Since it appears increasingly likely that the winner of the popular vote for president will not win the election, we are already seeing calls to “dump the electoral college.” Predictably, since the Democrat is the candidate who is likely to win the vote but lose the election, these calls are coming from Democrat supporters, while conservatives are supporting of the status quo. But if the situation were reversed — if the Republican were winning the popular vote but losing the election — I’m certain we would be hearing conservatives say we need to abolish the electoral college.
Seven states are currently undecided, so those are the states where candidates are doing most of their campaigning. Source: Real Clear Polling.
I want to abolish the electoral college not because of how it would change the outcome of this particular election but because of how it would change democracy. The United States is known for its low voter turnouts, and a large part of that is because many people don’t believe their vote counts. When it comes to the presidential election, those people are absolutely right unless they live in one of the “battleground states,” which this year are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Because presidential politics get more media attention than, say, gubernatorial or legislative politics, people who don’t think their vote for president counts are also less likely to vote in other elections.
I live in a Blue state that hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1984. No matter what my political preference, this doesn’t give me much of an incentive to vote or even to figure out which candidate I prefer. But if the president were elected based on the national popular vote, I would have more an incentive to participate, which also means I would be more likely to vote for other offices and measures.
Because the votes in the electoral college are equal to the number of senators and representatives from each state, it is biased towards the smaller states, which have two senators regardless of how small their population. The writers of the U.S. Constitution did this because they feared that without such a bias the large states — which around the time the Constitution was written were Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts — would dominate the rest.
That argument is still used today by defenders of the electoral college. One even goes so far as to say that, without the electoral college, presidential candidates would campaign in as few as two states.
That’s ridiculous. Although many states are “blue” or “red,” none are unanimous in these tendencies. Winning a national popular vote would require more than just appealing to voters in a few large cities.
Even among large states and cities there is little unity. Politics in California, the nation’s most heavily populated state, are almost exactly the opposite of Texas, which is number 2. Politics in New York and Los Angeles, the nation’s number 1 and 2 cities, are very different from Houston and Phoenix, the nation’s number 4 and 5 cities.
As the nation stands today, central city residents tend to be more liberal, rural residents more conservative, and suburban residents are more independent. Abolishing the electoral college would force candidates to campaign in suburbs throughout the country, which would effectively spread their campaigns to central cities and rural areas as well.
The electoral college not only depresses voter turnout, it influences federal pork barrel. A recent report from Politico found that, even though this year’s seven battleground states have less than 17 percent of the U.S. population, they have received 44 percent of the “clean energy” funds that have been given out to date from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. This is just one more reason for opposing pork barrel, but eliminating the electoral college would reduce the incentive for such waste.
Especially in view of how it influences voter turnout and pork barrel, I don’t find any other arguments for retaining the electoral college to be persuasive. Regardless of who wins this election, it is time to consider a constitutional amendment to elect the president based on the popular vote, not on an archaic system that ignores the will of the majority.
No, because the whole purpose of the electoral college, exactly what founders forsaw was to prevent one or two most populous and influential states from deciding our elections forever. Imagine if New York/California picked our presidents solely.
New York was already an established influential city and upset many when chosen as Federal capital albeit temporary; which is why DC was founded to create an unequivocal unaligned capital.
Ask Socrates what he thought about a pure democracy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6s7jB6-GoU
Results of Pure unfiltered democracy are always catastrophy. The laws we crafted in last 30 years are mostly to avoid Offense of sensibility, mostly avoid enraging demographics far too intellectually/mature devoid to handle critique or long term thinking.
I wrote LONG time ago about differing Intellectual outcomes preceding social stability. I forget what it was called, but there was a book years ago by former Vietnam US colonel; retired. In the book he points to US programs to enlist/draft low IQ Americans’ to serve in Vietnam war between 1965 and 1971. Many of these kids were sent frontline units; Sargents and Lieutenants were told keep quiet or redirected or threatened with disciplinary action if they spoke out. They had Marginal to poor reading skills, speech impediments never corrected, incapable of handling trained tasks without supervisors or chaperones.
In fact we saw it in the film “Forrest Gump” where dullards from middle nowhere towns enlisted, where intelligent, sympathetic officers were killed to pieces.
Of the 58,000 names on Vietnam War memorial , over 16-22 Thousand came from programs and rural enlistment and inner city.
Race is Not a social construct, Society is a racial construct. You cannot have a democracy in a multi racial society, it just turns into Shitfest of who can beg the ethnics for their vote or which group vies for most oppression points and Gibs. If/when that ethnicity social cognition is incompatible with founding principles of the nation they live in, they fight Long and hard to be in public office or work to re-adjust laws not to offend their sensibilities or push massive redistribution of income to perpetuate welfare state to compensate for their inability to produce long term results.
You can read my Favorite book, Fahrenheit 451, the book is not about censorship or book burning; that’s the plot, not the message. It’s about what happens when Low IQ or intellectually lazy people overrun society. And state to curtail violent uprest/upset to quell domestic issues they cannot solve.
– public institutions of non-obliatory learning die off (libraries, research, academics)
– Schools shutter all academic standards to curtail a flatline of grade performance. Sound familiar
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-says-students-dont-need-to-prove-mastery-of-reading-writing-or-math-to-graduate-citing-harm-to-students-of-color.html
Democracy requires a minimum intellectual threshold of over 90 plus IQ points.
Smart people will vote for a bridge to walk across a river lava, Dumb people will follow the carrot tied in front of them even if it leads them off.