McCain's Convention Bounce Essentially Gone

[The Ghost of RubangB]

Kasz216 said:

HappySqurriel said:

In the context of the original post, I do think that it is interesting that Obama is leading in national polls while sites like pollster.com and electoral-vote.com show John McCain winning the electoral college. Now I could be wrong, but I suspect this is because Barack Obama is winning in states with low per-capita electoral college votes by a very wide margin, while McCain is winning states with high per-capita electoral college votes by a much smaller margin.

That has been a democratic party complaint.

The electoral college gives slightly more per capita voting power to the smaller states to make sure they  don't get bullied by the states with more people.  Well that and because of the whole slaves thing... but i mean we don't have slavery anymore.

It also hurts independents.  I mean Ross Perot got 12% of the vote or something crazy like that... yet no electoral votes.  If he got electoral votes his party could of really stuck around as a real third option.

There are advantages to it as well and a lot of problems with a direct popular vote format.  So it's an interesting conudrum.

Also, the electoral vote is redistrubted once every 10 years, so every 10 years California is way behind in electoral power.  The population (and thus % of popular vote) here grows insanely fast, but our % of electoral vote grows super slow in big steps decades apart.  At any given election, your vote in Ohio is worth more than my vote in California.  Not to mention that the Electoral College mandates that campaigns only care about swing states.

And Ross Perot got 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992!!!  Then 8.8% in 1996.  Either way, the electoral college has become a scam that keeps us stuck with a 2 party system and makes the popular vote meaningless.  It's a good way to distribute Congressmen and Senators, sure, but they don't need to re-calculate votes based on those numbers anymore.