Outer Acharet wrote:Nobel Hobos 2 wrote:As you say, outside of the cities is pretty red. But if the cities were as blue as you seem to think, not only would a Democrat win, but neither candidate would bother campaigning there. Or speaking to their issues.
As I said, the fact that candidates don't campaign much in certain areas isn't just because there aren't many people there. If that were the only reason, they'd still get visits, though only ... in proportion to their population.
There's a much stronger pattern overlaying that. Candidates visit most, the places where a visit is most likely to change the election result. Swing states. Swing districts. And the best cure for that is for the less-favored party to also get votes (less, obviously). This give BOTH candidates an incentive to visit EVERY state or district. A voter anywhere is just as important as any other. City or country.
Of course you can't expect the candidate to spend most of their time in the country (unless the country has most of the voters, which is true of some districts). It's not possible to meet the same number of voters per hour, when travel time is accounted for. Halls where they can speak are smaller and/or draw a smaller crowd.
This is true, though I feel that "for the less-favored party to also get votes" only raises the importance of visiting every state or district relatively. You said yourself, the reason swing states are campaigned in is that they pose the possibility of allowing candidates to secure a state's votes by only convincing a relatively small portion of the population. In most swing states the same "my team good other team bad" mindset is still there, it's just close enough to a fifty/fifty split that the votes of swing voters matter. Electors voting freely would allow that partisan division to take over, I believe, and the swing states wouldn't hold so much importance.
This goes also to your last point. The Electors are bound more or less strictly depending on State, to vote "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct" ... by State law. The constitution gives states that power to "appoint" and some states take it so far as to remove Electors if they go against the majority of the state's voters. Some only fine them.
I wasn't exactly advocating more discretion for individual electors. More like a change in how States appoint the Electors. If the vote was 60/40 in a state with 5 Electors, the first candidate would get 3 Electors and the second would get 2.
Then we got into the problem of the smallest states with 3 electors, only being able to very roughly approximate the popular vote in the state, with the Electors they get. The problem could be solved, making all the "electors" representative of the popular vote in each state, by creating an enormous number of "virtual" electors. If the smallest state had 100 electors, the voters would be represented to the nearest 1%. However a constitutional amendment would be necessary, as the constitution sets the number of Electors to the number of US Representatives plus the number of Senators. Also that they be actual people.
The biggest problem with dividing each state's Electors according to the vote in the State, is that third parties would get elected in big states (and possibly medium states). Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see third parties in the US House, representing their 3% or whatever, but to win the Electoral College a candidate needs
a majority of electors. A third party would sometimes have the casting vote (aka "balance of power") which is power way out of proportion to their number of voters. And if they don't exercise that power by switching to one of the major candidates, the President is chosen by the US House in a contingent election ... which I don't like at all.
I figured what would happen with a "proportional Electors in each State" election using the vote from 2016.
Johnson got 5, Stein got 1 and McMullin got 1 elector. So neither Trump not Clinton would have won.A constitutional amendment would be necessary, and given that the result wouldn't be that great anyway (the small states having 'chunky' representation in the EC, and FPTP having some rather bad failure modes too,) I'm not really for this reform plan after all. I used to think I had a great idea, but better minds than mine have worked on it. I'm pretty sure it's a dud.
I might be wrong, but doesn't the guarantee of two extra seats from a state's senators mean that the votes of states with smaller populations, including rural states, carry more weight proportionally?
I'm not sure small states ARE rural states. It comes down to whether rural people are counted as persons/voters, or whether we just look at a map and see a lot of rural land. The labor-intensive farming of fruit and vegetables has more people, but less land, than huge fields of corn or wheat.
If it was based solely on population they would have much less of an impact on the Electoral College's results. And I wrote "In theory" because I originally had a sentence there bringing up how in practice partisan politics means that those incentives have largely been lost solely by the sheer force of sectionalism in the modern US. I excised it as I felt it wasn't that relevant to the paragraph itself.
We agree on that I think. Partisanship (particularly two-partysanship) is such a strong division it makes the slight advantage in the EC insignificant. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to reduce partisanship to sectionalism, but I need to think about that more. I suppose there are sectional interests that cross party lines.
We disagree then. I think they saw no practical alternative to states collecting the votes, and they just overlooked that states might assign their Electors all to the state winner. Perhaps they also expected Electors to use more of their own initiative (a really bad idea btw, which many states now ban).
Maybe. But the practice was done while they were still alive, unless I'm mistaken. Surely if they found that onerous they would have said otherwise?
It was a difficult compromise, I doubt they wanted to relitigate any of it and
particularly not anything to do with state powers. And maybe with fewer states it was less obvious that some were set in their ways while others might swing.
Y'know? Looking over the relevant bits of the Constitution:
Article II, Section 1, US Constitution wrote:Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress
Right. It doesn't say State must direct all their Electors to the popular vote winner there. Or that they may not. It's left up to the States who have (with only two exceptions) gone with winner-takes-all. States don't exactly "direct" the Electors, but they appoint them from the list provided by the winning candidate. Then some but not all states require the Electors to vote as they are pledged.
Sometime I'll re-run the 2016 electoral college using the Nebraska/Maine system. Just from interest, I expect it will show swing
districts influencing the election more than swing
states. Which would kinda be worse.
Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2020 6:40 pm