I'd argue that accepting that as sound still means what he said:
"then there's something fundamentally flawed with what your party is offering"
A party in a democracy must have as a core value that it wants the majority to govern, that that majority is as representive as possible of the population, and that this majority should govern even if the political outcome is the opposite of what your party wants.
And then there’s other people, who don’t care so much about money, but rather the values. They will vote for a candidate that will actually make them worse off as long as they feel that candidate represents their values. And they will do it over and over again.
The only relevant fact about the electoral college is the number of electors assigned to each state.
You haven't been following the news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_electors_in_the_2016...
Colin Powell finished third in the election, and Mike Pence got more votes for VP than Trump got for president.
Also votes are suppressed in specific areas which does not good in a democracy. People should be able to choose their leaders, it should not be leaders are able to choose their voters.
What I mean to say is that having good voting access should not be a political issue in a democracy.
The purpose of government is to serve the citizenry. If increased voting among the citizenry hurts your party there is something wrong with your party’s message or governing performance.
Not in the last ca. 20-30 years, it certainly isn't.
I know there are also Republicans who care about this issue, but I don’t know of a better plan to fix it than this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Redistrict...
If anything Democrats have been way too timid about gerrymandering and have lost votes because of it.
Ballot harvesting is generally agreed (by both political parties) to have been a major factor in the last congressional elections in CA for example.
Personally I think it is a very strange dynamic to have 200-300 political operatives canvassing specific addresses in a district to deliver provisional ballots, assist a very targeted set of people in helping to fill out those ballets, and then driving those filled out ballots to the polling station on Election Day.
> Ada Briceño, chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County, said her staff and volunteers have collected mail-in ballots for GOP candidates and turned them in along with Democratic and independent ballots.
> Briceño said her favorite story about ballot collection came in 2018, after she knocked on the door of a Latino man in his 70s. Her told her he’d never voted because he’d been intimidated by the ballot and process. Briceño said she spent time walking him through how it worked and discussing the candidates with him. By the end of their talk, she said the man was crying because he’d just finished voting for the first time in his life. [1]
We don’t allow campaigning within a certain distance of a polling place. But the chair of the Democratic Party can knock on a man’s door with a provisional ballot, discuss the candidates, and help him vote?
Republican campaigns take the position that their voters would never hand over a completed ballot or accept “help” in filling one out.
> Fred Whitaker, chair of the Republican Party of Orange County, said they spent money on a ballot harvesting program in 2018 but saw almost no results. He said, “Republicans will basically tell you, ‘You’re not prying my ballot from my hand.’”
The SF Chronicle wrote a piece on the last CA election where Democrats gained more seats then they’ve ever won before in CA;
> California Democrats took advantage of seemingly minor changes in a 2016 law to score their stunningly successful midterm election results, providing a target for GOP unhappiness that is tinged with a bit of admiration. [2]
> ...They felt the hit on Nov. 6 — and in the days after, as late-arriving Democratic votes were tabulated and one Republican candidate after another saw leads shrink and then evaporate. This week, a seventh GOP-held congressional seat flipped to the Democrats, leaving Republicans controlling a mere seven of California’s 53 House districts.
In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”
[1] https://www.ocregister.com/what-is-ballot-harvesting-and-how...
[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-la...
Same goes for popular elections vs electoral college. This is skewed towards the GOP which is why Trump won despite losing the popular election.
Call it what you want (balance of power, "minority rights", or whatever), but some people's votes were just counted as less of a vote.
I mean you could apply your argument to defend dictators or monarchs. Democracy of course will of course be hurtful to Maduro (of Venezuela) but helpful to his opponents. That's an odd way to frame something that simply shouldn't necessarily have been in the first place. It's not as if God made the world evenly divided between Left and Right. It's a constantly shifting line between how Left and how Right and sometimes one side is simply more wrong than the other.
I mean if we decided that somehow Left and Right should always be evenly power balanced we wouldn't have such Leftist policies such as universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery.
But that does not mean anything is allowed in politics. It's about time Trump was seriously challenged on his lies.