Democrats won popular vote in the Senate, too

[finehoe]

The White House may not be the only institution in Washington that Democrats lost on Tuesday despite getting more votes than Republicans.

It turns out that Democrats also got more votes for the U.S. Senate than Republicans, and yet Republicans maintained their majority on Capitol Hill.

In results that are still preliminary, 45.2 million Americans cast a vote for a Democratic Senate candidate, while 39.3 million Americans voted for a Republican. (In the White House race, as of Thursday afternoon, Clinton had 60.1 million votes and Trump had 59.8 million.)

The problem for Democrats is that, much like the Electoral College, the number of votes matters less than where those votes are cast.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/11/10/democrats-won-popular-vote-senate-too/93598998/

[fsquid]

Congrats to them.

[FlaBoy]

I also heard that the Jags had more total yards than the Lions on Sunday...

[Adam White]

Great analogy. You really captured the spirit of the argument.

[JeffreyS]

I don't believe that analogy is very relevant to the argument because the argument isn't that Trump didn't win the contest. Technically he did.  The argument is whether or not it should be a popular vote.  I believe it should be a popular vote even after listening to much of the rational. Good arguments to be made for both it seems.  In the end no argument I have heard seems to offer a quantitative ratio of how skewed the vote is intended to reasonable be. Obviously if we have decided not to equally represent each person we should have a rational for doing so (lots of those floating around) and a rational for what level of skewing should be invoked (this I can't find).

[Adam White]

Great analogy. You really captured the spirit of the argument.

Not really, Representative Government isnt a metric.  Its a government.

Neither the yards ran nor the field itself requires anything of the people running across them.  You are talking about a game meant to measure the players, not a body of people choosing who to do the job of administering a country.  The metaphor not only falls flat, it just doesn't apply.

Elections are supposed to be metrics, and it decides which party has been charged with running the government,  but it doesn't change the underlying reality, and that is the people being governed.

If our metric no longer really represents those people when gauged, then its time to take a look at how we are measuring that metric.

But it doesn't confer upon the government itself (regardless of which faction is in the driving seat during a two year period) the autocratic option to pretend that only the narrow interests of a minority of voters are important.

I was being sarcastic.

[Radio Man]

It is disingenuous to compare total Senate votes nationwide to the individual races. The fact is that we have two Senators per state, and those states have vastly differing populations, and vote totals will follow thus. To aggregate them and make a conclusion for the nation as a whole would be akin to bringing together sales totals from convenience store brands both small and large, and then making a conclusion from the total, whilst forgetting that each entity is independent and distinct.

[finehoe]

It is disingenuous to compare total Senate votes nationwide to the individual races. The fact is that we have two Senators per state, and those states have vastly differing populations, and vote totals will follow thus. To aggregate them and make a conclusion for the nation as a whole would be akin to bringing together sales totals from convenience store brands both small and large, and then making a conclusion from the total, whilst forgetting that each entity is independent and distinct.

The problem for Democrats is that, much like the Electoral College, the number of votes matters less than where those votes are cast.  However, with so many Monday-morning quarterbacks saying the Democrats need to change their message, target different voters, and the like, it's useful to remember that more people are buying what the D's are selling compared to what the R's are offering. In a society that calls itself a democracy, that matters.

[coredumped]

But the united States is a Republic, not a democracy. Never has been a democracy.

[Tacachale]

None of this matters; the Senate is designed to represent the states, so obviously the state elections are all that matter. It's a separate point from the electoral college which is only tied to state elections more or less by default.

[finehoe]

None of this matters; the Senate is designed to represent the states, so obviously the state elections are all that matter. It's a separate point from the electoral college which is only tied to state elections more or less by default.

It matters if you're a Democrat who is being told you need to modify your positions in order to get more votes.  If more people are voting Democratic than are voting Republican, ipso facto, their positions are more in tune to what the people want than the GOP.  The fact that the system is set up so that the majority doesn't always win shouldn't obscure this point.

[Adam White]

But the united States is a Republic, not a democracy. Never has been a democracy.

This is simply not true at all - it's a myth that is perpetuated by civics teachers.

The USA is a representative democracy, which is a type of democracy. The terms "democracy" and "republic" are not mutually-exclusive. Whilst it's true that the USA is not a direct democracy, it's worth noting that direct democracy is regularly practised in the USA - the recent FL amendment votes are examples of that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/13/is-the-united-states-of-america-a-republic-or-a-democracy/?utm_term=.1b53280f9f19

The United States is not a direct democracy, in the sense of a country in which laws (and other government decisions) are made predominantly by majority vote. Some lawmaking is done this way, on the state and local levels, but it's only a tiny fraction of all lawmaking. But we are a representative democracy, which is a form of democracy.

And indeed the American form of government has been called a "democracy" by leading American statesmen and legal commentators from the Framing on. It's true that some Framing-era commentators made arguments that distinguished "democracy" and "republic"; see, for instance, The Federalist (No. 10), though even that first draws the distinction between "pure democracy" and a "republic," only later just saying "democracy." But even in that era, "representative democracy" was understood as a form of democracy, alongside "pure democracy": John Adams used the term "representative democracy" in 1794; so did Noah Webster in 1785; so did St. George Tucker in his 1803 edition of Blackstone; so did Thomas Jefferson in 1815. Tucker's Blackstone likewise uses "democracy" to describe a representative democracy, even when the qualifier "representative" is omitted.

[Tacachale]

None of this matters; the Senate is designed to represent the states, so obviously the state elections are all that matter. It's a separate point from the electoral college which is only tied to state elections more or less by default.

It matters if you're a Democrat who is being told you need to modify your positions in order to get more votes.  If more people are voting Democratic than are voting Republican, ipso facto, their positions are more in tune to what the people want than the GOP.  The fact that the system is set up so that the majority doesn't always win shouldn't obscure this point.

"We lost, but it doesn't matter" should be the Democrats' official motto. I think it already is in Florida.

[finehoe]

"We lost, but it doesn't matter" should be the Democrats' official motto. I think it already is in Florida.

But if you get more votes than the other guy and still lose, how do you fix it?

[Tacachale]

"We lost, but it doesn't matter" should be the Democrats' official motto. I think it already is in Florida.

But if you get more votes than the other guy and still lose, how do you fix it?

With the electoral college, the solution could be replacing it with actual voting. With the Senate, there's nothing to fix, it's working as it should.