Thanks, McGovern, for getting back to me on this subject buried in a different sub-forum and thread.
I thought it'd be better to continue here. I never favored the current system all that much and have oscillated between slight dislike and ambivalence. I feel worse about it now, but I admit that that may be from still being butt-hurt about last year. I'm still trying to get my head around both sides of the argument, purely as a hypothetical exercise, and your points bring in considerations other than the usual talking points, which are almost partisan at this point. So, thanks.
I hadn't thought about the discrete state cultures (e.g., VT vs. NH). But why should that matter? A vote for the Democrat is a vote for the Democrat, be it from VT, NH or TX. To me, it means a conscious decision to want the same outcome.
...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.Ehh...I just don't buy the argument that CA provided her the margin of popular vote victory. It couldn't have done so without the 60M or so votes from all the other states, whose votes count the same for that purpose. In a way, it's like saying Anthony Kennedy is the deciding vote on the Supreme Court -- he only is "the deciding vote" when exactly 4 other justices also vote the same as he. This would also be true if he, like CA, were significant enough to be weighted more heavily.
I still think there are other ways to represent those competing priorities and political cultures than the election of one chief executive. Yes, we're a republic, but I don't feel so attached to a system from 200 years ago, when only white property-owning males could vote and slaves were counted as fractional people for the voting benefit of their masters. They also didn't favor the direct election of senators, but we changed that 100 years ago and we're still a republic. Just b/c it's this way and is virtually impossible to change, and candidates "know the rules", we don't have to like it. No one was around when the 12th amendment was ratified and folks like CA Republicans have no way of changing winner-take-all and they're just stuck.
Small states, rural regions of states, etc., get boosted powers within their own states and in their representation in the House and the Senate. In a nation as closely divided as this one, I just don't see how it's a good thing that the plurality of voters for President and the bare-minority of voters for Congressional elections get effectively no power whatsoever at the federal level.
...[The EC] forces candidates to reach out beyond "rallying the base". Depends on how efficiently typical party votes are distributed.
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.
These were very narrow victories in an all-or-nothing by-state system in which there can only be one winner overall.
Party platforms evolve anyway, at least when they want to keep power and know how to do it. Bill Clinton was a popular corporate centrist who won in '92 after three consecutive Democratic ass-kickings. That same corporate centrism burned his wife big-league when she ran for the same job under the same party two decades later.
and also...
... 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.There are other ways to do that, and I'm not convinced it needs to be a priority when deciding the chief executive, of which there can only be one.
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...
Don't forget Florida!
As a different example, Kerry only won the Northeast, the West Coast and a chunk of the Rust Belt. If things were a little different in Ohio, he'd have had just slightly more dominance in the Rust Belt, losing everything else, the popular vote, but would've been elected President regardless. I guess the EC might be good at measuring regional dominance (I'm not sure it is), but I don't see why it should be paramount.
...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. Funny, I had a possibly-unworkable opposite idea -- i.e., in cases where the national popular vote difference between the top 2 candidates, possibly after instant run-off, is within, say, 1%, the EC is the decider.
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. That they're just not efficiently distributed. It wasn't like she had 0% Rust Belt voters; she had roughly half of them. A change of merely 40,000 votes (out of > 100M cast) in just the right places and she wins the EC and the popular vote, roughly the same as Bush did in '04, when there was no outcry about the way the we do this.
Without the electoral college the United States would be dominated by regional parties...In part b/c of the EC, we have two bought-off national parties who function worse than a class of misbehaving 2nd graders. What are we clinging to? lol
