble and lost. Tough. The only reasonable alternative is the blanket ban (by which I mean no travel without quarantine) which would be simpler to administer.
Agree, but it would be useful if the govt released its logic for its decisions. Similarly for the internal lockdown decisions. Today's Manchester decisions seem completely irrational. Presumably there are sensible reasons but who knows. It is also in the government's interest as currently they look incompetent.
I am equally bewildered by the new restrictions in Glasgow. I mean, as a general proposition shutting down large parts of Glasgow seems a step forward but the rationale for these particular restrictions escape me.
It does help Nicola play mother of the nation once again I suppose but once again jobs will be lost.
It is only in people's houses so not shutting down anything , which is whole point of limiting it.
Which by remarkable coincidence are the same reasons the same decision was made for the North West.
Not a criticism it is probably the right move for both though I'm guessing when Sturgeon does the same as Boris it results in fewer snide remarks than when it is the other way around.
It may very well be that the underlying mechanics are the same anyway.
Oh absolutely. And an advantage of multiple governments is that each can learn from the successes and failures of the other.
I just find it amusing that when those same restrictions were introduced here for the same stated reasons there was widespread criticism - one common refrain was that the Tories are OK with you meeting others so long as its at a venue with a card reader - and whenever in general the English/UK government follows the Scottish government's lead on something that is what people want to talk about rather than discussing the merits of the decision itself.
Now Sturgeon has done the same thing as south of the border, for the same reasons - and people are discussing her actions on its own merits. Not on the fact that its copying the English, nor on the idea that its all about money.
To be honest, the discussion your side of the border is much more mature and sensible than it is over here!
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/trump-support-kyle-rittenhouse-election-violence.html?via=homepage_taps_top ...Yes, he is indeed different. Franklin Foer noted this week in the Atlantic that this administration has declared an all-out war on politics. As he observes, “Although [Trump] goes through the motions of pursuing an outright victory, much of his rhetoric is now focused on discrediting the political process itself. He disparages the rules that govern politics and the institutions that facilitate it. He seems to want his supporters to believe that their electoral participation will be rendered meaningless.” Trump, who refused to say he would concede if he lost the election in 2016, is now saying outright that the election will be invalid if he loses, because mail-in voting is inherently fraudulent; or because if the results are unknown on the night of Nov. 3, they won’t count; or because, as he and his attorney general continue to insist, foreign entities are interfering with any ballots that come by mail. Trump is promising to conscript law enforcement personnel to act as poll watchers who will be on standby to intimidate voters at their polling places (this is not lawful either). And the culmination of all these efforts to muddy the voting waters and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election results has come this week, as Trump complacently approves of lawless convoys of Trump supporters bent on performing what they believe to be law enforcement functions without any legal authority...
...He is implying, if not stating outright, that the legal work need not be conducted by lawyers at all, and that the conduct itself need not be lawful, so long as the ends are just. His supporters, he insists, day after day, are the only true Americans, and he keeps telling them that as patriots they are free from whatever norms once governed how we protest, how we enforce the law, and also how we vote. And as gun-toting countrymen, he says, aloud, they are well within their rights to decide when actual law enforcement is not doing its job correctly, and they can cross state lines with weapons of war to pick up the slack themselves. None of this is surprising for a man who could not bring himself to disavow Nazis marching in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, three years ago, but it is a tectonic shift in absolution, and also in incitement. It’s also a red flag for anyone who thinks this type of rhetoric won’t be directed at voters, voting, and ballot counting, in a few short weeks.
No 10 plans to create online “ID cards” for British citizens as Dominic Cummings tries to revolutionise the use of data across government.
Under proposals announced yesterday each person will be assigned a unique digital identity to help them with such tasks as registering with a new GP.
The details have yet to be finalised but it is understood that legislation could be amended to remove the need for landlords to check tenants’ immigration documents. Witnesses would no longer have to attend signings on property deals in person, and bar owners would be able to digitally verify drinkers’ ages.
What happens to all my data? Who has access to it? Who can they share it with? What can they do with it?
I definitely dont want mandatory ID cards. I can see benefits in replacing my NHS number, NI number, passport number, driving licence number, govt gateway numbers with a single number. If we are just adding yet another number it is bonkers.
The bigger issue is that the NI database and the NHS database (and probably many others) are full of duplicate entries and errors which are almost impossible to correct.
There's a definite huge advantage to a single login online to access all government services, but as with the last ID card proposal it needs to be done in a way that doesn't involve a massive tracking database behind it. The government, of course, would love the big database. All governments and their civil servants love big databases.
How would you do it without a big database?
Apart from anything else, without a big database it would be impossible to challenge when the ID system made a decision you thought was wrong, because there'd be no record of it.
And you can be sure that the ID system would get things wrong, so you'd need a correction mechanism.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
I would be curious to see historical winner takes all election results for the UK Parliament on a County basis. I suspect it would be even more lopsided than the actual results but it might not be.
Here's the 1997 election on a map. Looks pretty blue.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
Indeed Trafalgar Group's polling in Florida 2016 was awful, not good. They were the worst pollster.
Trump won Florida by +0.4% - which would be rounded by the pollsters to be a tie which was the results two of the other pollsters gave. The best pollsters for Florida Quinnipac and CBS/YouGov both called it a tie, which is what it was.
Gravis and CNN/ORC were next best, they had it at Clinton +1 which is much closer to Trump +0.4 than Trump +4 is.
Opinion Savvy at Clinton +2 were by the slightest of margins closer than Remington Research were at Trump +3.
Last of the list is Trafalgar at Trump +4. Booby prize for them.
That's what I've been saying. What's also worth pointing out is that he can do this without a Bond villain style control room in the White House directing affairs. He keeps on pumping out the rhetoric on Twitter and his followers will, to a certain extent, self-organise without him. It's a different world to Watergate.
Makes perfect sense. If you're going to take responsibility and aren't happy with the advice you're getting - then change the people giving you the advice.
Can you imagine actually trying to develop policy for defence, education etc in a setup like that? Productive work would be totally impossible.
Those policy areas reflects the bees in Cumming's bonnet. He runs the government so gets to choose what to focus on. Note, Johnson is being kept well away from the real decision-making. The office is outside Downing Street for this reason, I think.
No 10 plans to create online “ID cards” for British citizens as Dominic Cummings tries to revolutionise the use of data across government.
Under proposals announced yesterday each person will be assigned a unique digital identity to help them with such tasks as registering with a new GP.
The details have yet to be finalised but it is understood that legislation could be amended to remove the need for landlords to check tenants’ immigration documents. Witnesses would no longer have to attend signings on property deals in person, and bar owners would be able to digitally verify drinkers’ ages.
What happens to all my data? Who has access to it? Who can they share it with? What can they do with it?
I definitely dont want mandatory ID cards. I can see benefits in replacing my NHS number, NI number, passport number, driving licence number, govt gateway numbers with a single number. If we are just adding yet another number it is bonkers.
The bigger issue is that the NI database and the NHS database (and probably many others) are full of duplicate entries and errors which are almost impossible to correct.
There's a definite huge advantage to a single login online to access all government services, but as with the last ID card proposal it needs to be done in a way that doesn't involve a massive tracking database behind it. The government, of course, would love the big database. All governments and their civil servants love big databases.
How would you do it without a big database?
Apart from anything else, without a big database it would be impossible to challenge when the ID system made a decision you thought was wrong, because there'd be no record of it.
And you can be sure that the ID system would get things wrong, so you'd need a correction mechanism.
You'd do it with an authentication database, that simply validates the login for each department's systems.
The dangers are when the department's systems are integrated back into the authentication database, they you have a single system that can track your activities around multiple departments.
Positive uses for this are things like HMRC and DWP systems talking to each other, which happens already, or NHS services checking the NI database for entitlement reasons - but it needs to be done very carefully and with privacy in mind.
I wouldn't trust the civil service nor any of the usual suspects in the software world to do anything but try and replicate Facebook. A sensible government (Yes I know) would appoint a privacy guardian to oversee the process, probably an academic with a long record of advocacy in this area and accountable to a Select Committee rather than a minister.
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
So what, you don't get EC votes by voteshare margin you get EC votes by winning a state even if you win by only 1 vote.
Trafalgar Group as I said was the only pollster who correctly forecast Trump was ahead in enough states to win the Electoral College and the Presidency.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Oh yes we would.
As I said Essex, Yorkshire, Kent etc all have populations in the millions which are bigger than US states with EC votes from Vermont and Maine to Wyoming and Montana. Indeed Yorkshire has a bigger population than 29 US states. As the UK population is a fifth of the US population the comparison also works on a percentage basis.
The entire point of the discussion is leftwingers would want to impose artificial regions to make it easier to win on our historic counties which have a history longer in fact than US states, the US uses states in the EC we would use counties in a UK EC.
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
So what, you don't get EC votes by voteshare margin you get EC votes by winning a state even if you win by only 1 vote.
Trafalgar Group as I said was the only pollster who correctly forecast Trump was ahead in enough states to win the Electoral College and the Presidency.
You could get Trafalfar's results by taking the polling average and adding about 5 points to the Republican score.
Just been watching PMQ's. The Prime Ministers performance must rank as the most pathetic, embarressing, incompetent, unprofessional and worrying that I have ever seen. He is clearly completely out of his depth. I cannot see him surviving much longer. There must be someone on the Government benches he could speak up for th government, he just blunders and tries to spread confusion, but has met the wrong person in Starmer. The IRA reference was quite despicable.
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
So what, you don't get EC votes by voteshare margin you get EC votes by winning a state even if you win by only 1 vote.
Trafalgar Group as I said was the only pollster who correctly forecast Trump was ahead in enough states to win the Electoral College and the Presidency.
Which doesn't make them right, their polls were awfully wrong and by coincidence not accuracy got the right result.
Every single pollster last time said that Trump was within margin of error of being the winner in Florida. Every single pollster was more accurate in Florida than Trafalgar.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Is there any protection in our constitution against this actually happening on a counties basis? I guess not?
When you look at Johnson at PMQs you can see why the Tories want to abolish our current system of democracy. The only way Johnson can remain PM is if all scrutiny of him - in Parliament, via the courts and through the media - is abolished. He is totally out of his depth.
Bozo’s Quarantine Hokey Cokey continues as Ministers are considering reimposing quarantine measures for those arriving in the UK from Portugal as coronavirus cases rise, sources have told the BBC.
A change this Thursday would be the fifth affecting travellers and travel companies to Portugal since this whole sorry farce commenced.
Well your choices are:
A) no restrictions blanket ban C) flexible restrictions which change as the facts change
C) seems like a logical approach to me
Why is your data better than the people reviewing the information and making the decision on behalf of the government?
I'm with Charles on this one. Everyone knows that travelling abroad at the moment carries the risk of restrictions changing and at short notice. If you are not prepared to take the risk that you might need to isolate at the end of the trip, or worse cut the trip short, you should not be undertaking foreign travel, not at the moment.
Exactly. I have absolutely zero sympathy for those caught by a change in the regulations. They have taken a very obvious gamble and lost. Tough. The only reasonable alternative is the blanket ban (by which I mean no travel without quarantine) which would be simpler to administer.
I agree with your general point. However as quarantine updates appear to be happening weekly it doesn't seem a massive organisational burden to announce the changes midweek for implementation at the weekend. That would give people a couple of days to trigger their contingency rather than be caught out by the shutters coming down the same evening.
Isn't giving people a couple of days notice a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted?
Since infections data, hospital data etc is a very lagging indicator by the time we have made a decision to quarantine a country its because there's already a problem - not because we have the foresight to know there will be a problem.
Personally I think we should give people less notice not more. The moment a decision is made it should be implemented ASAP.
I assume governments are tracking infection rates prior to a go/no go on a quarantine decision They also seem to bundling several decisions into one weekly announcement. It is a case of making that call a couple of days earlier than they currently do, so people have time to get out ahead of the deadline. There will be times where imposition of quarantine can't wait in a rapidly worsening situation; people will have to take that risk.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Oh yes we would.
As I said Essex, Yorkshire, Kent etc all have populations in the millions which are bigger than US states with EC votes from Vermont and Maine to Wyoming and Montana. Indeed Yorkshire has a bigger population than 29 US states. As the UK population is a fifth of the US population the comparison also works on a percentage basis.
The entire point of the discussion is leftwingers would want to impose artificial regions to make it easier to win on our historic counties which have a history longer in fact than US states, the US uses states in the EC we would use counties in a UK EC.
“You as a leftwinger” Bzzt.
“Would want to make it easier to win...” We’re not proposing an Electoral reform; we’re illustrating how rolling up populations to a big size and allocating population-based seats/EVs on a winner-take-all basis leads to distorted and perverse outcomes.
The point of this wasn’t to derive a system for a favoured party to win, old chap.
Bozo’s Quarantine Hokey Cokey continues as Ministers are considering reimposing quarantine measures for those arriving in the UK from Portugal as coronavirus cases rise, sources have told the BBC.
A change this Thursday would be the fifth affecting travellers and travel companies to Portugal since this whole sorry farce commenced.
Well your choices are:
A) no restrictions blanket ban C) flexible restrictions which change as the facts change
C) seems like a logical approach to me
Why is your data better than the people reviewing the information and making the decision on behalf of the government?
I'm with Charles on this one. Everyone knows that travelling abroad at the moment carries the risk of restrictions changing and at short notice. If you are not prepared to take the risk that you might need to isolate at the end of the trip, or worse cut the trip short, you should not be undertaking foreign travel, not at the moment.
Exactly. I have absolutely zero sympathy for those caught by a change in the regulations. They have taken a very obvious gamble and lost. Tough. The only reasonable alternative is the blanket ban (by which I mean no travel without quarantine) which would be simpler to administer.
I agree with your general point. However as quarantine updates appear to be happening weekly it doesn't seem a massive organisational burden to announce the changes midweek for implementation at the weekend. That would give people a couple of days to trigger their contingency rather than be caught out by the shutters coming down the same evening.
Isn't giving people a couple of days notice a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted?
Since infections data, hospital data etc is a very lagging indicator by the time we have made a decision to quarantine a country its because there's already a problem - not because we have the foresight to know there will be a problem.
Personally I think we should give people less notice not more. The moment a decision is made it should be implemented ASAP.
I assume governments are tracking infection rates prior to a go/no go on a quarantine decision They also seem to bundling several decisions into one weekly announcement. It is a case of making that call a couple of days earlier than they currently do, so people have time to get out ahead of the deadline. There will be times where imposition of quarantine can't wait in a rapidly worsening situation; people will have to take that risk.
Just because decisions are being made in a weekly announcement doesn't mean the decisions are finalised days earlier.
If the decisions are only being finalised on Friday and then announced on Friday then its not possible to announce the decisions on Wednesday. If the decisions are being made on Wednesday but announced on Friday then absolutely they should be announced on Wednesday . . . but then why shouldn't they be implemented from Wednesday too?
As soon as the call is made, it should be implemented.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Is there any protection in our constitution against this actually happening on a counties basis? I guess not?
It would have to be introduced by act of parliament. In many other countries including the US, the hurdle to change the constitution is considerably higher than passing a normal law, in the UK there is no difference.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Oh yes we would.
As I said Essex, Yorkshire, Kent etc all have populations in the millions which are bigger than US states with EC votes from Vermont and Maine to Wyoming and Montana. Indeed Yorkshire has a bigger population than 29 US states. As the UK population is a fifth of the US population the comparison also works on a percentage basis.
The entire point of the discussion is leftwingers would want to impose artificial regions to make it easier to win on our historic counties which have a history longer in fact than US states, the US uses states in the EC we would use counties in a UK EC.
Very mushy PMQs where everyone: Boris, Starmer and Blackford etc were following the same lines rehearsed regularly over the past month or so. No surprises. I doubt it will change anyone's mind.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Oh yes we would.
As I said Essex, Yorkshire, Kent etc all have populations in the millions which are bigger than US states with EC votes from Vermont and Maine to Wyoming and Montana. Indeed Yorkshire has a bigger population than 29 US states. As the UK population is a fifth of the US population the comparison also works on a percentage basis.
The entire point of the discussion is leftwingers would want to impose artificial regions to make it easier to win on our historic counties which have a history longer in fact than US states, the US uses states in the EC we would use counties in a UK EC.
I suppose Essex would be Alabama.
No, culturally Essex would be New Jersey.
Lincolnshire might be Alabama with the highest Brexit vote of any county in the UK
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
Indeed Trafalgar Group's polling in Florida 2016 was awful, not good. They were the worst pollster.
Trump won Florida by +0.4% - which would be rounded by the pollsters to be a tie which was the results two of the other pollsters gave. The best pollsters for Florida Quinnipac and CBS/YouGov both called it a tie, which is what it was.
Gravis and CNN/ORC were next best, they had it at Clinton +1 which is much closer to Trump +0.4 than Trump +4 is.
Opinion Savvy at Clinton +2 were by the slightest of margins closer than Remington Research were at Trump +3.
Last of the list is Trafalgar at Trump +4. Booby prize for them.
What we don't see is who was consistently most accurate from this. Anyone can have a lucky night when n =1
We also don't know what weightings for turnout and differential turnout were applied then, and whether those weightings have been revised. The overcompensation by polling companies refighting the last election seems to be a genuine phenomenon, but how universal is it?
When you look at Johnson at PMQs you can see why the Tories want to abolish our current system of democracy. The only way Johnson can remain PM is if all scrutiny of him - in Parliament, via the courts and through the media - is abolished. He is totally out of his depth.
It's truly embarrassing. And tbh if, having seen him in the job, we vote him in again we will have lost all self-respect. You cannot be patriotic and not have higher standards than this for who represents us.
Mayor's taking responsibility for their own area? It will never take off.
No doubt people will criticise this as a u-turn but I don't see why listening to the elected Mayor of a region is a reason for criticism. If they overruled Burnham then the same people screaming "u turn" would be crying out about why Burnham is being overruled and calling it a betrayal of local government. Utterly absurd to call this a u-turn.
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
So what, you don't get EC votes by voteshare margin you get EC votes by winning a state even if you win by only 1 vote.
Trafalgar Group as I said was the only pollster who correctly forecast Trump was ahead in enough states to win the Electoral College and the Presidency.
Which doesn't make them right, their polls were awfully wrong and by coincidence not accuracy got the right result.
Every single pollster last time said that Trump was within margin of error of being the winner in Florida. Every single pollster was more accurate in Florida than Trafalgar.
So what, the only thing that mattered was forecasting who won the state, which Trafalgar did in Florida but also Michigan and Pennsylvania which other pollsters did not.
Now that might mean you can pay more attention to Trafalgar Group's Michigan and Pennsylvania polls this year and look at other pollsters for Florida polling but that does not dispute the fact Trafalgar Group were correct in 2016 in calling the winner
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Oh yes we would.
As I said Essex, Yorkshire, Kent etc all have populations in the millions which are bigger than US states with EC votes from Vermont and Maine to Wyoming and Montana. Indeed Yorkshire has a bigger population than 29 US states. As the UK population is a fifth of the US population the comparison also works on a percentage basis.
The entire point of the discussion is leftwingers would want to impose artificial regions to make it easier to win on our historic counties which have a history longer in fact than US states, the US uses states in the EC we would use counties in a UK EC.
“You as a leftwinger” Bzzt.
“Would want to make it easier to win...” We’re not proposing an Electoral reform; we’re illustrating how rolling up populations to a big size and allocating population-based seats/EVs on a winner-take-all basis leads to distorted and perverse outcomes.
The point of this wasn’t to derive a system for a favoured party to win, old chap.
We can take it further: England get 500 EC votes Scotland 60 Wales 30 and NI 20. Whoever wins the election in England becomes prime minister, the others are irrelevant.
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
States / constituencies elect MPs
The MPs caucus together and select a head of the executive branch
What’s fundamentally different?
What's fundamentally different is the winner-takes-all nature of the Electoral College at a statewide level. Take Florida 2000 as a famous example. Even discarding the hanging chads issues, there were millions of votes for both candidates but only a few hundred lead for Bush and the result was that all 25 Electoral College votes went to Bush. A few hundred votes the other way and all 25 would have switched to Gore.
The UK doesn't switch MPs en bloc like that. Since the 1948 Representation of the People Act each constituency in the United Kingdom is only worth a single MP. That is completely different to the US system.
As an example if we were to operate like the USA then take Lancashire. Lancashire has 16 constituencies which have gone 11 to the Tories, 4 to Labour and 1 to The Speaker. Under the US system it would be 16 to the Tories. In 2005 Labour won 12 of 15, with the Tories getting 3, while in 2010 the Tories won 9, Labour 6 and LDs 1. In the US system it would have been 2005 Labour 15, Tories 0; in 2010 Tories 16, Labour 0.
That's a big difference.
I've had a quick look at the past 4 elections. If we'd voted by region as Electoral College votes, we'd have had:
2019: Con 356, Lab 217, SNP 59, DUP 18 votes. Con win 2017: Con 302, Lab 271, SNP 59, DUP 18. No winner; vote goes "to the house" and voted on by State Delegations. Con have 5, Lab have 5, SNP have 1, DUP have 1. House likely split; there'll be a lot of voting until either the SNP buckle and put the Tories in (unlikely!) or the DUP get bought off by Labour. Likely Corbyn Government. 2015: Exactly the same as 2017. 2010: Con 302, Lab 330, Sinn Fein 18. Gordon Brown wins.
Prior to that, Labour did better, so I can't see a Tory Government under Regional Electoral College voting until 1992 at the closest, and I wouldn't be surprised if they still lost there. Labour's grip on the Electoral Votes of Scotland, Wales, the NE, NW, London, and Yorkshire and Humberside prior to that means they've got 330 EVs in the bag. Since losing Scotland's EVs to the SNP, that's been hit, but that's not helpful to the Tories. The 2019 election, instead of being a Tory landslide, came down to a 4% gap in Yorkshire & Humberside. A tiny slip there puts Labour back into Downing Street.
Except if we were voting on EC college lines we would be voting by county not on regional lines, Essex and Kent and Yorkshire for example have bigger populations than some US states.
In the US the regions are the West, South, North East and Midwest, which split 50-50 in 2016 between Trump and Hillary even though Trump won a big EC margin statewide.
At GE19 the Tories won 40 counties, Labour won just 6.
No, we wouldn't. Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000 Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Oh yes we would.
As I said Essex, Yorkshire, Kent etc all have populations in the millions which are bigger than US states with EC votes from Vermont and Maine to Wyoming and Montana. Indeed Yorkshire has a bigger population than 29 US states. As the UK population is a fifth of the US population the comparison also works on a percentage basis.
The entire point of the discussion is leftwingers would want to impose artificial regions to make it easier to win on our historic counties which have a history longer in fact than US states, the US uses states in the EC we would use counties in a UK EC.
I suppose Essex would be Alabama.
No, culturally Essex would be New Jersey.
Lincolnshire might be Alabama with the highest Brexit vote of any county in the UK
Ok that's better. Yes, Lincolnshire. They would have lots of guns there if they could and many of them are missing some teeth. I can see "dueling banjos" in Lincolnshire.
When you look at Johnson at PMQs you can see why the Tories want to abolish our current system of democracy. The only way Johnson can remain PM is if all scrutiny of him - in Parliament, via the courts and through the media - is abolished. He is totally out of his depth.
That was how he survived despite being a useless Mayor of London
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
So what, you don't get EC votes by voteshare margin you get EC votes by winning a state even if you win by only 1 vote.
Trafalgar Group as I said was the only pollster who correctly forecast Trump was ahead in enough states to win the Electoral College and the Presidency.
Which doesn't make them right, their polls were awfully wrong and by coincidence not accuracy got the right result.
Every single pollster last time said that Trump was within margin of error of being the winner in Florida. Every single pollster was more accurate in Florida than Trafalgar.
So what, the only thing that mattered was forecasting who won the state, which Trafalgar did in Florida but also Michigan and Pennsylvania which other pollsters did not.
Now that might mean you can pay more attention to Trafalgar Group's Michigan and Pennsylvania polls this year and look at other pollsters for Florida polling but that does not dispute the fact Trafalgar Group were correct in 2016 in calling the winner
No. The only thing that mattered is forecasting the shares accurately.
Who wins the state matters in the actual results, it is not what the pollsters are bothered by. If it was, then two of the pollsters wouldn't have accurately called it a tie which is exactly what it was after rounding.
If a pollster had said that Trump would get 99% and Clinton 1% then that would have also been calling the correct result but it wouldn't have made them an accurate pollster.
I think Trump will very narrowly win the election.
But I don't think his Presidency will last the four years... Nixon-Redux?
In which case will Pence be Gerald Ford or Nikki Haley? Agnew was Nixon's VP in the 1972 election but Nixon replaced him with Ford in December 1973 after Agnew resigned over tax evasion charges
Just been watching PMQ's. The Prime Ministers performance must rank as the most pathetic, embarressing, incompetent, unprofessional and worrying that I have ever seen. He is clearly completely out of his depth. I cannot see him surviving much longer. There must be someone on the Government benches he could speak up for th government, he just blunders and tries to spread confusion, but has met the wrong person in Starmer. The IRA reference was quite despicable.
What was despicable was the Labour party continuing to tolerate Corbyn and then electing him leader despite his collaboration with the IRA. As someone who chose to be on his front bench, as opposed to those who stayed on the back benches, SKS does have to justify that even although his own record in anti-terrorism is clearly a lot stronger than Boris's.
It was a very, very poor effort by Boris today though.
I missed PMQs but it sounds like Boris had a car crash
It is clear he cannot continue in this vein and his backbenchers need to start writing their letters to the 1922 and for Boris to leave in the early new year
If Trump does win in the EC, but loses the national vote by 2-3%, how sustainable is this? In a national vote for a national president, with effectively a 2 party system, that the party that keeps getting millions fewer votes keeps winning?
Add to that the gerrymandered House and Senate, and the highly political judiciary stuffed with increasingly out of touch with majority opinion ultra-conservative judges - isn't it a recipe for the disenfranchised majority getting extremely pissed off?
It's entirely sustainable. The Democrats if that happens will need to target states other than California.
That is the system working by design and not a flaw.
It IS a flaw, and plenty of Americans hate it quite understandably. The fact that you think it is a good system doesn't make it one. None of the better democracies use such a stupid system, and I don't see any country racing to copy it. That might tell you something.
We use an equivalent one in the U.K.
Fundamentally it represents communities not individuals.
You disagree. Fine. But it’s not stupid
The Electoral College is stupid (if you like it, fine, but it is still stupid). And we do not use an equivalent one in the UK.
I agree. The electoral college is stupid. I don't know anybody who would set it up as it is now if they were starting from scratch.
Our electoral system is not perfect either, as constituencies are not equal-sized. The Outer Hebridies has 21k and the Isle of Wight has 105k. So an OH vote is worth 5x what an Isle of Wight vote is worth.
But Wyoming has one EC vote per 190k people while CA has one per 1.4m, a 7x disparity. So our system is better, from tha point of view.
If we finally get around to eqalising constituency sizes, of course, that's another matter.
The US system has varying EC votes all the way through, for example, you could compare Texas vs. Rhode Island or Florida vs. South Dakota
Once our new boundaries are put in place, you should have 645 constituencies all within a narrow range, and then 5 undersized constituencies due to being islands
The EC system would be better if it wasn't 'winner takes all', and the EC votes were split according to the votes cast. In the last list HYUFD posted the two main candidates were within a percentage point of each other in most cases; in only the last two was there what one might describe as a clear lead for one or the other, yet in each case all the EC votes were cast one way or the other.
The best argument I've heard for the EC, or at any rate for some state-based system, is what happens if there's a very close result. If it's in the EC, then the recount chaos is limited to one or two states, as in 2000.
But can you imagine the nationwide chaos and paralysis if the candidates were within a couple of thousand votes of each other nationwide? Each party would look for tiny anomalies and claim that because a few posters showed the wrong opening times for a polling station in Rhode Island or Alaska, the other side has stolen the election.
National chaos for months or years.
The only time it was less than half a million in the last 100 years was 1960 when Kennedy won by 113 thousand
2020 will be a cleaner election than 1960.
"Mazo, the Herald-Tribune reporter, later said that he "found names of the dead who had voted in Chicago, along with 56 people from one house.""
Polls moving well for Trump in the critical states. Forget the national vote, its the individual states, no good Biden getting 65 - 70% in New York etc, Trump seems to be ahead in the marginal areas, which won him the election last time. It is not just one pollster now, its becoming a steady drift. Lets be fair Biden does not look the ticket really, does he, very staid, no inspiratriuon for the young to go out and vote.Over the past week seems as if Trump has picked up the undecided, presumably the violence in Wisconsin. The Oregon sitiation died not seem to have any impact on the national situation. 4 more years, God help us.
So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
Trafalgar Group had Trump ahead in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida in 2016 too, no other pollster had Trump ahead in all those 3 states and without them Trump would have lost
You keep saying that. But if you want to look at the track record from 2016 (which is anyway of questionable value) the honest question to ask would be which pollster was closest in those states - (and other states)? For example, I think there were 8 pollsters who got the Florida result closer than Trafalgar in 2016 in their last polls before the election.
So what, you don't get EC votes by voteshare margin you get EC votes by winning a state even if you win by only 1 vote.
Trafalgar Group as I said was the only pollster who correctly forecast Trump was ahead in enough states to win the Electoral College and the Presidency.
Which doesn't make them right, their polls were awfully wrong and by coincidence not accuracy got the right result.
Every single pollster last time said that Trump was within margin of error of being the winner in Florida. Every single pollster was more accurate in Florida than Trafalgar.
So what, the only thing that mattered was forecasting who won the state, which Trafalgar did in Florida but also Michigan and Pennsylvania which other pollsters did not.
Now that might mean you can pay more attention to Trafalgar Group's Michigan and Pennsylvania polls this year and look at other pollsters for Florida polling but that does not dispute the fact Trafalgar Group were correct in 2016 in calling the winner
No. The only thing that mattered is forecasting the shares accurately.
Who wins the state matters in the actual results, it is not what the pollsters are bothered by. If it was, then two of the pollsters wouldn't have accurately called it a tie which is exactly what it was after rounding.
If a pollster had said that Trump would get 99% and Clinton 1% then that would have also been calling the correct result but it wouldn't have made them an accurate pollster.
In which case Trafalgar Group most correctly forecast the shares in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2016.
Trafalgar's final Pennsylvania poll had Trump up by 1% and Trump won by 0.7%, the final RCP average had Clinton up by 2.1%.
Even Trafalgar's final Michigan poll had Trump up by 2%, Trump won by 0.3% so still closer compared to the final RCP average which had Hillary up by 3.6%.
DavidL. Despicable, the comment was and despicable the PM was. Whatever Corbyn may have done or said, is totally irrelevant. It was directed at Starmer , that cannot and should not be avoided. I voted Tory in 2015!
Comments
All August Wisconsin polling All August Pensylvania Polling All August polling Michigan All August Florida Polling (only 3! Wow that's mental) So with the exception of the Trafalgar Group who are these "not just one" pollsters?
I don't think you could argue this is because of measures to get COVID under control, because those measures would work just as well with stopping the flu.
There's a definite huge advantage to a single login online to access all government services, but as with the last ID card proposal it needs to be done in a way that doesn't involve a massive tracking database behind it. The government, of course, would love the big database. All governments and their civil servants love big databases.
I just find it amusing that when those same restrictions were introduced here for the same stated reasons there was widespread criticism - one common refrain was that the Tories are OK with you meeting others so long as its at a venue with a card reader - and whenever in general the English/UK government follows the Scottish government's lead on something that is what people want to talk about rather than discussing the merits of the decision itself.
Now Sturgeon has done the same thing as south of the border, for the same reasons - and people are discussing her actions on its own merits. Not on the fact that its copying the English, nor on the idea that its all about money.
To be honest, the discussion your side of the border is much more mature and sensible than it is over here!
...Yes, he is indeed different. Franklin Foer noted this week in the Atlantic that this administration has declared an all-out war on politics. As he observes, “Although [Trump] goes through the motions of pursuing an outright victory, much of his rhetoric is now focused on discrediting the political process itself. He disparages the rules that govern politics and the institutions that facilitate it. He seems to want his supporters to believe that their electoral participation will be rendered meaningless.” Trump, who refused to say he would concede if he lost the election in 2016, is now saying outright that the election will be invalid if he loses, because mail-in voting is inherently fraudulent; or because if the results are unknown on the night of Nov. 3, they won’t count; or because, as he and his attorney general continue to insist, foreign entities are interfering with any ballots that come by mail. Trump is promising to conscript law enforcement personnel to act as poll watchers who will be on standby to intimidate voters at their polling places (this is not lawful either). And the culmination of all these efforts to muddy the voting waters and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election results has come this week, as Trump complacently approves of lawless convoys of Trump supporters bent on performing what they believe to be law enforcement functions without any legal authority...
...He is implying, if not stating outright, that the legal work need not be conducted by lawyers at all, and that the conduct itself need not be lawful, so long as the ends are just. His supporters, he insists, day after day, are the only true Americans, and he keeps telling them that as patriots they are free from whatever norms once governed how we protest, how we enforce the law, and also how we vote. And as gun-toting countrymen, he says, aloud, they are well within their rights to decide when actual law enforcement is not doing its job correctly, and they can cross state lines with weapons of war to pick up the slack themselves. None of this is surprising for a man who could not bring himself to disavow Nazis marching in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, three years ago, but it is a tectonic shift in absolution, and also in incitement. It’s also a red flag for anyone who thinks this type of rhetoric won’t be directed at voters, voting, and ballot counting, in a few short weeks.
Apart from anything else, without a big database it would be impossible to challenge when the ID system made a decision you thought was wrong, because there'd be no record of it.
And you can be sure that the ID system would get things wrong, so you'd need a correction mechanism.
Tipping point 2018: Cali-10
Dem 52.30% GOP 47.70%
2018 Overall
Dem % GOP %
53.4% 44.8%
Tipping point 2016 (218th seat) Michigan-11
Dem 40.2%
GOP 52.9%
2016 House:
GOP 49.1% (46.1% Presidency)
Dem 48.0% (48.2% Presidency)
House GOP lean of 4.6% in 2018 or 12.7% in 2016 !
Counties would be an absurd comparator.
In England, they range from 39,000 population, with a median population of just over 900,000
Compare with the US; states range from just under 600,000, with a median population of 4.7 million.
The entire point of the discussion was about lumping in loads of votes like that on winner-take-all. FPTP gets less and less distorted the smaller the constituency size; comparing counties with States totally sidesteps the entire point.
Trump won Florida by +0.4% - which would be rounded by the pollsters to be a tie which was the results two of the other pollsters gave. The best pollsters for Florida Quinnipac and CBS/YouGov both called it a tie, which is what it was.
Gravis and CNN/ORC were next best, they had it at Clinton +1 which is much closer to Trump +0.4 than Trump +4 is.
Opinion Savvy at Clinton +2 were by the slightest of margins closer than Remington Research were at Trump +3.
Last of the list is Trafalgar at Trump +4. Booby prize for them.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/fl/florida_trump_vs_clinton-5635.html
Those policy areas reflects the bees in Cumming's bonnet. He runs the government so gets to choose what to focus on. Note, Johnson is being kept well away from the real decision-making. The office is outside Downing Street for this reason, I think.
The dangers are when the department's systems are integrated back into the authentication database, they you have a single system that can track your activities around multiple departments.
Positive uses for this are things like HMRC and DWP systems talking to each other, which happens already, or NHS services checking the NI database for entitlement reasons - but it needs to be done very carefully and with privacy in mind.
I wouldn't trust the civil service nor any of the usual suspects in the software world to do anything but try and replicate Facebook. A sensible government (Yes I know) would appoint a privacy guardian to oversee the process, probably an academic with a long record of advocacy in this area and accountable to a Select Committee rather than a minister.
Trafalgar Group as I said was the only pollster who correctly forecast Trump was ahead in enough states to win the Electoral College and the Presidency.
As I said Essex, Yorkshire, Kent etc all have populations in the millions which are bigger than US states with EC votes from Vermont and Maine to Wyoming and Montana. Indeed Yorkshire has a bigger population than 29 US states. As the UK population is a fifth of the US population the comparison also works on a percentage basis.
The entire point of the discussion is leftwingers would want to impose artificial regions to make it easier to win on our historic counties which have a history longer in fact than US states, the US uses states in the EC we would use counties in a UK EC.
But I don't think his Presidency will last the four years... Nixon-Redux?
Every single pollster last time said that Trump was within margin of error of being the winner in Florida. Every single pollster was more accurate in Florida than Trafalgar.
Bzzt.
“Would want to make it easier to win...”
We’re not proposing an Electoral reform; we’re illustrating how rolling up populations to a big size and allocating population-based seats/EVs on a winner-take-all basis leads to distorted and perverse outcomes.
The point of this wasn’t to derive a system for a favoured party to win, old chap.
Announce another U-turn during PMQs...
https://twitter.com/JoeMurphyLondon/status/1301120693153804289
If the decisions are only being finalised on Friday and then announced on Friday then its not possible to announce the decisions on Wednesday. If the decisions are being made on Wednesday but announced on Friday then absolutely they should be announced on Wednesday . . . but then why shouldn't they be implemented from Wednesday too?
As soon as the call is made, it should be implemented.
Lincolnshire might be Alabama with the highest Brexit vote of any county in the UK
Astonishing.
But it's just a feeling. Somehow it seems like he's never really got back to normal since March...
Once Brexit is done on 31/12/20 (which is what he was elected on) I just can't see him hanging around for long...
We also don't know what weightings for turnout and differential turnout were applied then, and whether those weightings have been revised. The overcompensation by polling companies refighting the last election seems to be a genuine phenomenon, but how universal is it?
I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to be in pain
Actually I tell a lie, they did predict hilary would just squeak through in Colorado by 0.44%.
No doubt people will criticise this as a u-turn but I don't see why listening to the elected Mayor of a region is a reason for criticism. If they overruled Burnham then the same people screaming "u turn" would be crying out about why Burnham is being overruled and calling it a betrayal of local government. Utterly absurd to call this a u-turn.
Now that might mean you can pay more attention to Trafalgar Group's Michigan and Pennsylvania polls this year and look at other pollsters for Florida polling but that does not dispute the fact Trafalgar Group were correct in 2016 in calling the winner
Who wins the state matters in the actual results, it is not what the pollsters are bothered by. If it was, then two of the pollsters wouldn't have accurately called it a tie which is exactly what it was after rounding.
If a pollster had said that Trump would get 99% and Clinton 1% then that would have also been calling the correct result but it wouldn't have made them an accurate pollster.
It was a very, very poor effort by Boris today though.
It is clear he cannot continue in this vein and his backbenchers need to start writing their letters to the 1922 and for Boris to leave in the early new year
A bit of hard work and research aka being a girly swot does help.
https://twitter.com/mrtcharris/status/1301123806866673664?s=21
PB Lefties: Boris was cr*p. Win for our side.
Just like every PMQs......
"Mazo, the Herald-Tribune reporter, later said that he "found names of the dead who had voted in Chicago, along with 56 people from one house.""
Pointless
Trafalgar's final Pennsylvania poll had Trump up by 1% and Trump won by 0.7%, the final RCP average had Clinton up by 2.1%.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/pa/pennsylvania_trump_vs_clinton-5633.html
Even Trafalgar's final Michigan poll had Trump up by 2%, Trump won by 0.3% so still closer compared to the final RCP average which had Hillary up by 3.6%.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/mi/michigan_trump_vs_clinton-5533.html
Such an idiot as one Jeremy Corbyn MP...
Somehow Tories will still find fault
Also as a matter of interest do you watch it normally
*gets out special complaining writing paper...*