Predictions? Let's Have It!

[ActivitiesGuy]

@Alrightmiami19c

Specifically, why did it makes sense at the founding and not now?

^Sorry man - I wasn’t really reading this board yesterday. Didn’t mean to blow you (and one or two others who have asked about this) off.

IMO, the reason it made sense at the founding is pretty obvious. @DoubleDuce wrote a nice description of this in a previous thread, so I’ll drop his words in here:

@DoubleDuce

To understand it, you must first understand the original intent. Originally, there weren’t really parties. People voted on local representatives that then all got together, debated, and decided on a president. So you voted on a representative in the debate and ultimate election process. The idea is that people in the states know their local representatives better and can trust more in electing an educated knowledgeable person with similar local interests to represent them in that actual election of a president. That’s why it’s there and why it started, though in the modern day bastardized version, it no longer serves that purpose.

It also, because senate seats are not weighted by population, slightly increases the say of people in smaller states helping to prevent small rural areas from being trampled by larger denser population centers who have vastly different interests. It does still serve this purpose.

(Emphasis mine)

In 1785, without Google, Facebook, television, radio, and so on - it was a lot harder to have any idea what the Presidential candidates planned to do, what their history was, etc. So a model where people elected a local representative to stand their area’s interests made a lot of sense.

Today, that’s kind of silly. In five minutes I can take one of any number of available “Which candidate do you align with?” quizzes to figure out which candidate better represents my personal interests. I can watch video of both candidates to decide which one has better hair, if such things matter to me. We don’t need a local representative to decide which candidate better represents our personal and regional interests because we all have access to information to determine that ourselves.

I’m going to flip raj’s Hillary-ran-up-the-score-in-California point around. If part of the problem is that GOP voters don’t turn out in states like California because they know the state is going blue no matter what (this is equally true of blue voters in deep-red states, by the way) then getting rid of the Electoral College and going by popular vote would let their voices be heard and encourage California Republicans to come out and vote for their preferred candidate. If we did away with the Electoral College, every vote would actually count the same, and candidates would actually have to campaign to “everybody” instead of just the seven or eight states that are expected to be tightly contested. Candidates would actually consider looking for ways to engage voters from states on “the other side” instead of just conceding that they’re going to lose that one and looking for a “path to 270.”

(Incidentally, if all states awarded their electoral votes more like Nebraska or Maine - by congressional district - I would find this at least somewhat more palatable…the winner-take-all model by state is what I find most absurd, so winning a state by 0.2% counts the same as winning an equivalent-sized state by 15%)

DoubleDuce does make the point that the EC being slightly weighted towards less-populous states still serves a purpose, and that’s fair. In the golden age of statistics and Big Data, surely a team full of smart statisticians with expertise in sampling methodology could work out a way to sustain that slight tilt favoring less densely-populated areas.