Here is Stacey Abrams in her response to the State of the Union:
“From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls to moving and closing polling places to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy.”
And I would add that we should no longer ignore the fact that we do not have a democratic method of choosing the president. We don’t depend on one person/one vote to pick the single national leader, and that is the essence of democracy.
New Mexico’s state House has passed a bill that would add New Mexico to the 11 states plus D.C. to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Currently, the Compact has 172 electors that will be pledged to the winner of the national popular vote if states with a total of 270 electoral votes join the Compact. If the New Mexico Senate also approves the bill, the state’s 5 electoral votes will be added to the total.
A similar bill recently passed in the Colorado Senate and is awaiting consideration by the House. Colorado has 9 electoral votes.
If you overlay against the map below the Electoral College, you’ll see that the Midwestern states critical to getting 270 electoral votes are more vulnerable to automation’s effects than the country as a whole:
It’s in the interest of all Americans to have forward-looking governmental policies for job creation. But the Electoral College system invites presidential candidates to promise reactionary, hostile, and ultimately useless responses to technological change.
It’s in the interest of businesses in the Midwest, as well as political leaders, to support the national popular vote as the means to choose the president. That’s the best way to get national job creation policies that are good for everyone.
Here is Part II of the series on how the Electoral College hurts Americans from MEVC co-founder and CEO Reed Hundt at Salon.com:
“[T]here are about 50,000 lumberjacks in the United States. Their median income is less than $40,000 a year, and their work is extremely dangerous. Almost all of them live in states taken for granted by the presidential candidates. Certainly candidates for statewide office in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho must pay attention to this sector, but presidential candidates devote exponentially more attention to coal miners, who are almost exactly as poorly paid, work in as dangerous an occupation, and are as numerous as lumberjacks. Why? Because they matter to the voting outcome in Pennsylvania.
If every vote counted equally, coal miners would not matter to candidates any more than lumberjacks, or more than any other category of workers concentrated outside swing states.
…
Ideally, every state legislature would pledge some or all of its electors to support the winner of the national popular vote. But if a few states took this action, either by law or through a ballot measure, then the odds of any presidential candidate winning the Electoral College without winning the national vote would drop dramatically. Faced with likely defeat by pursuing an exclusive swing-state strategy, both campaigns would seek both to win the pluralities in as many states as possible and also to win the national popular vote.”
As the chart below shows, voter turnout can increase drastically if a race is closely contested and people know their vote is likely to matter. A close Senate race in Texas and a close gubernatorial race in Georgia drove turnout up 14 and 21 points, respectively, above the average:
So if the presidential candidates competed to win the national popular vote, then every voter in every state would know their vote mattered. Turnout on average would go up in the 40 states currently ignored by the two parties’ candidates. An increase of 14 to 21 points would translate to at least 20 million more votes.
The two parties would have to reshape their policies, reconsider their coalitions, and perhaps change their nominating rules in order to capture a winning share of the huge influx of participation.
This chart from Gallup shows that twice as many Republicans as independents think immigration is the country’s top problem:
Because there is no way the incumbent president can be elected without a big share of independent votes, the natural question is why he has elevated the wall to such political attention.
But the chart shows national averages. The results in the states that determined the 2016 election – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – are now shaping President Trump’s policies.
At least in Michigan, whose electoral votes are critical to both parties’ nominees, independents do not agree with Trump’s insistence on a wall.
These independent Michiganders should support the move to have the national popular vote pick the president. They share the views of other independents in other states, and in numbers there is strength.
Read the latest from MEVC co-founder and CEO Reed Hundt at Salon.com:
“[I]f between 10 and 20 electors from likely Republican states or swing states were bound to the national winner, instead of the state plurality winner, the Republican nominee should decide to compete for a national victory. Correspondingly, if 10 to 20 electors from Democratic-leaning or swing states were bound to the national winner, then the Democratic nominee would compete for a national victory. It should be easy to put the question—do you want your state’s electors to be from the national winner’s slate?—on the ballot in enough states to make the candidates try to win the national election, for the first time in American history
…
The goal is to have candidates compete for every vote of every American, persuading everyone to participate and ensuring that the winner in the whole country becomes the president of the whole country. It can be achieved by the people themselves, acting through or in spite of their legislatures.”
Pete Buttigieg, Democratic presidential hopeful and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has come out against the Electoral College, saying: “We’ve got to repair our democracy. The Electoral College needs to go, because it’s made our society less and less democratic.”
Buttigieg joins President Trump, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Senator Kristen Gillibrand as 2020 candidates who have all called for the national popular vote to replace the Electoral College.
The writers of “How Democracies Die” say on page 222: “political scientists have proposed an array of electoral reforms…that might mitigate partisan enmity in America. The evidence of their effectiveness, however, is far from clear.” They prefer instead addressing “racial and religious realignment and growing economic inequality” by “reshuffling…what America’s political parties stand for.”
In my own book, out in April, I reach a similar conclusion about inequality, but I wish Levitsky & Ziblatt had included the national popular vote as an electoral reform. I think they would have to conclude that it very likely would “mitigate partisan enmity,” promote “racial and religious realignment,” and “reshuffle” what the parties “stand for.” The reason is that neither party could win a national plurality without appealing to factions they now mostly ignore as they battle for victory in a handful of swing states.
The editorial board of Connecticut newspaper The Day has published an editorial arguing that Connecticut should withdraw from the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (“NPVIC”). The editorial gives several arguments in support of its position, but none are persuasive.
The editorial board notes that in 2004, Democrat John Kerry won in Connecticut by 10.4 points, but that if the NPVIC had been in effect, “Connecticut would have assigned its seven electoral votes to Bush because he won the national vote by 2.4 points.” They argue that this would not have served Connecticut voters.
But the current system didn’t serve Connecticut voters either. All 693,826 Connecticut votes for Bush were thrown away. In addition, all the votes for Kerry over the 693,827 needed for plurality—163,662 votes—did not count either, because Kerry would have gotten Connecticut’s votes whether he won by one vote or by hundreds of thousands of votes. The fact that the election was “a landslide” in Connecticut was meaningless, and in fact rendered many votes in Connecticut pointless.
Under a national popular vote system, all the votes in Connecticut would have been counted, including the votes for Bush and the excess votes for Kerry. More importantly, the campaign itself would have been different, with both candidates reaching out to all voters instead of concentrating only on bringing out their bases in swing states.
The editorial argues that the “right way” to assure the candidates with the most votes wins would be to amend the Constitution.
But the Constitution does not mandate our current, winner-take-all system. In fact, Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution specifically leaves it to the states to decide how to allocate their electoral votes. There are multiple ways a state may allocate its votes, including splitting electoral college votes as Nebraska and Maine have done. It’s up to the states to decide what is the “right way” to allocate their votes.
Nor is it persuasive to argue that the Electoral College is supposed to protect small states like Connecticut.
That was certainly part of the intention—along with preserving the institution of slavery—but in reality, small states are ignored entirely under our current system unless they happen to be swing states. In fact, Connecticut is completely ignored under the current system. Presidential candidates never visit, nor do they pay attention to Connecticut’s particular concerns. The Electoral College is not making good on its promise to give a voice to small states.
Next, the editorial board writes; “Imagine the controversy if this plan was in place and the national vote was too close to call. The nation would face recounts in 50 states.”
The current system does not prevent chaos, as anyone who remembers the 2000 election will testify. Because it involves so many more voters, the national popular vote is much less likely to be too close to call than any given state’s vote. Moreover, all of the votes will be counted (and yes, possibly recounted) equally, instead of the entire country’s election turning on only a few votes in one state, as happened in 2000.
Next, they argue that the NPVIC would “encourage multi-candidate races” and raise the possibility of “a president being handed an electoral majority after getting, say, 35 percent of the vote, potentially without even winning a state.”
To the first point, many Americans would welcome a viable third party candidate. According to one poll, 68% of Americans say that two parties do not do an adequate job of representing the American people and that a third party is needed. As for the possibility of a winning candidate only getting 35% of the vote, that is already possible under the Electoral College. What’s worse, under our current system, one candidate could get 35% and still lose the election to a candidate with an even lower share of the votes!
Finally, they argue that Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution conflicts with the NPVIC: “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.” However, this is not the type of compact that the Supreme Court has found requires congressional approval.
The NPVIC is good for Connecticut and good for the country. Under a national popular vote system, all votes will count equally and politicians will have to listen to all Americans, not just the select few in swing states.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell says that making election day a national holiday is a “power grab” by the Democrats.
This idea is not about giving power to the Democrats. It is about giving power to the people. Right on.
Everyone in elected office legitimately holds their position only because they have obtained the consent of the governed. That is conveyed by voting. The more people who vote, the more the consent is validated.
It is weird for Senator McConnell to complain about democracy when the administration he helps so much is trying to unseat the leader of Venezuela on the grounds that he did not legitimately obtain the consent of his governed through a fair election.
Declaring election day a holiday makes it easier for people to give their consent to Senator McConnell exercising power over them, but it also celebrates that act of democracy. I particularly like the idea of combining Veterans Day with Election Day because soldiers fought and died for democracy.
In “How Democracies Die,” the authors inveigh against the use of impeachment to defeat the incumbent, of whom they plainly disapprove. Instead, they say “If Trump is defeated via democratic institutions, it will strengthen those institutions.” As one of these institutions they list elections. Page 218.
But the most important of all elections, the only one that directly relates to their goal of defeating the incumbent, is not democratic.
If a Democrat were to defeat Trump in 2020 by winning the electoral college without prevailing in the national popular vote, the Electoral College would certainly neither be strengthened nor would it be considered a democratic institution.
Indeed, it is easily possible to imagine the outrage among Trump supporters if they delivered him in 2020 a national popular vote plurality or majority and yet the swing states swung back to the Democrats, denying the incumbent a second term. Those Trump backers in this hypothetical would deserve support from everyone who believes in democracy.
One thing the incumbent is right about is this: he supports the idea that the winner of the national popular vote should always be president.
On January 29, Colorado’s Senate passed a bill that would add Colorado to the list of 11 states plus D.C. to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Currently, the Compact has 172 electors that will be pledged to the winner of the national popular vote if states with a total of 270 electoral votes join the Compact.
The Colorado bill will now go to the state’s House for consideration. If passed, Colorado would add its 9 electoral votes to the tally.
Our democracy is gravely at risk from foreign meddling. As Michael Chertoff and Anders Fogh Rasmussen explain their article, “The Unhackable Election: What It Takes to Defend Democracy” in Foreign Affairs:
Because the Internet and automation enable aggressors to act anonymously on a large scale, technology has significantly reduced the costs and risks of election meddling.
…
In some cases, foreign meddlers have tried to directly boost whichever candidate or party was most likely to adopt a soft stance on Russia. However, in most cases, their strategy is simply to discredit the entire democratic process. In the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries, for example, Russian operatives supported both the Republican candidate Donald Trump and the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, with the goal of radicalizing the political debate.
Nor is the threat limited to Russia:
In August, John Bolton, the U.S. national security adviser, announced that there was a “sufficient national security concern about Chinese meddling, Iranian meddling, and North Korean meddling” and said that the U.S. government was working to crack down on it. That same month, Twitter suspended 284 fake accounts with apparent links to Iran, and Facebook discovered 76 fake Instagram accounts originating in Iran.
The article discusses many approaches to the threat, including the technical and human aspects of cyberdefense; cooperation between the government and private sectors; updating our voting systems; and public education campaigns. It does not, however, mention something that makes elections in the United States particularly vulnerable to foreign interference: the Electoral College.
To shift the result of our elections, a malevolent foreign power does not need to reach everyone—just a few people in the small number of states that decide elections. If the president were elected by the national popular vote, coordinating a disinformation campaign would be more complicated, more expensive, and less successful.
In 2016 more women voted for the president then did men. And women preferred Clinton by a bigger margin than men preferred Trump. Obviously, if the United States had a democratic system the preference of women would have become president.
The chart below, showing what would happen if only women voted in the 2018 midterms, shows how the preference of women for the Democrats led to that party’s victory in the House of Representatives in 2018.
The chart also explains how the preferred choice of women in 2016 did not become the president. It may very well explain how the democratic nominee may not become president in 2020 unless some states allocate electors to the national popular vote winner.
The problem is the bizarre electoral college system in which the people in a few arbitrarily chosen states effectively pick the president.
Despite the huge Democratic preference among women nationally, in 2018, women in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were less supportive of that party. In many districts in these states women were still in the Democratic camp but statewide the female preference for Democrats was more muted than in the country as a whole.
These happen to be the swing states where the results of the 2020 election will be determined. Unless the system is changed.
Following the news that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is considering running for president as an independent candidate, former mayor Michael Bloomberg released a statement regarding independent runs. Bloomberg had considered an independent run in the past, but found that:
“The data was very clear and very consistent. Given the strong pull of partisanship and the realities of the electoral college system, there is no way an independent can win. That is truer today than ever before.”
Bloomberg understands that, at best, independent candidates can only serve as a spoiler in presidential elections. A centrist independent candidate would only have a chance of winning if we reform our system so that the winner of the national popular vote becomes the president.
Howard Schultz, lifelong Democrat and, at least for several decades, a billionaire, is thinking of running for president as an independent.
According to Axios, a Schultz adviser stated that:
“In the latest Gallup data, 39% of people see themselves as independents, 34% as Ds and 25% as Rs.
The adviser said research by the Schultz team shows a centrist independent would draw evenly from the Republican and Democratic nominees, and bring Trump down to a ‘statistical floor of 26-27-28 percent.’”
But hello, Schultz Adviser: the problem with your guy’s would-be candidacy is the Electoral College system. On a national level an independent, especially one willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars out of a personal fortune ten times that amount, might harbor some hope of finishing first in a national three-person race, assuming that the Democratic and Republican nominees offered little appeal to the huge middle of the electorate.
But it is very unlikely that an independent would do well in the Electoral College. Most probable is that the independent who is a former Democrat, like Schultz, would guarantee the electoral victory to the incumbent.
The reason is that no independent can finish first in the solidly red states that comprise about 230 electoral votes for the Republican. The margins for the Republican nominee, whoever that is, are simply too big to be threatened by an independent, especially one who used to be a Democrat.
The Republican path to victory then runs through Florida, with 29 electors, leaving only 11 to be gained from multiple means – just Pennsylvania, just Michigan, or Wisconsin plus one of the three ways to get a single elector in Maine. If the independent ran strongly in these states, then perhaps the Republican nominee would not prevail in Pennsylvania or Michigan. But the Republican needs just the 11 more if Florida is the red bag of states.
Meanwhile the independent’s candidacy makes it nearly impossible for the Democratic nominee to get to 270. The Democratic base of electors is only about 211 electors, drawn mostly from solidly blue states like California, New York, and the combination of states in New England. An independent probably will gain the most votes from these states—and will need to do so to be competitive in the irrelevant national tally.
If the independent finishes first in any of the typically blue states, there aren’t enough electors in the swing states to give the Democrat, with a diminished base, a way to get to 270 electors.
If the independent somehow manages to stop the Republican from winning a plurality in Florida, then possibly the Republican also cannot get to 270 electors.
But here’s the kicker. If the Republican and Democratic nominee each fail to get to 270 electors, even if Schultz amazes everyone by winning the meaningless national tally, the House of Representatives then chooses the president.
Every state delegation has one vote. An untested constitutional issue is whether the votes would be cast by the existing House or the newly elected House. Currently, Republicans control a majority of state delegations, and they might well retain that position after 2020. For that reason, resort to the House would probably favor the Republican nominee.
Therefore, the Republican nominee will probably win the presidency.
Someone might want to encourage Howard Schultz to bankroll the ballot initiatives that in many states can let the people decide whether they want the popular vote winner always to be president. Then his candidacy could possible lead to his victory in 2020. Otherwise, with the current, crazy, antedated, anti-democratic system, he can do no more than guarantee victory for the Republican nominee.
As the Gallup chart below shows, Americans as described by their political views are fairly evenly balanced. Most are moderate to center right. Compromise is obviously the way to get things done.
But the presidential selection system motivates both parties to push turnout of a few voters in a few states in order to win all the electors in those swing states. Noisy divisiveness is the tactic that the swing state system calls for.
(The people in the swing states especially don’t like this.)
If a few disparate states awarded their electors to the winner of the national popular vote, like Ohio, the Dakotas, and Oregon, then by 2020 both parties would have to win nationally. To do so, they would have to reflect the views of the majority of voters everywhere. The result would be more pragmatic, effective candidates, and a welcome harmony between the wishes of the majority of the people and the behavior of the winner as president.
“[T]he minority share of the electorate is growing,” and this favors the Democrats, assert Levitsky & Ziblatt. They then explain that the Republican response has been to limit participation by, inter alia, pushing for voter ID laws. These have “only a modest effect on turnout. But a modest effect can be decisive in close elections…” Pages 183-85.
Two comments.
First, increase in minority participation may be important to the national popular vote, but of course that is irrelevant to the question of who wins the presidency. The increase in minorities in the overall population arguably has motivated Republicans to vote for their nominee in swing states more than it has favored Democrats in swing states.
Second, the “modest effect” is especially critical in swing states. In a national popular vote system, voter ID laws would not matter much because their “modest effect” would be unlikely to alter the outcome.
Take a look at this map of states most and least affected by the government shutdown:
Now take a look at the list of the closest states in the 2016 election. A cursory glance shows a remarkable amount of overlap between critical, close states and states minimally affected by the government shutdown. The decisive states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire are among the states impacted the least.
The shutdown hurt all of America, but it did not hurt all Americans equally. The shutdown was most harmful to the states both parties can afford to ignore—D.C. and Maryland on the left; Alaska and Mississippi on the right—but largely spared the few voters that matter.
Though many have referred to Trump’s decision to shut down the government as a “gamble,” it was a gamble for which Trump understood the odds. He knew who would feel the pain and who would not. An increasingly large majority of Americans disapprove of the shutdown and held Trump responsible. But as any president or candidate knows, it is the opinion of voters in swing states that counts. The opinion of the country overall simply does not matter.
At least not yet.