Will the electoral college survive 2012?
The celebrated election-whisperer Nate Silver now says there is nearly a 4% chance that Barack Obama will win another term, even though most voters in the US want Mitt Romney to be their president.
As I’ll explain below, I think Silver understates the risk of a “false positive” in America’s most important election system.
But even if his number is correct, it strikes me as unacceptable for there to be a 1-in-25 chance of our democracy being led by a politician that loses the popular vote.
The culprit here, of course, is the creaky, 19th-century political apparatus known as the electoral college.
Our system distributes voting power in our presidential races not by the principle of one-person-one-vote, but instead uses a quirky system that distributes lopsided political power to different states.
It is a leftover from a time when communication was far slower and when the states were far more like separate federated nations than members of a permanent, integrated union.
In the past, Republicans enjoyed a distinct advantage in the electoral college system, because their candidates tended to fare well in low-population rural states that are “gifted” extra power.
But in recent political contests, Democrats have erased that edge.
They’ve done so first by dominating the biggest states in a way that gave them an easy pool of electoral college votes (a big strategic advantage) and then by capturing their own cadre of small states: Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington DC.
This has leveled and even tilted the playing field.
The potential for this tippy system to actually “throw” an election has felt tangible all year. Romney and Obama have been essentially tied in the national polls, with one or the other occasionally eking out a narrow lead.
But Obama has dominated in the electoral college standings. Even now, following Romney’s recent surge, Obama leads in states that give him 294 electoral college votes — 24 more than he needs to win a second term.
As noted, Romney has eked out a lead in the horse-race poll. If the election were held today, he might very well win the popular vote while still falling 26 electoral college votes short of a win.
To put that in perspective, to make up that extra ground, Romney would need to flip Iowa, New Hampshire, and Ohio. A pretty sizable and unfair burden for a guy who’s already “winning.”
Before talking about the extra risks that exist now — new weaknesses in the electoral college system — let me point out that this isn’t theoretical stuff. In 2000, it wasn’t hanging chads in Florida that doomed Al Gore, or even the Supreme Court.
It was our long-established system that redistributes political power.
Gore beat George W. Bush by roughly half a million votes, but in our weird wonky system, the Democrat was doomed by the 7,000 vote spread in tiny New Hampshire.
Bush won there, earned a lopsided 3 electoral college votes, and that tipped him the race.
In theory, tis kind of thing is a rare, once-in-a-lifetime anomaly. Most pollsters expect that the electoral college numbers will fall into line with the popular vote near the end of most campaigns — because that’s what has happened historically.
But things are changing in American politics. The states are more polarized, less fluid. It’s much, much harder for Romney to “convert” Pennsylvania, or for Obama to capture a state like Indiana.
What’s more, a growing number of states are moving toward early voting and absentee ballot systems that could weirdly skew outcomes. Consider this dispatch from today’s Wall Street Journal.
Nearly one in five Ohio poll respondents had already cast their ballots—and they favored Mr. Obama by a 63%-37% margin. People who haven’t yet cast their ballots favored Mr. Obama by 48%-46%.
Which means that even if Romney makes a strong closing argument, a big, cornerstone state like Ohio could in theory be off the table by late October.
What would it mean if we stumbled into a four-year stretch with an “accidental” president? George W. Bush pulled it off, managing to govern in his first term with panache that suggested a popular mandate.
Especially if Democrats hold control of the Senate, Obama might be expected to do the same, though Fox News and Rush would have a field day.
Hopefully, the bigger and more enduring impact would be a move to seriously question the value and appropriateness of an antiquated system that both the left and the right would have good reason to distrust.
Tags: election12
oops, sorry, didn’t mean to pile on about the rcp thing. just hadn’t refreshed the comment thread before posting.
Walker:
Uh, not really. Look again: Obama “has a lock” on 142 EC votes to Romney’s 76.
You are correct.
Geez, it burns me to say that. :)
Hey, we all make mistakes.
I think it is bad for our Democracy to have Presidents lose the popular vote and win by the EC, that is what would indeed breed bitterness and cynical views of our country. It is is not a healthy situation.
The 2000 election was not good for our country, first it made us look like we can’t manage democracy that we are too incompetent to count our own votes, who are we to send election monitors to other countries? Secondly it was decided by the courts we don’t really know for certain, who won and it bred a feeling that indeed voting does not matter when the person with the most votes does not win or we don’t know who won, then of course the conspiracy theories come into play.
Yes, Mervel, that is precisely the point. Larry, nothing tells a voter that voting doesn’t matter louder than the candidate with the lower vote count being declared the winner, and that is precisely what the Electoral College makes possible. And it is also perfectly clear that casting a vote for president in New York or California, whether one is voting for the Republican or the Democrat, has zero impact since the outcome is a given thanks to winner-take-all. We should dump the EC, or at least ban winner-take-all rules at the state level.
You all talk about the Electoral College as if it was some kind of evil conspiracy. It’s not and the way it works should not be a surprise to anyone. I won’t repeat the reasons why I think it should be retained; that’s not the point now. The point is that in 2000 it worked exactly as it was supposed to. We DO KNOW FOR CERTAIN who won the election; your problem, Mervel, is that you don’t LIKE who won. That said, I feel that those who don’t like the EC should work to change it. The best way to effect political change is to vote for candidates with whom you share a philosophy and an agenda. That works so much better than whining about how it doesn’t matter if you vote or how unfair the system is. If you can’t be bothered to vote you ought to shut up and accept the will of those who did.
That is not true Larry, I voted for Bush in 2000, (Gore???? please), but the fact is Bush lost the popular vote the majority of those who cast votes for the Presidency voted for Gore. However as you point out we have an EC system, but even at that point it came down to one contested state and the votes in that state were never fully or accurately counted, so the Courts had to step in and just decide the thing. Which is fine our system worked as well as it could have, nothing illegal happened and it was not a conspiracy. However it was an unhealthy result for our country it is not a situation I would like to see happen again.
One way to avoid the situation would be to not have an EC and just go with a national vote. If we had a national vote however I think we would want to totally re-tool how we conducted a national vote for the Presidency. Right now it is a screwed up mess we don’t have a well funded accurate system of deciding who can vote, how to consistently count those votes and how to compare voting systems.
I would propose the Federal Census agency conduct a national election totally separate from the states, one type of voting machine for the entire country, one standardized ballot for the entire country one method of accounting for the votes and a system that can be audited easily.
Right now we don’t have any of those things.
I don’t think we ever really know the actual vote counts in our presidential elections, it is usually just an estimate so when the race is very very close, it will probably always have to go to the courts.
Apologies, Merevel, I should have said you don’t like the WAY he won.
I don’t, I accept it as it was legal and he was the winner per our laws, there was no evil conspiracy etc.
But if we do that too many times, if that becomes the norm we will have major problems in this country.