Why do Ohio, PA, and Florida, always decide presidential races? I think this is ridiculous and anti-democratic. Our entire constitution was set up to avoid giving too much power to any one state. Now it seems like a presidential candidate who has the support of their party can’t get anywhere without winning two of these three. Why do these states get so much attention and power in campaigns, especially when the ultimate electoral prizes of Texas, California, and NY are mostly ignored?
Also, what if the three battleground states divided their electors by congressional district like Maine does? Would that fix this problem?
The three states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania get so much attention because they are 1) Big states with a sizable population and a considerable number of EVs, and also 2) States in which neither liberals nor conservatives have a clear-cut majority. Hence they are the top prizes.
Small states like Nevada and New Mexico are both on the fence, but are small.
Big states like Texas and California have big EVs to offer, but are reliably red or blue, respectively, and hence aren’t battleground states.
Anyway, the simple solution would be to abolish the Electoral College.
It really doesn’t matter IMO, the popular vote and who wins the electoral college is almost always identical. Was 2000 the only exception or were there more?
EDIT: There were more, but the last time it happened before Bush was 1888. I think it happened 3 times, a candidate won the electoral college but lost the popular vote.
Also, people in those states have to put up with an endless amount of people nagging them. That doesn’t sound pleasant.
The only real negative is that people in non-swing states have lower turnout.
64.2% turnout in swing states, 56.8% in non-swing states.
The idea of “Swing states” is illusory. As it happens, Florida is a state that could go either way. The fact is, however, that Texas is just as important in determining who the President is, and Texan votes count just as much as Floridian ones. While it’s true George W. Bush would not have won either election without, say, Ohio, he also would not have won either without Texas. That you don’t think of Texas as a swing state does not change the fact that its 38 electoral votes were more than the difference in 2000 and 2004.
But then there would be “swing cities” – must-win places like Cincinnati and Saint Louis – somewhat on the cusp of swinging either way, and delivering decisive numbers of votes.
The fault is in the nature of democracy itself – and a map that has ideological concentrations.
Simple? Good luck convincing the states.
I disagree. If you asked Clinton if she’d trade five thousand votes in New York for a thousand votes in Ohio, she’d happily agree even though it would lower her overall vote total. And surprisingly, Trump would happily agree to the exact same trade.
The important point isn’t how many votes you get in total; it’s whether you get at least 51%. Once you’ve got the majority of votes in a state, extra votes don’t help you. And if you fail to get the majority of votes in a state, none of the votes helped you.
So candidates focus most of their resources on swing states where the balance is close and a small number of voters can switch the state one way or the other. Spending resources in states which are either solidly for you or solidly against you is mostly wasted effort.
You won’t convince states like Florida, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. But states like California, New York, and Texas would agree. Any state that isn’t currently a swing state would see its influence increased.
Ohio and Florida didn’t decide the race in 2012. They were just padding on top of Obama’s victory. He could have lost both of them (his victories in both states were narrower than the national vote) and still won.
An incremental change not needing a constitutional amendment is doable: Maine and Nebraska have already moved from a “popular vote takes the whole state” to “popular vote takes the district’s EC vote, popular vote overall takes the two extra EC votes”. Other states could also do so, though it would help significantly if gerrymandering was banned outright so the districts won’t be as “locked” as many of the states currently are.
That’s an incremental change, but I don’t know that it’s incremental in a good direction. Even without gerrymandering, why should the choice of president have anything to do with congressional districts? If we’re going to keep the electoral college but divide the votes up within a state, it should be proportional or nothing.
Okay, I could see that. A state with, say, 10 EC votes, has a popular vote outcome of 50% for one party, 40% for another and 10% for a previously unrepresented third party like the Greens or Libertarians, so they allocate 5-4-1.
Is any state concretely moving in this direction? The Maine/Nebraska model has an advantage in that it’s currently operating and nobody can plausibly say it’s created any problems.
The electoral college system does have some advantages. A major storm which reduced voter turnout in a region would lower that region’s influence on the popular vote, but not the electoral vote. With only a few states that matter, campaigns can focus more, and tune policies for the median voter. In a country which treats a close election as a Selden’s Crisis requiring battalions of lawyers, at least the emergency recounts and lawsuits would be confined to just 1 or 2 states.
OP’s list of key swing states (OH, FL, PA) is somewhat obsolescent. In recent years, CO and especially VA have moved from likely-red to likely-blue, so OH and FL are now must-wins for ® but not enough to give them the election. This doesn’t change OP’s point of course, just the detail of which particular states are the key tipping states. (Latest estimate is that Hillary is more likely to win NC than she is to win OH!)
If we agree that it’s bad when the popular-vote winner does not win the EC-vote, get ready for the likelihood of bad outcomes! Nate Silver shows an 8%() chance that Hillary will win the popular vote but lose the White House. ( 7.4% + 0.7% ~= 8%) The chance for D-pop/R-ec has risen a lot since 2000 due to increasing blueness in large states, especially CA: Obama “wasted” 3 million votes in California compared with only 1.2 million votes “wasted” by Romney in Texas. In 2000 the “wastages” of these big states were 1.3 million each, so canceled each other. (Obama wasted 2 million NY votes.)
I’m not going to say you are totally wrong with these statements, but boy, you seem to have major misconceptions about the relationship between the Constitution and direct democracy, on one hand, and the Constitution and the power of the states on the other.
Perhaps you should do some reading on some of the most important debates during the constitutional convention. See for example, the establishment of the electoral college as a defense against direct democracy, and also the Great Compromise which protected the role of states as distinct entities with special privileges to undemocratic representation.
Do you know why each state has a minimum of three electoral votes? To protect the small states, and to keep the big ones from having too much power. If only a handful of states decide the election for president, those states have too much power.
This is the same sort of thinking that a person’s vote doesn’t count if they are not the deciding vote. Let me explain:
Let’s say you and your two roommates are debating whether to cancel cable TV. You’re for cancelling it, another dude is against cancelling it, and the third is undecided. If we follow your line of thinking, only the waivering vote has any value. That’s incorrect. Your vote counts just as much as his.
Just because your intention is clear doesn’t make your vote not count.
In the 2016 election that’s true. But that’s because of the way political lines are currently drawn. It may not be so in 2020, or 2024.
Also true - but as has already been pointed out, swing state efforts are generally an irrelevance in the fact of what the nationwide trend is. In the great majority of Presidential elections no one state is the difference and one candidate or another has a clear lead in both popular and electoral votes.
The OP is confusing “the need to campaign in State X” with “the amount of power State X has”. CA has the most power in determining who is president. The fact it normally goes for D doesn’t reduce its power. A presidential candidate can’t cater to FL at the expense of CA. If Hilary campaigned on adding a tax to movie and wine making, but reduce a tax on swamp land, she might win FL, but she’d lose CA.
The “swing” or “battleground” states make noise when the actual campaign for the top of the ticket is on. But the various party or interest-segment caucuses at the state and regional levels spend the intervening years on the unglamorous work of keeping the “safe” states safe. Just that this goes unremarked.