"Eliminating the Electoral College altogether and electing presidents with a straight popular vote, as Democrats want, is not desirable even if it were feasible"
This is insulting in the extreme. It's moderate fetishism. "Sure, we COULD adopt one-man, one-vote.... but that would disadvantage perspectives that have fewer votes!"
It brings to mind the old saw that to those used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Such a scenario would only 'disadvantage' Republicans to the precise extent that there are fewer of them.
The real danger here is that this alone is insufficient-- it would not fix the systemic biases in the House or in the Senate, and it will not address the self-selecting hyper-political nature of the Supreme Court. Actually allowing the people to elect their leaders by majority vote is presented as a hopelessly radical position, when it is the only solution that will address our ongoing legitimacy crisis.
I hope your reaction is to the "not desirable" part.
In practical terms, no structural reform is likely to happen. The terms for doing so set forth in the Constitution require that some portion of the 'red' states would need to cede their party's advantage. I don't think that's likely and Article 5 is pretty clear: " no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."
One would hope that in the spirit of 1787 some grand compromise could be reached. But compromise has become a dirty word for many. And so, sadly for the nation, pressing one's advantage is the more likely outcome.
Tim, neither the structure of the Senate or the EC stands a chance of changing. The only thing I can see is states deciding to award their electors proportionally which is their prerogative as ME and NE already do in a fashion by congressional district.
Since, that would give electors to the minority party of the state it is unlikely to pass in a single state, but perhaps if several states did it simultaneously where it did not favor a party, it could happen.
The only caveat is that if a state like CA or TX did it, they would be big enough to probably end up with some Green or Libertarian delegates which might make it more likely to end up in the HOR where it is decided by the majority house delegation for each state which gives the Rs a big advantage.
The feasible is correct as it is not happening, desirable is open to debate and dont know why it is fetishism?
Regardless what is the point of debating things that wont happen.
The EC is actually misunderstood. It is only minimally about small state advantage or rural/urban (urban small states like DE and RI have the same advantage as rural ones). The Rs usually get a 5-10 state advantage so 10-20 electors well below what the usual margin is and would not have changed the 2016 (would have the 2000).
The real disproportion in the EC is due to the first past the post, winner takes all, nature of awarding electors which could be changed by any state as ME and NE do. That just happens to favor Rs at this moment in time but within the last 20 years favored Dems when CA and IL were swing states leaning D.
Very nice piece, although, as Anthony Damiani points out, your objection to electing the president by a simple popular vote is specious. Also, the notion that the "old" Republican Party was ideologically "pure" is false. Although the "old" GOP talked incessantly of its determination to balance the budget, when in office they always ran up huge deficits while crafting elaborate plans for balancing the budget that, amazingly enough, were never enacted into law. Ever since 1994, the driving force of the Republican Party has been the populist nihilism of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Even prior to that time, an essential part of Ronald Reagan's appeal was his hatred of "welfare"--that is to say, programs that helped black people. Reagan's deep hatred of the American civil rights movement, a sentiment very much shared by William F. Buckley, William Rehnquist, and Antonine Scalia, is something that "conservatives" always manage to forget.
The NPV is not going to happen so why waste time debating it. The voter compact has failed to attract any blue states and has stalled and is questionably Constitutional and the likelihood of a Constitutional amendment passing is zilch since the small states will not relinquish power.
Possible and within any states prerogative is awarding electors proportionally which ME and NE already do via a districting process. This preserves the EC but gets rid of the most anti democratic component of it, namely the advantage of the party that wins close elections in big states which just happens to be the Rs in this historical period winning TX, OH, FL by close margins where the Ds waste votes in NY, CA, IL by winning big margins. Bidewn was able to win in 2020 by taking three big states PA, MI, and GA by small margins.
When I called Dalmia's argument against choosing a president by a simple majority vote "specious", I meant her claim that it would be somehow "unfair" to red state voters, which is, well, "specious". I know that any significant change in the Constitution is politically impossible. But that doesn't mean that electing the president the same way we elect other officials is somehow "wrong".
OK, I get that and agree. I do think there is a political feasibility in getting states to award electors proportionally as they somewhat do in ME and NE. It is clearly a state prerogative. What prevents it is that it would diminish the majority parties advantage so unlikely to happen except if several states at once chose this route. So if TX and CA chose to do so simultaneously it would cause little change in the EC but suddenly make California Republicans and Texas Democrats important, which imo would moderate politics.
Moreover, if states voluntarily choose to move to proportional apportionment of electors, it would also deal with my concern about less populous rural states being subjected to a reverse systematic bias. The political incentives for entrenched blue and red states still aren't conducive to them switching, but, still the barriers seem a bit more surmountable than eliminating or rejiggering the EC.
This "improvement" has no impact on the fundamental inequality of the EC, whereby the vote of a resident of Wyoming carries 70 times as much weight in the EC as the vote of a resident of California. There is no reason to provide more protection to rural voters than other minority groups in the population. Rural areas of individual states are not guaranteed protection in state level elections, so why should they be at the presidential level? The EC is simply the result of horse-trading in the development of the U.S. Constitution. The small states realized that they had the whip hand at the Convention, that the big states would agree to practically anything to get every state delegation to sign off on the finished project. This was exactly the opposite of Madison's expectation when he set about organizing the Convention, assuming that the small states would all be terrified of being left out.
Alan, you are correct in that proportional awarding of delegates does not correct the small state advantage. What it corrects is the first past the post bias that swings the election to the dubious category of the party that wins their states by smaller margins. But that is the majority of the disproportionate vote as opposed to the small state advantage.
Trump won 50 states in 2016 and Clinton won 40 + DC so he advantaged 9 states which equaled 18 electors. But he won by 77. He still would have won if they got rid of the electoral college but kept the first past the post.
Secondly, complain all you want about the EC, but it is going nowhere.
Yes, it was a compromise to get the smaller states to sign the Constitution. So be it. It can only be amended with a 3/4 vote of the state legislatures which wont happen.
Proportional awarding of electors is the prerogative of any states and is already done in two. Why complain about the unchangeable.
Lastly people keep mention rural/urban but the EC is not about rural/urban. Delaware, RI, HI, and DC are all urban states and have the same advantage as small rural states, and some big states like NC are more rural. In the aggregate, yes, more of the small states are rural but it is far from dramatically so.
I regard the overrepresentation of the small states in both the EC and the Senate (where the problem starts, of course) as "unchangeable" but also dangerous. Virtually all "conservatives" of any stripe, including Shikha, have convinced themselves that the Constitution is designed to protect us against the "tyranny of the majority", by which they mean the majority should not be able to pass any legislation that "the minority" objects to. This is just a restatement of John Calhoun's "concurrent majorities", meaning that any large group of voters (preferably white ones, of course) should have veto power over any issue about which they feel strongly. They adopt this position because no one right of center can see their way to a stable majority of the vote. The great appeal of Trump to the right is that he is a winner, a "winner" who lost to the near-pathetic Hillary Clinton by three million votes, and lost to the semi-comatose Joe Biden by seven million. This is their idea of a "winner". They have 99% convinced themselves that a righteous minority has the right to rule, on the basis of its righteousness. They are abandoning anything resembling democracy. The woke left has decided that due process and even-handedness are just tricks of the ruling class, and now the Right is doing the same. The difference is that the "woke left" is a portion of the left of center coalition, while on the right there is no coalition, only Trumpism.
"Democrats, on the other hand, have to hit as much as 53 or 54 percent to win the presidency. And this gap is only growing. Within a few more election cycles, Craig maintains, a Republican could get into the White House despite losing the popular vote by 5 to 10 percent or even more."
The first part is true but the second seems unlikely that the advantage will ever get to 5-10%.
Trump in 2016 pushed the upper limit in winning the EC while losing the PV by 2.1% to Hillary Clinton but Biden handily won the EC with a margin of 4.4% in 2020 so likely the GOP advantage is in the 3% range. GWB only lost the popular vote in 2000 by 0.5% and the argument could be made that Ralph Nader was the cause.
Most of that advantage in the EC is due to the winner take all awarding of electors, and as the author mentioned is about Dems winning their big states- NY, IL, CA- by much bigger margins than the R bigs- OH, TX, FL, so wasting votes. The small state advantage is much less important. In close elections the number of states won by the Rs has never exceeded 10 (9 in 2000 and 2016) so some 18 electors out of 538.
To get to a 5-10% advantage would require massive voting changes where in reality the trends favor the R advantage diminishing. For the advantage to increase for the Rs would mean that they won their states by less and Dems won their states by more, but in 2020 the swing to the Dems was more nationally than in NY, CA, and IL. For the Rs FL and OH had bigger R margins wasting votes. The exception to this was TX which had a closer election. However TX has been shifting blue to the point where it will become a swing state and conceivably a blue state at which point the EC advantage might actually shift to the Dems.
The TX trend should strike fear among the Rs. From 2012 to 2020 the R margin in Tx went from Romney's +15.8 to Trump 2016's +9.0 to Trump's 2020 3.4%. This is a remarkable shift and coincides with the growth of liberal suburbs and educated liberal voters migrating to TX.
Except that urbanization is increasing, and the country's population is increasingly in cities, meaning that the Democratic vote will become increasingly compacted in safe blue states, magnifying the structural advantage the Republicans have in rural states.
This is true though the urban areas that people are moving to are actually more in red states ie Phoenix, Atlanta, Orlando, San Antonio, Austin, Charlotte are the fastest growing MSAs which is contributing to the blue shift in TX, AZ, GA, NC whereas the urban areas in deep blue states Chicago, New York, LA are not growing as fast with the exception of Seattle.
Suburbs are growing more than cities which are growing more than rural.
It is more accurately a small state advantage in the Senate and EC than rural, as DE, HI, RI, and DC (for EC) all have the same advantage as the small R states, granted there are a few more of the small Rs.
The EC is mostly about Dems wasting votes in the big blue states of CA, NY, and IL but those states have been losing population and NY and IL are trending red. The most worrisome states for the Dems would be in the midwest where PA, MI, OH, IN have all trended red.
"Eliminating the Electoral College altogether and electing presidents with a straight popular vote, as Democrats want, is not desirable even if it were feasible"
This is insulting in the extreme. It's moderate fetishism. "Sure, we COULD adopt one-man, one-vote.... but that would disadvantage perspectives that have fewer votes!"
It brings to mind the old saw that to those used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Such a scenario would only 'disadvantage' Republicans to the precise extent that there are fewer of them.
The real danger here is that this alone is insufficient-- it would not fix the systemic biases in the House or in the Senate, and it will not address the self-selecting hyper-political nature of the Supreme Court. Actually allowing the people to elect their leaders by majority vote is presented as a hopelessly radical position, when it is the only solution that will address our ongoing legitimacy crisis.
I hope your reaction is to the "not desirable" part.
In practical terms, no structural reform is likely to happen. The terms for doing so set forth in the Constitution require that some portion of the 'red' states would need to cede their party's advantage. I don't think that's likely and Article 5 is pretty clear: " no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."
One would hope that in the spirit of 1787 some grand compromise could be reached. But compromise has become a dirty word for many. And so, sadly for the nation, pressing one's advantage is the more likely outcome.
Tim, neither the structure of the Senate or the EC stands a chance of changing. The only thing I can see is states deciding to award their electors proportionally which is their prerogative as ME and NE already do in a fashion by congressional district.
Since, that would give electors to the minority party of the state it is unlikely to pass in a single state, but perhaps if several states did it simultaneously where it did not favor a party, it could happen.
The only caveat is that if a state like CA or TX did it, they would be big enough to probably end up with some Green or Libertarian delegates which might make it more likely to end up in the HOR where it is decided by the majority house delegation for each state which gives the Rs a big advantage.
The feasible is correct as it is not happening, desirable is open to debate and dont know why it is fetishism?
Regardless what is the point of debating things that wont happen.
The EC is actually misunderstood. It is only minimally about small state advantage or rural/urban (urban small states like DE and RI have the same advantage as rural ones). The Rs usually get a 5-10 state advantage so 10-20 electors well below what the usual margin is and would not have changed the 2016 (would have the 2000).
The real disproportion in the EC is due to the first past the post, winner takes all, nature of awarding electors which could be changed by any state as ME and NE do. That just happens to favor Rs at this moment in time but within the last 20 years favored Dems when CA and IL were swing states leaning D.
Very nice piece, although, as Anthony Damiani points out, your objection to electing the president by a simple popular vote is specious. Also, the notion that the "old" Republican Party was ideologically "pure" is false. Although the "old" GOP talked incessantly of its determination to balance the budget, when in office they always ran up huge deficits while crafting elaborate plans for balancing the budget that, amazingly enough, were never enacted into law. Ever since 1994, the driving force of the Republican Party has been the populist nihilism of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Even prior to that time, an essential part of Ronald Reagan's appeal was his hatred of "welfare"--that is to say, programs that helped black people. Reagan's deep hatred of the American civil rights movement, a sentiment very much shared by William F. Buckley, William Rehnquist, and Antonine Scalia, is something that "conservatives" always manage to forget.
The NPV is not going to happen so why waste time debating it. The voter compact has failed to attract any blue states and has stalled and is questionably Constitutional and the likelihood of a Constitutional amendment passing is zilch since the small states will not relinquish power.
Possible and within any states prerogative is awarding electors proportionally which ME and NE already do via a districting process. This preserves the EC but gets rid of the most anti democratic component of it, namely the advantage of the party that wins close elections in big states which just happens to be the Rs in this historical period winning TX, OH, FL by close margins where the Ds waste votes in NY, CA, IL by winning big margins. Bidewn was able to win in 2020 by taking three big states PA, MI, and GA by small margins.
When I called Dalmia's argument against choosing a president by a simple majority vote "specious", I meant her claim that it would be somehow "unfair" to red state voters, which is, well, "specious". I know that any significant change in the Constitution is politically impossible. But that doesn't mean that electing the president the same way we elect other officials is somehow "wrong".
OK, I get that and agree. I do think there is a political feasibility in getting states to award electors proportionally as they somewhat do in ME and NE. It is clearly a state prerogative. What prevents it is that it would diminish the majority parties advantage so unlikely to happen except if several states at once chose this route. So if TX and CA chose to do so simultaneously it would cause little change in the EC but suddenly make California Republicans and Texas Democrats important, which imo would moderate politics.
I like that suggestion a lot, Jack.
Moreover, if states voluntarily choose to move to proportional apportionment of electors, it would also deal with my concern about less populous rural states being subjected to a reverse systematic bias. The political incentives for entrenched blue and red states still aren't conducive to them switching, but, still the barriers seem a bit more surmountable than eliminating or rejiggering the EC.
This "improvement" has no impact on the fundamental inequality of the EC, whereby the vote of a resident of Wyoming carries 70 times as much weight in the EC as the vote of a resident of California. There is no reason to provide more protection to rural voters than other minority groups in the population. Rural areas of individual states are not guaranteed protection in state level elections, so why should they be at the presidential level? The EC is simply the result of horse-trading in the development of the U.S. Constitution. The small states realized that they had the whip hand at the Convention, that the big states would agree to practically anything to get every state delegation to sign off on the finished project. This was exactly the opposite of Madison's expectation when he set about organizing the Convention, assuming that the small states would all be terrified of being left out.
Alan, you are correct in that proportional awarding of delegates does not correct the small state advantage. What it corrects is the first past the post bias that swings the election to the dubious category of the party that wins their states by smaller margins. But that is the majority of the disproportionate vote as opposed to the small state advantage.
Trump won 50 states in 2016 and Clinton won 40 + DC so he advantaged 9 states which equaled 18 electors. But he won by 77. He still would have won if they got rid of the electoral college but kept the first past the post.
Secondly, complain all you want about the EC, but it is going nowhere.
Yes, it was a compromise to get the smaller states to sign the Constitution. So be it. It can only be amended with a 3/4 vote of the state legislatures which wont happen.
Proportional awarding of electors is the prerogative of any states and is already done in two. Why complain about the unchangeable.
Lastly people keep mention rural/urban but the EC is not about rural/urban. Delaware, RI, HI, and DC are all urban states and have the same advantage as small rural states, and some big states like NC are more rural. In the aggregate, yes, more of the small states are rural but it is far from dramatically so.
I regard the overrepresentation of the small states in both the EC and the Senate (where the problem starts, of course) as "unchangeable" but also dangerous. Virtually all "conservatives" of any stripe, including Shikha, have convinced themselves that the Constitution is designed to protect us against the "tyranny of the majority", by which they mean the majority should not be able to pass any legislation that "the minority" objects to. This is just a restatement of John Calhoun's "concurrent majorities", meaning that any large group of voters (preferably white ones, of course) should have veto power over any issue about which they feel strongly. They adopt this position because no one right of center can see their way to a stable majority of the vote. The great appeal of Trump to the right is that he is a winner, a "winner" who lost to the near-pathetic Hillary Clinton by three million votes, and lost to the semi-comatose Joe Biden by seven million. This is their idea of a "winner". They have 99% convinced themselves that a righteous minority has the right to rule, on the basis of its righteousness. They are abandoning anything resembling democracy. The woke left has decided that due process and even-handedness are just tricks of the ruling class, and now the Right is doing the same. The difference is that the "woke left" is a portion of the left of center coalition, while on the right there is no coalition, only Trumpism.
"Democrats, on the other hand, have to hit as much as 53 or 54 percent to win the presidency. And this gap is only growing. Within a few more election cycles, Craig maintains, a Republican could get into the White House despite losing the popular vote by 5 to 10 percent or even more."
The first part is true but the second seems unlikely that the advantage will ever get to 5-10%.
Trump in 2016 pushed the upper limit in winning the EC while losing the PV by 2.1% to Hillary Clinton but Biden handily won the EC with a margin of 4.4% in 2020 so likely the GOP advantage is in the 3% range. GWB only lost the popular vote in 2000 by 0.5% and the argument could be made that Ralph Nader was the cause.
Most of that advantage in the EC is due to the winner take all awarding of electors, and as the author mentioned is about Dems winning their big states- NY, IL, CA- by much bigger margins than the R bigs- OH, TX, FL, so wasting votes. The small state advantage is much less important. In close elections the number of states won by the Rs has never exceeded 10 (9 in 2000 and 2016) so some 18 electors out of 538.
To get to a 5-10% advantage would require massive voting changes where in reality the trends favor the R advantage diminishing. For the advantage to increase for the Rs would mean that they won their states by less and Dems won their states by more, but in 2020 the swing to the Dems was more nationally than in NY, CA, and IL. For the Rs FL and OH had bigger R margins wasting votes. The exception to this was TX which had a closer election. However TX has been shifting blue to the point where it will become a swing state and conceivably a blue state at which point the EC advantage might actually shift to the Dems.
The TX trend should strike fear among the Rs. From 2012 to 2020 the R margin in Tx went from Romney's +15.8 to Trump 2016's +9.0 to Trump's 2020 3.4%. This is a remarkable shift and coincides with the growth of liberal suburbs and educated liberal voters migrating to TX.
Except that urbanization is increasing, and the country's population is increasingly in cities, meaning that the Democratic vote will become increasingly compacted in safe blue states, magnifying the structural advantage the Republicans have in rural states.
This is true though the urban areas that people are moving to are actually more in red states ie Phoenix, Atlanta, Orlando, San Antonio, Austin, Charlotte are the fastest growing MSAs which is contributing to the blue shift in TX, AZ, GA, NC whereas the urban areas in deep blue states Chicago, New York, LA are not growing as fast with the exception of Seattle.
Suburbs are growing more than cities which are growing more than rural.
It is more accurately a small state advantage in the Senate and EC than rural, as DE, HI, RI, and DC (for EC) all have the same advantage as the small R states, granted there are a few more of the small Rs.
The EC is mostly about Dems wasting votes in the big blue states of CA, NY, and IL but those states have been losing population and NY and IL are trending red. The most worrisome states for the Dems would be in the midwest where PA, MI, OH, IN have all trended red.