IMO, in the unlikely event the Democratic candidate wins the EC but loses the PV

[McGovernForPrez]

EC is fine IMO. Our country is too geographically and economically diverse to have a simple popular vote.

Finally, someone who supports the EC besides me.

There should be a club for Dems who support the EC. 2016 pretty much exactly proved the point of why the EC was necessary. Cater to only a select geographic region and you get clobbered. Democrats will now remember to focus on a more geographically appealing message.

Trump catered to a select geographic region and he won.

Yeah, that very uniform and small region known as the Plains, Great Lakes, South, half of the Mountain West, and northern Maine.

This is what I was trying to get at. Clinton was literally only popular in the new economy, and the "black belt" of the south. That is the textbook definition of a regional party. Obama was popular in the "new economy" and the Rust Belt, and the "black belt". Any system that rewards running up the margins in a small area is a poor electoral system.

[McGovernForPrez]

If you support the EC, what's your reaction to the following?

- The main argument I see in favor of keeping the EC system as is, is that it punishes candidates who ignore regions, as it did Hillary Clinton last year.  Yet if the state boundaries in those regions were just slightly different, she would have won the EC even without changing a single vote.  If that happened, could one say that she really ignored the region as a whole?

- Maybe this gets more to the winner-take-all way of allocating electoral votes, but an 80,000 vote difference out of 14,000,000 votes cast (~0.5%) across the 3 decisive states wound up mattering more than a nearly 3,000,000 vote, 2% difference overall.    I just don't see a good argument as to why that should be.

- Small states, rural regions, etc. get outsized power in both Houses of Congress, where, at least in theory, the concerns of all citizens are to be debated, deliberated on, compromises reached, etc.  But there can only be one winner of the Presidential election.  It's all or nothing.  The way things are now, roughly half the voters will get no representation within the executive branch.  Why shouldn't that "out of executive branch" group be the group that couldn't even muster a plurality?  (Questionable point, but the reason why 2016 happened is basically the inefficient concentration of Democratic voters -- that are mostly in cities -- that perhaps are more likely to need protection from national security threats, that the executive is more likely to handle than the other branches.)


I realize that my concerns are specific to modern times, where the electorate is highly polarized and there are generally just two major candidates, so maybe there are other scenarios where the EC is best to keep over the long run.  I also realize that there are other hypos that I haven't fully thought through (e.g., a virtual tie in the national popular vote with bizarre vote distributions across states).

Thanks.

I think the problem with saying "slightly different boundaries will change the outcome" ignores the fact that the way your state governs directly affects the political culture of it's citizens. Look how vastly different Vermont and New Hampshire are. One is a swing state, and the other is one of the safest Democratic states in the country. That type of massive difference between political cultures can only possibly happen due to the way each state's own political culture developed. Minnesota vs Wisconsin is another solid example. Both are economically and demographically very similar, yet one is much much more liberal than the other. Only giving it's electoral votes to a Republican once in the last 50 years.

This leads into your next point about having 80,000 votes outweigh the 3 million votes. The vast majority of the 3 million votes came from one state, California. Californians decided how they wanted their electoral votes to be spent. Similarly the people of PA, Wisconsin, and MI also decided how they wanted their electoral votes spent.  Everybody's vote counts within a given state.

The president was never and has never been elected by the people. He's been elected by the 538 electors, who in turn are beholden to the people of each given state. It's two tiered and always has been. The presidential election isn't one election, it's 50. This is better because as I said it allows the unique socioeconomic and political cultures of each state to have better representation.

Without the electoral college the Democrats would constantly be sitting and preaching to Californians and New Yorkers, and the Republicans would only be preaching to Texans and southerners. The electoral college forces candidates to focus primarily on swing states. Despite what some people claim that's actually a good thing. It forces candidates to reach out beyond "rallying the base". Rallying the base is one of the absolute worst parts of our modern political system, and Democrats are currently far more guilty of sinking into this mindset. By being forced to focus on swing states the electoral college punishes this base rallying mindset, and it's what cost Clinton the election. Swing states are fascinating because you have to reach out beyond you're comfort zone in order to win them. Republicans in 2016 were forced to step outside their free trade comfort zone, and they were rewarded by winning a number of swing states. It forces the parties to constantly evolve on issues that are relevant to our time and that's ultimately a good thing.

[catographer]

EC is fine IMO. Our country is too geographically and economically diverse to have a simple popular vote.

Finally, someone who supports the EC besides me.

There should be a club for Dems who support the EC. 2016 pretty much exactly proved the point of why the EC was necessary. Cater to only a select geographic region and you get clobbered. Democrats will now remember to focus on a more geographically appealing message.

Trump catered to a select geographic region and he won.

Yeah, that very uniform and small region known as the Plains, Great Lakes, South, half of the Mountain West, and northern Maine.

This is what I was trying to get at. Clinton was literally only popular in the new economy, and the "black belt" of the south. That is the textbook definition of a regional party. Obama was popular in the "new economy" and the Rust Belt, and the "black belt". Any system that rewards running up the margins in a small area is a poor electoral system.

Presidents have been elected with less geography than the loser (Obama '08 & '12). EC doesn't protect geographic diversity, nor the diversity of states (Carter '76, Kennedy '60). Also, saying that how much land you win matters more than how many voters you win is undemocratic. Land doesn't have person hood, nor voting rights. We are a nation "for the people, by the people," not "for the farms, by the farms."

Furthermore, I think your pre-occupation with belittling people who live in Clinton states is unfair and irrelevant. What is unfair about the idea of "one person, one vote, and those with the most votes wins?" If regions mattered, then does that mean that a Governor or Senator who won their election with a minority of counties in their state should lose? Should each state have an electoral college to prevent the dominance of NYC or Chicago?

[McGovernForPrez]

EC is fine IMO. Our country is too geographically and economically diverse to have a simple popular vote.

Finally, someone who supports the EC besides me.

There should be a club for Dems who support the EC. 2016 pretty much exactly proved the point of why the EC was necessary. Cater to only a select geographic region and you get clobbered. Democrats will now remember to focus on a more geographically appealing message.

Trump catered to a select geographic region and he won.

Yeah, that very uniform and small region known as the Plains, Great Lakes, South, half of the Mountain West, and northern Maine.

This is what I was trying to get at. Clinton was literally only popular in the new economy, and the "black belt" of the south. That is the textbook definition of a regional party. Obama was popular in the "new economy" and the Rust Belt, and the "black belt". Any system that rewards running up the margins in a small area is a poor electoral system.

Presidents have been elected with less geography than the loser (Obama '08 & '12). EC doesn't protect geographic diversity, nor the diversity of states (Carter '76, Kennedy '60). Also, saying that how much land you win matters more than how many voters you win is undemocratic. Land doesn't have person hood, nor voting rights. We are a nation "for the people, by the people," not "for the farms, by the farms."

Furthermore, I think your pre-occupation with belittling people who live in Clinton states is unfair and irrelevant. What is unfair about the idea of "one person, one vote, and those with the most votes wins?" If regions mattered, then does that mean that a Governor or Senator who won their election with a minority of counties in their state should lose? Should each state have an electoral college to prevent the dominance of NYC or Chicago?

I don't know how many times I need to explain it, this isn't about "land mass". It's about economic and political identity. The state you were born in directly affects your own political culture. Each state has a unique political culture and that needs to be protected. Obama won states within a fairly diverse region to be quite honest. He won the Pacific coast, New England, Rust Belt, Mid-Atlantic, and even some more of the upper southern states, like Virginia and North Carolina. I don't value land mass over all else. The electoral college obviously takes into account the number of people living in a state. That's why California gets more EV's than Vermont.

90% of the time the EV winner is the PV winner, however when this isn't the case we need to take a closer examination. In the case of Bush vs Gore, I think The electoral college might've goofed. Gore won the popular vote and just narrowly lost the electoral vote. In these cases I would enjoy to see PV award to rectify such a small EV loss. However in the case of Clinton and Trump the EV vote compared to the PV vote was so large that I think it says something about the base of Clinton's support. Without the electoral college the United States would be dominated by regional parties. PV vote is important but it's not tantamount.

To your last point about regionality, I think size is a huge part of this. The United States is very diverse culturally. When you zoom down to the state level that becomes less of a case. States share a common political culture and at such a small scale regional differences are negligable.

[SWE]

EC is fine IMO. Our country is too geographically and economically diverse to have a simple popular vote.

Finally, someone who supports the EC besides me.

There should be a club for Dems who support the EC. 2016 pretty much exactly proved the point of why the EC was necessary. Cater to only a select geographic region and you get clobbered. Democrats will now remember to focus on a more geographically appealing message.

Trump catered to a select geographic region and he won.

Yeah, that very uniform and small region known as the Plains, Great Lakes, South, half of the Mountain West, and northern Maine.

This is what I was trying to get at. Clinton was literally only popular in the new economy, and the "black belt" of the south. That is the textbook definition of a regional party. Obama was popular in the "new economy" and the Rust Belt, and the "black belt". Any system that rewards running up the margins in a small area is a poor electoral system.

The textbook definition of a regional party would be something along the lines of "a political party with its base in a single region," which doesn't exactly fit even your description of the Democratic Party, given that you listed multiple regions. Ignoring that, my county went for Clinton, and I don't think I'd consider Buffalo to be a part of the "new economy" or the "black belt," which were apparently the only places Clinton got any votes anywhere.

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Since I've already established myself as a Buffalo resident, I feel qualified to state that this is very obviously not the case. Hell, even just looking at my own county, there are enough cultural differences from town to town to refute this.

[DrScholl]

If a Democrat won the electoral college, but lost the popular vote, Republicans would call for the electoral college to be eliminated.

[pbrower2a]

EC is fine IMO. Our country is too geographically and economically diverse to have a simple popular vote.

Finally, someone who supports the EC besides me.

There should be a club for Dems who support the EC. 2016 pretty much exactly proved the point of why the EC was necessary. Cater to only a select geographic region and you get clobbered. Democrats will now remember to focus on a more geographically appealing message.

Trump catered to a select geographic region demographic and he won.

But he has since hurt that demographic badly and offered only vague promises of how that demographic would do better.

Figuring that Donald Trump is not going to create jobs (although he will bleed Americans of all classes but the Master Class for quick and high profits for the Master Class) -- or the jobs will come with long hours, brutal management, and near-starvation pay, I can imagine a Democrat running for President stealing a page or two from the Reagan playbook.