Electoral College Outlived its Time?

Great Debates
61

You know very well what swing states are, and they don’t have to be the same states election after election to be a problem. The fact that we separate out some states each election as being up for grabs, and others as solid for one candidate or another is the root of the problem. Sure, you can’t tell whole states to fuck off, but you sure as hell can focus your efforts in states where the electoral votes are up for grabs. You’d be stupid not to.

Every election, hundreds of millions of voters can be pretty confident that their vote doesn’t matter, since their state is going to go 60/40 towards one candidate, and 100% of their state’s vote is going to that candidate. At least with a true popular vote, every individual vote gets counted for the candidate it’s cast for, it’s not bundled into all or nothing support on the state (or district) level.

62

There’s a reason why we have Senators and Congressman.

Concerning faithless electors: Can’t the Senate take care of that?

63

A key point you overlook is that swing states are critical when an election is close. The 2008 election was not close. (And campaign decisions assume closeness, since otherwise they matter little.)

Obviously, swing states vary over time and even due to short-term effects, as different states will respond differently to different candidates. Nevertheless, the point I made in my post is fundamentally correct and explains why many voters in non-swing states hardly knew there was a campaign in 2008!

Responding to your comment about Florida and Ohio:
First note that Obama beat Palin in the 2008 popular vote by 53% to 46%. This is, relatively, a landslide. If this popular vote outcome had been known in advance there would have been no need for any state-by-state analysis (or campaign at all, for that matter – never mind that the simplifying assumption is absurd and counterfactual).

Hera are the states which Obama won, but with the smallest margins, along with a notation of Presidential voting behavior prior to 2008.

[ul]
[li] 10% New Hampshire – Swing, leaning Demo[/li][li] 9% Colorado – Swing, leaning GOP[/li][li] 6% Virginia – GOP[/li][li] 5% Ohio – Swing[/li][li] 3% Florida – Swing, leaning GOP[/li][li] 1% Indiana – GOP[/li][li] 0% North Carolina – GOP[/li][/ul]

Although again counterfactual, it simplifies discussion to assume that, had the election been close (i.e. that the 7% popular-vote margin between the candidates was zero) that the popular-vote percentage change would be constant across states. In that case, Obama would have won, barely, with his upset in Colorado being the key. But please note that Ohio and Florida would indeed have been key swing states. That Obama might have won without those swing states is due in part to his victories in Virginia and North Carolina, normally GOP states. (Was his success there due to higher-than-usual Black turnout?)

64

Exactly. Under a direct popular vote, anyplace a Presidential candidate can gain or lose a significant number of votes is important to him, regardless of what state it’s in. If a Dem thinks he can win Maryland 70-30 instead of 60-40, or lose Alabama by 40-60 rather than 30-70, it’s worth trying to do so. With the EC, such changes don’t matter.

Pushing the winner-take-all element down to the Congressional district level has the disadvantage of putting a premium on effective gerrymandering. Take a perfectly balanced swing state with 5 Congressional districts: if one party grabs control of the governorship and the legislature in the 2010 elections, and can manage to draw the districts so that one district is 90-10 in favor of the other party, while the other 4 are 60-40 for their own party, they win 4 out of 5 CDs, and have a 50-50 chance of winning the two at-large EVs as well. Using states as the essential unit is bad enough, but at least their boundaries can’t be redrawn every ten (or fewer) years.

65

If the only problem with the EC was the potential for faithless electors, that could easily be solved by just removing the electors.

Instead of having an EC, simply give each state a number of “points” equal to the number of electors they have. A state’s points would be awarded as electors are now. The first candidate to 270 points (or whatever the majority is at the time of the election) wins.

Zev Steinhardt

66

The problem isn’t too much power in the hands of swing states, it’s too much power in the hands of swing voters. These are the idiots who can’t decide until the day before the election who they’re going to vote for! How about each party publish their platform and each person is required to state a party preference for each office when they register to vote. Every year for two months, say January and February, people can go in and change their preferences, or when they move to a new voting precinct more than six months before the election. When November comes around, votes are automatically tallied according to people’s stated preferences. Plurality wins in each case, with no electoral college. If you can’t be bothered to choose a party at the appropriate time, you get no say in the election.

I can’t decide if this is a serious proposal or not!

67

You do realize that the Executive branch and the Legislative branch are not the same thing?

68

You do realize the concept of a republic with a representative democracy?

We have Congressmen (per population) and Senators (two per state) for a reason.

You said:

You start that movement to change the Constitution and get back to me. :smack:

69

This is the idea that I would propose. A “neutron bomb” solution. I like the EC idea of giving smaller states SLIGHTLY more power. In 2000, even though Bush lost the popular vote, he still won 30 states to Gore’s 20, and if it had been 29-21, he still would have lost the election. You can’t marginalize a large part of the country just because there are fewer people living there.

But, I would find it ridiculous if you had a 270-268 EC majority but some unknown person who was 2nd cousin to a party boss in WV or WY that got appointed to the EC changed their vote and threw the election into the House. The people should be removed from the EC system.

70

Clearly people want a say in who will lead the nation because all of the states have moved to assigning electors based upon a popular vote. How is it reasonable to suspect that people might get up in arms over having an equal vote with every other American?

The Electoral College is far more authoritarian than it is federalist. It allows states to prevent voters from helping their preferred candidates win. It’s not states vs the central government, it’s states vs their own citizens. The federalism is vestigial. States let voters assign electors.

As has been pointed out, it’s residents in “swing states” that are potentially privileged over the rest of us and not “small states”. (Potentially because so many of them would prefer to see their electoral votes go to a different candidate.)

It seems to me that you have missed the point here. Giving some people more influence over who becomes POTUS than the rest of us does nothing to strengthen states against the federal government. That ship has sailed. Once states turned the decision over to the voters they lost any potential leverage over presidential hopefuls. Candidates woo voters and those who can deliver votes. These local players may well be in the state government but their power is personal and does not derive from the state.

71

This is the most basic misunderstanding that causes people to support the current system. It is the EC that marginalizes people. No one is marginalized under a direct popular vote.

The Electoral College marginalizes people because so many people’s votes simply cannot affect the outcome. Certainly it’s not impossible for a Democrat to win Wyoming or a Republican to win the District of Columbia but only if there is such a tsunami of support for them that they will win no matter how residents there vote. So candidates have no incentive to attract voters there.

Under a popular vote every vote would count. No matter what. So candidates have an incentive to be attractive to everyone, no matter where they live. Now in practice you can’t please everyone. By taking some policy positions a candidate alienates some voters while attracting others. The point of elections is not to make everyone happy. It’s to give everyone a say in how we are governed. Elections are how we give our consent to be governed. Consent is the only just basis of authority. By skewing that principle the Electoral College has been perverting our government for centuries.

72

I would submit that even under a national popular vote you wouldn’t have a Republican campaigning in the District, nor would a Democrat be walking through the swamps of Alabama to try to get more support. Sure, every vote would count, but you want to focus your efforts on where they would count the most.

What would likely happen is a campaign to your own base to increase support even more. The GOP candidate could, for example, campaign hard in corrupt Texas counties to encourage the party bosses to bring in Republican voters by the truckload. Democrats would be bussing in homeless people in inner cities. Now, there is far less incentive to pull these shenanigans.

73

I would submit that it is far more important where a candidate is politically than where she is physically. That is what will tell voters more about how she will govern. By broadening the base of potential support it encourages candidates to broaden their appeal.

If electoral shenanigans are your concern then certainly you should support a move to a popular vote since it would decrease the effectiveness of such tricks. In order to turn the outcome they would need to corrupt enough votes to change the overall outcome and not merely enough in key districts to affect electoral votes. By making every vote count we could dilute the effect of localized corruption.

74

Abolish the EC and the candidates would focus on the large population centers, both parties. The Republican would start spending much more time in NY, for example. Though it’s normally a lost cause, without the EC, every percentage point swing is huge if it come from a large, densely populated region.

PA, OH, FL, CA. These are the kinds of places they’ll spend their time and focus their strategies. In fact, you can ignore states (to some extent). My state, PA, has Philly (and environs) in the southeast, Pittsburgh in the southwest, forming a sort of T-shaped area of the rest of the state. It’s been called “Philly, Pittsburgh, and the T is Alabama,” because the rest of the state is sparsely populated, and with a much more non-urban dynamic. The sort who cling to their religion and guns. :smiley:

So, a candidate can become even MORE selective. Screw the “T” in PA. Too few people–they only matter in an EC situation if the vote is close in the state. Unless there’s some statewide sensibility or benefit to campaign on, who cares about the rednecks in the T? Campaign up and down the NE Corridor, don’t stray too far from the coast (as one element of a “focus on the megalopolises” strategy). Play up to the urban and suburban commonalities as best you can. Do the same for other large population centers, and move the percentage meter as much as you can. You can move CA state a few percentage points? HUGE. You don’t need to win the state, just use your campaign time efficiently. Every speech in CA reaches WAY more people than one in WY.

The EC, as a matter of algebra, gives more weight (slightly) to smaller states. That’s what it’s supposed to do, so they don’t get completely ignored. To the extent any state is “ignored” now, large or small, it’s because they are a slam dunk for the other party. Take away the EC, and the areas that will be ignored won’t be tough to predict, and it ain’t gonna be the larger states. It will be most of the U.S., geographically, though. I think the EC is a nice compromise, a way for someone in Iowa (for example) to know their regional interests won’t get buried every single time. Same reason they have 2 Senators, just like CA.

75

I live in Penna and it doesn’t seem to me that gubernatorial candidates (and other candidates for statewide office) ignore people in the “T”. Do you have any evidence this is true? Politicians would be foolish to write off potential supporters based on irrelevancies such as where they live. And location is irrelevant once all votes are equal. It is only with districted systems such as the Electoral College that location matters.

And again, what does it matter where candidates campaign?

76

But with the EC abolished, a presidential candidate would not have to “win” PA. Just get more votes than the other guy nationwide. So ignore the T in PA and most of the midwest. Hit the coasts and the higher concentration of population centers. If he can speak to 50,000 in NYC, why go to a high school in New Mexico?

It matters because under your proposal, a President would not have to listen to the views of anyone besides urban residents.

77

In 2008, half of the states were visited exactly 0 times by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain, or Sarah Palin during the last 5 weeks of the election. This map shows where the visits (left) and the campaign spending (right) took place during that period. (I’m pretty sure the map is by state, not locations within states; I really doubt that the swing states were blanketed that evenly with campaign stops.)

Yeah, the electoral college really guarantees that people in rural areas get to hear from candidates. :rolleyes:

78

So the benefit of having pols visit your town comes from the opportunity to have them listen to your views? And what is the benefit exactly? To hear them make compassionate noises in person? Are we really to believe that these photo ops influence a candidate’s behavior once in office?

I think that instead of physical location a more helpful way to look at an election is on the basis of policy. That is, how candidates create a platform that can get them enough votes to win. While campaign promises aren’t exactly guarantees of behavior in office there is a political price to saying one thing and doing another (Hello Bush the Elder) so they do serve as an indication of which direction a candidate will jump.

From that perspective, it makes no sense to ignore any potential support. And the opposite perspective isn’t helpful at all since no candidate can visit every city and town in the nation so there are inevitably going to be people who are “ignored”. To answer the specific question, a presidential candidate might visit a school in New Mexico to avoid the perception that they don’t care about people living in small Western towns. Photo ops are about perception. Presidential hopefuls would never campaign solely on the coasts because it would open them up to charges of elitism.

79

I donno if I like 50 state campaigns. Seems like everyone would just inch to the right. :confused:

80

Where they campaign is reflective of whose views they’ll accommodate. The states that currently get “ignored,” large or small, are because they’re already decided. Without the EC, it is predictable who gets ignored–sparsely populated regions. It’s not an issue of who gets to hear speeches, it’s an issue of who you have to make happy. And saying, “some states already get ignored” misses the point. They are “ignored” because they’ve collectivity decided who has best heard their concerns, and they’re a slam dunk for that candidate. Without the EC? They’re screwed (or more screwed).