It's time to graduate from the Electoral College!
Why the Electoral College doesn't make sense for anyone
Most people know that the Electoral College is not good for the United States of America. However, change is hard.
The basic problem of electoral reform is that most of the people in power have an interest in maintaining the system that brought them into power in the first place. For the Electoral College, the majority in favor of abolishing the system have been opposed by a revolving coalition consisting of the minority of people who mistakenly believed the Electoral College helped them.
Today, many people believe three key myths about the Electoral College:
The Electoral College protects the interests of small states.
The Electoral College was designed to protect the interest of rural voters.
The Electoral College is a boon to Republicans.
My book was written to help implode these protective myths.
The Electoral College is a chaotic mess of a system; Republicans happen to have been lucky in a few recent electoral cycles, but there is no real enduring advantage held by either political party, and it is in the interests of both political parties to switch to a less chaotic system.
Remember the “blue wall” that so many people believed in back in 2015, and was supposed to guarantee a Democratic lock on the 2016 election? Whenever a key political group comes to believe the Electoral College is truly helpful to their cause, they are proven wrong in due time.
Fifty years ago, the Electoral College was defended by a key coalition of urban minority politicians in the North and segregationists in the South. Today, urban minority voters are largely ignored by presidential campaigns, and the 1968 election proved to be the last gasp of the Dixiecrats in trying to run a regional candidate for leverage.
In 1856, many pro-slavery politicians believed that the Electoral College protected against the election of an anti-slavery president. Then Lincoln was elected, and was elected in such a way that made it clear that 40% of the population (concentrated in the North) could force an anti-slavery president into power no matter how the South voted. The result was a civil war.
The myths that protect the Electoral College today are largely wrong, just as they were back in 1856 and 1968. Strip away the myths, and you’ll see clearly that maintaining the Electoral College is only in the interest of a revolving cast of a few key battleground states.