North Korea threatens to withdraw from summit with Trump

[Belsnickel]

(05-16-2018, 05:12 PM)bfine32 Wrote: Neither is relevant when talking about public opinion as that is not the purpose of the Presidential Election. I've already provided a personal example of how the numbers would have been different and who knows how many people in states that were not in question would have actually voted if they thought it mattered.

There are three potentially valid answers to my question: popular, electoral, or they are both equally (ir)relevant. There is one correct answer, though, and that is the popular total.

You see, an election is just a measurement of the public opinion. The rules determining winners and losers are different for the presidential election, but the purpose of an election is for the public to provide their opinion on who will best do the job they are electing them for or for their opinion on a ballot measure. Now, there will never be a +1.0 correlation between an election and the true public opinion, that's impossible. However, the correlation between the public opinion and the popular vote total is a much stronger one than the correlation between public opinion and the EC results. This makes the popular vote results more relevant to the discussion of public opinion.

If the discussion Lucie and I were having about the actual result of the election and the EC numbers, then you would have a sound argument. But our discussion was about public opinion and how it is more liberal than who our elected officials are would have you believe. The fact that the popular vote total has a stronger correlation to public opinion than the EC results is evidence of this and so discussing how Clinton received more individual votes in election is highly relevant to the argument.

This doesn't require extensive knowledge in political science or statistics to understand.