JONATHAN CHAIT JULY 27, 2010
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Psychologists say that people genuinely do not form their opinions on issues by sorting through arguments and arriving at a conclusion. Instead, they arrive at a conclusion and then formulate reasons to justify their decision. You see this dynamic all the time, but it seems especially obvious when you examine the arguments of defenders of the electoral college. Rick Hertzberg takes apart a defense of the electoral college offered up at a Cato debate by Tara Ross:
Ms. Ross argues that N.P.V. would undermine the two-party system. She says that there would be “five, six, ten Presidential candidates in elections. There’s no reason for there not to be.” As a result, she says, we would end up with a President elected with fifteen per cent (“or it might be twenty per cent, or whatever”) of the popular vote.
In reality, there is a very good “reason for there not to be.” The domination of two large, coalition-like parties is a function of the fact that there can be only one winner of a Presidential election. If it were remotely true that popular-vote elections cause parties to proliferate, then you would expect to find examples of this phenomenon. Since all fifty states elect their governors this way, there ought to be at least a couple that have, or have ever had, this problem. If the problem is a function of size—the larger the electorate, the more likely parties are to proliferate—you would expect to find such proliferation in, say, at least one of the four largest states, each of which is more populous than the entire country was in 1840. You find no such thing. It doesn’t happen in California (pop. thirty-seven million), it doesn’t happen in Wyoming (pop. half a million), and it wouldn’t happen in the United States of America (pop. three hundred million).
So that argument is merely untrue. A second argument—that N.P.V. would empower regional candidates—goes further: it is the exact opposite of the truth. Do I really need to explain why awarding a hundred per cent of a state’s electors to the plurality winner in that state favors candidates whose appeal is regional as opposed to national? “The George Wallaces of the world, which right now have basically no impact on national elections, would have a much larger voice,” she argues. No impact? In 1968, Wallace, whose appeal was regional, got 13.5 per cent of the popular vote and 46 electoral votes. In 1992, Ross Perot, whose appeal was national, got 18.9 per cent of the popular vote and zero electoral votes.
Whatever mental process Ross was employing, it's pretty clear she did not set out by defining the important goals of an electoral system and then, through careful side-by-side comparison, arrive at the conclusion that the electoral college best achieves these ends. Rather, what you see in the defenses of the electoral college is usually an attempt to imagine some awful circumstance that could occur as a result of a national popular vote. Evidence that the awful thing would be more likely to happen under a popular vote regime, let alone grappling with the overall pros and cons of alternative systems, is not part of the process.
I suspect that two factors are at work here. The first is an attachment to the status quo and a reverence for American political institutions of all stripes, which is certainly commendable up to a point (the point being a recognition of when the institution has failed.) The second is Republican partisanship -- since 2000, many Republicans associate criticism of the electoral college with the delegitimization of the Bush presidency. That is to say, if we admit that the electoral college is unfair, then we admit that Al Gore was the rightful winner in 2000. That's also an understandable sentiment but not a good basis for defending an ineffective electoral mechanism.
14 comments
My worry is that with the dissolution of the Electoral College, presidential campaigns would be conducted even more than they already are in the most populous and electoral-rich states, hence even more in major metropolitan areas, with even more money being spent on ad buys in a relative handful of media markets. My longtime friend Tom P., whom I met in 1974 when I took philosophy and religion and logic and ethics classes from him, has long had the same concerns, and he is somewhat to the left of me.
- liberal reformer
July 27, 2010 at 4:53pm
@liberal reformer: "My worry is that with the dissolution of the Electoral College, presidential campaigns would be conducted even more than they already are in the most populous and electoral-rich states[.]" And how often do you see Presidential candidates visit the following metropolitan statistical areas during the general election? * Los Angeles/Orange County * San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose * Chicago * Houston * Dallas * San Antonio * Atlanta * Boston * NYC? And yet these MSAs represent 15-20 percent of the U.S. population. So I'd argue the electoral college allows Presidential candidates to ignore a lot of the U.S. population -- particularly urban issues such as mass transit, intercity rail, poverty, etc. -- because it gives "real America" a lot more power.
- jimbomoron
July 27, 2010 at 5:50pm
But, lib ref, two points: First, are you considering the alternative (i.e., how we do it today)? Are presidential campaigns evenly focused across all states and regions and type of community? Hardly. They're focused on swing states and swing counties within swing states -- the relatively few places that the E.C.'s arbitrary math assign arbitrary significance. Second, what exactly is wrong with focusing campaigns on the places where all the people are?! This is one of those arguments I never understood. The more populous places *should* have proportionally more influence, because they have more of the only political unit that ought to matter -- individual.
- JakeH
July 27, 2010 at 5:53pm
The sensible people of Nebraska and Maine allow their electors to vote based on the plurality in each congressional district. More states should be that sensible. THEN we would have truly national campaigns instead of everyone annoying voters in Ohio and Florida. Perhaps the selection method of electors should be the issue because the U.S. Constitution was hoping for truly independent, educated electors to temper the mood swings of the masses. As always, waiting for my hard copy of The New Yorker.
- K2K
July 27, 2010 at 5:53pm
But K2K, states are dumb for assigning their electors in this way -- they're lessening their influence. Why would they do this voluntarily? A spirit of democracy? What's next? States' agreeing to a constitutional amendment to have the Senate apportioned based on population?
- JakeH
July 27, 2010 at 6:11pm
@jimbo: They visit those areas all the time. How else do you think they raise the funds to pay for all their attack ads in Miami, Cleveland and Philadelphia? @K2K: What makes you think that congressional districts would be any more competitive than today's states? Besides, that approach would raise the stakes in Congressional redistricting. A better approach would be to allocate electoral votes by winning the national popular vote. The correct 20 states doing so could guarantee that winning the popular vote would equal winning the electoral vote (Just California, Texas, New York and Illinois gets you over 120 which is almost halfway there).
- sighthnd
July 27, 2010 at 6:18pm
Thank you for making an obvious point, sighthnd, but one that needed to be made, nonetheless.
- liberal reformer
July 27, 2010 at 6:54pm
"Second, what exactly is wrong with focusing campaigns on the places where all the people are?! This is one of those arguments I never understood. The more populous places *should* have proportionally more influence, because they have more of the only political unit that ought to matter." I agree wholeheartedly. How could it be a disaster if candidates treat voters like their votes are equal? That sounds like a (small 'd') democratic wet dream. I get why conservatives are against it -- that's just their utilitarian side kicking in. But I think liberal resistance to this is entirely misplaced.
- Fishpeddler
July 27, 2010 at 8:11pm
It would take a constitutional amendment to change the electoral college. And changing winner takes all would require every state's agreement. The simplest solution is expand the House of Representatives. That only takes a simpler act of Congress, no amendment, no super majorities. The overweighting of empty states would be reduced, and the electoral vote would more closely match the popular vote.
- vips73
July 27, 2010 at 9:37pm
Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution makes it very clear that popular vote is not required. "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors..." The 'winner take all' is up to each state as it stands, which is why Nebraska and Maine do it differently. Good luck getting the Constitution amended on anything these days, let alone the very clear original intent that the President is NOT supposed to be elected by popular vote because the Presidency is meant to be solely Commander in Chief, conducting foreign relations and appointment of judges and diplomats, and certainly NO influence in the business of Congress except for veto power. Things changed with FDR. And you wonder why the country is so polarized over the role of the federal government? Last time anyone tried to expand the House, it went badly. Too much entrenched power.
- K2K
July 27, 2010 at 10:00pm
How would we apportion the House of Representatives without the Electoral College ? Any ideas ? The Electoral College needs to be scraped. Combined with the Senate and its filibuster and unanimous consent rules conservative states have greatly disproportionate power. Big problem for progressives.
- alanwilkov
July 27, 2010 at 11:34pm
alanw "How would we apportion the House of Representatives without the Electoral College ?" The House is apportioned by the decennial Census, as stipulated in the Constitution, Article I, Section 2. The two Senate seats for each state was part of the Connecticut Compromise. As James Madison wrote: "The use of the Senate is to consist in proceeding with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom, than the popular branch." which was a more diplomatic phrasing than Edmund Randolph's point for the Senate "...to restrain, if possible, the fury of democracy." Almost all of the Founders feared placing too much power in the central Federal government or the fury of the masses, and all of them greatly feared the power of the Presidency, deliberately designed to be the weakest branch of government.
- K2K
July 28, 2010 at 1:42am
@K2K: " 'Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors...' " Exactly. So why not have a set of states award all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote? They are within their rights under Article 2 to do so and if a collection of states with 270 or more electoral votes does so, then winning the NPV would secure a minimum of 270 electoral votes and the election. As for basing electoral votes entirely on what happens within the state, it's worth considering how the current system came about. First why we have the electoral college in the first place. The founding fathers didn't trust the people to elect the president (or their senators, though that's irrelevant here) and so contrived a system of having leading citizens elect the president, apportioned to each state based on representation in Congress. As they weren't sure how to determine the leading citizens, they left it up to the states to do so. By the 1820's, one state decided to democratize its process by having an election to determine who its electors would be. Since no other state did so at the time, the only election that could apply was within the state. Other states joined over the next few decades and by the end of the century, every state established elections as their means to select electors (and early in the 20th century, the 17th Amendment established elections as the means to determine senators). At each point in that process, based on the information available at the time, the steps made sense or were at least defensible (leaving selection of the head of state for leading citizens can be defended when there had not yet been any examples of heads of state being elected by the people). Does that mean it makes sense as a system drawn from scratch or that we should reject a feasible proposal for a system that is functionally indistinguishable from one that we would draw from scratch.
- sighthnd
July 28, 2010 at 12:19pm
It's a ridiculous system, and if we had the popular vote today and someone suggested the electoral college it would be laughed at. But the idea of doing it by congressional district is even worse. The problem is that Democrats tend to live in clusters and so in an even election, a majority of congressional districts will always go to the Republicans. I remember reading somewhere that if we all used Maine and Nebraska's system, Bush would still have beaten Gore, Nixon would have beaten Kennedy and Ford and Carter would have tied, even though Carter won the popular vote by 2%. If it produced a systematic slant toward Democrats, I would be equally opposed. Any system that generates deviations from the popular vote, especially ones that systematically favor one party, is bad.
- WillPastor
July 28, 2010 at 12:48pm