The National Popular Vote is Bigger than Any One Candidate

Jamelle Bouie for the New York Times admirably explains that the national popular vote is about more than partisan fighting or the outcome of any one election and succinctly lays out the arguments in favor of reforming our current system, including:

• The Electoral College undermines the principle of one person, one vote.

• The Electoral College means that candidates can (and do) ignore rural voters in big and mid-size states like California, New York, Illinois, Alabama, and South Carolina because those states are taken for granted by one party or the other.

• As a matter of math, California and New York could not dominate elections under the national popular vote.

  • In 2016, only about a quarter of all votes cast came from New York, California, Texas, and Florida in total.

  • Even if everyone in those states somehow voted unanimously, candidates would need to campaign elsewhere to win.

• On the other hand, under the Electoral College, the 11 biggest states could decide election by bare majority in each state.

• Under the national popular vote, people with similar interests across state lines can band together to make their voices heard.

• Framers feared "pure democracy," but the real concern was there was greater suffrage in the north than the south because of slavery.

• The Electoral College makes it possible for the House to decide the president, which would be chaotic and destabilizing. 

North Dakota Mistreated

I was kindly invited to speak on the Plain Talk podcast with Rob Port in North Dakota. Here’s what I tried to communicate:

1. The 216,000 North Dakotans who voted for Donald Trump got three electors in the Electoral College, but only 174,000 Trump voters in Wyoming got the same number, and only 163,000 in Alaska got the same number. What's fair about not giving every vote in every state equal weight? The only way to do that is to count every vote in every state equally in a national contest for the presidency.

2. There are according to various sources at least 583,000 eligible voters in North Dakota. Of course it is a Republican leaning state, but only 216,000, or 37%, voted for Donald Trump. Why? Because his campaign took the state's outcome for granted, and not every vote cast there mattered. This is how the electoral college system does not bring North Dakotans into full participation in the single national election. The result is that your citizens get less attention paid not only in the general election but generally in politics than they deserve. This is why, for instance, the tariff war doesn't help you, why the focus on manufacturing in Ohio does nothing for you, and so on.

3. There are 60 million Americans in rural areas. By and large they are ignored relative to the residents of a handful of swing states, even though their concerns and issues are quite distinct. The reason is that almost all live in states that are taken for granted by the presidential nominees.

4. According to Wikipedia, presidential visits to North Dakota are few and far between—only seven visits since Nixon—if you want to take that as evidence of being taken for granted.  By contrast, Barack Obama and Donald Trump alone have visited New Hampshire (a state with only one more electoral vote than North Dakota) seven times as presidents.

The Electoral College is a Security Risk

From NPR:

Swing states, and even individual precincts within those states, present a significant point of vulnerability when it comes to the threat of election interference because of their potential to impact the result in a presidential race, the current secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and one of her key predecessors both told senators Wednesday.

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[L]ocal jurisdictions in places that can have an outsized effect on the outcome of national races — like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — will be forced to defend against cyber-threats posed by entire nation-state adversaries like Russia.

“The reality is: Given our Electoral College and our current politics, national elections are decided in this country in a few precincts, in a few key swing states," former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who served under President Obama during the 2016 presidential election cycle, told members of the Senate intelligence committee. "The outcome, therefore, may dance on the head of a pin.”

Dispatch from the Land of the Ignored

As everyone probably knows, in seeking the 270 electoral votes, both parties' candidates in the general election take for granted more than 40 states, where more than 80% of Americans live.

Nevertheless, some people assert that this skewed game makes candidates pay attention to small states and the Midwest. That was demolished succinctly last night by a respected Republican strategist:

In just the last day numerous presidential candidates have inveighed against the current system. They all grasp that no one in the country really wants the presidential election in 2020 to be determined by the two parties spending two or $3 billion on trying to persuade voters in just five or six states. 

Well, there is an exception. One presidential candidate tweeted that if every vote in the country mattered, and were counted equally to pick the president, then the candidates would ignore all small states and all states in the Midwest.

The idea that with a national popular vote system the parties would pay no attention to voters in the Midwest or Great Plains is about as logical as saying that Amazon doesn’t deliver products outside big cities or cell phones don’t connect to people everywhere in the country. Everyone in business knows how to reach everyone in the country, and in the business of politics with the national popular vote the candidates would do what businesses do: try to get every single customer. 

More than visiting, advertising, opening get-out-the-vote offices, going on radio, supporting small town newspapers, polling and calling people in small population states, the candidates would actually have to listen to people in every state. When every vote counts, every person gets attention.

Politicians who like the status quo might well dislike national campaigns by the presidential candidates. Republicans would have the incentive to rebuild their party in Vermont; Democrats would seek voters in the Dakotas. Two party contests would occur in most states, and some incumbents would lose their seats. Voters would have choices to make. Elections would not be foregone conclusions and mere coronations. The political parties would have to be big tents, where compromise was required to bond factions together. Small market newspapers and broadcast stations would be invigorated by advertising and news about candidate visits. Things would change. Democracy does that.

For those who think the country’s politics are heading in the wrong direction—and rural areas have high percentages of people who feel this way—the best possible antidote for the troubles of today is the election of the president by the people.

When I was the chairman of the FCC one of the reasons we wanted the Internet to touch everyone was precisely because we thought that if the political parties could reach everyone cheaply and efficiently through digital technology they would do so. The only reason that doesn’t happen now is the electoral college system makes 40 states and 80% of the people functionally irrelevant (taken for granted as) to the outcome of the presidential election.  

No Matter Where you Live, Your Vote Should Count

Here is Representative Seth Moulton on the national popular vote:

People often defend the electoral college by arguing that without it, presidential candidates would pay attention to only a few states. But that’s already the case because of the electoral college: Two-thirds of general-election presidential campaign events in 2016 were held in just six states, and 94 percent were held in just 12 states. In a winner-take-all-electoral-votes system, candidates campaign only in the states that are a toss-up.

But if we abolish the electoral college — either through a constitutional amendment or a national popular-vote compact— presidential candidates could earn votes anywhere, making them far more likely to campaign everywhere. Then, no matter where you live or how your neighbors vote, your vote would matter. As it should.

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Demography and Democracy

In “No Property in Man,” historian Sean Wilentz explains that the southern representatives to the constitutional convention were disappointed to see rather quickly that the “widely expected movement of population to favor the south and southwest never occurred, as settlement of migrants and new immigrants disproportionately favored the North.” Page 187.

In 1800, free states had 76 members of Congress, and slave states had 65. But by 1820 the margin was 122 to 90.

Southerners had hoped that the three-fifths compromise coupled with a swelling slave population would give them a slaveholding majority in the House. In that event, the Electoral College would always produce a pro-slavery president, even while slaves could not vote.

But demography is destiny. The burgeoning population of the North rapidly gave the House more free state representatives despite the three-fifths compromise.

Now again, as in first decades of the Republic, the demographic trends of the country are rapidly filling the House with members who root out and oppose racism in all its many manifestations, whether blatant or insidious.

These same trends have not yet changed the method of selecting the president. This is the reason that racially divisive candidacies for that high office are still possible.  

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ICYWTK

Someone asked me the other day what I most disliked about the Electoral College system (that any state law can change). Huge is the fact that the system virtually forces the candidates to ignore the views of the vast majority of Americans. But here's the whole list of what disturbs your correspondent.

1. Makes the views of most Americans irrelevant to presidential candidates.  The Electoral College system creates swing states—they are accidents of demography, states where the balance of right and left leaning voters by happenstance is roughly equal. Most state populations tilt one way or the other. These are the ignored states, because the candidates know who will win the plurality. But more than 80% of Americans live in the land of the ignored. There strong majorities support more government action on infrastructure, shift to clean power, limitations of the size of magazines in assault weapons, the well-off paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes than the middle to lower income households, more government support of higher education so college doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and immigration reform to give clarity to millions of people about whether they can or cannot ever become citizens. The Electoral College system motivates the candidates to appeal to the views of the few and ignore the wishes of the many.

2. Bad for Black Americans. The framers of the Constitution designed the Electoral College to make sure that no abolitionist could become president. When Lincoln got elected in 1860, and the civil war ensued, in the aftermath the former Confederate states in the south adapted the system to make sure that all electors from their state represented white supremacists and no former slaves could ever send an elector to choose the president. To this very day that same system suppresses the relevance of African American votes in almost every election. This is why Barack Obama got zero electors from South Carolina to Texas—right across the heartland of the old Confederacy.

3. Unfair to women. The Electoral College is biased against women. More women vote than men. Women turned out a bigger majority for their preferred candidate than men did for theirs. But somehow the choice of males got elected in 2016 and 2000. Why? The Electoral College made the election turn not on the views of the whole country but only on the skinny margins of a handful of states where the views of women were felt a little less strongly than in the whole country. 

4. Treats legal immigrants as second class citizens. The Electoral College is biased against immigrant citizens even to the second generation. Most immigrants live in just five states—the states that are portals to the country. In all these five except Florida the candidates of both parties take the election results for granted, and so they ignore the wishes of immigrants. And in Florida the immigrants who matter most matter are Spanish speakers not from Mexico. No candidate could campaign about a wall or rail against immigration except for the unfairness of the Electoral College.

5. Throws shade on workers. The Electoral College is biased against workers who hold jobs located mostly in the 40 states that are taken for granted. Loggers and longshoremen for example are ignored while coal miners get lots of attention. Why? Coal miners live in swing states. The others don't. This unfairness exists only because every vote does not matter—hardly any votes matter except those in swing states.

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Right, Professor, Right

In his book “No Property in Man,” historian Sean Wilentz writes of the Constitution’s Framers, “On July 20, the delegates gave their initial approval to what might have been the most decisive triumph on behalf of slavery of the entire convention….the creation of the Electoral College.” Page 70.

The Electoral College was conceived in the sin of slavery. No one now argues that slavery was anything other than a horrible proof of the depravity of human beings. Holding on to it was the single strongest motive of the southerners at the convention.

As Wilentz writes, “the convention divided between those more and those less impressed by the competence of popular rule,” but beyond doubt “southerners in both groups had an additional reason to oppose popular election of the president.”

What was that? And does it still lurk in the thinking of those who oppose direct election by national popular vote of the president? See, e.g., former Maine Governor Paul LePage, who oppose direct election because it would empower non-white voters.

Wilentz explains that because slaves would not be able to vote, “southerners were unlikely ever to win the presidency under a democratic system.”

Even today, more than 200 years later, African American voters in the south typically play little to no role in the general election of the president – because the electoral system systematically discards the votes for runners-up, which usually is where the non-white vote in the polarized south goes:

To win the southern states’ agreement to vote for the constitution, Madison apportioned the electors according to total of the seats in the House, which gave weight to slaves on a three-fifths basis, and seats in the Senate, which gave weight to relatively underpopulated states (which came to include more slave states, like the nearly empty Florida and Arkansas). The unsurprising result, Wilentz explains, was that “four of the first six presidents of the United States were Virginia slaveholders.” He might have gone on to say that no president was anti-slavery until Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And Lincoln won only because the Democratic Party split between northern and southern factions.

The history of America is the history of race and the principal arguments for the Electoral College system today are, whether or not well-intentioned, all too clearly resonant of the views of the southern delegates in the 18th century and Governor LePage this week.

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Prominent Republicans Come out in Favor of the National Popular Vote

Michael Steele, former Chair of the Republican National Committee, and Saul Anuzis, former Chair of the Michigan Republican Party, are urging their fellow Republicans to support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in Delaware.  They note that:

Over the seven presidential elections since 1988, exactly 1,013,308 Delawareans have trekked to the polls to cast their popular votes for the Republican ticket. Yet their efforts have not produced one single GOP electoral vote. Because in election after election, Delaware delivered the majority of its popular vote – and under the “winner-take-all” system, all of its electoral votes – to the Democrat ticket.

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Delaware Republicans need to be politically relevant again in every presidential election. A vote in Delaware should count as much toward electing a president as a vote in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, or any other state.

A system that makes candidates from both parties compete for all votes everywhere is the best thing for our country. It’s true that in recent elections, Republicans have been the beneficiaries of the Electoral College system.  But as Steele and Anuzis recognize, the next election could very easily go the other way. 

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The New Plan to Make Every Vote Count

Maryland State Senator Bill Ferguson explains the innovative bipartisan “pairing” strategy to get presidential candidates to pay attention to all voters, not just those who live in swing states.

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Majority Rules

Except when it comes to the presidency it doesn't.  You cannot expect people to run for president, or presidents to govern, according to the popular will when they do not get elected by winning the national vote and cannot get re-elected by pleasing most of the people most of the time. 

Maryland is considering a bill that allocates all its electors to the national vote winner if a Republican-leaning state does the same. This reaching across the aisle via legislation is a great way to produce the reform in the rules of running that can let the majority fairly, subject to constitutional protection of individual rights, get the policies and politics that are best for most people. 

Can anyone think of any good reason not to applaud Maryland's leadership? And why wouldn't Republican Governor Larry Hogan want to sign, in fact want to champion this bill? 

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Free Advice

Huge credit to National Popular Vote, Inc., the non-profit that has pushed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact slowly but steadily for more than a decade, marching through states one by one. With the addition of Colorado’s nine electoral votes, the Compact is now two-thirds of the way to its goal—a fantastic achievement.

So where do we go from here? 

Based on public statements from its leaders, NPV Inc. does not think that it is likely that it will be able to achieve its reform in time for the 2020 election. But why wait? It's a good idea that is long overdue.  

Democratic governors hold office in 14 states that have not passed the Compact: in descending order of electors, PA 20, MI 16, NC 15, VA 13, MN 10, WI 10, LA 8, OR 7, KS 6, NV 6, NM 5, ME 4, DE 3, MT 3. Assuming that as with other states that enacted the Compact, a Democratic governor would sign, then in all these state legislatures NPV Inc. should find legislators who will introduce and advocate for the Compact. Is NPV Inc. pushing hard for legislation in all of those states?

So far, only blue states have joined the Compact. It would be terrific, arguably vital, to include Republican-leaning states in this reform. One way is the ingenious idea initiated by Maryland state senator Bill Ferguson. Maryland would award its electors to the national popular vote winner if a Republican-voting state with the same or more electors took the same action, effective for 2020, even if the Compact is not in effect by then. Maryland still would stay bound to the Compact, but this move would put to the Republican governor of the state, Larry Hogan, a pro-democracy initiative that presumably he would support. He then could find a Republican governor in a Republican-leaning state who would join him in creating a prize of electors available to the candidate who wins the national vote. 

Possibly neither major party candidate would think the prize big enough to campaign nationally. But the idea alone is worthwhile because it would be the first linkage of the national vote to an award of electors in the history of the United States. Perhaps more important, the Ferguson bill offers a Republican-leaning state a way to join hands with a Democratic-leaning state to move toward this reform. Although some of the representatives of NPV Inc. have been quoted in ways that suggest they don't expect Republican allies, it should be obvious that the goal of having the national vote pick the president ought to be discussed, debated, and embraced by most Americans in all states. Indeed, some prominent Republicans have recently come forward in support of reform because it’s the right thing for the country, regardless of party. Republicans should be part of such an important step forward for democracy.  

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Compact Making Progress

As this article says, the national popular vote movement is continuing to move forward step by step. But this reform is not fast enough, for all the reasons stated in the article. It is not healthy for the country to have still another election where the winner of the national popular vote is not necessarily going to be the president, or to have only "blue states" banding together to seek reform. Most Americans in most states favor the national vote winner getting to be president.  

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The Electoral College "Has Not Stood The Test Of Time"

In an excellent piece in the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie explains that the Electoral College has almost never worked as it was intended, and states the case for making a change:

The history of the Electoral College from [1800 on] is of Americans working around the institution, grafting majoritarian norms and procedures onto the political process and hoping, every four years, for a sensible outcome. And on an almost regular schedule, it has done just the opposite.

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Americans worried about disadvantaging small states and rural areas in presidential elections should consider how our current system gives presidential candidates few reasons to campaign in states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion. For example, more people live in rural counties in California, New York and Illinois that are solidly red than live in Wyoming, Montana, Alaska and the Dakotas, which haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades. In a national contest for votes, Republicans have every reason to mobilize and build turnout in these areas. But in a fight for states, these rural minorities are irrelevant. The same is true of blue cities in red states, where Democratic votes are essentially wasted.

Candidates would campaign everywhere they might win votes, the way politicians already do in statewide races. Political parties would seek out supporters regardless of region. A Republican might seek votes in New England (more than a million Massachusetts voters backed Donald Trump in 2016) while a Democrat might do the same in the Deep South (twice as many people voted for Hillary Clinton in Louisiana as in New Mexico). This, in turn, might give nonvoters a reason to care about the process since in a truly national election, votes count.

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Workers Too

In the same commission process that illuminated the bias against African-Americans, Alexis Herman pointed out that the primary process’s schedule “affects which voices within the party are the loudest, which issues are given the most prominence. Where, she asks, is the vote of the manufacturing worker?”

In 2005, the commission mitigated the bias created by putting Iowa and New Hampshire early by moving South Carolina and Nevada, with their very different demographic compositions, up close behind the early two.

This in Primary Politics by Elaine Kamarck at 80-81.

In the general election, the winner-take-all system is biased against the interests of every working group not in a key precinct in a battleground swing state. That includes almost every constituent of the AFL-CIO. Labor should insist in every state that at least some electors are allocated to the national winner. The Chamber of Commerce should have the same view. Every business not big in a swing state gets taken for granted in the general election. That is almost all of business.

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The Electoral College and Women

Watch MEVC CEO Reed Hundt explain how the Electoral College, as it currently operates, keeps women from seeing their candidate of choice become president, despite voting at higher rates than men:

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The Electoral College Harms African-Americans

Most African-Americans live in the south. Even though the vast majority of African-Americans cast their votes for Democratic candidates presidential elections, many of those votes do not count because of the Electoral College.

Republicans' Small-State Advantage Is an Optical Illusion

Besides the obvious fact that Republicans won 'wrong-winner' victories in 2000 and 2016, one of the main reasons why GOP leaders believe the Electoral College generally helps their candidates is their supposed advantage in small states.  That bit of conventional wisdom is not confined just to Republicans.  Here's a recent statement from a respected neutral source, the fact-checking website Politifact:

Two factors explain why today’s political environment, if anything, gives Republican states a leg up in the Electoral College. First, smaller states get a disproportionately large impact in the Electoral College, because each state (plus the District of Columbia) gets a guaranteed two electoral votes before the rest of the electoral votes are allotted based on House seats (and thus, indirectly, on population). While there are some smaller blue states, the smallest states are disproportionately Republican-leaning.

Looking at any of the familiar blue-red Electoral College maps from recent elections, it's easy to see why such a perception took hold:

Huge red swaths on the map represent vast, sparsely populated, solidly Republican states—Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas.  Blue small states, in contrast, tend to be small in area as well as in population—Hawaii, Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware, the District of Columbia.  They're easy to overlook, so glancing at a map may result in an optical illusion rather than a reliable answer.  Instead, let's examine actual numbers from elections over the last three decades:

In four of the last seven elections, the Democratic candidate won more small-state electoral votes than the Republican!  Over the same period, the median number of small-state votes won by the two parties is exactly the same—30 each.  In the two most recent elections, votes from small states split almost evenly, as they gave a one-vote margin to Obama in 2012 and a two-vote edge to Trump in 2016.  In short, the idea that small states reliably give Republicans a leg up in the Electoral College is a myth.

Jack Nagel is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. This is Part II of his series debunking the myths that the Electoral College always benefits Republicans and that the national popular vote would necessarily benefit Democrats.  Read Part I here.

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The Electoral College is Bad for Small States

Watch MEVC CEO Reed Hundt explain how, contrary to popular belief, the Electoral College as it currently operates is bad for voters who live in small states:

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California Dreaming

But for the electoral college system, would the sort of confrontation reported below between a first-term president and the biggest state be imaginable? I have a dream of one country bound by a national election where every vote was weighed, measured, and counted equally. 

WASHINGTON — A day after California filed a lawsuit challenging President Trump’s emergency declaration on the border, the Transportation Department said it was exploring legal options to claw back $2.5 billion in federal funds it had already spent on the state’s high-speed rail network.

The Trump administration also said it was terminating a $929 million federal grant to the California High-Speed Rail Authority, according to a letter the Transportation Department sent Tuesday.

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