Reblogged:Did the Electoral College Dumb Down the GOP?

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Richard Hanania makes a "conservative case" for abolishing the Electoral College, which is interesting for two reasons. First, as one can see from at least ten posts here on the subject over the years, it is typically a leftist project to do this. Second, while I disagree that doing so is necessarily a good idea, the post does make some very interesting points on what I would call an emerging phenomenon of our system of electing Presidents in the context of cultural deterioration since the Founding.

The gist of Hanania's argument is that, by effectively disenfranchising millions of Republican voters in deep blue states, while disproportionately amplifying the preferences of voters in the declining Midwest, the Electoral College is incentivizing the GOP to cater to older (hence, more change-resistant), less-educated, and more passive voters than it otherwise would.

Two passages should suffice to get this point across. First, here is how more educated, younger, more dynamic voters from "blue states" end up getting ignored:

People usually think of the senate and electoral college in terms of how much voice they give to conservatives versus liberals, or rural versus urban residents. Yet these institutions also change the balance of power within our two major political tribes.

Consider that in 2020, the state that provided the most votes to Trump wasn’t Florida or Texas, but California. Trump got more votes in New York than Nebraska, Idaho, West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Alaska combined.

...

[T]he bulk of right-wing voters in blue states aren’t WSJ writers or tech visionaries but regular Americans who don’t want to ban abortion but dislike crime and wokeness and want lower taxes. It is they who are most disenfranchised by the electoral college, and the fact that Republicans don’t feel the need to appeal to them stops their numbers from expanding. [bold added]

And second, with the continued decline of the Rust Belt, the type of voters there has been changing:

I think the outsized role that the Midwest now plays in our politics due to electoral college considerations has been a quite negative development. This is a region that is conservative in the worst sense. As the US deindustrialized, many people moved to areas with nicer weather and better economic opportunities. The ones who stayed in places like Michigan and Wisconsin are disproportionately passive and want to be taken care of. If there was no electoral college, then a citizen moving from Wisconsin to Texas doesn’t make his vote less valuable. But as things stand, he ceases to matter in presidential elections, and candidates continue to court his poorer and less ambitious brother who stayed home. Republicans in the Trump era have been losing ground in states that are younger and more dynamic like Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, and Virginia, which ironically grew in the first place due to a history of conservative economic policies, while gaining ground in the Midwest, turning former blue states into swing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), and what were previously swing states reliably red (Ohio and Iowa). Florida is one major exception as a state that has done well while trending red instead of blue. [bold added]

These are good observations, but as much as I wish the GOP (or either party, really) gave a fig about voters like me, I have serious reservations about ditching the Electoral College.

Without going into a lengthy analysis, I'll just list my reservations below. Broadly, I'd say my objections fall into two categories: (1) the proposal is a band-aid for a symptom of a deeper problem, and (2) the proposal could cause other big problems we simply don't have yet.

Here they are, all together. I think it's easy enough to see which category each would fall into without me having to segregate them:

• The Electoral College was originally intended to be something of a deliberative body, rather than a coarser-grained version of a popular vote. This change has caused it to become more "democratic" in the bad sense of the term, namely that it is not populated by the best each state can offer, but by proxies chosen based on the popular whim of the moment. Perhaps, rather than abolishing it, we should consider making it more deliberative again.
• Even if the Electoral College were returned to something more like it was originally intended to be, the problem would remain that politics flows from culture, which is a product of the philosophical premises most people hold (usually implicitly). This means that more benighted states are more likely to choose more benighted electors, but far from being a reason to abolish the electoral college, it's an argument that the problem lies deeper than that particular institution.
• Speaking of which: Hanania's whole argument assumes a two-party system. I have heard -- I don't know where -- that the parties in our system are analogous to coalitions in parliamentary systems. This seems like an imperfect analogy, as there seems much less fluidity over time. Nevertheless, might such a radical change to our system lead to more instability than we might bargain for?
• Related, the odds of a tie would go from minuscule to zero if we abolished the Electoral College. Considering the poor quality of the choices in our current race, I wouldn't want a tie to be impossible. I like the idea that either one of these clowns can enter office unable to pretend to have a mandate.
• Speaking of mandates, as imperfect as the current operation of the electoral college is, it does avert the need for runoffs and prevents us from regularly having Presidents elected by mere pluralities. Since the President is not the same thing as a Prime Minister and is our commander-in-chief, it is good to have a way to quickly and decisively choose a winner, mandate or not. At the very least, abolishment of the Electoral College would need coupling with something like ranked-choice voting.
• Hanania's disenfranchisement argument to the contrary, the electoral college preserves the strength of the individual voter by requiring candidates to appeal to broader sections of the country. In this election, if either party had fielded a candidate with a more centrist platform and who could be bothered to reach beyond his base, is there any doubt such a candidate could still win in a blowout?
• The Electoral College quarantines electoral disputes.

My weakest-looking argument would be preservation of voting strength, but I think the poor quality of the Trump-Harris choice is what's making it look weak. A traditional Republican would walk all over Harris, and a Clintonesque or even center-left Democrat would do the same to Trump.

That said, the problems Hanania raises demonstrate rather starkly the dependence of our form of government on a populace that can appreciate and uphold it.

-- CAV

Link to Original

[DavidOdden]

Who the hell cares whether abolishing the Electoral College is a left-wing idea or a right-wing idea, the only question that should be asked is whether it is a good idea or a bad idea. Given the structure of the US Constitution and surrounding laws, the question has to be more specific: “repeal X and add Y”. Art. II sec. 1 needs a massive rewriting and the 12th Amendment must be repealed. Presumably, whoever, nationally, gains the largest number of votes would win, diversity of votes would no longer be an issue.

Now, why would direct election be a good or bad thing? The tradeoff seems to be between “representing the views of the greatest number of voters, irrespective of where they live” versus factoring in the “interests” of individual states. Since states do not have rights therefore have no legitimate interests in controlling who is president, that would seem to be the loosing proposition. Mob rule is not a good thing, but direct election, as we have with congressmen, is not mob rule.

Still, having mentioned congressmen and since we are in the mood for democracy, why do we have senators and representatives elected on a state-by-state basis? This leads to a massive democratic imbalance that the ratio of electors-to-senators is extremely high for California and extremely low for Wyoming, by orders of magnitude. Why should the few citizens of Wyoming have the same aggregate political power as the myriad citizens of California – the Senate is by nature extremely un-democratic. The reason, as we know, is that this device was installed so as to hard-code the notion of “states rights”.

The only “truly democratic” system would be geography-independent direct election of a chief executive and a body of legislatures. This is how the Knesset is elected, and the Dutch House of Representatives (but not their Senate). One substantial flaw with that system is that one votes for a party, not a candidate. I would rather buy a pig in a poke rather than a pig in a poke claimed to be locked in a truck parked in some missile silo.

It is inevitable that nearly half the voters will “get ignored”, unless we also demand a supermajority in order to be elected president (not a good idea, in case you were wondering). Even with a supermajority requirement, many voters would “get ignored”, i.e. their candidate would lose. Anti-democratic appeals to the horrors of influence by older (younger) less- (better-)educated, affluent (impoverished) masses could be accommodated (pandered to) by assigning every voter a government-determined weighting – rich people’s votes count 1.2, poor people’s votes count 0.8 (or the opposite).

I propose an amendment to the saying “don’t fix it if it’s not broken”. Instead, “don’t fix it if you don’t have a clearly thought-out and principled alternative”.

[necrovore]

The Constitution has multiple systems of checks and balances and the electoral college is one of them.

States don't have rights per se, but the individuals in those states do, and the purpose of giving states equal representation in the Senate (for example) is so that more populous states don't become lords over the less populous states.

Of course it would help a lot more if people couldn't infringe the rights of others merely by voting for those infringements, but the Constitution (unlike Objectivism, which came later) largely leaves open the question of how those rights are supposed to be identified in the first place.