The Republic/Monarchy binary split you mention doesn't even make sense though. There are many other types of governments that don't fall under those two categories, e.g., dictatorship, tribalism, democracy, oligarchy, theocracy. So why are you artificially restricting the question to two choices?

Sure, they can't repossess a degree, but thats why student loans are very difficult to discharge even in bankruptcy, so the are pretty much guaranteed to be paid at some point.

False. Batteries these days are seeing minimal degradation after 100-200k miles.

The earliest immigrant like the Pilgrims and Quakers, sure. But they're a footnote next to the migration that actually built the country. Roughly 40 million Europeans came between 1820 and 1924, and they weren't fleeing the size of the state. They were fleeing starvation, conscription, and pogroms. The Irish didn't board famine ships over a theory of limited government; they boarded because staying meant dying. Most came from places with almost no state services and would have happily taken one that fed them.

You can see the motive clearly in the fact that it reverses. When Europe was poor and dangerous, people fled to America. Now that European states are safe and prosperous, Europeans stay put and a growing number of Americans are moving there for the healthcare and the security. Nobody's voting with their feet over political philosophy. They're voting over whether life is survivable and decent. That was always the real driver.

Umm, when the US was founded, the European 'style' government you're referring to didn't exist. And a large portion of the nonwhite population at the time and a while probably didn't have much of an opinion on what style government they were after, since they were, you know, slaves.

In any case, a huge majority people coming voluntarily to the US were driven primarily by economic considerations (escaping poverty, famine, war), so probably would have preferred a government like many current European countries have that actually take care of their citizens.

Haha so you don't care about convenience 95% of the time, only 5% of the time. You do you I guess...

Don't know what you're talking about. In day-to-day life, an ICE vehicle is way more inconvenient than an EV.

While we're at it, lets just get rid of crime and then we wont need cops! See I can solve problems too!

On "that's not the Electoral College, those were just uncompetitive states", they're only "safe" and ignorable because of winner-take-all, which you already agreed is the problem. Under a popular vote there's no safe state to write off: a vote in California counts the same as a vote in Ohio, so no one's surplus can be ignored. The Electoral College is the very thing that makes votes in 38 states worthless.

And it only gives "the less populated a voice" in the dozen swing states. Rural voters in California, upstate New York, and rural Texas get nothing today. So it doesn't protect rural voters, it protects rural voters who happen to live in a swing state.

On candidates flocking to dense areas, the math doesn't support it. The 100 biggest cities hold about 20% of Americans, roughly the same as rural America, and about 60% live in suburbs or smaller towns. You can't win a national majority from cities. When every vote counts equally, you chase votes everywhere, including the rural areas the current system writes off.

On Virginia, we agree and that's my whole point. Electoral votes are House seats plus two senators, so the extra House representation slavery bought flowed straight into electoral votes. That's exactly how the Electoral College carried the slavery advantage into choosing the president; a popular vote wouldn't have, because the enslaved couldn't vote.

A few of these don't hold up, and one does. Let me separate them.

"It forces the President to consider everyone." It's the opposite. Under the Electoral College candidates ignore most of the country: in 2020, 96% of campaign events were in 12 states and 33 got none. Small safe states like Wyoming get ignored just like big safe states like California. What draws attention is being a swing state, not being small. And no one wins a national popular vote from cities alone; the largest metros aren't close to a majority. A popular vote is what would finally make a Republican in California or a Democrat in Wyoming worth chasing.

On Virginia, you've got it backwards. Virginia was the most populous state largely because roughly 40% of its people were enslaved and they couldn't vote. Under a popular vote that 40% disappears from Virginia's weight. The Electoral College counting them through apportionment is exactly what gave Virginia outsized pull. That's my point, not a rebuttal of it.

On winner-take-all, you're right, and it's a fair point. WTA isn't in the Constitution and it drives most of the distortions people complain about. But it's not "California's" policy: 48 states use it, including Texas and Florida, so singling out California is selective. And even if every state dropped WTA tomorrow, my original point stands. A Wyoming vote would still be worth about 3.6 times a California vote, because the per-capita disparity is built into the structure, not into WTA.

What can you do about the small states? Give all states one person = one vote for the presidential election. Then its fair to everybody.

And yes, you're right that the framers built counter-majoritarian features on purpose... no argument there. But three things:

First, that's the Senate, not the Electoral College. Equal representation regardless of population was the Connecticut Compromise. The EC came from a separate fight over how to pick the president; the small-state bump is just a side effect of borrowing the Senate's math.

Second, one "region" that protected was the slaveholding South. The Three-Fifths Compromise let states count enslaved people toward apportionment, padding Southern electoral power even though those people couldn't vote. Madison said as much. So "the founders' design" isn't the clean principled story it sounds like.

Third, the EC doesn't protect a coherent "minority". It weights geography, treating a rural Wyoming voter and a rural California voter completely differently. Minority rights are protected by the Bill of Rights, the courts, and federalism, all of which survive without it.

How does that contradict what I said? In the end, both parties candidates are vetted by the establishment, so you get an establishment candidate no matter who wins.

You're defining it by senator which doesn't make sense in this context. What matters is how many electoral college votes per capita, which is the 3.5x number I mentioned.

Proportional allocation of electoral college votes doesn't fix the imbalance caused by the disproportionate per capita voter weighting of each electoral college vote. If you want true proportionality, one person, one vote would be the most fair.

Why should low population states have more of a say per voter than high populations states when selecting the president? They already are far and away disproportionately represented in the senate and house, so in this case 'checks and balances' just seems to be 'oppression of the majority by the minority'.

Define 'very small'. Last I checked, from the electoral college's standpoint a voter in Wyoming's vote counts 3.5x more than a voter in Texas, Florida, or California. To me, 3.5x is not 'very small'.

So how is the opposite OK then? What we have now is that a minority of the population who never set foot in populated areas get to decide policy for the majority of the population who happen to live in cities. Why should minority rural voters have all the power?