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Who is spending money on winning California or New York? Republicans haven't broken 40% in 20 years in California, and except for the last election, ny is the same.
In fact the classic criticism of the electoral college is that if you live in CA or NY then your vote doesn't matter. The ad spending bears this out. And this isn't a new trend - twenty years ago candidates were also focusing little on California and New York and way way more on Ohio.
It doesn’t matter if your a red tribe Californian as the state has three huge blue urban centers that outweigh the red vote, so the state is a lock for tge blues. The state isn’t competitive, but on a federal level, if you removed those few locked in states, the country is actually far redder than most people actually believe. Further, there are states that are only blue because of a huge blue city in an otherwise red state. Illinois has been this way for decades. 99% of tge state are red tribe. The state is solid blue because of Chicago.
New York State is the same way. Georgia is competitive for democrats for the same reason.
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Yes, cities are blue, this is a fact.
Nevertheless, it's obviously false that presidential candidates are elected by the coastal elites or that candidates spend most of their energy on California and New York.
The majority of ad dollars and pandering do not go to convincing the coastal elites. The coastal elite vote is, as they say, priced in.
At best you can say that the coastal elite in California mean that the rest of the votes in the state don't matter. Of course, this is simply a popular vote, so it's a little strange to call them an elite when they apparently have the majority opinion in the state.
I agree, if you remove all the democrat voters the country would be red like you wouldn't believe.
As a point of fact, the state, like almost all states is winner take all, either by district or in the case of the president, the entire state. So the state goes democratic, and because of that, Democrats get an automatic 54 votes for president.
And the huge locked in states have basically kept democrats in the game much more than they would be if they weren’t guaranteed the entire state of California. Removing the large locked in states means Ds get something like 108 electoral votes in the presidential election rather than the close race we see. Now yes, some of this is organic but because those states are winner takes all, it’s a huge boost to blues to have 150 or more votes locked in before a vote even occurs.
Yes, by land area the US is more red, but deciding that land area is what matters is even more ridiculous than the people who think the popular vote is all that should matter. Chicago dominates Illinois because the population of Illinois is under 13 million people and the population of chicago and its suburbs is almost 10 million people.
You're justifying in terms of capital-centric paradigm that doesn't work at a continental scale.
One of the historical failing points of empires / large states is that the capital politics is going to prioritize the benefits of the capital region to the disadvantage of the peripheries. The periphery regions, in turn, begin to build up grievances and divisions against the capital regions, which- over time and exasperation- can lead to resistance / revolts / insurgencies that threaten the capital's ability to control the peripheries, particularly when the costs of trying to maintain control threaten the ability of the capital elites to maintain control. This elite capacity is further complicated by the willingness of elites to trade off elements of the periphery for personal advantage in control over the rest, or the ability of external states to support the periphery against the core.
Historically, there are three main outcomes of this: (a) the peripheries are lost until the capital reaches an equilibrium of being able to maintain control as a small-to-medium state, (b) an extensively resourced suppression state apparatus is built and maintained to suppress separation for as long as the means to do so are available, or (c), the core region's institutional powers are deliberately limited so as force greater consideration of the periphery territory's interests.
The US, as a federalist system, commits to (c), which in turn allows the periphery power centers to become miniature capital centers and dominate their peripheries... but only to the point within the system. The California elite can dominate California, but it can't dominate the power center of Nevada. The California elite can't in turn build their own suppression state, and so have to balance how they deal with people with the ability of people to migrate out. If California were to leave the protections of the federalist system, the capital-periphery dynamic of the state would change- not least because they could be supported by the now-external federalist state to break apart the California core zones against the periphery zones (see the prospect of California spin-off states).
The inverse of that federalist system, however, is the systemic protection of the voting power of the periphery states against capital-group interests. This means states who power is in a sense decided by land area (namely- they control an area of land sufficient to be a state, which has equal senate representation).
Rather than being a ridiculous way to allocate power in a system, this is the way to have a federal system in the first place once you hit a point where core centers of power can no longer maintain control of the peripheries. The alternatives are for a still-born system where periphery states wouldn't join in the first place, or a suppression-state system which the periphery states wouldn't willingly join in the first place and would have much higher tendencies to fight back against.
Systems where a populated core dominates the periphery aren't formed of willing members, they are conquered or converted from more restricted beginnings. There are reasons that even the EU has gotten less stable as it has tried to concentrate powers that functionally consolidate the influence of the core regions (Germany and France) at the expense of periphery regions.
If I were arguing for using the popular vote instead of the electoral college you might have a point but that's not my position. Neither is it my position that Chicago should be allowed to impose its culture and rules on wider Illinoisans. The capital of Illinois isn't even Chicago as a concession to this idea that the wider state ought not be totally dominated. What voting rule specifically do you even advocate here? That the ~20% of Illinoisans who don't live in Chicago but own a great deal of much cheaper land outside of the metropolitan area should dominate? It's going to be a hard sell to say that farmers are treated poorly by the federal government given how large farm subsidies are.
It seems worth noting that downstate Illinoisians seem to have far fewer complaints about their democrat state government than interior Californians or upstate New Yorkers or- notoriously- eastern Oregonians or upper peninsula Michiganders.
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