This won’t likely come up in Arizona, since Romney got the electoral votes here, but the Republican plan that Josh Marshall described on TPM yesterday is some wildly sinister stuff:
To review, here’s how it works. The US electoral college system is based on winner take all delegate allocation in all but two states. If you get just one more vote than the other candidate you get all the electoral votes. One way to change the system is go to proportional allocation. That would still give some advantage to the overall winner. But not much. The key to the Republican plan is to do this but only in Democratic leaning swing states — not in any of the states where Republicans win. That means you take away all the advantage Dems win by winning states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and so forth.
But the Republican plan goes a step further.
Rather than going by the overall vote in a state, they’d allocate by congressional district. And this is where it gets real good, or bad, depending on your point of view. Democrats are now increasingly concentrated in urban areas and Republicans did an extremely successful round of gerrymandering in 2010, enough to enable them to hold on to a substantial House majority even thoughthey got fewer votes in House races than Democrats.
In other words, the new plan is to make the electoral college as wired for Republicans as the House currently is. But only in Dem leaning states. In Republican states just keep it winner take all. So Dems get no electoral votes at all.
I might be one of the few people who actually believes the Electoral College largely works in its existing form, but this sort of super-gerrymandering is ridiculous. Here’s a simpler pro-tip for the Republican Party: if you’d like to win the presidency, don’t run somewhat-clueless candidates that don’t reflect modern America. Might be a bit easier than rewriting state constitutions across the country.
Actually, maybe not. I take it back, this might be the best strategy, even though it sucks.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2013.
One of the reasons why the Electoral College has remained in effect for all of these years is because it is assumed that all of the swing states benefit so greatly from the attention and advertising dollars, that no politician from these states would advocate eliminating it. However, if the state republicans are willing to sacrifice the attention and money that comes from these contests, then they can not logically oppose shifting to a popular vote, at least not on those grounds. This could be a unique opportunity to push for the elimination of the Electoral College. Sign the petition at:
http://wh.gov/yd76
Spread the word. Let’s make this the first petition to hit the new threshold of 100k signatures. Thank You.
Yeah I need an ID to purchase a gun but not to vote hee hee
Popular vote is the only fair way to do it in these times. If you live in a predominately Republican or Democratic state and you’re of a different view your vote doesn’t count.
I never would have imagined that a Republican could devise a plan that would only benefit their own party. Since I live in a cave and the only network I receive with any clarity is Fox News, I guess that I may be biased.
we have to get our country back any way we can, it is rapidly going down the toilet! soon we will be past the point of no return! unless we want to just declare bankruptcy and not pay back any of our debt! i an reg. rep. but blame bush, his 8 yrs. in office really hurt our country and now obama is going to finish us off!
seems legit
Them little dirty tricksters! What do they except, falling all over themselves with Romney as their #1 candidate. It’s these types of moves that make people change party affiliations.
to my 2 dislikes: It is called sarcasm people.. “ya gots ta chill”