I believe the result would actually be the opposite: right now, in winner-take-all elector races, California (and Texas, and Ohio) are big enough that if you have any shot at all of winning them, you damn well better work to win them. If you have very little chance of winning them, then it isn’t a good place to sink campaign dollars, but boy does it hurt to lose them. The state as an entity is very meaningful, even if it has a bias.
If the representation was proportional, on the other hand, and you already know you’re going to get 40% of the California votes based on nothing but party affiliation, then you have very little incentive to campaign in California as opposed to all the states of New England. You have an incentive to campaign in whatever large cities you have the best shot of winning, and you have to do the calculus for each candidate and election to determine which cities those may be. But there’s no guarantee that Californian cities will be as meaningful under this system as California as a whole was.
All you can say is that while, say, Californian Republicans used to be unrepresented because the Democrats had the state locked up, under the new system they’re still unrepresented as Californian Republicans, but somewhat represented as generic Republicans (provided their specific concerns as Californians are irrelevant). And that would be true of every state in the union. States would not be meaningful entities in the election except as containers for cities.
If the Presidency was determined by popular vote then a candidate might seek to build a broad coalition of supporters that included millions of rural voters from California and other predominantly urban states. In doing so they’d seek to understand what policies those voters cared about even if they didn’t visit them in person.
Under the current system there’s no motive for any Presidential candidate to give a hoot what those voters want even though the number of rural voters in California is almost ten times the entire population of Wyoming.
Isn’t that basically what Trump – who as a candidate was comparable to a blind AI trained to repeat whatever randomly-generated outlandish lie resulted in the most applause – already did? at least for some very loose interpretation of the word “understand”.
(EDIT: to clarify my meaning: Trump took every position on every issue at least once, seemingly at random, I believe with no real support for any. If it generated a lot of applause, it went into a mental box labeled “repeat again”. Eventually he repeats enough popular lies that he gets a 30 second sound bite, including applause, on national news. Repeat that for 1 year to win support.)
I would worry less about how the new system would theoretically make it less likely to elect such a person based on a thin margin of electors, and instead worry about how the new system would theoretically make it just as likely to elect such a person based on a thin margin of popular votes.
So the complaint is that the random promise bot failed to randomly appeal to California Republicans specifically (at least this time)?
EDIT (itchy trigger finger): I get that your argument is that CRs specifically didn’t contribute to this election, b/c Cali. went all-in on Democrats. But even under a different system, they still wouldn’t matter to this recent election, b/c having their vote would just mean winning more. The Republicans already won.
It’s derivative of the will of the people, but it’s certain distinguishable as a separate entity. States aren’t administrative districts of the federal government. Again, if you want a different Constitution, seek it, but the whole structure of the federal government is premised on states being sovereign within their domain. So they clearly have separate interests, just like any group of people can be said to have a separate, collective interest in a thing (a church or a corporation or a co-op or a frisbee club)
In any roughly democratic system to elect a person to a single office, about 49% of the people’s votes won’t matter.
The goal is not to make every vote matter because that’s impossible – unless of course, the entire Presidency hinged on a single person’s vote in a nationally-democratic election. But let’s be honest, is that intolerance for error desirable in any human endeavor? We’re not aiming for perfect, because that’s impossible. We’re aiming for workable.
This isn’t just about Trump, or making sure that a certain kind of person wins. Obviously it’s possible to elect horrible candidates with either system. But a system where every citizen’s vote counts equally is far more just, provides incentive for everyone to vote, and encourages a candidate to push for policies that appeal to the greatest number of people. Preventing Trump-like candidates from winning is essentially a separate problem as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not interested in designing an election system that is meant to subvert the will of the people in order to prevent bad people from winning.
True, but in a real democratic system every vote is of equal VALUE. Currently, many citizens live in states where their vote essentially has no value, or certainly not as much value as those of their neighboring states. If it did, the candidates would be courting them.
The Senate has co-signed no small number of idiotic bills (likesuchas the Fugitive Slave Act), this circular reasoning that Senators are wise by virtue of winning a Senate seat needs to be put to rest. There is no IQ test, no measure of wisdom or self-control that has ever proven this thesis–the main difference in governing style between Senators and Congresspersons is that Senators have the luxury of six-year terms, and are thus more capable of weathering short-term political swings than their Congressional counterparts. Furthermore, having more representatives is better protection from the individual idiocy of any given representative–we would be better off from a risk standpoint by neutering the Senate in a similar manner to the British House of Lords, increasing the number of reps in the House, and probably increasing the term of House members to four years, in sync with the presidency, to get closer to the balance of power you see in parliamentary governments.
Federalism was a good argument in the colonial times, where the entire western frontier was open to colonisation from other countries, making them vulnerable to being picked apart, but once you get to the point in the modern era where locomotives were shattering notions of time and space, as well as the gaming of the federal system to preserve slave state parity, states as some sort of “natural” congregation of people around local affinity stops making sense. The Civil War pretty definitively resolved the question of Federalism, I think it’s no small coincidence that most arguments for Federalism since then have been on behalf of people looking to institute Jim Crow.
I’m not sure if a ‘majority of states benefit from it…’ … But that’s moot. Because the smaller Red States could and probably would block a Constitutional Amendment to remove the Electoral College, that’s not possible… However, not only does the National Popular Vote sidestep legally around the Electoral Colege issue, it also doesn’t need a massive majority to negate those states that don’t sign on. You don’t need all 50 states to agree to this: The National Popular Vote bill has already been enacted by 11 jurisdictions possessing 165 electoral votes—61% of the 270 electoral votes necessary to activate it Notice that you only need 270 Electoral votes of the total 538 in our nation to make this work. it’s really quite clever. Go to the webpage and read through it.
Only if they counted all the undervotes and over votes and awarding votes for multiple people to the one that has a chance is not how the law was structured.
Last I checked, nobody was spending any ad money in Wyoming either. Other than New Hampshire and Iowa, most of the campaigning seems to be concentrated in highly populated areas. (And the winner, Trump, hardly campaigned anywhere.) I don’t have any reason to believe that eliminating the EC would change that.
I’m in a small state which is not courted at the presidential level because (a) we are so strongly Democratic that the Republican presence is essentially nonexistent (HRC won 2-1 here, that was locally considered too small of a Democratic margin) and (b) by the time most of us are voting polls have closed in much of the US and the election is already being called by the media. Nevertheless, I don’t feel any more or less valued as a voter than I did when I lived in large states (eg, Illinois) or swing states (eg, Iowa).
Of all the things that rile me politically, the technical power of my vote is not even an also-ran.
I can’t think of any parliamentary governments that are functioning that much better than we are. One thing I did like about my years living in the UK was easy access to my MP, a result of having an MP for every 100,000 people. A similar ratio in the US would result in a house with 3000 members. Some systems just don’t scale.
