by russell
Twice in the last 20 years, a highly contentious election season has yielded a POTUS who lost the popular vote. Most recently, lost by a lot.
The argument is made that the system we use – the electoral college – was created as a compromise between the interests of states with larger populations vs those with smaller populations. By having the POTUS elected by a college whose members equalled the size of each state's Congressional representatives in number, states with smaller populations would have a proportionately larger voice in the selection of the POTUS.
This is, as stated, true, and a reasonable case for its value can be made.
That argument is often further extended, to say that the intent was for the POTUS to be elected by the states, and not the people. This argument is related in some ways to the common practice of having all electors in a state vote for whoever won the popular vote in that state, regardless of by what margin.
This is, as stated, false. There is nothing whatsoever in the Constitution about the POTUS being elected "by the states". Nothing. There is also nothing whatsoever in the Constitution that requires that all electors for a state vote for the winner of the popular vote in that state. That practice emerged over a few decades, initially by a couple of states as a way of enhancing their electoral advantage, and then eventually by nearly all states in a kind of race to the bottom.
I don't care much about the electoral college one way or the other, per se. I do care about the profoundly un-democratic way that the our practice of allocating electors has played out in this past election, and in 2000.
Electors or not, the POTUS should be elected by a process that reflects the will of the population. Not the states. There is nothing whatsoever in the Constitution, or in the intent of the folks who wrote the Constitution, that argues for a POTUS "elected by the states".
I don't know how to change this, because it would likely take a Constitutional amendment, but what we have now is not what was intended.
I mused a while back about how big a divergence there needed to be between the popular vote winner and the Electoral College before even the winner in that situation agreed something needed to be done. I think I pegged it at 5 or 10 million votes.
But this experience tells me that there is no such number. So, like the Senate, we are stuck with this wholly undemocratic anachronism forever (barring an upheaval on par with the Civil War) because of rules laid down in more than 250 years ago and which, BTW, in the democratic transitions that have occurred in other countries since then no one else has followed.
The only thing I see possibly happening is the “big” states get together and decide that the popular vote winner will get their electoral votes, but I don’t see how, e.g., Texas would go that way.
because of rules laid down in more than 250 years ago
Not even. Because a couple of states figured out they could game the rules, and then the other states had to follow suit or get hosed.
The rules laid down more than 250 years do not require our current practice, and the folks who wrote the rules weren’t happy about it when the states began allocating electoral votes as we do now.
I don’t know how to change this, because it would likely take a Constitutional amendment, but what we have now is not what was intended.
It might be worthwhile to send a letter to as many Trump electors as you can to ask them politely to vote for someone other than Trump. If the electors were to take matters into their own hands, we would probably see a Constitutional amendment pretty quickly. http://directelection.org/
Great summary, russell. Though it’s not directly relevant today, I think another aspect of the history of the EC is important to remember for what it says about the “logic” behind the institution.
The voting power of the states was, in the beginning, related not only to the disproportionality between large and small states created by each state having two senators. It was further skewed by the fact that the 3/5 rule counted each (non-voting, of course) slave as 3/5 of a person for purposes of Congressional apportionment. That gave massive extra weight to the slave states both in Congress and in the EC. Five of the first seven presidents were from slave states (4 from VA), and the Mass. Adamses each served only one term.
Population numbers here.
If the EC/popular vote margins of the two parties were switched this election, there would be a YOOOGE push for reform. As it is, crickets.
I wonder if anyone has done the math on allotting electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in each state, whether on a whole-number or fractional basis. (Consider how poorly the smallest states would approximate their popular vote with only 3 electors if they couldn’t split them into fractions. Fractionalizing would imply getting rid of human electors, I suppose.)
Small states would remain more heavily weighted, but it would still more closely reflect the national popular vote. It would be interesting to play with the numbers to see how likely the extra weight given to smaller states would be to put the electoral college into conflict with the popular vote without winner-take-all in place. (Not very, would be my guess. It would have to be a real squeaker with a really wide divide between rural and urban voters.)
To clarify, when I wrote “done the math,” I meant specifically with the popular vote in each state in this past election.
hsh: see here.
There has been an argument about this at Balloon Juice, which, in typical BJ fashion, dribbed away (maybe because the posts come so thick and fast it’s like having ADD).
Lessig did an op-ed somewhere that (IMO) had a different slant on the topic, but in this — admittedly long and lawyerly — article, he is arguing for allocating electors proportionally to the popular vote, *by state.* N.b. *not* by congressional district within each state, as Maine and Nebraska do right now, and as some people have hastily interpreted it.
In the linked article, there’s even a map that implies some math for you — no fractional electors, though.
Thanks, Janie. There’s some good stuff at that link, going well beyond just the math.
I disagree Russell, in Clause three its is very specific:
Which affirms that the methods in Clause two are left to the states purposefully but in the event of choosing a President without an electoral college majority each state gets one vote, and a majority of “States” selects the President. I have always been unclear how the plain language in the two clauses can be construed any other way.
This reinforces the underlying assumption of the states prerogative in clause 2 by specifying the equality of states votes in clause 3.
That’s interpretive, Marty. The primary electoral method allocates votes based on population (voting or not), while the secondary method allocates votes by state. Asserting that the secondary method should be used to divine an unstated intent inherent within the primary method is more than a little specious.
I disagree Russell
You are correct, there is a provision under which the states directly elect the POTUS.
The Constitution specifies that, if the electoral college vote does not yield a majority, then, when the vote goes to the House, each state gets one vote. So, my claim that there is “nothing” about states choosing the POTUS is incorrect.
The states get to choose the POTUS, via their delegations in the House, if and only if the electoral college fails to yield a majority for any one candidate.
The relevant language at this point actually comes from the 12th A, rather than Article II Section 1, but your point holds.
As far as that implying that the electoral college is intended to be an election by the states, your reading is interesting, but your argument is not with me, but with the sentiments and practices of the folks who actually wrote the Constitution.
That doesn’t appear to be what they said or believed, and it wasn’t what they did in practice.
The piece from Lessig that JanieM links to brings the constitutional and legal discussion up to date.
I appreciate that folks in low-population states don’t like having their interests neglected.
People in high-population states don’t, either.
We can either continue doing as we do, in which case the issue will become increasingly problematic as the population differential between urban and rural areas continues to grow.
Or we can figure out something more equitable.
What we do now is bullshit, and it’s only likely to get worse.
Or, what NV said at 12:13.
With the added comment that what NV said at 12:13 is consistent with what the folks who actually wrote the Constitution said and did.
“What we do now is bullshit, and it’s only likely to get worse.”
Only because you didn’t like the outcome.
Only because you didn’t like the outcome.
Says you.
In every election that I can remember, the country has been divided along the same bullshit culture wars lines.
Real America vs Hippy America.
Silent Majority vs Liberal Elitists.
Etc etc etc.
It’s divisive and dysfunctional. Among other things, it utterly disenfranchises all of the conservative people who live in “blue states”, and all of the liberal people who live in “red states”.
Those folks might was well just stay the hell home. They have no voice whatsoever in selecting the POTUS. None. They don’t count.
Contrary to the stupid freaking red state / blue state maps, the range of political views and interests are extremely varied, in every state in the country. There are very conservative people in MA, and there are very liberal people in TX, UT, or whatever red state you like.
Those people are effectively disenfranchised by the winner-take-all electoral college practice.
If you’d like to address that issue, great. If all you want to bring to the table is “you’re just bitching because you lost”, you can kiss my ass.
Thanks.
I think I pegged it at 5 or 10 million votes.
But this experience tells me that there is no such number.
Ugh, I think that, at least partially, we are looking at a perfect storm. Pick either major party candidate from your lifetime. Your 5-10 million number might well be correct. The thing is, this time we have a candidate we, judging from his (non)reaction to being repeatedly caught lying, simply has no sense of shame. And that experience is coloring your current view.
This is basically the national popular vote interstate compact, which I’m surprised more people don’t know about:
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status
The idea is that legislatures individually pass bills that commit them to appointing their state’s electors according to the national popular vote, once sufficient other states enter into the same agreement (i.e., 270 EVs worth).
So far, 165 EVs worth of states have passed bills. Another 105 and it goes into effect.
Although all of the states it has currently passed in look ‘blue’ to me, I think there’s often a fair degree of bipartisan support. It has passed some wholly Republican-controlled chambers in the last couple years (e.g., the Arizona house, or the Oklahoma senate).
That kind of makes sense, because it’s more about how campaigns work than it is a red/blue thing. The EV system works great if your state is regularly on the ‘battleground’ map, but if not, you and your state’s issues basically get ignored in presidential races. By both parties. A popular vote would totally change that dynamic, so it’d probably be good for the Californias and the Oklahomas alike.
Check the list and call your state reps if it hasn’t passed where you’re at!
thanks for this, jack
all of the states it has currently passed in look ‘blue’ to me
Yeah, me too.
Which means that all of the heavy lifting and sacrifice that would be involved would be coming from the “blue” side. I.e., NY CA IL MA etc, which are reliably solidly blue, would probably split their electors between (D) and (R).
I live in MA, I’m glad it passed here, even though it would probably not work out to my advantage in terms of my preferences for outcomes. Because it is, by my understanding, the right thing to do.
Sure, every blue state whose majority is big enough that it could swamp the preferences of three or four red states wants to be in charge. From the other side it’s just a coup.
I don’t understand why states rights somehow bother those states. Why do they(you) think you should be able to tell people everywhere else how to live?
How do you think that’s “the right thing to do”.
Almost no one in the states that are red want to do away the individual states rights.
The majority of people in Texas don’t want to live in California. Even Democrats. Why would they want the huge margins in California be able to decide how they vote?
Why do they(you) think you should be able to tell people everywhere else how to live?
They would follow the popular vote nationally. If a Republican won the popular vote, those blue states would give all their electoral votes to the Republican, even if their own state went to the Democrat. How is that telling everyone else how to live?
Sure, every blue state whose majority is big enough that it could swamp the preferences of three or four red states wants to be in charge
First, states don’t have preferences. People do.
Second, there are a ton of people in TX who would prefer to have Clinton, or basically anybody with a pulse, as POTUS rather than Trump.
Likewise, there are people in MA who would have greeted a HRC Presidency as the end of the world.
Those folks have no voice in selecting the POTUS at all. Their votes are of no account. They might as well have stayed home.
What about their interests?
Third, you seem to profoundly misunderstand both my and jack lecou’s comment.
Lastly, why is it better for states with small populations to “impose their values” on states with large populations, rather than the other way around?
Do you somehow think that people in rural areas are the only ones who have to put up with crap in order to try to make this stupid project work?
If folks want to live in TX rather than CA, then by god they should live in TX rather than CA. I do not give a rat’s ass. What that has to do with electing the POTUS is beyond me.
I don’t understand why states rights somehow bother those states.
The national popular vote interstate compact is an exercise in states’ rights, BTW.
I think I misunderstood Marty, now that I’m re-reading. You were referring to proportional allocation of electors, not the interstate compact, right, Marty? If so, never mind and my apologies.
The national popular vote interstate compact is an exercise in states’ rights, BTW.
Not the right kind of states’ rights, apparently.
I’m still trying to figure out how a state like CA or NY willingly diluting its reliable, 100% solid blue electors is an example of them trying to “be in charge”.
This BS is going to be the end of this nation yet.
BTW, this is interesting:
Google also says Instant will be automatically disabled when they can detect that a searcher has a slow internet connection.
Several years old, from here.
And with this I think I’m finished butting my head against a stone wall.
“If folks want to live in TX rather than CA, then by god they should live in TX rather than CA. I do not give a rat’s ass. What that has to do with electing the POTUS is beyond me.”
Yes. It is clear that it is beyond you. Because you don’t feel at risk from the permanent majority in CA imposing every tax, zoning law, gun law, non right to work law and asinine way of living law on you because well, you like that stuff.
It is specious to believe that the left isn’t more interested in imposing their rules on everyone than the right is, but it is ludicrous to deny that difference on a state by state basis. Yes CA and MA and NY want to impose their local preferences on the whole country.
Apologies, the comment of mine above is in the wrong thread. I’m still done with that topic. 😉
I do find it interesting, in this thread, that it’s somehow not okay for a larger # of people to “impose their local preferences on the whole country” but it’s just dandy for a smaller # of people to do the same thing. Pot, meet kettle.
Almost no one in the states that are red want to do away the individual states rights.
Maybe, but that would have to change if this were to ever work. By my count, it would take at least a few ‘off-the-beaten-path’ red states — states like Idaho, Oklahoma, Alabama, etc. — to reach 270.
I’m assuming that the states least interested in going along with something like this wouldn’t be red states, it’d be purple states. The existing system is great for the likes of Ohio and Florida – they each got dozens of visits by candidates. But when was the last time a major candidate held an event in Boise? It wasn’t 2016. Even Texas and California only had an event each this year.
The need to run up the vote total nationwide would change that dynamic, and it seems at least some Republican state legislators agree that that might be a good thing (as do I).
“Why do they(you) think you should be able to tell people everywhere else how to live?”
That is an utterly nonsensical objection to this proposal.
What you describe is exactly the situation we have now. A handful of residents in places like Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin effectively get to “tell people everywhere else how to live”, while the vote of someone in California or Alabama has almost no effect.
Deciding the election by popular vote instead (however that came to pass) is literally the opposite of that. A vote in Texas would be just as desirable to win as a vote in California.
Yes CA and MA and NY want to impose their local preferences on the whole country.
I know you don’t like the mean ol’ federal government, Marty, but a relatively small percentage of stuff is decided at the federal level, and an even smaller percentage is decided by the president.
…as do smaller and/or redder states. You feel they should be able to impose their will on us, while arguing that letting them do so via disproportionate federal power is necessary to prevent the blue would-be tyrants wield undemocratic-but-propotional federal power, and that “states’ rights” are preserved by smaller states imposing their will on larger states rather than no states being able to impose their will on each other.
Also, what exactly is the principled “states’ rights” objection to the interstate voting pact? Jack is absolutely correct that it is an exercise in states’ rights.
…add Yes CA and MA and NY want to impose their local preferences on the whole country. and/or @Marty to the start of my comment.
So twenty states get together to take away the rights of the rest of the states and well, its a states rights initiative.
So twenty states get together to take away the rights of the rest of the states and well, its a states rights initiative.
Please describe what right is being taken away.
Well, forget this, then:
I think I misunderstood Marty, now that I’m re-reading. You were referring to proportional allocation of electors, not the interstate compact, right, Marty? If so, never mind and my apologies.
Posted by: hairshirthedonist | December 12, 2016 at 02:34 PM
What I wrote before the above stands.
So twenty states get together to take away the rights of the rest of the states and well, its a states rights initiative.
I only if you completely mischaracterize it.
Yes CA and MA and NY want to impose their local preferences on the whole country.
And vice versa. So screw you too, right?
Right now people with traditional conservative values rely on gerrymandering, disproportionate representation in the Senate, and the f***ed up approach we take to the Electoral College to avoid having “other people’s values imposed on them”.
That’s not a good position to be in. The demographic trends are, overwhelmingly, against them.
Maybe they want to figure out a way to work things out other than throwing wrenches in the works.
There are a hell of a lot of people getting sick of it.
It is specious to believe that the left isn’t more interested in imposing their rules on everyone than the right is
Like hell it is.
Personally, I don’t care what people in TX do as far as guns, zoning laws, taxes, right to work, or whatever. I really do not give a crap. Just keep it out of my state.
See? States’ rights.
I don’t really know what the people in CA want.
I do know that stupid culture wars BS has delivered us one Donald J Trump as POTUS, which is likely to freaking break the country.
So you are by god right that I’m pissed off about that.
But as far as the electoral thing goes, I am in favor of allocating electors in a way that aligns with the popular vote on a state by state basis.
That still gives rural states an advantage, because they get an electoral count that is equal to their representation in Congress.
If they end up splitting those electors because the popular vote in their state is mixed, then that is appropriate, because *the people in that state* would have voted that way.
If they have three electors and one third of the voters voted blue, then one elector votes blue and two vote red.
If one third of the people vote red, then one elector votes red and two blue.
How the hell is that unfair?
If it turns out that *more people in the country, regardless of where they live, prefer to vote blue*, then we will have a (D) POTUS. If more prefer to vote red, then we will have a (R) POTUS.
The point being that the representation of the people in government should reflect the people themselves. That’s what republican governance is.
Why are the values of all of the people in small states who don’t happen to be in the majority in their state unimportant?
Why are the values of all of the people in LARGE states who don’t happen to be in the majority in their state unimportant?
So are we arguing about splitting electoral votes of each state in proportion to the popular vote in each state, or are we arguing about the interstate compact? Or are we arguing about both at the same time? Which one is Marty (more) opposed to?
Both at the same time.
Marty can speak for himself.
“Electors or not, the POTUS should be elected by a process that reflects the will of the population. Not the states.”
It’s worth remembering that this is impossible, in the limit where the two-party system breaks down and nobody comes close to a majority. So before you go charging off into something like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, remember that it’s a first-past-the-post voting system. You can wind up electing presidents with tiny pluralities if there are lots of viable candidates. If the goal is to best reflect the will of the people, that seems like a terrible idea.
If what you’re really looking for is the “will of the people” (hopefully in some form that’s stable enough to withstand a nasty tweet storm), then perhaps you’d do better by figuring out how to coax the two-party system into a less pathological mode where it didn’t wind up selecting for extreme candidates. Focusing on the Electoral College, which is far downstream from the real problem, seems kinda silly. Instead, maybe implementing things like ranked choice voting (aka instant runoff) in the primary system would come a lot closer to reflecting the will of the people–and would probably produce better candidates, to boot.
So twenty states get together to take away the rights of the rest of the states and well, its a states rights initiative.
Does each one of those states have the right to select their electors as they please, or not?
If you say they don’t have the right to chose their own electors, you’re denying them a right currently reserved for the states by the Constitution, and you have zero credibility in claiming to be advocating states’ rights.
If you say they do, then why is their exercising that right rather than allowing other states to extra-constitutionally dictate how they select their electors an affront to the concept of states’ rights?
Your objection to the compact is not based on states’ rights. Your objection is to majority rule. Those two concepts are not interchangable by any stretch of the imagination.
To follow NV, I’m repeating this:
Why do they(you) think you should be able to tell people everywhere else how to live?
They would follow the popular vote nationally. If a Republican won the popular vote, those blue states would give all their electoral votes to the Republican, even if their own state went to the Democrat. How is that telling everyone else how to live?
TRM, you objection to the compact is based on what seems to be an unlikely scenario. To wit:
…in the limit where the two-party system breaks down and nobody comes close to a majority.
(…)
You can wind up electing presidents with tiny pluralities if there are lots of viable candidates.
And this one, while I’m not opposed to it, is something for the parties to decide (and not mutually exclusive with the compact):
Instead, maybe implementing things like ranked choice voting (aka instant runoff) in the primary system would come a lot closer to reflecting the will of the people–and would probably produce better candidates, to boot.
You can wind up electing presidents with tiny pluralities if there are lots of viable candidates.
That’s a problem we don’t currently have, though, so I’m not sure it’s a good argument against trying to solve a problem we actually do seem to have (at least in 2 of the last 5 elections).
And while I agree the two-party stranglehold is a problem, it’s mostly orthogonal to this one. I’m not sure a popular vote-based outcome would change the party dynamics much either way (campaign dynamics, yes, party dynamics, no).
In the short term, it would probably reduce the popularity of marginal third party candidates — there would no longer be ‘safe’ states where residents could feel more free to cast protest votes. (And that wouldn’t hurt the argument for proportional voting at all.)
Nor would this really be worse than the current system. If we ever did have an election so balkanized that, say, the Libertarians were leading the pack with 5.6% of the vote, the decision would currently just get punted to the House.
Instead, maybe implementing things like ranked choice voting (aka instant runoff) in the primary system would come a lot closer to reflecting the will of the people–and would probably produce better candidates, to boot.
I agree, except for the word “instead”. There’s really no reason not to push for both.
Have you had time to think about this yet, Marty? It looks like NV is curious about your answer as well.
Several good points, I object most to a national popular vote.
The, new to me, idea that electors would get selected by the National vote is equally terrifying, someone mentioned my distaste for majority rule and that’s true in this case. California ballot initiative process is a good example of how many challenges there are with that.
Other issues I have include there are not as many national Republicans or Democrats as people envision. Most Texas Democrats would certainly be Massachusetts or California Republicans.
The concept that the swing states get too much attention is problematic for me,
they seem to represent those that are disenfranchised in other states giving them some voice.
Demographics nationally certainly work against Republicans, but again, CA and NY have plenty of votes to spare and in the microsecond that the Democrats were in charge they passed more federal legislation to take away states rights since lbj.
So yes all of the above. I would be less concerned about allocation of electoral votes within a state, if they chose that, but it certainly would significantly increase the divisive nature of elections and almost certainly mean we would never have another Republican president. So no I wouldn’t like it.
HSH, I agree that the primary reforms are orthogonal to the EC issues. But since all of this is the most egregious form of mental masturbation in the first place, it hardly matters.
I do think it’s worth considering whether something like the NPVIC strengthens or weakens two-party politics. I like to decompose political tactics into three broad categories:
1) Ideological politics: Advocacy based on a theory of government.
2) Interest politics: Advocacy based on working to achieve specific outcomes on specific issues.
3) Identity politics: Advocacy based on protecting and/or promoting a group.
These are ranked roughly in order of effectiveness, with ideology being least effective and identity being most effective.
Interest politics tend to be local, and would therefore be weakened the most by NPVIC. Identity politics are often regional, and would be weakened somewhat. Ideological politics are in principle not affected by geographic factors but in practice are filtered through the same kinds of regional effects as identity politics.
The thing is, party power is dispensed through the promotion and demotion of interests. Since interest politics is the most local of the three types, it will be weakened the most by NPVIC. That in turn will weaken the two-party system.
Given that both parties are closer to fracturing than at any time in the last 150 years, it’s probably a good time to rethink whether the two-party system is a net positive or negative force in American politics. How you decide that question ought to have a big impact on what you think about the Electoral College and systems like NPVIC.
it certainly would significantly increase the divisive nature of elections and almost certainly mean we would never have another Republican president.
It’s hard to imagine how the divisive nature of elections could be increased significantly. I guess we could all get in fist-fights and shoot at each other.
In any case, I’m not seeing how letting states split their electors makes that any better or worse. I’m talking about the more modest proposal here, not the popular election one.
In any case, if it meant we wouldn’t have a (R) POTUS, that would be because a sufficient number of *people* wanted one. So much so that it would even overwhelm the natural electoral advantage that rural states, which tend to lean conservative.
Were that to be so, why the hell should we have a (R) POTUS?
No reasonable tweak to the election system that preserves any substantial vestige of democracy will guarantee that we never have another Republican president, or another Democratic president. Each party already gets nearly half of the electorate in recent elections. Surely the shift in positions, candidates or circumstances that would allow either to win a given election is relatively subtle.
Now, a conservative might not like what a Republican candidate would have to do going forward to win the popular vote, or an electoral system with a different allocation of votes. But George W. Bush actually got a (hair-thin) popular majority as recently as 2004, so this isn’t inconceivable.
I like the diagram at the bottom of this Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_elections_by_popular_vote_margin
Clearly, at least since the emergence of the Democratic and Republican parties, there are powerful restoring forces that keep the major parties adjusting to appeal to about half of the voting population. A sixty-forty split is the kind of historic whomping that turns almost the whole electoral map one color. When one party does even worse than that, it’s usually because of a major third-party or independent candidate.
Each party already gets nearly half of the electorate in recent elections.
Yes, that is my take as well.
And I agree, if a candidate for POTUS had to win something more like the popular vote, and something less like edging out a win in a small handful of “swing” states, (R) candidates might be less hard-line conservative.
And (D)’s might be less hard-line liberal, for that matter.
Perhaps candidates for POTUS would represent something like whatever the sweet spot is, somewhere in the middle of all of that.
Folks can still vote in whatever unreconstructed hard-liners they want for the House and Senate. And for their state and local folks.
russell Look, not to be difficult, but everything you’ve written, demographic shifts, R’s would need to move left etc. Is all about a President you agree with having veto power over the legislative agenda. It is not “the right thing to do” it is the right thing to make sure your side is at least in charge of one of the branches.
If demographics were not on your side in the coastal enclaves this would be a bad idea.
As for divisiveness, subject 45 states to the executive rule of 5 permanently and our current divisiveness will seem like a church social.
Is all about a President you agree with having veto power over the legislative agenda.
Actually, if I’m not mistaken, that seems to be where you are coming from.
You think all of the people in CA want to come to wherever it is you are and make you do things you don’t want to do, so you want to make sure there is some kind of built-in political impediment to that happening.
Where I’m coming from is having the POTUS be elected by something resembling the population as a whole. That’s all. Because, unlike the folks in the House and the Senate, there is one and only POTUS for the whole country. So that person should not be selected by a small number of people in a handful of swing states.
Wherever that lands, I’m happy to live with. I make no assumption that doing it “my way” is going to create a result I’ll approve of. I like my Senators and my House Rep, there are probably a small – very small – handful of other people holding national office that have views that I think maybe resemble mine.
Other than that I don’t expect anybody holding a national office to think like me, because I’m an outlier. I don’t expect it, and I’ve never been disappointed.
Sorry to be getting back to this late.
Marty: It is clear that it is beyond you. Because you don’t feel at risk from the permanent majority in CA imposing every tax, zoning law, gun law, non right to work law and asinine way of living law on you because well
I note with interest that every one of these is something that is a local, rather than Federal, issue — per the Constitution as of the last time I read it. Changing how the POTUS is elected would have zero impact . . . no matter which side of the issue got a President whose views agreed with them on those issues.
The guy elected President may be either a great fan or a staunch opponent of rent control laws. (Which are a bad way to actually deal with an arguably real problem IMO.) But his position as President will give him, zero influence over those places which are considering them.
Marty feels at risk. Maybe he can explain why.
Why does Marty feel at risk. Only look at how the popular vote has gone the last half dozen elections.
If you selectively forget how it went in the 1970s and 1980s, you can see a very real risk. At least if you assume that the immediate past is the best predictor of the future. In 1985, a liberal Democrat could have felt the same way . . . and with equally little accuracy as to the future of Presidential elections.
“Marty feels at risk. Maybe he can explain why.”
Isn’t it OBVIOUS?1??
Obama just barely missed out on gay-marrying Marty to an ISIS terrist, while forcing him to decorate the cake also, too.
Really, such tyrannical acts just take the cake, amirite?
Several good points, I object most to a national popular vote.
Let’s take ’em one by one:
The, new to me, idea that electors would get selected by the National vote is equally terrifying, someone mentioned my distaste for majority rule and that’s true in this case. California ballot initiative process is a good example of how many challenges there are with that.
Well, technically, electors already get selected by popular vote, at least since 1860, when South Carolina was the last state to stop picking them in the state legislature. You’re not making it entirely clear why a national popular vote should be any more terrifying.
(And yeah, I’m as skeptical of direct democracy (ballot initiatives) as anyone, but this is not that. The President is an executive, not a ballot initiative.)
Other issues I have include there are not as many national Republicans or Democrats as people envision. Most Texas Democrats would certainly be Massachusetts or California Republicans.
It’s undoubtedly true that party lines are somewhat relative, and depend on local politics. I’m not quite sure what the objection is, though.
At the end of the day, the President holds a national office, and a Texas (or Oklahoma) Democrat is free to cast their vote for a California Republican if they’re running and that’s who they like best. Or not.
The only difference is whether their vote will actually mean something to the outcome.
The concept that the swing states get too much attention is problematic for me,
they seem to represent those that are disenfranchised in other states giving them some voice.
Again, I’m a bit baffled. You’re saying that people who are ignored and disenfranchised shouldn’t be enfranchised because they’re represented by swing state voters?
Maybe, maybe not, but it’s not much of an argument against just letting people in all states have a voice of their own, and giving candidates incentive seek them out wherever they are.
Also, this seems to contradict the previous. As you correctly pointed out, there’s a lot of local differences between party lines and voter attitude from state to state. Yet what determines ‘battleground state’ status is basically just whether those local idiosyncratic party identifications shake out to be closely in balance or relatively skewed. That’s basically accidental. It’s local, historically contingent, and has a great deal of persistence from election to election and decade to decade.
None of that suggests that there’s likely to be a good correlation between how evenly divided a state’s presidential vote is and how in tune they are with the actual issues facing the nation as a whole.
Nor is there reason to believe that, for example, disgruntled former factory workers in Alabama or California (who don’t get to have a voice) are being adequately represented by disgruntled factory workers in Michigan (who do). Their issues are probably, you know, local, and different.
Nevermind people whose issues have nothing to do with being disgruntled former factory workers. Are you really prepared to say that every national issue of any importance is well-represented by swing voters in either the rustbelt or the not-so-deep south?
Again, why not just let people nationwide be heard for themselves?
Demographics nationally certainly work against Republicans, but again, CA and NY have plenty of votes to spare and in the microsecond that the Democrats were in charge they passed more federal legislation to take away states rights since lbj.
Basically you’re opposed to letting the majority be heard, because the guys they elect might actually work to enact the platform that gets them elected.
Which is, I guess, an ethos.
But I suspect you’re also being a bit too pessimistic. The Republicans did have a 3 million vote presidential majority as recently as 2004. There are a lot of votes in California and New York, but remember that not all of them are Democratic. Republican voters are effectively disenfranchised there, at least for pres. races. A national popular vote makes their voices count too. Heck, Trump is on record as wanting to give it a try.
That would change the dynamics totally, yes. Among other things, it means a Republican candidate would have to appeal to and turn out potential supporters in all states — purple, red, and blue. Would they have to change their strategy and platform a bit? Likely so. They’d probably have to make the latter, you know, a little more representative of the (changing) country as a whole.
But you should be for that.
I mean, I get that you want your guys to win, but what’s the better way to do that, ethics-wise, statesmanship-wise, and long-term success-wise: A) keep hoping you can prop up the party’s growing lack of appeal by ramping up the divisiveness and leaning harder and harder on anti-democratic institutions, or B) grow to where the country is and try to win on the merits?
So yes all of the above. I would be less concerned about allocation of electoral votes within a state, if they chose that, but it certainly would significantly increase the divisive nature of elections and almost certainly mean we would never have another Republican president. So no I wouldn’t like it.
See above – I doubt either of those things are likely.
As for divisiveness, subject 45 states to the executive rule of 5 permanently and our current divisiveness will seem like a church social.
This might be true if you ignore, as russell has stated at least once, that there are both Democrats and Republicans in every state. And if you live in a majority-Republican (or -Democratic) state, you still have legislators at both the state and federal levels as well as a governor (and all the county and municpal offices, more locally) to vote for completely independently from other states.
[T]here is one and only POTUS for the whole country. So that person should not be selected by a small number of people in a handful of swing states.
This.
No matter what, there are always going to be a lot of people who disagree with everyone else’s choice of POTUS as well as the choices of the presiding POTUS.
Until a President manages to unambiguously defend us from unambiguously hostile and nasty-looking alien invasion by punching the nasty-looking aliens right in the face on live television (and social network livestream), and then follows it up by personally visiting everyone and buying them a beverage and/or frozen treat of their choice while warmly and unoffensively complementing them on their taste in fashion, music, literature or sports team, 100% approval is right out. Probably not even then.
But it really doesn’t seem like it’s beyond the pale to propose that, all else equal, it’s probably better if we pick the one chosen by, say, 48% of voters rather than pick the one chosen by only 46%…
Why is a state-wide popular vote an acceptable way to elect a governor? I live in less-populated South Jersey. I want my vote to be weighted more heavily than someone in more-populated North Jersey. Waaaahhh!!!
@jack lecou:
“That’s a problem we don’t currently have, though, so I’m not sure it’s a good argument against trying to solve a problem we actually do seem to have (at least in 2 of the last 5 elections).”
This seems like a “something is wrong, therefore we must do something even if we don’t know if it is better or worse than the current thing” kind of argument. And the premise that something actually is wrong is open for debate, even before you get to the wisdom of doing some specific thing.
Look, the “popular vote” is illusory, or at the very least it’s not an expression of the will of the people. There’s a reason why voting theory exists as a non-trivial area of study. All voting systems ultimately sharpen the will of the voters down to choosing a particular candidate, and all of them have various pathological conditions. Absent compelling evidence that there’s something inherently better about choosing a president via first-past-the-post popular plurality than there is by state-by-state majority, I’d recommend not changing anything.
Which of course is exactly what’s going to happen.
“In the short term, it would probably reduce the popularity of marginal third party candidates — there would no longer be ‘safe’ states where residents could feel more free to cast protest votes.”
I suspect that the short-term is shorter than you might think. Parties have power because they can horse-trade at the national level to dispense favors to local constituencies. That all goes away with a campaign that’s based solely on the popular vote.
This stuff is all incredibly delicate, and simple changes have unobvious results. Remember how eliminating earmarks was a no-brainer to reduce corruption, and then it wound up driving party extremism because the leadership couldn’t keep the members in line through judicious distribution of pork?
My guess is that election by popular vote at the very least makes populist candidates more viable, and less beholden to state party apparatus. That’s almost certainly a bad thing.
“…the decision would currently just get punted to the House.”
Under something like the NPVIC, nothing ever gets punted to the House, because the candidate with the largest national plurality wins a majority of electoral votes–end of story.
R’s would need to move left
Of course Marty feels at risk. If you (generic) don’t want to give up anything, everything you have is going to seem at risk. In fact, it’s going to feel so much at risk that you’d elect someone whose campaign goes against values you profess to hold that you claim are more important than anything else ( frex), because of the possibility that you might have to give something up. (though Marty is still ‘on the fence’, as he says)
That metaphor that Sebastian pointed to, about people cutting in line, is all about this. If it is about your place in line, it’s always going to be at risk if people start suggesting that it’s not.
It seems to me that the heart of this boils down to whether you’d rather have a system that finds a consensus or a system in which your side gets to win. It’s pretty clear that the Rs have come down hard on the “get to win” side for fear of being, as Marty says, “swamped” by the majority (that quaint notion that some call “democracy”).
And Marty can talk about TX fighting a brave holding action against CA all he wants, but the truth is that TX is heading towards going both urban and blue. When TX flips the fallout across the board on all the social issues for which the states rights people are comfortable being a winning minority will be epic because those people have been entirely uninterested in being fair, compromising, or on building anything like a consensus.
If the culture warriors were serious about building a system in which their preferences were protected from a disagreeing majority they’d be looking for some sort of consociational state, but that would mean admitting that they were both a minority and an identity group.
Good luck with that.
Off topic, but a bunch of groups are pressuring various companies not to participate in a Muslim registry.
Yes, this link is to the Intercept. And yes, anyone interested in resisting Trump might want to consider reading it. I will have to see if there is some petition the average person could sign. Failing that, I will look into these groups and see which ones I might want to give money.
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/12/following-intercept-report-22-organizations-urge-tech-firms-to-reject-muslim-registry/
Poor Marty, He will miss Social Security and Medicare,
Register as a Muslim, Donald, if that happens. Until January 20, resist the Inauguration. There are ways to do that. Those ways are on topic, I’ve linked to one means.
When the Inauguration arrives, the game will be changed. It will be nice to sign petitions, but who will care, really? There will be a reichstag fire, and all will be chaos. Trump is already playing with China, and I am praying (for the sake of people I love who lives there), that it doesn’t boil into a war. Maybe a nuclear war, because Chinese leaders are “hardliners” and Trump doesn’t like people who are as stubborn as him.
There’s a great deal to worry about, Donald. You might want to quit posting Greenwald’s rag. He’s also a Putin puppet (Edward Snowden, the useful idiot is his mainstay), and although I’m sure that there are some pearls in there somewhere, they’re probably already mixed with swine scat.
I have thought of registering as a Muslim if it comes to that. But we can also try to prevent it from coming to that.
On the intercept, I trust them, G included, a hell of a lot more than most mainstream Democrats. And I don’t think our powers of resistance all vanish in January, assuming Trump takes office.
I agree about China, or anyway I worry about that. I forgot to read it, but there was a NYT story, I think, which said Bob Dole had something to do with the Taiwan call.
Umm. No, it’s the kind of argument that says saying “X won’t work to fix actual situation Y because X won’t help in completely hypothetical situation Z that hasn’t obtained in over 200 years of history and would have a pretty perverse outcome under the status quo anyway” isn’t the best argument. Because it’s not.
This is a somewhat better argument. Somewhat.
The fact is, there are good reasons to favor at least some kind of national vote (and it needn’t be FPP), over a winner-takes-each-state system.
More than 90% of the campaign happens in about a dozen states. That means 30-odd states, and their citizens and issues, get essentially zero attention by either the candidates or the media. There is no incentive to listen or pay attention to them, because the overall outcome in those states is given, and votes, at least below a certain large threshold of swing, literally don’t count.
That is actually unusually pathological, even as voting theory goes. And it’s not like this is an unusual corner case that comes up once or twice a century. This is every single election.
If it were a constitutional amendment, I’d be with you there. I think I’d give this thing about even odds though. It’s still alive, anyway.
The need to campaign and GOTV strongly in 50 states rather than 12 seems like it would make party apparatus stronger rather than weaker, but I’m curious to know if you can flesh that out more.
I certainly agree it would change things, I just don’t think those changes are necessarily huge or bad, or especially, that they would necessarily lead to a total fracturing of the party system and Joe the Plumber taking office with 4% of the vote or whatever. You’re arguments so far there have been a little opaque to me.
Yes. I understand that.
You were saying that NPVIC gives a seemingly weird outcome in an alternate universe where there are 25 viable parties and the most popular has 5% of the vote or something. Namely, a candidate wins with only 5% of the vote.
I am saying that that isn’t much of an argument because you’d get a pretty weird outcome in that universe regardless. The possibilities are: a) this 5% candidate maintains that slim lead in enough states to get 270 and wins; b) some other party with only 4.5% of the popular vote makes a better showing in the EC and gets to 270 for the win; or c) nobody gets to 270 and the House just picks someone – probably the guy with 5%.
I think you’re trying to argue that a popular vote would create that fracturing, but I really don’t see it. Nor are there obvious examples out there in the world. Take Brazil and Mexico, for example, which have presidential systems, elected by popular vote. They both have a couple more parties than the US, but the totals for the top two aren’t crazy low. (Even taking just first round totals for Brazil, which has proportional voting.)
Ian Welsh on China. Straying far off topic now, so I will post this and just go back to lurk mode. The discussion about the EC is interesting, but I have nothing to contribute.
http://www.ianwelsh.net/the-trump-china-showdown-aligns-with-reality/
I said it before, and I’ll say it again, that if this year, the electors don’t vote for Trump (unlikely, but why not try), people will examine the electoral college in a different way.
Other than that, we’re just pissing in the wind, because the same people who won this election oppose the abolition of the electoral college. On the other hand, if the electors actually are “faithless”, maybe we can look at the institution as being a check.
I doubt that will happen. The states select a slate of electors from the party that won, so my guess is that very entrenched Republican electors will be representing Trump. Some have indicated some dissent though, so wouldn’t that be something.
Ian Welsh is an idiot, and not a China expert. So do lurk, and try to keep on topic, Donald.
“Why does Marty feel at risk. Only look at how the popular vote has gone the last half dozen elections.”
I guess my question is what is it Marty feels at risk of.
“the premise that something actually is wrong is open for debate”
President Donald J Trump
I rest my case.
President Donald J Trump
Praying, sending positive vibes, having high hopes, that somehow, some way, the electors make that not happen. That would be so brave. So American. So lovely.
I’d have to look at the Ian Walsh article more closely, but sapient, if you want a vacation from the blog, just keep it up.
Funny, lj. Donald constantly is off-topic, and posts many off-topic posts in succession, but you’re totally okay with that. I do it? Not okay.
You can ban someone you agree with, and who agrees with you. Fine. Give more voice to fascist collaborators. I’m finding other stuff to do.
And Ian Walsh has a long history at Firedoglake, a blog I loved in the early days of the Bush administration, but which went off the rails. I’m pretty sure that most of those folks are Greenwald sycophants now, as is Donald.
But, Donald is Christian, and a good man. And a fascist collaborator.
Yes, I’ll vacate.
meanwhile, Trump has decided to postpone the press conference in which he will explain how he plans to structure his relationship to his businesses.
he’s too busy to do it now.
and all the folks who were disturbed by the “pay for access” grift at the Clinton foundation will be pleased to know that Ivanka Trump is selling coffee dates for $50K.
in other news, Mitch McConnell is walking back Trump’s promises of a massive infrastructure program.
what the hell is the upside for Trump supporters?
Good heavens.
I’ve read the thread, including all of Donald and sapient’s comments.
I see no grounds for kickbanning either, nor do I see that Donald’s topic-switching hase done any damage to the discussion.
I read Ian Walsh’s standalone blog for many years, but deleted the link in exasperation sometime within the last year.
No worries about Donald being banned, joel hanes.
Please, I seriously doubt anyone is going to be banned.
Meanwhile, can we discuss the OP? I just got here!
Davebo, keep up!
What do you think?
You wait OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS for the Electoral College to be useful for protecting the nation from an objectively unsuitable candidate in the pocket of a foreign power…and there’s a good chance that they just can’t be arsed.
Pull their accreditation and kick ’em out of the NCAA, I say.
Well sapient I think a reasonable compromise is to proportionally award EC votes based on the popular vote but it seems that’s non-starter.
In the spirit of getting things done perhaps a compromise can be found along the lines of winner takes 65% of the EC votes or his/her proportional win whichever is higher.
Honestly, I’m not sure which is why I enjoyed reading this discussion.
What would be really nice would be for Donald to answer russell’s question (and comment) at 8:37. But Donald just uses this blog as a public place to post his private diary and links.
Donald, instead of trolling, why don’t you actually engage with people?
Well sapient I think a reasonable compromise is to proportionally award EC votes based on the popular vote but it seems that’s non-starter.
Davebo, but wouldn’t it be so cool if, this year, the electors would actually look at the problem here. Putin.
Evan McMullin is someone who is courageous, and a patriot. I don’t agree with his policy positions in almost any way. If the electoral college would actually assert their independence in light of the popular vote being against Republicans – if they voted for him, I would still be inspired. In that case i would think the EC had a legitimate role.
This idea that the dynamics of the parties would drastically change if we went to either proportional elector assignment or national popular vote for the presidency seems a little overstated. There are still, again, legislators at the state and federal levels to be elected, governors to be elected, and county and municipal elections to be held. The method by which those people are elected would be entirely unaffected by changing how we elect the president.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t change things at all as far as parties go, but it’s not the only damned thing the parties are concerned with. It’s not a sweeping change to everything the parties do. It would change some of the dynamics of how the parties approach presidential elections. Neither proposal is some wild idea. One is more democratic than what we do now. The other even moreso.
I will never understand why a guy like McMullen could get no traction.
I probably agree with him on, optimistically, 10% of his positions. and I would have no problem with him as POTUS. more executive experience would be good, but he seems like a straight shooter.
FWIW
yeah, electors do your duty. the situation in hand *is exactly why the institution was created*.
I am not holding my breath.
Yes sapient, that would indeed be cool. And also almost a disastrous as what we currently face.
Let’s be realistic. Any change, unlikely as it is, would apply to future elections not this one.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for change, just that one should have realistic expectations.
Let’s be realistic. Any change, unlikely as it is, would apply to future elections not this one.
Honestly, I’m waking up in the morning as if I’ve suffered a death. I don’t honestly think we’ll have another election. It will be an “election” at best. We have a narrow window IMO, or it will be many years. That’s 1 and 2 in order of optimism, then there’s 3, which we won’t see.
Try to keep calm sapient. Don’t panic till the “stuff” hit’s the fan. Then fight against it.
I have no doubt it will be pretty horrible but I won’t loose sleep until the horrible starts. I’ll need the energy.
Thanks, Davebo. That’s what the kids say, and I try to keep them optimistic. Don’t worry, I’ll fight. I have little to lose. Don’t want to be tortured though – can’t see that I’m going to do well under those circumstances,
I didn’t live under the “knock at the door”. But my father flew a fighter jet over Normandy, before D Day and after. Most of Europe lived under that for quite awhile. Asia through horrors then and since then. We’ve lived under their legacy of US Peace for a very long time. We’re on our own now.
I can assure you that your father didn’t fly a fighter jet over Normandy!
But it would have been really cool if he had!
Right, it was just a little plane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_P-47_Thunderbolt
And he was even more cool than if he’d flown a jet.
But it would have been really cool if he had!
What’s cooler still is that he taught me to fight fascists. And I will. Every single day, I’m doing something. And after the inauguration, I will continue to fight, but it will be harder then, and will require skills that I haven’t yet learned.
if it comes to it, maybe check these guys out.
http://canvasopedia.org
the principals were involved in overthrowing milosevic, so they speak from hard won experience.
we have had over 200 years of mostly stable, mostly peaceful governance and transfers of power. that’s actually quite unusual. I think we take it for granted.
it’s also relatively fragile, and to a larger extent than we might think depends on mutual agreement to respect and abide by certain norms.
many of which are, in fact, at risk, now.
so, it may be useful to know how other folks have dealt with negative situations.
the principals were involved in overthrowing milosevic
Thanks for this, russell. I’m seeing some friends of mine from Bosnia tomorrow. They know.
Good to have an online resource.
“Right, it was just a little plane.”
Thunderbolts were and still are way cool!
Single seat, big meat as we used to say of our A-7’s in Navair.
Thanks, Davebo. Wish he were around to say hello!
Don’t know if you saw it this Sunday morning sapient but this was touching to me re WWII vets appreciated.
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/one-students-special-military-operation/
I hadn’t seen that, Davebo. That made me so happy. Thanks so much! My dad died several years ago, but I miss him. I worry that people don’t understand what happened then.
By the time he was old, many of his friends had much more conservative views than he did, and he didn’t have much patience for that. He wasn’t perfect, but was an incredibly good guy. I have to say that I still agree with his politics. He absorbed what he saw and read, and had an incredibly accurate read on current events. He loved the possibility that our country could stand for justice. I wish he had lived to see Obama as President. Am glad he didn’t see this Trump thing.
sapient your Dad was a Thunderbolt driver and hence, a hero.
That said, beyond his service it’s obvious he was also a rational thoughtful person and more importantly, passed that on.
Keep fighting the good fight but pace yourself and most importantly, take care of yourself so you may live to fight another day. Just as we needed him America needs you! ;0)
Sapient, I said a vacation, not a ban. Here in Japan that’s a day, but where you are, I think a week is a general unit of measure. Content free comments like “So do lurk, and try to keep on topic, Donald.” are going to earn you that.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I’m actually a lot closer to your position than Donald’s. Maybe because of that I’m holding you to a higher standard than I’m holding him. I don’t think so, but that’s a possibility. But Donald doesn’t have to answer questions, and he can post his private thoughts. You can disagree with him. But you are crossing a line, and if you don’t know what that line is, I’ll give you a week to figure it out.
Emphatically what Davebo said at 1.22.
Thanks, folks. I should take a vacation. I’m still distraught.
Hi Sapient, I really understand your feelings and understand how it can impinge on what you want to say. That’s why I said vacation rather than ban, and I’d really prefer not to have to do even that.
I mentioned earlier that this is the absolute first time I’m happy that my mom and dad are not around, cause they would be worried about the kind of world that we would have to raise their grandchildren. I think the majority of people here have the same kind of feeling that you have and it is hard to deal with. But please, don’t take it out on people here, even if you strongly disagree with them, cause I don’t see how that can help anything. Thanks.
Marty,
The reason your comments about states sound wrong to me is that there seems to be an underlying idea that states are somehow sentient, apart from their residents, that they have feelings, opinions, policy preferences, and so on.
They don’t. They are arbitrary closed curves drawn on a map of the US. The people who live inside these curves undoubtedly have feelings, opinions, rights, etc, but, first of all, these are not uniform within even the most partisan state. Second, no one is proposing to disregard them, or value the residents of one state any differently than those of another. Well, no one except people who go on about states rights and not wanting to “live under the rule of California.”
You will not live under the rule of California. You will live under the rule of the majority of voters in the US, subject to the various protections and limits on the government as a whole.
Now, it is true that, taken as a whole voters in CA and NY and TX will have more influence than those in OK and KS, for example. But that’s because there are more of them. If they prefer policies that voters in other states tend to dislike, that is just a natural outcome of democratic procedures. Given a choice between two policies at the national level it makes no sense – none – to say that individual voters in OK and KS should have more influence – more, because that is what you are arguing for – than those in more populous states.
Frankly, these arguments about some states dominating others are nuts, IMO.
Yeah, it sure sounded like Marty was complaining about a group of states with 270+ electoral votes TOTALLY JAMMING A PRESIDENT down his throat.
I, for one, feel his pain.
we have had over 200 years of mostly stable, mostly peaceful governance and transfers of power. that’s actually quite unusual. I think we take it for granted.
it’s also relatively fragile, and to a larger extent than we might think depends on mutual agreement to respect and abide by certain norms.
many of which are, in fact, at risk, now.
so, it may be useful to know how other folks have dealt with negative situations.
Milosovic/Trump and the Balkans/US are light years apart. I agree that respecting and abiding by certain norms is important to maintaining the body politic. Living with the consequences of the Electoral College–which people have been discussing and questioning forever–is part of that respect.
Those who want to change the rules should make that case prospectively.
I get the majority vote thing. It has resonance. But Marty has a point too. We may be one country, but we are diverse geographically in a number of ways (although, I think it is less geographical in many respects and more urban v suburban, but that’s beyond my current point). What works for very comfortable majorities on the West Coast and the Northeast is problematic for more or less equal comfortable majorities elsewhere.
The beauty of the electoral college is that it gives smaller states a bit more of a vote, which means that national candidates have to pay attention to smaller states. It may be inconsistent with pure democracy, but it isn’t per se wrong or even anti-democratic.
Which means national candidates have to be ‘national’ and not regional. There is nothing wrong with that.
Also, a lot of what drives the current discussion is Donald J. Trump. If Mitch Romney or someone like MR had won, the intensity level would be a lot lower.
So, rewriting the rules because of DJT seems a bit premature. The world as we know it has not ended.
What’s entirely odd about this notion of states entering into the popular-vote compact forcing everyone else to live under their rule is that it’s the opposite. They’re all agreeing to live according the rule of the country as whole, at least as far as electing presidents goes. I’d still like to know how a state whose popular vote goes one way while the national popular vote goes the other is forcing anything on anyone else by assigning its electors to the opposite candidate it would have absent the compact.
They aren’t agreeing simply to assign their electors the same way collectively according to their own collective decision. They’re subject to the vote, however it happens to go.
Indeed. If they were forcing their opinion down the other states’ throats – or were really aggressive about pressuring other states to join – they’d make the compact require their votes be given to the winner of the popular vote strictly according to votes cast within the compact states. They are, simply put, not doing that.
The beauty of the electoral college is that it gives smaller states a bit more of a vote, which means that national candidates have to pay attention to smaller states.
Aren’t the House and Senate enough?
And, of course, if we wake up in a week or so to find that the Electoral college voted 270-268 in favor of Hillary she will just slide into no problemo because, well, that’s the way the electoral college works?
Aren’t the House and Senate enough?
And, of course, if we wake up in a week or so to find that the Electoral college voted 270-268 in favor of Hillary she will just slide into no problemo because, well, that’s the way the electoral college works?
The House is proportional to population; the Senate is not. The Senate concept emanates from the same principle as the EC. I’m not saying it’s great or perfect, just that it’s been there forever and it isn’t irrational. It’s all in the Constitution, i.e. that common ground we all agree to be on, yes?
If the EC votes for HRC, I think that will be a much bigger thing than anyone here expects. But, I’m not going to borrow trouble between now and then.
Putting the compact aside for the moment, is it safe to assume, then, McKinney, that you would have no problem with proportional assignment of electors instead of winner-take-all assignment? Someone in Wyoming would still be worth 3.6X someone in California.
In practical terms, the two proposals are almost the same. The possibility of the electoral college going the opposite way of the popular vote would be miniscule with proportional elector assignment and every state would matter, not just the swing states.
McK,
The beauty of the electoral college is that it gives smaller states a bit more of a vote, which means that national candidates have to pay attention to smaller states.
I think that, like Marty, you are confusing states with people, assigning them qualities they just don’t have.
It may be inconsistent with pure democracy, but it isn’t per se wrong or even anti-democratic.
I think it is plainly anti-democratic.
Which means national candidates have to be ‘national’ and not regional. There is nothing wrong with that.
Our four most populous states are CA, TX, NY, and FL. Not exactly a regional bloc, is it? The next six are IL, PA, OH, GA, NC, and MI.
Let’s look at a bunch of southern states, AL, AR, GA, LA, NC, SC, and MS. Their combined population, at 41 million, is 4% bigger than CA, and they have a combined 55 House seats to CA’s 53. OK. That makes sense. But they have 14 Senators to CA’s two, and hence 69 EV’s to CA’s 55.
How is that not wildly undemocratic? Would a system that chose the President by popular vote cause candidates to ignore the very similar political interests of these states, of that region? Wouldn’t they in fact pay more attention than they do now?
The house is not proportional to population – CA house districts average 723,000 per district, the entire population of VT is 626k and WY 584k. This could be fixed by adding more House members, as it is, even the House is out of wack. (numbers per wiki for 2014).
Yes there is essentially zero chance that enough Electors will defect from Trump that anyone else will win the electoral vote and thus not worth worrying. If that did happen it would be chaos. Perhaps if the number is 15 or 20 it will spur reform. But I doubt it.
The beauty of the electoral college is that it gives smaller states a bit more of a vote, which means that national candidates have to pay attention to smaller states.
I missed this part. This isn’t true. National candidates have to pay attention to the states that are up for grabs because it’s winner take all. Size isn’t the issue.
a lot of what drives the current discussion is Donald J. Trump. If Mitch Romney or someone like MR had won, the intensity level would be a lot lower.
I think this is very much on point. I would go further and point out that in 2000, with a result even more fraught (thanks to the Supreme Court) and a President elect that a lot of folks had serious reservations about, the level of emotion was a lot lower. High, but a lot lower.
I think that is indeed specific to Mr Trump. Not even so much to the sort of pandering he did to the basest emotions of his followers, but to the personal characteristics that he brings to the position. Characteristics such that a substantial number of those who voted for him say that he is not qualified and/or not suited to the job.
McKinney, isn’t there some legal aphorism about hard cases making bad law?
“Aren’t the House and Senate enough?”
Uh, no. With the continuous expansion of executive power and the power of the veto it ensures that the best Republicans will ever hope for is divided government with ultimate authority in Democrats hands. See CA. The only limitation of Congress continuing to cede power to the executive is that the next executive might be from the other party. When you take away that real possibility then you have an autocracy.
Historically autocracies, even voted in one’s, are suboptimal governments.
With the continuous expansion of executive power and the power of the veto it ensures that the best Republicans will ever hope for is divided government with ultimate authority in Democrats hands. See CA.
I think that is a pretty serious misstatement of the actual situation in California. Yes, the Republican Party has been an irrelevance in California for the past couple of decades. But that is entirely a self-inflicted wound.
The range of political opinion in California today is not much different from what it was in the days when Ronald Reagan was elected (and re-elected) Governor. What happened is that the Republican Party chose to go off the deep end to the right. Nobody forced them to do so. Nobody, outside the GOP, prevents them from moving back towards the center. NOT, note, to become a center-left party; just back towards the center.
And, in fact, we are seeing (at least I think I am seeing) the beginnings of exactly that. We have Republicans as mayors of some of our biggest cities. Mildly (as opposed to extremely) conservative Republicans are getting elected to the legislature — even from districts, such as mine, where Democrats are a substantial majority of registered voters.
My personal expectation is that, in the future, we will again see Republicans in statewide offices. They will be people who are too moderate to have a good shot at winning a Republican primary today (or would if we still had partisan primaries, rather than top-two primaries). But they won’t be liberals by any stretch of the imagination.
I think the same applies to the Republican Party nationally. The GOP could, without even changing most of its positions on the issues, be an easy majority party. A great number of blacks, and a substantial majority of Hispanics, are quite conservative on social issues. If they did not have the (justified) feeling that they are being deliberately rejected by the GOP, their home would be there. In short, for conservatives being an electoral minority is a choice. If we decide that you can be conservative without being a racist or a xenophobe, that you can be a conservative politician without pandering to them, then we are back winning elections across the country.
I believe it is important to point out that California voted for Clinton 8.5M to 4.3M. Outside California Trump won by over 2M votes. NY 4.5 to 2.5. These are not the same kind dswora@burntsand.com l
No question but that the California GOP has succeeded, to a remarkable degree, in making “Republican” a toxic label in California. Which doubtless contributed to Trump’s showing here.
All I’m saying is that the wound is self-inflicted. And that it looks like it is (finally!) being reversed. It’s not something set in stone for the indefinite future.
Reminds me of a recent poll where a large percentage of Trump voters claimed that it was a pro Trump lanslisde since all those excess Clinton voters were from California (and therefore illegitimate).
Milosovic/Trump and the Balkans/US are light years apart.
Yes. Let’s keep it that way.
Less jocularly (haha!) I shared the CANVAS link because I’m a proponent of non-violent political and social activity. In the context of DJT plus the current flavor of (R)’s with a majority of the House and Senate, and god knows what on the way in the SCOTUS (are there any ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs alums left, or have they all been nominated to the Cabinet?), it may be that folks who don’t like how things are going will need to resort to extra-electoral action to have a voice.
So, protest, civil disobedience, etc.
I’m not saying we live in the Balkans, I am saying that direct action may be on the menu. There is nothing more in the American tradition. Some forms of direct action are effective, some aren’t. If you’re gonna play, best be effective.
Regarding the EC issue, it is absolutely related to the election of DJT. Many people, myself included, see that as a freaking calamity.
I will add in the fact that we have had the lost-the-popular-won-the-electoral thing happen twice in less than 20 years. Which gets my attention.
And I will add in the fact that yes, it is primarily an urban/rural divide, and that divide is going to increase if current trends continue and more and more people live in cities.
I don’t really have a problem with either the Senate or the EC as a way of giving less-populous areas a slightly larger voice in things. I don’t mind measures to make sure minority interests aren’t steamrollered.
What I do have a problem with is that, due to the winner-take-all way in which electoral votes are allocated, the electoral vote can end up diverging from the popular vote to a degree that renders it unrecognizable as the will of the people.
I think that is equally as dangerous as neglecting minority interests. More so, probably.
The winner take all strategy is not mandated by the Constitution, was not the original practice, and in fact was viewed by alarm by many of the folks who actually wrote the constitution. For all of the reasons discussed throughout this thread.
There is no reason that it has to persist.
Is “fear of California” in the DSM?
The house is not proportional to population – CA house districts average 723,000 per district, the entire population of VT is 626k and WY 584k. This could be fixed by adding more House members, as it is, even the House is out of wack. (numbers per wiki for 2014).
Or Montana, with over a million people for one seat. Or DC and PR, with 700K and 3.5M respectively, and no (voting) House seats at all.
Of course, even 584K is an awful lot of people for one person to fairly represent. If we kept to the more manageable 35K or so per seat we had in 1792*, we should have something more like 9,000 House seats.
I think that’s an idea worth considering.
It’d make it a lot easier to run for a seat, for one, which would bring in new and different sorts of people. And it’d be a lot easier for the winners to actually stay in touch with and faithfully represent their constituents.
Smaller districts should also be harder to gerrymander.
And of course it would fix some or most of that proportionality problem, just by virtue of having smaller units to deal with. And, speaking of, also make the electoral college more representative (because the senator count doesn’t change).
—
* The apportionment of 1792 created 105 seats, spread over a population of just under 4 million (that 3/5s nastiness notwithstanding). That’s only about 36,000 people per. The fixed 435 number wasn’t settled on until 1911, which meant about 212K to a seat at the time. And now we’re up to 730K odd and counting.
I am in favor of embracing the Republican mantra, and stripping the right to vote from welfare recipients.
If your state gets more money from the federal government than it pays in, it loses its electoral votes.
Drug test, too.
I believe it is important to point out that California voted for Clinton 8.5M to 4.3M. Outside California Trump won by over 2M votes. NY 4.5 to 2.5.
I’m not sure why this is important to point out. Unless the implication is that Californians aren’t Americans…?
If the EC votes for HRC, I think that will be a much bigger thing than anyone here expects.
I agree with this, and neither expect nor wish for the EC to install HRC rather than Trump.
I’m with Ugh, IMO it would be appropriate and completely within the scope of their responsibility for electors who do not want Trump as POTUS to decline to vote for him.
Whatever flowed from that, would flow from that.
Man, we could have fun expanding on jack lecou’s comment.
Here’s my proposal: The least-populated state in the country shall have 2 representatives in the house. Each of the other states shall have a number of representatives in the same relative proportion to its population as does the least-populated state.
Not even so much to the sort of pandering he did to the basest emotions of his followers, but to the personal characteristics that he brings to the position.
It’s also worth pointing to just how nasty of a campaign we just sat through, to include explicit exhortations that the current outcome was not akin to a Nazi winning, but WAS a Nazi winning… and all the “we’ll see” talk on the other side about accepting results. The rhetoric utilized in the campaign in both camps pretty much assured us that we were going to have a contentious holiday season.
In other news, Trump has just named Rick Perry as his pick for Secretary of Energy.
Careful readers will remember that the Dept of Energy is the department that he couldn’t remember he wanted to eliminate back in 2012.
Is this all a prank?
Is this all a prank?
So long as the outrage machine continues to focus on his most recent outrage, we all get fatigued. I think this happened on the other side when we got tired of arguing about the false allegations of Obama/Clinton. While in this case they may be true, it is still fatigue.
Well, then DoE is safe, provided we can keep Perry from remembering that he wanted to eliminate it.
On the other hand, aren’t the US nukes under DoE (instead of DoD)?
Here’s my proposal: The least-populated state in the country shall have 2 representatives in the house. Each of the other states shall have a number of representatives in the same relative proportion to its population as does the least-populated state.
I just made a spreadsheet.
Anchoring to a manageable number of reps in the smallest state is interesting. (You have a constitutional hiccup if there’s ever a state with fewer than 60,000 people, but that could be dealt with.)
By my reckoning, this scheme would give you a total of either 1069 or 1095 reps, I think, depending on whether you allow rounding up. Which stands to reason – you basically double the seats in the smallest state and the whole system follows suite.
Still seems like a lot of people for one Congresscritter to represent — it varies between 246K in Alaska and 378K in ND in the rounding up model.
BTW, using a fixed divisor of 35K, you get a House with 8,780 or 8,804 members (depending on rounding). I think it’d be fun!
Speaking of nukes….
Our POTUS, Calamity Donald.
HSH, that was my immediate reaction, too. Give the least populous state two House seats. Give every other state a number of House seats which would correspond to how many multiples of that number of people it has.
A far smaller, and therefore more workable, House than the 9000 JL suggested. But a lot more reasonable representation.
I suspect it is easier to keep in touch with 300k constituents today than it was to keep in touch with him 35000 in the 1700’s
Pushback from the DOE.
I suspect it is easier to keep in touch with 300k constituents today than it was to keep in touch with him 35000 in the 1700’s
What about represent?
HSH, that was my immediate reaction, too.
Great minds think alike. And so do we!
On my off topic posts, I apologize if they are a distraction.I started to explain my reasoning and just deleted it. Too long. One suggestion–maybe there should be an open thread once a week for off topic links, nasty insults, accusations of fascist collaboration, and personally I could use a sort of drop point for my secret messages to Putin.
Uh, no. With the continuous expansion of executive power and the power of the veto it ensures that the best Republicans will ever hope for is divided government with ultimate authority in Democrats hands.
Or, you know, the GOP could change its policy positions so they have a chance of winning the popular vote. Like a political party or something.
Like a political party or something.
So Republicans and Democrats aren’t bound to their positions by natural law? It’s always something on this damned blog, I tell ya.
One suggestion–maybe there should be an open thread once a week
We traditionally had a weekend open thread every week. But I have been remiss the past few. Sorry.
Yes, Republicans could make sure that Republicans have no one to represent them. Problem solved.
Yes, Republicans could make sure that Republicans have no one to represent them. Problem solved.
And who represents the Illinois Nazis?!!? What about them?!!?
I think you are unclear on the difference between “have a voice in government” and “have the ability to prevent anything we don’t like from happening”.
One is reasonable, the other is not.
Nobody gets everything they want.
Are all Republican voters perfectly represented by all Republicans in office now, Marty? Or is it that some Republicans in office line up on some things with some Republican voters, and other things with other Republican voters, and maybe even with some Democratic voters on a few things?
How is it, for instance, that Dixiecrats became Republicans? What about Reagan Democrats? Did those people wake up one day suddenly believing different things that they did when they went to be the night before?
..than they did when they went to bed…
To put it another way:
If the (R)’s endorse policies that don’t attract the support of the majority of people in the country, then it’s reasonable for them to occupy the position of minority party.
Rural people, specifically, have a voice in government that is larger than their numbers. If that isn’t sufficient for them to prevail on a particular issue or set of issues, then that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
They won’t be the only ones in that position, trust me.
Consider the number of votes cast for Democratic candidates versus the number cast for Republican candidates at all levels of government in this country as compared to the numbers of Democratic and Republican office-holders at all levels of government in this country. Then tell me who should be complaining about not being represented.
On the other hand, aren’t the US nukes under DoE (instead of DoD)?
The National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within DoE, is responsible for design, construction, maintenance, and storage of non-deployed nuclear warheads. Also reactors for the Navy. IIRC, another part of DoE manages WIPP, the geologic storage facility for waste from the nuclear weapons program.
To be honest, DoE’s history of handling nuclear things isn’t particularly good, especially at locations in western states. Carry-over from that is a good part of why western states generally dislike commercial nuclear power.
I suspect it is easier to keep in touch with 300k constituents today than it was to keep in touch with him 35000 in the 1700’s
Yes and no. Communication and travel is easier, what with automobiles and airplanes and telephones and emails and whatnot.
But that goes only so far. If we assume that one way email blasts and robocalls aren’t what we mean by “keep in touch”, than most of the benefit amounts to effectively reducing travel time – rather than making a circuit of the county seats on horseback or whatever to talk to people, a candidate can sit in their office and answer the phone.
But you do still have a finite amount of time to talk, and the time you gained by ditching the horse travel isn’t necessarily exponential. Three hundred thousand (or whatever fraction is actually doing the talking) is a lot if you mean to actually listen to them, even via email and phone calls.
Plus you can’t remove all the travel and logistics either. For example, a good representative should be holding lots of local meetings and townhalls where people can come out and have a chat. Ten times as many people means 10 times as many meetings, over 10 times the area.
Ten times as many people means at least 10 times as many local issues (demographic groups, industries and employment centers, specific environmental, transportation and energy supply issues, etc., etc.) to mentally track as well.
There are major tipping points with all of these – for example, there’s going to be a big drop in participation and engagement when you pass the point between where you can manage to hold completely regular meetings (same place every Wednesday night) which everyone knows about vs. having to maintain a complicated variable calendar which people have to look up and may not even know exists. And there’s a point where a district gets large enough that one person just can’t simultaneously mentally juggle all of the relevant issues and events and constituencies going on. (Thirty or forty thousand is super manageable. That’s a city neighborhood, or a small town and a bit of farmland around it, etc.; three hundred is an entire mid-size city, or more likely, a big, probably diverse corner of a state.)
Relatedly, there’s some point where people “feel” like you are actually approachable, vs. feel like you are a distant, too-important functionary, and thus don’t even bother to try and reach out (even if they technically could, and you were eager and able to listen).
I think there’s something to be said for keeping the number down to where personal contact with everyone is possible, if that’s remotely feasible. Both campaign-wise and representation-wise.
So how much is too much? I don’t know. Three hundred thousand might be fine. Finding out where those tipping points actually are would be an interesting line of research to start finding out.
Yes, Republicans could make sure that Republicans have no one to represent them. Problem solved.
Oh, hi, Marty, welcome to my world! It’s not so bad here once you manage to replace your sense of entitlement and belonging with thick-skinned cynicism or amnesiac optimism.
Which is to say, for as long as this country has existed, there’s been large blocs of people in this country who have been living with the unthinkable state of affairs you can’t imagine being subjected to. It’s not like a more centerist Republican party would become Portland Greens – they’d still hold more closely to your particular position nationally than other parties, and in very red regions, they’d presumably hold even closer locally. Having a political party that perfectly matches your ideology AND controls the levers of power in the federal government is not a citizen’s right. You can have one of those, or the other. If you get lucky, you can sometimes have both. But having been lucky at any given moment doesn’t mean you’re now entitled to be lucky in perpetuity.
Heresy!
Speaking of, I demand that the Federalist party be returned to a majority in the halls of power. Or at least granted a veto over everything.
It’s divisive and unfair that all these Republicans and Democrats and other populist hooligans keep ramming their policies down our throats just because they win elections!
What have you got against Whigs?
One contravailing issue, JL. A part (perhaps even a big part) of the rise in partisan rancor in national politics seems to be this: travel has become sufficiently easy that a lot of members of Congress now live and keep their families in their home district. As opposed to moving with the family to Washington.
Arguably, this makes it easier to keep in touch with the folks who elected them. But it removes the informal social ties that used to exist between members of Congress. As one memorably put it, “it’s hard to demonize the other guy when you spend Saturday watching your kids play soccer together.”
Also, it’s harder to get things done when you only work 3 days a week on your job in Congress, because Monday and Friday are travel days so you can see your family back home. We need, perhaps, to have a discussion on the proper balance between keeping in touch and doing the actual legislating that you were elected to do.
Arguably, this makes it easier to keep in touch with the folks who elected them. But it removes the informal social ties that used to exist between members of Congress.
That’s probably true.
I wonder if there are even enough airplane seats leaving DC for 10,000 reps to fly every week…
Seriously though, that’s definitely a discussion worth having. Mandatory attendance?
The sheer logistics while in session of a chamber 5, 10 or 20 times as large would need some working out too. Obviously a lot of work already gets parceled out to committees and smaller working groups. That’d have to get dialed up to 11, I suppose, which might or might not be all to the good.
I admit to being of many minds on this subject.
One that hasn’t appeared much here is that if we are going to decide that states are nothing but administrative regions for implementing federal policy, then we ought to have a Constitutional Convention and make that explicit. While we’re about that, it would be good to draw the boundaries based on some other principle — population, or watersheds, or something less arbitrary than “from 37°N to 41°N latitude and from 102°03’W to 109°03’W longitude” (Colorado’s official boundaries, with deviations for early surveying errors).
Absent that, then under the 230-year-old rules, states do matter, and that has to be reflected in national politics in some fashion or another. Sure, Wyoming is over-represented. OTOH, 40% of the coal used for electricity in the US is mined in Wyoming, the vast majority on federal lands, the large majority of that to benefit Midwestern and Eastern states, and Wyoming is denied the kind of taxing authority that, eg, Texas has on its petroleum and natural gas resources. No one is ever going to convince the political class in Wyoming that they’re getting a fair shake, even with two senators. (For the record, I’m a long-time coal opponent and not just because of CO2. It’s an example.)
Lots of people talk about urban vs rural. Of late, I’ve been inclined to think that the fundamental difference in the political classes is “states matter” and “no they don’t”.
MC: Wyoming and other Western States made that deal to join the Union. Texas was more powerful and could negotiate. With Art of the Deal Trump as President, surely those leaders will learn this is what a contract is?
While we’re about that, it would be good to draw the boundaries based on some other principle — population, or watersheds, or something less arbitrary
Wouldn’t that be nice.
I think there’s actually a lot of dysfunction coming from the fact that regions like metro NYC/NNJ or metro DC/NoVA/MD are essentially fractured, with much policy being set by state capitols hundreds of miles distant.
This recent work on deriving economically linked megaregions from commute data is interesting on that line: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/12/how-4-million-commutes-shape-americas-megaregions/509483/
I can probably think of about 50 things wrong with using those as political division right off the bat, though. There’s almost certainly no perfect way to divide things up.
Absent that, then under the 230-year-old rules, states do matter, and that has to be reflected in national politics in some fashion or another. Sure, Wyoming is over-represented.
What’s perverse about the electoral college though is that even though Wyoming technically has a disproportionate number of electors, it has exactly zero influence on the outcome of the election. It is red, therefore ignored utterly, while the concerns of, e.g., rural Ohioans are pandered to endlessly.
A national popular vote wouldn’t be as good for Wyoming as, say, letting the Senate pick, but it’d still be better than status quo.
“Oh, hi, Marty, welcome to my world!”
I’m smiling at this, because there certainly not any party that approaches my ideal. However, The somewhat cavalier notion that it is a good thing if parties simply change their positions so they can win elections is not really how it happens, nor would it be a good thing.
I keep missing the explanation of how the fact that there are 8 million blue voters in California should translate to Texans not being able to own a gun. The questions are that simple.
All based on Michael Cain’s ultimate question in his 5:25, I believe that states matter. States formed a union, states were added, some were territories until they got to be states, some didn’t join until they were assured of certain rights.
States matter and it is absolutely the bedrock of my point, and failure of your critique, that everything that comes back is a way of saying states don’t matter. In more than one place in the Constitution the states were specifically recognized to have certain rights, unless specifically granted to the federal government. To call the understanding of the Constitution as recognizing that states matter, as a whole or in its parts, is specious.
Marty,
No one is saying Texas can’t have guns. If the guns stay in Texas, no one cares. When guns cross state lines, it becomes a federal issue. Figure out how to keep your guns there, and you can regulate them.
Wyoming and other Western States made that deal to join the Union.
No, they didn’t. When Congress added them, the states had the expectation that they would get the same deal earlier states got — federal lands would be transferred fairly quickly into local private and/or state hands (eg, Nebraska). Much of what did go into private hands was to large eastern business concerns, who bought elections to serve their interests — driving the entire ballot initiative and recall movement across the West. Federal policy towards the lands changed drastically (but still unofficially) around 1905, and the final nail was the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which said the western states would never gain control of the public lands in those states, and which passed Congress against an almost unanimous western vote.
I keep missing the explanation of how the fact that there are 8 million blue voters in California should translate to Texans not being able to own a gun. The questions are that simple.
Well, it goes like this.
California and Texas are states in a union which has a thing called a federal government, and is in the whole constitutes a “nation”. The respective authority of the states and the federal government to make policy within that nation are spelled out (or in some cases, vaguely gestured at) in a document we call the Constitution.
Policy at the federal level is made by a legislature elected at varying degrees of representation by all the states, and an executive branch led by a president and vice president, who are appointed by electors chosen by the states, with each state having electors equal to the number of its federal legislative delegation.
California, as a populous state, has a large delegation, and a large number of electors, though not enough by itself to determine anything. It chooses its presidential electors according to the winner of the popular vote in California.
Texas does likewise, though being less populous, it has somewhat fewer electors to choose.
If California and other states holding at least 270 electoral votes between them should decide instead to nominate their electors in a block based on the outcome of the national vote rather than the votes in their individual states, this is within their rights. And should Texas or other states elect not to participate in this coalition and continue to appoint their electors based on the vote within the state, it would also their right.
Either way, every four years, California and Texas and the other several states will appoint electors according to the method selected by their state government, and if at least 270 of those electors thus appointed choose the same candidate, that person will become president.
The president, once sworn in, signs laws sent to it by the congressional delegations of the states, and administers laws previously passed (as well as conducting diplomacy and war, nominating judges, and other functions).
If the congressional representatives appointed by the states should pass a bill restricting gun ownership, and if the president — elected by the electors appointed by the states in their due proportions — should sign it, and if the court officials appointed and consented to by this and previous presidents and congresses should decide that the law does not contradict certain notorious clauses in that Constitution we mentioned, then gun ownership will be lawfully restricted in Texas (as well as the other states, presumably).
Simple!
Mexico, on the other hand, not being a member of the union, chooses its own laws, and is not subject (at least directly) to the votes of US citizens in California or Texas. See how that works?
Likewise an explanation of why Californians can’t ban guns in California, should they so choose, would be nice.
The latest long piece by TNC (which is to my mind a tremendous read), is also to the point:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/
“And so I’m careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didn’t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn’t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn’t have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn’t have a problem with the GI Bill, and didn’t have a problem with the [Federal Housing Administration] subsidizing the suburbanization of America, and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class—and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class, you now have a violent opposition to them—then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are, and what’s different, and what’s changed.”
‘expectation’ has a lot to unpack. I am not an expert on this and would love to know more. If my understanding is misguided I can change my opinion.
I keep missing the explanation of how the fact that there are 8 million blue voters in California should translate to Texans not being able to own a gun.
I didn’t know Texans couldn’t own guns.
But I do keep missing the explanation of how the fact that Republican Senators represent many fewer people than Democratic ones should translate to a whole boatload of Republican nonsense, and [fill in rant about Trump appointees].
OTOH, 40% of the coal used for electricity in the US is mined in Wyoming, the vast majority on federal lands, the large majority of that to benefit Midwestern and Eastern states,
Let’s start by not pretending that Wyoming mining activities are altruistic efforts to help Midwestern and Eastern states. My understanding is that the coal is sold, at market prices, not shipped out for free.
Also, that Wyoming mines a lot of coal is no more basis for privileges than the fact that Michigan makes a lot of cars ought to give it privileges. It’s a normal business activity.
and Wyoming is denied the kind of taxing authority that, eg, Texas has on its petroleum and natural gas resources.
I assume you are talking about severance taxes. OK, but why can’t Wyoming simply tax the mining companies. Per Wikipedia, the state is one of the few with no corporate income tax.
No one is ever going to convince the political class in Wyoming that they’re getting a fair shake, even with two senators.
A little arithmetic might help, but in any case, this tends to be true of the political class in most states.
In more than one place in the Constitution the states were specifically recognized to have certain rights, unless specifically granted to the federal government.
…so we come back to you not actually objecting to the interstate voting compact, right?
Look. States can matter all they like. The federal government is not the states, though, and I might possibly be able to find some deviant reading of the Constitution that could kinda-sorta suggest the federal government matters, too. So unless you’re pointing to specific Constitutional text forbidding a given solution to the electoral Charlie Fox that the states exercising their rights to reduce each others’ relevance in presidential elections by implementing the current trainwreck of winner-takes-all electoral vote allocation (which was not the intent of the framers), I’m not seeing how that’s a Constitutional issue, nor that denying states rights you don’t like is actually a way of increasing states’ rights. States’ rights are explicitly their rights to self-govern, not their rights to impose their will on other states. So if states want to change how they carry out their federal elections in accordance with the Constitution, states’ rights says they should. That you want to invoke a third-or-fourth-order negative consequence for some states by that happening doesn’t change that – or at least it certainly doesn’t on other topics.
And if you want to argue that we mustn’t contemplate amendments that would change this because of the role of states in the Constitution… the document was written for a world that no longer exists. We as a nation have changed, and our subnational government’s relationships to each other have changed. We’ve updated the Constitution accordingly; no more slaves, universal suffrage, direct election of Senators despite that taking power away from the states… It may be that there are magnificent reasons to maintain every scrap of the current federal-state balance in place, but if we’re willing to broach the subject of going beyond merely legislative solutions “founder’s intent” isn’t one of them, as evinced by their adding to the Constitution provisions for amendment…
If CA *really* wanted to get Marty’s knickers in a twist, all they have to do is allow non-citizens resident in CA to vote in state legislative elections PLUS federal elections.
It’s completely constitutional. It’s how that hotbed of commie liberalism, Wyoming, gave women the vote before the suffrage amendment.
Art I, Sec 2: “Section. 2.
“The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.”
And the Federales cannot interfere. Suck it, Texas.
ETA: the previous comment was NOT directed at our friend McTx, but rather the state.
It could be done by proposition in CA, for extra fun. I, for one, would gladly support such a measure.
“All persons, resident in CA for more than one year, and at least eighteen years of age, are eligible to vote for state legislators, and other local, county and federal offices. GOPers that attempt to bar them from the polls may be shot without penalty.”
Okay, that last part is a bit over the top. A bit.
For the record, there aren’t 8m blue voters in CA. Hillary Clinton won Orange freakin’ County by 5% during this election – the first time that the county has gone blue since 1936.
In any other campaign year with any other candidate that difference would be much smaller.
It’s not that CA is so much more blue, it’s that CA is so much less white.
How fortunate tor residents in those southern rural states that my personal vote counts 20% less than theirs do. But at least I count as more than 3/5 of a person for representational accounting…
“Lots of people talk about urban vs rural. Of late, I’ve been inclined to think that the fundamental difference in the political classes is “states matter” and “no they don’t”.”
that’s an interesting point. my take on it is that the folks who have strong feelings about states’ rights are pretty much the same folks who live in rural areas.
all of that said I’m fine with states having authority in any area that isn’t in the purview of the feds.
and there’s the rub. right?
as far as guns go, there are 6 states which offer completely unrestricted permission to carry a firearm, 35 that allow it as long as you meet some basic criteria which is typically to pass a background check and maybe take a class, and 9 that reserve the right to deny you permission to carry. and even in those 9 you can get a firearm for hunting or home defense.
TX is shall issue, so if taking a freaking class and having to demonstrate an understanding of which end the bullets come out is too high a bar, you still have 6 other states you can move to.
I’m fine with states. I don’t want them electing presidents. presidents should be elected by people.
“direct election of Senators despite that taking power away from the states…”
yes, away from the states, and to the people who live in them.
Unsurprisingly, I’m with Russell.
It’s fine for local/state issues to be decided by local/state governments. In fact, it makes sense to do that.
But when we come to national policies the whole notion of states makes no sense. Policies need to be chosen by the people affected by them. Let Montanans set the speed limit in Montana. But don’t let Montanans have a disproportionate influence over questions of war and peace, or national budgets, or whatever.
However, The somewhat cavalier notion that it is a good thing if parties simply change their positions so they can win elections is not really how it happens, nor would it be a good thing.
It is kind of how it works, though.
There have been 30 presidential elections since 1900, but, excepting the Roosevelt/Truman years, no party has managed to win the popular vote for more than 3 times running.
In the same period, the makeup of the country, and the views, platform and makeup of the people voting for those parties have changed almost totally. (A time travelling voter from 1900 probably wouldn’t recognize either party today, and I suspect knowing which party they came from then would only give you about a 50/50 chance of guessing which one they’d join today.)
The obvious conclusion is that the parties – or at least the coalitions of people that form them – adjust pretty rapidly in order to stay relevant. The mechanisms are probably complex, but it clearly happens.
And on the whole, that adaptation a good thing.
That it’s good seems like a necessary conclusion given that a) a permanent single party state probably isn’t healthy, and b) lots of wins by technicality by a party that’s steadfast to its principles, but increasingly in the minority and out of touch with the nation probably isn’t much better.
There have been 30 presidential elections since 1900, but, excepting the Roosevelt/Truman years, no party has managed to win the popular vote for more than 3 times running.
It may be worth noting that moving the starting date back to 1896 gives a second stretch of more than three consecutive wins.
(No objection to the main point, to be sure, but basepoints do matter.)
” But don’t let Montanans have a disproportionate influence over questions of war and peace, or national budgets, or whatever.”
I don’t know anyone who disagrees with this. My experience is that Democrats think everything is a national issue, and if it’s not it should be, so whatever is exactly the problem.
States matter and it is absolutely the bedrock of my point, and failure of your critique, that everything that comes back is a way of saying states don’t matter. In more than one place in the Constitution the states were specifically recognized to have certain rights, unless specifically granted to the federal government.
I’m really not sure what this is even directed at anymore. If it’s an argument against something like the NPVIC we’ve been talking about, or other changes to the appointment of electors, it’s not a cogent one. It’s sort of not even wrong.
Assuming that’s it, I’ll just point out, for the umpteenth time, that appointing presidential electors in a manner of their own choosing (with virtually no restriction) is exactly one of the rights specifically granted to states by the Constitution.
Jack, I struggle to even respond after the 5 paragraph completely unnecessary civics lecture, but I am pretty sure i havent commented on the NPVIC specifically, as it seems it is completely within the rights of the state’s, it’s just a bad idea. If we were discussing simple proportional allocation of electors based on the voters within a state, I’m not sure I would even object. Proportional allocation of electors in a state based on the national vote strikes me as just slipping one by the voters, and a fraudulent bypass of the intent of the framers and 230 years of history.
So in the end, if all the blue states adopt it, they do exist by the common definition, then I would be thrilled in the short term because the GOP would pick up electoral votes. If they forced everyone to do that,( obviously the intent of the movement, it would just be a tricky way to move to the popular vote Democrats want so they can bypass the states.
The history of different parties certainly shows the changes back and forth but that doesn’t predict the future.
If Democrats didn’t believe it would help them win they wouldn’t be for it. All the rest is rationalization to the voters whose vote wouldn’t matter anymore.
Is there any right granted* to the states to conspire to achieve a goal? No! And that of course makes any voluntary ‘compact’ between states a no-no (as opposed to e.g. a national party leadership blackmailing the representatives of states to vote a certain way or face consequences).
*of course ‘granted to the states’ is a heretical phrase all by itself. All granting is done BY the states (or to be precise: the rulers of each).
[/snark]
My experience is that Democrats think everything is a national issue, and if it’s not it should be, so whatever is exactly the problem…
Really ?…
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/12/13915990/federalism-trump-progressive-uncooperative
Proportional allocation of electors in a state based on the national vote strikes me as just slipping one by the voters, and a fraudulent bypass of the intent of the framers and 230 years of history.
Doesn’t sound like you read the link in the OP, among other things. Popular vote and proportional allocation were both on the table in the early days of the republic (the latter was, in fact, common for a while). There were reasons that neither became part of the Constitution or otherwise mandatory, but — like the reasons for the 3/5s compromise — they weren’t especially noble ones. And they aren’t relevant today, either way.
…If they forced everyone to do that,( obviously the intent of the movement…
This part doesn’t make sense.
Part of my confusion might stem from the willy-nilly switching between the NPVIC — a concrete (if possibly quixotic) proposal with some actual legislative success — and the (currently) more academic proposal of some kind of intrastate proportional allocation, which might take several forms.
In neither case is this characterization really accurate, though.
If you’re speaking of the NPVIC, than no, forcing everyone is not the intent or end goal of the movement. No state will ever be forced to pass anything it doesn’t want to, and *everyone* certainly does not need to sign on. Only states sufficient to form a block with at least 270 electoral votes. The same kind of block of states which has determined the outcome of *every* presidential election since at least 1824.
If you’re aiming that remark at proportional appointment, it’s a better fit, but only slightly:
There’s currently no organized movement for proportional apportionment AFAICT, so it’s hard to talk of any specific intent, but I do see three potential approaches if anyone does give it a try: incremental adoption; constitutional amendment; and finally, supreme court decision — perhaps along the lines of the equal protection argument someone linked to previously.
The first is clearly not forcing any state to do anything it doesn’t want to, same as NPVIC. Neither is the second, unless you consider the constitutional amendment process itself to always be an unethical “forcing” of the majority’s views on abstainers. (Perhaps you do.)
Which takes us to the last one. I suppose it *is* probably fair to say the 14th amendment *was* forced on a reluctant state or two back in good old 1866. But characterizing the amendment itself as “forcing” states to treat their citizens equitably seems a lot like characterizing detention as “forcing” school bullies not to steal their weaker classmates’ lunch money.
It might be force, but it’s not necessarily unjust.
..it would just be a tricky way to move to the popular vote Democrats want so they can bypass the states
I won’t deny that there’s a bit more…interest on the issue from the D side in recent days, but it’s absurd to claim that there aren’t plenty of non-partisan reasons to favor a popular vote, or at least some fixes to the existing system. The electoral college as it stands is objectively pretty awful.
For me, it has always had a lot more to do with loathing the ways electoral politics circumscribe presidential campaigns in almost ritualistic ways, and genuinely bypass the voices and concerns of a majority of states and people, from California to Mississippi…
Maybe try to look at it from a Rawlsian perspective.
Say I offer to send you on a one way trip 120 years into the future, in my many-possible-worlds quantum-time-teleporter.
Everything’s pretty different in the future, but I assure you that the one I’ve found for you has an electorally competitive political party that you will find very congenial. In fact, I offer you the choice of *two* such futures: both have the same political parties, but there’s one where the electoral college persists in essentially its current form, and one where a popular vote is used instead.
I won’t tell you anything else about the choices. In particular, I won’t tell you whether conditions in the future mean that your party would tend to be more helped or hindered by a popular vote in presidential contests.
Which do you choose, and on what basis?
Jack,
There is some of the jumping back and forth in my thought process, so, I don’t like NPVIC but the states have a right to try and use their electoral college votes however they see fit. The states that have passed are all blue, the repeal process has already been tried in a few states and given a really strong Republican candidate this year more of them might have considered it. I suspect many people in the states where it has passed don’t have a clue that is how their votes might be counted, or not counted at all in a few cases.
I do see this and some other ideas as trying to get to a national direct vote through the back door so my reaction to it is based on my reaction to that.
The electoral college in its current form is certainly my choice. The primary objections to it seem contrived or as self interested as my support.
The self interested part is simple, many on the left believe that direct elections will favor them demographically over time. Which I agree with, so I am against it.
I believe it would marginalize anyone who doesn’t live within 30 miles of a huge population center and I think that ultimately the concerns for those people matter. While people say “land doesn’t count people do”, the reality is that the system we have at least seeks to ensure that people who don’t want to live in those metro centers have some voice in their government.
The contrived ones, one person one vote etc. are just ways to make the desire more noble than “we should change the system to ensure we win more”.
I believe that the founders, and early advocates of the electoral college, created a mechanism that allows a country as large and diverse as ours to last past the time when it could have otherwise.
It makes sense to me that the Presidential election would end up focused on a few swing states as the issues that impact those states become both a microcosm of national issues and they, like the Rust Belt this year, have issues that may require the federal government to provide policy solutions.
It also makes sense that proportional allocation within states is a means to provide the minority in both red and blue states a voice and moves toward the basic goals of the one person one vote contingent without undoing the ability to change that if the results had unintended consequences.
Both national direct election and the NPVIC fundamentally change the nature of our political system, which I do not agree is objectively awful, it is subjectively awful to you. It is my opinion that the fact that we can go from Obama to Trump, and likely someone more moderate next, is a strength of the system not a weakness.
Despite the accolades heaped on him Obama pushed the boundaries of executive power and the swing to Trump is likely to undo some of that. Some of Obamas overreach will be undone and it is likely the Republican Congress will actually take some power back from the Executive.
There is no mandate or even broad Republican support to accomplish the worst outcomes, we will not be installing a permanent fascist state because no one is actually for that. The Republicans themselves are likely to reject a few of Trumps appointments just to make sure he knows that he requires their support.
There is a valid argument that a third term with Clinton at the head was a more risky proposition in terms of creating a permanent ruling class.
All to say that the electoral college hasn’t provided the doom of our country and direct election might have created a worse long term outcome.
“My experience is that Democrats think everything is a national issue, and if it’s not it should be, so whatever is exactly the problem.”
Funny, but my experience is that (R)’s think exactly the same thing, and “states’s rights” is something they roll out whenever they don’t get their way.
“If Democrats didn’t believe it would help them win they wouldn’t be for it”
and again, if (R)’s thought it would help them, they’d be all over it.
see also, for instance, voter registration laws.
your argument overall seems to be thar (D)’s want to impose their will on everyone else. well so do (R)’s. so do the greens for that matter, and the libertarians.
we live in a big Country with lots of different people in it. we’re going to bug each other. we either need to accept that and deal with it, or go our separate ways. what we’re doing now ain’t working.
Marty,
Me: But don’t let Montanans have a disproportionate influence over questions of war and peace, or national budgets, or whatever.
You: I don’t know anyone who disagrees with this. My experience is that Democrats think everything is a national issue, and if it’s not it should be, so whatever is exactly the problem.
ISTM that anyone who thinks the Senate is just a lovely institution disagrees with my point. The Constitution itself disagrees with it.
And yes, in a 21st century country, as opposed to an 18th century one, a great many issues are national, or at least interstate, in scope.
Marty,
I believe [a national popular vote system] would marginalize anyone who doesn’t live within 30 miles of a huge population center and I think that ultimately the concerns for those people matter.
I really don’t understand this at all, and it seems completely backwards. Right now California Republicans, rural or urban, are completely marginalized in Presidential elections. Their votes are meaningless.
Under a popular vote system that would not be so. Their votes would every bit as important as those in FL or PA.
“There is no mandate or even broad Republican support to accomplish the worst outcomes, we will not be installing a permanent fascist state because no one is actually for that”
I basically agree with this, with the caveat that for ‘no one’ we should read ‘no one in a position to make it happen’. the concepts themselves were major applause lines throughout trumps campaign, which is a cap that his supporters can expect to wear indefinitely.
I know it’s not something I will forget anytime soon. it’s right up their with the hearty cheers for the guy who died because he had no health insurance.
maybe the social conservatives are right. maybe shame is undervalued as a social force.
what we can expect from trump is abuse of his office for his own personal gain and that of his cronies, significant federal support for extracting fossil fuels, privatization of public lands and infrastructure, and tax breaks and other goodies for the very wealthy.
and a shredding of what minimal social safety nets we have now.
not fascism, but a kleptocratic banana republic.
Trump is not a rebalancing back from excessive executive power. he is the reinstatement and normalization of teapot-dome style corruption.
all the folks in the “fuck your feelings” shirts are going to learn exactly what that phrase means. but they will never have the self awareness to see the connection between trump and their immiseration, they’ll just blame obama.
or maybe I’m wrong, and there will be some of epiphany.
in either case, it’s actually kind of tragic.
I’d be fine with proportional allocation. it ain’t gonna happen, but it should.
“I really don’t understand this at all, and it seems completely backwards. Right now California Republicans, rural or urban, are completely marginalized in Presidential elections. Their votes are meaningless. ”
And they would remain meaningless in a national direct vote system. As would Massachusetts Republicans, and every other Republican in every state. Here is an exercise, figure out how many states it would take to add up to the 6 million vote margin from NY and CA, plus a million from Massachusetts. 7 million, that’s the margin.
At least some Republican votes matter now.
Proportional allocation of electors in a state based on the national vote strikes me as just slipping one by the voters, and a fraudulent bypass of the intent of the framers and 230 years of history.
Who has suggested this, and why would anyone suggest it? Am I misunderstanding what you wrote here, Marty?
At least some Republican votes matter now.
Considering that they’ll hold all three branches of the federal government and a solid majority of governorships and state legislatures, “some” might be an understatement.
hsh,
No you are not misunderstanding what I wrote.
It was my mashing of all these discussions into a single thought sitting in an airport on my phone. It should have said allocation rather than proportional, it was my unclear, (perhaps even to me),response to NPVIC. NPVIC is worse because it isn’t even proportional.
Gotcha. I was thinking, “Who the hell came up with that one?”
And they would remain meaningless in a national direct vote system. As would Massachusetts Republicans, and every other Republican in every state. Here is an exercise, figure out how many states it would take to add up to the 6 million vote margin from NY and CA, plus a million from Massachusetts. 7 million, that’s the margin.
Again, I just don’t understand. You seem to be complaining that there are more Democrats than Republicans in the country, and that it is unfair that Democrats should win national elections because of that. Sorry, but that seems like a completely bizarre complaint.
All of this feels, to me, like the same arguments the federalists and anti-federalists had in the 1780’s.
We want to be part of the nation, but not too much.
We want to be part, but only if we don’t have to give up too many things.
There isn’t a half-way. You’re in or you’re out. If you’re in, you live with the fact that everything isn’t going to go your way.
This is broader than the discussion of the EC. The emergence of voter registration laws which, somehow, selectively target people who vote (D) is another case of the same effort to hold on to an advantage that is not supported by numbers.
I don’t mind that the Senate and the EC give rural states disproportionately high representation. I do mind that that is not enough, that there has to be disproportionate representation, *and* discriminatory voter registration, *and* winner-take-all electoral voting allocation.
If you can’t win with the advantages that are built in to the system, then you don’t deserve to win. You either have to change, or get out of the way. You can’t dig your heels in and break the whole f***ing system for everyone else.
To the degree that Trump’s support is based on his claims to revive the economy for working folks, I’m sympathetic. I don’t think he’s going to deliver that, in fact the opposite. But I understand the wish for it to be so.
To the degree that it’s flipping the bird to snotty coastal elitists because you think they’re going to impose their horrid lifestyle on everyone, I’m not really that sympathetic. We put up with you all, you need to get a grip and figure out how to live with us.
Otherwise it ain’t gonna work, because nobody’s going away.
So NPVIC is worse, since it “isn’t even proportional”.
I, for one, join Marty in welcoming Pres. Clinton with her 56% of the electoral votes, then.
While people say “land doesn’t count people do”, the reality is that the system we have at least seeks to ensure that people who don’t want to live in those metro centers have some voice in their government.
Pure post hoc conjecture. This may (or may not; I’m leaning towards may not as that’s not actually something it does unless you live in certain states) be what it does, but it does not “seek” to do this. The text does not have intent. It’s paper and ink. It was also drafted by committee, and incorporated consensus decisions and compromises, so even talking about the “authors’ intent” is a fool’s game since different authors had different intents for the same chunks of text.
The contrived ones, one person one vote etc. are just ways to make the desire more noble than “we should change the system to ensure we win more”.
And the claim that all your opponents are scurrilous conniving two-faced gits is just a way to make your self-interest seem more noble. Believe it or not, some people are actually pro-democracy as a matter of principle rather than convenience, even if it means “their” party loses. You may not be, but you can’t hold that up as evidence that others aren’t which is what you’re basically doing here. Not all of us are sensible enough to be rationally self-interested. There are naive idealists* out there, despite their exposure to the political system.
I don’t want IL Nazis to have freedom of speech and of assembly because it benefits me in a direct political sense by helping to bring about the implementation of policies I support. I want them to have it because it benefits me in an abstract, esoteric sense by allowing the free exchange of ideas. Same thing with direct democracy. You keep invoking the principle of the republic as it was conceived as an abstract concept people can rally to; if you can understand your rallying to that, is it really so difficult to imagine other people rallying to an ideal of direct democracy?
*Not me, mind you. I’m a jaded, cynical idealist.
While people say “land doesn’t count people do”, the reality is that the system we have at least seeks to ensure that people who don’t want to live in those metro centers have some voice in their government.
It’s also worth noting that if we were to consider authorial intent, the opinions of rural farmers, miners, etc. being weighed more heavily than cosmopolitan citizens is honestly pretty much the opposite intent that the authors had for the electoral college. One gets into trouble when one conflates the geography and political power distribution as it now exists with the original eastern seaboard United States of 1789.
many on the left believe that direct elections will favor them demographically over time. Which I agree with, so I am against it.
I think that any effect there will be fairly short lived, and changes to both the way campaigns are run and the way the parties present themselves would keep the gap narrow.
But to the extent it wouldn’t, this is basically an argument for tyranny. Think about what you’re saying: you are conceding that candidates espousing the platform you favor are at a 7 million vote deficit — and climbing. But you want them to stay in power anyway.
There are ultimately three outcomes if that continues.
One: The demographics and other forces driving that deficit eventually drive it so high that it overwhelms even the moderating effect of the electoral college. Result: the Republican party as it is today suddenly becomes just as permanently impotent as you fear would come to pass with a popular vote. This may only take an extra cycle or three. A lot of people thought we were already there.
Two: Those forces continue, and the deficit in popular support continues to grow, but Republicans-as-currently-constituted cling to power indefinitely. Perhaps by expanding partisan voter suppression and other tactics — poll taxes, changing the franchise outright, deportation of citizens, restriction of political speech, who knows — to match. Bottom line: if they are in a substantial minority, but somehow they’re still in power with no end in sight, some cherished democratic institutions will by definition have to have been broken along the way. (At some point, maybe holding fake elections, Baathist style, becomes a lot simpler all around.)
Three: The Party eventually concedes defeat, and adapts to meet the shifting winds. They make new, more convincing arguments that their ideas are best. They ditch some of the arguments or positions that are turning people off. Result: they get more support, and least enough to remain competitive, and no longer tremble at demographic trends.
If you are a friend to democracy, number three is obviously the best possible outcome, and the sooner the better. This is true even if you will personally mourn some of the changes in the platform.
It’s also exactly what would (have to) happen under a popular vote system.
many on the left believe that direct elections will favor them demographically over time. Which I agree with, so I am against it.
I also think you are misreading the partisan argument.
The argument does not go, “I want the Democrats to win, therefore lets pick the mechanism that will make that most likely”.
The argument is, “It is unjust that Democrats — who have a clear majority — are not winning more. This injustice is caused by the mechanism we are using.”
This is very different.
(I can’t help but not that the first, contrived, argument does seem to be the one *you* are using, however.)
This is true even if you will personally mourn some of the changes in the platform.
What I find vexing about this discussion is that, while Marty can come off (from my POV) as a wild-eyed partisan with what looks to me like irrational hatred of Obama and Clinton, when we get into policy discussions and away from specific political actors and their underlying motivations, he’s not much of a standard Republican, and I find there’s a fair amount I can agree with him on.
So I really don’t get why changes to the Republican platform should be so objectionable. We’re only talking about some moderate adjustments to net them a marginal number of voters, gaining more from the middle than they lose from the fringes. We’re not talking about, say, a Republican party that proposes to do everything someone like me would like to see. My guess is we’d be looking at a party that would better represent Marty than it does now.
I would suggest (3) as the most fruitful way forward.
It’s what the (D)’s did 25 years ago, see also Bill Clinton.
Don’t know if it was the right thing to do or not. I wasn’t, and am still not, a fan of it. But it let them remain in the national conversation.
I, for one, would like to hear about those never-changing-with-the-political-winds GOP positions on Free Silver, breaking up the Standard Oil Trust, and whether the USA should get involved in WWI.
It’s what the (D)’s did 25 years ago, see also Bill Clinton.
It’s also what the (R)s tried in 2000. Remember “compassionate conservatism”?
I’m not sure it stuck — or struck outsiders as especially sincere — but it does show recent precedent.
As someone who calls himself a Communist(Marxist-Leninst, Trotskyist, or Maoist depending on season) this has not been going well. I am overmatched here, so hesitate to jump in, but I tend to be with Marty on the issues of majoritarianism and the Electoral College. (I would stop here and not offer arguments if I had a sense of humour)
I define democracy, tentatively, as governance with the consent of the governed. Majority rule is easy, common if not universal (under broad sense of consent, including passive), and is only codified (or a republic) for the sake of efficiency. Rule by popular vote is nearly a tautology without constraints.
The US Constitution, original and amended, recognizes this, so largely deals, with what’s important for free societies, the protection of minorities. I find it nearly offensive and outrageous that liberals are arguing for the tyranny of the majority without restraint. The White or Christian majority?
I almost feel I shouldn’t go on about protection of minorities, we can assume that is the purpose of gov’t, all the way back to Hobbes) One pertinent question of course is how minorities should be protected, by a meta-gov’t a super-authority not subject to majority veto (a king, a bill of rights) always understanding that a super-authority will not hold against a determined majority.
Or perhaps by a mandatory consensus, universal veto, which appears cumbersome and conservative, but has been adopted by syndicalists and Occupy.
Finally, in ppractical and historical terms, you are unwise to suicidal to lead a minority of any more than 15% to believe they have no meaningful representation or stake in the system because if they don’t leave they will rise up and vote for disorder. As we are seeing with Trump. Occupy was committed to people not leaving.
Of course Democrats have imposed social policy on Red States, abortion and gay marriage in front. (Blue President, Blue Justices, Blue national imposition). I like those decisions, but I recognize them as social dominance of a temporary majority, and sympathize with Marty, because I don’t want my pot taken away.
Signed, serious states rights leftist.
All of this feels, to me, like the same arguments the federalists and anti-federalists had in the 1780’s…
Quite.
It’s notable that those expressing strong opinions on either side during the first contested presidential election in 1796 tended to regard their opponents as actual traitors to the revolution (as they variously understood it)…
And what about the poor socialists in the US? Who’s representing them? Their official color is red, but that’s what’s been established for Republican-majority states. I will, for my purposes, designate their color as salmon.
Where are all the salmon states? There are none! WTF, man?
I hadn’t refreshed and wrote my last before seeing bob mcmanus’ comment.
Alaska and Washington are salmon states
(majority-minority districts. Of course it is about bending heavily toward overepresentation of minorities. Who are you people?)
Okay, you might say that after the elimination of the Electoral College, minorities would still have adequate protection in the overrepresentation in Congress, the bill of rights, etc. That’s enough.
No, it’s not. No they wouldn’t.
Sorry, Montana must have in itself, or in a plausible and accessible coalition, a veto over California and whatever coalition it can assemble. Understand, usually Montana will respect majoritarianism and not exercise that veto. But I think they should have it.
As perhaps African-Americans, American-Muslims, LGBTQ etc should also have a national veto.
I will accept almost anything to void a codified majoritarian tyranny, because they told us after WWII never forget and I haven’t.
I find it nearly offensive and outrageous that liberals are arguing for the tyranny of the majority without restraint.
Personally I am not arguing for that. The biggest change I’m looking for is proportional allocation of electoral votes at the state level.
Funny you should mention syndicalism, of all of the theoretical systems floating around it’s probably the one closest to my own values. I just don’t think it would be practical here, for purely cultural and historical reasons.
If we were really up for a do-over, on the whole I think I’d prefer something more like a Westminister parliament. It just seems more flexible and more able to adapt to emerging conditions and situations.
For reasons that are beyond me but which are probably understandable by an actual political scientist, we seem fated to two-party rivalries. Which seem inherently artificial to me. Every point on a quite broad range of points of view has to fit under one umbrella or the other.
I liked Occupy, they really did capture the energy of a moment, but they couldn’t find a way to be effective.
Sorry, Montana must have in itself, or in a plausible and accessible coalition, a veto over California and whatever coalition it can assemble.
I guess what I find odd about what you’ve said here, and in general about the “state’s rights” argument, is the conflation of a group of people with a common set of interests with a political state (small-s). E.g., Montana.
People in Montana have some interests in common, and probably some not. And each sub-group of Montanans with a recognizable set of common interests probably share those interests with people in other places.
So, people who want to extract minerals from Western lands have a common set of interests, and people who want to leave the land the hell alone have common interests, across state boundaries. But probably not across the whole country, most likely regionally.
Ditto for things like transportation infrastructure, water rights, wildlife and fisheries, border control issues, etc etc etc.
In other areas issues like industrial policy, housing, environmental quality, etc etc may be more urgent.
Maybe some kind of regional compact approach is the way to go.
I appreciate what you’re going for with this, I’m just unclear on why a state is the right entity to carry it.
Finally, why states? And the EC.
Well, the President has an air force.
Because, under dire local circumstances people can move somewhere else with definable borders and an independent more congenial self-governance that might be oppositional to any bordering or near regional or national coalition. Utah.
Be nice to have a couple hundred more.
Call me slow, but I don’t get how the EC without the winner take all feature still gives low populated states a disproportionately high representation.
The US Constitution, original and amended, recognizes this, so largely deals, with what’s important for free societies, the protection of minorities. I find it nearly offensive and outrageous that liberals are arguing for the tyranny of the majority without restraint. The White or Christian majority?
Well, I obviously don’t think that the fairly minor change of allowing presidential elections to follow the popular vote amounts to “tyranny of the majority without restraint”.
Couple things.
One, popular/electoral splits have only happened 4 times in 56 tries. In none of those is it remotely clear that any genuinely threatened minority was protected from tyranny. Indeed, the first resulted in the infamous compromise of 1877 and a resurgence of racist oppression in the South. The others were simply the same story we have today: narrow margins in a couple of key swing states.
Two, there are plenty of other, rather more effective and better engineered institutions for protecting minorities from tyranny. The Constitution, the courts, the Senate, the freedom of press and speech, the various powers vested in the states.
Three, the elector system was originally adopted over a popular vote to better empower white property owners: Some states had a broad franchise, while others enfranchised only, e.g., those aforementioned white property owners. The latter states were rightly afraid their small number of actual votes would be subsumed by the larger number of votes in more democratic states.
While I suppose you can argue that makes it an institution designed to protect a minority (i.e., white property owners), that particular minority has never really been in much need of special protection.
I’d suggest that it’s more correct to view it as an institution designed to protect the class represented by white property owners. A job it’s still doing pretty well today.
Be nice to have a couple hundred more.
At what point do we just call it a day and all just go our own ways?
I’m not even saying that would be a good thing, or a bad thing. I’m just saying that at a certain point it’s a thing. A reality.
I guess the other question about your argument here, bob, has to do with disproportionate representation as the means for insuring minority rights.
Basically, right now somebody in WY has three votes for POTUS for every one that somebody in CA has. More than, actually, but we don’t do fractional votes. Some have three and some have four.
What makes the people in WY the “minority” whose point of view must be protected against the “majority” in CA?
CA has the same population as basically the 21 or 22 lowest-population states. Which makes it seem like it has extraordinary power.
But there is one CA, and 21 or 22 of those other states. And every person in every one of those 21 or 22 other states has greater representation in national government than any person in CA does.
Is it accurate to claim that CA has some kind of majoritarian advantage over those other states?
Bob,
I am all for protection of minorities. But I think there are a number of issues to consider.
1. What our electoral system does is protect arbitrarily defined minorities. The 274,000 Trump voters in Montana got three electoral votes. The 3 million in California got none.
2. There is a difference between protecting minority rights and letting a minority rule. It makes no sense to say that it’s a good idea to have a President elected by a minority because that protects the rights of the minority. If you fear that a majority, in power, will treat minorities and their interests unfairly, why does the same not apply, inversely, to a minority in power?
3. There are within-state minorities as well. How are they to be protected, noting, as a historical fact,that the record of the states on this issue is poor. If it is outrageous for the federal government to declare that states must allow SSM, is it also outrageous to deny them the right to outlaw interracial marriage? A well-worn analogy, I know, but a good one, I think, nonetheless.
Oh, and I had a Four, but I think Russell got to it first: states don’t make any particular sense as checks on majoritarian tyranny.
As often as not what see instead are groups genuinely in need of protection instead having their voice chopped into even smaller chunks by arbitrary state borders, and subsequently ignored.
And no, picking up and moving somewhere else is not a practical or humanitarian solution to that.
Also – jack and bob, great to hear from you guys again. Thanks for stopping by, don’t be strangers!
Last one?
Question about universal veto: damn, how far do you go? Salmon states? Slave states?
To the point negotiation breaks down law becomes liminal and politics begin. State of Exception. Politics is always the directed application of material force, be it strikers and Pinkertons, a march or sit-in or sabotage, or the vote. The vote, in itself, is an extralegal force the state and law are about how to count it and what to do with the results.
The violence is always there, in the state, looking at you and through you. The decision to focus it apart from the state is individual, hopefully collective and rare, and catastrophic but accessible and should always be kept in mind.
It might be interesting to think about what states that really did represent group identities would look like.
You could have the State of White Dudes Who Think Truck Nuts Are Cool, and the Republic of Lesbians With Multiple Piercings Who Are Trying Out the Paleo Diet.
Everyone could only be a citizen of one at a time, of course. New states would be formed with statehood petitions. You’d probably have to have a minimum population, and dissolve states which dropped too low.
And you’d have to put your state on your W2 and pay taxes to it. And there’d be elections for legislatures, and governors. And every state would send two Senators and however many Representatives off to Washington. And appoint electors to vote in presidential years.
Maybe I’ll run for Senator from the Commonwealth of Data Nerds Who Write Too Much On the Internet When They’re Procrastinating On A Project.
For reasons that are beyond me but which are probably understandable by an actual political scientist, we seem fated to two-party rivalries. Which seem inherently artificial to me. Every point on a quite broad range of points of view has to fit under one umbrella or the other.
This is edging up to a thought I had about the parties changing their platforms to appeal to a broader set of voters, and that this can be seen as some sort of threat to – I don’t know – democracy or political stability. I’m not sure.
At any rate, that POV seems to have an underlying premise along the lines of people being born as Republicans or Democrats, as though it’s in their DNA, and that what makes someone one or the other is immutable and universal among those of the same party. It’s as though it was ordained by the creator or set deterministically during the Big Bang – maybe both. (Or maybe they’re the same thing when it comes down to it.)
Maybe the Whig gene was a dead-end mutation.
I don’t understand how anyone is getting worked up over the thought that states might allocate their electoral votes according to the voting percentages within their state. Isn’t this pretty close to what Nebraska and Maine do now? Not identical, of course, but close in spirit.
It might be interesting to think about what states that really did represent group identities would look like.
W\Jack, we’ve already got something on that:
Robert Heinlein Double Star
The way he describes the parliament is pretty much exactly what you describe. Albeit with less whimsical categories.
I don’t understand how anyone is getting worked up over the thought that states might allocate their electoral votes according to the voting percentages within their state.
Part of it may be that they think it’s not likely to happen unless all the states are made to do it by the federal government.
that POV seems to have an underlying premise along the lines of people being born as Republicans or Democrats, as though it’s in their DNA
So it’s like blue eyes and brown eyes? At the risk of setting off a storm of outrage, I wonder which party is the recessive…. 😉
I really have to start getting up earlier, so the daily discussion doesn’t get so far before I start reading.
Robert Heinlein Double Star
Is that the one where a down-on-his-luck actor is recruited to impersonate a dying politician?
I don’t remember the politics in there.
More pessimistically, there was Kornbluth and Pohl’s Space Merchants, where you had the Senator from Dow Chemical and so forth. (I suppose that was Idiocracy too.)
Yeah. You had one representative for space crew (think teamsters), another for unmarried college women, etc., etc.; with one for Martians being added in the course of the story. I don’t recall if there was anything on how the groups were decided on. But the groupings were eclectic — i.e. not just companies or labor groups or ethnic groups.
“Oh, and I had a Four, but I think Russell got to it first: states don’t make any particular sense as checks on majoritarian tyranny.”
Actually, Jack, James Madison got to it first. Not only do states not make sense as checks on majoritarian tyranny, they make it more likely. From Federalist No. 10:
“The other point of difference is, the greater number of citizens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded in the former than in the latter. The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.”
Isn’t this pretty close to what Nebraska and Maine do now?
Yes.
Also, I wonder whether bob’s idea of groups aligned by common interest isn’t the same thing as corporatism.
Not Mussolini corporatism, just corporatism.
I don’t understand how anyone is getting worked up over the thought that states might allocate their electoral votes according to the voting percentages within their state. Isn’t this pretty close to what Nebraska and Maine do now? Not identical, of course, but close in spirit.
Maybe close in spirit, but apportioning via congressional district as ME and NE do now makes the process utterly subject to gerrymandering. Apportioning acc’ to overall statewide vote avoids that problem. I dont’ have time to look up #s but the results would be quite difference in some states via the two methods.
McManus!
Lewis Carroll:”James Madison got to it first. Not only do states not make sense as checks on majoritarian tyranny, they make it more likely. ”
Worst tyrannies in the modern USA: homeowner’s associations.
A city councilperson probably has in the back of their mind “I better not screw people if I ever want a higher office”. HOA members? That’s what they live for.
Janie: all you have to do is compare the R/D ratio of House seats to the R/D ratio of votes for House races.
all you have to do is compare the R/D ratio of House seats to the R/D ratio of votes for House races.
Feel free. I already said I don’t have time.
Not only do states not make sense as checks on majoritarian tyranny, they make it more likely.
I’m tempted to agree, but I also think it’s a glass half full/half empty thing.
I mean, from one perspective, the record of state autonomy on issues such as civil rights is terrible. Slavery, ladies and gentlemen.
On the other hand, even at the beginning, when federal neutrality was the negotiated compromise on that issue, the states had the right to differ, and there were states such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts which were officially abolitionist. Eventually — albeit with some difficulty! — they were able to spread that to the entire country, and the abolitionist side prevailed.
Or take SSM. Sure, many states would still ban it if legally able; but there were other states which lead the way instead, and that helped show it could be done. Ditto things like marijuana legalization, or public health care provision. It repeats over and over.
I don’t think Madison is wrong, so far as it goes. Certainly if you look at any one point and examine it’s containing political sphere as you expand it outward (from HOA board, to county, to state, to nation), the effects are probably exactly as he describes.
But at any one of those levels, there are lots of other points you could pick instead, where the local politics have led to a quite different result. The states really are sort of fifty petri dishes, where different experiments are being run.
But that still doesn’t make them super great institutions of minority protection per se. The fact that someone might be protected in Massachusetts is generally going to be small comfort to someone being abused in Alabama. Ultimately, there is still a need to make universal changes at the federal level, and any given state is as likely to be standing in the way of that as helping it.
That is a good point, Jack…the ‘laboratories of democracy’.
“If you are a friend to democracy, number three is obviously the best possible outcome, and the sooner the better. This is true even if you will personally mourn some of the changes in the platform. ”
If you are a friend of the tyranny of two states over the other 48 you like this outcome. It is just that simple. You take 48 states, have an election the Republican wins by varying majorities that are relatively small in a lot of states, the Democrats win by pretty small majorities in the others. Those people are involved in a decision making process.
Two states come along with radically different views and needs and vote 66% to 33% for the other candidate who then wins.
We can go around that circle a thousand times but there is nothing good about that outcome.
And, as for Madison, the whole excerpt assumes more than two parties, substantially more, making it completely irrelevant, as Madison mostly is.
If you are a friend of the tyranny of two states over the other 48 you like this outcome. It is just that simple.
Marty, this is silly. Sorry, but it is. States don’t do anything to other states, let alone tyrannize them. People do things to other people.
And that’s before you get to the point that states are far from homogeneous.
“States don’t do anything to other states, let alone tyrannize them. People do things to other people. ”
No, this is silly. Like I don’t think states are comprised of people.
I guess Marty would have more of a point if we were discussing national referendums on all sorts of policies (like, say, California getting to decide the speed limit in Wyoming) being run through the electoral college. As it stands, we’re only talking about electing the president, who doesn’t necessarily have the desire or the inclination to do the bidding of only California and New York.
Beyond that, it’s not as though there’s some state conspiracy to vote a certain way. If 66% of the people in 2 very large states vote the same way, but the rest of the country votes the other way by some small margin, it means a lot of fncking people (a majority!) voted for the same candidate.
What happens after that is we get the most voted-for president. Shocking! Tyranny!
making it completely irrelevant, as Madison mostly is.
OK then.
Let’s not forget the first part of the quote: And, as for Madison, the whole excerpt assumes more than two parties, substantially more…
Madison was talking about interests, not parties. We’re back to Republicans agreeing with each other on everything, and the same for Democrats. We’re also back to states being homogeneous blocks of people. That’s the only way this logic works. Majority-Republican states are 100% Republican and Republicans agree on everything. It’s bizarrely categorical.
If you are a friend of the tyranny of two states over the other 48 you like this outcome. It is just that simple.
You’re still dodging the question: What actually makes states the correct units of calculus?
Let’s take your hypothetical horror case. Two states – those devils NY and CA I’m assuming – have large populations which are heavily liberal. The remaining 48 states have, in total, much more population, but are each and every one divided almost evenly, with a whisker thin margin to the conservatives.
To make it easier on my brain, let’s put down numbers: say 48 states have 100 voters each, and the remaining two have 600 voters each, for a total national electorate of 6000. In each of the Small States, the vote is 51/49 (R). In the Big Two, the vote is 400/200 (D).
Thus, the electoral vote clearly would be won by (R) (it doesn’t even matter that much how skewed the elector apportionment is – a perfectly fair 1 elector per 100 population still gives it to (R), a fixed 2 senator bonus would just make it worse).
The popular vote is 3152 (D) to 2848 (R).
So the question is, is it just to appoint the federal executive based on this electoral outcome?
You and some others are trying to argue yes, it is. It protects the minority, you say.
But who is the minority?
Within the 48 Small States, the minority is (D). They must submit to government at the state level by (R). They must *also* accept representation in the federal Senate by (R), and possibly the federal House as well, depending on how cleverly the (R) state legislature has drawn the districts.
That’s 2300 people – 39% of the entire electorate – who have no one to represent their views at any of those levels of government.
The only remaining office they might be able to influence — their only source of protection if the (R)s should choose to persecute them at the state or federal level — would be the federal president.
The (D)s in the Big Two face a slightly different plight. Although they are able to govern within their states, their representatives in the federal legislature are heavily outnumbered. Again, their only hope for a check on unfair treatment by the federal government is a (D) in the executive.
Happily, the (D)s in the Small State and the (D)s in the Big Two happen to outnumber the (R)s by about 5%. A popular vote would provide a (D) executive who could provide a check on any excess by the heavy (R) dominance at the state and federal level.
But you say that’d be unfair to the (R)s, who might be tyrannized, by…somebody.
Jack, the D president would tyrannize them. Marty has, alas, been fairly clear and consistent over the years (and even has mentioned in this thread) that Obama’s tenure represented unacceptable levels of executive tyranny. So I’d assume the answer remains identical.
Although when he broached this topic upthread and pointed to executive veto as proof of the impotence of the legislature to withstand presidential tyranny, he did fail to mention that vetos can be overridden, albeit only if noticeably more than a bare minority think they should be.
But again, we’re circling back to the idea that tyranny is inevitable, so we need to pick the closer-to-our-interests tyrant…
[…]
Same, same, same. <sigh>
I’m happy that folks are discussing the future of the electoral college, because if we ever have a democracy again, we should change our current electoral system. But please save your work in a very safe vault.
“There is no mandate or even broad Republican support to accomplish the worst outcomes, we will not be installing a permanent fascist state because no one is actually for that”
All indications are that Republicans are either complicit, or in denial about this. Their president lies constantly, and expresses preferences, and Republicans believe him, and embrace those preferences, just like that.
Mitch McConnell refused to join a bipartisan condemnation of Putin’s hacking before the election. Of course, his wife has a job in Trump’s cabinet now.
People delude themselves. Everything is okay until it’s not.
History teaches us, but mostly we don’t listen.
Not to be alarmist or anything, but it’s time to be alarmed. A lot of very knowledgeable people are very worried. (Of course, knowledge is so 20th century.)
It’s like this.
Marty wants to be left alone. He doesn’t want the presence or interests of other people to cause changes in society that he doesn’t like. At least not where he lives. He doesn’t want them, doesn’t want to have to adapt to them, doesn’t think he should be required to adapt to them.
Like, you know, every single one of the rest of us are, and do.
Anything that might require that of him can only be seen as tyranny. Nothing else. It’s tyranny.
Do I have it wrong Marty? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you.
In any case, is there a point in even trying to have the discussion?
I’m sick of hearing about what a bunch of freaking bullies people like me are. Like all we think about all day long is how to bug people like him. And like “people like him” aren’t trying to impose their vision of the world on anybody else.
It’s become a god-damned tiresome waste of time from my point of view.
No, this is silly. Like I don’t think states are comprised of people.
Well, from your words that’s exactly how it looks. Maybe it’s blindness on my part (although I don’t seem to be the only one getting that read). Maybe it’s sloppy phrasing on your part. But that’s definitely the message that comes thru: states matter; the people who live there don’t.
Sorry, one of my links was to a questionable news site. I will link to another:
Mitch McConnell refused to join a bipartisan condemnation of Putin’s hacking before the election. Of course, his wife has a job in Trump’s cabinet now.
I’m sick of hearing about what a bunch of freaking bullies people like me are. Like all we think about all day long is how to bug people like him. And like “people like him” aren’t trying to impose their vision of the world on anybody else.
russell, and the thing is, you’re not asking that people sign up on a registry just in case their religion proves to be dangerous. You’re not trying to inflict your religious beliefs on somebody else’s medical decisions. You’re not trying to restrict voting rights. You’re not trying to work so that big corporations can ruin the environment. You’re not trying to prohibit people with pre-existing health conditions from getting insurance. You’re not trying to eradicate education.
There’s basically nothing that Democrats try to do that hurts people. There’s an argument about raising people’s taxes, but that money is an investment that saves lower and middle class people money every time. Unless Marty has a whole lot of money (which he complains that he doesn’t have enough), he’s good to go. I don’t get it. I will never get it.
And, again, Marty, how about Social Security and Medicare. Are you against those things? Because the Republican Congress is salivating to cut benefits day one. Is that really okay with you? I just turned 60, and it’s not okay with me.
Jack, the D president would tyrannize them. Marty has, alas, been fairly clear and consistent over the years (and even has mentioned in this thread) that Obama’s tenure represented unacceptable levels of executive tyranny. So I’d assume the answer remains identical.
Right, but that would be an absurd response.
It is possible to make a case, especially in retrospect, that a particular President has overstepped bounds, and that even if opposition majorities in Congress existed, they were ineffective at preventing it. I dunno about Obama, but it could happen.
However it is not possible to use the chance that that might happen once in a while to claim that, especially in the abstract, a minority party should therefore always hold the levers of power at literally ALL levels of government.
For one thing, there’s an equal ex ante possibility that it’s the minority party’s pick who will choose to abuse their power – and then their would be no one to even try to stop them.
As Bernard articulated very well up thread, there is a huge difference between protecting a party from abuse when they are out of power, and protecting a (minority!) party from ever having to relinquish the reins at all.
The latter is literally the definition of antidemocratic. Not to mention just plain… obtuse.
“Anything that might require that of him can only be seen as tyranny. Nothing else. It’s tyranny.
Do I have it wrong Marty? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you.”
Well, no. I am pretty specific here that I don’t think the rules of the way we have the country organized should change because the Democrats didn’t win. As mentioned above, I was less happy with Obama as President as time went on, but never did I say he should be impeached nor did I fail to recognize his legitimacy as President.
All the talk about changing the ec, and the ec should not elect Trump and whatever, is all about losing. Nothing, not a single thing has happened under a Trump Presidency yet and there is an impeachment movement.
Pretty much every discussion of the ec or the popular vote is a way to delegitimize someone who hasn’t even taken office. Turnabout being fair play.
IMO, this isn’t a discussion of adapting to changes in society, it is a discussion about how to make a pretty drastic change because someone named Trump got elected and if we could just count all those California votes he would not have been.
Someone upthread posits that there are people who would be for this altruistically even if it meant their person were more likely to lose. OK, anyone who is in that camp I apologize whole heartedly for saying the reasons were all self serving.
I will also say, again, that it is in my best interest currently for things not to change so that is one of the reasons, high on the list, I’m against it, I expect that I would be against it if the situation were reversed, I have more than once sided with the Democrats when I felt that they were on the states rights side.
…I have more than once sided with the Democrats when I felt that they were on the states rights side.
I’m glad you agree with states exercising their rights via the NPVIC.
“Well, no. I am pretty specific here that I don’t think the rules of the way we have the country organized should change because the Democrats didn’t win”
Actually Marty, your comments in this thread have gone quite far beyond the specific point that the rules should not change just because Trump won.
I’m not sure anyone here as asked for a do-over. other than maybe sapient, I don’t think anyone has asked for Trump to be denied the presidency.
it’s been a discussion about whether it makes sense to continue with a way of electing a POTUS that allows someone to win who has actually lost the popular vote.
your position has been that it’s actually the states and not the people who were intended to elect the president.
the point of the original post was to present an argument, from the words and practice of the folks who wrote the damned constitution, that that position was in error.
to which you have made no good reply other than the somewhat bizarre comment that Madison’s point of view was irrelevant.
mostly you’ve bitched about how people in CA are trying to impose their values on you.
so whatever. it’s a pointless waste of time pursuing it, because you’ll just try to weasel out of owning your own argument. just like you did just now.
im gonna go read a book, its more enjoyable. see you in the funny papers.
Someone upthread posits that there are people who would be for this altruistically even if it meant their person were more likely to lose. OK, anyone who is in that camp I apologize whole heartedly for saying the reasons were all self serving.
Thank you. It might have been better not to cast the aspersion at all.
I will also say, again, that it is in my best interest currently for things not to change so that is one of the reasons, high on the list, I’m against it,
As far as I can tell, that is the only reason. The others I think we’ve seen – that the EC is an important institution of minority protection, that there were solid, enduring reasons the founding fathers picked the EC, that the battleground state politics created by the EC is a good microcosm representing the issues of the country as a whole – simply don’t stand up to any scrutiny (there is plenty of elaboration already up thread).
If you’ve got any cogent non-partisan self interest related reasons, I’d love to hear them.
russell,
I have provided any number of arguments, I have tried to come at it different ways and I have used CA as the prime example, hell I don’t even live in TX. That’s not weaseling out of any stance I have taken, its formulating different ways to make a point. I did try to take a little of the personal out of it at the end, I certainly meant no insult in my opinion that the arguments for the change are partisan based. I think most of these political arguments are effected by partisan influence, including my own.
As far as Madison goes, he wasn’t the only founding father. He did stand for a side, in lots of the discussions, and there were other sides. So my reference to him was that I don’t normally agree with his side. And despite objections the quote from him certainly does reflect an expectation of more than two groups negotiating for power.
Next, jack, simply asserting the reasons that the arguments for the protections the EC provides don’t stand up to scrutiny doesn’t make it so. Elaboration upthread notwithstanding.
I remain unconvinced, for both partisan and nonpartisan reasons, that there is any justification to change the way we count Presidential votes. You have provided no compelling reason to consider the current way unacceptable. The single reason you have provided is that direct vote, or apportion by national direct vote count, is “more democratic” which by definition may be true but is not a better thing simply by definition, as you seem to keep asserting.
Pretty much every discussion of the ec or the popular vote is a way to delegitimize someone who hasn’t even taken office.
I don’t think delegitimatize is the right word. No one, certainly no one here, is claiming Trump didn’t win fair and square according to the rules as they are currently laid down.
I think you have to admit that losing the popular vote certainly gives a President somewhat less of a mandate so far as that goes, but that hasn’t really been what this thread is about.
This has been a discussion about the origins of the EC, and whether it might be time to change how the EC works. As far as I can tell, everyone here (yourself possibly excepted) is having that discussion primarily for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with purely partisan parochialism.
I think you really can’t see that. But try this: imagine that instead of Trump, Peter Skewes* had won the election.
And imagine he did so not because the votes cast were any different, but because of this one weird rule that notorious jokester James Madison slipped into the Constitution (in really tiny letters), reading: “if the first five Digits in the total Number of Votes cast be a Number such that the two adjacent Integers are a perfect Square and a Prime, than the Candidate with the LEAST votes shall be the President.”
That would be, you know, frigging weird. And it wouldn’t just be sour grapes for people to make the observation that, hey, that isn’t actually very democratic, maybe we should change that.
I would actually expect Peter Skewes himself to acknowledge that — however well it worked out for him — such an outcome is maybe not really the way it ought to work.
And, for a number of good reasons, that is exactly how many of us feel about the current working of the electoral college.
What’s more, so does Donald Trump, for more or less exactly the reasons I do:
(From a Sixty Minutes interview Nov. 13. See: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/president-elect-trump-reaffirms-his-long-standing-opposition-electoral-college-and-favors-nationwide)
—
* actual 2016 candidate
“As far as Madison goes, he wasn’t the only founding father”
He is generally considered to have authored the constitution. so, in terms of perspectives on what was intended by the language of the constitution, I find the idea that his is “irrelevant” to be well beyond bizarre.
“The single reason you have provided is that direct vote, or apportion by national direct vote count, is “more democratic” which by definition may be true but is not a better thing simply by definition, as you seem to keep asserting.”
if you can find a statement from me in this thread arguing for either of those things, I’ll give you five bucks.
I am in favor of allocating a state’s electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in that state.
for the record, as compelling arguments go I will put “more democratic” up against “people in CA are going to keep people in TX from owning guns” any day of the week.
for one thing, about 20% of Californians own guns.
I like facts. I don’t have a lot of patience for bullshit, there’s too much at stake.
bullshit is going to run this nation right into the ground.
“if you can find a statement from me in this thread arguing for either of those things, I’ll give you five bucks”
Both of those statements were addressed to jack.
“I am in favor of allocating a state’s electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote in that state.”
To put a point on this, I am in favor of that because the president is not the president of the states, but of the people.
“Both of those statements were addressed to jack.”
I appreciate the clarification, but I’ll still take “its more democratic” over “people in CA are gonna take our guns away” any day of the week.
And Russell, I tend to try to frame arguments in practical terms. “This is the practical outcome that I see as the up or downside of the discussed action”. It gets called lots of things, whining etc. But I don’t live in TX or own a gun or want to own a gun. It is simply a straightforward outcome that I would expect in the event that NPVIC or direct election were implemented that I find less good. In parlance, tyranny of the majority.
Oddly, you are the person on the thread I tend disagree with the least as I stated above that while it would probably not be great I would complain the least if the change was to proportional allocation by state wide results.
…while it would probably not be great I would complain the least if the change was to proportional allocation by state wide results.
But, in practical terms, a simple nationwide popular vote, the NPVIC, and proportional allocation at the state level are all the same. The only one that has any chance of a result that wouldn’t be the same as a national popular vote is proportional state-level allocation, but it’s so miniscule as to be meaningless.
Maybe I’m just talking you out being less bothered by proportional allocation, but there it is.
if we want to discuss practical outcomes, we should discuss ones that are remotely likely.
Yes, hsh, but a change much easier to undo than the others if people didn’t like the outcome. Politically at least.
You have provided no compelling reason to consider the current way unacceptable. The single reason you have provided is that direct vote, or apportion by national direct vote count, is “more democratic” which by definition may be true but is not a better thing simply by definition
That is, frankly, a laughable assertion. You should maybe reading comprehension betterer (sic).
Here are some of the reasons I have provided:
1. The winner take all EV system produces a small number of only very slowly changing “battleground” states which receive virtually all of the media and candidate attention in campaign after campaign, while voters in states with solid majorities one way or the other are mostly, to use your word, bypassed.
1b. A handful of residents in places like Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin effectively get to “tell people everywhere else how to live”, while the vote of someone in California or Alabama has almost no effect.
1c. In places like California, it is especially the votes of Republicans in California which are ignored. A large percentage of Democrats could disappear from the state with no effect on the outcome, but ALL of the Republicans could. The inverse goes for a place like Alabama. Decision by popular vote would count all constituents equally.
1d. It should go without saying, but there is no magic reason to believe that the issues or the voters in these battleground states are especially representative of the issues or voters in other states in any manner. Florida and Ohio are, after all, quite different places from Montana, Massachusetts or Mississippi, in all sorts of important ways.
2. The word ‘democratic’ isn’t just a meaningless buzzword. Representative democracy, with checks and balances under the rule of law, is the basic governing principle of our republic. The electorate votes on those who represent them; the candidate with the most support take office. This is the way all other federal elected offices work, and the way most or all state offices. It’s the way representative democracy *normally* works, and where we deviate from it we should have compelling reasons.
2b. The EC system produces results contrary to that democratic expectation. The Office of the President represents all Americans, but it seems to be relatively easy to get a President who is not favored by even a plurality of Americans.
2c. As in the example you provided this appears to be manifestly unfair to the majority, who could in, particularly pathological cases, be frozen out of every single branch and level of governmental power. This is perverse. Preventing a tyranny of the majority is one thing. Promoting a tyranny of the minority is quite another.
3. The historical reasons, such as they were, for the original adoption of the EC system, do not exist anymore. Some of them were, arguably, never particularly good in the first place.
3b. Some (key!) founders wanted a popular vote even at the time, and, in hindsight, those arguments have fared a lot better than the ones that prevailed.
3c. In the early years, EV allocation was quite different, with more proportional allocation, and/or allocation by district. Something like that was the stated intent of the founders, and resembles a direct vote or, natch, proportional allocation, more closely than the state-by-state blocks we ended up with. The system as it exists today is a stable equilibrium which resulted after attempts to game the system. There’s no reason to think it’s a good equilibrium.
3d. Contra assertions to the contrary, there is no clear mechanism whereby the EC seems to serve as any kind of check on majoritarian oppression.
4. There’s no good reason for you to oppose it on partisan lines. If it is true that demographic trends are turning the majority permanently against you, then the possibilities are either that your party adapts to the future, dies out, or breaks democracy further in order to remain in power. A popular vote would not change any of that either way, at most it could only speed the inevitable along slightly.
I think that’s most of them? There’s probably a few more I could come up with as well, but I haven’t made those yet.
Thanks jack, that is a very complete list of the ways you said “more democracy” while asserting EC was never good.
Our “democracy” was built on the basis of states specifically having the right to allocate their EC votes as they see fit. One of the key reasons used here to support NPVIC is equally applicable to the current system.
The battleground states have served very well to reflect the focus on economic issues across the country, more than once.
In fact, I can simply reverse each of these and assert it as confidently as you have, except one or two are reasonable points.
The most important, in my mind, is number 4. The permanent majority represents primarily four metropolitan areas. It is illogical to declare that it would be a good thing, or even democratic beyond the strictest definition, that all parties should adapt to representing the interests of those four metropolitan areas to win Presidential elections.
“The most important, in my mind, is number 4. The permanent majority represents primarily four metropolitan areas. It is illogical to declare that it would be a good thing, or even democratic beyond the strictest definition, that all parties should adapt to representing the interests of those four metropolitan areas to win Presidential elections.”
Then I guess those four metropolitan areas should stop sending their tax dollars to support rural areas, because “taxation without representation”.
not to be a jerk, but what 4 areas are you talking about?
Miami, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Madison?
BTW, how about allocating ECs based on the state residents tax contribution to the Federal government? (gross, not net, otherwise red-staters would NEVER get a say).
It’s sort of like how corporate votes are done, so it MUST be okay, amirite?
I’d guess the 4 areas are NYC, LA, Chicago and (Rick Perry brain fart).
Yeah, well, California called this morning to say New Jersey needs to cut down on the lunch meats. I think Marty’s on to something.
It is somewhat disingenuous to claim that historical and contingent circumstances as reasons that the EC is malfunctioning in principle. It wasn’t that long ago at all that the swing states and battleground states included Texas and California.
Under different demographic, ideological, and tribal conditions, the EC would work just fine.
The real problem is Bill Bishop’s Big Sort 2009 (essential reading) and the geographical polarization by ideology and lifestyle. I’ll just recommend the book, or material about it online (search), and note that the material conditions that make the EC dysfunctional will not be resolved by eliminating the EC, but are guaranteed to make matters worse.
Look, if you have most the Democrats in two states, or 5 cities in Texas, or Madison or Lawrence, comity and cooperation are not going to be legislated.
As Bishop proves, polarization and lack of communication and mutual hostility leading to radicalism, paralysis and eventual violence can only intensify under such conditions.
And Democrats will lose that long run war. The law or a majority will not save you.
Wait, who’s President?
I’m starting to re-think my assertion that proportional elector assignment would have a miniscule chance of a result in conflict with the national popular vote, particularly if you assume, as I would, that electors (currently actual humans) would still come in whole numbers. Smaller states would still have overrepresentation relative to population, and they would also have greater rounding errors because of lower resolution (or grosser quantization, if that works for you).
A state like Wyoming will almost be guaranteed to go 2-R, 1-D regardless of who’s running. Putting aside minor parties, all states with odd numbers of electors will give a full elector advantage to a winner by even the slimmest of popular-vote margins.
When you do consider minor parties, the question is whether the winner by plurality of electoral votes becomes president, rather than requiring the current 270 elector majority.
It’s mostly a matter of mental masturbation, but this, you know … a blog.
And Democrats will lose that long run war.
Actually I don’t think that war has any winners.
The reason I asked about the cities is that many places that are not traditionally liberal are becoming increasing urbanized.
“Big city” no longer means east or west coast.
Similarly, examples like “CA is going to make us give up our guns” are guaranteed to polarize a discussion unnecessarily.
We’re talking about the election of the President. The President can’t really take people’s guns away.
It’s not helpful when discussions about stuff like this are based on bad information and misconceptions. It leads to bad and harmful decisions.
“CA is going to make us give up our guns” is a look into the answer to YOUR question as to what might be lost in the complete takeover of the Presidency by the Democrats.
Once guaranteed the executive branch, every Dem Congress would provide the executive more wide ranging power to ensure against the potential GOP takeover of half or all of Congress. With that power and the power of always picking the Supreme Court Justices banning guns becomes simply a matter of how long it takes.
CA doing that is the way of pointing out that the Democrats would be able to move very far left because California is very far left, as is New York. Chicago is certainly pretty staunchly left.
BTW, for simply the recognition it deserves I included Boston that has smaller numbers but similar margins.
So, russell, the discussion is about the potential consequences. CA essentially picks the executive and the executive uses its power to push through the bills. Like, oh, the ACA. Its not like it hasn’t happened.
Or it might not. But don’t ask what Marty thinks might be lost if you really think nothing could be lost.
U.S. Total
Current Method Proportional National Total Proportional State Total
Hillary Clinton 65,817,699
48.07%
232 257 259
Donald Trump 62,957,197
45.99%
306 250 247
Gary Johnson 4,487,612
3.28%
18 18
Jill Stein 1,456,464
1.06%
6 6
Evan McMullin 713533
0.0052
3 3
Other 1,474,321
1.08%
4 6
Total 136,906,826
538 538 538
US
Once guaranteed the executive branch, every Dem Congress would provide the executive more wide ranging power to ensure against the potential GOP takeover of half or all of Congress. With that power and the power of always picking the Supreme Court Justices banning guns becomes simply a matter of how long it takes.
Okay, but… here’s the twenty-trillion-dollar question: why should we think this isn’t going to happen just the same in reverse if the Republicans can manage to lock down three branches no matter what demographic changes occur? And please don’t tell me they’re the party of states’ rights, because recent experience as well as Jefferson Davis would certainly beg to differ.
You’re advocating a system where a minority can consistently beat a majority. That’s minority rule. And if they’re able to do it consistently, they can potentially do it every time. How? Handwave, just like how your (monolithic) Democrats “lock down” the Presidency and Congress – the latter being the biggest handwave in the last post, especially since in a states-v.population debate, “states” have a stranglehold on the Senate… So. How are you not arguing for the abolishment of CA’s ability to forbid the sale of fully automatic machineguns without licensure or background check, if we’re talking about what will be lost? To say nothing of the various freedoms of association that comprise labor protections, the ability to hold ownership of public lands collectively, and various rights that will quietly go away in individual states, thus “correctly” restoring them as privileges of the well-heeled rather than rights of the rabble. And all that assumes that the Republicans (against form) restrain themselves and only engage in an anti-federal agenda…
do you know if the patterns of gun ownership have changed during the 8 years of the obama presidency/
or if the local regulations controlling gun ownership and use have changed?
if either has changed, in which direction? more guns in private hands, or fewer? more restrictions on ownership and use, or fewer?
note that Obama is, by your lights, the most tyrannical President in modern memory.
yes, I asked the question. I don’t think the example you gave is sensible in light of the facts on the ground.
you are correct, however. a (D) POTUS helped pass the ACA, such as it is. if that is what tyranny looks like to you, then I suppose you have reason to fear.
not for too much longer though. the (R)’s will tweak it and rebrand it, and our national tyranny will end.
Marty, what do those numbers mean?
OK, I figured it out.
So, under either a national proportional approach or a state proportional approach, no candidate would have an electoral majority, and it would have gone to the House.
Does that seem like a problem to you?
What Republicans think Democracy looks like.
It’s difficult to imagine that Democrats will ever hold office again after Trump, much less that the states will amend the Constitution to create a more equitable electoral college (or abolish it).
But don’t ask what Marty thinks might be lost if you really think nothing could be lost.
Someone is always losing something. The question is over who loses what and how we decide. I think you’ve admitted that this is a partisan issue, in that you want things the way you want them, and the system that best secures that outcome is the one you prefer. You’ve also more or less admitted that it doesn’t matter to what degree that system is democratic.
I might want a system that better secures my preferences and interests (which don’t include an outright ban on guns, if that makes you feel any better), but, in the case under discussion, democracy looks to be on my side.
I’m not really sure what else there is to it.
Aside from what the numbers mean, where did they come from? They don’t look unreasonable, but I’d like to delve deeper.
…and it would have gone to the House.
Assuming that didn’t also change along with proportional elector assignment. I could see where there might be some other minimum threshold established – a plurality of no less than 250 electoral votes or something like that.
hsh, I just got them from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016
scroll down a ways and you get to a table of the vote counts and electoral totals for each state. I just imported it to a spreadsheet and change the calculations totaled them up and cut and pasted the totals lines.
“You’ve also more or less admitted that it doesn’t matter to what degree that system is democratic.”
No, I just said that democracy as a form of government is not the one we have. So saying something is “more democratic” doesn’t sway me. We are a republic because the founders, who often disagreed, did agree it was the form that limited the tyranny of the majority.
So saying those protections aren’t built in or are outdated is simply not accurate.
CA doing that is the way of pointing out that the Democrats would be able to move very far left because California is very far left, as is New York.
I’m having a problem with this assertion. Yes, California is more liberal than the average for the country. But “very far left”?
Somehow I missed when California was among the first 4 states to legalize marijuana. New York was 8 years away from being the first state to legalize same sex marriage, and California was 2 years after that. (In fact, 5 years after Massachusetts legalized same sex marriage, California explicitly banned it. By popular vote, mind.)
I think the confusion may be due to the fact that the California GOP went very far right, leaving the Democrats with a lot of easy election wins. But it wasn’t that the population moved far left from the days when Reagan was easily elected and re-elected Governor. (And won the state when running for President, too.) In short, I think we’ve gotten a bad rap.
So saying something is “more democratic” doesn’t sway me.
So a system of government is either a pure democracy or it isn’t a democracy at all. Got it.
No, I just said that democracy as a form of government is not the one we have. So saying something is “more democratic” doesn’t sway me. We are a republic because the founders, who often disagreed, did agree it was the form that limited the tyranny of the majority.
It is very interesting, then, that Madison for one, uses phrases such as “Republican principle of numerical equality” in his arguments, and carries on as if everyone will understand that. Almost as if democratic and republican principles were synonymous.
Democracy and republicanism are not opposites. The latter is a form of the former, but the principles of democracy still apply. They are foundational.
So saying those protections aren’t built in or are outdated is simply not accurate.
In a general sense, you’d be right.
In the specific sense of the EC, you’re wrong.
The reasons for the founders selection of the EC system are on record.
One line of reasoning has to do with easing the logistical difficult of running a national campaign at the time. Voting was hard, so better to have far flung local citizens designate a trusted elector who could go meet the candidates, rather than the other way around.
That factor is literally outdated and irrelevant. Both because communication and transportation have made it possible for everyone to have the information they need to make a decision come to them, and because subsequent changes contract between electors and the electorate have made electors themselves essentially mute functionaries, rather than independent decision makers.
The other line of reasoning has to do with the fact that some states had a lot of people, but not as many votes. You know, because slaves (and non-landowners in many cases) couldn’t vote.
I don’t think anyone really thought that it would be unfair per se for states with more people to have more say in the election of the president, but a strictly popular vote would mean the eligible voters of, e.g., Pennsylvania could always outvote their far less numerous counterparts of Virginia, even if the overall populations were similar.
Thus, the Compromise. An EC where non-free residents would be counted toward the weight a state carried – people are important – but the votes would be cast on their behalf by free citizens.
It may have escaped your notice, but we don’t have slaves any longer. Not officially. Thus, outdated.
I could have sworn Arnold Schwarzeneggger, a Republican, was the governor of California until 2011.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Can I get my “g” back?
No refunds!
hsh, Arnold Schwarzenegger was initially elected because, along with the Gray Davis recall, there was a single round election for a successor. Whoever got a plurality won, which was Arnold — in part on simple name recognition. However, he got re-elected because he had been doing a decent job.
Note, however, that someone as moderate (sorry! but not very) as Arnold would have a terrible time winning a statewide GOP primary.
Note, however, that someone as moderate (sorry! but not very) as Arnold would have a terrible time winning a statewide GOP primary.
I’ll buy that, but it doesn’t change the fact that all those supposed commies in California voted him into office twice.
I don’t want to be too hard on Marty, but how many argument do you have to make that are in conflict with all the readily available evidence before you start questioning yourself?
But “very far left”?
As folks have pointed out many times, the (R) platform of 1956 would nowadays be considered left.
Probably very far left.
This isn’t the same country I grew up in. Lots of things have changed, for everyone.
I can understand the desire to not have your interests trampled by forces you cannot counter. I understand it because I live with it. It is my own experience.
I also agree that the founders were very suspicious of pure majority rule. Their reasons for that were valid, and IMO are still valid.
What distinguishes a republic from a democracy is that, in a republic, a certain set of rights are held as inviolable. Even if a majority of the people want to violate them.
Part of what guarantees that are the specifically un-democratic institutions that are baked in to our Constitution. The Senate and the EC among them. They act as a brake on rash public actions, or at least are intended to do so.
I’m not in a rush to abandon them.
All of that said, it is problematic that, for the second time in less than 20 years, we have a POTUS whom more people voted against than voted for.
As anomaly, it’s something we can probably work with.
As a pattern, not so much.
And given that the population is increasingly segregating itself by factors that appear to align with our two-party structure, it’s likely to happen with increasing, rather than decreasing, frequency.
In my opinion, there would be value in bringing the election of the POTUS more closely in alignment with the demonstrated preferences of the population.
Whatever threat that would present to one group or another will, IMO, be more than offset by the threat presented by the office being held by someone who more people *do not want* then otherwise.
We’ll see how it plays out. Best of luck to one and all.
Once guaranteed the executive branch, every Dem Congress would provide the executive more wide ranging power to ensure against the potential GOP takeover of half or all of Congress. With that power and the power of always picking the Supreme Court Justices banning guns becomes simply a matter of how long it takes.
Granted those assumptions, this is possibly true.
But it’s not on topic. The consequences you’re talking about don’t come about because of a shift popular vote. They come about because of a shift in the popularity of Republicans.
What you keep refusing to face is that, given such a huge, permanent, Democratic majority within the population, pinning the hopes for your salvation from the scenario on the Electoral College makes no sense. Zero.
Electoral/popular vote mismatches are rare, and they require fairly particular distributions of partisanship to happen (very lumpy some places, very smooth in a couple critical ones).
This “permanent majority” might be dammed up in the coastal cities for now, but sooner or later they’ll start to leak out. And the same demographic trends ostensibly creating it are also ticking along, if perhaps more slowly, in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Not to mention Florida. (And even Texas, Arizona, Georgia…)
It would have taken only a couple hundred thousand people sprinkled through the rustbelt this time to flip the electoral college outcome to match the popular vote. (Heck, they’re already there: if a few more Democrats had gotten out of bed in Detroit and Philadelphia and Milwaukee, there would have been no mismatch.)
The EC system isn’t very democratic, but it’s still kinda democratic. It simply isn’t built to give a genuine minority victories indefinitely in the face of overwhelming popular opposition.
“The EC system isn’t very democratic, but it’s still kinda democratic. It simply isn’t built to give a genuine minority victories indefinitely in the face of overwhelming popular opposition.”
Absolutely, but it has the effect of keeping focus on a broader set of states and issues. Even though I see people saying a popular vote would mean they would have to address a broader audience, I think the opposite would be true. Margin of victory in the population centers would pay bigger dividend that tryin to squeeze a few votes out of Iowa, where they would pick up some by default. It turned out two of the three states that “swung” the election weren’t really thought of as swing states until the last minute.
No one guarantees a minority rule, and if the demographics move the way they did for same sex marriage, the amount the ec can help is limited, but it may also delay the next unwelcome change, So there is that.
A few thoughts from an outsider…
The original constitution managed to avoid mentioning slaves and slavery; within twenty years of the revolution, ‘founding fathers’ were happily calling each other traitors as they contested their views of what the republic ought to be; Jefferson managed to be elected vice president while pretending not even to be interested in running, let alone campaigning (and subsequently went to war with his president, paying for libels to be published again him while forswearing all knowledge…).
I think we are maybe entitled to a fair degree of latitude in deciding what were the ‘intentions’ of the framers.
Is this a reasonable effort to defend against the “tyranny of the majority’ ?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/15/north_carolina_legislative_coup_an_attack_on_democracy.html
Oh, and I really like the extra g; Arnold should run with it.
it [the Electoral College system] has the effect of keeping focus on a broader set of states and issues.
I don’t see how you reach that conclusion. It certainly puts the focus on a different set of states. And arguably on a somewhat different set of issues. But “broader”? Not seeing that.
Swing states are noted for their broadness. Look how much farther you have to travel to cross Pennsylvania going from east to west than you do from north to south. And that Florida panhandle – YUGE!
Absolutely, but it has the effect of keeping focus on a broader set of states and issues. Even though I see people saying a popular vote would mean they would have to address a broader audience, I think the opposite would be true. Margin of victory in the population centers would pay bigger dividend that tryin to squeeze a few votes out of Iowa, where they would pick up some by default.
Yes, margin of victory in population centers will always pay a better dividend than trying to squeeze a few more votes out of more isolated places.
But it’s a question of scope.
In the EC system, the playing field is currently a dozen or so specific mid-size states, and the population centers to squeeze are Miami and Columbus and Philadelphia. (And Cincinatti and Cleveland Toledo and Akron and Scranton and Pittsburgh and Harrisburg and Tampa and Orlanda and Tallahassee and Jacksonville… Wait. Weird how it’s not just the top five that get any attention, isn’t it?)
In a popular vote system, all of those population centers would still get squeezed. Why wouldn’t they? There are densely packed votes there, and volunteers to do the door knocking.
It’s just that so would Los Angeles, and Boston, and St. Louis and Wichita and Helena…
It turned out two of the three states that “swung” the election weren’t really thought of as swing states until the last minute.
Which is doubly damning, if you ask me. All that you’re saying is that pundits and campaign staffers didn’t expect Wisconsin, for example, to really be in play, so it didn’t get designated in advance with a coveted “swing state” slot.
So even though it proved after the fact that it “deserved” that slot, in the meantime it didn’t get any attention at all from one party (or the media), and minimal from the other. (And that only because Trump’s gut happened to be right — but that’s a fluke. A different (R) candidate probably wouldn’t have bothered, and then maybe the pundits would have been right after all. This battleground business sure makes sense, amiright?)
So, what about handing each eligible voter a note at random with a number between 1 and 50. That will be his or her ‘state’ (and will be changed every election)?
Or if that would draw candidates only to high density population areas hand out notes with a state name in proportion to the actual population. So, a candidate from e.g. the real Arizona would not know where his virtual Arizonans are and has to campaign everywhere.
—
Yes, I am aware of the numerous flaws.
One point no one has yet brought up is the development of campaign costs (individual and in total), if the election was not state-wise. as it is now, nearly all of the money gets spend in a handful of locations. Now imagine a real 50 state campaign becoming necessary. I doubt that the current spending would simply be spread out (and thus thinned locally*). I’d expect it to rise even faster than now and the current totals are already beyond insane.
I’d be open to the suggestion though that this is a national security matter and thus the election campaign costs should be taken directly from the Pentagon 😉
*even with a general trend towards more populous states this would imo not simply get compensated by not spending in the marginal ones. the risk would be too high.
I don’t see how you reach that conclusion. It certainly puts the focus on a different set of states. And arguably on a somewhat different set of issues. But “broader”? Not seeing that.
I’m pretty sure Marty thinks there is some kind of invisible hand mechanism which makes the people and issues in battleground states magically perfect avatars for the people and issues in the rest of the country.
He hasn’t mentioned what this is, other than to say that it has meant that economic issues come up a lot. Which…I just can’t even.
The notion is absurd, of course. For example, here’s a map of statewide unemployment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_unemployment_rate#/media/File:Map_of_U.S._states_by_unemployment_rate.png
Does that look to you like battleground states are representative of the diversity of problems around the country? Me either.
There are a lot of maps like that.
If we’re going to pick a dozen states and let them pick the president, we should at least do it with some kind of lottery or something, and change the seats a little more often.
Which is doubly damning, if you ask me. All that you’re saying is that pundits and campaign staffers didn’t expect Wisconsin, for example, to really be in play, so it didn’t get designated in advance with a coveted “swing state” slot.
Right. And what about North Carolina and Ohio and Iowa, which appeared to be far more in play than they actually were, going more strongly for Trump despite the time Clinton spent there? So Clinton should have spent that time in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. (Not that she ignored all three, but still.)
What does that have to do with the point that candidates spend most of the time in the few states they think are up for grabs, rather than focusing on some particular set of interests (that are important to Marty)?
The main reasons Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are considered the ones that swung the election is because they were the most surprising and had such thin margins of victory. Which means what, exactly?
Margin of victory isn’t important in the close states The last 20k votes on Wisconsin aren’t worth what they used to be. The concept is to maximize the big states because the money is more efficiently spent there. Get a half million more with the same ad budget
You know, we could require candidates to apportion their campaign budget and face time equally across all Congressional districts, plus two bonus units in each state……
Except that big state media markets are much more expensive. So the cost per vote is likely to actually be lower in smaller states.
see? the market has smoothed out whatever advantages the big city folks have.
I doubt that the current spending would simply be spread out (and thus thinned locally*). I’d expect it to rise even faster than now and the current totals are already beyond insane.
This is a valid concern.
I tend to think it’s an orthogonal issue though:
One, as you say, it’s not as if campaign spending isn’t already beyond insane. Clearly something needs to be done about that. The only really sane solution is probably public financing, at which point there isn’t that much difference between budgeting, say, $700 million and $7 billion. What’s an order of magnitude between friends? (It could be that public financing would come with strings about, e.g., how many useless consultants could be hired too, and thus come out a bit more frugal.)
Two, status quo bias is a powerful thing, but, if we imagine we were starting from the POV of having a nationwide popular vote, but it had become too unwieldy to manage, there are almost certainly about 999 solution which we would before we got down the list to anything like the current EV system. I suspect all of them would be fairer, more representative, and more consistent on a whole suite of criteria.
Even the original system of sending (non-partisan and undecided!) electors up to make decisions on behalf of their districts would be better. Or, how about, say, picking 10 random points on the map and drawing circular districts around them, sized such that each end up containing a population equal to 1/50th of the total national population.
Or something else. There’s a whole branch of statistical science devoted to proper sample design.
Except that big state media markets are much more expensive. So the cost per vote is likely to actually be lower in smaller states.
This seems to depend on the specific geography. For example, apparently if you want to advertise to voters in NH you spend a lot of money on TV in the Boston area. At least, I saw a lot of NH ads.
NH has a population of 1.3 million. The five MA counties in the Boston MSA as defined by OMB have a combined population of 4.3 million. So in NH, at least, you waste an awful lot of money advertising to out-of-state voters.
One of the best ways to reduce campaign spending would be to shorten the duration.
The same spending intensity over 1/10 the time is 1/10 the money.
It’s really not clear that having campaigns that last the better part of a year is helpful. Or pleasant. For anyone. Many other countries manage to wrap up national elections much more quickly. Maybe over the course of little more than a couple of weeks.
But don’t most of those countries with short campaigns have fluid (if that is the right term) lengths of terms. That is, the parliament gets dissolved and new elections are called. But when that will happen is up in the air — maybe with a maximum of how long between elections, but nothing like a fixed far in advance date.
Without that kind of approach, how do you cut down the “campaign season”? And make the shortened length actually stick.
I mean, where is the line between “I am out giving speeches to promote my point of view” and “I’m out giving speeches to persuade people to vote for me in the next election”? Not to mention between “I’m out interacting with the folks who elected me” and “I’m campaigning for my next election.” Not obvious, at least to me, how you draw the lines there.
Well since the UK brought in the Fixed Term Parliament Act, it doesn’t seem to have much extended the campaign season… though we do quite strictly limit campaign spending at the constituency level.
Yeah, what makes it work elsewhere is that no one even knows that there will be an election until the date is announced two weeks out or whatever.
So I’m not sure either.
If we had more control over contributions and spending, we could simply tell campaigns that they are not allowed to spend (or receive) any contributions until X days from the election.
That would effectively limit the money spent, but not necessarily our collective annoyance and misery. As you say, there’s not much you can legally do to actually prevent people from just giving lots of speeches that just happen to mention what a great President they’ll make.
There are possibly tricks you could play with registration deadlines – don’t start accepting any registrations until a short time before the election.
Regulating the timing of party conventions and primaries would help a lot (i.e., moving all of that stuff way forward) but as those are technically quasi-private organizations, maybe not. Perhaps public funding could be a carrot to encourage them to do so voluntarily.
There also might be a few carrot/stick things around things like the reduced rates provided for political ads (that’s still a thing, right?). But that might already be limited to a few weeks before an election.
Anything else anybody can think of?
Tax PACs on their income (donations) at a sufficiently ruinous rate to make them no longer cost effective? Seems like the only effective way to restrain them.
Free up limits on what candidates can accept for donations BUT require them to be tattooed with the name/logo of the donor, in a size proportionate to the size of the donation. (with a threshold, so no tattoos for the ‘small donors’).
No painkillers for the tattoos, also, too.
Think of it like the logos on NASCAR cars. Same idea.
Now I expect that candidates will cover up more, to avoid showing how they’ve been bought, so ultimately they’ll be dressed like Darth Vader.
Truth in advertising, I call it.
Think of it like the logos on NASCAR cars. Same idea.
Brilliant. Gives a bit of a fundraising advantage to…wider candidates though.
Wider candidates can address broader concerns.
Over here all broadcast media are by law forced to provide a certain amount of FREE OF CHARGE airtime* to the political parties during election season. There is a mechanism to have a fair distribution between the establsihed parties and new or marginal ones (as far as possible), so every one is going to be noticed without the ability to swamp the market with fakes. In my experience the small ones tend to invest far more creativity into their spots and thus have a real chance to stick out**.
I believe that is large factor in keeping the costs low because it reduces the necessity to buy airtime at cutthroat rates and thus the leverage of the providers to charge the same.
That’s of course one reason why it will never catch on in the US.
*most of it right before news sections.
**people still remember well some ads of parties that never made it or went back into obscurity long ago.
“Wider candidates can address broader concerns.”
it worked for Taft!
As per Hartmut, in the UK too there are free “party political broadcasts” that each party is entitled to a number of. Not that our own democracy is perfect, of course, we currently suffer under the ridiculous FPTP system that currently allows the Tories to govern with an absolute majority in the Commons despite attaining only 36% of the popular vote. That too is an appalling scandal that, it seems, few have the appetite to fix.
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I confess to sympathizing with Marty to a small degree in this thread — I think that there probably *is* something to be said for the leader of a nation to have attained moderate popularity everywhere rather than extreme popularity in a few places and extreme unpopularity in others; it is this feature that the electoral college is supposed to deliver.
I of course find it astonishing that such a system would deliver a radical loudmouth like Trump over a status-quo candidate like Clinton.
What I would like Marty and McT especially to consider is this: imagine a world in which the Dems have won and annihilated the entire concept of states, and POTUS is now directly elected by a simple majority. You can knock yourself out and imagine it’s even run under some kind of runoff voting if you like.
Leaving aside the other political implications, of which clearly there would be many, you’re now asked to whole-cloth invent a new system for electing the president to ensure that the electee conforms to your notions of preventing the tyranny of the majority. What system would you choose? Would you really choose to subdivide the nation into arbitrarily-sized-and-located chunks with a misaligned number of electors-to-voters, and run multiple FPTP winner-takes-all-the-electors elections?
I confess to sympathizing with Marty to a small degree in this thread — I think that there probably *is* something to be said for the leader of a nation to have attained moderate popularity everywhere rather than extreme popularity in a few places and extreme unpopularity in others; it is this feature that the electoral college is supposed to deliver.
But it doesn’t, unless only the south and midwest count as regions. Isn’t the West Coast (50 million people) a region? Isn’t the Northeast (NE plus NY =33 million)?
This is just another version of the “real America” fallacy.
…moderate popularity everywhere rather than extreme popularity in a few places and extreme unpopularity in others; it is this feature that the electoral college is supposed to deliver.
Supposed by many. But not actually designed or intended to do that, historically speaking. So it’s not too surprising that it doesn’t deliver very well.
Says it all, really:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/12/18/majority_of_republicans_mistakenly_think_trump_won_the_popular_vote.html