Here, the only office not directly elected by popular vote is the US Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, where it is determined by the infamous Electoral College, where each state has a different number of votes to cast, one for each senator and representative seat they have. Most states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in their state, but a couple of them (Maine and Nebraska) do it differently, so sometimes the other candidate winds up getting one of their electoral votes.

All other elected offices are determined by popular vote for the seat being elected. So,

For a US Senate seat (where each Senator represents the entire state), every voter in the state votes in that race and the winner is determined by popular vote [1].

For the US House of Representatives, each state is divided into a number of districts, with the number based on the population of that state relative to the US population as a whole. So a state with a large population gets many districts and a state with a lower population gets only a few (in some cases, only one!). The voters in each district elect their representative for their own district and the winner is determined by the popular vote in that district.

[1] Before 1913, people didn’t directly elect their Senators, the state legislatures did! So we’ve at least made progress there.

The USA is a union of 50 semi-independent states, not a single homogenous country, which is where most of the complexity comes from.

But, doesn’t your country (you didn’t say which it is) have any districts (or geographic subdivisions of some kind) where the inhabitants living within it send a representative to the national level to advocate for their interests and vote on national legislation with their local interests considered? That’s what we’re talking about here, except with an extra layer in between, where each State (being a semi-independent entity) gets to decide how it draws the boundaries of the districts within it.

Good to hear!

Thanks for the info that it’s totally legal, I didn’t realize that. So I guess the cases I’ve heard about where district boundaries were found illegal by a court must have been based solely on the racial discrimination aspect for violating a civil rights law or something (maybe the voting rights law that SCOTUS has been gutting step by step?)

I know there has always been plenty of gerrymandering, but there always seemed to be a limit to how far they went with it, so I stupidly thought there was some actual law limiting it in some way.

If a candidate wins a majority of the population as a whole, it is not logical to assume they won a majority of all demographics in that population.

More specifically, in the previous 2 times he ran before the 2024 election, we knew that the majority of women voters voted against him. And that he won one of those elections in spite of not getting a majority of women. So the logical thing to assume would be that he didn’t get the majority of women in 2024 either, in spite of the fact that he won that election. Which is what happened.

I think you missed my point. Their being a lost cause doesn’t mean we don’t have to care about what they do. Their illegal gerrymandering affects all of us by cementing a republican majority in the US Congress.

But they used to have to draw their districts in a way that wouldn’t get thrown out by the courts. Now they can do whatever they want. There are still a few judges left that will rule against them, but not for long as more and more are replaced by MAGAts. In the meantime, they can still go ahead and do it now because by the time the issue works its way through the legal system the 2026 midterms will have happened and they’ll have cemented control.

Oh? Then why are repubs gerrymandering so hard? Because they’ll pick up 5 seats in Texas by doing it. And they’re going to do the same in all the red states they can and pick up an extra one here and an extra one there and get a nice, cushy permanent House majority by blatantly violating district-drawing “norms” to a mind-boggling degree like this. Because now they can.

But don’t worry about Dems fighting back by doing a damn thing, let alone gerrymandering harder.

Nope, that would only help with state-wide and national elections, not for district-level ones. If they’re gerrymandered to be a majority republican district, the winner will be a republican even if there is ranked choice and popular vote. Or vice-versa if gerrymandered to be a Dem-majority district.

Not logical at all.

I was trying to answer OP’s question “isn’t that what volcanoes are” by clarifying that volcanoes are formed by the release to the surface of magma from the mantle. If they are now discovering there is also some core material mixed in with the lava in some volcanoes, that’s interesting and we might mention that as a minor component in those cases. But to say regarding material from the core, “that’s what volcanoes are” would be inaccurate. That would be some weird metallic-ass volcano if it was made from outer core material.

No, the stuff that comes out of a volcano is magma (which is then called lava when it reaches the surface). It comes from the mantle which is just below the crust.

The core is at the center of the earth and has a composition that is very different from magma. There’s an inner and outer core and I assume they’re talking about the outer core here since the inner core is thought to be solid.

There should be a photo of the buffalo posing with his body, like all those pics of him posing with his kills.

Not clicking on yet another clickbait “feel-good” article, but what is it this time-41%? Because every “New Low!!!1!” reported on is always in the low to mid 40’s. Always.

In other news, sales of some kinds of fresh vegetables have increased.