The proposed National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

I don’t know if it’s always the case – maybe in a parliamentary system there are other factors that make up for this particular “less just” characteristic. For example: a hypothetical system in which everyone gets an equal vote, but the candidates must be a certain ethnicity and gender, would be less just IMO than a system in which everyone gets a vote, but the influence of each vote is based on factors like geography (like the EC) and not always equal, but candidates are not restricted by ethnicity or gender.

When I look at the EC and compare it to a hypothetical national popular vote system for the US, I don’t see any benefits that make up for this less just characteristic. If I understand their reasoning correctly, the framers were concerned that without an EC, presidential candidates would ignore vast swaths of the country and only focus on high population areas. Modern politics and the EC has proven that presidential candidates still ignore vast swaths of the country, including many or most of the largest cities, and that strikes me as even worse than focusing on big cities at the expense of rural areas, which might occur with a national popular vote.

I believe the compact would indicate the winner of the plurality, as it has been rare for a president to actually win a majority. Your examples are times when the vote was extra split by a more robust than usual third party, but most of the time, the winner still has less than 50%.

It *has *to mean a plurality. How else are you going to have a winner?

If this chart is right, a president has received a majority of the popular vote in 30 of the 49 elections since 1824. And in 18 of the 26 elections between 1916 and 2016. It’s hardly “rare” (although, of course, the person elected president has had more people vote for someone else in 4 of the last 7 elections, so maybe it’s becoming more common).

Yes. Note that in the only case that matters — one side wins the pop vote, the other the traditional e.c. — the election is very close and the vote winner will almost certainly NOT get a majority.

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The present system favors campaigning in swing states and, for different reasons, in Iowa and New Hampshire specifically (both swing states). I view this as a feature not a bug. For one thing, it almost forces the D’s to reach out to Middle America rather than focusing primarily on urban centers. And, by addressing voters in 50-50 regions, dialog is possible, in contrast to the echo chambers on the coasts or in the lopsidest states of Flyover land.

Thanks for the link, I was thinking that it was a bit more common than that. In my voting lifetime, Obama is the only president to win the initial election by a majority. (Of course, in my voting life, republicans have only initially won the presidency while losing the popular vote.)

An interesting note, if you sort by margin, then trump comes in right behind quincy adams and hayes on winning with the most popular vote against him.

Iowa and New Hampshire are “middle America”, I guess they may have up to a few dozen black folks.

The second part of your statement doesn’t follow at all from the first.

Being a swing state has nothing to do with Middle America or Flyover country or rural areas or anything else. Florida isn’t Middle America. And Kansas definitely is.

Swing states got that way, essentially, by luck–just the right mix of demographic factors that led to a 50/50 split. Maybe the population is relatively red-leaning but there’s a higher mix of cities. Maybe it’s relatively blue-leaning but they had fewer cities. Whatever–it’s sheer happenstance. It’s like gerrymandering, except that the boundaries got locked in centuries ago and we’re just stuck with the artificial boundaries.

Why was Colorado a swing state but not Kansas? It’s not because the demographics are all that different. Colorado just happened to have a few factors that nudged it toward a split vote. Probably Boulder is a tad bigger than Wichita, relatively speaking. It doesn’t matter. The factors are arbitrary and irrelevant for the people that live on the boundary, except that it meant people 100 feet to the West had their votes count and 100 feet to the East did not.

Focusing on swing states doesn’t make “dialog possible”; on the contrary, it makes reasoned discussion of nationwide issues virtually impossible, by ignoring huge swaths of the population and focusing on a few randomly-selected locations and the local issues that come with them.

Pretty clear to me.

Why the emphasis on “initial” / “initially”? From my perspective, it looks like you’re just trying really hard to exclude Bush’s 3-million-vote victory over Kerry in 2004, but is there some other reason for the focus?

Because incumbency is a different beast than your first run. I may not have worder things as well as I liked, but my reasoning was to not count incumbency.

OK, thanks. I may have been relying too much on the wikipedia article linked to in the OP, and didn’t see that in it.

Thanks, that’s a reasonable answer. I appreciate the clarification.

But that aspect of it didn’t have much to do with the 2016 result. Every last electoral vote really didn’t count in 2016. Trump ran up the score with tiny pluralities in a few large, heavily urban states. Hillary would have lost even if she’d won every single state with 3, 4, or 5 electoral votes.

It’s bizarre that so many people on both sides want to believe that the opposite happened.

  1. Wouldn’t ‘middle America’ be the suburbs these days? Dems are doing a pretty good job connecting to the 'burbs.
  2. What’s so magic about reaching out to rural and small-town America, which is what I guess you really mean by ‘middle America’? Dems don’t exactly neglect their interests, but if their votes are already decided by God, guns, and gays, then all the ‘reaching out’ in the world won’t do any good politically, short of sacrificing core values.
  3. When do we get a system that ‘almost forces the R’s to reach out to urban America’?

More of a balance between urban and rural/small town. Denver’s a big city with major-league teams and such, plus there’s the other Front Range cities. Wichita (Motto: “far from this opera forevermore” ;)) is much smaller, ditto the part of the KC area that’s in Kansas. Most of the state is small town and rural.

Colorado has some larger cities, certainly. The state’s population is also larger. Colorado’s top 15 cities cover 50% of the population. How many in Kansas? Also 15.

The larger a city gets, the bluer it also tends to get. That’s probably enough to tip the balance. But these are relatively small effects. If you throw out every other city in Colorado, the lists look pretty similar. Colorado has 11 cities with >100k people; Kansas has 5. Colorado has 26 cities with >25k people; Kansas has 16. Pretty much what you’d expect from a state with just under twice the population.

So there’s no dramatic difference in urbanization, but a few big cities and some minor other differences are enough to tip the balance. It doesn’t have to be much; a few percent is the difference between a swing state vs. not.

The differences between Colorado and Kansas are less than the differences between, say, the LA metro area and the CA Central Valley. And yet we pretend that CA is a homogeneous lump of liberals, Kansas is a homogeneous lump of conservatives, and Colorado is a purple state deserving of special attention.

Wanted to mention another thing: this isn’t even true in the first place. It only looks true on a binary red/blue map.

If you want a more representative picture, see this one of the 2016 election, or this one of 2008. Good luck finding a path coast to coast without hitting a purple county at the least.

Another thing of note: you can’t really see states on the map. You just get the barest outline from the county boundaries. If it were smoothed out just a tad, you would have no idea which state is which. This is a really big hint that states are the wrong unit of quantization for deciding the election.

Assuming the compact is the same in every state, it is quite clear. Here is how it appears in California’s Election Code:
The chief election official of each member state shall designate the presidential slate with the largest national popular vote total as the “national popular vote winner.”
Plurality is specified. (BTW, in case of a tie, it works like it does now in 48 states - each state’s electoral votes all go to the popular vote winner in that state.)

Like you say, “the larger a city gets, the bluer it also tends to get.” Which is important because you’re ignoring the elephant in the room. “If you throw out every other city in Colorado,” the only thing that will matter is, is one of those cities Denver?

Because the Denver MSA contains 2.6 million people, which is 47% of the state’s population. Kansas has no cities of a million or more.

Below that, yeah, Kansas and Colorado look similar. But Kansas has no Denver, or anything remotely close.