That creates a powerful incentive to ensure it works. The “local laboratory” system creates a powerful initiative to leave a shitty place for those who can afford it, leaving those who can’t afford to do so behind.
But “swing” states only exist under the electoral system. There’s no benefit to winning more than 50.00001% of California’s votes. Either you win all the electoral votes, or none of them.
Under a direct popular vote, however, those excess votes matter tremendously. A 10% margin of victory in California is worth more than my whole state. As Kepler1571 noted, winning becomes more about inflaming the base to ensure a high turnout than having broad appeal. Even if California as a state isn’t electing the President, Californians have interests in common, and a wise politician would appeal to them as much as (legally) possible.
The value would get a lot more tangible once California, Texas, and New York are the key to every Presidential election, every four years, for the forseeable future.
One of the problems with the First Past The Post system is that it’s the least-disliked candidate that gets elected. PR systems tend to political hacks getting elected and remove the direct connection between the elected and the electors. I suggest moving to Approval Voting so that the most-liked candidate is the one elected. It scales to multiple-member constituencies too.
Interesting, I’ll have to read up on those.
I’d like to keep the electoral college, just with a proportional rather than winner-take-all method for allocating electors, and automatic rather than human electors.
That’s only if you consider “California,” etc., the political unit. I consider the human being the political unit. It doesn’t really bother me if 53 million people routinely outvote 500,000 people.
This assertion doesn’t make sense logically. What a direct popular vote ensures is that anyone’s vote anywhere has equal weight, so it’s of value for a candidate to seek support wherever it can be found, and right now if a candidate knows that he can’t get 50 percent of the California vote, then California is useless to him. However, under a popular vote system, every vote in California counts, even if those votes constitute a minority within the borders of California.
And it’s patently false to assert that all California voters have some “Californianess” in common that makes their interest as a group antithetical to non-Californians. There are tens of millions of Republican voters in California who routinely fall into a minority in presidential elections, but its not some hopelessly small minority. It’s a lot of people. It’s far more of a tragedy that those Republican voters in California as individuals get essentially zero say in presidential elections than it is that Wyoming voters as a group have fewer votes than California voters as a group.
It’s built to prevent federal tyranny (“tyranny” like telling Massachusetts to disestablish the Congregationalist Church or banning states from importing slaves before 1808) while turning a blind eye to the problem of state tyranny, which arguably ended up being a much bigger problem. Perhaps that couldn’t have been known in the 18th century, but I think the issue was just that the people who founded the country had a pretty terrible definition of tyranny.
Works for whom? A one-size-fits-all approach to government can only make slightly over half of the people happy…especially since this government we have sticks its nose into literally every aspect of our lives. There can really be no way to “ensure” it works..we have nothing to compare it to. All we are left with are a bunch of fucking idiots on both sides of the political spectrum telling us how bad it would be if the other guy got his way.
Some will suffer, as you said, in the “local laboratory” system. That’s life. In the one-size-fits-all system there is the potential that the number of suffering could increase by orders of magnitude. And, as I said, there is no escape for anybody (short of leaving the country). Also, let’s not pretend that the poor cannot move. There are plenty of examples of poor families uprooting their entire lives and moving cross-country for a chance at a better life. It is less common now probably because government assistance is no further than a mailbox away.
See below.
Come now, I didn’t speak of “Californianess”, but rather of common interests within a state. No, not everyone shares such an interest, but in boad strokes, for example, Iowans have a disproportionate interest in agriculture, and Kentuckians have such an interest in coal. Further, since states are political units whether or not they vote as such for presidential electons, they have interests on that level as well. For instance, a president that supported federal grants to balance state budgets would appeal to states that have budget deficits.
It ended up being a bigger problem only because the checks on federal tyranny worked very, very well. Frankly, the system worked exactly as it was designed to, the states that ratified the Constitution were much more interested in restraining federal power than their own.
And I thought I was the biggest optimist here. 
Correct. Also, California is a significant outlier in being both a hulking giant *and *extremely heterogeneous. Any program for national electoral reform should include splitting CA into at least two states. TX is getting there, too (though if we’re trying to improve the country I suggest TX independence).