So of course, now that the liberal academicians and their overly-influenced snowflakes, the students who should know better, have all retreated to their "safe zones" after the election, those of them who are the loud pampered ones have taken off toward the destruction of a venerable institution.
That would be, of course, the Electoral College.
[Note -- I suppose it would be wise at this point to recall that during Rush Week at the Phi Delta Theta house in 1972, as a senior, I was unforgettably amused when one of the incoming freshmen who pledged showed up with a sweatshirt titled "Electoral College Athletic Department." I think it is completely coincidental that he now lives in Canada.]
Several times in these pages I have written about people's propensity to "talk past each other" when they're arguing. This happens either when one side is so unalterably correct that the opposing voice needs to distract from the fact that they are losing the debate, sort of like "But Mussolini made the trains run on time", or "Castro certainly had a high literacy rate while mass-murdering his opposition, right?".
They also talk past each other when the topic has two separate components to it that complicate the argument. Such is the case with the Electoral College.
You see, here's the thing. There are indeed two completely separate things to argue regarding the Electoral College. The first is the whole "electors" thing, meaning the mechanics of each state physically casting its votes for the presidency based on which candidate got the most votes in the state. Since the electors are people too, we assume, and are not all legally bound as to whom they vote for, strange things could happen.
The other is probably most important, and that is the "popular vote" thing -- whether or not the candidate who gets the most votes across the country should be the president.
Of course, those two "things" get conflated all the time. While the "electors" thing is, by all accounts", somewhat of a relic of the 18th Century, the system of electors has become part of the voting argument, when it should in fact be about 406th in priority as to fixing what we may think is wrong with the nation.
So we are going to stay today on the "popular vote" thing, and since it is my column, you will pretty much hear one side. And I'll start by saying that nothing is going to change, not ever, never. The Constitution is not going to get amended, and I may even circle back to just why that is the case before I'm done here.
The 2016 campaign is actually surprising in terms of where the candidates did their campaigning. The past few cycles, the candidates had spent an inordinate amount of time in Florida and Ohio, with side trips to maybe 5-6 other states to say hello and then return to Florida and Ohio. And we understand why; those two states have the twin attributes of being populous (and therefore having a lot of electoral votes), and being politically balanced, such that the number of Democrat and Republican votes can be surprisingly equal.
In 2016, principally because of the phenomenon of Donald Trump running a very different campaign and running on a somewhat-different set of issues, a number of other states got actual candidate visits -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, North Carolina -- which was a breath of fresh air, at least depending on which one was speaking.
But it has been the truth for a long time that states like California and New York, which are large in electors but vote only for Democrats, never see a speech except on TV. Why would they? Even for someone like Trump who can do five or six rallies in a day, there is a finite amount of time, and none to waste on quixotic treks to states you won't win.
So, the argument goes, those states' voters get no attention and their needs are never met. Of course, if once in a while they might tease us and vote for Republicans, they might rise to the attention of a candidate. Same, I suppose, for Texas in the other direction.
And this is the bottom line as far as the popular vote goes. Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it, along with a whole set of unintended consequences. With the current state-based, proportional system, the candidates spend time only in toss-up states and, theoretically, the provincial needs of unwinnable or unloseable states are given no air.
But if you were to switch to a popular vote nationwide, you leave the frying pan and jump into the fire -- instead of states that are toss-ups and get attention, the candidates would speak only in big population centers, trying not so much to influence their thinking as simply to get them to the polls. Forty states would never see a candidate and, of course, only big urban centers (with lots of votes) would be promised anything. Rural states with scattered population would be electoral wasteland.
Nothing is going to change -- as I mentioned, the preponderance of the states being low-population, and a change requiring two-thirds of the states to ratify it, and the change being anathema to most states, no Constitutional amendment is going to happen. But at least you understand why. There is no moral superiority in disenfranchising one set of voters in favor of another.
And that is the argument that will always win the day. Unlike most colleges in this country, the Electoral College is free ... and working tolerably as it is.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There's a new post from Bob
at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving
new meaning to "prolific essayist." Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at
bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
No comments:
Post a Comment