First, this concept is wrong. The EC exists for a number a reasons, the compromise btw large and small states in the 1700s is but one. The fact that direct election of presidents by the riffraff had to be avoided was another. What they all have in common though is that they're all irrelevant nowadays- small states are ignored in the current system too. Second the argument that campaigns will focus on population dense areas rather than sparse areas is not very compelling. They already do as well they should Population centers are more important than depopulated areas because that's the essence of governing and why it exists.
Quite frankly, Im surprised Romney is doing as well as he is now. Both parties have put out bad candidates that the voters did not like and they ended up losing. If you look at the last few elections, its always been about the lesser of the two evils. A couple exceptions to this is Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. 2012: Romney 2008: McCain 2004: Kerry 2000: Gore 1996: Dole 1992: (even) 1988: Dukakis This is far back as I can recall, but these candidates did a poor job at energizing their base.
I agree with most of these - though I would disagree on Gore and McCain. I think Gore was actually pretty well liked, but he ran away from Clinton (mistake) and lost in a bit of a fluke given that he won the popular vote. I think most people voting for him did so because they liked him as opposed to a big fear/dislike of Bush (who ran as a moderate that year). The same would be said of Bush had Gore won that election. It's also easier to not fear the other side when you'd just had a debate of great economic growth with both parties sharing power, I guess. McCain, I think, just had bad timing. I think he would have been enormously popular running in 2000 or 2004 - he just got caught up in an anti-GOP year and, by then, had lost a lot of his maverickness.
when did the law take effect, and are Maryland electors legally bound 9under Maryland law) to vote for the pop vote winner in this election?
No - the way the law is written is that it only takes effect when states totalling at least 270 EV's also pass the same law. So far, states with about 130-140 EVs have done so. Basically, it's a hostile takeover of the EC. When that many states pass it, then whoever the national popular vote winner is will automatically get 270 votes, so they win the election.
As you note NH is getting more attention than it's population would attest to so is IA. Also you have states like WI that are medium sized states that are getting more attention than they would. Except the primaries, especially the Democratic primaries, are run sort of like an electoral system using proportional delegate representation of each state and not a winner take all national election. The primaries just like the general election are currently fought on the basis of state by state. As you note that was a mistake Hillary Clinton made in the 2008 primaries but scrapping the EC a Hillary strategy would make perfect for the national election. Just ignore the small states and focus on the large population rich states since it is winner take all of the popular vote. It matters to an extent but you have to consider that campaigns have limited resources and the overall population of Idaho is much smaller than Ohio. Is it worthwhile for a campaign to spend time traveling across sparsely populated states or just concentrate on major population centers in larger states if all you are interested in is total votes? I strongly suspect the latter. Further you have to consider the size disparity of the states. We are talking about states whose populations are smaller than many cities. ND population is smaller than Minneapolis proper and 1/10 the size of the Twin Cities metro area. ND isn't very relevant now because it is a solid Red state but it has elected many Democrats to Senate so it could be flipped. That said why would a presidential candidate in a national vote system bother campaigning from Fargo to Lewiston when they could get more votes just in Anaheim? I've already stated the biggest problem with a national vote. It will lead to probably the death of retail politics on the Presidential level and far far greater dependence on TV ads. Money in campaigns is already running out of control and campaigns now have to focus on trying to blanket the nation with their message than just battleground states we are going to see way more money, ads (mostly negative) than we do now. I believe that will lead to campaigns being even less substantive and shallow than they will now. I am not sure what 270 EC votes have to do with a constitutional amendment. The Constitution states that 2/3rds of both houses have to pass the amendment and then it has to be ratified by 3/4 of all the states. As stated I see no reason why small states like the Dakotas and battleground states like Ohio, WI and IA would want to go along with a system that reduces their importance on the national stage.
So IA doesn't matter now? That would come to a surprise to the campaigns spending millions there now. Bill Clinton campaigned for Obama just last week in Duluth. Paul Ryan has campaigned in Eau Claire. The US Constitution disagrees. Its structure has always been a balance between large and small states.
Really? You thought that people were really voting for Gore because he was so well liked? I am not sure what election you were seeing in 2000 because most of what I recall was that Gore personally was considered cold and arrogant while Bush was considered likeable. Bush was considered a moron though with unpopular policies.
So the EC helps NH and Iowa, at the expense of a dozen or more other small states. That's a good thing? Not at all - with proportional representation, the Dem primary is closer to a national popular vote than a EC vote. The whole thing with the EC is that you have winner-take-all, so winning by 50.1% is the same as winning by 80%. Proportional representation eliminates that and makes margin of victory matter. Each Presidential campaign had about a billion dollars this year - they are throwing money around for no reason now because they have nowhere to spend it. Presidential campaigns don't remotely have limited resources in the modern era. And yes, it is worthwhile to travel to remote areas - just like the candidates are still going to Iowa and NH instead of spending all their time in Iowa and Florida. Because it's easier to win over votes in Fargo than Anaheim because the other candidate probably won't go there. That was how Obama racked up huge popular vote margins in the primaries - Hillary ignored then. It's game theory - if only candidate pays attention, they have a huge edge, which potentially forces both candidates to pay attention. In the modern era, retail politics is overrated. I don't see why this is a bad thing. Why should voters in Ohio get to see Obama and Romney every other day while the rest of the country doesn't see them at all? We'll certainly see more ads, but the camapaigns won't be more shallow. You're ignoring the fact that what you're complaining about is already the reality in the 8 or so states that will decide most elections. Spreading ad money out amongst 50 states makes it far more difficult to just blanket airwaves. You actually have to spend your money wisely. The National Popular Vote legislation doesn't require a Constitutional Amendment. It just needs a bunch of states to pass it, and the EC becomes irrelevant. So all the swing states can b**** all they want, but if the other states do it - and they are certainly moving in that direction - there's nothing those few states can do about it.
Here are the states that have already passed NPV: CA, IL, WA, HI, NJ, VT, MD, MA, DC As you can see, there's a mix of big and small. Even the non-competitive small states support a national popular vote. The one commonality is that they are all liberal states (thanks to the 2000 election). If Romney wins the popular vote and loses the EC, you'll see that list joined by a bunch of GOP states - that's when the real momentum will start.
congrats. You found a single smaller, if not small, population state to bear the standard out of the 7 or so battlegrounders. This must elate your average delawarean, vermonter or alaskan- to know that their fellow Smallies in IA are on the radar..right? . Which are both population centers relative to the surrounding areas. But otherwise we must protect the small-town house as I'm sure people from Galveston are heartened to see Eau Claire get props. Not a very persuasive argument even if I concede its a magical piece of parchment, m considering that the same draft considers nonwhites to be 3/5 of a human being....for the same lame-ass reason of preserving state balance
If you go with proportional Electoral votes, that means all of us have to be subjected to all those horrible ads. I'm in favor of the current system in part to keep all those ads confined to the swing states. Those people can't make up their minds for good or bad? Let them suffer.
You don't really believe that, do you? I'd gladly put up with it in TX just so my vote would matter and wouldn't be taken for granted.
That has more to do with ideological makeup than there nature as small states and as noted with ND while it at the moment it is a reliable Red State right now since it has elected Democrats to Senate it is possible it could be a swing state in the future. Under a national election system though whether the population of ND is a swing state or not there is little reason to pay attention to the 300K votes there when that is about the population of Anaheim and they could also campaign for the millions more in So Cal. Except the Dem primary delegates still aren't proportionally equal to the population. ND still has more relative power per resident than CA does. Under a national election system a voter in ND is the same as one in CA so ND is only as valuable as Anaheim in the national election. Except you have to consider that travel to Fargo is more expensive than travel to Anaheim and in Anaheim you are not only campaigning to the residents of ND but also to many others in SoCal. As noted above in a national election a voter in ND is the same as CA so you get more bang for your buck in that scenario to campaign in Anaheim than Fargo. Have you engaged in much retail politics? One of the nice things about living in a state at the smaller side is getting to experience retail politics and it does make a difference to get to talk to candidates directly. Over the last 12 years I've been able to have unscripted and relatively unguarded meetings with Tim Pawlenty, Norm Coleman, and Paul Wellstone. Yes I agree in some ways they will have to spend their money more wisely, particularly in travel, but regarding blanketing the airwaves since they will be going for a nationwide audience the messages are going to get simpler and coarser as they appeal to the least common denominator. That is interesting but if this isn't an amendment but an agreement of states I can see some problems happening with it. First is that agreement will only hold as long as the states agree. For instance say a state that has agreed but later a legislation and governor is elected that doesn't like it could take the state out.
That doesn't disprove the point that small states do matter, maybe not all of them, not all of the time, but there are plenty of situations when they do. Perhaps your upper Midwest geography isn't that good but Duluth and Eau Claire both are close enough to the Twin Cities to be in the media market so Clinton and Ryan could've just stayed in Minneapolis, since they both also have stopped here recently, instead of going to the boonies. Apparently both campaigns felt it was important to send major players out to smaller cities than just stay in the metropolitan area. And we fought a war to change that and that was amended less than 100 years after the writing of the Constitution. It's been 220 years since and we still have the EC and no one has gone to war over it. For that matter we haven't gotten rid of the Senate or the House which is also part of the balance of power between large and small states. You are free to believe it is lame ass that said given that no serious attempts have been made to radically change the state balance history disagrees.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/OUS9mM8Xbbw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7wC42HgLA4k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Our election system needs some serious changes.
And getting rid of electoral college will help end the two party system as we know it today, everyone should be for that.
There's 2 of the 7 battleground states that arguably qualify as small. That's probably less than the proportion of them nationally. To make the argument that "it makes small states matter!" when on the whole it doesn't really help the vast majority of them isn't very persuasive. | They're metropolitan areas of (according to wikipedia 150,000+ and 200,000+ people) - I've really kind of lost track of what are you actually arguing here? That the framers would be happy to see the rural balance being preserved due to campaign appearnces in the Duluth-Superior twin ports area? WE went to war and got rid of one vestige of counterproductive big-state/small state bargaining, and not another. So what? That doesn't change the fact that the other one a) sucks, due to its overwhelmingly net negative consequences (thus far the only positive you have identified is a rally in Duluth which I guess projects mental goodwill psychically to Rhode Islanders or something), and b) was the product of now-irrelevant 18th century horse trading, just like the 3/5 compromise.
The electoral college is a ridiculous relic. One of the things it tends to do now is make about 80% or more of the population spectators in a "national" election fought out in a few battle ground states. No ads, debates or appearances in the three largest states for instance CA, NY and TX.
