The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
A good political rule of thumb is that any idea supported by Hillary Clinton, George Soros and Common Cause is a very, very bad thing.
But when former Senator Fred Thompson jumps on board, it boggles the mind.
The idea in question is the National Popular Vote (NPV) movement, which seeks, by an end run around the Constitution, to replace our current system of electing Presidents by the aggregate number of the electoral votes of the several states with a system that delivers the White House to whichever candidate garners the most popular votes nationwide.
The idea behind the NPV movement is simple: the current system is unfair, because each state gets an automatic 2 electoral votes by virtue of having two Senators, regardless of a state's population. Why, the thinking goes, should mighty California have only the same number of Senatorial votes as dinky Wyoming?
The answer is because the delegates to the original Constitutional convention wanted it that way. Before they signed, the delegates of the smaller states wanted to be sure that they had some mechanism to assure that the Republic wouldn't be totally dominated by the large states.
The NPV Compact is an agreement by states who legislatively opt in to cast all of their electoral votes for whichever candidate won the most popular votes nationwide. As of last month, the legislatures of Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia have signed on, accounting for 77 of the 270 electoral votes necessary for the compact to take effect.
In practice, implementation of NPV is unlikely to change the outcome of a Presidential election. But its effects would be insidious, indeed, for the red states of the South and the Middle West. Why should any Democrat candidate care about the concerns of Alabama or Kansas, when their votes will be swamped by California or New York? Under the system designed by the Founders, voters in small states must be wooed. Under NPV, they can be haughtily dismissed.
The late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, perhaps the last honest, patriotic Democrat politician on the national scene, clearly limned the perils of NPV when he said, “There would be genuine pressures to fraud and abuse. It would be an election no one understood until the next day or the day after, with recounts that go on forever, and in any event, with no conclusion, and a runoff to come. The drama, the dignity, the decisiveness and finality of the American political system are drained away in an endless sequence of contests, disputed outcomes and more contests to resolve outcomes already disputed. That is how legitimacy is lost."
NPV is a very bad idea. My question is why a very good man like Fred Thompson agreed to sign on as the movement's national Co-Chairman. Peter Robinson, you're a friend of Fred Thompson; could you invite him to explain himself on Ricochet?
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Comments :
May '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
If nothing else, it sure will make campaigning easier for the candidates, given they'll only need to hustle around CA, AZ, NM and TX if this thing goes into affect.
Jul '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
Well, I'm not certain about your selection. The bounty would come from increasing turnout in the big states - CA, TX, NY, FL, IL, PA, OH, MI, GA, NC, NJ, VA, WA and MA.
Of those, six states - CA, NY, IL, PA, NJ and WA are solidly blue and dominant in terms of population.
One, TX, is reliably red - for the time being.
And six - FL, OH, MI, GA, NC, VA - are battlegrounds.
Candidates can pretty confidently write off all the other states as either solidly red, solidly blue or too small to care. Ironically, we'd be going back to 13 states which determine the nation's direction.
May '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
Kenneth
Well, I'm not certain about your selection. · May 13 at 8:21am
The implication being that as the four southern border states, both parties will scramble to shore up their (lack of) border policies to ensure a steady stream of voters, ripe for the picking.
More of a quip, than analysis.
Oct '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
I also am flummoxed that Fred Thompson would lend himself to such a clear end run around the Constitution. This democratic (not the party) movement is the antithesis of the Founders expressed intention that a constitutional democratic republic was their goal.
Fred Thompson has just won the Woodrow Wilson Progressive Prize for Destructive Intent.
Jul '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
Our Founders were remarkable Visionaries, but did They ever think We would have States the size of California and TEXAS?
If worse comes to worse, TEXAS still has the Right to divide into five States [III. B. b. 2.] for more sway in the Senate.
Jul '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
raycon: I also am flummoxed that Fred Thompson would lend himself to such a clear end run around the Constitution. This democratic (not the party) movement is the antithesis of the Founders expressed intention that a constitutional democratic republic was their goal.
Fred Thompson has just won the Woodrow Wilson Progressive Prize for Destructive Intent. · May 13 at 8:40am
I'd really, really like to hear him explain himself.
Apr '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
I don't like the National Popular Vote idea, for the reasons listed above. I would, however, like to see more states (or at least my own state of Minnesota) move away from the winner-take-all system to the Congressional District Method used by Maine. There are districts in Minnesota where Republicans can win but our votes are swamped by the Democratic majority in the Twin Cities. It would give people living in more rural areas a fighting chance of having their presidential vote matter.
Jul '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
Maybe we should just do away with the Senate entirely. From the standpoint of liberals, it distorts Presidential elections. From the standpoint of conservatives, it gives too much power to crazy little blue states such as Vermont and Rhode Island, as well as schizophrenic states such as North Dakota and South Dakota, which have a nasty habit of sending liberals to the Senate.
After all, the 17th Amendment pretty much abolished the original reason for having Senators in the first place.
Oct '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
Repeal the 17th amendment !!!! Not possible?? Then why waste any time on the balanced budget amendment?? For that matter, let's simply give up. Some days I feel that way.
Mar '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
While I find the methodology of the NPV severely flawed, I fail to see how the Electoral College today forces candidates to fight in small states. Most of the "battleground" states of the last few elections (FL, PA, OH) are relatively large themselves.
Kenneth
Why should any Democrat candidate care about the concerns of Alabama or Kansas...
Do Democrat candidates really campaign in these states under our current system? I heard somewhere that the NPV is popular in many states because they never see any presidential candidates after the primaries, and would like at least some attention.
Mar '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
Electoral College: Candidates shower 10% of voters with 90% of their attention; ignore almost everyone else
National Popular Vote: Candidates play get-out-the-vote with their (hardcore) base.
I would also favor the Electoral College, but as a lesser of two evils.
Jan '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
What's interesting to me is that this whole discussion is about how political parties affect the Electoral College (EC), but the EC was installed before the evolution of political parties. We now discuss the election entirely in terms of party balance, but the EC had nothing to do with that. The EC was intended to balance small states against large, but now the battle is between a small number of large Democratic states against the rest of the country.
The election is distorted because the large Democrat majorities are forged by political machinery, not voter choice.
Chris Wallace (hardly a liberal) once said that he's a registered Democrat, because he lives in DC. In DC, the fall election between Democrats and Republicans is meaningless. The only time your voice is effectively heard is in the primary, so you register Democrat to participate in the primary. That's what party machinery forces you to do.
I know that most people assume that parties are inevitable, so we have to accept the current situation. But even if parties were inevitable (which I debate), that doesn't mean that THIS is the only system possible. We can do better.
May '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
KC,
Perhaps we can do better, but we won't do better by Californicating the presidential election, by effectively replacing it with a quadrennial national plebiscite. NPV assumes that the best system is a national election, ignoring our founding belief that the states should retain some measure of sovereignty and power. NPV really consolidates the Federal government's power grab of the twentieth century.
There are other reforms that could shake up entrenched power much more effectively. How about growing the size of the House of Representatives? Montana has nearly one million people and they get . . . one Congressman. Proportional representation schemes could mitigate some of the power of political parties, making it possible, say, for a Tea Party (or a Socialist) to seek a few seats in Congress weakening the existing conservative (or liberal) party. I'm also sympathetic to repealing the 17th Amendment (quixotic though that desire may be).
Discussing these sorts of theoretical tweaks makes for a nice parlor game, but is the procedural apparatus is so broke as to warrant the disruptions that would inevitably follow?
Edited on May 13, 2011 at 12:17pmMay '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
So under the Electoral College system, most states' legislatures choose a winner-take-all system in order to maximize their state's influence on the Presidential election in favor of the candidate chosen by their state's voters. How is this undemocratic?
The Electoral College has been reduced in importance to the point where the Electors (the people you are actually voting for) are not even listed on the ballot! They are simply represented by the name of the candidate they are pledged to.
Apr '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
I yield to no one in my opposition to the goal of NPV, but I think calling it an end run around the Constitution is mistaken. The Constitution clearly gives the right to state legislatures to figure out any way the like to choose the electors for the Electoral College. It's really the state legislators who are violating their duties to their constituents at the state level who are at fault.
Feb '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
NPV and the Electoral College are nothing other than mechanical mechanisms that to a large degree determine the strategies of the two parties. If you have NPV, both parties will change their strategies. What ultimately matters is candidates and message, not electoral mechanics. No state is reliably blue or reliably red -- it depends on candidates and circumstances. Obama was able to eat into the red zone because of candidates and circumstances. Next time, whoever the Republican is, they will be able to not only recapture the red zone lost, but eat into the blue because of circumstances. The success of doing so will depend on the candidate. I really would not get too excited about NPV. That's not where the real action is.
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
I am not surprised about Fred Thompson. The truth is that most of the politicians on our side are dopes -- ignorant of the reasoning that underpinned the framing of our Constitution, uninterested in learning about it, and confident that they can improve on it. Consider John McCain and the question of freedom speech. His view is that Congress can make any law it pleases regulating our freedom.
The electoral college forces those running for the Presidency (and, by way of indirection, those running for the nomination of each of the two parties) to pay close attention to the interests and concerns of people in the various and diverse states. In its absence, we could end up with regional parties.
Jul '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
I get excited about anything that's backed by Soros and Common Cause.
NPV is just the latest step in the long march away from true federalism to the centralization of our political system. The 17th Amendment stripped much of the states' sovereignty away; NPV seeks to finish the job.
Whenever we tinker with the Founders' original scheme, we do so at our peril. Isn't that understanding what conservatism is all about?
Edited on May 13, 2011 at 12:39pmJun '10
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
What I don't get is why any state would sign off on NPV. What does a state stand to gain in handing over additional sovereignty to the federal government, not to mention potentially "disenfranchising" the will of the people within their state?
Jan '11
Re: The Electoral College? Oh, That Old Thing?
Well, to be clear, I desperately want to break up the power of the current political parties. I honestly think parties are a myth like the Emperor's clothes; if you seriously sit back and examine them, their justifications disappear.
We don't need them. I don't think the disruptions would be very much at all.
So let me address the question squarely. Why do we need parties at all?
I pause for reply ...