Is this the year that Americans toss over the electoral college?
I’ve laid out the math several times before, arguing that the antiquated electoral college that we use to decide presidential elections can skew the outcome dramatically.
In the past few election cycles, the unfair distribution of electoral college votes — giving a disproportionate number of votes to small, rural states — tended to favor Republicans.
It also had the unfortunate effect of causing candidates to essentially ignore many of the country’s biggest, most important states. When was the last time a presidential candidate barnstormed through California or New York?
Instead, they wind up thumping around in Iowa, Nevada and New Hamsphire.
But this year the paradigm has shifted in interesting and equally troubling ways.
Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney are locked in a tie in the national polls — literally hovering within the margin of error for weeks.
Yet Obama holds a commanding lead (yes, still) in the electoral college math. The Democrat currently leads by 5 points or more in states that give him enough 271 EC votes, enough to win.
(He leads by narrower margins in states that would give him 332 electoral votes, a landslide.)
There is clearly a disconnect here, a distortion of the national mood by the mechanism we use to choose our most important public official.
So here’s my question: If Obama is re-elected, despite the fact that Mitt Romney wins the popular vote, will we finally abandon the electoral college system? As always, your comments welcome.
Tags: election12, electoral college
Brian, you are dead wrong on a number of points. In the first place, the Electoral College cannot be “abandoned” without amending the Constitution.
The Electoral College system guarantees that small (low population) states do not lose their “voice” in presidential elections. Also, given that electoral votes (equal to a state’s representation in Congress) are apportioned according to population, it ensures that the most populous states have a proportionally greater influence on the results.
It is a genius solution that serves both large and small states. Without it, we would soon have a true minority president, one with say, only 30% of the popular vote. This way, the winner must have a clear majority, albeit not necessarily of the popular vote.
By the way, the reason candidates don’t campaign much in NY has nothing to do with the Electoral College and everything to do with the extremely unlikely prospect of the state voting for a Republican candidate.
You need to remember one of the reasons for the electoral college was to protect the country from stupid voters.
If Romney were to win the popular vote but Obama were to win the electoral college and thus the presidency, it would be proof the founding fathers were correct in doing what they did.
Pete, that is so not the reason for the Electoral College. The Founding Fathers saw the country in terms of states and tried very hard (succeeding brilliantly) to balance the interests of both small and large states.
By the way, your anti-Romney comments, which seem to be based on nothing more than a visceral hatred of the man, make you sound ridiculous. You should stick to substantive issues; there’s plenty of material there.
“the reason candidates don’t campaign much in NY has nothing to do with the Electoral College and everything to do with the extremely unlikely prospect of the state voting for a Republican candidate.”
States don’t “vote”, except in the sense of the electoral college. So if candidates are skipping a state because that state won’t vote for them, that IS a product of the EC.
Candidates do not “waste” their time in NY given that no Republican presidential candidate in recent years has won the state’s popular or electoral vote. They concentrate their campaign efforts in states where the vote is thought to be close. It has nothing to do with the EC.
Seems like you are talking about some sort of a state by state popular vote system.
Most people, when talking about the popular vote, refer to the national popular vote. You don’t win states in a system like that. The candidate who gets the most popular votes – total, throughout the country – wins. In that system, the people who vote republican in NY State begin to count again… even if they are outnumbered in their state.
Larry…First I am aware that changing the EC system would require amenxing the Constitution…something we have done repeatedly to improve the voting system. We now have direct elections for US senators and allow women to vote. And of course the EC syztem is to blame for candidates ignoring NY anx CA. Ic candixates were looking for votes…rather than EC wins…they would work to boost votes and turnout in these places…even if they couldnt win 51% of the vote. Is it a distortion that North Dakota means more to a GOP candidate than NY? Sure. Brian…NCPR
I can’t imagine the US ever jettisoning the EC, no matter how much sense it might make. It takes a Constitutional Amendment, and that means (for proposal) that a Supermajority (75%) in the House and Senate propose it. The House might go for it but the Senate would never reach 75 votes – small population states like Hawaii, Alaska, Wyoming, RI, NH, VT, CT etc. would never go for it. The populations of those states (except CT, since it is close to NYC) would be nearly irrelevant in a national popular vote campaign. Sure, every vote counts in a national popular vote contest, but a smart campaigner would spend all of his/her time in big TV markets, big cities etc.
Another way would be to make every state count equal – the winner of a majority of votes in a majority of states wins. Then, it would be cost effective to spend all the campaign time and gold on the little states – easier to reach the majority of voters in those. You could end up with a winner that lost the national popular vote by a large margin.
It is interesting that the drafters of the Constitution anticipated all this – the problems haven’t changed. The Electoral College is a kluge, but it is likely to stay for the simple reason that in any change, some interest will lose. It does mean, alas, that some US Citizens votes count more than others.
Larry, smile some. Romney in a top hat was a joke.
Brian, I questioned your knowledge about amending the Constitution because the title, “Is this the year that Americans toss over the electoral college?” seemed to imply that such a change could be made summarily and without the process of amending the Constitution.
Of course the EC system is to blame….. Says who? “Common knowledge” is often wrong and is often based on who shouts the loudest. Don’t you think Romney would love to win the popular and electoral votes in NY and that he would campaign vigorously if he thought there was the slightest chance he could win either?
Basing the presidential election on the popular vote alone raises the spector of a true minority president or a president who was the choice of only a few very populous states. It’s a question of balance and the EC certainly provides it.
Pete, It’s hard to tell where the sniping stops and the jokes begin. My apology for not getting it.
“In the past few election cycles, the unfair distribution of electoral college votes — giving a disproportionate number of votes to small, rural states — tended to favor Republicans.”
Ha! If it didn’t favor the Republicans, you media types wouldn’t even be mentioning it.
Any political advantage the Dems have is ok, apparently.
JDM, you’re not paying attention– this year the Electoral College is favoring the Democratic candidate, and Brian is mentioning it.
by all means of get rid of it. I realize Larry thinks that we should keep it because the Founders were geniuses who could do no wrong, (unless, of course you count slavery, right of women vote, treatment of the Native Americans, etc.) but I’m not persuaded. In fact, I would go further and adopt the presidential system in France which not only has a popular vote but also has runoff elections if no candidate gets over 50%.
The important thing should not be where you get votes but how many votes you get.
Until it’s changed, perhaps voters should refuse to vote for any candidate who refuses to visit their state.
The current system doesn’t benefit big states or small states. It benefits close states. Vermont or Wyoming are no more likely to get presidential candidate attention than Texas or New York. Though it does matter in one sense: the vote of a Vermonter counts a lot more than a New Yorker. If you factor in the total number of voters and the number of electoral votes per state, a New Yorkers’ vote in 2008 was only worth about 70.7% of a Vermonters’ vote. Though the greatest disparity in the election was the Californian whose vote was only worth 18.4% of the Wyominger.
So much for all Americans are equal under the law. But that’s because under the EC, we don’t vote as Americans for America’s president.
The electoral college (EC) was a brilliant solution for 18th century realities but it’s an anachronism today. Whatever its alleged benefits, it CAN NO LONGER WORK AS THE FOUNDERS INTENDED.
As conceived by the authors of the Constitution, EC electors were supposed to use their own judgment to elect the best candidate, not necessarily the person who got the most votes. Yet in about half the states, electors are REQUIRED BY LAW to vote for whomever they were pledged to or whomever got the most votes. They are banned from exercising the sort of independent judgment foreseen by the EC’s conceivers.
As conceived by the authors of the Constitution, the EC was supposed to select the best candidate, not necessarily the person who won the overall popular vote. Yet it’s precisely in cases where the EC goes against the popular vote winner (eg: 2000, 1876) that the EC causes the most controversy. If something is at its most controversial when it works exactly as intended, that’s a pretty good hint that maybe it might not be a good idea anymore.
Good work, scratchy, knowing what I think. You haven’t a clue! Yeah right, let’s model our system on France. Really?
OK, now for some substantive commentary. Our presidential election was never meant to be a one-man-one-vote election but rather a state-by-state election. One-person-one-vote (as it would be now) would be more “democratic” but the results could be chaotic. Substantial fraud, for example, in just one large state could turn an election. How about if no candidate achieves a majority? Run-off elections could leave us with a President who was maybe the first choice of only 20% of voters. The EC system is far from perfect, just like most of the rest of the Constitution, but it works.
If it isn’t just a typo “amenxing” is about the best new word I’ve seen in a long time.
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC), without needing to amend the Constitution.
The National Popular Vote bill would change existing state winner-take-all laws that award all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who get the most popular votes in each separate state (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), to a system guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes for, and the Presidency to, the candidate getting the most popular votes in the entire United States.
The National Popular Vote bill preserves the constitutionally mandated Electoral College and state control of elections. It ensures that every vote is equal, every voter will matter, in every state, in every presidential election, and the candidate with the most votes wins, as in virtually every other election in the country.
Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.
National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don’t matter to their candidate.
And now votes, beyond the one needed to get the most votes in the state, for winning in a state are wasted and don’t matter to candidates. Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004. 8 small western states, with less than a third of California’s population, provided Bush with a bigger margin (1,283,076) than California provided Kerry (1,235,659).
With National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere would be counted equally for, and directly assist, the candidate for whom it was cast.
Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in a handful of swing states. The political reality would be that when every vote is equal, the campaign must be run in every part of the country.
With National Popular Vote, when every vote counts equally, successful candidates will find a middle ground of policies appealing to the wide mainstream of America. Instead of playing mostly to local concerns in Ohio and Florida, candidates finally would have to form broader platforms for broad national support. Elections wouldn’t be about winning a handful of battleground states.
Now political clout comes from being among the handful of battleground states. More than 2/3rds of states and voters are ignored.
Now with state-by-state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but since enacted by 48 states), presidential elections ignore 12 of the 13 lowest population states (3-4 electoral votes), that are non-competitive in presidential elections. 6 regularly vote Republican (AK, ID, MT, WY, ND, and SD), and 6 regularly vote Democratic (RI, DE, HI, VT, ME, and DC) in presidential elections. Voters in states that are reliably red or blue don’t matter. Candidates ignore those states and the issues they care about most.
Support for a national popular vote is strong in every smallest state surveyed in recent polls among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group. Support in smaller states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK -70%, DC -76%, DE –75%, ID -77%, ME – 77%, MT- 72%, NE – 74%, NH–69%, NE – 72%, NM – 76%, RI – 74%, SD- 71%, UT- 70%, VT – 75%, WV- 81%, and WY- 69%.
In the lowest population states, the National Popular Vote bill has passed in nine state legislative chambers, and been enacted by 3 jurisdictions.
Of the 25 smallest states (with a total of 155 electoral votes) 18 received no attention at all from presidential campaigns after the conventions. Of the seven smallest states with any post-convention visits, Only 4 of the smallest states – NH (12 events), NM (8), NV (12), and IA (7) – got the outsized attention of 39 of the 43 total events in the 25 smallest states.
The Founding Fathers in the Constitution did not require states to allow their citizens to vote for president, much less award all their electoral votes based upon the vote of their citizens.
The presidential election system we have today is not in the Constitution, and enacting National Popular Vote would not need an amendment. State-by-state winner-take-all laws to award Electoral College votes, were eventually enacted by states, using their exclusive power to do so, AFTER the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. Now our current system can be changed by state laws again.
Unable to agree on any particular method for selecting presidential electors, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method exclusively to the states in section 1 of Article II of the U.S. Constitution– “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors . . .” The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as “plenary” and “exclusive.”
The constitution does not prohibit any of the methods that were debated and rejected. Indeed, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors using two of the rejected methods in the nation’s first presidential election in 1789 (i.e., appointment by the legislature and by the governor and his cabinet). Presidential electors were appointed by state legislatures for almost a century.
Neither of the two most important features of the current system of electing the President (namely, universal suffrage, and the 48 state-by-state winner-take-all method) are in the U.S. Constitution. Neither was the choice of the Founders when they went back to their states to organize the nation’s first presidential election.
In 1789, in the nation’s first election, the people had no vote for President in most states, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes.
The current 48 state-by-state winner-take-all method (i.e., awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in a particular state) is not entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution. It is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the debates of the Constitutional Convention, or the Federalist Papers. The actions taken by the Founding Fathers make it clear that they never gave their imprimatur to the winner-take-all method.
The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding the state’s electoral votes.
As a result of changes in state laws enacted since 1789, the people have the right to vote for presidential electors in 100% of the states, there are no property requirements for voting in any state, and the state-by-state winner-take-all method is used by 48 of the 50 states. States can, and frequently have, changed their method of awarding electoral votes over the years. Maine and Nebraska do not use the winner-take-all method– a reminder that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not required to change the way the President is elected.
The normal process of effecting change in the method of electing the President is specified in the U.S. Constitution, namely action by the state legislatures. This is how the current system was created, and this is the built-in method that the Constitution provides for making changes. The abnormal process is to go outside the Constitution, and amend it.
With the current system of electing the President, no state requires that a presidential candidate receive anything more than the most popular votes in order to receive all of the state’s electoral votes.
Not a single legislative bill has been introduced in any state legislature in recent decades (among the more than 100,000 bills that are introduced in every two-year period by the nation’s 7,300 state legislators) proposing to change the existing universal practice of the states to award electoral votes to the candidate who receives a plurality (as opposed to absolute majority) of the votes (statewide or district-wide). There is no evidence of any public sentiment in favor of imposing such a requirement.
If an Electoral College type of arrangement were e ss ential for avoiding a proliferation of candidates and people being elected with low percentages of the vote, we should see evidence of these conjectured apocalyptic outcomes in elections that do not employ such an arrangement. In elections in which the winner is the candidate receiving the most votes throughout the entire jurisdiction served by that office, historical evidence shows that there is no massive proliferation of third-party candidates and candidates do not win with small percentages. For example, in 905 elections for governor in the last 60 years, the winning candidate received more than 50% of the vote in over 91% of the elections. The winning candidate received more than 45% of the vote in 98% of the elections. The winning candidate received more than 40% of the vote in 99% of the elections. No winning candidate received le ss than 35% of the popular vote.
Since 1824 there have been 16 presidential elections in which a candidate was elected or reelected without gaining a majority of the popular vote.– including Lincoln (1860), Wilson (1912, and 1916), Truman (1948), Kennedy (1960), Nixon (1968), and Clinton (1992 and 1996).
And, FYI, with the current system, it could only take winning a plurality of the popular vote in the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population of the United States, for a candidate to win the Presidency — that is, a mere 26% of the nation’s votes.
The current state-by-state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes maximizes the incentive and opportunity for fraud and voter suppression. A very few people can change the national outcome by adding, changing, or suppressing a small number of votes in one closely divided battleground state. With the current system all of a state’s electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who receives a bare plurality of the votes in each state. The sheer magnitude of the national popular vote number, compared to individual state vote totals, is much more robust against manipulation.
National Popular Vote would limit the benefits to be gained by fraud or voter suppression. One suppressed vote would be one less vote. One fraudulent vote would only win one vote in the return. In the current electoral system, one fraudulent vote could mean 55 electoral votes, or just enough electoral votes to win the presidency without having the most popular votes in the country.
The closest popular-vote election in American history (in 1960), had a nationwide margin of more than 100,000 popular votes. The closest electoral-vote election in American history (in 2000) was determined by 537 votes, all in one state, when there was a lead of 537,179 (1,000 times more) popular votes nationwide.
For a national popular vote election to be as easy to switch as 2000, it would have to be two hundred times closer than the 1960 election–and, in popular-vote terms, forty times closer than 2000 itself.
Which system offers voter suppressors or fraudulent voters a better shot at success for a smaller effort?
Isn’t that a crosswalk in front of a church?
I wouldn’t mind the electoral college if they could get rid of the winner take all apportionment and let the electoral college votes be allocated according to the popular vote within a state.
That way you could still give voice to all the states which IS important and be more democratic. I am not sure you would need a constitutional amendment to make that sort of change, some states already do this.
I think it will be interesting however if this time around the tables are turned and the electoral college, winner take all system helps Obama win the White House.
Any state that enacts the proportional approach on its own would reduce its own influence. This was the most telling argument that caused Colorado voters to agree with Republican Governor Owens and to reject this proposal in November 2004 by a two-to-one margin.
If the proportional approach were implemented by a state, on its own, it would have to allocate its electoral votes in whole numbers. If a current battleground state were to change its winner-take-all statute to a proportional method for awarding electoral votes, presidential candidates would pay less attention to that state because only one electoral vote would probably be at stake in the state.
The proportional method also could result in third party candidates winning electoral votes that would deny either major party candidate the necessary majority vote of electors and throw the process into Congress to decide.
If the whole-number proportional approach had been in use throughout the country in the nation’s closest recent presidential election (2000), it would not have awarded the most electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most popular votes nationwide. Instead, the result would have been a tie of 269–269 in the electoral vote, even though Al Gore led by 537,179 popular votes across the nation. The presidential election would have been thrown into Congress to decide and resulted in the election of the second-place candidate in terms of the national popular vote.
A system in which electoral votes are divided proportionally by state would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote and would not make every vote equal.
It would penalize states, such as Montana, that have only one U.S. Representative even though it has almost three times more population than other small states with one congressman. It would penalize fast-growing states that do not receive any increase in their number of electoral votes until after the next federal census. It would penalize states with high voter turnout (e.g., Utah, Oregon).
Moreover, the fractional proportional allocation approach does not assure election of the winner of the nationwide popular vote. In 2000, for example, it would have resulted in the election of the second-place candidate.
A national popular vote is the way to make every person’s vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees that the candidate who gets the most votes in all 50 states and DC becomes President.
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported
the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the
presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate
state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a
national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and
Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually
every state surveyed in recent polls in closely divided Battleground
states: CO – 68%, FL – 78%, IA 75%, MI – 73%, MO – 70%, NH – 69%, NV –
72%, NM– 76%, NC – 74%, OH – 70%, PA – 78%, VA – 74%, and WI – 71%; in
Small states (3 to 5 electoral votes): AK – 70%, DC – 76%, DE – 75%,
ID – 77%, ME – 77%, MT – 72%, NE 74%, NH – 69%, NV – 72%, NM – 76%, OK
– 81%, RI – 74%, SD – 71%, UT – 70%, VT – 75%, WV – 81%, and WY – 69%;
in Southern and Border states: AR – 80%,, KY- 80%, MS – 77%, MO – 70%,
NC – 74%, OK – 81%, SC – 71%, TN – 83%, VA – 74%, and WV – 81%; and in
other states polled: AZ – 67%, CA – 70%, CT – 74%, MA – 73%, MN – 75%,
NY – 79%, OR – 76%, and WA – 77%. Americans believe that the candidate
who receives the most votes should win.
The National Popular Vote bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral
votes – 49% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.
NationalPopularVote
When did life get so complicated?
The point I like that he made was about fraud and vote suppression. A national vote would be much harder and costly to manipulate than coming up with 500 votes in one state, that determined one of our most recent elections.
So, if I understand National Popular Vote correctly, NY (and other participating states) will require all its electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote? For example, even if Obama gets 90% of the vote in NY but Romney wins the national vote, all the NY electors must cast their votes for Romney. Insanity.
Walker: “this year the Electoral College is favoring the Democratic candidate”
If it wasn’t for the electoral college, New York and California would be picking the president every time around.
Not if Texas and Florida have anything to say about it.
Is this the year that Americans toss over the electoral college?
No.
This has been another addition of simple answers to simple questions.
And thanks Oldgulph! Great food for thought. But hire an editor!
“But hire an editor!”
Or he could have just provided a link to the Wikipedia page on the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. For those with a real taste for detail, see NationalPopularVote.com.
And Larry, it may seem like insanity to you, but “A 2007 poll found that 72% favored replacing the Electoral College with a direct election, including 78% of Democrats, 60% of Republicans, and 73% of independent voters.” And if it continues to pass state legislatures at the rate it has been for the last five year, it should elect the president in 2020.
The Electoral College is a minor issue. There are two more important factors at the moment that will affect this Presidential Election.
The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling ratified $1 = 1 vote. Forget about 1 person = 1 vote.
A dozen states controlled by Republican Governors and Legislatures are implementing voter suppression ID laws to “fix” non-existent voter fraud. These measures will affect mostly poor and minority voters who are likely to vote for Democrats. Republicans openly admit they are hoping these tactics will deliver states like FL and PA to Romney. That is the real voter fraud!
Walker, I won’t bore everyone with a list of bad ideas that were or are favored by 72% of the American people. Too often, the stock answer is “everyone is in favor of it.” Weren’t you ever warned not to jump off the bridge just because “everyone” is doing it?
With the current state winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes, winning a bare plurality of the popular vote in the 11 most populous states, containing 56% of the population, could win the Presidency with a mere 26% of the nation’s votes!
But the political reality is that the 11 largest states rarely agree on any political question. In terms of recent presidential elections, the 11 largest states include five “red states (Texas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Georgia) and six “blue” states (California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Jersey). The fact is that the big states are just about as closely divided as the rest of the country. For example, among the four largest states, the two largest Republican states (Texas and Florida) generated a total margin of 2.1 million votes for Bush, while the two largest Democratic states generated a total margin of 2.1 million votes for Kerry.
Among the 11 most populous states in 2004, the highest levels of popular support, hardly overwhelming, were found in the following seven non-battleground states:
* Texas (62% Republican),
* New York (59% Democratic),
* Georgia (58% Republican),
* North Carolina (56% Republican),
* Illinois (55% Democratic),
* California (55% Democratic), and
* New Jersey (53% Democratic).
In addition, the margins generated by the nation’s largest states are hardly overwhelming in relation to the 122,000,000 votes cast nationally. Among the 11 most populous states, the highest margins were the following seven non-battleground states:
* Texas — 1,691,267 Republican
* New York — 1,192,436 Democratic
* Georgia — 544,634 Republican
* North Carolina — 426,778 Republican
* Illinois — 513,342 Democratic
* California — 1,023,560 Democratic
* New Jersey — 211,826 Democratic
To put these numbers in perspective, Oklahoma (7 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 455,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004 — larger than the margin generated by the 9th and 10th largest states, namely New Jersey and North Carolina (each with 15 electoral votes). Utah (5 electoral votes) alone generated a margin of 385,000 “wasted” votes for Bush in 2004. 8 small western states, with less than a third of California’s population, provided Bush with a bigger margin (1,283,076) than California provided Kerry (1,235,659).
A survey of New York voters showed 79% overall support for a national popular vote for President.
By gender, support was 89% among women and 69% among men.
By age, support was 60% among 18-29 year olds, 74% among 30-45 year olds, 85% among 46-65 year olds, and 82% for those older than 65.
By race, support was 78% among whites (representing 67% of respondents, 78% among African Americans (representing 18% of respondents), 86% among Hispanics (representing 12% of respondents), and 70% among Others (representing 4% of respondents).
Support was 86% among Democrats, 66% among Republicans, 78% among Independence Party members (representing 8% of respondents), 50% among Conservative Party members (representing 3% of respondents), 100% among Working Families Party members (representing 2% of respondents), and 7% among Others (representing 7% of respondents).
Most Americans don’t care whether their presidential candidate wins or loses in their state. . . they care whether he/she wins the White House. Voters want to know, that even if they were on the losing side, their vote actually was directly and equally counted and mattered to their candidate. Most Americans think it’s wrong for the candidate with the most popular votes to lose. We don’t allow this in any other election in our representative republic.
On June 7, 2011, the Republican-controlled New York Senate passed the National Popular Vote bill (S4208 / AB 489) by a 47–13 margin, with Republicans favoring the bill by 21–11 and Democrats favoring it by 26–2. Republicans endorsed by the Conservative Party favored the bill 17–7. The bill passed the New York Senate in 2010 when the chamber was controlled by Democrats and has now passed with the chamber controlled by Republicans.
In 1969, The U.S. House of Representatives voted for a national popular vote by a 338–70 margin. It was endorsed by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and various members of Congress who later ran for Vice President and President such as then-Congressman George H.W. Bush, and then-Senator Bob Dole.
The bill has been endorsed by the New York Times (NY), Chicago Sun-Times (IL), Minneapolis Star-Tribune (MN), Los Angeles Times (CA), Boston Globe (MA), Sacramento Bee (CA), Anderson Herald Bulletin (IN), Fayetteville Observer(NC), Hartford Courant (CT), The Tennessean (TN), Daily Astorian (OR), Sarasota Herald Tribune (FL), Miami Herald (FL), Connecticut Post (CT), Wichita Falls Times Record News (TX), Cape Cod Times (MA), The Daily News, Milford Daily News (MA), Patriot Ledger(MA), Denver Post (CO), Westport News and Fairfield Citizen News (CT), The Baxter Bulletin(AR), Frederick News Post (MD), Kent County Times(RI), Enterprise News (MA), The Columbian (WA), and the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, FairVote, Sierra Club, NAACP, National Black Caucus of State Legislators, ACLU, the National Latino Congreso, Asian American Action Fund, DEMOS, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Public Citizen, U.S. PIRG, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.
More than 2,110 state legislators (in 50 states) have sponsored or voted for the National Popular Vote bill.
NationalPopularVote
Oldgulph, you’re wasting your time: Larry already knows what all the good ideas and bad ideas are, and we should obviously defer to his vast wisdom and appoint him dictator for life.