The answer is … math. If we can agree that most urban centers lean more liberal, then the majority of people lean liberal. The urban center populations outnumber the rural and suburban centers. It’s why Hilary had more votes in total than Trump, and why Biden had more votes. If we just tally the total number of people voting, with no weight towards location, we will effectively neuter the overall rural and suburban vote. The big cities will carry the elections.
And under the electoral college system sparsely populated rural states have a disproportionate say in presidential elections. The EC system also completely distorts the process of campaigning for the presidency with the candidates concentrating on a small number of swing states while ignoring most of the country.
Not only that but voters in less populated states also have a disproportionate say due to the fact that all states get the same number of Senators. When combined with the EC, it seems to be a sort of double whammy.
Fair points. No system is perfect. But I feel our representatives system of government needs to have true representation for it to survive. IMO, the only fair way to discard the electoral system is to severely eliminate campaign financing - a hard limit on total campaign funding, including PACs. That way, candidates would be forced to actually get their true messaged platform out to the people, on an even keel, and let real elections take place with people focused on actual platforms and facts, not what we have now.
Funny that anyone lamenting loss of liberty would rest on Hamilton. He was perhaps Early America’s foremost opponent of limited government. In any case, today’s electorate are sustains government powers and privileges that vastly exceed the parameters of the Constitution.
My comment wasn’t to point out that “where a person lives” matters. I don’t say it as a problem, but a reality that needs to be discussed in discussing the utility of the electoral college.
To my lights, the rural v urban distinction is the only one that probably actually exists on some level. The state by state identities aren’t real anymore, as can be seen in Florida, where anyone in the panhandle will likely share more in common with a citizen of Alabama than Miami. That said, the electoral college was absolutely not designed to temper this rural v urban tension. It was based on states. Some states will have more urban centers than others, and since no one is in charge of this pattern, no one is in charge of the correction that the EC makes for it. In fact, under certain future growth patterns, the EC could just as easily come to actually exacerbate the urban advantage, rather than curb it. Instead, the main effect of the EC today is to distort voter power in totally arbitrary ways, such as heavily weighting the votes of citizens of swing states. Thankfully, state borders are not up for redistricting like state districts, or the US would look like a Picasso painting by now.
I don’t care so much about the left vs right squabble, but as far as accurately representing the views of our citizens, about which I do care, the EC appears to do a terrible job. And I wouldn’t call the fight against the EC fringe either. It has had noted problems since the beginning and was on the verge of being completely abolished in the 60s behind overwhelming bipartisan support. Electoral College abolition amendment - Wikipedia I would say what keeps it alive today is that it somehow got wrapped up in the left vs right conflict.
What we really need, what we are desperate for, is true, real, workable campaign finance reforms. Our elections have almost nothing to do with real issues anymore. It’s all party-based, meaningless talking points with no substantive plan of action. We need our candidates to speak to us about the issues and present concrete plans to attack those issues. And we need an electorate that listens to the platform, not the boogeyman billboards and commercials.
What we really need is to educate people to think beyond tribalism and select the best candidate. About 80% of the country (maybe more) is going to vote for the one party they committed to years (sometimes decades) ago. They can't think beyond the party lines and a handful of hot-button issues. It's too complicated for them. They don't realize that the election narratives each side puts out are largely propaganda and exaggerations. The democrats are not going to outlaw all guns, just like the republicans are not going to outlaw women in the workplace. We as a nation have gotten that stupid and it needs to change.
Actually, those areas would have a proportionate say in the election. The rural/urban argument misses what would be the real things that would matter under such a system: likelihood to vote and likelihood to vote for a particular party. High in both of those elements, and you wouldn't matter in a popular vote system. Low in both and you likely don't matter that much. Low in one or the other and high in the other and you decide the election. BTW, that is how it is now. It is just that the only low likelihood to vote but loyal to a party voters and the high likelihood to vote but low likelihood for either party voters that matter are those that exist in about 10 states. Those people in the other 40 states don't matter. In either the 10 states that matter or the 40 that don't, there is no concern over whether such a voter is urban or rural. In terms of whether the parties would care about rural areas, one needs to look at how large companies market. Do they spend all of their marketing budget in large cities? Think about McDonalds or Coca-Cola or P&G. Do they ignore potential customers in Wyoming or Montana? Absolutely not. They are aware that there are less potential customers in those locations, but it is cheaper to reach those areas as well. As such, they try to reach the marginal customer in those locations, just as a political campaign would try to reach the marginal voter in those locations. As such, the focus of a national popular vote would be wherever you could find a high proportion of voters that are either less likely to vote or less likely to vote for a particular party (i.e., low in behavioral partisanship) but not both.
Not sure how it's disproportionate when California gets 100 EC votes or something and Montana gets 2. If montana got like 50 then maybe so.
California gets 54 electoral votes. Every state gets a minimum of three EC votes, including DC In addition, this is how LA county compares to the rest of the country L.A. County has more people than 40 states, but its political power doesn't reflect that Also, there are more Republicans in California than in other state.
OK, so they get 54 vs. 3. Still proportionate based on population. Kind of like house of representatives. California, Tx, NY and maybe Fl have more than other states.
It is disproportionate based on the number of voters in states relative to the number of electors allocated to states. Put another way, if it were proportional, California would be allocated more electors than it is currently allocated while states like Rhode Island and Wyoming would be allocated less electors than they are currently allocated.
I like the spirit of this. I am troubled by the last problem you identify about the electorate, as it seems so fundamental and so challenging. How can we make the people on this board and elsewhere care more about the platforms than the group identities? And when you only have two options, the platforms should almost always be tradeoffs. Like picking between two grocery carts that have been prefilled, it’s unlikely that either will be free of unwanted items.
OK, so how many should Montana get (they currently have 4)? 1? None? If CA gets 54 and they have 52 representatives, why not use that number? That would give Montana 2 or 3. Or are you saying Montana shouldn't have that many representatives either?
