See This Red Area? This Is Sand

and their votes count more than your city votes!

I can hear their goddamned chants...

Every square yard counts!
Every square yard counts!

When it suits them. That is basically how it does work, to their benefit. If it benefitted Democrats, well then... "that's entirely different, see?", they'd be screaming to high heaven at the "unfair librul conspiracy to take over the government!"

Yep. Thanks slavery! A great idea that just keeps givin’

I hate that.

Wait, so the US Votes by area and not by head count?

¡VIVA LA PROLETARIAT! DEATH TO THE RICH!

I don't think it is relevant.

The xkcd points out distribution and population.

The second map highlights how much more democratic the us is than republican and that is it obviously a broken system that republican's have a chance of winning

My favorite thing to do with these people is to ask them "okay, would it be alright if these issues were decided on a per-county basis then?", if they say no they've outed themselves as just wanting to hold as much control over others as possible from a minority position, if they say yes ask again but with individual towns, if they say yes to that, then you narrow it down to individual people, then they tend to get mad when they realize what you've done

Yep. There are currently three heavy biases favoring the rural population. -senate (by design) -the house --not by design, but because the representation was capped at 435. It hasn't grown with population and thus a citizen in Wyoming gets more representation than a citizen in California (or Texas for that matter) -the presidency by virtue of the above two being biased.

Fix house apportionment, let the Senate be the safeguard, and the presidency will have a very slight protection by nature of the electors via what matches the Senate.

This is all in line with the framing of the Constitution, but it gives up power to "the bad guys" (aka the actual majority)

let the Red ones rot in their ancap dystopias?

Because there will be a lot of people in those areas who are not happy living under an ancap dystopia. Those states may even try to trap them there like Texas wants to do.

Imagine a couple moved to one of these ancap dystopias and have a kid. That kid turns out to be a big leftist and they hate not having rights.

We can't just forget about the other states and only care about some. At that point, you can consider the United States to have fallen.

Why don’t the Blue states just enact social democratic policies and let the Red ones rot in their ancap dystopias?

Because the red states have outsized influence over federal law, and they can outlaw the social democratic policies at a national level.

Why don’t the Blue states just enact social democratic policies and let the Red ones rot in their ancap dystopias?

If we assume that the Democratic Party actually wants to do good and not just what their donors want. They still have to contend with a Senate that's is biased towards the empty states, and even the House of Representatives is somewhat biased but not as bad.

Now if the Blue States (or even Counties) form some kind of union to transcend the USA, things might begin to happen.

The EU is a patchwork of rights for example

The EU is a confederacy. It has a much weaker central government and much stronger states. The US could go back to a confederacy model.

That was the ideal, but every ounce of freedom given to the south has been used to torment the vulnerable, so they kept losing supreme court cases and having amendments added to the constition that give the federal govt. more power because its needed their state governments from being evil.

See slavery, the black codes, jim crow laws, womens rights, religious freedom, environmental protectionism, coal mining in appalaicha, etc.

You still cant hold office in 7 states in the south if youre an athiest btw.

End Blue to Red state subsidies.

The traditional map is more reflective of electoral power. This one is by population which would be critical in a republic, but traditional map where each count is colored by their majority shows how being the majority in lightly populated areas gives outsized power.

Cities tend to be Blue, but cities don’t get a unified vote, plus are subject to state laws. Look at Houston: they don’t have a chance

But yes, we do federalism. Speaking for Massachusetts:

• as close to universal healthcare as you can get in the us
• healthcare “sanctuary” state
• consistently the best or near the best education system
• free tuition at state universities
• minimum wage over $15, among the highest
• strong emphasis on transit, walkable cities
• strong anti pollution and anti climate change laws
• strong wetlands and coastal protection
• among the first states to be entirely rid of coal
• immigrant protections
• first state to legalize gay marriage
• among the first to legalize marijuana
• by some reviews, highest quality of life in the US

But we’re affected by everyone else:

• not allowed to make air pollution rules. All we can say is we agree with California
• we had forced EPA to regulate Midwest polluters where downwind pollution affected us. Worked for a few decades but recent Supreme Court ruling says EPA can’t regulate interstate pollution, wtf
• strong gun control laws, partly invalidated by recent Supreme Court. I know I’m not surrounded by “good guys” with concealed weapons ready to blast away when they get uncomfortable

When I read about some places attempts to prevent voting, I am so happy none of it is relevant. My state has good outreach to make it easy to register, easy to vote in whatever manner you choose, and has sufficiently funded voting center ps that everyone has a convenient one with little to no waiting. I can walk to mine. When there’s been a line, it’s short and in air conditioning. There’s always a school fundraiser bake sale if I want a treat

So yes, believe me, we look down on all those dystopias between free cities as we fly over. They may have been misled and manipulated but they chose their poison

gasp Are you suggesting, good sir, that republiQans may in fact not be arguing a particular point in good faith???

NO! I cannot believe it.

Why would a popular video game character get his own spot on this map?

I’ll allow it.

**Land SHOULDN'T vote.

Abolish the senate.

Why does the Senate exist then?

Why does land determine who tells me what to do then?

Especially Google maps, they persuaded my friend to turn right and now he thinks corporations are people.

That’s often how it gets portrayed, yes.

As others have said, yes it is. Unfortunately it's also a strong representation of how the voting process operates in the US. At the local level (towns and cities), individual votes matter. However, for something like the presidential election (for example), then the votes are averaged by county and state.

So what happens is everyone from a county votes, and if that county is more of one side than the other, that entire county is "voting x/y". Then the counties across the state are compared, and that state is declared as "voting" for either side. Then nationally, each state is counted as either/or, so even if the more populated cities vote one way, if enough of the rural population votes the other way, the rural side wins, and the urban side loses.

It's almost as if the system urgently needs reform. Too bad the powers in charge of that were elected specifically because of it.

It’s coarse and rough, and it votes Republican

What's your point, though? I'm not sure if you're pointing out that this is basically a population density map in order to argue something in particular? Because it seems like OP's entire point was that while the majority of Americans are not conservative, people disguise this fact by NOT using population density maps to demonstrate political spreads.

So, yeah, people live in cities. And most Americans swing left. Glad we can both read the map and agree on its message 👍

Mostly only recently

I remember a coworker from Utah once telling me that farmers are the most disadvantaged minority or something. Basically his argument was it is better that rural areas get more representation and people in the cities don't need to be represented as much. For him it was an easy argument to make since it is the status quo and serves his interests.

The people who want to change things are who need to come up with either strong arguments to win public opinion or increasingly evident win their rights by direct action. No one who benefits from the current system will give up anything.

It’s the same reason all around the world: India, China, Australia, Venezuela, Romania, Kenya: Hicks.

Hicks are everywhere. And they vote for regressive authoritarians for any number of reasons, most of them wrong.

They are probably coloring whole counties, where the second map just makes a dot for each country proportional to population.

Because of the way the US handles elections.

Here's a link to my other comment that explains it as I (a laymen) understand it as I was taught in school.

https://lemmy.world/comment/11291037

Probably because 40 out of the 50 voters in those counties voted red.

Keep in mind both of these maps are grossly misleading. Or at least one is being presented in a misleading way.

One is just coloring an entire county the way the majority voted. This is why those huge (land) counties are all red, because at least 1 more person in it votes for trump than Biden (presumably, I don't know what the map is actually based on but it's a safe bet). So that's why "the sand" is regularly colored red. Although saying noone lives these is misleading.

Which leads me to the second map is probably a noble effort to show some population scale, by reducing all of the counties to a circle the relative size of their population, but it's being misrepresented here as if that's where all of the people in those counties live, which is certainly false. Just look at the center of the country, it's basically a grid of small dots. Do people honestly think the population is distributed like that?

The most frustrating thing about this is everyone in this thread is complaining about how Republicans are too stupid to understand why the map is colored the way it is...while being absolutely fooled as to why the other map is the way it is.

Blue has abandoned anything outside cities. Their outreach is basically move to a city, which unsurprisingly isn't popular there.

🤔

I loved finding this out from a random comment on Lemmy. The interweb’s still got it!

In my head I read that as "one kiloGOP per square mile"

The way they are so evenly situated, I think they are just putting a population-proportioned dot in the center of each county. In meant states, counties are pretty much equal sized squares with varying amounts of people in them.

Thank you

So the NYT wants to tell us we're not as polarized as the maps may show?

Of course they do. Both Sides, you know. Other than that, the points about colors are well taken, it's just so on-brand for NYT to have the editorial POV that everything's normal, it's fine.

Hey now, the KS governor just vetoed some bullshit anti-abortion stuff. Somehow.

But yes, KS is a poster child for letting right-wing idiocy run rampant.

The dots are counties - the largest red one above LA is Kern county - Tulare county is the smaller red dot above it to the right

This is a clearer version of that map. The other two much smaller red dots above LA are Kings and Inyo counties - this map is based on 2016 presidential results, as Inyo went blue in 2020 (by only 14 votes though)

Presidential? Yea you would think. But seeing this map overlayed with districting lines would help explain how we get some of our senators representatives we have.

If you live there then not no-one lives there. A higher resolution image would show you on there, waving.

Because it would mean living in Wyoming.