permafrost Loc: Minnesota

... Patrick O'Neill

Why would a political science professor in a California university say that there is no reason for the e*******l college in modern America?

As a threshold matter, I’m going to bet that the professor in question has already given the answer. So, you know, Google is your friend.

But to answer the question: wh**ever it is you think the E*******l College does or was supposed to do, it doesn’t actually do that.

What you think it does:

The most common explanations I see are something along the lines of “the EC protects small states” or “the EC protects rural states.” If not for the EC, people would only campaign in/pay attention to big cities and/or big states. Leaving aside the actual history or desirability, that at least is a coherent theory of the EC is supposed to do. Does it do that?

Well, here’s a map* of where the candidates campaigned in 2016 general e******n:

Just six states (Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan) accounted for 3/4 of the visits. Five of those state are in the top ten for population (and, coincidentally, e*******l v**es), while the sixth, Virginia, is all the way down at 12 for population. Of the 10 smallest states, New Hampshire is the only one that really got any love. So the “pay attention to small states” theory doesn’t seem to really hold water. Of the ten states with the highest percentage of rural residents, only Mississippi (1) and Maine (3) got any visits at all. So “pay attention to rural states” doesn’t seem to be working either.

Functionally, what the EC does is force candidates to go to the 8–12 largest swing states. There does not seem to be a real, principled reason why Ohio and Pennsylvania deserve significantly more attention than Illinois or Georgia, or why Florida gets more attention than California or New York. It is tactically advantageous to campaign in those states because of 21st century partisanship, but that doesn’t really seem like what the Framers had in mind.

We might also note that under the EC system the presidents themselves tend to come from the largest states: in the last century only two presidents came from states that were in the bottom half in terms of population (Clinton/Arkansas and Eisenhower/Kansas), with about half of the total coming from New York, California, or Texas.

*94% of 2016 P**********l Campaign Was in Just 12 Closely Divided States

permafrost Loc: Minnesota

These both are courtesy of Slatten for any who wondered..

What the Framers had in Mind:

People make a lot of claims about what the Framers wanted the E*******l College to do. We can actually read the notes from the Philadelphia Convention to find out, but people decline to do this for reasons that are beyond me.

The first key thing to remember is that the Framers didn’t actually think of the E*******l College as being particularly desirable in itself: it was a compromise between delegates who wanted the legislature to choose the executive and delegates who wanted some form of popular input. The E*******l College was a fairly last-minute kludge

The second thing to remember is that the EC as originally conceived was a catastrophic fuck-up that caused a constitutional crisis on the second competitive e******n. They slapped together a quick fix (the 12th Amendment), but at no time until very recently did anyone think this was the result of great wisdom by the Framers. It more or less worked after the fix (1876 notwithstanding), so we all decided that good enough was good enough.

All that being said, the problems that the E*******l College was intended to solve don’t actually exist any more. If you actually read the debates, there were basically three objections to the popular v**e, which had been proposed by James Wilson.

The first two were interrelated - there was some concern about (1) how v**ers would know about candidates, and (2) whether they were competent to make good choices about candidates. As a practical matter these concerns haven’t really been politically relevant since the rise of Jacksonian democracy and newspapers by the 1820s, but another important thing to remember is that the people writing the Constitution didn’t actually know that much about democracy. These concerns are totally irrelevant today, with the potential exception of Sen. Mike Lee.

The third issue, which James Madison mentions as one of the major points of conflict, is that in the 1790s the states had wildly different criteria for who could v**e, which skewed direct se******n of the president in the direction of larger Northern states without property qualifications for e*****rs. In particular, Southern s***e states didn’t have many v**ers, so would be at a disadvantage. The E*******l College system flipped that, giving disproportionate power to s***e states, which is why so many presidents came from Virginia

To keep folks from yelling at me in the comments, here’s what Madison had to say about the issue (it’s from his semi-official notes so he refers to himself in the third person:

The people at large was in his opinion the fittest in itself. It would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. The people generally could only know & v**e for some Citizen whose merits had rendered him an object of general attention & esteem. There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the e******n on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of e*****rs obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

The Professor Said It Because It’s True

The E*******l College doesn’t do what people think it does, and either doesn’t do the things it was designed to, or else we just don’t care about those things anymore. It is a jury-r****d solution to 18th century problems, and its only modern function is to channel political campaigns and p**********l attention to an arbitrary set of largish swing states, with the bonus feature of occasionally and at random awarding the presidency to the person who fewer v**es.

There’s no evidence this channels p**********l campaign attention in a way that either party finds desirable or optimal outside of the constraints of the system. President Trump got more v**es in Los Angeles County than he did in Mississippi. There are a lot of rural v**ers in Illinois, California, Georgia, and Alabama that both parties could be paying attention to, but don’t under the current system. If candidates were out there trying to get actual v**ers, you’d see Democrats swing through Cheyenne and Salt Lake City and Republicans campaigning in upstate New York and Louisiana. It’s not at all clear to me why all of those folks are less worthwhile than people in Pennsylvania and Arizona suburbs, but perhaps James Madison had a compelling premonition of Scottsdale he forgot to share with us.

roy

They didn't every seem this muddied,there has always been questions, but now we have trump ,as his niece said ,it will be scorched earth ,he lost and he want give a dam how much damage he does and We are seeing it in real life.