3 Comments
Dec 8, 2020Liked by G. Elliott Morris

Trump pressuring the state legislatures to overturn the election should be a big news story instead of punditry and prediction journalism (both of which I greatly enjoy). The mainstream news generally does not cover this and certainly doesn't analyze the long term implications of this on democracy. There are laws against appointing electors that don't go to the winner of the state's popular vote, so we aren't in a constitutional crisis this election cycle. The state legislatures could change the laws for the next Presidential election, so they don't have to appoint elections based on the winner of the state's popular vote.

I also notice while many supporters of the Electoral College are alarmed about this, they don't want to get rid of the Electoral College. When I suggest, they revisit their position, they shrug. There is a big disconnect there. However when people, myself included, point out that the state legislatures can't overturn the election, they argue that not enough people aren't taking this "seriously".

We have four major problems, the lack of awareness of Trump trying to overturn the results of the election, and the lack of knowledge of the methods he is attempting to do so, the news media not covering these events, and the unwillingness to take the action necessary to prevent this from happening. We potentially are headed towards constitutional crisis in four years.

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Dec 7, 2020Liked by G. Elliott Morris

I think the sentence "And, to a lesser extent, Nate Silver and his peers/underlings also do not appear fit for purpose in really explaining politics all that well." should be extrapolated upon more here. If Nate Silver were still publishing 538 on his own or publishing journal articles I think it would be okay to acknowledge that he only has one job. However, data journalists and the organizations they work for should be faulted for putting out this information for public consumption and not acknowledging that the line between public policy data and policy/politics is nonexistent. Watching Nate Silver offer commentary on politics is painful and uninformative. In my opinion, 538 should have hard-hitting political and policy journalists to put the data into context and flesh out the real-world implications of what is happening.

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