NYU stages gender-swapped Trump-Clinton debate to prove gender bias.
End up realizing they might have been biased against Trump after all.
So NYU staged a re-enactment of the debates, with Clinton acted by a man and vice versa.
The idea was that it would ‘confirm the suspicion that Trump’s aggression would not be tolerated from a woman’, and that ‘Clinton’s competence would seem even more convincing coming from a man’.
It turned out a little different, here are some reactions from the crowd:
We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election.
The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.”
Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was “really punchable” because of all the smiling.
There was someone who described Brenda King [the female Donald Trump] as his Jewish aunt who would take care of him.
Someone else described her as the middle school principal who you don’t like, but you know is doing good things for you.
I just noticed the Guardian uploaded the video but they unlisted it, meaning only people with the link can see it (pls thank me pls) and it doesn’t show up in searches or suggestions.
They basically hid it. Hmm. Why oh why would they do that?….
NEW YORK—Let’s all dogpile on the Electoral College.
It’s undemocratic, it’s outdated, it’s un-American. The New York Times (surprise, surprise) believes it should be abolished and we should go to a straight-up popular vote.
Because (this is the part they don’t tell you when they make this argument)…
Screw Wyoming.
Screw Vermont.
Screw Arkansas.
Screw Rhode Island.
Screw Delaware.
How could the concerns of those little pipsqueak states matter when
the massive voting blocs of the Upper West Side and West Hollywood and
Nob Hill and the South Side of Chicago are saying, “You people go back
to your bass boats and your cattle ranches and your plaid work shirts
and let us run the country as we see fit.”
The founders never intended 100 percent popular voting except at the
lowest levels of government, town halls and city councils, where
everyone knows one another. Anything beyond that, they wanted some kind
of check on the passions of the mob, so that nobody got railroaded just
because they were too small to defend themselves.
In other words, the Electoral College is set up to defend minorities.
That’s why Wyoming gets three votes out of 538. This one half of one
percent apparently outrages the East Coast Brahmans who would prefer to
ignore the small-government radicals from Laramie and Casper who keep
rabble-rousing for causes like better management of the wolf population
and more equitable policies for grazing livestock on federal land. Who
cares about crap like that? They should have exactly what their
population entitles them to—
.018 percent of the vote.
They can use the incredible clout of that .018 percent to get
whatever they need and then go back to roping their goats or whatever
they do.
The same goes for the syrup farmers in Vermont and the Walmart moguls
in Arkansas. Twenty-five of the fifty states have seven electoral votes
or fewer, so all those people who choose to live away from the crowded
urban areas can basically just go artificially inseminate themselves.
The most underrepresented people in America—citizens of the District of
Columbia—should have those three votes taken away so we don’t have to
listen to their constant bitching about, you know, how they’re not
represented in Congress at all.
So we’ve had 56 presidential elections, and in four of them the
Electoral College has differed from the popular vote. In 1876 it was
because the North and Far West went for Hayes over Tilden even though
the Democrats in the South came out in far greater numbers in an effort
to get rid of Reconstruction. In 1888 it was Benjamin Harrison
outcampaigning the solid Democratic South that wanted to keep Grover
Cleveland. In 2000 it was the South and the Midwest defeating the big
voter turnout on both coasts and the Rust Belt. And in 2016 it was, of
course, the South, the Midwest, and the Rust Belt defeating the heavily populated coasts.
So 7 percent of the time, the small states get pissed off and defeat
the big ones. This is exactly what the founders envisioned. They didn’t
want the planter class of Virginia or the mercantile millionaires of
Boston and Philadelphia running roughshod over Delaware, Rhode Island,
and Georgia. In fact, the small states feared the big states so much
that, without that provision, the Constitution never would have been
approved.
But there’s another reason why the popular-vote argument doesn’t hold
water. If the most recent presidential election had been decided by
popular vote, that doesn’t mean Hillary would have won, because the patterns of campaigning and spending would have been completely different.
Clinton didn’t campaign in Texas. Trump didn’t campaign in Illinois.
Cities like Houston and Denver and San Diego would be in play if they
weren’t written off in advance. To say “Trump would have lost if we had a
popular-vote system” is to create some alternative universe in which
the rules are all changed but the behavior of the candidates remains the
same.
The Electoral College was set up to prevent injustice. Majority rule
only works when everyone agrees on the basics. And one of those basics
that no one agrees on is the role of states in our federal system. If
you follow the New York Times argument to its logical conclusion, we shouldn’t have states at all. We should be more like Germany. Or Russia. Or Starbucks.
So
today is Thanksgiving, the holiday that commemorates a moment when two
entirely different cultures—the Puritans and the Native
Americans—decided that, even though they both had weird lifestyles and
they were never going to have anything in common, they were willing to
live peacefully side by side and respect each other’s traditions. Red
states and blue states need to be breaking bread together today, because
consider the alternative.
Does anyone wanna risk a straight-up popular national vote on
abortion? Or gun rights? Or gay marriage? Or sanctuary cities? Or
affirmative action? Or any of a hundred other issues that affect one
part of the population but nobody else cares about? Isn’t it better to
keep the messy system we have, where small groups of people can still
win because it’s impossible to ignore them? There comes a moment in
everyone’s life when you’re the minority.
There comes a moment when we’re all Wyoming.
Let’s make sure our cowboy hats are creased and our eccentric causes
are always heard. Let’s make sure the bigots in New York don’t eliminate
the bohemians in Bozeman. The Electoral College works just fine.
