The Electoral College Thread

Others have suggested that while we shouldn't give up on the South, the strategy should be a generational one that relies in post-2004 cycles on the demographics of African-Americans and tech workers moving there.

That Washington Post article irked me.. How can one not tend to think something's wrong when a major party decides to just write off a huge chunk of the country? You don't have to pour tons of money into the South and believe it's impossible to win the election without it, in order to take seriously the fact that there is a very, very big disconnect between a lot of voters and the message/image of the Democratic Party. I'm struck by the fact that this strategist is willing to accept this divisiveness without even interrogating it - and then goes on to say, well, we can't turn out enough black voters to win in the South, so let's try to appeal to Latinos in the Southwest and win there..

I guess my basic questions are, why are we not interested in knowing why Democratic Party strategists are trying to write off the South? What does that say about our opinion of certain people - that we don't even deign to try and communicate with them any more? I don't appreciate Zell Miller endorsing Bush but I also think one shouldn't be deaf to many of his complaints..

Despite the recent controversies I still hope the Dean campaign doesn't accept this - and what strikes me as an important difference is the level of grassroots support Dean has. Unlike Gore, there won't be a massive net loss of resources if Dean keeps running a grassroots campaign in the South - you couldn't divert many of these folks to Florida if you wanted to. Actually, I hope that even if Dean is not the nominee, the grassroots people don't quit - there is the potential to organize huge GOTV efforts and that can only help Democrats.

Incidentally, I'm very proud of Senator Landrieu's performance during the filibuster. She usually embarasses me with her deference to the oil industry, but she was on fire!

http://nutrias.org/~nopl/photos/recent/morerecent8/recent486.jpg

* sigh *

We have a Nevada County down here. It's pronounced ne-vay-duh.

Seems like there was a particular American city that JFK continually mispronounced that eventually voted against him for it. Wish I could remember that one right now.

They should send Bush to Worchester, Mass. That would be fun.

Let's look at some state-by-state numbers. Some are better than others and I'll focus on these. Consider that many are from before Super Tuesday, which gave Kerry an additional bump in the polls.

Arizona
2000 vote - Bush 51, Gore 45
ASU poll, mid-late Feb - Kerry 46, Bush 44

Florida
2000 vote - Bush 49, Gore 49
Miami Herald poll, early Mar - Kerry 49, Bush 43

Indiana
2000 vote - Bush 57, Gore 41
SurveyUSA poll, mid-Feb - Bush 51, Kerry 45 (Bayh would give us the 3 points easy)

Iowa
2000 vote - Gore 49, Bush 48
Des Moines Register poll, early Feb - Kerry 49, Bush 42

Missouri
2000 vote - Bush 50, Gore 47
Decision Research (Dem) poll, mid-Feb - Kerry 49, Bush 46

Nevada
2000 vote - Bush 50, Gore 46
Survey USA poll, mid-Feb - Bush 49, Kerry 48

New Hampshire
2000 vote - Bush 48, Gore 47
UNH poll, early Feb - Kerry 53, Bush 38

Pennsylvania
2000 vote - Gore 51, Bush 46
Quinnipiac poll, mid-Feb - Kerry 50, Bush 45

Washington
2000 vote - Gore 50, Bush 45
SurveyUSA poll, early Feb - Kerry 55, Bush 43

Are there any state-by-state breakdowns on House delegations? I assume it would follow party lines - states with a GOP majority and states with a Dem majority. That would actually favor Kerry, as Texas has zero chance of going to him, but the Congressional delegation is (for now) 17-15 Dem.

Assuming they could keep the Texas Dems in line, that's a gift from God. (That could be offset by the NY and Cali. delegations, though)

US House - 4 Democrat, 6 Republican
US Senate - 1 Democrat (Bayh), 1 Republican (Lugar)

Senate- Democrat Majority
General Assembly- Democrat Majority
Governor- Republican
US House - 3 Democrat, 1 Republican
US Senate - 2 Democrat

2000 Result: Bush 51%, Gore 46%, Nader 2%

Arizona
Margin - 95,000 votes
Growth - 450,000 people

Colorado
Margin - 145,000 votes (90,000 for Nader)
Growth - 250,000 people

Florida
Margin - less than 600 votes
Growth - more than 1 million people

Georgia
Margin - 300,000 votes
Growth - 500,000 people

Nevada
Margin - 20,000 votes
Growth - 240,000 people

Minnesota
Margin - 60,000 votes (125,000 Nader)
Growth - 130,000 people

Missouri
Margin - 80,000 votes (40,000 Nader)
Growth - 110,000 people

New Mexico
Margin - less than 400 (20,000 Nader)
Growth - 55,000 people

Oregon
Margin - 7,000 people (77,000 Nader)
Growth - 140,000 people

Tennessee
Margin - 80,000 votes (20,000 Nader)
Growth - 150,000 people

Virginia
Margin - 220,000 votes (60,000 Nader)
Growth - 310,000 people

Washington
Margin - 130,000 votes (100,000 Nader)
Growth - 240,000 people

Wisconsin
Margin - 6,000 (94,000 Nader)
Growth - 110,000

All of the states had a Bush-Gore margin of less than 10%. Two - Nevada and Tennessee - had a margin of less than 5%.

If you add the Nader vote to the Gore vote, six of the states - Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Tennessee, and West Virginia - had a margin of less than 5%, and one of these - Nevada - had a margin of only 1%.

Five of the states - Arizona, Arkansas, Nevada, Tennessee, and West Virginia - had percentage voting-age-population turnouts of below 50%, and six (add Virginia) had below average VAP % turnouts.

Older Electoral Results

Seven of these states - all but VA - voted for Bill Clinton. Four of these states - Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Tennessee - have elected Democratic governors since 2000, and Louisiana also elected a Democratic Senator.

The Vice Presidential factor

Six of these states are the home state, or are next door to and culturally similar to the home state, of a Vice Presidential prospect:

AR: Wesley Clark, Hillary Clinton (both highly unlikely)
AZ: Bill Richardson (New Mexico)
CO: Bill Richardson (New Mexico)
LA: Mary Landrieu, John Breaux (both unlikely)
VA: Mark Warner (unlikely), John Edwards (North Carolina)
WV: Jay Rockefeller, Ed Rendell (Pennsylvania)

The Demographic Factor

Three of these states - Arizona, Colorado and Nevada - are in the top 10 for growth in the last few years. All have substantial hispanic populations.

The regional factor

Seven of the eight states have substantial population in a region that favors or is neutral to Democrats.

AR: Big River (52% Gore+Nader)
AZ: El Norte (58% Gore+Nader)
CO: El Norte
LA: Southern Lowlands (50% Gore+Nader)
NV: El Norte
TN: Big River
VA: Southern Lowlands

Also, I doubt that dissatisfaction with the electoral college is a leading cause
of non-voting. Americans are ignorant; most non-voters probably don't know
what the electoral college is (besides a few half-remembered news stories from
the 2000 recount debacle).

You think Florida 2000 was bad? Multiply that by 51.

I say keep the Electoral College, but do it the way Tipsy alludes to, with each congressional district getting an electoral vote with a two point bonus to the overall popular winner.

it seems like it encourages a "campaign in ohio/florida/virginia" mentality

This explains why Obama is doing unexpectedly well in North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, and possibly North Dakota.

I really think he's winning in large part because he's got people on the ground (in addition to media saturation and, you know, an opponent who seems ever loopier by the day).

But I'm not entirely pro-EC, I'm just saying, this seems like a nice thing about it.

ok, sure -- n.c., ind., mo. and possibly n.d. (although obama pretty much pulled his campaign from n.d. weeks ago). he's still not campaigning in new york, california, texas or illinois, and neither is mccain. not to mention idaho, arizona, rhode island, hawaii and a whole lot of other states. so i don't think the e.c. encourages nationwide campaigning. it just encourages a different, weirder sort of narrowly targeted campaigning than a popular-vote election would.

the best arguments i can think of for not trying to get rid of the thing have to do with inertia. a.) it's probably futile; and b.) it only occasionally gives an election to someone who actually lost it. if that happened more often, there'd start to be a lot more growling about it.

The electoral college had two purposes, only one of which is still operative.

The original EC was designed to place a buffer between the passions of the demos (the people) and access to power, by placing the actual vote in the hands of a few, presumably sober and judicious, electors who could override the outcome of the election in case of need. This fucntion no longer functions.

The second purpose was similar to the reason for giving Wyoming or Alaska the same number of senators as California or New York, which is to dilute the influence of heavily-populated states and increase the influence of less-populated states. It still serves this purpose.

Whatever the theoretical justice of this system might be, the practical effect has been to give rural populations a disproportionate voice in government and a huge amount of tax-subsidies in relation to their economic contributions.

At first glance this might seem awfully ill-conceived, until you imagine just how backward, impoverished and benighted the boondocks would be without these subsidies. If you think rednecks are ignorant now, just reduce them all to the condition of sharecroppers living in tarpaper shacks and see how much worse off they would be. The gulf between city and country which seems so large today would become an unbridgable chasm and the gap between rich and poor far larger and more corrupting than it is today.

The EC is part of the tribute the cities are forced to pay to the Utahs of this country. Bad as that price seems, it could be worse.

What about all those rednecks in Florida, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina?

I mean, let's not forget that "Red" America includes some pretty populous areas. Meanwhile, Vermont, Maine, DC, and Delaware get a free pass when we start talking about how "ignorant" the smaller states are now.

yeah, there are more rural residents of new york than there are total residents of idaho, montana or wyoming. it's true that less-populated states tend to be more rural, but they don't actually have more rural people. so i don't think the city-country argument really holds up. if you want to protect countryfolk from the predations of the city, you're better off fighting for it in the new york or illinois state legislatures. illinois is a "big state," with a big city, but it also has more farmers than kansas (not to mention 3 x as many as montana, and more than 8 x as many wyoming). so you're not really talking about urban vs. rural interests, just the interests of states with more people (urban and rural) vs. fewer people (urban and rural).

and anyway the current e.c. set-up doesn't empower the small states that much. it's just the +2 electors they get for their senators that gives them a small edge. california still has 55 electors to nevada's 5. the big states are still the big prizes (as obviously they should be). and when you get a big state that's closely divided -- florida, say -- that's where candidates go to spend their money and time.

all of which is just to say that as far as i can tell, the electoral college's effects are more sort of weird and accidental than purposeful. they slightly empower warren buffett in nebraska, and slightly disenfranchise single moms in houston housing projects. the effects aren't huge, but i don't see on what basis they're justifiable (apart from we're-stuck-with-it).

(one other thing: our whole sense of "red america" and "blue america" really comes from the electoral college. because of winner-take-all allocation, i think it really drastically exaggerates the political and cultural divisions in the country, and how we all think about them. in a simple-majority system, we'd still know which candidates fared better in which regions, but i don't think the differences would seem as stark.)

Has anyone been following the progress of the National Popular Vote Compact? It's being put forth as an alternative to the constitutional amendment process as a way to get de-facto popular vote for the presidential election. Basically every state that passes it pledges to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote - as long as at least 270 electoral votes worth of states have pledged to do the same. The idea is that it doesn't penalize individual states for agreeing to this b/c it only comes into effect once enough states have agreed to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Seems to be getting support in some states, but still pretty far from 270.

Not necessarily an argument pro, or against, but I was thinking about EC and Colorado recently. Remember a few months ago when McCain mentioned redrawing the water deals between Colorado and like, Arizona, and Colorado said, "Over my dead body?" And everyone was talking about how McCain lost Colorado because of those comments?

If the election comes down to Obama winning Colorado, that would essentially mean that a water conflict in a particular state gave Obama the election. That could only possibly happen with an Electoral College.

Has anyone been following the progress of the National Popular Vote Compact?

oh, thanks. i was trying to find something about that earlier, because i've read about it but couldn't remember the details. it's an interesting approach. probably easier than a constitutional amendment, but still hard to do. hard to say what effect it would have.

on the colorado water thing, yeah, that's one of those peculiarities. and i don't know, maybe the quirkiness of the system is sort of an argument in its favor. it makes elections weirder than they might be otherwise.

I actually think what might have most aged the EC system is actually the rise of polling - if you were having the 2008 election in 1950 states like Oregon and South Carolina would be being campaigned in. It's not that candidates are more willing than before to micro-target their resources, more that they're now able to.

I would just like to point out that I was OTM in an email I wrote to President Clinton when I was 10 telling him that I had just discovered that it was possible for someone to be elected president despite having failed to win the majority of national votes.

In 2000 I was srsly like O_o SEE BILL I TOLD U WHY DON'T U ANSWER YR EMAIL EVER.?!?

I also asked him to attend a BBQ at my house.

He didn't answer that either.

i'm just trying to find any sensible reason for having it today

IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT

seriously why would a sitting president push to reform the EC?

the only way it's going to change is by having each state alter the way they operate. Big swing states will go last, but judging by the attention Omaha got, other states with small vote counts that don't typically swing might be more enthusiastic about proportional representation in a few years.

seems like the problem with states switching to proportional representation is it can change the electoral map in a way that is favorable to one side. like a couple years ago when republicans in california wanted to put up a ballot proposition to allocated their EV's proportionally, and everyone freaked b/c it would take a 50+ EV edge off the table for the dems.

also to be fair it's still not that representative or much better than winner-take-all states. if all the states had proportional representation by congressional districts like NE and ME then most people would still live in "safe" districts and get no attention.

yeah, there's two different approaches, and which party prefers which alternative is way too obvious. "natl popular vote" vs "proportional representation;" although whatever the GOP thinks is a good idea (about any issue) is about to become a moot point, it would seem

I don't know if this has already been said above, but I think it's weird that there's a National Popular Vote campaign but not a national abolish-the-Senate campaign. I mean the electoral college usually comes pretty close to reflecting the popular vote anyway, whereas the Senate gives California the same power as Wyoming, which has about 1/70 the population. THAT shit is fucked up.

yeah. i started a thread about that once. in which i eventually ended up ranting like a streetcorner monomaniac. most americans are basically happy with the system, so whatever. plus talk about something that has zero chance of ever changing.

Haha, I forgot that I sort of argued the other way on that thread. But maybe we need a *proportional-plus* system or something. I don't think it would be fair to reduce all of Wyoming to a drop in the bucket, but I don't think the current system is very fair either.

It'd be interesting to see an in-depth analysis of certain Senate votes by population. There are probably plenty where a bill with support by a HUGE popular majority loses.

but I think it's weird that there's a National Popular Vote campaign but not a national abolish-the-Senate campaign. I mean the electoral college usually comes pretty close to reflecting the popular vote anyway, whereas the Senate gives California the same power as Wyoming, which has about 1/70 the population. THAT shit is fucked up

really? yeah but. . . that's why you have the House.

Well, and yet obviously the founding fathers weren't interested in having a pure democracy, but rather a "mixed" system, which they believed would be safest from the problems of democracy (mob rule).

i mean maybe i don't pay enough attention to this sort of thing, but i've never heard anyone complain about the Legislative branch like that. it's not a perfect system, but it's pretty close.

You've never heard anyone complain the Senate is un-democratic?!?!

I've heard the complaint, it's just not an energizing cause the way popular vote is, which is basically all because of the 2000 election, which really had a lot more to it than just the popular vote issue anyway

i guess it's the kind of complaint that begs the question: okay, so how would you redesign the senate? and yeah, the electoral college, to me, is a much more important place to reform

I guess the compromise by the Founding Fathers was that every (white male) American had the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and that if those three rights could be had in a state that wasn't New York, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, then so be it.

Why should someone who chooses to live in Vermont or Wyoming be penalized in representation just because they don't live in a state like Texas that got to be coaxed into the Union with a bunch of grandfathered-in rules?

you can have a unicameral legislature if you want but you should probably just go ahead and dissolve the state borders at that point

federalism lol

also people who live in STATES complaining about what is and isn't fair can eat me

I lived in your non-state for 15+ years.

i would like the states to dissolve and have america turn into russia

200 years til the US is divided into a number of smaller nation states.

Russia? For that remark we shall send you to the gulag (the eastern Montana scablands). xpost

in russia the electoral college elects you putin.

15,805,136 clinton
13,300,472 trump

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/democratic_vote_count.html

those numbers refer to the popular vote as opposed to the electoral college

I think that link goes to vote counts from the dem primaries, not the general.

oh you're right

that's what i get for copy pasting

sorry about that

59,796,265 clinton
59,589,806 trump

http://www.cnn.com/election/results/president

Good Jamelle Bouie piece, addressing some of the arguments used in support of the EC:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/opinion/electoral-college-warren-trump.html

Gotta start adding “except Jamelle Bouie” to all my comments about the NYT opinion page.

Michelle Goldberg is pretty good, too.

Sen Dems propose

https://www.thedailybeast.com/senator-brian-schatz-introduces-constitutional-amendment-to-abolish-the-electoral-college

a brutal reminder:

it must not only receive support from two-thirds of both chambers of Congress but also three-fourths of all the states.

Even if, by some miracle, this won enough votes in Congress, how likely is it that legislatures from the least-populated 15 states would voluntarily vote to greatly diminish their disproportionate power over presidential elections? This is a fairly reasonable proposal that is utterly and completely doomed from the get-go.

I agree.

lol:

“I think if you want to set up a single nationwide count so we could have the Palm Beach story nationwide, and you could have the maximum incentive for Democrats to steal the election, and the maximum incentive for Democrats to have illegal immigrants voting, it’s a terrific idea. And I think anybody who believes in having a totally corrupt nationwide system ought to be in favor of it. But if you think it’s better to have a decentralized system — and by the way, I want to see these candidates for president go to Iowa and go to New Hampshire and explain why they think in the future no presidential candidate should worry about any place except New York and California.”

– Newt Gingrich, this morning on Fox & Friends

Does this Palm Beach Story have a Weenie King?

Hanging Chad King

Ohioans may vote this November on a proposed state constitutional amendment to award the state's presidential electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of who receives the most votes in Ohio.

https://www.cleveland.com/politics/2019/04/proposed-ohio-constitutional-amendment-would-ditch-electoral-college-what-you-need-to-know.html