Blast from Past

Below is the electoral map from 1960, the famous Nixon-Kennedy contest. The irrelevant popular vote was very close, 34.2 million to 34.1 million. But Kennedy won the Electoral College by 303 to 219:

This big margin concealed numerous close statewide races. Labelling a state as a swing state if the popular margin statewide was 3% or less, we see that Kennedy won these swing states: Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, Texas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Nixon won these swing states: Alaska, California, Florida, Montana, and Washington.

Obviously there were so many swing states that the election felt like a national election. Moreover, the swing states were so different demographically that the candidates each had to appeal to big, complex coalitions of factions in order to prevail.

The Electoral College system did not appear to contribute to divisiveness, despite the extreme closeness of the outcomes in so many states and the indicative if meaningless closeness of the national popular vote.

Obscured somewhat by Kennedy’s large electoral victory was the untenable nature of the Democrats’ Electoral College block. Kennedy won New York, the state with the most electors at 45, by a 5% margin. This result marked a giant reversal from Eisenhower’s victory there in 1956 with 60% of the votes. The Democratic coalition in urban and suburban areas was racially, ethnically and religiously mixed. This coalition plainly was the base for Democrats to depend upon in future elections, given population gains in the former free states. Its composition, however, differed radically with the party’s southern base, from where 81 Kennedy electors came. That explained Lyndon Johnson’s presence on the ticket. But it foreshadowed the Republican choice to align its party with white voters in the south while relinquishing its historic Lincolnian alignment with African-Americans. New York’s results in 1960 taught the Republicans to look south for winning in the future. By 1968 Nixon’s southern strategy was in place.

With the popular vote virtually evenly divided, the parties could have taken different paths toward political victory if the national popular vote selected the president. The Electoral College system, however, made the southern electors, chosen almost exclusively by white votes, so critical that the Republican Party could not resist reshaping its policies, programs, and promises to take the pluralities in these states. The divisiveness of American politics today stems not from the popular vote in 1960 and thereafter, but instead from the pernicious electoral system.

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The National Popular Vote Would Make Every Vote Equal

In her article opposing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, Tara Ross makes three arguments in favor of the antidemocratic unequal treatment of voters accorded by the Electoral College.  First, she argues that but for the Electoral College, residents of small and midsize states would be ignored.  Second, she argues that a change to the national popular vote can only be done by a constitutional amendment.  Finally, she argues that if states are bound together to cast electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, some states will be prejudiced because the rules for voting differ from state to state.  None of these arguments are convincing.

The first argument makes no sense on its face. If all votes counted equally then candidates would have the same motivation to seek all votes regardless of geography. The question is not whether they would do that, but how. As we noted in another blog, advertising on social media makes it easy to reach out to potential voters all across the country, and if the popular vote winner became the president, all candidates would have to do just that.  National brands like Wal-Mart and Amazon do not ignore people in smaller markets; nor would candidates seeking to get the most votes across the country.

Contrary to the argument that the Electoral College protects small states, small and midsized states are entirely ignored under our current system, except for a small number of swing states. The candidates flock to New Hampshire and Iowa, but ignore Rhode Island and North Dakota completely because those votes are taken for granted by one party or the other.  Under a national popular vote system, candidates would reach out to all voters in all states.

Second, we do not need a constitutional amendment to ensure the that winner of the national popular vote becomes the president because the Constitution empowers states to allocate their electoral votes as they see fit.  Article I, section 1 of the Constitution provides: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . . .” In other words, the drafters of the Constitution specifically left plenary power to the states to decide how to choose the electors.  Our existing, winner-take-all system is not mandated in the Constitution and is only one of a number of options a state could chose to allocate its votes. Originally, many states chose to have their legislatures choose the electors directly, without having the people vote at all, a choice they could theoretically still employ today. Maine and Nebraska have chosen to split their electoral votes by congressional districts with two votes awarded at large.  Assigning electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote is another permissible choice, and a choice that is good for the country. 

Finally, differences in voting requirements from state to state is not a reason to stick with the outdated, undemocratic Electoral College.  Ross notes that some states have more opportunities for early voting or make it easier to vote absentee, and states that under the Electoral College system, “no one cares if Texans have more time to early vote than voters in Colorado.”  However, with the national popular vote, “a ballot cast in Texas could dictate the outcome in Colorado. Suddenly, it matters a great deal that Texans had more opportunities to vote.”  This does not follow.  The outcome of a vote in one state can already impact the outcome of the election for all other states under the Electoral College.  Further, when only a few states matter, our elections are much more vulnerable to foreign meddling or election irregularities because it is far easier to hack an election in the three critical swing states that decided the 2016 election than in the whole country.

The current system allows the candidates to ignore the vast majority of the governed, focusing only on the small number of people living in states where the election is likely to be close.  If the winner of the national popular vote became the president, the interests of rural voters in Illinois would matter as much as rural voters in Michigan, and city dwellers in Texas would matter as much as city dwellers in Florida. For these reasons, most people agree that the person who wins the popular vote should become the president.

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National Vote Would Minimize Money's Power over Presidency

As this chart shows, money does not enter politics equally from both ends of the political spectrum:

Most of the policy preferences supported by the biggest funders on this list run counter to the wishes of the majority of Americans. Gun control stands out as a clear illustration. Money cannot be kept out of politics (although the Supreme Court has done the country no favor by increasing its importance). But the current presidential selection system increases money's leverage by causing the winner of the election to be chosen from a handful of swing states, where the dollar-to-voter ratio rises to dizzying levels. If money had to persuade not just a hundred thousand voters in swing states but up to 200 million voters, then its power over the outcome would be diminished. 

Seeking federal legislation to constrain the role of money is hopeless, even if the Democrats controlled both houses, given the make-up of the Supreme Court and its unfortunate precedents. But moving to the national popular vote as the means to choose the president is quite possible. If the amount of money spent by any of the groups in the chart were dedicated to legislation awarding electors to the national vote winner, then this reform would be effective for the 2020 election, and the role of money on choosing the next president would shrink far more radically than any other feasible method could accomplish.

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The Electoral Process Cannot Save us if the Process is Broken

Actor Robert Redford wrote in a letter to the Washington Post:

“Our most powerful tool is still the electoral process. We must not be distracted from the opportunity we have in 2020 to reject hatred and division and choose civility and progress. Let’s not talk about impeachment or put all our hopes on the special counsel: The former is mired in Washington politics, and the latter will be once the report is released. Let’s stay focused on taking back our country with the power of our votes.”

Unfortunately, the electoral process, which Redford hopes will be the avenue for our country to “choose civility and progress” is not working.  In the last presidential election, the losing candidate got over three million votes more than the winning candidate.  The “power of our votes,” is diluted by a system that treats a small, random percentage of voters in swing states as more important than all other voters. 

Until we reform our electoral process, we cannot pin all our hopes onto it.  But if states choose to assign their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, then candidates will be forced to return to civility, good works, and the issues that Americans care about. 

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If Candidates Had to Win the National Tally They’d Compete Everywhere

A shibboleth of the enemies of direct democracy for choosing the president is this:

If every vote mattered equally no candidates would care about the votes in less dense or rural states.

On its face this claim seems self-contradicting. If every vote counted equally, then obviously every candidate would try to get every vote everywhere. The question would not be whether they wanted every vote, but rather how would they go after the votes in less dense areas. 

We already know the answer by looking at how major brands and retailers reach every possible customer. 

First, retailers invest in national branding. Currently in the general election presidential candidates spend almost nothing advertising on national television shows. If every vote mattered equally this would change. You’d see the president advertising on the Super Bowl, or for that matter, stalking the sidelines for “product placement.”

Second, in major urban areas the cost of reaching customers through broadcast or cable channels is much higher than in less dense areas. Therefore campaigns would proportionally spend less on television spots in dense areas, and much more on television in less dense areas. If you own a television station in the Dakotas, you should want the national popular vote to pick the president. Similarly there’d be political advertising on local radio in rural areas, whereas today there is none from the presidential candidates.

Third, the rise of social advertising is inexorable, because social advertisers can pick the target audience with more precision than can one-to-many advertising. Especially in dense areas, social would be preferred over old school techniques. But because distance is irrelevant for social advertising, the big social firms would be a platform for reaching every voter everywhere.  

Fourth, just as Wal-Mart ignores no one, so candidates would ignore no region in their search for votes. Very likely, in right-leaning states the effort to get out the vote for the Republican nominee would go up, because the Republicans currently gain nothing by seeking higher turn-out in the more rural states where they are the preferred party.

 Fifth, there is some evidence already that confirms these hypotheses. This is from the estimable web site Nationalpopularvote.com:

The fact that serious candidates solicit every voter that matters was also demonstrated in 2008 by Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district (the Omaha area). Even though each congressional district in the country contains only 1/4% of the country’s population, the Obama campaign operated three separate campaign offices staffed by 16 people there. … Mitt Romney opened a campaign office in Omaha in July 2012 in order to compete in Nebraska’s 2nd district and … the Obama campaign was also active in the Omaha area.

…

In many cases, small states offer presidential candidates the attraction of considerably lower per-impression media costs …

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Can't Save What Never Had

Rick Hasen rightly praises the many good features of H.R.1, a bill that would reform many aspects of our elections, but the title of the article wrongly claims it may save democracy.

You cannot save what you do not have. We do not have a democratic method of choosing the president.

If you want democracy, the single most important reform of elections in the United States unquestionably would be a guarantee that the national vote winner always became president.

This reform would: 

• cause both parties to compete everywhere for votes, using all the Internet-enabled tools to find and seek to persuade every eligible voter in every part of the country.

• drive up total participation by 20 to 80 million votes, roughly ten times the amount of increased participation that all the measures in H.R.1 would be able to accomplish. Yes, that's right: ten times more impact!

• change the two major parties' policies, practices, and pitches so that each would be far more likely to seek voters than to reject voting. The reason is that wooing and winning a plurality among the extra tens of millions of voters is more likely to succeed than discouraging a few hundred thousand voters in swing states.

• discourage voter suppression by bringing every effort of that kind into proximity of every voter. Why? Because if both campaigns valued, looked for, needed, and tried to get every vote, then any effort to discourage voting necessarily would occur in every precinct. That would cause the vote-suppressing party to be known everywhere as the enemy of democracy—hardly the way to win elections. By contrast, with the current system, where the presidency is chosen by votes that are elsewhere, far away, in a distant state, from the perspective of the vast majority of voters, then voter suppression too is someone else's problem. 

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Who’s on First

Elaine Kamarck explains at page 71 passim of Primary Politics how Iowa and New Hampshire politicians have fought successfully to keep their caucus and primary systems at the front of the nominating process. The lesson is that just two states can affect the entire system profoundly.

So, if just two states awarded their electors to the national winner, they would go a long way, maybe all the way, to forcing the candidates in the general election to try to win the national popular plurality.

Just two states’ politicians could give America a true one person-one vote democratic way of choosing the president. The leadership role is there for the taking.

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Another Voice in Favor of Keeping Connecticut in the NPVIC

Connecticut newspaper The Day has published an excellent response to their op-ed urging Connecticut to withdraw from the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  The response, by Jonathan Perloe, notes that according to Making Every Vote Count’s poll, “a substantial majority of Connecticut voters across party lines (78 percent) agree that the candidate who wins the most votes nationwide should become president.”  As we noted in our blog responding to the same op-ed, a system that ensures the winner of the national popular vote becomes the president is better for Connecticut and better for the nation.

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Kamarck Explains

A bunch of points from Elaine Kamarck’s “Primary Politics”:

1.     Turnout in Iowa has increased almost every year in which there’s a competitive contest. In 2008 227,000 Democrats participated in the caucus, as compared to 124,000 in 2004. Page 17. When candidates show up, participation goes up.

2.     In the 1970s the caucus and convention system, “long a private or at most semi-public process, became, by law in both parties, a fully public system.” Pp 20-21. States can change the system.

3.     “As the process became public it attracted the kind of attention and voter interest that was unheard of in prior days.” Page 21. If states allocated some or all of their electors to the national winner, then the nominees’ search for voters everywhere would attract huge attention and voter interest everywhere.

4.     The primary system had led to consolidation of voting around certain days. It could lead to a national primary, which is favored by “substantially more than 50% of the American public [that] favors the simplest and most direct form of democracy.” Page 26. Similarly, well more than 50% favor simple, direct democracy as the way to choose the president in the general election. The cure for non-participation in politics is to let the people participate directly in a single national vote for president.

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Fanboying Andy Hall

This book by Stanford professor Andy Hall is worth a good look. We want reasonable people to seek public office, and Andy explains how.

He was one of the first academics to help Making Every Vote Count think through the problem of the presidential electoral system. Congrats on the book, Andy!

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Against Kings

Katherine Stewart writes that: 

"The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself." 

The American experiment is and always has been a "direct attack" on a king, on the idea of kings, on the notion that kings should rule and the people should not. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the War to End All Wars, the triumph of the United States against fascism and then communism: our country has always been dedicated to opposing authoritarians, dispelling the dark magic of paranoia, and, yes, fighting for the equality of all people, including women oppressed by patriarchal regimes.

If Ms. Stewart is right, then Christian nationalists are on the wrong side of truth, justice and the American Way. They will have to be out-voted. Democracy must prevail. 

Might as well start in 2019 with reforming the way the president is selected. Seems like good timing given that several dozen people are announcing they want to be president. They should all say publicly that they do not want to win without campaigning nationally to win the national popular vote in order to become president. The rules of the game have to be changed. 

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The State of the Union Shows how the Electoral College Distorts Our Policies

In the State of the Union, President Trump called out a few specific states that, according to him, were particularly harmed by U.S. trade deals:

“Another historic trade blunder was the catastrophe known as NAFTA. I have met the men and women of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Hampshire, and many other states whose dreams were shattered by the signing of NAFTA.”

It is no coincidence that Trump’s list of states includes some of the most important battleground states that will decide the 2020 election. Under our current system, the president is free to ignore the needs of most Americans, focusing only on a few closely contested states. Our policies should be evaluated based on their overall impact on the nation, not just their impact on swing states.

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How about using democracy to choose the president?

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. 

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New Mexico House Passes National Popular Vote Bill

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.

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Presidential Selection System Skews Policies Badly

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.

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Who gets hurt worst by the Electoral College? It's not Democrats — it's democracy

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.”

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Turning Out Every Vote Counts a Lot

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.

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The Midwest May Not Love the Wall

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.

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America's presidential elections are broken: Here's how to fix them

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.”

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Another Presidential Candidate Calls for Abandoning the Electoral College

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.

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