The biggest problem with the electoral college is that it is the original gerrymander as states introduced winner takes all in the early 1800s as a partisan power-play. Keeping it is statically irrelevant if electors are proportional, it keeps wonks happy, and is a more achievable minimalist change

I can hear the "if" struggling in that phrase,

Meaning, what exactly? We are discussing options for reform of the US electoral system in this thread. Nobody claimed that it would be easy. There are plenty of opportunities to be cynical about the future of US democracy in 99.9% of the other threads on BlueSky, however thanks for your opinion.

I was just pointing out that proportionality is always a hard-fought and contentious issue.

So is gerrymandering, as we see in Texas. The electoral college is implicitly proportional by design, it was acts of state legislatures that destroyed that original intent by awarding all electors to only one of the candidates A version of proportionality works right now in both Maine and Nebraska

My overall idea is fairly radical, but I feel like now's the perfect time to make some dramatic changes. These racist, greedy psychos are burning the whole house down. It's now clear to a huge swath of the population how broken it all has been to enable this. If we let things return to ->

The fact that almost nobody is taking about these kinds of issues right now is a concern. Sure, opposition to Trump is the primary goal, however I fear that the lack of serious discussion is because the Left wants its turn. That kind of thinking is a recipe for mutually assured destruction.

We don't have a real left at the federal level except for some of the house and Sanders. Most of the dems in Congress are just peons for a different set of rich jerks. Look at how Schumer and Jeffries have been towards Mandani in the NYC mayoral race. They'd rather eat a shoe than say something ->

Agreed.

- nice about the man. It's brain dead and is going to hurt everyone. I'm pretty sure most of the establishment Dems still refuse to believe how serious the situation is. They're in denial, and will remain that way until they're arrested as political enemies and publicly executed on the Mall. It's ->

- absolutely bonkers to me how few people in the left or center seem to be taking this situation truly seriously. We need a few of the governors and any other truly progressive leaders to work together, with the leaders of the protest movements. Without coordination we're hosed. I'm trying things ->

- "normal" afterwards, we'll never get anywhere. The climate crisis will continue largely un-attended too, and it will just mean our decline and end takes longer. We have to use the chance this mess has given us to rebuild from the ground up.

I can't really think of easy ways to chop this into 300 character bits. I have no paywall on anything, I just needed a place to host writings I could link here. I'm not really liking Substack honestly, if anyone has other suggestions I'd be interested. I just lack the ability to build from scratch.

Most of the in depth governmental changes are about halfway in I think, labeled Act 3 right now. Should anyone actually be inclined to give it a read.

Coming from New Zealand, that sentence is absolutely bizarre to me.