willhsmit
Rookie
Posts: 33
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« on: October 18, 2004, 10:05:16 PM » |
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It depends -- in the short term (the immediate election), you benefit if you support the minority party and lose if you support the majority party. In the long term, one might argue that you lose state clout by making your state a less tempting target for presidential candidates. So, one would assume that the proposition would be opposed by the majority of the voters, if they viewed the question in pure party/state self-interest.
As an interesting point, if the whole country moved to voting by CD, I calculate that Bush would have won 290-246 (with 1 district in FL and 1 in TN ambiguous left gray in the Atlas for 2000). So, voting by CD is definitely not the cure to matching the Popular and Electoral votes.
Bush's greater margin can be attributed to the fact that he has more support in small states, and the EV advantage for small states is unaffected by the way electors are distributed within a state. Further, smaller states are more likely to deliver their CD's overwhelmingly to the state winner than large states, because the CD's tend not to be as differentiated. (A state with 30-50 can have pure urban, pure rural, and pure suburban districts, while a state with less than 10 will probably have more uniformity). It's hard to tell how gerrymandering plays into this.
Using proportional distribution on a state-by-state basis is harder to compute, but I think it would have given Bush a narrow victory in 2000. It might be narrow enough that he would have lacked an overall majority, though.
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