I'm really confused by this Palinesque thread title. Is Massachussets trying to have its voters spayed or neutered? Or maybe turn them into neutrons or neutrinos? Or to have them declared neutral? Somebody advise. Thx.
Vermont, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Delaware, D.C. Gore didn't really lose the EC vote because of small states. He lost it because he won his states big and lost the toss up states (Florida, Ohio) by very small margins, which caused a huge swing in the EC. If he gets 100,000 more votes in FL and OH, he wins the EC by a huge margin, much larger than his popular vote margin.
You are missing the point. If the EC was absolutely proportional to population, Gore would have won regardless of Florida and Ohio. Gore lost because states like Idaho got more votes than they should, the swing states would have been moot.
There's no evidence that turnout is lower in the big states than the small states. There's also no evidence either way whether the winners don't turn out, or the losers don't turn out. For example, Republicans in New York or Democrats in Nebraska might not bother because people don't like voting for a loser as much as they do for a winner. While true, there's no evidence this impacts voting. Lots of red states have consistently blue governors and state legislators, for example. On the flipside, Minnesota hasn't had a Dem governor in 20+ years. California tends to have GOP governors as well.
Again, that ignores Vermont, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Delaware, Maine, and D.C. Gore also would have won with 1500 more votes in Florida, and in that scenario, his EV margin would have outpaced his vote national margin. If what you're saying is true, the party that wins most of the small states should consistently overperform their national vote in the EC, but there's no evidence that they do.
The same could be said of slavery - the US wouldn't have existed without that, but we don't consider it a sacred thing that needs to exist today. The reality is times change, and the reasons for the EC are not as relevant today. You want small states to be represented, but outside of New Hampshire, not a single one of them is relevant in the Presidential election. No candidate campaigns or even gives a thought to any of the states you or I listed, so that purpose of the EC is no longer effective.
I disagree. Much of the urban vote is locked in anyway - it's not a swing vote. The idea is that you simply can't campaign in a handful of states. These candidates have to make their platforms viable everywhere. I disagree again. In the 2008 election, McCain won Utah by the same margin Obama won Ohio. So those two states would have neutralized each other in value under this new system. Alabama's margin was twice that of Florida in total votes. If Obama chooses to ignore states like Utah and Alabama, it's at his own peril. On the flipside, the Dem margins are huge in the big blue states. But this is all very misleading. Obama already maxed out his vote in NY - McCain didn't campaign there at all. If anything, McCain can gain votes in New York, while Obama can gain votes in Alabama and Utah. Currently, it serves no purposes to campaign there; but in this new system, there are votes to be earned everywhere. Right now, Dems basically ignore the heartland, and the GOP basically ignores the big cities. It's things like that which allow Obama to say rural voters are "clinging to guns" or Palin to say small towns are "real America". In this scenario, it's in Dems' best interests to have a platform that appeals to the heartland. And the GOP platform needs to better appeal to the inner city. That's one of the big benefits - you have to campaign on a platform to lead the nation, rather than to lead your constituency in the swing states. All this said (for both you and Sweet Lou), I'm not suggesting this solution is perfect. There are negatives like the lower representation of small states. I'm only arguing that it doesn't favor one party or the other. If you look historically, there's no real evidence that either party has an inherent popular vote advantage in Presidential elections or a structural EC advantage - one of the two would need to be true for this to favor one party or the other.
On a side note, I didn't follow through, but my graduate thesis was originally going to be on this topic - and specifically if/how the EC affects state and local elections. That is, whether there was a "winner effect" where Dem votes show up less (or GOP more) in deep red states in Presidential years and vice-versa in deep blue states - and how that affects the results of state and local elections. In other words, does the existence of the EC cause the GOP to win even more in red states and Dems to win even more in blue states as compared to off-year elections. I have no idea the answer to that, but my theory was that it does have an distortive impact.
Major, I would just like to commend and thank you for your recent postings. They have been superb. Not just in this thread but in several. I may not always agree politically, but always look forward to your informative input. I would give you more rep but it won't let me, yet.
Thanks! I just realized I posted about 6 straight times in this thread. This issue is something I focused a lot on many years back around 2004, so it's actually a lot of fun to see states slowly passing this law and seeing where it all goes. Personally, I think there's a lot to be gained from scrapping the EC, but I know a lot of people feel that it does a lot of good things as well.
This simply is not true. Analysis and studies show urban voters (blue state) turn out less than rural (red state) voters. Also there are models built on predicting turnout and one of the main variables in predicting turnout out is the likelihood a potential voter might win for their party or make a difference. We're talking presidential elections by the way - national pollitics not local. A very different animal all together. I don't think it impacts elections but it would significantly if we moved to a national poll.
Why would small states give up that power though? Why would Iowa or Maine say - hey, yeah, get rid of the EC? They'll never do it. And I do think if the EC was gone, it would shift presidential elections to the left since a lot of people who don't vote because they don't think their vote will affect the outcome all of a sudden will have a reason to turnout.
Exactly, urban voters whether Democratic or Republican too often don't vote because many believe their vote won't make a difference. By creating a NP vote, turnout should dramatically rise in urban areas for both parties. However, the Democrats hold an advantage in those areas and that's why they are trying to move to this system. Also it's pretty well known that it's easier for Republican to gain urban votes than it is for a Democrat to win the rural areas. Again, this system creates a disproportionate advantage for the Democrats in urban areas.
Sure - but that's primarily the fact that minorities don't vote as much. those factors exist in both competitive and non-competitive states. It's not a factor that would be affected by a change to the EC. Absolutely - and that's why you'll see turnout much higher in tossup states. That's one of the arguments for removing the EC - a lot of people simply don't vote in states that aren't competitive. But that's not a Dem thing or a GOP thing - that's simply a "my vote doesn't matter" thing. Here's voter turnout data from 2008: http://elections.gmu.edu/Turnout_2008G.html There's no real pattern to high and low turnout states. Absolutely - there would definitely be a significant impact in both campaign strategy and voting patterns going to a national election. But that impact isn't biased to one party or the other. Two things. First, I don't know about individual states. In the case of Iowa, they are enough of a tossup state that they get attention and probably would be opposed. Maine is irrelevant now; they might be slightly more relevant in a national election, so they have no reason to support the EC unless they think they'll be a tossup state down the road. But that said, they don't need to agree to it - that's the beauty of this covenant thing. You only need enough states to get to 270 to make it work. You already have 72. California passed it but got vetoed by the governor. Eventually, it could very well pass there, which puts it around 120. So you only need 150 more. It probably doesn't pass in the tossup states like FL or OH because they benefit from the current system. But there are plenty of states that would benefit from it - including big ones like Texas. Right now, it's primarily blue states because their voters are the ones with the memory of being "screwed" (Gore/Bush). The best thing that could happen in terms of pushing all this forward would be for Obama to win in 2012 without the popular vote - that would get the GOP states on board pretty quickly, and you'd probably the 270 votes participating by 2016 or 2020. While it doesn't sound realistic, it was actually a very real possibility in this last election. Had McCain done better and won the popular vote 51-49, there was a very real possibility that Obama still would have won the EC, because he had a lot of structural advantages in a few key toss up states.
If anyone is interested, here's a pretty detailed site that discusses the issue: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/ .It's from the organization pushing the concept, so it's obviously biased. But the "Answering Myths" section at the top talks about a lot of the issues brought up here and addresses whether there are biases and things like that. This page specifically addresses a few of the big-state-bias issues: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/pages/answers/m7.php
Clearly you have studied this issue Major, I must admit that despite my skepticisms you make a strong case. Do you really think you can get 270? I mean, sure the first 150 might be easy, but i doubt red states will go along with it particularly since it's already mostly blue states. Texas might get more turnout but can you imagine what would happen if Texas had voted for a Republican but instead delivered it's votes to a Democrat? The people of Texas would be enraged...all those Republicans would feel disenfranchised and it could backfire terribly. Maine may have interest in listening to their conservative constituents who might be opposed. And let's not forget the Supreme Court could get involved and rule this convenant unconstituational. Yes, states can decide how electors are decided, but this convenant does circumvent the constituation since it makes the EC irrelvant. The question is if the Supreme Court can rule on a "convenant" I don't know...a national popular vote may be better but there are consequecs that could be unforseen.
Increasing voter turnout, increasing participation in the democratic process...how is that a bad thing? Should it not be so simple that that the candidate with the most votes in the nation wins the presidency? That makes every state, every region, every vote matter and equally important.
Nobody is against voter turnout or trying to supress American democracy. That is not the argument here. We are talking about why the Founders didn't want a handful of highly populated states to destroy the Republic. Everyone here agrees that the Electoral College has some flaws but not enough that it should be broken up. Again, under a popular vote the small states become completely irrelevant. There will be no need to even bother with campaigns in like Vermont, Montana, Wyoming and such with populations under 1 million. Right now the EC forces a candidate to carry a number of small states in order to win the election. That is what the Founders wished for in order to prevent a mob rule by large coastal states. [to Major] You continue to argue against the swing states like Florida and Ohio getting prefered treatment from each candidate and I completely agree with you. But that isn't the result of some flaw in EC. In fact, swing states are the result of no one party being able to dominate that specific state which means over time the swing state status can change from one state to another. If more states were to become competative in terms of partisan politics then there would be no need for swing states. That won't happen unless we completely change the way we do elections at the city and state level. In addition you seem to mistake my view on the urban issue. I don't mean the large state like California amd New York as a whole when I say urban areas. Yeah it's true that most urban areas are located within these few large states. However I speak of urban areas in general throughout each state. For example in Texas the 4 largest uban areas Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin are all predominantly Democratic even though the rest of the state is Republican. That's pretty much true in all of the states regardless of whether it's blue or red. Urban areas of all sizes are under Democrat control throughout the country. Now under the EC system of winner-takes-all, there is incentive for one party to cater to the small towns and rural America if the other party controls the large urban vote. This is by design of the Framers who didn't want all candidate and all parties to focus solely on large population areas. If we bypass the EC then using Texas as an example, I can see Republicans now having to compete with Democrats for the urban vote which becomes more valuable because every dollar spent can net more votes. Again, look at the EC, that is the comprimise the Founders agreed upon to preserve a Republic. Right now we have large states, small states, moderate states, red states, blue states, and swing states but with popular vote there are not states anymore. Just a bunch of cities and metropolitan areas up for grab to the highest bidder. There is no more Republic. Finally Major, I think this would help explain my point better: Math Against Tyranny
