Popular Vote Useless?

It’s about time the news media stops misleading folks with their relentless bombarding of National Presidential Voting Polls. They are a waste of time and really don’t estimate how the 2024 election might turn out. The reason for this is that they are based on the total voting population in the U.S., and that is not how the winner of the Presidential Election is determined. If that were the case we would have had Al Gore and Hilary Clinton as past presidents, for Gore received more total votes than Bush and Clinton more than Trump.

The President of the United States is determined by the Electoral College votes.  According to the National Archives website, “The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. Your state has the same number of electors as it does members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two Senators.  Almost all states have a 'winner-take-all' system that awards all its electors to the Presidential candidate who wins that state's popular vote."

In an extreme example of just how this system renders current national presidential polls somewhat useless, suppose a candidate wins the popular vote in a particular state by a single vote. The entire number of electors in that state cast their vote for the candidate.  Below appears the electoral votes each state is allocated:

So, as you can see any national poll of voters’ choice for U. S. President is rather pointless unless it is conducted on a state by state basis.

An additional negative side effect of the present Electoral College System for electing our president is that it may actually suppress the popular vote.  In Louisiana, if you decide to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, your vote just fades away into the sunset because historically the majority of Louisiana voters favor Republican presidential candidates. So all the electoral votes go to the Republican.

This notion might discourage some from voting, but for me it doesn’t because I always like the fact that the previous Republican President of the United States will go down in history as never being elected by the majority of the voters; kind of like our present governor who continually preaches how he is “advocating for the will of the people of this state”, and who, in fact, was elected by just slightly over 18% of the registered voters in this state.