Do You Understand the Electoral College?
Some comments on the above video from a poster named Virgil G:
"Look at it this way, for instance, take the electoral map and look at how many counties Clinton won vs Trump. Trump blew her out of the water in rural areas of the states and where she got most of her votes were in the big inner cities because of the diverse demographic. In Illinois for example Trump lost the total popular vote obviously so Clinton won the state and electoral votes, but when you break it down Trump won about 90 counties vs Clinton's 12 counties. But the urban communities decided who won the state because of the diverse nature of the areas. She had more black and Hispanic support and it showed and she won by a large margin in Illinois nearly 1 million votes. Out of all the Counties in Illinois that Trump won (90 out of 102) she had plenty of support from 12 counties that made the choice for the whole state who clearly voted for Trump. She won 20 electoral votes for Illinois. You can kind of see why a national popular vote is a little unfair. The people in widespread rural Illinois wanted Trump and they were overtaken by the high population in their own geographically smaller area cities." "... if only geographically small cities with high population had the majority say in the election it would be far too unbalanced and unfair. Cook County is roughly 1,635 square miles Chicago (234 square miles) and the entire United States is roughly 3.7 million square miles. That's the urban areas in which Clinton won and had a vast more amount of votes. Illinois' population is 12.8 million and just over 5 million people voted in Illinois and Clinton won Cook County (population 5.2 million) and the 5 surrounding counties. That just goes to show how small geographically but large population areas can affect a majority in just one state. And we know That particular area is (northeast Illinois) vastly diverse in ethnicity and ethnicity was the target for Clinton." "Everyone's vote counts as just 1 equally. The idea is that there are so many more people in and around urbanized cites they out number rural areas. It wouldnt make any sense to vote more for one candidate in your state but a couple highly populated cities on the other side of the country with opposite views and beliefs decide who your president will be. Even with the electoral college Trump still lost Illinois even though he won 90 counties out 102. Why? Because Clinton accumulated most of her votes in and around Chicago and Cook county and other cities that have very high population. Though there were other counties she won but he won most of the counties by far and it still wasn't enough to win Illinois. Now just think if the election was based on the national popular vote, the largely populated states and cities would basically decide who our Country's President would be no matter if every single person in your state voted for the other candidate. That's not fair is it? Your state wouldn't have any say so. So with the electoral college it encourages the candidates to travel to every single state instead of just going to a few big cities to clinch masses of voters to win. With electoral college they have to strategically win every states majority approval to win their electoral votes and then move on to win majority approval in another state until they collect 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Every state has a set amount of electoral votes based on how many representatives they have for their state in the house of congress. The amount of representatives in a state is based on population, California has the highest population and thus has the most representatives (House reps 53, Senate reps 2) 55 and that corresponds to how many electoral votes they have. If the election was based off a popular vote California, Texas, and New York state could basically elect the president for the other 47 states based off of population alone."
