Kevin Drum is enthused that California has joined the National Popular Vote movement, and my question is: why?
I’m not asking “why does he support the National Popular Vote.” I agree with him that a national popular vote, assigning each state’s electors by percentage of votes to each party, is a much better and fairer way to assign electors to the Electoral College than the current winner-in-each-state-takes-all system, since it’s both more reflective of the populace’s desires and it also means that Presidential candidates can’t skip campaigning in their “solid” states. It ends the swing-state phenomenon. This is good.
But the NPV movement is going about it in a stupid way: they’ve decided to round of 270 electoral votes’ worth of states and, when they hit that number, they agree to all commit to popular-vote elector assignment. This sounds nice in theory, but right now, at about the halfway mark (132 electoral votes), they’ve signed up California, Vermont, Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington and the District of Columbia.
What do all of these states (well, and D.C.) have in common? Not a one of them has gone to the Republicans since 1988. These are blue states, every one. And the problem with NPV is that if only liberal states are going to jump on the bandwagon, you’re basically saying that the only candidates electable to national office will be Republicans – since Republicans will get all of the electoral votes from their “safe” states in the Deep South and the plains, and then snag all the additional votes in blue states that they weren’t previously getting.
This is a recipe for electoral disaster for liberals in America – and liberals in America didn’t exactly have it easy to begin with. I understand and agree that, generally speaking, the national popular vote is a movement favoring good governance – but if only one side cares about it, the other side can take exceptional advantage of it.
EDIT: So apparently the National Popular Vote isn’t a proportional allotment of electors, making this entire post pointless! Just pretend it is about unicorns or something instead. You like unicorns, right?
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Isn’t the significance of “270” that at that point, they’ll be a big enough bloc to swing the electoral vote no matter what?
Assume all states are either red or blue, and all-and-only blue states sign on to NPV, and that NPV states have exactly 270 votes.
In Dem-wins-popular-vote years, the Democratic candidate will have 270 electoral votes, plus whatever votes they squeeze out of red states. The Dems win.
In GOP-wins-popular-vote years, the Republican will have 270 votes, plus a huge number from all those red states. The GOP wins.
So yeah, once they pull the trigger, Republicans who win (by winning the popular vote) will have higher margins in the electoral college than they did before. Maybe that’s bad for the optics, if people don’t understand it. But it’s not actually giving away any advantage in the electoral college.
I think you’re misunderstanding how the NPV works. The idea is that there is a coalition of states that add up to enough EC votes to guarantee a win. Once enough states sign up for that, all of them will go for whichever candidate has more votes nationally. The percentage of votes in the individual states doesn’t matter.
So it’s not really an attempt to give away votes, it’s more an attempt to normalize what is already an unbalanced system.
The reason that California is getting on is because votes in California are less valuable than votes in, say, Wyoming. The NPV is seen as an answer by doing an end-around. The states that are more likely to favor it are ones that have a high ratio of voters to EC votes. The ones that don’t are going to have a low ratio.
States with a high ratio, like California, tend to go blue. States with a low ratio, like Wyoming, tend to go red. In most cases, the states are going to join or not join in their own best interests.
The protection of the NPV idea is that until there’s a grouping of states that can guarantee the win, no state is beholden to it.
The problem with the NPV, now, is that the number of EC votes required to get to 270 is pretty long, now. Since a lot of the high-EC power states have low populations, they aren’t likely to get much support there, that leaves high-population states. The remaining big ones would be, I think, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Of those, only NY is blue, and thus might favor changing a broken system. Texas is, unfortunately, pretty red, so even if their votes are devalued, they tend to align with states that help them. Ohio, Flordia, and Penn are all pretty swingy. That makes them even less likely to go for it, since being a swing state gives them a lot of perceived power.
I don’t wanna sound like a queer or somethin’, but I think unicorns KICK ASS!
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). The recent Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University poll shows 72% support for direct nationwide election of the President. Support is strong in virtually every state, partisan, and demographic group surveyed iin recent polls in closely divided battleground states: CO– 68%, IA –75%, MI– 73%, MO– 70%, NH– 69%, NV– 72%, NM– 76%, NC– 74%, OH– 70%, PA — 78%, VA — 74%, and WI — 71%; in smaller states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE –75%, ME — 77%, NE — 74%, NH –69%, NV — 72%, NM — 76%, RI — 74%, and VT — 75%; in Southern and border states: AR –80%, KY — 80%, MS –77%, MO — 70%, NC — 74%, and VA — 74%; and in other states polled: CA — 70%, CT — 74% , MA — 73%, MN – 75%, NY — 79%, WA — 77%, and WV- 81%.
The National Popular Vote bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers, in 21 small, medium-small, medium, and large states, including one house in AR (6), CT (7), DE (3), DC (3), ME (4), MI (17), NV (5), NM (5), NY (31), NC (15), and OR (7), and both houses in CA (55), CO (9), HI (4), IL (21), NJ (15), MD (10), MA(12), RI (4), VT (3), and WA (11). The bill has been enacted by DC, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, California, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington. These nine jurisdictions possess 132 electoral votes — 49% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.
See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com
Now with state-by-state winner-take-all laws presidential elections ignore 12 of the 13 lowest population states (3-4 electoral votes), that are almost invariably non-competitive, and ignored, in presidential elections. Six regularly vote Republican (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota), and six regularly vote Democratic (Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, and DC) in presidential elections.
Support for a national popular vote is strong in every smallest state surveyed in recent polls among Republican voters, Democratic voters, and independent voters, as well as every demographic group. Support in smaller states (3 to 5 electoral votes): Alaska — 70%, DC — 76%, Delaware –75%, Idaho – 77%, Maine — 77%, Montana – 72%, Nebraska — 74%, New Hampshire –69%, Nevada — 72%, New Mexico — 76%, Oklahoma – 81%, Rhode Island — 74%, South Dakota – 71%, Utah – 70%, Vermont — 75%, and West Virginia – 81%, and Wyoming – 69%.
Nine state legislative chambers in the lowest population states have passed the National Popular Vote bill. It has been enacted by the District of Columbia, Hawaii, and Vermont.
Any state that enacts the proportional approach on its own would reduce its own influence. This was the most telling argument that caused Colorado voters to agree with Republican Governor Owens and to reject this proposal in November 2004 by a two-to-one margin.
If the proportional approach were implemented by a state, on its own,, it would have to allocate its electoral votes in whole numbers. If a current battleground state were to change its winner-take-all statute to a proportional method for awarding electoral votes, presidential candidates would pay less attention to that state because only one electoral vote would probably be at stake in the state.
If the whole-number proportional approach had been in use throughout the country in the nation’s closest recent presidential election (2000), it would not have awarded the most electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most popular votes nationwide. Instead, the result would have been a tie of 269–269 in the electoral vote, even though Al Gore led by 537,179 popular votes across the nation. The presidential election would have been thrown into Congress to decide and resulted in the election of the second-place candidate in terms of the national popular vote.
A system in which electoral votes are divided proportionally by state would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote and would not make every vote equal.
It would penalize states, such as Montana, that have only one U.S. Representative even though it has almost three times more population than other small states with one congressman. It would penalize fast-growing states that do not receive any increase in their number of electoral votes until after the next federal census. It would penalize states with high voter turnout (e.g., Utah, Oregon).
Moreover, the fractional proportional allocation approach does not assure election of the winner of the nationwide popular vote. In 2000, for example, it would have resulted in the election of the second-place candidate.
A national popular vote is the way to make every person’s vote equal and guarantee that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states becomes President.
For the most part unicorns vote Democrat, I’m not saying that unicorns can’t vote Republican, I’m just saying that, historically, the Unicorn Vote has gone to the candidate with the largest singular horn sticking up out of their forehead and that that candidate has, historically, been Democrat (after the policy swing and, of course, factoring out the short lived “Unicorn Party Party”)
Especially vexing is that the Republicans actively HATE the Unicorn Vote, excluding unicorn groups from major activities and actively fighting against unicorn rights so why ANY unicorn would remain a Republican is a fairly common question.
I think it’s shameful how the national lame-stream media has ignored Tim Pawlenty’s scandalous anti-unicorn policies as governor. Shameful.
And the thing from Michele Bachmann about only snorting powdered unicorn horn once while in college? And she didn’t inhale? Complete BS! She’s such a hypocrite!
Do alicorns count? Because I gotta tell you, I’m waiting to see who Princess Celestia endorses in 2012.
@Eric – I think you’ll find that unicorns raised in the traditional ‘magic-dust-and-rainbows’ enchanted forests tend to have a dim view of expansive government.
To their mind, the forest provides all the things they need with a little bit of effort on their part, so why do they need a government to enforce any kind of ‘virgins for all’ policy? It would just create a sense of entitlement among gryphons (who barely even live in the forests, but will immediately campaign for the same kind of rights) and give unprecidented power to the Virgin Union.
UnSub, I think you’re confusing ‘need’ with ‘want.’ I mean, sure, they have everything the need to survive in the forest, but what about luxuries? The Federation of Fickle Faeries is still imposing tariffs on any exports and that’s their only continental neighbor. Last time I looked most Uni’s spent most of their coin on silly accessories like hairbands and jewelry anyway, and if campaigning for bigger government could essentially get them more for cheaper (through subsidization), I think they’ll go for it hoof and horn.
@Murc: Which party does Pinkie Pie endorse?
(Also, we’re neglecting the Earth Ponies, Pegasuses, & Seaponies? Shaaaaaame on everypony.)