Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Does the electoral college really solve the problem of candidates focusing on only a few states?
In class today we learned about the original intent of the electoral college: to force presidential candidates to care about all states, not just the large ones. This made sense to me at first, that this does in a way help smaller states matter. But I thought about it more, and doesn't it just push the candidates to only care about the swing states? Most elections depend on the voting of these states, which promotes the favoritism that the electoral college was trying to fix in the first place. This can be seen with the hoard of presidental candidates visiting the Iowa (a swing state) State Fair in order to win Iowa's favor, something that would be unlikely to be seen in California or Wyoming. (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/13/iowa-state-fair-hillary-clinton-donald-trump) Most of these swing states are not small states, so in that regard, the electoral college fails too. They include Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. (http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/swing-states/) If the electoral college isn't serving its original purpose, why does it still exist? Is there another benefit of continuing to using it? If it was possible to get rid of the electoral college, what should replace it? Popular vote? Or possibly another system that would reduce favoritism?
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This is an interesting point that I never really thought of before. I had always assumed that the Electoral College caused presidential candidates to focus on small states and did not think that they would only focus on swing states. You seem to take a stance that the Electoral College is completely useless if it does not serve its purpose of causing presidential candidates to focus on small states. Even though this is a defect of the Electoral College and our political landscape at the moment, I still think the Electoral College is useful in other ways, as described by Allen Guelzo in the following website that discusses the Electoral College: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/in-defense-of-the-electoral-college. The Electoral College makes sure that rural interests are represented and that presidential candidates are not only elected by urban people (even if presidential candidates might not necessarily visit strong urban or strong rural places since presidential candidates are focusing on swing states). As a result, there will be more voter turnout overall because people in smaller states will feel that they have a chance to change the outcome of the election. If there was a popular vote, most small states would feel dejected as the larger states would always carry the winners. Although I do agree that the flaw you brought up warrants enough cause for potentially revising how the Electoral College works, I do not think the Electoral College should be completely disbanded due to how it still has some positives.
ReplyDeleteI think this is an interesting critique of the Electoral College. To discuss possible alternatives, I want to look at the difference in Elector College among states. Of the 50 states, 48 do a winner-takes-all style of voting, while Nebraska and Maine split the votes based on the state's popular vote (known as proportional voting)(https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/faq.html#wtapv). There have been 5 presidential elections where the president did not win popular vote, and this has a lot to do with states like California voting heavily in one direction while swing states had a much narrower margin but still gave all the Electoral College votes to one candidate. If more states were to adopt a proportional voting system, this would help make the Electoral College represent the wishes of the people. Also, this would go back to you point about making candidates visit every state: Republican candidates would still have a reason to go to California and fight for two or three extra Electoral College votes because now they only need to sway a part of the population, not the majority, to see an influence in their votes.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the electoral college really give an advantage to the swing states because their votes can change at any time, but the founding fathers back then didn't really think this far ahead and they created it so that if it wasn't working in the future, it is our job to fix that. The closest that the US has ever gotten to abolishing the electoral college is in the 91st congress, between 1969-70. Currently there is something called the national popular vote interstate compact where states can give their electoral votes to presidential election candidates if the states combined equal 270 or exceed it. However I feel like a proportional voting system would also be beneficial because it would encompass everyones interests, the small states and the big states.
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