Rural States flex their Muscles - Part 2
In honor of today's coronation of Donald Trump through the quadrennial Electoral College rubber-stamping process, we thought it best to continue with last week's discussion.
We previously spoke about the density disadvantage, and how the winner-take-all allocation in the Electoral College penalizes States with high amounts of urban voters. In order to set the stage for this conversation, let's offer a brief history lesson about how the winner-take-all method came into practice, and why it is still used today. This piece by FairVote is an excellent primer. The abridged version is that our Constitution allows States to choose whichever method they like for selecting their Electors. At the outset of the Republic, State legislatures would either choose their Electors without any popular input, or they would apportion Electors based on popular votes in each legislative district (a practice still used by Maine and Nebraska). However, Virginia went towards a winner-take-all system in the 1800 election, securing the White House for their hometown hero: Thomas Jefferson. That began a cascading effect in which every State was forced to follow suit for fear of becoming less important in ultimately choosing the President.
The winner-take-all approach seemed uncontroversial until Al Gore defeated George W. Bush in the 2000 Presidential election, but lost in the Electoral College. Now, given the shock of the Trump victory, the winner-take-all method is responsible for the second popular vote upset in just the last 5 Presidential elections. Hillary Clinton's record 2.9 million vote margin of victory over Donald Trump makes for the largest popular vote lead ever held by an Electoral College loser, compared to Al Gore's more modest margin of around 500,000 votes.
Given the growing frustration with the winner-take-all system, we wondered, "how bad could it get?" In other words, how widely could the popular vote winner's margin grow while still losing the Electoral College? We performed a simple simulation to study the most egregious possible Electoral College outcomes. Our calculations used the follow basic rules:
The total population of the United States is 320 million (2016 estimate)
The total number of registered voters is 230 million (2016 estimate), or about 70% of the population
Every State aside from California has 3 million residents, adding up to 150 million (hypothetical)
California has all remaining residents, adding up to 170 million (hypothetical)
Every State has a 60% voter turnout (2016 estimate)
Every State except California votes Republican by a 51 to 49 percent margin (hypothetical)
California votes Democrat by any margin, which we can adjust to study outcomes
Electors are apportioned using the current rules, with 2 per State for Senators and 1 per Representative (about 735,000 residents per district in this case), in a winner-take-all fashion.
The District of Columbia is treated as a regular State for our purposes.
There are 538 Electors total (100 Senators, 435 Representatives, 3 from D.C.)
Electors are apportioned in whole number increments (rounded down to nearest 2 decimals)
In this simulation, we can very quickly see the effects of the winner-take-all system by simply dialing California up to a 99 to 1 percent Democratic margin of victory. Under that scenario, the Democratic candidate would beat the Republican by a whopping 68 million votes, while still losing the Electoral College 300 to 238! This would mean that a Republican candidate who received only 24% of the ballots cast, or a measly 10% of the votes from all eligible voters, would be given the keys to the White House (along with the nuclear codes). Even if we dial down the margin of victory for the Democrat in California to 62 to 38 percent, in order to reflect the actual numbers for 2016, our simulation would still show a popular vote lead of nearly 16 million voters in an Electoral College defeat.
We can plainly see, through this trivial example, how dangerous the winner-take-all system has become in the process of disenfranchising massive numbers of urban voters. There is a clear advantage given to those who can barely win a plurality in a large number of States, whereas there is no advantage to generating large vote counts in fewer States, even if they have large populations (i.e. the density disadvantage). Given the heavy inclination of urban voters to choose the Democratic candidate, and the increasing desire for left-leaning millennials to move to American cities, this problem will only continue to get worse--and vastly more undemocratic--if we don't have a national consensus to end this archaic institution.
In an upcoming post, we'll discuss how this exact same phenomena is in effect within our Congressional and State legislative districts, which has made the process of gerrymandering so much more potent as a weapon of voter suppression. Stay tuned...