I was reading this thread, in which it’s proposed that states could give out their electoral votes in proportion to the amount of votes received, rather than a “winner takes all scenario”, which major party would benefit the most from such a setup in the race for president?
Or is it such a neutral thing that it could go either way any given year?
For clarity, I would’ve ended the sentence after “scenario” and started a new one with “Which”.
Ah well, this is what 8am does to me.
The only way to answer your question is to (a) carefully define the alternative system you are proposing; and then (b) enter a lot of numbers into an Excel spreadsheet and see what pops out.
It sounds as if you are proposing to keep the allocation of electoral votes the same but change how they are awarded within each state. Next you must decide whether you wish to recognize fractional votes (not possible without Constitutional amendment) or round off to the nearest “whole elector”. And what about minor parties? If you start awarding votes to third parties, you have to decide how to handle rounding errors.
Once you’ve done that, enter the votes for the last several elections into a spreadsheet. I don’t propose to do it myself, but I predict that you would find no consistent advantage to either party.
There are a few more things to consider. First, two states already split their electoral votes, Nebraska and Maine. In both cases, one elector corresponds to each congressional district in the state, and whoever wins the majority in that district gets his elector appointed to the College. In addition, whoever wins the majority over the whole state gets the two additional electors that correspond to that state’s Senators. ME and NE are both quite small (population-wise) so the effect is not that significant. It would be very interesting to see what happens if New York or California or Texas went with such a system.
I think it’s safe to assume that a Constitutional amendment forcing all states to use a Maine/Nebraska type system would fail, as the EC was specifically designed to give smaller states a slight edge in terms of electing the executive: all states are guaranteed a minimum of three electors, while in the House they are only guaranteed a minimum of one Representative.
You could easily play “what if” and get a big database of election results by district and see what happened if every state had a ME/NE type (or other fictional type) of system. However, it’s important to remember that if that were the case, the candidates would run their campaigns very differently. While a 52% win in California gets you a ridiculous number of electoral votes, a similar win in the other system would only get you half (if that.) So a candidate is likely to choose an entirely different approach to California. In fact, the parties would probably nominate different people altogether.
Fringe parties would definitely benefit.
It would definitely be interesting in an election that was in year xxx8, and possibly had very different population densities than were counted in the census that many years earlier.
Also, swing states could get even weirder. Especially ones with urban rural splits.
USA Today ran a story analyzing the election results from 2000 using a Maine/Nebraska proportional system. I believe that Bush won by a slightly larger margin, probably because he won more states.
Such a system would make the decennial reapportionment an even more partisan and bloody spectacle.
If you want to see how a state like California would do, just look at the composition of the state’s congressional delegation. Pretty much every district was set up to favor incumbents, so presumably the Dems and Reps would split along those lines.
As others have hinted at, merely plugging in electoral results from past elections–as jklann suggests–would have absolutely no bearing on future results. Not only would the candidates of the major parties run their campaigns differently, but so-called “third parties” (Greens, Libertarians) would see a strong upsurge of votes.
Currently, in the winner-take-all system, 3rd party candidates suffer from the “wasted vote syndrome”. However, in a proportional representation system, a vote for a “minor” party candidate would actually mean something. So, I think, there would be a lot more dissaffected Republicans & Democrats voting Libertarian & Green. At least that’s what happens in other countries with this type of voting system in place.
I think this depends upon whether we’re talking about a proportional system where the electoral votes are awarded on the Maine/Nebraska model or a proportional system like Germany where candidates would be ranked.
We’re getting out of of GQ here, but to do away with all of the silly fractions and at the same time eliminate those silly third-party electors, consider returns by congressional district. You know, winner in a district gets the elector. Then figure out what to do with the two “senate”-counted electors.
Of course, that’s still a state decision, and while I’d be in favor of it here because Detroit screws us every time and makes us look like a stupid state, the overall systems works spectacularly well as-is.