With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
California is an interesting case. It has more Republicans than Texas does. But because of the total dominance of the CDP, it's pretty pointless for Republicans to vote. The last Democrat for statewide office to get less than 50% was for Attorney General in 2010, a certain Kamala Harris, with typical vote shares hovering around 60%. Sometimes, because of the primary system, there isn't even a Republican on the ballot for the general.
This suppresses turnout of Republicans a lot, because why bother? But if Trump gets people excited enough to vote for him, even if it's pointless, maybe it'll knock the California Republican Party out of its stupor to realize some races are winnable.
California is one of those contexts where I somewhat roll my eyes at Americans complaining that the electoral college unfairly limits attention to only a few battleground states. It's not the electoral system that limits presidential campaign attention to states like California- it's the winner-takes-all structure decided by the state where the dominant party knows it can get more political value of taking the electoral votes enabled to the opposition population rather than split them.
It's a classic party versus state interest issue. If the state wanted to invite far more presidential attention / attempts to lobby to California interests, it could do so by some form of proportional distribution of electoral votes, say a system in which the house votes are allocated to the party that wins the representative district but the senate votes go to the majority winner. However, doing so would threaten the Democratic party with far fewer votes and thus ways to electoral success, and increase the risk of the Republican national party investing into the state and making the state Republicans competitive election winners, and thus compromise the California Democrats ability to be a core of the Democratic party if they had fewer / more vulnerable members.
In my ideal world, there could be some sort of state-swapping agreement in which states of roughly equivalent proportional size agree to mutually-conditionally transition to proportional models in exchange for eachother doing so. But this would still threaten the state-party standings in the national parties, and thus never happen.
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