Plus the whole electoral college thing amplifies the importance of swing states. The Presidential vote isn't derived from the popular vote.

For example, California has 30-something delegates. If you win California you win ALL the delegates. Even if you win by one vote. Some states do split the delegates in line with the proportion of the vote captured, but in most states it is "winner takes all".

I think that this amplifies the polarisation of political viewpoints, eg a conservative Republican has no incentive to campaign in California because he knows he won't win it - whether he loses by 10% or 30% is irrelevant.

Iowa caucus underway.

Cruz appears to be in front of Trumpies.

-PB

This was my thought but all you have to do is go to a university these days and see the Greenies and Socialists going nuts. It certainly was the case 6 years ago at Griffith. That's why I think the Greens would get more power, the radical parties have some access to the young demographic.

It costs an astronomical amount of money to get elected in the USA right? Like 10's of millions?

Oh of course, that's why they place so much emphasis on the swing states that aren't nailed to a particular side.

I would argue that the USA is a country of extremes - you look at New York, LA, and some other areas and they have political preferences that you could recognise as European, and certainly more similar to us.

It is in other areas like the mid-west and the bible belt that produce the evangelical brand of politics we recognise as "crazy American".

If you ever look at a US voting map, you will see that (broadly speaking) the coasts vote Democrat, and the centre votes republican.

The general rule with voluntary voting is that the young, and the poor, generally vote in lower numbers than the retired and the wealthy.

So it increases the voting power of those who generally vote more to the right than the left.

Obviously, because we have had compulsory voting for so long, it is hard to measure what would occur here, but that skewing of the voter demographic vs the population demographic is seen across many countries with voluntary voting, not just the USA.

Also - there is the issue about parties spending money to get people out to vote. I think that voluntary voting would turbo charge political fundraising. And we already have some of the most lax fundraising disclosure laws already.

America has legalized gay marriage in many states (don't know actual numbers) and yet we have not. While they may identify as more religious, especially through polls, they're at least more progressive (on this front at least).

While media focuses on the 'crazy evangelists', are we really much different?

Do any schools in Australia actively teach creationism?

As a point of relevance, there was a peer reviewed paper (happy to link) written about why the poor in America vote, on average, against their own economic self interest. Briefly, it was because the right wing Republican Party manipulate them through religion. Would you agree we are less religious? I think it would be less of an issue.

I would think the average Joe would be worse off. People who work 50+ hours a week and can't be bothered researching which politician to vote for. Out of curiosity, how are the poor and vulnerable worse off?

I think if we were voluntary, we'd have a lot more power with the Greens and other extreme parties. As it stands, people vote labour or LNP because they have to vote.

How about the issue I raised regarding how it affects the voting demographic? I would have assumed that you would share my concerns that the poor and vulnerable are worse off under a voluntary voting system....

As I clearly stated, you have to attend the voting booth, with the threat of a fine if you don't.
Undemocratic. Plain & simple.

This. In our local election all candidates were claiming to be pro-jobs which resulted in a small parcel of land off my street being developed into a high density residential area and screwing over everyone's house prices.

I wrote a mean word next to every candidates name because I'm mature :)

The issue could be people who randomly tick boxes when they vote because they're uninformed and don't care. I would think this would make up an insignificant percentage of the total vote.

Should know very soon who the candidates will be.

-PB

2 points in response:

1) You are not actually required to vote. You are only required to have your name marked off the electoral roll. So if you had an ethical position of not wanting to vote for anyone, you can just walk off once your name is marked off.

2) I actually agree with you in principle, as I am generally pro-civil liberties. However, I think the practical implications are problematic, hence why I agree with this slight imposition on freedom for this specific case.

The main reason is that if we got rid of compulsory voting tomorrow then you would increase the incentive for political parties to raise money - they would have to spend in order to encourage people to turn up. Increased electoral spending will then create problems like you see in the USA regarding catering to special interests in exchange for donations. That does exist in Australia now, but will dramatically worsen.

The other issue is the simple fact that the people who will not vote are the young, the poor, and minorities. They are generally disengaged from the political process as is. Remove compulsory voting and they will disproportionately drop out of the process altogether.

I don't disagree with you in principle. However, I think the consequences on the most vulnerable in society of the alternative means that I think the current arrangement is preferable.

Out of interest, what percentage of eligible voters do you think would vote in elections in Australia if we made voting voluntary?

In 1922 (the last federal election with voluntary voting) the turnout was only 59%.

Council elections in South Australia are not compulsory - in 2014 the turnout was only 30% or so. I realise council elections are not the same as federal/state elections, but I would be worried about turnout if we got rid of compulsory voting.

Totally disagree.
It's hypocritical to call ourselves a democracy and then make voting booth attendance compulsory.
Population size is irrelevant.
If people choose not to care about politics, that's their decision. That's democratic.

Very interesting article.

I think over here we sometimes underestimate the importance of generating enthusiasm in US elections. With compulsory voting, we don't have to enthuse people in order to get them to vote. You only need to get them to vote your way.

I think compulsory voting is a good safeguard against charisma being too much of a defining factor as to who gets voted for. And it also ensures that everyone's interests are more likely to be catered to, rather than those who vote in a voluntary system (old and rich).

:^o :-" :-"

[youtube]-dY77j6uBHI&t[/youtube]

NY Times have endorsed Clinton and Kasich respectively; both good choices I reckon. Obviously both Clinton and Sanders are better options than any Republican, but Kasich seems to be the most moderate of the bunch, and he also seems genuine, which is a rare quality in politics.

The problems plaguing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid

January 30, 20163:55pm

IT is the question every politician hates. A curly one that none of them want to answer. The T question. What about trust?

Hillary Clinton’s time came exactly a week out from the first votes being cast in the race to the White House. This young millennial voter from Iowa had a question for the frontrunner.

“It feels like there is a lot of young people like myself who are very passionate supporters of Bernie Sanders,” Taylor Gipple said, referencing Clinton’s key opponent for the Democratic nomination.

“And I just don’t see the same enthusiasm from younger people for you. In fact, I’ve heard from quite a few people my age that they think you’re dishonest,” he says.

At the mention of the word “dishonest”, Clinton tilts her head, concerned.

Gipple forges on: “But I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.”

It was in that moment that a young voter cast a spotlight on one of the great questions of the 2016 race to the White House.

Where is the love for Hillary Clinton?

This was meant to be her election. It was hers to lose. And yet, just days away from the first primary votes being cast, she’s in a fight for her political life.

Lack of momentum

It has been dubbed an “enthusiasm gap”, this problem that’s plaguing Hillary Clinton.

In short, Americans aren’t that excited by the former First Lady turned Secretary of State. Although she may still be ahead in national polls, there is a creeping malaise in Clinton’s presidency bid.

In politics, momentum is everything. Take one look at Clinton’s campaign and it clear that while she has many things on her side in this fight, momentum isn’t one of them.

Back in July, when Donald Trump first came on the scene, polling aggregators had Clinton well ahead, at 53 per cent to his 33.

Now, they put Trump in striking distance — at 41 per cent to Clinton’s 44.

The story with her main rival for the Democratic nomination is almost identical.

In July, polls put Clinton at 57 per cent to Bernie Sanders’s 17.

On January 15, that had recalibrated to Clinton at 48 per cent, Sanders at 39.

It’s the very pattern that Clinton’s 2008 demons are made of. It was this time exactly eight years ago that Barack Obama seemed to come from nowhere to beat Clinton in the Iowa primaries. It was then that he stole the march to victory, with Clinton simply unable to recapture momentum.

This gradual creep up of her key opponents comes despite Clinton’s experience meaning that she’s undeniably running a well-oiled campaign machine.

She’s got celebrity endorsements, ample funding, a tightly-run message ship and delivers confident performance after confident performance.

Even at Monday night’s debate, in the face of curly questions like the one from Gipple, Clinton is relaxed, sharp and focused, almost always outshining her rivals.

And yet, she is struggling to maintain a lead in the democrat primaries. As of right now, Clinton still has her neck in front, but the gap is closing.

The old guard

The New York Timesthis week described Clinton has having an “animatronic plasticity”, which it said raised “questions of ambition versus authenticity”.

This idea of Clinton’s fundamental unrelateable-ness is partly the curse of political experience.

Americans have known Hillary Clinton for a long time. They first saw her on the regular back in 1992 as a young mum helping her husband campaign for the nation’s top job.

Later, they knew her as the jilted wife. The Senator. The failed presidential candidate. And finally, as Secretary of State.

This familiarity of Clinton as regular fixture of government brings with it the curse of tying her to the struggles that have plagued everyday Americans over the past two decades.

While Clinton’s years of preparation for the presidency should work in her favour, they have instead meant Americans don’t view her as an exciting candidate who can bring great change and make their nation better.

They believe they already know what she can do. Plus, this history means she’s bound up with baggage: her own, her husband’s and the legacies of the Obama administration.

Clinton’s struggles can be broadly categorised in two ways.

Firstly, there are the scandals that trouble her campaign: the emails, Benghazi, her husband.

Then, there is that non-tangible problem that’s harder to shake — this fundamental lack of enthusiasm in the electorate and the disdain for her ties to the past.

Clinton is the candidate with all the celebrity endorsements — people like Beyonce, Lena Dunham, Katy Perry, Magic Johnson and the Kardashian/West crew are all in her camp.

And yet, while hordes of Americans turn out in fever-pitch force at rallies for candidates like Trump and Sanders, Clinton doesn’t get the same reception.

It’s a malaise that can be partly racked up to an America firmly in the grips of an anti-establishment phase.

To everyday Americans, Clinton is the old guard.

A year ago, the common wisdom was that the race for the White House would be a dynastic one between two old, wealthy American political families: Clinton v Bush.

The idea was all but repulsive to swathes of middle class American who were wiped out and are yet to recover from the horror of the Global Financial Crisis.

These Americans see the dynastic families as having success handed to them.

And so, in this way, candidates like Trump and Sanders represent the American dream — they’ve forged their own path and represent a fundamental hope.

In 2014, Obama said in an interview with George Sephanopoulos that he believed American people wanted something fresh in the presidency.

“I think the American people, you know, they’re gonna want that new car smell,” he said.

“You know, their own — they wanna drive somethin’ off of the lot that doesn’t have as much mileage as me,” he said.

Obama was referring to the fact that after two terms as president, his time was done, paving the way for a new leader.

However, the remarks — months before Clinton even declared her intention to run — captured the very problem that would haunt her campaign.

Americans want something new, fresh, exciting. And that’s something Hillary Clinton just isn’t.

The most qualified candidate

Hillary Clinton’s whole life has been working towards this moment.

A young lawyer who sought to make lives better, she went on to become a politically fierce First Lady.

She was the first First Lady to have her own office in the West Wing, pushing health care onto the agenda.

Post White House, she became the first female senator for the state of New York before seeking a failed 2008 bid for the presidential nomination.

That failure wasn’t the end of career, with Clinton instead just ramping up, taking on the key Secretary of State role in the Obama administration.

It is this hard-nosed political history and front line experience that makes Clinton objectively the most qualified candidate for the top job.

Her husband said it best: “I do not believe in my lifetime anybody has run for this job in a moment of great importance who is better qualified by knowledge, experience and temperament to do what needs to be done,” Bill Clinton declared in January.

As well as the on paper success, Clinton has an instantly recognisable world wide brand.

She’s known simply as “Hillary” — an honour bestowed on only the world’s most famous women. Think Oprah, Beyonce, Madonna. And then, Hillary.

Not even Clinton’s husband managed such a feat of brand recognition.

The scandals

Despite her political experience, it is true that Clinton’s most publicised scandals are directly bound up with her time as Secretary of State.

Firstly, there’s her email scandal, with reports this week that the FBI was seeking an indictment.

It’s been a slow burn issue that doesn’t go away and haunts her campaign almost weekly.

It was in March last year that it was first revealed that Clinton used a private server for official email exchanges while she was Secretary of State.

As recently as this week, she was accused of using the sever for super high level intelligence information known as “special access programs”.

These types of messages are even more sensitive than top secret.

The email saga is bound up with the problem of her other key scandal — Benghazi.

On September 11, 2012, the US embassy came under attack in Benghazi, Libya, killing the US ambassador and three americans.

It was in investigations about what went wrong in Benghazi that Clinton’s use of the private server was revealed.

As Secretary of State, Clinton was accused on not properly assessing the security concerts at the embassy. She has largely been cleared of any official wrongdoing, but the stain on her reputation remains.

In politics, appearance means a lot. And so it was particularly painful for the Clinton campaign that the Michael Bay blockbuster 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi — depicting the horror of the Benghazi attacks from the perspective of those caught up in them — was released this January.

Sensing opportunity, Trump packed theatres in Iowa with voters, offering them free tickets to the dramatisation of one of Clinton’s soft spots.

Bill Clinton baggage

Another soft spot Trump has targeted is the sexual history of Clinton’s husband.

Clinton finds herself inextricably linked, through no wrongdoing of her own, to one of America’s most dramatic political dramas in recent decades.

While America appeared to forgive its 42nd president, his history has clung to his wife like bad baggage.

Despite this, Clinton has repeatedly mobilised her husband in her election efforts — the former president is considered one of the world’s all time great political campaigners.

On the trail, Mr Clinton exalts his wife’s virtues, talking through her policy ideas, talking up her experiences and recounting memories of how they met and fell in love.

But every appearance he makes is seized on by Trump and others and portrayed as evidence of why Hillary is bad for women.

“She’s got one of the great women abusers of all time sitting in her house, waiting for her to come home for dinner,” Trump said.

And: “She wants to accuse me of things and the husband is one of the great abusers of the world,” Trump said. “Give me a break.”

And again: “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!”

Bill Clinton’s history is an albatross around his wife’s neck, which sees her opponents attempt to blunt any attack he is able to make on the campaign trail.

Worse for Clinton, this criticism is bound up with and plays into her very real statistical problem with women.

In theory, as a smart, successful and viable female candidate, she should have the support of the female liberal electorate.

But it just isn’t as clear cut as that, particularly with younger female voters.

A USA Today/Rock the Vote poll conducted this month has Sanders leading Clinton with young voters aged 18 to 34, with 46 per cent of the vote to her 35.

Narrow the poll to only women, and his lead was even more staggering — 50 per cent to Clinton’s 31.

There’s also the broader question of whether America is progressive enough to elect its first female president.

In Iowa, where Clinton is struggling to keep a lead on Sanders, the state only elected it’s first female member of congress in 2014.

Excitement factor fail

As Donald Trump capitalises on Clinton’s demons, Bernie Sanders has tried to harness her lack of the excitement factor.

Sanders declared this week “What this campaign is about, and I’m seeing it every day, is and excitement and energy that does not exist and will not exist in the Clinton campaign.”

So far, Sanders is right.

But does that mean one can’t become president?

The Clinton campaign for their bit are so angered by the enthusiasm critique that they have plastered their campaign offices with Sanders’s quote.

It’s meant to be motivational, and is accompanied with a day by day count down to the first votes in Iowa.

The campaign is also using Clinton’s husband to sell the message that she is a fresh, exciting candidate.

Mr Clinton repeatedly references his wife’s ability to make “change” — a clear attempt to separate Clinton from the establishment vibe that drags her down in the estimations of middle America.

“She’s a born changemaker and everything she ever touched she made better,” Mr Clinton told one rally.

And again: “It took my breath away when I realised 45 years ago that’s really what motivates her. She is walking, breathing change agent.”

Clinton will to continue to use her husband in her campaign strategy, and commentators say they are yet to see the former president bring the A-grade material he is so well known for.

This week Mr Clinton went for the attack on the republicans. Of their campaign, he said: “It may be entertaining, but it doesn’t have a lick of impact on how you live.”

Commentators lamented the lack of that special something that served Mr Clinton so well in campaigning almost two decades ago.

“The Clinton of lore, the one-in-a generation political natural … has yet to appear,” the New York Times wrote this week.

“Oh my god we’re gonna be president!”

Popular US comedy show Saturday Night Live featured a Clinton sketch late last year that was so loved it went viral on an international scale.

The sketch featured a Clinton impersonator laughing hysterically at the idea that her greatest competitors were Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

“Oh my god we’re gonna be president!” comedian Amy Poehler, playing Clinton, cackled.

The sketch poked fun at the absurdity of these two men being Clinton’s nearest rivals.

It went viral because voters related to the humour. And yet, Clinton now has the senator from Vermont breathing down her neck while Trump goes from strength to strength.

This was always Clinton’s election to lose.

Despite her narrowing gap, a recent poll showed most Americans still believe she will win.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll found 54 per cent of people believed she would win the top job if she went head to head against Trump. They give her a wider lead against rivals like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

In theory, everything has been stacked in Clinton’s favour. Her experience, her politics and her celebrity support.

But theory doesn’t take in the complexity of the American relationship with the Clintons and establishment history.

This week, in response to young Iowan voter Taylor Gipple, Clinton reached for her experience to rebuff him.

“I have been around a long time and people have thrown all kinds of things at me and I can’t keep up with it,” she retorted.

“If you are new to politics and it’s the first time you’ve really paid attention, you go, ‘Oh my gosh, look at all of this’

“I have been on the frontline of change and politics since I was your age.”

And that might just be her problem.

http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/the-problems-plaguing-hillary-clintons-2016-presidential-bid/news-story/51d9e8139c5c2554c9bc688547cd00cb

Trump too afraid to confront a woman at a debate.
I guess girls win this round. Augers well for Hillary 2016. :)

Yep, which is why it makes political sense, but it is still utterly cowardly. Megan Kelly asked Trump some uncomfortable (but entirely reasonable) questions a few months back and so he's decided to cut and run rather than face more scrutiny. It's weak.

:lol: And his supporters still think that he's a "strong leader."

Nope, he stated that there's a clear conflict of interest because the lady moderating has made it clear that she doesn't like Trump. Additionally, the FOX press release on the issue was incredibly childish and condescending, so he said "Fuck this, I'm leaving".

FOX News we're going to use it to ambush Trump and shill for Cruz (they were going to invite a YTer who said Trump = Hitler), so he did the expedient thing and simply pulled out. Why would he open himself up to attacks and biased moderation?

Besides, Trump destroyed Cruz last debate, especially with his lines on "New York values" and his eligibility question.

Then, CNN just announced that they will be televising a Trump event at exactly the same time. The man is a genius.

Edited by 433: 28/1/2016 04:27:47 PM

He's unelectable.
He could be a practical joke to demonstrate how mindless the GOP are.

I'm starting to think Trump is a secret genius - absolutely brilliant strategic move on his part to avoid the debate. Those who hate him won't change their minds.

Those that love him, love him because of his anti-politician persona. This is the ultimate "F**k you! I do what I want!" move. And the advantage is that he gets to completely avoid being exposed in an actual debate.

I'm tempted to think he will reveal himself to be a Stephen Colbert-esque parody on the eve of the first primary....

He's boycotting the debate because he's dipped in the polls after every other debate, and this is Cruz's best chance to rip into him.

It's politically smart, but it's also entirely cowardly.

Trump boycotting the debate because he won't take FOX's shit.

Absolutely based.

That video is peak America :lol:

Oh the irony.

:lol: :lol:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfrRzW-Yqog

Edited by fatboi-v-: 28/1/2016 10:54:36 AM

Edited by fatboi-v-: 28/1/2016 11:00:39 AM

Yes - at the very least it gives a power of veto to prevent the other side doing anything legislatively.