Here in the U.S., the presidential election season, like Christmas, seems to start earlier and earlier each time.
In keeping with this, the Democratic National Committee is making waves by announcing that it will exclude Fox News, which has the largest viewership of the major cable news networks by a considerable margin, from debate coverage of DNC presidential candidates.
Thomas Lifson outlines a number of reasons this may not be a good move.
One is that from a historical and strategy perspective:
Presidential debates inevitably favor the challengers. Trump can push them in that direction by agreeing to debates only if Fox News is included. That forces them to either accept FNC or have no debates at all. If they accept, that makes FNC the debate worth watching. The rest are discredited as Democrat "safe spaces,"
And it appears he has pounced and done exactly that from his twitter account:
Democrats just blocked @FoxNews from holding a debate. Good, then I think I’ll do the same thing with the Fake News Networks and the Radical Left Democrats in the General Election debates!
Really all either party has to do is A) not be crazy and/or B) keep their idiot mouths shut to win.
Neither of these seems to be in the cards dealt to either side, so it should be a heck of a ride.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Oakenshield on Monday March 11 2019, @07:11PM (4 children)
Did you even read what you wrote? Why do you think those "pissant" states that nobody lived in wanted these particular horse-trades? To prevent the "tyranny of the majority". Representatives are fielded based upon population. Why would they cede self determination to a populous state just to be a part of this new Constitution? I'm guessing logic was not in your curricula.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @09:20PM
Come now, please don't try to induce critical thinking into rote learning dude/dudette, heads will explode...
(Score: 3, Informative) by number11 on Monday March 11 2019, @11:26PM (2 children)
You seem to think that "self-determination" is for governmental units, rather than for humans. I dunno, maybe that made sense in an era where citizens were not permitted to vote for the President anyhow. Are you suggesting we go back to having state legislatures elect electors, who then get to vote on who'll be President? Are you that afraid of what the will of the people is?
Electoral votes are not based on population. California has one electoral vote per 719K inhabitants. Wyoming has one electoral vote per 193K inhabitants. So a Wyoming citizen's vote counts the same as 3.7 California citizen's votes in a Presidential election. Sounds more like "tyranny of the minority" to me. Granted, those two states are the most extreme cases.
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:42AM
Electoral votes are based on the closest approximation to the population of each state, given the conditions that each state always gets at least one rep, and the total number of reps is set at 435, AND each state gets two votes because of Senate representation (the latter distribution in the upper house is what really skews things).
Had we continued following the scheme the founders expected we'd have a much, much larger lower house legislature with better approximations to population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @04:08AM
California has an unfairly large share in proportion to the number of US citizens living in California. Basically, the state is cheating by welcoming illegals. That gives them a couple dozen undeserved electoral votes and members of the house.