Darn, I managed to delete my original reply.
That would be a recipe for continual strife (if different parties are in charge of the Executive and Legislative branches) and it gives sparsely populated areas disproportionate political power. Why should there be a geographical basis for the system ?
The cause of the strife is that you have significant parts of the population who are at odds about an issue that they feel is existential. The most a voting system can do to resolve this is to force both sides to come to the table to by deadlocking the government. If that doesn't work, you'd better hope the two groups are sufficiently geographically isolated from one another that you can solve the problem by allowing them to do their own thing in their own area. If that fails, all you have left is hard power to resolve it.
Anyway, that's not the way it works in the US, the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and judicial are equal so the executive isn't in charge to any great extent. Whatever they want to do can be overturned by the other two branches.
I didn't mean to imply the branches weren't coequal.
One party has managed to both politicise the legislative branch, and lock down that branch.
Perhaps. That doesn't change the basic problem though that the public is deeply divided.
Without a multi-party political process, proportional representation, independent administration of the elections and more transparency in the lobbying process, there's little or no incentive to compromise.
The word "independent" is doing a lot of work there. There is a story about Maggie Smith when she was preparing for the role of Miss Jean Brodie. Somebody recommended she talk to their aunt to pick up the appropriate Edinburgh accent. The aunt was terribly offended and told Maggie Smith in a Jean Brodie accent that she had it on the best of authority that she had no accent whatsoever.
The issues with election administration are by their nature political. You can't make them non-political by handing the question over to some "independent" body. Would you be keen to hand such a power to an "independent" body whose members believed in States rights, election security, and the need to make sure rural counties views were representative? It's always easier to regard "independent" bodies as neutral and apolitical when you expect to broadly align with them politically.
I don't think proportional representation solves the issue either. Would changing the Democrats into the Greens, the Socialists and the Liberals, solve anything? Would doing the same to the Republican's. Trumps approval in the Republican party is 85%. I don't know, given PR you could maybe pull some support off him with a Rhino GOP party that would refuse to cooperate so you could keep him from power. The basic problem in terms of the country being split isn't fixed by that though.
The US has none of those things and has demonstrated no desire to move towards those things so you're left with government by minority (as is now the case in the US where one party has representation at a national and state level far beyond its electoral performance) or majority.
That isn't the problem though unless one is ideologically committed to some particular measure of the popular will determining elections. The problem is that the US is deeply divided.
It can't be any worse than the current system in the US where the will of the minority rules more often than not if Republicans are in power.
Well, this is kind of academic since the change isn't going to happen. I do agree that the changes you recommend would keep the minority out of power. That's like solving a problem with a faulty pressure cooker by holding down the valve. Maybe the populist, conservative tendency will die down, and maybe it won't. I don't see the forces that drove it into being having stopped, so it just seems to me that this solution would be a way of avoiding dealing with the problem.
Republicans have won the presidential popular vote once since 1988 IIRC.
Bush won the popular vote in '04, but I get the general point. I just don't think a few points here or there is important. It's not as if the system is actually designed to deliver a president who is the embodiment of the popular will. To pick one issue amongst many, with rare exceptions, you are given candidates who have been selected by the donors. You don't choose a representative of the popular will. You choose which of a number of candidates who represent elite will you want in charge.
I appreciate you probably aren't in favour of the influence of donors, but quibbling over a few percentage points in a system that is skewed and rigged six ways from Sunday just seems pointless to me, except in the partisan sense of "but for those percentage points my side would have won".
The 50 Republicans in the senate represent 41 million fewer people than the 50 Democrat senators.
And? When the UN General Assembly votes, they don't do it on the basis of population size either. It's not uncommon to operate in this way. It's been the system since the beginning, so the Republicans can hardly be blamed for this.
What could be more political than how you decide who should be in power?