Where the People Live

"An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod"-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Years ago I worked with an Irish programmer who could not see the difference between the U.S. Republican and Democratic parties. You're crazy I told him and then pointed out the differences as I saw them. Now a decade later I'm less sure that he was wrong. Regardless of who's in office we see the same behavior of graft, corruption, lobbying, and business as usual. Not much changes.

But that is not what I wanted to talk about today. The site http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/ has published a map for Electoral College reform to avoid the "bucket effect"; i.e. if you win California by just one vote you get all 55 electoral votes of the state. The reform map creates 50 new electoral districts of equal population (5.6 million) - if you win the district, you get that one vote. I do not see this happening. A much easier system is percentage distribution- if you get 55% of the vote you get 55% of the electoral votes. Of course if this happens then there is not much point to the electoral college and you can just use the popular vote to elect.

But once again, I'm off topic. What impressed me about the map is the population distribution within America. Look at how much land is needed to gather 5 million people in the mid-west and mountain west. While California is chopped into 6 zones . It's hard to see on the map, but cities like LA, and San Francisco are huge population zones onto themselves. FakeIsTheNewReal has another graphic comparing relative populations of states - but with a twist. Metropolitan regions are pulled out of each state and included in the comparison on their own merit. The top three US population areas are NY metro, LA metro, and Chicago metro, with the state of Texas taking fourth (after Houston, Dallas, etc are removed). California is fifth and to my surprise, North Carolina is sixth. There must be a lot of people in NC outside of large cities. Sounds pleasantly bucolic.

Bottom Line

While I live in a crowded region of a blue state (NY metro), my roots come from an uncrowded red state (Idaho), so my conservative views are in the minority here. Ironically my father, who has retired to his Idaho home, has become very liberal - making him a minority view there. I believe the reality of the blue-red political maps (metro areas vote liberal, "country" regions vote conservative). I'm just not convinced that either political party is actually representing the views of either red or blue. I also fear that our electoral college system is biased in favor of metropolitan zones. The upper half of NY state is red/conservative/country but is nearly always overwhelmed in votes by the blue NY city region. So blue takes all and the votes from upstate NY have no influence at all at the national level.

Update

The Amazon book review for "In Search of Self-Governance" by Scott W. Rasmussen shares the notion about our two political parties acting too much alike:

"Today, Americans are united. United in the belief that our political system is broken, that politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers. Add to this the growing disdain for the unholy alliance between the largest corporations and our government, and there's a lot of frustration festering in our country."