Attention Arkansas, District Of Columbia: Fill & Download for Free

Let’s start here: majority rule is not a problem. It’s the way things are supposed to work. Yes, we have the Constitution that sets up rules and limits on majority power. But within those limits, the majority was always intended to run things. Democracy, republic, call it what you will, the idea was always to have a country run by the majority within limits.And…Middle America. You mean the part of the country that includes Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City and St. Louis? Somehow, those places never seem to get included in people’s mental pictures of “middle America”. So let’s cut to the chase: you’re really talking about rural areas, which exist all over the country. Central PA. Eastern California. West Texas. Mississippi. Western Virginia.Third, let’s talk about this word, “disenfranchised”. I don’t think it means what you think it means. It means you don’t get a vote. There’s no guarantee in the system that your vote will always be cast in a competitive election. There are parts of the country that have only elected Democratic Representatives for decades. That doesn’t mean Republicans in those districts are disenfranchised, and the same thing is true if you flip the labels. But if you’re going to use this incorrect definition of “disenfranchised,” let me point out to you that there are millions of people in the US right now who are regularly disenfranchised in Presidential elections: they’re Republicans in rural upstate/western New York. They’re Democrats in urban Georgia. They’re Republicans in rural California, Democrats in Dallas and Houston. That’s with the system the way it is. And even Republicans in Idaho and Democrats in Hawaii are simply taken for granted. They reliably vote for the candidate who’s going to win their state’s EVs, but no one ever comes and campaigns to them.Now let’s do some math. All numbers here are from the 2016 election, counting only votes for the two major parties.There were 128,838,342 votes cast for President. How many states would it take to be 50%+1 of that? CA would get you 10.3%. Add TX, 16.9%. FL, you’re up to 24%. NY makes 29.7%. PA gets you over 1/3, at 34.3% IL, 38.4%. OH, 42.4%; GA 45.5%. Getting close now. MI gets us to 49.0%, and NC finally puts us over the top at 52.6%.But that’s assuming that one party wins every vote in those states. So all a party would have to do to “shut out” most of the states is take 100% of the vote in CA, TX, FL, NY, PA, IL, OH, GA, MI, and 1.23 million in NC.Now the alert reader will have noticed something at this point. Those states don’t all tend to vote the same way. In fact, Trump carried 7 of them, Clinton 3. The most lopsided victory for one party in any of them was in CA, where Clinton got 66% of the vote; second was NY, where she got 62%. The winner didn’t top 60% in any of the others. And here’s another thing: except for PA, MI, OH, and FL nobody seriously campaigned in any of the others. Could CA have been closer than 66/34 if Trump had campaigned there and Republicans felt like their votes really counted? I think so. Likewise Democrats in Texas, where Trump won 55/45. In practice, after counting those ten states the popular vote was 54% Clinton, 46% Trump. And that’s without Democrats campaigning in TX or GA, or Republicans in CA or NY.Would smaller states get less attention than large states if we abolished the Electoral College? Certainly. But the pertinent question is whether they’d get less attention than they do now, and I think the answer to that is no. In 2016, no Presidential candidate visited Montana. Nor Arkansas, Tennessee, Vermont, or South Carolina. There are Democrats in Arkansas and South Carolina. There just aren’t enough to make it worth a candidate spending any time there because there’s basically zero chance of winning the state. But if a candidate could pick up an extra 50,000 votes in Nashville or Columbia, suddenly it would make more sense because those would count exactly as much as 50,000 votes in Pennsylvania or Florida. A Republican would have incentive to try to make a coalition of voters in western New York and central PA, or Eastern Washington and Idaho. Or rural Illinois and Iowa. The possibilities for innovative campaign strategies would be huge because you wouldn’t be writing off large chunks of the country as “settled” long before the election.The idea of the country really is majority rule on most things. There are limits, but within those limits we really do decide almost everything that way. It’s time we elected the President that way, too.

Not sure where you got your numbers. This is from Statista.com. As of April 16 2021.Death rates from coronavirus (COVID-19) in the United States as of April 16, 2021, by state(per 100,000 people)Number of deaths per 100,000 peopleNew Jersey282New York264Massachusetts253Rhode Island250Mississippi239Arizona235Connecticut224Louisiana221South Dakota220Alabama219Pennsylvania200North Dakota198Indiana196New Mexico191Illinois189Arkansas188Iowa186Georgia185South Carolina181Michigan178Tennessee176Nevada174Texas171Oklahoma169Kansas168Delaware164Ohio162Florida159West Virginia155California154District of Columbia154Missouri147Montana143Kentucky141Maryland141Wisconsin127Minnesota125Virginia123Wyoming121North Carolina118Nebraska114Idaho113Colorado107New Hampshire93Washington70Puerto Rico68Utah67Oregon58As you can tell, your assumptions are completely false. The lockdowns are not the life saver they claim. I think the lockdowns were necessary in some places, where you live very close together. Not necessary in places that are more rural. The more spread out areas should have probably tested people coming from other states, but that's hard to do in the US. You can't stop people from driving state to state. The lockdowns were a social experiment. They were also a failure.As long as they keep pretending that Fauci is as smart as he thinks he is, it won't change. He loves the media attention and he loves the power. He is very much like the grade school child that the teacher left in charge. Nobody really liked that kid. And anytime you gave them a little power, they used it as a cudgel.

The Compromise of 1850 had four provisions:California was admitted as a free stateThe Missouri-Compromise line was extended to the Pacific, ruling out the creation of new slave states north of Arkansas and limiting the expansion of slavery to the arid territories of what are now New Mexico and Arizona.The slave trade, though not slavery, was outlawed in the District of Columbia.A really effective Fugitive Slave Law was enacted.The first two provisions were adverse to the interest of Southern whites who wanted new territory for slave agriculture. California was well suited to plantation agriculture and slave mining, and the compromise deprived the white South of the richest part of the spoils of the Mexican War. It also prevented the spread of slave agriculture westward from Missouri into the neighboring territory of Kansas.The third was of little practical effect but a symbolic insult to the South. It was the first action that the federal government had taken adverse to domestic slavery, and it was demanded by Northern white opinion.The result was to convince significant numbers of white Southerners that their interest in slavery was threatened by the changing demographic balance in the US. From 1789 through 1836, slave and non-slave states had been admitted in offsetting pairs. Texas and Florida were the last slave states admited, in 1844 and 45, offset by Iowa and Wisconsin. There would be no offset for California, Minnesota or Oregon, changing the balance in the Senate, as the balance in the House had already been changed by the population growth in the non-slave states. An increasing number of white Southerners came to believe that their interest required either expansion of slave territory into the Caribbean or secession from the United States.On the other hand, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 for the first time made the capture and return of escapees from slavery effective. The Act required only the sworn affidavit of a claimant in federal court. The accused was not permitted to testify, and the magistrate receive a fee of $10 for deciding in the claimant’s favor and only $5 for deciding against him. In addition, the Act made it a federal crime to harbor or aid an escapee from slavery. The result was to bring the institution, which had been largely invisible outside the slave states, forcibily to the attention of many white Northerners who had never thought much about it, to encourage Northern anti-slavery opinion, and to further convince Southern whites that the Northern white public was hostile to their interests.That being said, the Compromise of 1850 was generally thought at the time to have averted the danger of secession and war. In the so-called Georgia Platform, Southern Unionists, including several future leaders of the Confederacy, declared that the Compromise was an acceptable resolution of the crisis, but that the South would make no further concessions, and that continued adherence to the Union demanded strict enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. When a mixed race crowd forcibly rescued an imprisoned fugitive from the Boston courthouse and helped him escape to Canada, President Fillmore and Secretary of State Daniel Webster demanded that they be prosecuted. The leaders were tried, but they were acquitted by an all white Massachusetts jury, providing more evidence of Northern hostility to slavery.The political crisis that led to the war heated up again after the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the extension of the Missouri Compromise line and opened the lands of the northern Great Plains to the expansion of slave agriculture, leading in response to the creation of the Republican party opposed to any further expansion of slave territory.