Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, November 07, 2018

Democracy

Are you disappointed and disturbed that a campaign of bigotry, paranoia and lies succeeded in increasing the Republican Senate majority? Well keep this in mind, folks, from 538:

56.7 percent

Voters cast 44.7 million votes for Democratic Senate candidates and 32.9 million votes for Republican Senate candidates — in other words 57 percent of Senate votes went for Democrats. But given how states and cities and stuff work, and which of the former happened to be up for election this year, this gap translated into at least a two-seat gain for Republicans. Republicans will have a majority in the upper chamber, and are currently sitting on 51 senators with several races yet to be called.
The Senate, and the electoral college, are anachronisms that resulted from compromise with the slave states. We need a new constitution.

3 comments:

Mark P said...

We absolutely do need a new constitution, but I'm afraid the amendment process is rigged just like the Constitution itself, so it's highly unlikely it will ever happen, short of a revolution. I used to think we had a good government, but I just hadn't thought it through.

Don Quixote said...

Time to invoke Article 5.

As I've said before, deal with our history of genocide and enslavement and everything else will fall into place.

Bob Owen said...


It's been done 27 times. The system works, but there has to be fairly widespread agreement.