National Popular Vote Interstate Compact: Convincing states to join

[Dr.Strangelove]

@HurricaneDitka

1. Swing states, under the current system, are the recipients of lavish spending (both in terms of time and actual $$$) by the campaigns. They’d have to be willing to give all that up to adopt the NPVIC. It seems unlikely that there’s anything of comparable value this deal would offer the Floridas and Nevadas of the country.

Agreed. Swing states hold massively disproportionate power relative to their size, and they’d be a little crazy to give this up.

@HurricaneDitka

2. Red states probably perceive a bit of a political advantage to the Electoral College system, having had the last two splits go their way. I don’t know how you’d convince Texas or Idaho that it’s in their (Republican-aligned) interest to change the current system.

While true, I think this is the weaker argument. Yes, Texas does benefit from the current split. But it’s not unimaginable that they would get more attention from a Democrat moving to the center than they would from a Republican in the current system. They only benefit in a kind of overall sense from a Republican administration, not from anything state-specific.

Maybe it’s still not enough, but I don’t think it’s completely crazy. From the poll results in 2007, even 60% of Republicans support a popular vote. Perhaps this would be less now that we have a second example of a split vote, but I don’t think that’s guaranteed either. Individual Republicans may still feel shafted with the current system even though they ostensibly benefit.

(BTW, thanks for actually addressing the OP. I wasn’t really intending this to be a general discussion of the EC.)

[HurricaneDitka]

There’s actually a third wrinkle here that I forgot to address: the Electoral College favors small states. While it doesn’t surprise me that CA, NY, and IL are in favor of the NPVIC, it’ll be tougher to convince small states like WY, ND, SD, MT, AK, DE, ID, NE, NH, etc. to dilute their rather potent votes for president by switching to a national popular vote. This isn’t insurmountable (obviously, because HI, DC, VT, and RI already passed it), but it is one more line of thinking behind some of the opponents to the NPVIC.

It leads to the situation we’re in, where states like FL oppose it because they lose their swing-state prestige, while WY and DE opposes it because they lose their electoral votes per capita edge, and states like UT and OK oppose it because it feels like some Democrat shenanigans to steal future elections (and saying things like “Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections” probably reinforces this notion).

[John_Mace]

The first time CA and NY have to give all their votes to the Republican candidate, we’d see this whole thing fall apart.

[voltaire]

“Swing state prestige” isn’t an actual thing. A state like Florida opposes it because the state government is solidly Republican and has a solid chance of swinging a solid chunk of electoral votes to their preferred Republican candidate every election. It’s easy to see how they prefer that to the alternative that Florida’s (or any swing state’s) nearly even popular vote ratio has the much more neutering effect of cancelling each other out on the national level.

[DrCube]

@Dr.Strangelove

The top 5 cities in the US have a combined population of 18.9M people. The US population is 318M, making them only 6% of the total. The top 10 cities are 25.6M, or 8%. So, it’s simply false that one only has to win the major cities in a popular vote.

Furthermore, to the extent the argument is true at all, the EC system is still in every way worse. “Big cities in swing states” is a smaller set than “big cities in all states.”

The top six metropolitan statistical areas have more people than the winning candidate got votes in the last election.

And the whole point of the EC is that cities shouldn’t be in charge of who gets to be President. The EC requires candidates to build a national coalition of all kinds of people in all localities. A popular vote only requires a candidate pick a single pet issue that city folks can get worked up over, like gun control or park funding.

Without the Electoral College, you get people like this running the world:

@Salvor

I want to see rural strongholds emptied out and stripped of whatever shadows of population they have left beyond the bare essentials. Saving that, I’d like to see the urban centers we know as cities expand outward to encompass more area.

If the cities are to be the liberal stronghold, and rural america is the home of conservatives, I want to drain the swamp of conservatism and make it FAR more desirable to move to the city, I want better economic prospects than there are now, I want the decision to stay rural to be so destructive that even the Sarah Palins of the world will strap on rocket boots to move to modernity.

Good luck getting the rubes to agree to that deal.

[DrCube]

@Dr.Strangelove

There are so many problems with this analogy that it’s hard to know where to start.

Americans have much more common with each other than they do with other countries. To the extent there are differences, there’s no reason to believe that states are the correct granularity of division.

Kansans have much more in common with each other than they do with New Yorkers. To the extent there are differences, there’s no reason to believe that the entire US is the correct granularity of division.

And the analogy works, you just don’t like it. We have the same influence in the UN as China, despite China’s vastly larger population. Your “popular vote” ideals would put China in charge. That’s not smart, and that’s why the US ambassadors to the UN didn’t agree to that system. And furthermore, it wouldn’t be smart for small states to give up their power to influence the Presidential election (and Congress – it’s the exact same issue), and that’s why they didn’t agree to a system that does that.

And that’s why they never will. We can spitball about ways to replace the Electoral College all day, sign petitions, write your congressman, etc. But it will never be replaced by a popular vote, anymore than the UN will voluntarily let itself become a tool of Chinese foreign policy.