Following up on the Pennsylvania GOP’s move to award electoral votes by Congressional district, here’s some commentary:
* Stephen L. Taylor offers three reasons for abolishing the electoral college.
* ED Kain explains how this could happen in other “trifecta” states.
* Nate Silver has a extremely thorough analysis of why this might not be the best idea for Republicans. Overall, though, he thinks the Electoral College benefits Republicans.
I live in a blue state and will be re-districted into a blue district, so a lot of the activists in this area end up being bused to swing states like Ohio or Pennsylvania to do GOTV there. Like a lot of other voters in this area, I’m well aware that my vote for President doesn’t “count” in the same way swing state votes do. I think that’s anti-democratic, and abolishing the Electoral College would increase voter engagement by keeping those activists home and also making voters feel like they’re more engaged in the process.
Update: Something really funky happened to WP and it ate half this post and turned off comments. I think we’re back now.
arguingwithsignposts
You call her out almost every day.
mistermix
@arguingwithsignposts: I like pie.
SiubhanDuinne
@arguingwithsignposts:
@mistermix:
LOL you two. Great dialogue to start the day.
kenfair
I live in a “red state” and the same is true for us. Presidential candidates only come here to raise money and draft volunteers to work in other states. Our concerns aren’t addressed either.
The National Popular Vote Compact solves this problem by awarding the electoral college votes to the person who receives the most popular votes nationwide. The great part about the compact is it does not require a Constitutional amendment and can be enacted on a state-by-state basis. It only takes effect once states with 270 electoral votes have signed the compact.
Maude
@arguingwithsignposts:
That was my first thought. It will be a busy thread.
Davis X. Machina
Some day they’ll take that traitor to his class FDR off the dime, and replace it with their real hero — Al Davis. And out will go that redistributionist E Pluribus Unum — feh! As if there were a ‘Unum‘ in the first place. — and put “Just Win, Baby” in its place.
kd bart
Right now, I could go for some pie. Blueberry would be nice.
schlemizel - was Alwhite
@Maude:
Maybe we could get ABL to post about Moore in the thread and then drag President Obama’s performance into it – THAT would be the trifecta!
Jason Stokes
How goddamn obtuse can Nate Silver be?
This is not actually an issue with the electoral college. It’s an issue with statewide winner-take-all apportionment of the electoral college. Yes, statewide winner take all apportionment benefits republicans. However, what benefits republicans even more is if blue states have congressional district apportionment, and the red states have statewide apportionment. If you make enough blue states with apportionment diluted between republicans and democrats, and keep the red states as monolithic voting blocks, no democratic candidate can ever get elected again, even if they win the overwhelming majority of the electorate, which is precisely what the Republicans have been trying to achieve for the past 25 years.
It’s another blow in the Singaporeanization of American politics: nominally democratic, in practice, rigged to make it impossible for the opposition to win.
The only way to make it fair would be a coordinated, mandatory, country-wide switch to congressional district apportionment… which would require in practice a constitutional amendment. The kind that the constitution was designed to make virtually impossible.
The GOP knows what it’s doing. The only way it could backfire is if Democrat-controlled legislatures in red-states retaliate.. and the GOP has rigged the game enough in those states that it doesn’t have to worry about it. Democrats should recognise this as a profound threat, and another reason why the national popular vote initiative has to be put on the fast track.
danimal
National Popular Vote. Halfway there now. Seriously, it’s the best, most feasible way to stop the shenanigans.
@arguingwithsignposts: lol. Summoning the ghosts.
Warren Terra
Electoral College Is Over If We Want It.
In other words, if you live in one of 41 states that doesn’t already have it, tell your representatives to pass the National Popular Vote. If enough states pass it, the electoral college becomes moot.
daveNYC
@Jason Stokes:
Exactly this, and I mean exactly this. A piecemeal modification of the electoral college on a state by state basis has a much greater chance of making things totally fucked.
Davis X. Machina
You’ve reached a point where the mere prospect of normal rotation in office is interpreted by one of the major parties an existential threat to the Republic.
In other words, it’s 1860 again. “We had to destroy the country — the other guys were going to destroy it the wrong way.“
Samara Morgan
The electoral college benefits Distributed Jesusland™.
That is, the red part of this 2008 map minus the cities.
American cities are all becoming Obamaland.
the demographic singualrity is coming.
this is actually what the founders and framers intended– the system is WAI.
it will be interesting to redraw the Jesusland map for the 2012 elections.
Samara Morgan
@Davis X. Machina: it is an existential threat to the white christian nativist republic.
Perhaps we have two americas now.
Samara Morgan
@Jason Stokes: no, the framers and founders built the system to be shock resistant. Change is buffered, and can only happen gradually.
The change that is happening is democratic. Immigrants and the children of immigrants, slaves and the children of slaves are colonizing the electorates of western democracies.
And this change is global.
I like to call it the demographic singularity.
:)
KCinDC
@Jason Stokes, congressional district apportionment is not a solution. That just shifts it from most states being ignored and all attention being focused on a few swing states to most congressional districts being ignored and all attention being focused on a few swing districts. And with the gerrymandering, you’d end up with a candidate winning a state’s popular vote but getting a minority of the electoral votes (and that would happen more often for Democrats because their voters are concentrated in urban areas).
Assigning the electoral votes proportionately would be better, but even with that you have the possibility that the national popular vote winner would lose. National Popular Vote is really the way to go.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@mistermix: You must really like pie. Have you considered getting some counseling for this?
Samara Morgan
it does right now….
Samara Morgan
and it wont happen in Colorado.
Colorado turned the red wave into beach break in 2010.
But im not clicking over to Forbes to help Erik “Beyond Unions” Kain save his gig.
:)
Juicers are just amazingly thick. First frag the unions, now a big push is coming for small business deregulation.
If the GOPteabaggers can redistrict, and reduce the american worker status to that of a chinese or indian worker, then they can hold off the demographic timer for a few more years.
Suffern ACE
@Jason Stokes: Yes. I am all for this change. Let’s see how it goes in Texas and Georgia first, though.
Samara Morgan
@KCinDC:
did you mean mob rule?
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: whee!
Samara Morgan
you see, it is a basic principle of free market theory that jobs follow the cheapest labor source. Jobs would come back if american workers became competitive in the global market, and deregulated capitalism aka Erik Kain’s “freed” market would be vindicated, profits would rise….
KCinDC
@Samara Morgan, I think ballot initiatives are generally a bad idea, and I might use the word “mob rule” for that. Democratic election of public officials, where the person who gets the most votes wins, is the way it works in other democracies and at other levels in the United States, and we don’t generally call it mob rule.
Even if I agreed that the people are sometimes stupid and choose the wrong candidate, I don’t see how the electoral college improves the situation. It just sticks in an arbitrary disruption to the system that sometimes causes the person who’s supported by fewer people to win the election. There’s nothing about that that weights it in favor of the “better” candidate in any sense.
Samara Morgan
@KCinDC: the electoral college is a damper for extremist popular vote swings. the founders and framers thought a lot about demagogues.
there is nothing in the constitution about being able to read/write, having an education or an IQ over room temperature as qualification for voting.
stupid people have a right to vote too.
KCinDC
@Samara Morgan, the electoral college as envisioned by the founders might be such a damper, because the electors would be able to vote their conscience against the will of the people. But that’s not how the electoral college works now. Giving extra weight to Wyoming and North Dakota does nothing to suppress extremism, and neither does intense focus on Florida and Ohio in campaigning.
Samara Morgan
@KCinDC:
sure it does. it allows for the representation of the stupid and the ignorant.
you are not looking at correctly. the EC allows stupid, rural, and uneducated people (mostly white (NHC) christians) to form a self-representing constituency. Jefferson’s Noble Yeomen Farmers.
Where the system is temporarily broken is the fourth estate. The free market and the internet/social media have broken the dissemination of TRUE information.
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan:
keep fucking that chicken, dead girl.
Samara Morgan
@KCinDC: the demographic timer is going to correct the disequilibrium eventually.
either the party of white rural christians will integrate non-white urban non-christians, or it will go the way of the Whigs and another (more demographically integrated) conservative party will rise to take its place.
But the founders and framers damped the system against dramatic swings.
The system is WAI.
:)
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts: i dont know that this a bad thing. its just that the fourth estate enables demagoguery now instead of preventing it.
/shrug
its evo theory of culture in action.
Cris (without an H)
The argument against the Electoral College (and by extension, against the Senate) is ultimately about whether you believe the State is a legitimate political entity. Every person I see advocating for ending the EC complains that “small population states are overrepresented.” Well, yes. That’s what the Great Compromise was all about.
I won’t go so far as to say that States are people, but it is reasonable to speak of regional interests. If you move to completely proportional representation, high-population areas are now overrepresented. So the political interests of dense areas get precedence over those of sparse areas. The president is elected by LA and NY, not so much by Omaha. This is a core resentment of rural people: that “city folk” are imposing city values on the countryside.
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: You don’t know much media history, do you?
Sentient Puddle
@Samara Morgan:
Funny you should assert that…the aforementioned Stephen Taylor wrote another post on this showing that the electoral college has never functioned as the founders intended:
That only happened twice, in 1800 (when they realized the system was so fucked up that they had to patch it with the 12th amendment) and in 1824 (an election that makes 2000 look like a petty squabble).
No, it’s pretty clear that when you look at the history of it, the electoral college was one of the founders’ biggest fuck-ups.
KCinDC
@Cris (without an H), sparse areas are overrepresented in the electoral college if the arbitrary dividing lines happen to have been drawn in such a way that they have a state to themselves. Sparsely populated parts of New York State, for example, don’t have the sort of weight that sparsely populated parts of low-population stats in the West have.
Samara Morgan
@Cris (without an H):
and my hypothesis is that the GOP can never carry another another presidential election, because of the majority/minority cities and the falling power of the countryside aka Distributed Jesusland.
@Sentient Puddle: electoral college has never functioned as the founders intended…on the issue of candidate selection.
fixt!
it functions pretty much as they intended in other areas, a degree of self-representation for the Noble Yeoman Farmer, and a buffer against wild swings in the popular vote.
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts: /shrug
competition usta keep the media truthful to sell product…..now it forces them to lie and/or promote liars to sell product.
not so hard to understand.
Sentient Puddle
@Samara Morgan:
There’s basically nothing to suggest that this was the case at all, what with how much respect the founders afforded non-landowners. To wit…
Back in those days, there was no such thing as a popular vote.
KCinDC
@Samara Morgan, how exactly does the electoral college buffer wild swings? If anything, it could sometimes amplify them. There’s no buffering, just a little added unpredictability.
Citizen Alan
And this takes me back to the specific reason I have for being pissed off at Obama. When he took office in 2009, the GOP was at its lowest point since the Great Depression. If Obama had been a pragmatic liberal politician instead of a bipartisanship fetishist, he could have finished the GOP off for a generation or more and sent them into the wilderness like FDR. Instead, he spent so much time “reaching across the aisle” and endlessly adopting right-wing frames that the GOP is not only resurgent, they are closer than ever to achieving Grover Norquist’s dream of a permanent Republican majority! I just can’t wait to come here in 2015 to hear people wax poetically about all those great bills that Obama signed into law that were repealed six months after President Perry’s inauguration, mixed in with a few plaintive worries about whether any of us would live long enough to see another Democrat be elected president.
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: /shrug
This is where you reveal that you don’t know shit about media prior to 1920s or so.
Look, here’s a clue: don’t talk about shit you know nothing about.
Samara Morgan
@KCinDC: the EC makes change slow.
the system is set up for conservative change.
It tends to keep structures in place.
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts: pardon, i thought the discussion was the effect of the electoral college in contemporary america.
please, do give us an irrelevent lecture on 1920s media.
Samara Morgan
@Citizen Alan: the country is still roughly half bubba.
there was zero chance of Obama fulfilling your fantasies.
Samara Morgan
@Sentient Puddle: they built for the future, as much as they could.
Have you read the Federalist Papers?
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: when you bring “the fourth estate” into the discussion, it is very relevant, cudlip. do study your history before you make asinine comments about the “fourth estate.” and the founders.
Samara Morgan
@Cris (without an H): This is a core resentment of rural people: that “city folk” are imposing city values on the countryside.
this is the synopsis of the problem. Also that educated urban elites are telling the rubes what to do.
The problem that the Founders tried to deal with is how to get self-representation for the Noble Yeoman Farmers that wasn’t uneducated and less intelligent.
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts:
Fourth estate: (n)
meaning:
1. the public press (newspapers)
2. the mass media (newspapers, TV, radio, and magazines)
origin:
This phrase was originally used as a synonym for newspapers. But with the advent of radio, television, news magazines, etc., its meaning has been broadened to include all of what is known as the mass media.
Its coinage, with its present meaning, has been attributed to Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), a British politician. It comes from a quote in Thomas Carlyle’s book, “Heros and Hero Worship in History” (1841).
“Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all.”
The three estates in the above quote refer to the British parliament, the Lords Temporal, the Lords Spiritual and the Commons. The Lords Temporal and the Lords Spiritual combined being The House of Lords, the upper House of parliament. And the Commons is The House of Commons or the British lower House.
cudlips chew free market cud, among other things.
im an anticapitalist.
:)
Sentient Puddle
@Samara Morgan: Evidently, more than you have.
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: now go study how that estate existed before. idiot.
Samara Morgan
@Sentient Puddle: relly? it isnt at all apparent.
:)
@arguingwithsignposts: that is much better.
again, cudlips chew free market cud and american exceptionalism cud.
those things make me puke lately.
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: soak in it, cudlip. i’m gonna kill ur threadz!
daveNYC
@Samara Morgan:
Yeah, because Yellow Journalism actually refers to the color that old paper turns. Have you never heard of the Spanish-American war? Or how awesomely truthful the media was due to the competition between Hearst and Pulitzer?
I almost liked it better when you were just making up random shit about Turkey.
Davis X. Machina
Is there an LD50 dose for pie? And if so, what is it?
I’m starting to feel not-good.
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts: wallah…this isnt my thread.
it was mistermix’s thread to pimp some pageclicks for poor EDK whos gonna get sacked from forbes.
and to eeyore us about the election.
from ABL’s post.
im not a cudlip. cudlips chew free market cud, among other things.
im an anticapitalist.
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: keep shitting on that thread, little dead girl. cudlip.
Samara Morgan
@daveNYC: did you just ask about Turkey?
do you think they are going to war with Israel?
when is the UN vote on Pali statehood?…..oh yeah, the 20th.
four days.
:)
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: when are you joining your sisters in the arab spring?
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts: im confused.
i thought that was your job.
hahaha
i think out of all the “appalling” things i have said here, like death to crusaders/missionaries, quoting Salam-Douthat stratification on IQ, conservative backfire effect and red/blue genetics, Distributed Jesusland, christofascists and israeli-nazis, Big White Christian Bwana,…..cudlips is the one epithet that bothers the juicitariat most.
because its true?
arguingwithsignposts
@Samara Morgan: not gonna do it, little dead girl
Samara Morgan
@arguingwithsignposts: you think the American version of the Arab Spring isnt already lapping at Fortress America’s crumbling moats?
Wikileaks and Anonymous and #Anonops and #Antisec are the first wave.
danimal
@Samara Morgan: Thanks for reminding me. I clicked onto the Forbes link. Again.
Toodles.
Citizen Alan
@danimal:
I’m baffled by this. Are you saying you clicked on a link — twice — that you otherwise would not have clicked on with the goal of marginally increasing the click totals for E.D. Kain for the sole purpose of annoying an anonymous poster at a completely different website? What exactly are you doing with your life that you consider this to be a productive use of your time?
Samara Morgan
@danimal: it wont save him.
Erik will, in the end, be a victim of the “freed” market he worships.
:)
Nathanael
Of course we should abolish the electoral college. But the “congressional district” nonsense doesn’t help one bit.
The National Popular Vote compact would work, but seems to be making no headway. EDIT: I stand corrected. I’m glad it’s making some headway!